ABSTRACT
Failure to define rights and prerogatives, and to delimit the spheres of what the crown could only do in parliament and what it could do by its 'absolute' power did not so much lay up trouble for the future as avoid, in the sound tradition of good government, the posing of insoluble problems. When political and religious difficulties, as well as private follies, put those questions squarely before the nation, the result was civil war. The weakness of the Tudor theorists lay not in their ignoring the concept of sovereignty but in their inability to develop the theme on a native basis by admitting the unrestricted sovereignty (not only the supremacy under the law) of the crown in parliament. Thus they permitted the conflict between improper and alien theories which wished to ascribe true sovereignty either to the king or to the commons alone. The practice of the Cromwellian constitution collapsed after 16°3; it may be argued that its underlying theory remained obscure in the sixteenth century and did not come to be accepted more generally until Burke's revival of the organic body politic.
