Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/287

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 279 tions in the parliament of 1399, one to the king from Haxey himself, the other a commons' petition. On the latter great stress has been laid, and Dr. Wittke assumes, as other writers have done, that the commons were alone responsible for it : they knew of the king's favourable answer to Haxey's petition, but were not content to let the matter rest there and wished to vindicate their own liberties. Comparison of the two petitions, however, will reveal that they are almost verbatim the same, which leads one to suggest that, like a wise suitor, Haxey made doubly sure of success by sending a second petition to the commons, who thereupon presented it to the king. In any event the petition is for the reversal of a specific judgement as contrary to law and procedure, and no privilege of free speech could have covered Haxey, who was not a member of parliament, nor indeed could it have prevailed in any case against a charge of treason. Haxey, and the commons as sponsors of the petition, were probably either claiming that the offence was not treason or that the trial was irregular. 1 This reading of the case serves to interpret the oft-quoted phrase ' Liberties de ditz Communes ', in which ' Libertees ' does not include freedom of speech and ' Communes ' does not refer to the repre- sentatives in parliament. In 1455 we have the case of Thomas Yonge, who was a member of parliament. His assertion of freedom of speech, upon which he based his claim for redress of his grievance, is important ; but we should beware of over-emphasizing it, and we should not forget that his petition was a personal suit. His words no more prove the existence under Henry VI of such a liberty as he describes than the very similar words of Peter Wentworth prove its existence under Elizabeth ; and the political circumstances of the case warn us against accepting the favourable answer to the petition as implicit confirmation of the privilege asserted. Even under Elizabeth, Yonge's statement would need judicious interpretation to represent historical fact, and a century's development for the commons lay between the two eras. Free speech, it seems more correct to assume, was a slow growth, the stages in which are unchronicled ; but it was a noteworthy advance when a prescriptive and possibly vague right was at length given expression in the Speaker's petition: and the history of the privilege during the second half of the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth century is that of a contention between a royal and conservative inter- pretation of the term ' freedom ' and a parliamentary and progressive interpretation of it. When Dr. Wittke describes Elizabeth's veto upon the introduction of bills affecting the royal estate as * quibbling ' he simply falls into an anachronism. On pp. 21 and 22 Dr. Wittke falls into two errors which the verification of his references might have prevented. In the first the original culprit was May, who quoted the Speaker's petition of 1841. and then asserted that the terms of the petition had been the same since 1515. Dr. Wittke follows May, only to contradict himself in subsequent pages. In the second instance he is following Hatsell's precedents upon the question whether a new Speaker coming to office in the middle of a parliament's life 1 Miss I. D. Thornley informs me that in her opinion the procedure was in fact unprecedented in the trial of one who waa not a peer.