Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/161

 The Norman kings had originally come in by conquest; but in 1087 William had been moved to have regard to his oath that he would maintain the laws of the Confessor. Stephen and John had come in by election. The royal power of Matilda had been broken because she would not maintain the Confessor’s law. As for Magna Charta, “Whosoever readeth it (which every man may at large, at the beginning of the book of Statutes) shall find it an absolute Contract betwixt the Kings of England, and the People thereof, which at their Coronations ever since, they take an Oath inviolable to observe.” In the past, kings of England had ruled by compacts with their people, had broken their compacts, and had ceased to rule!

By the rules of abstract justice implied in these general propositions, the radicals had next to weigh the existing government of England, legally and nominally vested not only in the House of Commons, but also in the House of Lords and the king; actually vested in the peers as well as the representatives of the people. So weighed, it must have been found wanting. The author of Regall Tyrannie might, it is true, have disposed of the king’s pretensions in the orthodox fashion. The king, he might have said, while ruling justly, was king by contract; for the rest, Regall Tyrannie went beyond previous books in its insistence that the king’s violation of his contract was the end of his power and the beginning of his deposition. But similar reasoning could not have established on a basis of