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It would not have suited the ante-Tudor kings to have had a fictitious assembly; they would have lost their sole FEELER, their only instrument for discovering national opinion. Nor could they have manufactured such an assembly if they wished.
It was a large, square-built house, close indeed to the road, but separated from it by a high wrought-iron gate in an oak paling, and a short, straight garden-path; originally even ante-Tudor, but matured through centuries, with a Queen Anne front of mellow red brick, and back premises of tile, oak, and modern rough-cast, with old brew-houses that almost enclosed a graveled court behind.
I believe no statute at all, as far as we know, was passed in the reign of Richard I., and all the ante-Tudor acts together would look meagre enough to a modern Parliamentary agent who had to live by them. But the negative action of Parliament upon the law was essential to its whole idea, and ran through every part of its use.
Henry VII. attained a kingdom in which there was a Parliament to advise, but scarcely a Parliament to control. The consultative government of the ante-Tudor period had little resemblance to some of the modern governments which French philosophers call by that name. The French Empire, I believe, calls itself so.
There are, as is well known, three great periods in the English Constitution. The first of these is the ante-Tudor period. The English Parliament then seemed to be gaining extraordinary strength and power. The title to the Crown was uncertain; some monarchs were imbecile.
The necessity of consulting the great council of the realm before taxation, the principle that the declaration of grievances by the Parliament was to precede the grant of supplies to the sovereign, are but conspicuous instances of the primitive doctrine of the ante-Tudor period, that the king must consult the great council of the realm, before he did anything, since he always wanted help.
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