Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/60

 Pym’s speech on the declaration of grievances, March 31, 1642, may be cited also: “That the house of commons considered that the law of God and the law of the land, was only fit for the representatives of the body of the kingdom to judge of; for if there must be idolatry against the law of God, it concerns them much to resist it, less they should incur the divine wrath; and nothing concerns them more than to see the laws of this kingdom executed: herein we may displease Man, we shall not God. For the Public Faith and League, it is less than that with God; we must respect the higher, and not the lower; no contract can oblige against the law of God, neither can any contract bind us against the law of this kingdom.” Parliamentary History, II, 1163. The allusion is to the treaties with France, guaranteeing the queen liberty of worship.

It is very interesting to note that frequently parliamentary champions couple the offenses of bishops and judges as alike usurpations on the juridical power of the Parliament. Of the bishops, Nathaniel Fiennes said in a speech of December, 1640, on the canons of that year: “the framers of these Canons have assumed unto themselves a Parliamentary power, and that too in a very high degree, for they have taken upon them to define what is the power of the King, what the liberty of the Subjects, and what propriety he hath in his goods. If this bee not proper to a Parliament, I know not what is.” He considered the convocation’s action in prescribing an oath a usurpation of a parliamentary power higher even than the legislative; for this oath might bind individual Parliament members against altering a thing that Parliament had the right to alter. Fiennes’s speech is in E. 196 (35). As to the judges, St. John in his argument before the Lords on ship money took the position that the judges in their opinion on ship money had reversed on the point of the king’s power to overrule the known law a decision that Parliament had itself made in the Petition of Right; a lower court had had the presumption to reverse the decisions of a higher. Nalson, An Impartial Collection, I, 712. Other utterances on the action of the judges in the ship money case might be quoted. For instance, Harbottle Grimston said April 16, 1640, “and in the third year of His Majesties Reign that now is, we had more than a Confirmation of it [Magna Charta]; for we had an Act declaratory past; and then to put it out of all question and dispute for the future, His Majesty by his gracious Answer, Soit Droit fait comme est desire, invested it with the Title of Petition of Right. What expositions contrary to that Law of Right, have some men given to the undermining the liberty of the Subjects, with new invented subtil distinctions, and assuming to themselves a power, (I know not where they had it) out of Parliament to