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Ireland, it has been said, had an independent legislature from 1782 to 1800: during eighteen years there were two coequal parliaments under one Crown; and yet there was no collision.
His tyranny strode over all legal bounds. Wentworth is the one English statesman of all time who may be said to have had no sense of law; and his scorn of it showed itself in his coercion of juries as of parliaments.
As I am only giving an opinion on this point, and not at all debating it in an adverse line, I hope I may be excused in another observation. With great truth I may aver that I never remember to have talked on this subject with any man much conversant with public business who considered short Parliaments as a real improvement of the Constitution.
To this end are arranged the three readings of bills and the various other dilatory devices of most parliaments and congresses. But when great constitutional changes are to be attempted, such measures as these are insufficient. Great changes should be introduced one by one, separately debated and fought over.
This day both Houses met, and on the gist the king opened the session with a speech from the throne, in which occurs this Passage: "I pray, Mr. Speaker, and you, gentlemen of the House of Commons, give that Triennial Bill once a reading in your house, and then, in God's name, do what you think fit for me and yourselves and the whole kingdom. I need not tell you how much I love parliaments.
A humourist of our own day has laughed at Parliaments as "talking shops," and the laugh has been echoed by some who have taken humour for argument. But talk is persuasion, and persuasion is force, the one force which can sway freemen to deeds such as those which have made England what she is.
The immediate object of this bill was the dissolution of the present parliament, which had already sat three sessions, and began to be formidable to the people from its concessions to the ministry. The benefits that would accrue to the constitution from the establishment of triennial parliaments were very well understood, as these points had been frequently discussed in former reigns.
Wentworth's aim was to force on the king, not such a freedom as Eliot longed for, but such a system as the Tudors had clung to, where a large and noble policy placed the sovereign naturally at the head of the people, and where Parliaments sank into mere aids to the Crown. But before this could be, Buckingham and the system of blundering misrule that he embodied must be cleared away.
The riding of the Parliament, when in gallant order two by two the commissioners of the boroughs and the counties leading the way, the peers following, through the guards on either side who lined the streets they rode up solemnly from Holyrood to the Parliament House, with crown and sword and sceptre borne before them, the old insignia, without which the Acts of the ancient Parliaments of Scotland were not considered valid marching for the last time to their place of meeting to give up their trust would be one of the most remarkable.
Even when he was most feared he maintained his place in the popular affection. His parliaments carried out his will, but his will and theirs were in conformity: while Wolsey ruled, he rarely consulted them, but after Wolsey's fall they were called upon to ratify all the King's measures, and were in frequent session.
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