"Liberty of speech was granted in respect of the aye or no, but not that everybody should speak what he listed." Bacon declared, "the Queen hath both enlarging and restraining power; she may set at liberty things restrained by statute and may restrain things which be at liberty." Yet Elizabeth raised no objection to the theory that Parliament was the sovereign power, for her authority controlled Parliament; and so we have Sir Thomas Smith writing in 1589 that "the most high and absolute power of the realm of England consisteth in the Parliament." In his "Ecclesiastical Polity," Book I.( 1592-3), Hooker argues that "Laws human, of what kind soever are available by consent," and that "laws they are not which public approbation hath not made so"; deciding explicitly that sovereignty rests ultimately in the people.
VICTORY OF PARLIAMENT OVER THE STUARTS When he came to the throne in 1603, James I.was prepared to govern with all the Tudor absolutism, but he had neither Elizabeth's Ministers--Cecil excepted--nor her knowledge of the English mind.

The English Parliament and the English people had put up with Elizabeth's headstrong, capricious rule, because it had been a strong rule, and the nation had obviously thriven under it.[50] But it was another matter altogether when James I.was king.
"By many steps the slavish Parliament of Henry VIII.

grew into the murmuring Parliament of Queen Elizabeth, the mutinous Parliament of James I., and the rebellious Parliament of Charles I." The twenty years of James I.'s reign saw the preaching up of the doctrine of the divine right of kings by the bishops of the Established Church, and the growing resolution of the Commons to revive their earlier rights and privileges.

If the Stuarts were as unfortunate in their choice of Ministers as Elizabeth had been successful, the House of Commons was equally happy in the remarkable men who became its spokesmen and leaders.

In the years that preceded the Civil War--1626-42--three men are conspicuous on the Parliamentary side: Eliot, Hampden, and Pym.