176 ENGLAND. 



kings of England have very seldom ventured to exercise. He pos - 

 sesses the right of choosing his own council ; of nominating all the 

 great officers of state, of the household, and the church ; and, in fine,, 

 is the fountain of honour, from whom all degrees of nobility and 

 knighthood are derived. Such is the dignity and power of a king of 

 Great Britain. 



Of the parliament.. ..Parliaments, or general councils, in some 

 shape, are, as has been before observed, of as high antiquity as the 

 Saxon government in this island, and coevai with the kingdom itself. 

 Blackstone, in his valuable Commentaries, says, " It is generally 

 agreed, that in the main the constitution of parliament, as it now 

 stands, was marked out so long ago as the 17th of king John, A. D. 

 1215, in the Great Charter granted by that prince ; wherein he pro- 

 mises to summon ail archbishops, bishops, abbots, lords, and greater 

 barons, personally : and all other tenants in chief under the crown., 

 by the sheriffs and bailiffs, to meet at a certain place, with forty days 

 notice, to assess aids and scutages when necessary. And this con- 

 stitution hath subsisted, in fact, at least from the year 1266, 49 Henry 

 III, there being still extant writs of that date to summon knights, ci- 

 tizens, and burgesses to parliament." 



The parliament is assembled by the king's writs, and its sitting- 

 must not be intermitted above three years. Its constituent parts are, 

 the king, sitting there in his royal political capacity, and the three 

 estates of the realm ; the lords spiritual, the lords temporal, who sit 

 together with the king in one house, and the commons, who sit by 

 themselves in another. The king and these three estates, together, 

 form the great corporation or body politic of the kingdom, of which 

 the king is said to be caput, principium, et finis : for, upon their com- 

 ing together, the king meets them, either in person or by representa- 

 tion ; without which there can be no beginning of a parliament ; and 

 he also has alone the power of dissolving them. 



It is highly necessary, for preseving the balance of the constitution, 

 that the executive power should be a branch, though not the whole, 

 of the legislature. The crown cannot begin of itself any alterations 

 in the present established law ; but it may approve or disapprove of 

 the alterations suggested and consented to by the two houses. The 

 legislative, therefore, cannot abridge the executive power of any rights 

 which it now has by law, without its own consent ; since the law 

 must perpetually stand as it now does, unless all the powers will 

 agree to alter it. And herein indeed consists the true excellence of 

 the English government, that all the parts of it form a mutual check 

 upon each other. In the legislature, the people are a check upon the 

 nobility, and the nobility a check upon the people, by the mutual 

 privilege of rejecting what the other has resolved : while the king is 

 a check upon both ; which preserves the executive power from 

 encroachments. 



The lords spiritual consist of two archbishops and twenty-four 

 bishops, with four bishops from Ireland. The lords temporal con- 

 sist of all the peers of the realm ; the bishops not being in strictness 

 held to be such, but merely lords of parliament. Some of the peers 

 sit by descent, as do all ancient peers ; some by creation, as do all the 

 new-made ones ; others, since the unions with Scotland and Ireland, 

 by election, which is the case of the sixteen peers who represent the 

 body of the Scotch nobility, and the twenty-eight Irish peers who 



