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Statutes & Royal Ordinances, Edward II | | | The major conflict of his reign was against the Scots led by Robert Bruce where the English army suffered a series of reversals leading up to a decisive victory by the Scots in 1314. | |
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< | Edward II was most probably gay. This, some say, is what lead to his falling out with Isabella. However, more importantly this lead to a series of “favorites” in his court, most prominently Piers Graveston, whose ascending power disturbed the feudal balance of powers in the court and became the flashpoint which lead to the far-reaching Ordinances of 1311, and the death of Gravestone. Later on, Hugh the Despenser became extremely powerful (and by some accounts, the de facto ruler of England) which lead to a increasingly conflict ridden end of the reign till the king was deposed in 1327. However, the Despenser period saw a massive shift in the Constitutional balance towards the king from the barons, culminating in the Statute of York in 1322. | >
> | However, the conflict that would have far reaching consequences for the constitutional history of England was of a domestic nature. | | | | |
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> | Baronial Opposition and the Ordinances of 1310-11
It was Edward’s political battle against the Barons that lays the stage for the constitutional developments that concern this topic. One could mark the decade of 1310 as the decade when the Baronial opposition was successful in gaining the upper hand. The decade began with the Ordinances of 1310-11 which imposed severe limitations on the authority of the King. Among other things, it stipulated that the King could not make war, leave the realm, make appointment to important posts, make grants of title without the consent of the Barons in parliament. The phrase in parliament is of great significance here. To read the intention of the Barons as that of establishing constitutional checks and balances would be anachronistic. The Barons did not have a “constitutional” plan as such, as one would understand it in the modern sense. Instead, for the them, the Parliament emerged as a political space in which they could successfully and effectively challenge and contest the King’s authority without indulging in all out military assaults every time.
The parliament was not for the Barons an independent source of legitimacy and power. There was no principle of representation involved. It was a place where the Barons would gather together, and thereby have an effective political platform to challenge the King. It is in this context one has to understand the importance of the insistence in the Ordinances that the nobility was summoned to the Parliament “by right and not by the King’s grace”. The regularity and the transparency of the summons (in which lied the seed of the notion of Peerage, which still governs the House of Lords) was of crucial importance.
While the Parliament is associated in modern times as primarily as centre of legislative power, this is not what it meant for the Barons. Their main focus was administrative, and to a lesser extent judicial power. In none of these functions of the parliament did the commonality have a share, whose role was limited to assenting to legislation, to make grants for money and to present petitions – in other words, functions of mostly legislative in nature. Not a word was said about any of these functions in the Ordinances concerning the parliament. In other words, in the Baronial vision of the Parliament, as evidenced through the Ordinances, there was no significant role for the commonality to play.
However, despite their highly limited and strategic vision for the Parliament, the decade of Baronial political success had two major impact in how Parliament was to evolve. One was (and this becomes more significant in view of the Household Ordinances, which was aimed at the private sphere of the Monarch) to establish the Parliament as a space for “public” exercise of political power, as opposed to the highly personal nature of the Monarchy. It allowed for a setting where the exercise of state power could be made public, and for the opposition that implied a level of transparency and check. It also provided a sense of legitimacy (though, not in the modern sense of the word) which made it easier for the Barons to make claims against the King. The inherently public nature of the Parliament provided for the Barons a greater ability to successfully curtail the power of the King which would have been difficult, or at any rate much more troublesome, to achieve through sheer force. The biggest evidence of this lies in the fact that the biggest political successes of the Baronial Opposition in the decade of 1310s was achieved in a Parliamentary setting (most notably, the Lincoln Parliament of 1316). One should not undermine the importance of the military strength of the Barons in all this (after all, Thomas of Lancaster, the leader of the Barons, often brought in his own armed guards inside the Parliament), but the developments of this decade gave the Parliament a notion of legitimacy, and public exercise of power, both of which were crucial to its future development as the most powerful institution in the realm.
The second major impact was the emergence of the Parliament as an independent political sphere, no longer just another monarchical chamber. In the battle against the King, the Barons had a serious handicap. The King possessed a source of power and legitimacy that came to him by virtue of his lineage – by the mere fact of being King. What the Barons needed was a political stage were they could unify and a stage and one that was independent of the aura of the King. They partly identified, partly made the Parliament to be such a stage. The realized (and successfully put into practice) that by controlling the parliament, they could be controlling a sphere of political action that could be outside the King’s control. This freeing of the Parliament from Monarchical control, even if just politically (as opposed to constitutionally) was a move of great significance, resonance of which could be felt even in Edward II’s reign.
Attempts at Reassertion of Royal Power: The Coronation Oath Argument | | | There were different ways in which Kings would extricate themselves from the promises made. Edward I, for example, did so through absolution through a Papal Bull. Edward II though took a novel approach, and argued against the 1311 ordinances on the basis of the relationship of the Sovereign to the law. He especially argued that the Ordinances, and the limits the sought to impose on him, were violative his Coronation Oath (given below), especially the first and the fourth precepts. [Anthony Musson, Medieval Law in Context, Mancheter University Press, Manchester, at 239-240.] | | | [Emphasis Added] | |
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> | Reassertion of Royal Power Statute of York, 1322 | | | | |
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< | STATUTE OF YORK (1322) | | | In 1322, soon after Edward II won his political and military victory over the Baronial opposition, he convened the Parliament at York to pass the Statute of York to repeal the Ordinances of 1311 and reestablish the absolute superiority of the Monarchy.
The relevant portions of the statute read: | | | The statute became, in time, one of the most important in the history of English constitutional law. Of great importance, and which got a lot of attention from the future scholars, was the term “and the commonality of the realm” at the end of the statute. This was often viewed by future scholars as a recognition of Parliamentary supremacy, and a constitutional recognition of the role of the “commonality” (or commons) who till that point had little substantive role in the process of law making.
To understand the significance of the Statute of York in English constitutional history (especially the aspect of legislative power) one must look at the role of the Parliament in the conflict between Edward II and the Barons. | |
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< | The Barons did mention the Parliament several times in the Ordinances of 1311. However, they did not foresee any role for the commonality in it, neither did they seek the co-operation of the commonality in drafting the ordinances or in their battle against the King.
The role that the Barons sought for the Parliament was as a meeting place for the Magnates who could effectively act as a check on King’s power. They did not envisage the parliament to be an effective centre of power, especially legislatively. The focus of the Baron’s challenge, and what they were really concerned with was administrative power. And the way they sought to use the parliament is either as a judicial body (to check king’s decision) or as a body which gives consent to all the important administrative postings. Ordinance 29, through which the Magnates in Parliament were to hear pleas delayed in the Royal Court, or against Royal ministers was an example of the former. Ordinance 14, which stipulated that the ‘counsel and assent of the Baronage and that in Parliament” was required for any significant royal appointment was an example of the latter.
In neither of these functions did the commonality have any role to play. Their role was limited to assenting to laws, granting money and petitioning for new laws – all alongside the rest of the Parliament, and mostly just formal in nature. Eitherways, the Barons were not so concerned about the legislative aspect of the power, their focus was on controlling the administration of the realm.
In this context the abovementioned phrase in the statute can be seen as a major concession to the commonalities. While such concessions have been made by Kings earlier from time to time for strategic purposes (including Edward’s father Edward I), this statute gave it permanency, and as would be argued by future historians and politicians, a constitutional validity to the right of the community to be consulted on fundamental matters which clearly concerned it.. | >
> | The abovementioned phrase in the statute can be seen as a major concession to the commonalities. While such concessions have been made by Kings earlier from time to time for strategic purposes (including Edward’s father Edward I), this statute gave it permanency, and as would be argued by future historians and politicians, a constitutional validity to the right of the community to be consulted on fundamental matters which clearly concerned it.. | | | However, it would not be in any ways correct to surmise from this that the intention of Edward II and his advisers who drafted the Statute was to establish the Parliament as a centre democratic power. The commonality was only a bit part of the drama. The express intention of the statute was to secure royal supremacy, as the rest of the statute makes it amply clear. Moreover, what Edwards was specifically concerned about is having unchecked and unfettered power over matters concerning his own person, estate, family and heirs. In the fractured Feudal nature of the British realm, this was of the central concern to him. The concession to the commons on the other hand was made regarding the “estate of the realm”. Here, it was not seen as threatening to his immediate concerns to atleast acknowledge the principle that matters concerning all must be approved by all. In anycase, it is likely that he saw the commonality as playing a merely formal role as they ad used to and not emerging as a alternate centre of power, like the Barons, who were the more immediate enemies. |
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