In the year 1051, the great council known as the witan conducted a state trial that would define the limits of royal power for centuries to come. Earl Godwin, one of the most powerful men in England, stood before the assembly to answer charges of treason, setting a precedent that even the highest nobles were subject to the judgment of the realm's magnates and clergy. This assembly, which met regularly at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun, was not an elected body but a feudal council where barons fulfilled their obligation to provide counsel to their lord the king. While these gatherings helped produce Anglo-Saxon law codes and decide major political questions like war and peace, they rarely resulted in a change in royal policy. The witan spoke for all English people through virtual representation, negotiating with kings like Aethelred the Unready and Cnut the Great, yet they lacked the power to approve taxation. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, the king received regular counsel from the members of his curia regis, periodically enlarged to discuss national business and promulgate legislation. The Domesday survey was planned at the Christmas council of 1085, and the Constitutions of Clarendon were made at the 1164 council, yet these assemblies were more concerned with ratification and publicity than with debate. The king could levy direct land taxes at his own discretion, and the great councils had no role in approving taxation, creating a system where consultation rarely resulted in a change in royal policy.
The Birth of Parliament
The word parliament first appeared in the late 11th century as a French term meaning talk or speech, but it did not become a common name for meetings of the great council until 1236. By the mid-1230s, the normal meeting place for Parliament was fixed at Westminster, and parliaments tended to meet according to the legal year so that the courts were also in session. Most parliaments had between forty and eighty attendees, bringing together social classes resembling the estates of the realm of continental Europe: the landed aristocracy, the clergy, and the towns. The lower clergy were occasionally summoned when papal taxation was on the agenda, and beginning around the 1220s, the concept of representation gained new importance among the clergy. They began choosing proctors to represent them at church assemblies and, when summoned, at Parliament. As feudalism declined and the gentry and merchant classes increased in influence, the shires and boroughs were recognised as communes with a unified constituency capable of being represented by knights of the shire and burgesses. Initially, knights and burgesses were summoned only when new taxes were proposed so that representatives of the communes could report back home that taxes were lawfully granted. The Commons were not regularly summoned until the 1290s, after the so-called Model Parliament of 1295. Of the thirty parliaments between 1274 and 1294, knights only attended four and burgesses only two, marking a slow but significant shift in the balance of power.
By 1258, the relationship between King Henry III and the baronage had reached a breaking point over the Sicilian business, in which Henry had promised to pay papal debts in return for the pope's help securing the Sicilian crown for his son, Edmund. At the Oxford Parliament of 1258, reform-minded barons forced a reluctant king to accept a constitutional framework known as the Provisions of Oxford. The king was to govern according to the advice of an elected council of fifteen barons, and the baronial council appointed royal ministers to serve for one-year terms. Parliament met three times a year on the octave of Michaelmas, Candlemas, and June 1, and the barons elected twelve representatives who together with the baronial council could act on legislation and other matters even when Parliament was not in session. The reformers hoped that the provisions would ensure parliamentary approval for all major government acts. Under the provisions, Parliament was established formally as the voice of the community. The theme of reform dominated later parliaments, with the Ordinance of Sheriffs issued as letters patent that forbade sheriffs from taking bribes, and the Ordinance of the Magnates enacted in which the barons promised to observe Magna Carta and other reforming legislation. Henry III made his first move against the baronial reformers while in France negotiating peace with Louis IX, using the excuse of his absence from the realm and Welsh attacks in the marches to postpone the parliament scheduled for Candlemas 1260. The king's motive was to prevent the promulgation of further reforms through Parliament, but Simon de Montfort, a leader of the baronial reformers, ignored these orders and made plans to hold a parliament in London.
The Model Parliament
In November 1295, King Edward I convened what became known as the Model Parliament, a gathering that would define the future structure of English governance. In addition to the earls and barons summoned individually, sheriffs were instructed to send two elected knights from each shire and two elected burgesses from each borough. The Commons had been summoned to earlier parliaments but only with power to consent to what the magnates decided. In the Model Parliament, the writ of summons invested shire knights and burgesses with power to provide both counsel and consent. This need for money to finance the war in Gascony and to put down a Welsh rebellion and win the First War of Scottish Independence led Edward to take arbitrary measures, including the seizure of merchants' wool and the imposition of the unpopular maltolt, a tax never authorised by Parliament. Church wealth was arbitrarily seized, and the clergy were further asked to give half of their revenues to the king. They refused but agreed to a smaller sum. Over the next couple of years, parliaments approved new taxes, but it was never enough. More money was needed to put down a Welsh rebellion and win the First War of Scottish Independence. The Model Parliament marked a turning point where the Commons were summoned with the power to provide both counsel and consent, establishing a precedent that would shape the evolution of the English Parliament for centuries to come.
The House Divided
In 1341, the Commons met separately from the nobility and clergy for the first time, creating what was effectively an Upper Chamber and a Lower Chamber, with the knights and burgesses sitting in the latter. This Upper Chamber became known as the House of Lords from 1544 onward, and the Lower Chamber became known as the House of Commons, collectively known as the Houses of Parliament. The authority of Parliament grew under Edward III, and it was established that no law could be made, nor any tax levied, without the consent of both Houses and the Sovereign. The Commons came to act with increasing boldness during this period. During the Good Parliament of 1376, the Presiding Officer of the lower chamber, Peter de la Mare, complained of heavy taxes, demanded an accounting of the royal expenditures, and criticised the king's management of the military. The Commons even proceeded to impeach some of the king's ministers. The bold Speaker was imprisoned, but was soon released after the death of Edward III. By the 15th century, a franchise was introduced which limited the number of people who could vote in elections to the House of Commons. From 1430 onwards, the franchise for the election of knights of the shires in the county constituencies was limited to forty-shilling freeholders, meaning men who owned freehold property worth forty shillings or more. The Parliament of England legislated for this new uniform county franchise in the statute 8 Hen. 6. c. 7, marking a significant step in the evolution of the voting system.
The Civil War
In January 1642, tensions between King Charles I and his Parliament reached a boiling point when Charles entered the House of Commons and tried, unsuccessfully, to arrest John Pym and four other members for their alleged treason. The Five Members had been tipped off about this, and by the time Charles came into the chamber with a group of soldiers they had disappeared. Charles was further humiliated when he asked the Speaker, William Lenthall, to give their whereabouts, which Lenthall famously refused to do. From then on, relations between the king and his Parliament deteriorated further, leading to the English Civil War which began with the Battle of Edgehill in October 1642. Those supporting the cause of Parliament were called Parliamentarians, and those in support of the Crown were called Royalists. In Pride's Purge of December 1648, the New Model Army purged Parliament of members that did not support them. The remaining Rump Parliament enacted legislation to put the king on trial for treason. This trial, the outcome of which was a foregone conclusion, led to the execution of the king and the start of an 11-year republic. The House of Lords was abolished, and the purged House of Commons governed England until April 1653, when army chief Oliver Cromwell dissolved it after disagreements over religious policy and how to carry out elections to Parliament. The events that took place from 1649 to 1660 were hugely important in determining the future of Parliament, proving that Parliament could survive without a monarchy and a House of Lords if it wanted to.
The Glorious Settlement
In November 1688, William of Orange assembled an army estimated at 15,000 soldiers and landed at Brixham in south-west England, marking the beginning of the Glorious Revolution. When many Protestant officers, including James's close adviser, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, defected from the English army to William's invasion force, James fled the country. Parliament then offered the Crown to his Protestant daughter Mary, instead of his infant son, who was baptised Catholic. Mary refused the offer, and instead William and Mary ruled jointly, with both having the right to rule alone on the other's death. As part of the compromise in allowing William to be King, Parliament was able to have the 1689 Bill of Rights enacted. Later the 1701 Act of Settlement was approved. These were statutes that lawfully upheld the prominence of Parliament for the first time in English history. These events marked the beginning of the English constitutional monarchy and its role as one of the three elements of Parliament. The revolutionary events that occurred between 1620 and 1689 all took place in the name of Parliament, and the new status of Parliament as the central governmental organ of the English state was consolidated during the events surrounding the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The Restoration began the tradition whereby all governments looked to Parliament for legitimacy, and Charles II died in 1685, succeeded by his brother James II, who was openly Catholic and attempted to lift restrictions on Catholics taking up public offices.
The Final Union
After the Treaty of Union in 1707, acts of Parliament passed in both the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland created a new Kingdom of Great Britain and dissolved both parliaments, replacing them with a new Parliament of Great Britain based in the former home of the English Parliament. The Parliament of Great Britain later became the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1801 when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was formed through the Acts of Union 1800. The Parliament of England was the legislature of the Kingdom of England from the 13th century until 1707 when it was replaced by the Parliament of Great Britain. Parliament evolved from the great council of bishops and peers that advised the English monarch. Great councils were first called Parliaments during the reign of Henry III. By this time, the king required Parliament's consent to levy taxation. Originally a unicameral body, a bicameral Parliament emerged when its membership was divided into the House of Lords and House of Commons, which included knights of the shire and burgesses. During Henry IV's reign, the role of Parliament expanded beyond the determination of taxation policy to include the right to petition, which essentially enabled English citizens to petition the body to address complaints in their local towns and counties. By this time, citizens were given the power to vote to elect their representatives, the burgesses, to the House of Commons. Over the centuries, the English Parliament progressively limited the power of the English monarchy, a process that arguably culminated in the English Civil War and the High Court of Justice for the trial of Charles I.