The Executive 291
seem likely to result in an the cir-
cumstances, dangerous limitation. That this was not
the case was due to the extraordinary of
theTudors.1
Under the Tudots and the Stuarts, the
the royal prerogative was a subject of controversy,
and the constitutionalists of the Stuart
Lancastrian precedents to the
royal limitations, real or supposed, of Edward L's time.
What was, then, the royal prerogative of the later
ages? Substantially what Prothero has it as
being in the sixteenth century:
The prerogative of the crown consists in the
immunities, and powers enjoyed by the sovereign in-
cluding the precedence of all persons in the realm. These
privileges rest partly on statute, partly on custom prose-
dent. But they are not vague and indefinite: they are kaowa
and capable of description,3 They do not amount to aa
emancipation from law; on the contrary, they are limited by
it. This is the view of Bracton; . . . But
and definite powers do not exhaust the rights of the crown,
because circumstances may occur which are provided for
neither by law nor custom. . . . Thus beyond the definite
1 "The thing which was peculiar to England and decisive in its con-
stitutional history was not the creation of Parliament nor the invention
of the representative system, however important and interesting some
peculiarities of detail may be in both particulars. The peculiar and deter-
mining fact was that Parliament, at the moment when it came into
ence as a distinct institution, found ready to its hands, as a result of a line
of development independent of its own, a traditional policy of opposition
and of the control of the sovereign, based upon dennite principles
rights."—Adams, in American Historical Review, v., 655, 656, Each
scholar is likely to find the distinctive feature along the line of his own
research—Maitland found it in the Inns of Court and the Year Books—
but surely we are not in much danger of overstating the distinction or
importance of England's conception of monarchy as worked out in the
middle ages.
2 For example, to summon, prorogue, or dissolve Parliament; to create
peers and practically to name the bishops; to make boroughs parliament-
ary boroughs; to veto bills; to make ordinances and exercise the dispen-
sing and suspending powers (on these various rights relating to Parlia-
ment see above and below, pp. 130, note i, 343~4. 394» 418-21, 427); im-
munity from being sued or prosecuted; chief command of army and navy;
to appoint or dismiss justices and almost all other officials, high, or low.