Hitherto, however, the parliamentary determinations of the commons, as re garded the constitution of their ewn house, had constantly tended to maintain the political rights of their constituents against invasion on the part of the crown. But that firm and lasting establishment of their own power as a distinct legisla tive body, which may be dated from the great revolution that first brought the house of Lancaster to the throne, seems, by that very additional security which it gave them against royal encroachment, to have tended to embolden the house, not, as formerly, to maintain the elective franchise to the utmost with the same zeal with which they upheld their own interest and independence as a legislative chamber, but to commence a sort of reac tion against the constituent bodies by narrowing the basis of the suffrage itself. The earliest of these disfranchising enact ments, and one of the most remarkable, is that of the 8th Henry VI., which restricts the county franchise, formerly possessed by all freeholders, to such only whose freeholds were worth clear forty shillings a year, a sum at least equal to twenty pounds of the present day. The next remarkable instance, though very different in its nature, of legislative enactment respecting the constitution of the Com mons' House, appears in the parliamentary incorporation of Wales and Cheshire in the reign of Henry V III., which brought an accession of sixteen county and fifteen borough members.
The borough representation in general was still the great object of attention to the crown in undermining the independ ence of the House of Commons. This part of its policy was diligently pursued under the later reigns of the Tudors, and car ried to the utmost limit by the Stuarts : 1st, by creating or reviving parliamentary boroughs, and at the same time remould 1ng their municipal constitutions accord ing to the views of the crown ; 2nd, by proceeding to assimilate the municipal constitutions of the old parliamentary boroughs to those of this newly created class. Of the 46 parliamentary boroughs first created in the reigns of Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, Lo fewer than 27 appear in schedule A of the Reform Act of 1832, besides five of the same number which are in schedule B; a very clear indication as to the description of places which were chiefly selected at that period to exercise for the first time the parlia mentary franchise. The last addition to the English representation, previous to the recent changes, was, under Charles II., the enfranchisement by statute of the county and city of Durham, and the crea tion by charter of the parliamentary bo rough of Newark. James I., by virtue of his royal prerogative, had already con ferred the right of electing two members upon each of the two universities of Ox ford and Cambridge, quite independently of the city and borough representation of those places already existing: thus intro ducing an anomaly, as well as novelty, into the representative system.
Those who conducted the revolution of 1688 made much more effectual provision against the return of Roman Catholic ascendency than they did for the purifi cation of the representative system. The Bill of Rights does, indeed, express, "that the election of members of parliament ought to be free ;" but this vague decla ration seems to have amounted to nothing more than an indication of the prevailing public opinion on the subject. We find another strong proof that the public at tention had now begun to be directed not merely, as in former times, to upholding the authority of the Commons' House as constituted in parliament, but to the na ture of the relations, on the one hand, between the house and the constituent body of the nation, on the other between the several members and their individual constituencies, in the enacting of the statute commonly called " the Triennial Act," which deprived the crown of the power of continuing the same House of Commons for a longer period than three years. The Triennial Act of 6 & 7 Wil liam and Mary, c. 2, was an enactment wholly on the side of electoral freedom. The discretionary power previously exer cised by the crown, not only of dissolving, but of continuing at pleasure, was highly favourable to any such view, on the part of the crown, as that of forming a tacit compact with a corrupt or servile majority of the Commons' House, and was there fore, as had been lately seen under Charles H., exceedingly convenient both to king and commons, when the latter happened to be sufficiently pliant. So strongly, however, was the popular opinion on this point expressed at the period in question, that it compelled the commons to persist in the measure in spite of King William's refusal of assent to the bill after its first passing the two houses, so that on the second occasion his assent was reluctantly yielded. The same activity of the public opinion of that day respecting the com position of the commons, produced the several acts of that reign which disqualify various classes of placemen for seats in the house.
The legislative union with Scotland, effected in 1707 by statute 6 Anne, c. 8, brought an accession to the English (which thereby became the British) House of Commons, of thirty members fbr counties, and exactly half that number for cities and boroughs ; ex hibiting between the numerical amount of the county and that of the borough representation a proportion quite the re verse not only of that which existed in England, but of that which had previously appeared in the Scottish parliamentary representation.