ABSTRACT
Shortly before Charles I’s 1628 Parliament met, one of its memberssaid, ‘I should be very glad to see that good old decrepit law of Magna Charta, which hath been kept so long and lain bedrid, as it were – I shall be glad to see it walk abroad again, with new vigour and lustre, attended and followed with the other six statutes [of Edward III]’.1 In the seventeenth century, the Great Charter again claimed a central position as common lawyers and parliamentarians wielded a mythical ancient constitution as a weapon against the royal prerogative reasserted by the Stuart king. The English tradition of subjecting royal power to the rule of law enshrined in Magna Carta was an anomaly in seventeenth-century Europe, for trends supported divine-right doctrines. Religious wars, noble revolts and social strife had convinced other Europeans that their only alternative to anarchy was submission to an absolute monarch’s Godgiven authority.
