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By Root 1419 0

the other constituent parts. They also gave a commitment to remove illegal innovations that had crept into the church – a commitment to the preservation of the Reformation within the law which implied again the importance of the law in the regulation of political and religious life. The argument about the estates of the realm had a very respectable lineage, but there was room for disagreement here. Hyde held to the view that the three estates of the realm were the Commons, the Lords spiritual (the bishops) and the Lords temporal (the peers). He felt that Colepeper and Falkland had conceded too much in taking the (equally venerable) line that the King was one of the three estates – making him an equal partner, rather than the King over the three estates. In effect, however, they had mounted a defence of a limited monarch, something that had been taken for granted in 1640.29 Indeed, Colepeper had been a vociferous petitioner in the opening days of the Long Parliament, in defence of the lawful government of the country, and now found himself the spokesman for moderate royalism on the eve of a civil war.

In response to the Answer, Henry Parker, something of a veteran pamphleteer and controversialist, published his Observations on some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses. This broke new ground in a number of ways. Unperturbed by the royalists” claim to be the defenders of the constitution, he pushed ahead, spelling out very clearly the implications of the recent declarations and demands. In an emergency which threatened the state the King was obliged to follow Parliament’s advice. Parliament was the state itself, with a sovereign power of its own, capable of addressing dangers by legislative, executive or judicial means. Its advice was crucial to supplying the defects of monarchy and if the King did not follow it then the ultimate moving force of all human laws – individual self-preservation and the good of the people (salus populi) justified the Lords and Commons in acting without him.30 Even more daringly, he argued that the King’s Negative Voice rendered all Englishmen slaves. It was based on an argument about freedom which can be traced before 1642 in parliamentary speeches and elsewhere, not least in the controversy over the Petition of Right. To be free, it was said, it was necessary not only to be able to exercise all your rights and freedoms in practice; you also needed to be free, in principle, from any possible constraint. This was because fear of censure or hope of reward would act as a bridle or a spur, distorting your actions as a free man and rendering you, in effect, the creature of another. This was used as an argument in favour of the Bishops Exclusion Bill in January – they should not sit in the House of Lords since their position depended on the King, and they were not, therefore, free to exercise their rights and liberties as free men. Parker now yoked it to the controversy about the Negative Voice, the existence of which rendered all Englishmen ‘slaves’, since it was a continual potential limit on the exercise of their rights and liberties.31

But was Parker speaking for anyone but himself? It is significant here that Parker was probably also involved in drafting two declarations of May which had flirted with these ideas and his argument about slavery. Parker was secretary to the Committee of Safety established in the summer of 1642, and clearly had a role in drafting many of its papers and letters. From July onwards the committee also had a primary role in drafting declarations and, although Pym was the most prominent member of the committee, it is unlikely that an experienced polemicist like Parker was there only to take dictation.32 Parker’s argument about slavery was taken up in other pamphlets later in the summer – among them a pamphlet called Reasons why this Kingdom ought to adhere to the Parliament. This has plausibly been shown to have been published by presses run by George Bishop and Robert White, who evidently had a line in radical parliamentary publications. Even more intriguingly, they