Henry M. Baird · 19 of 379

CHAPTER I · Checks upon the king's authority.

Yet, while, through the absence of any effectual barrier to the exercise of his good pleasure, the king's authority was ultimately unrestricted, it must be confessed that there existed, in point of fact, some powerful checks, rendering the abuse of the royal prerogative, for the most part, neither easy nor expedient. Parliament, the municipal corporations, the university, and the clergy, weak as they often proved in a direct struggle with the crown, nevertheless exerted an influence that ought not to be overlooked. The most headstrong prince hesitated to disregard the remonstrances of any one of these bodies, and their united protest sometimes led to the abandonment of schemes of great promise for the royal treasury. It is true that parliament, university, and chartered borough owed their existence and privileges to the royal will, and that the power that created could also destroy. But time had invested with a species of sanctity the venerable institutions established by monarchs long since dead, and the utmost stretch of royal displeasure went not in its manifestation further than the mere threat to strip parliament or university of its privileges, or, at most, the arrest and temporary imprisonment of the more obnoxious judges or scholars.