Parliament 445

ought to have their freedom to speak and say in the house of
their assembly as to them is thought convenient or reasonable
without any manner challenge, charge, or puiution therefore
to be laid to them in anywise.1

Compensation was procured him at the king's order.
But

matter of privilege as it was, the prayer is for personal and
private indemnity: the commons seem to have no remedy
but petition, and no atonement is offered to their injured
dignity. So the case stands in the last years of the Lancastrian
rule.2 " -
Nothing can be added for the Yorkist period.
Clearly the conception of a Parliamentary right of free
speech had made progress in the reigns of Richard II. an,d
Henry IV. And yet the sum total of evidence is disappoint-
ing. It would be hardly worth recording . . . were it not
that these early notions and precedents, however vague they
seem to us, were to be much used by the protagonists of priv-
ilege at a later time. Strong bulwarks of liberty have some-
times been erected on slight foundations. The truth is that
in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries Parlia-
ment was so little aware of its possible powers that it did not
conceive clearly the dangers besetting it. ... How little
conception of a constitutional principle there was is best
shown by a consideration of the period of nearly a century and
a half that follows.3
It is far easier to show the breach than the observance of
any lines of conduct looking to the preservation of the
privilege that had been tried in the earlier time. Then in
1576 Peter Wentworth's great words sounded the note of
a new era ^ not interrupted until not only
* Cited in Stubbs, Constitutional History, § 451.
*Ibid. 3 W. and N., pp. 170, 171,