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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes imposed on the former type.”
If constitutionalism precisely means the existence of a constitutional state, Britain occupies the
most significant place in this regard. Moreover, the growth of British constitution affords a brilliant
case of the development of genuine constitutionalism. The age of Tudor despotism ended with the
‘golden age’ of Queen Elizabeth I. The Stuart monarchs had to face the opposition of the people.
The Civil War of 1640-48 was conducted on the issue as to who was supreme - the law or the king.
The defeat of the king and the victory of the people confirmed the principle of the sovereignty of
the latter. What remained undone in the Civil War was accomplished in the Glorious Revolution
of 1688 that laid the foundation of the sovereignty of Parliament. The movement for the
democratisation of the system continued with the result that the great Reform Acts were passed in
1832, 1867 and 1884 which enfranchised more and more people. The parliament Act of 1911
crippled the powers of House of Lords and its amendment in 1949 further reduced the area of
authority of the House in matters of passing a non-money bill. The rise of the two political parties
had its own contribution to the development of English constitutionalism. It made the functioning
of the parliamentary government a possibility.
As a result of all these developments, the British sovereign stands away from the area of effective
political authority; the power is exercised by the ministers of the Crown accountable to the
Parliament; and that all citizens of the country, irrespective of their social and political status,
enjoy the boons of liberty and equality what Dicey calls the ‘rule of law’. What is of special
importance in this regard is that English constitutionalism has supplied “a continuity of life to
liberal institutions through many centuries when elsewhere they were dead or had never lived,
permitted the growth of its own institutions among those communities in all parts of the world of
which England herself was the mother and supplied the pattern of a constitution when the moment
came for any newly liberated community to found one.”
Controversy Regarding its Existence

As already pointed out, the constitution of a state consists of those fundamental rules which
determine the form and functions of government and lay down the procedure by which the
political authority is to be exercised. It is thus one of the celebrated axioms of the science of politics
that there can be no state without a constitution. Curiously, a controversy has found its manifestation
so far as the existence of the English constitution is concerned. The names of Thomas Paine of
America and Alexis de Tocqueville of France are known in this direction who reacted against the
classical defence of Edmund Burke regarding his argument of a prescriptive constitution. The
central theme of the argument of Paine is that there exists no constitution at all unless it can be
produced in a visible form, that is, in the form of a document. A generation later, Alexis de
Tocqueville of France repeated the same argument. But while Paine examined the case on the basis
of a written constitution, de Tocqueville studied the case on the basis of its flexible nature. Like
Paine, he concluded that the English constitution did not exist owing to the fact that there was no
difference between the ordinary law of the land and the constitutional law.
That the views of Paine and de Tocqueville are miserably misfounded and that a thing like
constitution does exist in Britain becomes clear with a close look at its component elements. The
English constitution not having been made at a particular period of history has grown like an
organism and developed from age to age in which contributions have been made by six important
factors:
1. Great Charters: The great charters constitute the most important milestones on the way of
struggle for personal liberty and responsible government. They are historic and have a very
important bearing on some of the fundamental aspects of the practices and principles of the
constitution. The Manga Carta of 1215 established that even the king is subject to the law of the
land and that the people have certain liberties which must be respected by him. The Petition of
Right of 1628 denied taxation without the consent of the Parliament, prohibited arbitrary
imprisonment, and biletting of royal soldiers on private residences, and also outlawed certain
abuses of the royal power. Then, the Bill of Rights of 1689 laid the foundations of constitutional
monarchy. These charters are the product of political crises and they contain the terms of

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