Magna Carta Two

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

In England the royal prerogative is the way centralised Government bypasses Parliament. These princely prerogatives are what Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army left in the royal domain after grabbing the things that mattered for their Short, Long and Barebone Parliaments.

Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599 and was elected to represent Cambridge City in the Short Parliament of April 1640. He continued to serve in the Long Parliament convened in August 1640 and took a leading role in that parliament's refusal to bail out the bankrupt King Charles I, eventually stripping him of his power, taking control of fiscal policy and placing the army and navy under parliamentary control. Within two years a Civil War was waging throughout the land with families divided and royalist Cavaliers and parliamentarian Roundheads at daggers drawn.

Out of the skirmishing the Puritans emerged victorious, cut off the king's head and after an interlude with the Barebones Parliament appointed Cromwell as Lord Protector of England ruling with the help of a single-chamber parliament. It was not long before the expense of a standing army and the cost of the trade war with the Dutch brought Cromwell to his knees too. Nations need finance as well as firepower if they are to undertake glorious action. Cromwell died in 1658 and two years later the monarchy was restored.

The immediate legacy of the English Civil War was a constitution in which the King in Parliament was the glue that bound together the monarchy and the three branches of government: the legislature, the administration and the judiciary. Before the English Civil War the princes did not rule unfettered. There was a written constitution imposed by provincial barons on King John at Runnymede called Magna Carta. But mostly the princes were constrained by the unwritten Common Law and the rights derived from it upheld by a semi-independent judiciary’.