PETITION OF RIGHT.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20473, 30 July 1928, Page 5

PETITION OF RIGHT.

THE 300TH ANNIVERSARY. PERSONAL LIBERTY. BULWARK AGAINST ROYAL OPPRESSION. The Petition of Right, a statute declaring the principles of liberty in England, was passed by King and Parliament 300 years ago on June 7, writes a barristei in the London Daily Telegraph. It has been considered by constitutional historians as second in importance only to Magna Chnrta itself. It was largely the work of that great lawyer Coke, who was no longer a chief justice submissive to the royal will. At the ago of 77 he was returned for the Parliament of 1628 as M.P. for the county of Buckingham, and at once took the lead in voicing the indignation of the people over the oppressive and illegal activities of the Duge of Buckingham and other of King Charles 1 s Ministers. This statute consists of eight clauses aimed at grievances classed in four categories; 1. Illegal exactions) 2. Arbitrary imprisonment; 3. Billeting of soldiers and marines; and 4. Martial law. It recited statutes of Edward I and 111 relating to the right to liberty of person and purse. After an attempt at evasion King Charles I reluctantly put his sign manual to this Act, declaring the illegality of procedings which had given rise to the much-needed reform. The Petition ot Right was more or less rounded oft by the Habeas Corpus Act, 1679, which entered upon its 250th year about a fortnight ago. Personal liberty is a conception that is peculiarly English. It was already iccognised as a public right at a time when a species of serfdom still existed in this country, notably in the Charter of Liberties issued by King Henry I on his coronation in 1100. Dicey, in his Law of the Constitution, has emphasised the undoubted fact that the security of personal freedom which an Englishman enjoys did not originate in any declaration contained in any written document, such as is found, for instance, in the Belgian Constitution. In England the notion seems to have been taken for granted. STATE AND THE PEOPLE. . During the last eight centuries this principle has brought the State authorities into constant collision with the people, and the people have won every time, albeit after long intervals of oppression and against heavy odds. So ingrained has tne sense of privilege become that the merest suggestion of an attempt by the powers that be to exercise illegal presure upon any person, even if it be in a praisewoi tny attempt to avert threats to public order, induces the least public-spirited of citizens to throw off his apathy. There is Stubbs’s authority for the statement that* Henry I’s. Coronation charter had a n important bearing on the constitutional programme put by the barons before King John. The 39tn article of Magna Charta was confirmed in Edward I’s. reign (1297), by an enactment. the English version of which is:— “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed. No man shall be condemned at the King’s suit, either before the King in his Bench, or before any other commissioner or judge whatever, but only by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man, either justice or right.” The original in Latin, of course, just as were most records in those days. The late Mr Holland, in his lectures on the General Eyre, introduced a humorous touch when he said: “ Even when in ‘ Piers the Ploughman ’ the angel came down from heaven to bear a message to William Langland, the angel delivered his message in Latin.” It Henry I. who created the system of itinerant justices in England, and though the main purpose of the much-hated General Eyre was to collect money for the Crown by way of amercement and forfeitures, the evidence of the Year Books and other records shows that incidentally the travelling justices remedied a great deal of injustice which had been suffered by people at the hands of their feudal superiors. HABEAS CORPUS. Many infractions of the law of personal liberty and Darnel’s case in particulars, led to the Petition of Right, followed by the Act of 1640 abolishing the Star Chamber and again declaring the principle of Habeas Corpus. After the Restoration the regime of Lord Clarendon was so tfnged with the arbitrary tradition of earlier Stuart days that when, in 1676 the Lord Chancellor (Lord Nottingham) declined in Jenkes’s case to issue a writ of Habeas Corpus in vacation, such a powerful reforming movement, arose that Parliament was constrained to pass the statute in 1679. This is still the basis of the English substantive law in regard to the liberty of the subject, though certain imperfections and omissions in it have been repaired by subsequent Habeas Corpus Acts, the most important of which is that of 1816. The most recent case of importance in which the protection of Habeas Corpus was invoked against the executive was that of Rex v. Home Secretary: ex parte O’Brien, in the year 1923, when the Court of Appeal held that certain internments made in connection with the then unsettled condition of affairs in Southern Ireland were illegal, and an Act of Indemnity had to be passed.