The Government of England

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART I.--CENTRAL GOVERNMENT CHAPTER I THE CROWN Political liberty and romance in English history are both bound up with the shifting fortunes of the throne. The strong hand of the Norman and Angevin kings welded the whole country into a nation, and on that foundation were built the solid structures of a...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART I.--CENTRAL GOVERNMENT CHAPTER I THE CROWN Political liberty and romance in English history are both bound up with the shifting fortunes of the throne. The strong hand of the Norman and Angevin kings welded the whole country into a nation, and on that foundation were built the solid structures of a national Common Law, a national Parliament, and a long series of national statutes. When in the fulness of time the Crown had accomplished its work of unification, it came into conflict with Parliament, and after a series of convulsions, in which one king lost his head and another his throne, political evolution resumed its normal course. The House of Commons gradually drew the royal authority under its control. But it did so without seriously curtailing the legal powers of the Crown, and thus the King legally enjoys most of the attributes that belonged to his predecessors, although the exercise of his functions has passed into other hands. If the personal authority of the monarch has become a shadow of its former massiveness, the government is still conducted in his name, and largely by means of the legal rights attached to his office. With a study of the Crown, therefore, a description of English government most fittingly begins. The Title to Ever since 1688, when James II., fleeing in fear of his the Crown, li wit, ndrew himself out of the kingdom, and thereby abdicated, the title to the Crown has been based entirely upon parliamentary enactment. At the present day it rests upon the Act of Settlement of 1701,1 which provided that, in default of heirs of William and of Anne, the Crown should pass to the Electress Sophia, and the heirs of herbody, being Protestants. Sophia was the granddaughter of James I., through her mother, wife of the Elector Palatine; and while not..