id="Page_24" class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="24"/> usurpation. But it is evident from the whole course of proceeding that it was the breach of privilege in citing their own members to appear, which excited their indignation. It was but incidentally that they observed in a conference, "that the Commons cannot find, by Magna Charta, or by any other law or ancient custom of parliament, that your lordships have any jurisdiction in cases of appeal from courts of equity." They afterwards, indeed, resolved that there lies no appeal to the judicature of the Lords in parliament from courts of equity;[46] and came ultimately, as their wrath increased, to a vote "that whosoever shall solicit, plead, or prosecute any appeal against any commoner of England, from any court of equity, before the House of Lords, shall be deemed and taken a betrayer of the rights and liberties of the commons of England, and shall be proceeded against accordingly;"[47] which vote the Lords resolved next day to be "illegal, unparliamentary, and tending to a dissolution of the government."[48] But this was evidently rather an act of hostility arising out of the immediate quarrel than the calm assertion of a legal principle.[49]

Question of the exclusive right of the commons as to money-bills.—During the interval between these two dissensions, which the suits of Skinner and Shirley engendered, another difference had arisen, somewhat less violently conducted, but wherein both houses considered their essential privileges at stake. This concerned the long agitated question of the right of the Lords to make alterations in money-bills. Though I cannot but think the importance of their exclusive privilege has been rather exaggerated by the House of Commons, it deserves attention; more especially as the embers of that fire may not be so wholly extinguished as never again to show some traces of its heat.

In our earliest parliamentary records, the Lords and Commons, summoned in a great measure for the sake of relieving the king's necessities, appear to have made their several grants of supply without mutual communication, and the latter generally in a higher proportion than the former. These were not in the form of laws, nor did they obtain any formal assent from the king, to whom they were tendered in written indentures, entered afterwards on the roll of parliament. The latest instance of such distinct grants from the two houses, as far as I can judge from the rolls, is in the 18th year of Edward III.[50] But in the 22nd year of that reign the Commons alone granted three fifteenths of their goods, in such a manner as to show beyond a doubt that the tax was to be levied solely upon themselves.[51] After this time, the Lords and Commons are jointly recited in the rolls to have granted them, sometimes, as it is expressed, upon deliberation had together. In one case it is said that the Lords, with one assent, and afterwards the Commons, granted a subsidy on exported wool.[52] A change of language is observable in Richard II.'s reign, when the Commons are recited to grant with the assent of the Lords; and this seems to indicate, not only that in practice the vote used to originate with the Commons, but that their proportion, at least, of the tax being far greater than that of the Lords (especially in the usual impositions on wool and skins, which ostensibly fell on the exporting merchant), the grant was to be deemed mainly theirs, subject only to the assent of the other house of parliament. This is, however, so explicitly asserted in a remarkable passage on the roll of 9 Hen. IV., without any apparent denial, that it cannot be called in question by any one.[53] The language of the rolls continues to be the same in the following reigns; the Commons are the granting, the Lords the consenting power. It is even said by the court of king's bench, in a year-book of Edward IV., that a grant of money by the Commons would be binding without assent of the Lords; meaning of course as to commoners only, though the position seems a little questionable even with the limitation. I have been almost led to suspect, by considering this remarkable exclusive privilege of originating grants of money to the Crown, as well as by the language of some passages in the rolls of parliament relating to them, that no part of the direct taxes, the tenths or fifteenths of goods, were assessed upon the Lords temporal and spiritual, except where they are positively mentioned, which is frequently the case. But as I do not remember to have seen this anywhere asserted by those who have turned their attention to the antiquities of our constitution, it may possibly be an unfounded surmise, or at least only applicable to the earlier period of our parliamentary records.