Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/611

 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 603 Part I of the treatise, so that a welcome is sure to be given to the singularly lucid investigation of it in this volume. Part I, as is stated in the ' Character ' of it prefixed, treats of the parliamentary govern- ment of Scotland from 1603 to 1707, deahng with it under the succes- sive heads of the constitution of 1603, and that of 1690, and by means of an admirably instructive process for which the Introduction had prepared us, illustrating the exposition comparatively, by showing forth the likeness and the unlikeness of parliamentary government in this period in Scotland to that in England. Our authors are, no doubt, right in agreeing that, though the point may be pressed too far, James as king of England held far greater power in Scotland than he did while merely king of Scots. But of far greater importance is the fact, on which it is in the present connexion difl&cult to lay too much stress, that neither before nor after 1603, nor until the revolution of 1689, did the Scottish parliament take the leading part in Scottish legislation or govern Scotland. The legislative power was really in the hands of the committee of the articles — bills, in our parliamentary parlance— which were only rarely debated. The appointment of the committee (the nomina- tion of the lords of the articles) was, till its abolition in 1690, by a com- plicated process secured by James for the king. And more than this. No man who was not a king's freeholder (tenant-in-chief of the king) had, either before or after 1690, the right to appear in parliament at all ; and it was thus limited to nobles, bishops, representatives of royal burghs, and lairds holding land as king's freeholders. No others (with certain very limited exceptions) could sit there ; the electoral body was accord- ingly small, and not, in the full modern sense of the word, representative. Furthermore — though this point would admit of discussion as to its effect — the Scottish parliament was unicameral ; and finally, by an arrangement for which a pjirallel could not easily be found, the king had from 1603 (and apparently much earlier) the right of summoning, when parliament was not sitting, a convention which could pass temporary legislation and grant taxes. It was, in reality, an enlarged privy council, and its rights and functions were part of that power oi the king in council which the Scottish nobility feared beyond all things, and which, in the end, formed for them a chief inducement to support the proposal for a union. While this treatise thus shows that the Scottish parliament could never become the centre of Scottish national life, it likewise explains why the assertion remains true even after 1690, when the Scottish parliament certainly became the field of free and vehement debate. In 1690 the general assembly of the church of Scotland met, after having been in abeyance for forty years. It became at once the rival of the parliament and a counter- weight to it, for it indirectly represented both the clergy and the laity of the church of Scotland ; and when the day of the union came, the act ' which merged the Parliament of Scotland in the Parliament of Great Britain secured the prolonged existence and continued authority of the General Assembly '. So unique a phenomenon is without even an analogon in the history of the relations of church and state ; it contrasts strongly with the experience of the English parliament and with that of the English