Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War

The eight essays in this volume, the first in the series The Making of Modern Freedom, treat the evolution of English ideas of liberty from the end of the Elizabethan period up to the 1640's in the context of English constitutional and parliamentary history. The volume begins with a study by J. H. Hexter of the Humble Answer and the Apology of 1604, examining how the issues raised by a disputed election to the House of Commons expanded to a more general concern with the process by which monarchs had enhanced their powers at the cost of the liberty of their subjects. It shows that by the beginning of the seventeenth century, many Englishmen had come to see Parliament as an essential bulwark against assaults on their rights and freedoms. The next two essays pursue this growing identification of liberty with Parliament. Johann P. Sommerville demonstrates that the years leading up to the calling of the Long Parliament, a period of increasingly broad claims for royal authority, led to an aggressive defense of Parliament as the main recourse for protecting the liberties of subjects from royal encroachment. David Harris Sacks scrutinizes the links between liberty and representation, particularly in the concept of 'free elections', the unencumbered participation of those eligible by law to vote in parliamentary elections. Clive Holmes and Charles M. Gray focus on the character of the common law and its connections to political thought and practice, tracing the development of ideas about liberty and of rules of law to safeguard it. Holmes explores the common-law traditions governing property and taxation and the threats to subvert them in the early seventeenth century. Gray ranges broadly over the whole field of law, giving us a sense of what has come to be called the 'common-law mind' and its principal institutions. Robert Zaller and Thomas Cogswell consider the effects on the idea of liberty of England's foreign relations and the war on the Continent in the 1620's. Zaller shows how the parliaments of that troubled decade feared that Catholic invasion or popish subterfuge would lead to the 'extinction of both civil and spiritual liberty'. C ogswell examines the continental war as the catalyst for the Petition of Rights of 1628, which countered the pressures that ongoing warfare placed on domestic liberties. In the concluding essay, Derek M. Hirst traces the survival into the era of the Restoration of the world of the Petition of Right, with its emphasis on the supremacy of law, the definition of the subject's liberties, and the central place of Parliament as the defender of both law and liberty.