ABSTRACT
In 1640-1 the Elizabethan constitution collapsed. Subsequently, during the English Revolution and the reigns of the later Stuarts, there was a search for a new constitutional ‘settlement’. In the early years of the eighteenth century, many people believed that this search had been successful in 1688-9 when, it was thought, the architects of
the Glorious Revolution had erected a constitution in which the three elements in it – king, Lords and Commons – balanced and limited each other, producing conditions of political stability and constitutional harmony. ‘Herein indeed consists the true excellence of the English government’, wrote Sir William Blackstone in the middle of the century,
that all 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. And this very executive power is again checked and kept within due bounds by the two houses . . . Thus every branch of our civil polity supports and is supported, regulates and is regulated, by the rest . . . Like three distinct powers in mechanics, they jointly impel the machine of government in a direction different from what either, acting by itself, would have done; but at the same time in a direction partaking of each, and formed out of all; a direction which constitutes the true line of the liberty and happiness of the community.1
