The subject was not
at the mercy of the king except when he placed himself outside the law.
The disadvantage, however, of an unwritten constitution is that there
are always a number of cases for which the law does not provide; and
there were many more in the seventeenth century than there are to-day.
These cases constituted the debatable land between the crown and
parliament. Parliament assumed that the crown could neither diminish
parliamentary privilege nor develop its own prerogative without
parliamentary sanction; and it read this assumption back into history.
Nothing was legal unless it had been sanctioned by parliament; unless
the crown could vouch a parliamentary statute for its claims they were
denounced as void. This theory would have disposed of much of the
constitution, including the crown itself; even parliament had grown by
precedent rather than by statute. There were, as always, precedents on
both sides. The question was, which were the precedents of growth and
which were those of decay? That could only be decided by the force of
circumstances, and the control of parliament over the national purse
was the decisive factor in the situation.
The Stuarts, indeed, were held in a cleft stick. Their revenue was
steadily decreasing because the direct taxes, instead of growing with
the nation's income, had remained fixed amounts since the fourteenth
century, and the real value of those amounts declined rapidly with the
influx of precious metals from the New World.
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