The changing power of the monarch
History · Key Stage 2 · The School
Beginning with almost everything
After 1066 William I held power that is hard to imagine now. He owned the land. He granted it to his followers in return for service. He made the law. He led the army. The Domesday Book of 1086 recorded who held what, because knowing that was how you taxed it. Even so, a medieval king needed his barons' cooperation, and that need is where every later limit begins.
The moments that cut it down
MAGNA CARTA in 1215 forced King John to accept that the king was not above the law. It was the first written limit. He agreed under threat and broke it almost at once, but nobody forgot it. Parliament grew out of the councils that kings called when they needed money. The Civil War of the 1640s ended with a king executed. The settlement of 1689 fixed that the monarch could not make or suspend laws without Parliament.
Where power sits now
Today the monarch is HEAD OF STATE but does not govern. Parliament makes the laws. The government is led by whoever commands a majority in the elected House of Commons. The change was slow and often violent. Nobody drew up a plan for it. It is the piled-up result of arguments about money, religion and law. Each one was settled at the time, and nobody was aiming at where it ended up.
Here is one crisis, step by step. In 1909 David Lloyd George, the Chancellor, brought in the People's Budget. Among its taxes were new ones on the land and incomes of the wealthy. It was meant to pay for old age pensions and new warships. In November 1909 the House of Lords voted it down, though it had not rejected a budget for two centuries. Two general elections followed in 1910. Before the second, the Prime Minister asked King George V for a promise, and the king agreed. If the Liberals won and the Lords still refused, he would create hundreds of new Liberal peers. Peers sit in the Lords, so these would cancel out its Conservative majority. In August 1911 the Lords passed the Parliament Act. Some peers who opposed it voted yes, fearing the new peers. The Lords lost their veto, the power to block, over money bills. For other bills they could only delay them, for up to two years. The king had agreed to the elected government's request, and the Commons ended up stronger than the Lords.