1 - The neo-roman theory of free states
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
Summary
When civil war broke out in England in 1642, the ideological initiative was at first seized by the opponents of Charles I's regime. Among the defenders of parliament's opposition to the crown, Henry Parker was perhaps the most influential of those who argued that, at least in times of national emergency, ‘the supreame judicature, as well in matters of State as matters of Law’ must lie with the two Houses of Parliament as representatives of the ultimately sovereign people. ‘The whole art of Soveraignty’, Parker declares in his Observations of 1642, depends on recognising ‘that power is but secondary and derivative in Princes’. ‘The fountaine and efficient cause is the people’, so that the people's elected representatives have a right to ‘judge of publike necessity without the King, and dispose of anything’ when the freedom and safety of the people are at stake.
Parker's defence of parliamentary sovereignty was immediately countered by royalist affirmations to the effect that the king in person must be regarded as the sole ‘subject’ or bearer of sovereignty. Denouncing the allegedly ‘new-coyned distinction’ between ‘the King and His authority’ Charles I's apologists insisted that God ’hath expressed in Scripture that both Soveraignty and the person clothed with Soveraignty are of him, by him, and from him immediately’. Meanwhile a number of more cautious parliamentarians turned their attention to the actual workings of the British constitution and concluded that absolute or sovereign authority must instead lie with the body of the king-in-parliament.
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- Liberty before Liberalism , pp. 1 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012