Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/26

10 of the place of king, church, and courts in the English constitution. Their definitions of monarchy, of prerogative, of the function of Parliament, all pointed to one central theory—the supremacy of law.

In terming the English constitution a balanced monarchy, they implied the belief that the king, although supreme ruler of the nation, was bound by the law. They drew a distinction between what the king could do as a man and what he could do as a king; or, as Oliver St. John had put it in the argument on ship money, between the king’s natural power and his legal power. They admitted that the law of England called the king the fountain of justice: they admitted that the law of England called itself the king’s law. But they emphasized the fact that the king could lawfully dispense justice only through his courts and enact the law of England only through his High Court of Parliament. They admitted that the crown of England, in so far as it dispensed its benefits to the subject through constitutional institutions, was absolute; but, they said, it was absolute only because an act of the king not according to law was not an act of the crown.

In so limiting the absolute authority of the king, they stripped the word prerogative of the sanctity with which judges, bishops, and king had sought to invest it. Prerogative, said the