He might as well have pretended
that the original grant of the Charter was an "act of parliament;
"because it was not only granted at the request, and with the
consent, and by the advice, but on the compulsion even, of those
who commonly constituted his parliaments. Yet this did not make
the grant of the charter "an act of parliament." It was simply an
act of the king.
The object of Coke, in this pretence, was to furnish some color
for the palpable false- hood that the legislative authority,
which parliament was trying to assume in his own day, and which
it finally succeeded in obtaining, had a precedent in the ancient
constitution of the kingdom.
There would be as much reason in saying that, because the ancient
kings were in the habit of passing laws in special answer to the
petitions of their subjects, therefore those petitioners were a
part of the legislative power of the kingdom.
One great objection to this argument of Coke, for the legislative
authority of the ancient parliaments, is that a very large
probably much the larger number of legislative acts were done
without the advice, consent, request, or even presence, of a
parliament.
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