CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

The England of Shakespeare's day was a monarchy, but a monarchy of a special kind. Though the king or queen ruled without question and stood isolated at the apex of the social and political pyramid, that rule had to be exercised within quite well-defined limitations: it was in no sense despotic, though it could be autocratic. The most formal conditions of restraint existed in the law of the land, called the common law, and its accepted conventions. Though the monarch possessed special rights not available to his subjects, these so-called prerogatives themselves received definition in terms of the law.

Royal prerogatives – rights enjoyed by that person whose duties were special and could not be discharged without such rights – were usually divided into two kinds, ordinary and absolute, which refer to the relationship between royal rights and the law. Ordinary (meaning ordained) signified ‘defined in the law of the realm’ absolute (free of the law) meant ‘not so defined’, the implication being that they could not be defined because they touched upon unpredictable needs of the state that the ruler must be able to meet. Ordinary prerogatives included the fiscal rights of the crown, the power to appoint to office, the right to dispense justice and the regulation of trade. Absolute prerogatives included the making of peace and war, but also (more ominously) the taking of necessary action against alleged enemies of the commonwealth, as, for instance, imprisonment and examination under torture. The absolute prerogative unquestionably had autocratic and even tyrannous possibilities; it needed to be used with tact and without arousing dangerous dissatisfaction, the more so because this monarchy disposed of only a minimal establishment of armed force.