Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/54

 nation. Constitutional forms by which the majority might declare its pleasure in orderly fashion had yet to be devised; and if such forms had existed, the nation lacked the political experience that would have enabled it to use them. Under the circumstances Parker’s doctrine that the Parliament was the nation articulate had much to commend it. Parliament might misrepresent the people’s wishes; but neither precedent nor practice could afford any other means by which the wishes even of any considerable part of the kingdom might be learned.

A student of the Leveller political theories is concerned with the multitudes of Royalist pamphlets printed after 1642 only in so far as they afford acute criticism of the parliamentary position. Such criticism first appears in the state papers drawn from the king by the controversies that began with the Grand Remonstrance. At the moment when the Parliament abandoned the exposition of the fundamental laws of the land for the interpretation of the law of salus populi, declarations and answers under the king’s name began to defend his prerogative by appeals to the customs of the realm. The king’s answer to that part of the Grand Remonstrance, or rather the petition accompanying it, that related to the taking away of the votes of the bishops in the House of Lords, was “that their right is grounded