Entry taken from the book The Plantagenets
The recent terrorist attack in London has led various media to refer to it as an attack on "the cradle of parliamentary democracy", as well as to talk much about the birth of such a democracy in the British Isles. This has made me decide to recover the section that I have dedicated in my new book on the Plantagenets to this subject, located in the chapter dedicated to King Henry III (1216-1272). However, I do not want to fail to point out in the first place that, according to UNESCO, the courts held in León in 1188 by Alfonso IX constitute the oldest documentary evidence of the European parliamentary system.
Henry III of England was a king without great personality, more concerned with religious than political issues and governed by one and the other. In that sense, his reign, caught between two as convulsive and eventful as those of his father John and his son Edward I, would have gone down in history normally only for having been the longest of an English king until that of the queen. Victory.
But there was one circumstance that has deserved greater attention by historians:the little more than a year that elapsed between the battles of Lewes and Evesham, in which the effective government was in the hands of of Simon de Montfort with the king as a figure stripped of all power and a parliament to which de Montfort was accountable. Thus stated, it seems that this regime is a direct precedent of the current British parliamentary system, although this statement must be qualified.
The existence of some kind of council of notables had already existed in England since the Witenagemot of the Saxons, which met once or twice a year and was made up of the main nobles and bishops of the kingdom, and was also used by the Norman kings. Little by little, this council of nobles became aware of itself as a collegiate body, demanding that the kings not change the laws of the kingdom without their participation and approval.
A further step was taken in the reign of Juan sin Tierra, who in 1212 told the sheriffs that each must come to the royal councils accompanied by five or six of the most distinguished gentlemen of his earldom. It is true that Juan required his presence to "do what I tell them to do." With the progress that Magna Carta entailed, one of the new points was that no king could agree on the collection of extraordinary taxes without the consensus of the community of the kingdom. However, for the framers of the famous document "the kingdom" meant only the barons and the bishops.
Henry III was the first to use the term "parliament" (from the French "parler") for the meetings of this council in 1236, but initially they exclusively included nobles and bishops . Only in 1254, when the extraordinary financial needs for the conquest of Sicily required the consensus of a larger number of taxpayers, did Henry require the sheriffs they were accompanied by two gentlemen of the county and the presence of the lower clergy was also allowed.
When De Montfort took power in 1264, he required the presence in parliament of two representatives of the cities (bourgeois), although not to give a greater democratic content to his decisions, but for having greater support against the great barons of the kingdom who opposed him.
It is still debated in England today whether De Montfort's fight at the Battle of Lewes and his subsequent government makes him a champion of democracy and a predecessor of the current British system of government, where the king reigns but does not rule, or if he acted for purely personal reasons. It seems evident that neither he nor the rest of the rebellious barons of Lewes had anything like the current British political system in mind, but it does not seem fair to think that they were only looking for personal gain, since at least they always claimed to do so to recover the validity of the « good laws and customs of the kingdom. In the words of Simon Schama:
«Few charismatic leaders have undertaken a goal without an element of selfish ambition and vanity. And Simon was no exception. But there is also no doubt that he believed that what was good for the de Montforts was also good for England. And for a time, at least a good portion of the nobles and citizens of the realm believed it as well."
What is certain is that for more than a year there was a system in which parliaments were convened with diverse representation and without direct participation of the king in the government of the country. It is also true that the recognition of the participation of the gentlemen and the bourgeoisie in parliament marked the beginning of their inclusion in the social system, which caused both gentlemen and bourgeoisie to evolve in a progressive stratification and class differentiation between them.
And over time the opposing sides in the negotiations in Parliament would no longer be the monarch and his subjects, but the great lords (nobles and bishops) and the representatives of the bourgeoisie and the citizens, the "commons"... but that's another story.