The first chapter of this book outlined the secular political thesis urged by Anglican Royalists: the unimpeachable sovereignty of the monarch. This chapter provides a contrasting account of a principal plank in the secular ideology of the country party opposition that emerged in the 1670s and soon acquired the name Whig: the necessity of regular, free parliaments. The task of the Whigs was to dismantle the political heresy of the claim that the crown was the final arbiter in matters of civil government. This entailed, in their view, the restoration of an ‘ancient constitution’ in which parliaments embodied the uncorrupted will of the political community. Yet faith in parliaments was compromised by fear of the actually existing parliament, the deracinated and seemingly perpetual ‘Cavalier Parliament’, elected in 1661 and still sitting, without any further general election, until 1679. This was the parliament that had imposed harsh penal legislation for religious uniformity, and which, by the mid-1670s, was firmly in the grip of the earl of Danby and his allies. Accordingly, as we have seen, the enemies of Anglican Royalism were deeply ambivalent about parliament. In matters of religion, they sometimes appealed over the heads of parliaments, and prelates, to the wisdom and authority of the supreme magistrate, to rule on behalf of people of all consciences. The present chapter turns to a more familiar, that is to say secular, account of Whig thought, as a parliamentarian retort to absolute kingship. The two Whiggisms – magisterial and parliamentarian – coalesced in an anticipation that regular parliaments, assemblies elected frequently and uncorrupted by ‘placemen’ in the Commons and by the episcopal ‘deadweight’ in the Lords, would cauterize the wounds inflicted on the body politic by that most monstrous of parliaments, the ‘Cavalier’ Parliament.

Enshrining frequent parliaments

From the era of the Levellers in the 1640s to that of the Chartists in the 1840s political reformers demanded annual parliaments as a fundamental right of the English people. What they generally meant was that, every year, there should not merely be a session of parliament but an election. It is a commonplace that, of the Six Points of the Chartist programme, whereas five – universal suffrage, the secret ballot, equal constituencies, wages for MPs, and an end to property qualifications for MPs – have all been achieved, only annual parliaments has not.