Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/46

 invested with a power to dispose of them as they shall thinke meet, not onely by making new Lawes, but also as they are a great Court above all our ordinary Courts, to governe us, and determine of all things proper to the power and jurisdiction thereof in all things tending to the conservation of the Commonwealth and of our Religion, Laws and Liberties, and to be limited to be only Proctors to speak for us is senselesse and ridiculous.

The official utterances of Parliament adopted but gradually such glosses by enthusiastic partisans on its earlier declarations. As late as November 2, 1642, a parliamentary declaration denied that Parliament claimed the power to divest the king of “his ancient unquestionable undoubted rights,” but at the same time reaffirmed in even broader terms its right to interpret in last resort the laws of the land. Men who were unskilled in the legal casuistry of the time must have been puzzled to know just what legal position and what relation to the king Parliament claimed.

To add to the difficulty, not all the men who fought Parliament’s paper battles interpreted the compact theory as Parker and his followers had done. A few writers deduced from it not parliamentary absolutism, but rather a narrow doctrine of popular sovereignty. The divergence of the two schools can be explained most easily by a running summary of the manner in which two or three typical authors stated the compact theory