The social turmoil occasioned by the Wars of Roses, and the time it took for the new Tudor dynasty to assert its supremacy, unsettled the rule of law. To what extent is open to debate, but it was the perception at the time. Since the 1460s, maintained Richard III's parliament, the realm had been ‘ruled by self-will and pleasure, fear and dread’, and ‘all manner of equity and laws [had been] laid apart and despised’. For chaos to be banished and order imposed, for the law to be enforced, and for justice to be administered, a strong central authority was needed. The Tudor dynasty provided this, but the measures successive monarchs took to maintain law and order and the way they took them could also threaten the integrity of the common law. The exercise of the royal prerogative enabled effective and decisive government under the Tudors – who were adept at increasing the power of the Crown without seeming to endanger the constitutional balance or the rule of law – but under the less astute Stuarts engendered unease over the extent of arbitrary royal power.

The prerogative was exercised out with parliament or the common law courts. It was necessary that the Crown retained some undefined executive power to deal with unforeseen and unforeseeable contingencies of administration and with political crises. But prerogative unrestrained smacked of the Roman imperial tradition and despotic theocratic monarchy, rather than the more contractual ‘Germanic’ kingship championed in England since Magna Carta or before.