s
Prerogatives of Parliaments, a work not published till after his death.
It is a dialogue between a courtier, or counsellor, and a country
justice of peace, who represents the patriot party, and defends the
highest notion of liberty which the principles of that age would bear.
Here is a passage of it: "Counsellor. That which is done by the king,
with the advice of his private or privy council, is done by the king's
absolute power. Justice. And by whose power is it done in parliament but
by the king's absolute power? Mistake it not, my lord: the three estates
do but advise as the privy council doth; which advice if the king
embrace, it becomes the king's own act in the one, and the king's law in
the other," etc.

The earl of Clare, in a private letter to his son-in-law, Sir Thomas
Wentworth, afterwards earl of Strafford, thus expresses himself "We live
under a prerogative government, where book law submits to lex loquens."
He spoke from his own and all his ancestors experience. There was no
single instance of power which a king of England might not at that time
exert, on pretence of necessity or expediency: the continuance alone, or
frequent repetition of arbitrary administration, might prove dangerous,
for want of force to support it. It is remarkable, that this letter of
the earl of Clare was written in the first year of Charles's reign; and
consequently must be meant of the general genius of the government, not
the spirit or temper of the monarch. See Strafford's Letters, vol. i.
p. 32. From another letter in the same collection, (vol. i. p. 10,)
it appears that the council sometimes assumed the power of forbidding
persons disagreeable to the court to stand in the elections. This
authority they could exert in some instances; but we are not thence to
inter, that they could shut the door of that house to every one who was
not acceptable to them. The genius of the ancient government reposed
more trust in the king, than to entertain any such suspicion; and it
allowed scattered instances of such a kind, as would have been totally
destructive of the constitution, had they been continued without
interruption.

I have not met with any English writer in that age who speaks of England
as a limited monarchy, but as an absolute one, where the people have
many privileges. That is no contradiction. In all European monarchies
the people have privileges; but whether dependent or independent on the
will of the monarch, is a questio