Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/38

 raised for the safety of the kings person, defence of both Houses of Parliament, and of those who have obeyed their Orders and Commands, and preserving the True Religion, the Laws, Liberty and Peace of the Kingdom.” Simple people were once more perplexed at an army on foot for the inconsistent purpose of making war on the king to secure the safety of his person.

The Parliament, therefore, employed the older terminology of the constitution to cloak actions that in reality were defensible only as acts of a sovereign power. It employed its assumed power of interpretation in order to make the law of the kingdom something entirely different from that which it was on the face of statute and precedent. The forced constructions of the fundamental laws of the kingdom, however, answered the immediate purpose; they gave a show of legality to an assumption of power necessary to the safety of Parliament and its followers. And once the parliamentary leaders had provided for the pressing necessity of the moment, they probably did not look far into the future.

In the spring of 1642, arguments based on abstract principles of government began to supplement the constitutional technicalities that had filled the Parliament’s official declarations. Un-