God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [156]
Implied in this power of deposition was a renunciation of the idea of constitutional balance which had characterized the Answer to the XIX Propositions. In December 1642 the Discourse between a Resolved and Doubtful Englishman had said this explicitly – necessity allowed Parliament to set aside constitutional and legal precedent and the King had no power to reject legislation. This truth about where power lay had been revealed only slowly and that had made it more palatable: ‘that necessity might make the people know that that power was just and reasonable, as fearing the people’s weakness could not digest these strong and sinewy truths, whereunto their stomachs had not of long time been accustomed’. Such truth was all that made us ‘firm, and resolute, and true Englishmen’, however. The Privileges of the Commons had argued, in December 1642, that the Commons was superior to the Lords and in the following March The Priviledges of Parliament argued that the Houses could impose legislation on a dissenting monarch.54
Such claims were difficult to justify on the basis of precedent and rested instead on a radical view of the basis of political authority. They were suggesting in effect that the ancient constitution – the complex of rights and liberties enshrined in the common law and customs of the kingdom – should give way before parliamentary sovereignty. As the author of Touching the Fundamental Laws put it in February, the ultimate authority was not Parliament but that ‘universal and popular authority, that is in the body of the people, and which (for the public good, and preservation) is above every man and all laws’. It was here that Plaine English made its distinctive claim – that the people could renounce the authority of parliaments too, if that body threatened to betray their interests. In the immediate circumstances of January 1643, this threat lay with the dominance of proponents of an easy peace in Parliament, and the absence on business of the more resolute members. The danger was that Parliament ‘out of an intolerable weariness of this present condition, and fear of the event [outcome], agree to the making up of an unsafe unsatisfying accommodation’. War weariness, and fear of the outcome, threatened a betrayal of the cause and of the sacrifices already made which was here being countered by the assertion of political fundamentals.
Jeremiah Burroughs had made a similar argument in December 1642 in response to a direct challenge by Henry Ferne, the royalist propagandist. Ferne had asked: ‘But if Parliaments should degenerate and grow tyrannical, what means of safety could there be for such a State’. What he seems to have hoped would make the claim for parliamentary sovereignty look ridiculous actually prompted a more revolutionary argument.55
Burroughs’s argument rested in part on English freedoms, which distinguished free men from slaves:
There is no country in the world where country men, such as we call the yeomanry, yea and their farmers and workmen under them, do live in that fashion and freedom as they do in England; in all other places they are slaves in comparison, their lives are so miserable as they are not worth the enjoying, they have no influence at all into the government they are under, nothing to do in the making of laws, or any way consenting to them, but must receive them from others, according to their pleasure; but in England every freeholder has an influence into the making and consenting every law he is under, and enjoys his own with as true a title as the nobleman enjoys whatsoever is his.56
Here, perhaps, is an echo of the neo-Roman ideas of freedom expressed the previous summer, now cast as a potential source of resistance