Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/63

 and consequently if there be no text neither of the Old nor New Testament, nor yet any Law of Nature, that Kings may not make Lawes without Parliaments, they may make Lawes without Parliaments, and if neither in the Scripture, nor in the Law of Nature, Kings be forbidden to lay taxes or any kind of impositions upon their people without consent in Parliament, they may doe it out of Parliament (Sir) if they bee due by the Law of God and of nature, they are due, though there bee no act of Parliament for them, nay (Sir) if they be due by such a right, a hundred acts of Parliaments cannot take them away, or make them undue.” E. 196 (35). True, Fiennes later himself pronounces the “Et Cetera Oath” against the laws of nature.

Of course the parliamentary champions prior to 1642 did not rely solely on the fundamental laws as they stood revealed in common-law precedents. Some theory of the origin of government, which afforded a historical background for these precedents, must from the beginning have been in their minds. Only indistinct traces of it can be found. In 1641, St. John had spoken of the laws of the realm as “instituted at the first, and freely assented unto, and chosen by their Ancestors, for preservation of themselves, and us their discendants in our persons, lives, and estates.” The Speech or Declaration Of Mr. St. John, E. 196 (1).

Pym in his speech against Strafford had held up as particularly heinous among his offenses his declaration that Ireland as a conquered nation was under absolute subjection; for, as England had been conquered, the same reasoning was applicable to it. If the various compacts between conqueror and conquered, by which the conqueror’s might had been transformed into the king’s lawful right were at the mercy of the king’s whim, the subjects were not only deprived of their legal safeguards, but were also reinstated in their old right of resistance to the conqueror. Rushworth, VIII, 662.

The comparison of Parker’s political philosophy when stated in terms of parliamentary absolutism with his doctrine of the supremacy of the civil power over the ecclesiastical will be instructive.

The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, published by him in November of 1641, is throughout a splendid glorification of the majesty and sufficiency of power—of the coercive might of civil government in contrast with ecclesiastical. Parker will allow no division of supreme power between church and state. Churchmen can show no grant of legislative power, either from God or from the assent of the body of