88 TRANSACTIONS. 19OI-2 



Just here I would like to refer to Dr. Gierke's recently 

 published scholarly work on Political Tlieories of the Middle 

 Age. At pp. 39, 40, he says that it was the well recognized 

 theory of the European jurists in the twelfth century that 

 "the legal title to all Rulership lies in the voluntary and 

 contractual submission of the Ruled". This, it seems to me^ 

 is a very remarkable anticipation of the apothegm I have 

 already quoted from the American Declaration of Indepen- 

 dence. 



The next great and salient instance where the sovereignty 

 of the people constrained the King, was the case of John, of 

 infamous memory. True, John was deposed by the Pope 

 rather than by the English Parliament, and it is also true 

 that the Great Charter was wrung from the pusillanimous 

 King by the people under arms ; but the Charter was a 

 triumphant vindication of the amenability of the King to the 

 law. Speaking of the Great Charter during the hey-day of 

 Stuart absolutism, Sir Edward Coke said in Parliament : 



Sovereign power is no parliamentary word. Magna 1 harta and all our statutes 

 are absolute, without any s-aving of sovereign power. Take we heed what we 

 yield unto. Magna Charta is such a fellow that he unll have na sovereign. 



Then we come to a most notable occasion in history, 

 when, for the first time after Parliament had assumed its 

 settled form and character, the whole executive government 

 was taken from the King (i), he being ultimately deposed. 

 I speak of the case of Richard II. You remember the story. 

 After repeated quarrels with the Parliament over his ty- 

 rannical conduct, his partiality for favourites, such as had 

 been the undoing of Edward II, and his determined policy to 

 subvert the fundamental laws of the land. Parliament declared 

 that it had become 



la'W'fu] for his people, by their full and tree assent and consent, to depose the King 

 from his royal throne, and in his stead to raise up some other of the Royal ra^c upon 

 the same. 



Taswell-Langmead says : (2) 



<1; See Hallavi's Mid. Ages, iii, 59. 

 (2) Eng. Cons. Hist. cap. viii. 



