Political Legitimacy: A Belief-Based Definition

An authority is considered legitimate by a particular subject if that subject accepts the morality of her rule and thus his moral obligation to comply with her policies. An authority is more legitimate the more subjects consider her legitimate and the stronger their moral commitment to comply. Because intrinsic beliefs are unobservable, however, they are not the only type of beliefs that contribute to an authority’s (perceived) legitimacy. Some subjects behave as if they believe in the legitimacy of an authority because they believe that others believe in the legitimacy of the authority.

Such common knowledge regarding legitimacy beliefs matter because subjects’ best responses are strategic complements. The more one expects others to comply, the greater the gain from compliance. Hence, it is not necessary for the entire population to view the ruler as legitimate for the population to act as if they do. If enough of the population views the ruler as legitimate, a shared belief regarding the ruler’s legitimacy can prevail. An authority’s (perceived) legitimacy thus depends on managing shared, commonly known beliefs about her legitimacy and the legitimacy of her actions. Over time, perception and reality can converge as people internalize patterns of behavior.

Political legitimacy can be personal or action-based. Personal legitimacy is the extent to which an authority is viewed as legitimate. Action-based legitimacy is the extent to which an action taken by a particular entity is viewed as legitimate. We denote the set of policies that must be consented to by a specific agent for the policy to have action-based legitimacy as that agent’s legitimacy domain. For instance, some policies were legitimate for a pre-seventeenth-century English monarch to enact on her own based on royal prerogativeFootnote ⁶ (e.g., determining royal marriages), while other policies could only be legitimated by an act of Parliament (e.g., direct taxation).

Action-based legitimacy is different from legality. An action can be legal but illegitimate, illegal but legitimate, or legal and legitimate. This distinction is important in the case under study because, in the buildup to the Civil Wars, Charles I levied several fees, notably ship money, that had medieval precedents and were therefore a prerogative of the monarchy.Footnote ⁷ But these fees were widely considered illegitimate, as they had not been imposed for centuries and had thus fallen outside of his legitimacy domain.

Legitimacy is also different from state capacity: the “ability of a state to collect taxes, enforce law and order, and provide public goods” (Johnson and Koyama Reference Johnson and Koyama2017, p. 2). The two are clearly related: legitimacy reduces the cost of governance and thus improves state capacity, though merely having state capacity does not make an authority legitimate. Hence, state capacity is a function of legitimacy. But the two are distinguishable, both empirically and conceptually. This is because state capacity is also a function of other inputs, such as administrative institutions. This means that a political authority with a weak administrative apparatus may be highly legitimate but have low state capacity. For instance, nearly every medieval European king had low state capacity, regardless of his legitimacy.

Legitimacy fosters an authority’s efficacy because it reduces governance costs. A political authority is more effective the more her subjects comply with her policies. Compliance is an issue whenever an authority demands actions that are costly to a subject (e.g., taxation). Authorities thus generally invest in the capacity to punish non-compliance. Motivating compliance through punishment is costly, however, even if it is not practiced. Legitimacy, in contrast, induces compliance based on intrinsic motivation. In general, power and legitimacy are substitutes and co-exist, and although legitimacy is not the sole basis for political authority, it can be crucial for a regime’s effectiveness and longevity.

Did English Monarchs Care about Their Legitimacy?

How can we know that legitimacy matters to English monarchs? The general principle of managing shared beliefs is well known. Public events—such as coronations—during which one is exposed to information relevant to the belief-formation process are crucial. The public nature of such events makes one aware that all others have been exposed to the same information as well (Kuran Reference Kuran1995; Chwe Reference Chwe2001).

In general, legitimacy is non-observable, and this frustrates comparative statics analyses in which legitimacy is either the dependent or independent variable. However, the content and timing of publicly observable events provide an alternative, particularly in past societies in which we could neither conduct surveys nor administer randomized experiments.

Choices made by English monarchs since 1066 reveal that they cared about their legitimacy and tried to manage shared beliefs regarding it. When an English monarch died, members of their inner circle immediately declared a new monarch. Although the decision was made public, the event was private and presumably had limited impact on shared beliefs. A second event, the coronation ceremony, was public. It transpired over several days and was held in highly visible and symbolic locations. During the coronation ceremony, the new monarch’s legitimacy was recognized by subjects deemed important. The coronation thus provided an opportunity to manage shared beliefs.

Coronation ceremonies can foster shared beliefs regarding both power and legitimacy. But because England had long been a hereditary monarchy in which the right to the crown passed from father to his oldest surviving son (born in wedlock), coronations can reveal that legitimacy mattered to English monarchs. If legitimacy mattered, those with a lower legitimacy endowment—non-adult male heirs—should have had more to gain by holding earlier coronations. A non-adult male heir had more to gain by quickly creating shared beliefs regarding their legitimacy.Footnote ⁸ If English monarchical authority was based only on power (resources), adult male heirs and other heirs would have been equally motivated to hold the ceremony as soon as possible. In contrast, if legitimacy contributed to their authority, heirs who were not the adult sons of the previous monarch would rush to be coronated.

The data confirm that this was the case. Table 1 shows the days between the monarch’s accession to the throne and their coronation since 1066. The data separate adult male heirs of the previous monarch from all other heirs. It took an average of 84.3 days for a non-adult male heir to hold a coronation ceremony, while it took adult male heirs 242.2 days, on average, to do so. Prior to the Glorious Revolution, which initiated a period of “Parliamentary supremacy” whereby Parliament was the dominant political force and in which securing legitimacy may have been more important for monarchs, the data also shows a substantial difference in the days to coronation between adult male heirs (164.0 days) and non-adult male heirs (40.2 days). There are certainly many factors that contribute to the “days to coronation” metric, which is merely suggestive evidence that legitimacy may have mattered to English monarchs. Yet, this relationship has no meaning in a world where rule is based on power alone. Its meaning is clear in a world where legitimacy matters.

Table 1 Days to Coronation of English Monarchs, 1066–present

Notes: Adult male heirs were men who were 17 or older at time of succession to the throne, and their father (mother) was the previous monarch. Henry VI ascended to the throne at nine months and we do not include him. Also excluded is the disputed reign of Matilda (1141) and the short reign of Edward VIII (1936); neither had a coronation. Charles II’s reign dated from 29 May 1660, when he entered London, marking the first meeting of crown and Parliament since the crown was abolished in 1649.

Source: See various Wikipedia entries on each monarch.

The details of various coronation ceremonies reaffirm that legitimacy mattered to claimants to the English crown. Legitimacy-weak rulers invested much to enhance the legitimating impact of their coronations. For instance, in 1399, Henry IV usurped the crown from Richard II. In need of legitimation, he added many new features to the coronation to give it a more spectacular aura. These included donning ceremonial robes (instead of dressing in white as a “humble suppliant”), lifting the Coronation chair on the scaffold for enthronement, using the Holy Oil of St. Thomas, and presenting himself as a “man of God” (Strong Reference Strong2005, pp. 166, 169).

On the other hand, those who had a strong legitimate claim to the throne, based on the principle of hereditary monarchy, held modest ceremonies. Consider, for example, the coronation of Charles I (r. 1625–49), who was the first adult male heir to ascend to the English throne in over a century. Charles’s ceremony was a relatively simple matter, and he did not even bother to enter London in a procession as was done by his father, James I, and the Tudor monarchs (Strong Reference Strong2005, p. 267). In other words, Charles I did not feel that a public display promoting his legitimacy was necessary. He was the king by right and inheritance, and a coronation ceremony was held pro-forma only.

Legitimacy Principles: The Cultural and Institutional Foundations of Legitimacy

Our analytical and empirical strategy rests on the interplay between the cultural and institutional foundations of legitimacy. The cultural foundations of legitimacy specify the conditions necessary for a particular individual or organization to have legitimate authority or the legitimate capacity to enact policies in certain domains. For instance, in many monarchies, the eldest son of the previous king has the most legitimate claim to the throne. Meanwhile, in a democracy, the winner of a fair and free election has the right to rule. As these examples illustrate, the cultural foundations of legitimacy go well beyond simply specifying who has legitimate authority. They overlap with the cognitive structures that people use to comprehend the world around them (Greif and Mokyr Reference Greif and Mokyr2017).

The institutional foundations of legitimacy are the means of fostering the shared beliefs that an authority satisfies these conditions. It specifies how one attains legitimacy, what institutional means one can employ to demonstrate or enhance their legitimacy, and the process through which policies must be formulated to be considered legitimate.

The cultural and institutional foundations of legitimacy together constitute a society’s legitimacy principle. It articulates why a particular individual (or organization) has legitimate authority or action-based legitimacy (including the right to legitimate an authority or her action) and how she should establish legitimate authority in some policy domain. Like their constituting foundations, legitimacy principles are a product of historical development, and as such, they are history-dependent and society-specific. Using the conceptual framework developed in Greif (Reference Greif2006), legitimacy principles are commonly known as internalized beliefs (moral norms) and behavioral beliefs (expectations), complemented by rules that guide and coordinate behavior, and a corresponding cognitive framework that justifies the distribution of political authority. Moreover, prevailing legitimacy principles are not necessarily unique. It is possible for several non-mutually exclusive legitimacy principles to co-exist. In the case of early modern England, as we shall discuss, the legitimacy principle of inherited monarchy coexisted, at different times, with legitimacy principles of Parliamentary (legal) legitimacy and the Divine Right of Kings.

Legitimating Agents and Endogenous Legitimacy Principles

A particularly important (and observable) component of the institutional foundations of legitimacy is legitimating agents, those whose actions and sayings influence others’ beliefs.Footnote ⁹ Although an authority can choose whomever she pleases to legitimate her, the effectiveness of a legitimating agent depends on satisfying two conditions. The first condition is that the agent is perceived as having the information, knowledge, and credentials necessary to make an informed decision regarding the legitimacy of the authority and her actions. Catholic cardinals legitimate a pope, high nobles legitimate a monarch, and electoral boards legitimate elected officials.

The second condition is that the agent is perceived as being able to refuse legitimating with relative impunity. Legitimating agents must be sufficiently independent of the authority; yes-men and sidekicks are not kingmakers. Agents under the authority’s thumb provide no new information about whether the authority (or her actions) satisfies the conditions necessary to legitimately rule, and they thus do little to affect shared beliefs in the authority’s legitimacy. This logic leads to a counter-intuitive conclusion: yes-men and sidekicks can be particularly effective in delegitimating the authority they rely upon. Because they are not independent, their condemnation of the authority is a strong signal that the authority (or her actions) is illegitimate, exactly because these agents have much to lose by declaring the authority illegitimate.

Legitimating power can change endogenously when the authority changes her legitimating agent. The mere act of an authority requesting legitimacy enhances the power of the chosen agents to legitimate. It endows them with legitimating power in a particular policy domain. The request by the authority signals that she accepts that these agents can recognize whether she and/or her actions are legitimate or not. For instance, when a king calls a session of Parliament to enact legislation, he thereby recognizes the legitimating power of Parliament’s stamp of approval.

The reliance of an authority on legitimating agents influences the legitimacy of the authority and also impacts the distribution of political power—the power to influence political decisions or their execution. To reward legitimating agents while satisfying the previously noted conditions, an authority is likely to concede to them direct participation in political decision-making or administrative control that affects the execution of policies. The credibility of such concessions is achieved by the authority declaring that they are in the legitimacy domain of the agents. Hence, legitimating agents with legitimating power also gain the capacity to influence policies and/or their execution. The relations between an authority and her legitimating agents are therefore fundamentally those of cooperation, not conflict.

Legitimacy principles can change endogenously over time. As an integral component of a society’s cultural heritage, the initial set of legitimacy principles is part of the conditions that impact an authority’s initial choices. In the long run, however, an authority’s choices can influence the distribution of legitimating power and, thus, political power. Legitimacy principles are prone to change in the long run.Footnote ¹⁰

When will an authority seek to change the prevailing legitimacy principle by changing her legitimating agents? When will such change take place cooperatively and when will it be conflictual? Recall that legitimacy afforded by an effective legitimating agent increases compliance with a legitimate policy. Legitimacy generates a surplus, but it comes with a cost to the authority. The cost is that the authority must make policy compromises to accommodate the preferences of her legitimating agents. An authority faces a trade-off between compliance and compromise. A stronger (weaker) legitimating agent increases compliance by more (less) but can extract bigger (smaller) policy concessions from the authority.

The implications of this insight are intuitive. A low legitimacy authority would prefer a strong legitimating agent because, without such an agent, compliance would be minimal. If the agent is initially weak, the authority would benefit from increasing the agent’s legitimating power. This can be done, for example, by increasing the immunity of that agent or publicly accepting the agent’s legitimating rights.

Such a process is cooperative, as both sides benefit, but its inverse is confrontational. When a legitimacy-strong authority inherits a strong legitimating agent, she prefers to weaken the agent. After all, the authority can achieve a high level of compliance without making any policy concessions to the agent. The agent, in turn, would seek to employ his legitimating power to protect it, thereby conflicting with the authority. A legitimacy conflict would transpire.

The Tudors’ Legitimacy Challenge

Low personal legitimacy is a necessary condition for an authority to seek a strong legitimating agent. Did the sixteenth-century Tudors have weak personal legitimacy? The evidence indicates they had low legitimacy—much lower than the seventeenth-century Stuarts.

As previously discussed, the oldest legitimate son of the previous monarch was the most legitimate heir in pre-modern England. Under this principle, the Tudor monarchs had low personal legitimacy. The dynasty’s founder, Henry Tudor (the future Henry VII), was not the son of the previous monarch but won the throne on the battlefield. He was born in 1457 during the Wars of the Roses (1455–85), fought between the royal houses of Lancaster and York. Henry was Lancastrian with a weak claim to the throne from his mother’s side, while his father was Welsh, not English. Victories by Yorkist forces implied that, in 1471, Henry was among the last surviving Lancastrian claimants to the throne. Henry was sent to safety in Brittany (France) but returned to England in 1485 and defeated the Yorkist King Richard III. Dethroning Richard III was arguably treason, although Henry claimed that he was a conqueror and thus not a traitor. He was fortunate that Richard III was neither legitimate nor popular; Richard was widely believed to have murdered the legitimate Yorkist heirs to the throne (the sons of his late brother, Edward IV).

Henry VII was aware of his legitimacy deficit. Even prior to defeating Richard III, he announced his intention to marry the daughter of the late Yorkist King Edward IV so that his son and heir would have bloodlines from both houses. Despite his efforts, Henry was repeatedly challenged for more than 20 years by pretenders who claimed to be the missing sons of Edward IV and thus had a stronger claim to the throne. Henry VII’s low legitimacy cast a long shadow on his dynasty, while most of the other Tudors also had low legitimacy for other, idiosyncratic reasons. One was a child (Edward VI) and two were the first female monarchs in English history (Mary and Elizabeth).

It is possible to measure the legitimacy of each Tudor and Stuart monarch when they came to the throne using one exogenous and two endogenous proxies (Table 2). First, and perhaps most important, is the legitimacy associated with being the closest male (next-in-kin) adult heir of the previous monarch.Footnote ¹¹ Adulthood smoothed royal transitions, as the new monarch could rule from day one rather than being subject to a regent. Among the Tudors, only one (Henry VIII) out of five monarchs satisfied this condition, while among the Stuarts to 1688, four out of four monarchs did (James I was the closest living male relative of Elizabeth and her chosen successor; James II was the brother of the previous king who had no legitimate children).

Table 2 LEGITIMACY ATTRIBUTES OF THE TUDORS AND STUARTS

Source: Authors’ compilation.

Two endogenous proxies of a ruler’s legitimacy reveal the perception of contemporaries regarding the monarch’s legitimacy. The first is days to coronation, which was discussed earlier. A higher number reveals that the monarch was more confident in their legitimacy. The Tudors seem to have been much less confident than the Stuarts; the average days to coronation for the Tudors was less than 64 days, while that of the Stuarts was 210 days.

The second proxy is whether a monarch’s first Parliament passed an act of legitimacy. Such an act was a public event as, similar to all acts, it was widely circulated in the kingdom as an open letter and thus was common knowledge. Like the days to coronation proxy, a legitimacy act indicates weak personal legitimacy; it signifies the monarch’s need for Parliament’s stamp of approval. It was first enacted to legitimize Mary I, the first female queen of England. It was later issued for Elizabeth I. In the seventeenth century, it was awarded to every monarch that Parliament brought to power: James I, Charles II, and William III and Mary II. A legitimating act was not issued to Charles I or James II, both of whom lost their thrones due to internal opposition led by Parliamentary supporters. These proxies, though not conclusive, suggest that the Tudors had low legitimacy, especially relative to the Stuarts.

Papal Legitimation and Its Demise

Relying on Parliament to be legitimate was not the Tudors’ initial intention. The primary way that the first Tudor king, Henry VII (1485–1509), responded to his legitimacy deficit was by appealing to papal legitimation (Russell Reference Russell1971, pp. 69–103). Responding to Henry’s request, the pope sent him (in early 1486) a papal bull confirming his right to the throne and requiring obedience from his subjects on pain of excommunication. A new pope sent another papal bull in 1492 (Crawford Reference Crawford1967, p. lxxvii). These bulls were translated into English, circulated to parish churches, and were to be read by (or to) all. The second Tudor monarch, Henry VIII (1509–47), went even further in obtaining papal legitimation and published a treatise (1521) rejecting Luther’s challenge (1517) to papal authority. The treatise was sufficiently influential to elicit Luther’s response. In return, the pope bestowed on Henry VIII the hereditary title of “Defender of the Faith.” Henry VIII was the first (and only) English monarch to receive this title from the pope.

The Tudors rewarded their Catholic legitimating agents by giving them the opportunity to influence policy. High clergy held policy-influential public offices during the first (pre-Reformation) 45 years of the Tudor dynasty (1485–1529). Specifically, high clergy held the most important offices of Lord Chancellor and Keeper of the Privy Seal throughout this period. In total, high clergy held 100 percent (90 out of 90) of the office-years for these offices during this period.Footnote ¹² Moreover, the high clergy held all the office-years under the Catholic Queen Mary I (1553–58).Footnote ¹³

The pope also benefited when clergy held high public posts. Consider, for example, Thomas Wolsey (b. 1473–1530), who held important clerical offices but was also the Lord Chancellor. He initially advanced in the ranks of the church but in 1507 he entered the service of King Henry VII. Upon Henry VII’s death in 1509, Wolsey gained a seat in Henry VIII’s Privy Council, and in 1515 he became the Lord Chancellor. Prior to his fall from power in 1530, he also rose in the ranks of the Church, becoming the Bishop of London, the Archbishop of York, a cardinal, and the papal legate in England. Although Wolsey was a dedicated and capable chancellor who recognized his dependence on Henry VIII’s patronage, he “adapted his country’s foreign policy to the needs of the pope” (Elton 1991, p. 114).

Protestant high clergy had no comparative advantage in intermediating between the papacy and the crown. This is not to say that the post-Reformation English monarchs ceased using religion or the Church of England to legitimize their rule. Elizabeth I, for instance, frequently employed religious symbolism. Yet, the Church of England was dependent upon the monarch, since the latter was the formal leader of the Church. Our framework indicates that this should have made Church authorities weaker legitimating agents, though their capacity to delegitimate should have been greater.

Were the Protestant Tudor monarchs therefore less likely to nominate Protestant high clergy to policy-influential posts? The evidence confirms that this was the case. After the Reformation, from 1530 to 1603 (when the Tudor dynasty ended and excluding the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I), the high clergy held the office of Lord Chancellor (a senior position in the Privy Council) only twice, that is, 3 percent of the total. No high clergy held the office of the Keeper of the Privy Seal (one of the highest offices in England). In total, out of the 138 office-years, high clergy held office only in 2 years (1.45 percent).

The reason that Henry VIII broke with Rome also reveals the legitimating role of the papacy in pre-Reformation England. Notwithstanding the role of religiosity and greed in the drama of the Reformation, if the pope were a legitimating agent, the crown and papacy might have failed to reach a policy compromise. Was this the case? Did the pope and Henry VIII fail to reach a policy compromise that Henry was willing to accept, and the pope was willing to legitimate? The evidence supports this interpretation.Footnote ¹⁴

Specifically, Henry VIII and the pope failed to reach a compromise regarding the annulment of the marriage of Henry and Catherine of Aragon. By 1527, Henry had already concluded that their marriage would not produce a male heir. Accordingly, he sought an annulment. The case for annulment had merit, and Cardinal Wolsey, Henry’s Chancellor and the papal legate, was expected to quickly resolve the matter. By 1529, however, neither a viable compromise nor a process leading to it was in sight. In fact, the pope seemed to have been playing for time, perhaps because Charles I, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, objected to the annulment. Henry VIII responded by dismissing Cardinal Wolsey and accusing him of treason for placing the authority of the pope above that of the crown (praemunire).Footnote ¹⁵ From 1529 to 1536, Henry VIII achieved the annulment, reformed the Church in England, and became its supreme head (to the exclusion of the pope).

From Rome to Westminster: Promoting Parliamentary (Legal) Legitimation

Prior to 1529, papal legitimacy was effective because most of the English population was Catholic. It is therefore puzzling that “the break with Rome was achieved with a minimum of opposition” (Lehmberg 1977, p. 279).Footnote ¹⁶ If the pope was important in legitimating policies, how did Henry VIII and the other Protestant Tudors motivate compliance with policies to which the pope objected? The Tudors, after all, had low personal legitimacy and faced numerous policy challenges, including twice breaking with Rome (under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I), restoring Catholicism (under Mary I), crowning England’s first female monarchs, marrying a reigning queen (Mary I) to a Spanish prince, and a long war due to the refusal of another queen (Elizabeth I) to do so.

Although compliance can sometimes be coercively induced, this was not the case under the Tudors. As G. R. Elton noted with respect to Henry VIII, the most legitimate and powerful Tudor ruler, “despotic action” to counter popular resistance “would have been beyond Henry’s means” (Elton 1991, p. 115). This is not to say that the Tudors failed to use brute force and monetary incentives, when needed, to get their way. Yet, they refrained from policies leading to popular resistance, and they adjusted policies to accommodate such resistance when it arose. The reaction to Henry’s installation of the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries is a case in point. There was some resistance, the most dangerous of which was the Pilgrimage of Grace, a popular revolt that spread in the north of England in response to the Reformation. Henry defused the revolt by misleading its leaders into believing that he respected their concerns. Once the revolt ended, Henry executed the leaders. However, Henry did not subsequently rule despotically with respect to religious issues. Recognizing the threat to the Tudor regime, Henry’s religious policies were thereafter more accommodating to the Catholic tradition (Turvey Reference Turvey2015, pp. 106–07).

To strengthen their legitimacy and withstand papal delegitimation, the post-Reformation Tudors relied on Parliament to legitimize their policies. They therefore labored to strengthen Parliament’s legitimating power. The post-Reformation Tudors relied on legitimation provided by acts of Parliament (the statutory component of common law), which combined the legitimacy principle of hereditary monarchy with those of representation, consent, and rule of law.

Breaking with Rome entailed advancing an alternative legitimacy principle to papal legitimacy. Beginning in the 1530s, Henry VIII fostered the legitimating power of Parliament by regularly and publicly declaring that acts were issued by the authority of Parliament and not by his authority. An act was now declared, in Henry’s words, “by the King’s most excellent majesty, with the advice and assent of the Lords spiritual and temporal, and the Commons, in the present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same” (Elton 1974b, p. 30). This formula explicitly recognized that a law was enacted by the crown in Parliament, requiring the consent of the Commons, Lords, and the crown.Footnote ¹⁷ Subsequent Tudors continued doing so, and this enactment formula has become standard ever since.

In other words, the Tudors increased the legitimating power of Parliament by publicly changing the legislation process from one in which the crown legislated in consultation with the Lords and the Commons (crown and Parliament) to one in which Parliament legislated by the consent of the Lords and Commons, with the assent of the crown (crown in Parliament).

Henry VIII further reinforced Parliamentary (legal) legitimacy in various ways. This included explicitly recognizing the legal immunity of Members of Parliament (MPs). To illustrate, consider the Ferrers case of 1543, which involved an MP (George Ferrers) who was arrested for a default on a loan to which he stood surety. When Parliament’s Serjeant-at-Arms sought his release based on the immunity of members of Parliament, the arresting officers refused. The dispute escalated, and eventually the king ordered the release of Ferrers and noted the unity of Parliament and the crown. In Henry VIII’s words, the crown “at no time stand[s] so highly in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament, wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together into one body politic, so as whatsoever offence or injury (during that time) is offered to the meanest member of the House is to be judged as done against our person and the whole Court of Parliament. Which prerogative of the court is so great (as our learned counsel informeth us) as all acts and processes coming out of any other inferior courts must for the time cease and give place to the highest…” (Elton 1982, p. 277).Footnote ¹⁸ In other words, Henry VIII publicly recognized the ultimate legitimating powers of the crown in Parliament.

Henry VIII also fostered Parliament’s legitimating power as a legislative body by transforming his conflict with the papacy from one over religious authority to one over legal authority. Henry advanced Parliamentary supremacy over the Convocation, the legislative assemblies of the clergy. The histories of Parliament and the Convocation date to the thirteenth century, when both were summoned by the crown to grant taxation. While Parliament represented secular subjects, the Convocation represented the people of the Church.Footnote ¹⁹ By the Tudor period, both assemblies deliberated on and made laws; Parliament issued acts, and the Convocation issued canons. Acts were the statutory component of common law and thus adjudicated in common law courts, of which the highest court was the High Court of Parliament. Canons were the statutory component of canon law, whose highest procedural authority was the papal court in Rome. Common and canon laws were supposed to have distinct spheres of adjudication. Common law was applicable to civil and criminal matters for secular Englishmen, while canon law was applicable to spiritual matters. In practice, however, the laws overlapped substantially, as members of the English clergy lived under canon law and every English person was subject to canon law in spiritual matters (the definition of which was open to arbitrary definition by canon law).

The Convocation, canon law, and church courts were visible manifestations of the legitimacy of the papal claim to supreme authority. One of the first steps taken by Henry VIII in breaking with Rome was encouraging Parliament to present him with the Supplication against the Ordinaries (1532), which listed complaints about corruption in the Church and abuses by the Church courts. Henry exploited (or assisted in inventing) animosity between the Church and the gentry who dominated Parliament (Fritze Reference Fritze1991, p. 366). Ironically, the crown’s reliance on papal legitimacy had previously motivated English monarchs to allow such abuses.Footnote ²⁰ Henry VIII sent the Supplication to the Convocation, requesting a response. Shortly afterward, prior to the Convocation responding, he invoked the 140-year-old Statute of Praemunire of 1392 (16 Richard 2 c 5) to accuse the clergy, as individuals and as a group, of praemunire (placing the authority of the pope above that of the crown). The Convocation agreed to pay a very large fine, submit to the crown’s authority (with some ambiguous qualifications), and place canon law under the supervision of common law. In the following year (1533), Parliament issued the Ecclesiastical Appeals Act (24 Hen 8 c 12), prohibiting legal appeals to any court outside England, including Rome.

Although Convocations continued to meet and legislate, acts of Parliament limited their legislative authority. Similarly, the Church courts survived the break with Rome, but “the Reformation radically altered the position of the Church courts” (Fritze Reference Fritze1991, p. 106) and placed them under the authority of common law (e.g., the Act for the Submission of the Clergy, 1534). Once the Church courts were subdued, their authority was extended by acts of Parliament and under the supervision of the crown (Fritze Reference Fritze1991, p. 106).

The conjecture that the Reformation was a turning point in relying on Parliamentary legitimation implies that starting in 1529, Parliamentary activities would increase in number and scope. The evidence confirms this prediction. Table 3 presents the number of Acts of Parliament per year during Henry VIII’s reign. It shows that there was a sudden, significant, and persistent increase in the activities of Parliament after 1529. The left half presents the data for the pre-Reformation years (1509–28) and the right half for the post-Reformation years (1529–46).Footnote ²¹ Calculating the yearly average of the number of acts indicates a substantial increase in the latter period. Between 1509, when Henry VIII came to power, and 1529, when he began the break with Rome, the yearly average of Parliamentary acts was 7.58, while the yearly average from 1529 onward was 30.51, a fourfold increase. The same was true of public acts, which increased from 4.14 to 18.86 per year. These are reflective of how much Henry used Parliament, not merely for royal private acts.Footnote ²² Parliament was also in session much more after the Reformation. Prior to the Reformation, it was in session for 5.0 percent of days. This share nearly tripled to 13.8 percent after the Reformation. Moreover, the number of days it took a sitting Parliament to issue an act declined. The pre-Reformation Parliaments only enacted about four acts every ten days in session, while the post-Reformation Parliaments enacted about six acts every ten days in session. A similar increase in Parliamentary activity occurred with respect to public acts (an increase from 2.25 to 3.75 public acts for every ten days in session).

Table 3 ACTS OF PARLIAMENT UNDER HENRY VIII, 1509–1546

Sources: Pickering (1767); History of Parliament online, various surveys of Parliaments.

The higher level of Parliamentary activity persisted during the reigns of the other Tudor monarchs, suggesting an increased reliance on Parliamentary legitimation. Table 4 presents the number of acts and acts per year for every monarch from 1399 to 1688 (i.e., from Henry IV to James II). The number of acts (both public and total) per year under Henry VIII after the Reformation was higher than any previous monarch, and it remained high under Edward VI and Mary I. Although it declined somewhat under Elizabeth I, it was still higher than for most of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Table 4 ACTS OF PARLIAMENT AND CROWN PROCLAMATIONS, HENRY IV–JAMES II

Notes: Reign of Henry VIII split into pre-Reformation (1509–28) and post Reformation (1529–47). Charles I data up to Long Parliament of 1640, as acts of Parliament were not recognized as such by the crown after the onset of conflict. For most sessions the dates of assembly are known, but in rare cases we must use the designated dates for the assembly.

Sources: Pickering (1767); Crawford (Reference Crawford1967); Steele (Reference Steele1910); Heinze (Reference Heinze1976); Youngs (Reference Youngs1976); History of Parliament online, various surveys of Parliaments.

Table 4 also presents the ratio of proclamations (royal executive orders) to public acts as a proxy for the relative increase in the use of acts over time. If legitimation were immaterial, the crown would have preferred to rely only on proclamations that the monarch could issue without Parliament. The table shows that this was not the case. The ratio of proclamations to public acts dropped to its lowest level of 0.55 during the post-Reformation reign of Henry VIII, implying a greater reliance on acts than proclamations. This ratio remained low under the other Tudors, although it increased under Elizabeth I. Elizabeth had her share of conflicts with Parliament, particularly in her later years when her legitimacy was more secure (having ruled for several decades and having removed the primary contestant to the throne, Mary, Queen of Scots), although England was at war with Spain and she was in need of financing. Creating monopolies was part of her response. Despite these tensions, her relations with Parliament were primarily those of cooperation, especially relative to what it would become under the Stuarts.

Another indication that acts were used to legitimize policies is the large expansion of acts concerning issues that were beyond Parliament’s traditional purview. The use of acts in policy areas new to Parliament suggests the expansion of its legitimacy domain. Henry VIII, for example, sought acts to legitimize each step in the break with Rome. The issues involved were ones Parliament never dealt with before, including religion, marriage, divorce, and royal succession.

The high legitimation value of acts of Parliament is clear from the high demand for private bills regulating the affairs of specific locations, individuals, and corporations. As Elton (1974a, p. 195) noted, “in the course of the sixteenth century Parliament came to be a very important instrument in the management of the political nation’s private affairs … people wanted Parliaments not only to make laws for church and commonwealth, not only to serve the economic and social needs of particular areas or sectional interests, but also as the major—the most conclusive—means for settling the legal problems.” In fact, the total number of acts under the Tudors was around 1,800, about 68 percent of which were private (Pickering Reference Pickering1767).Footnote ²³ The large number of private acts is remarkable given the substantial number of public acts dealing with the major reforms of the period.

For agents to successfully legitimate a political authority, they must have some degree of independence. Was this the case for the Tudor Parliaments? On the one hand, Parliament met at the discretion of the crown, who summoned and dismissed it at will (although the crown could not determine its composition). The crown influenced the legislative agenda and could decline assenting to any bill. Yet, the crown was unable to manipulate the elections of MPs to any significant extent, force MPs to accept demands, or wholesale buy their obedience. Elton (1982, pp. 307–08) noted that “Parliament was so little packed, subservient or submissive that it could never be relied upon with real certainty to support the policy of the Crown.” Other notable historians of the period concurred (Lehmberg 1977, p. 275; Schofield Reference Schofield2004, p. 16). Because Parliament was not subservient to the crown, it could legitimize the crown.

Legitimacy-Based Cooperation or Balance-of-Power Conflict?

That MPs benefited from their service, although unpaid by the crown, is well known. One way they benefited was by advancing private bills for which the promoting MP was financially and legally compensated by the individual or corporation seeking the bill.Footnote ²⁴ There were also social benefits to joining Parliament. MPs were highly esteemed among their peers and members of their community. Such social connections made in the halls of Parliament could lead to financial gain, as interactions with the most powerful men in England opened the door to lucrative possibilities such as a seat in the House of Lords (Wasson Reference Wasson2000, p. 31).

Evaluating whether the Tudors and Parliament shared the gains from legitimation is challenging because Parliament can rarely be considered a unitary actor. It was too large, diverse, and eclectic for its members to have identical preferences on most issues. One issue unifying Parliament arose during the restoration of Catholicism under Mary I, and it reveals how the crown and Parliament used the legitimating power of acts of Parliament to their mutual benefit. The desire of Mary I to return to Catholicism raised the issue of property rights in land that had belonged to Catholic monasteries prior to the Reformation and had been confiscated by Henry VIII during the Reformation. Much of this land was subsequently acquired by the county gentry that dominated Parliament. They stood to lose this land if restoring Catholicism meant restoring that land to the Church. The policy compromise was to enact the restoration of Catholicism—as Mary wanted—but also to issue an act securing the property rights of the new owners—as Parliament wanted. The First and Second Statutes of Repeal (1553 and 1555) abolished religious legislation that had been enacted under Edward VI and Henry VIII (after 1529) under the stipulations that the monarch was still the supreme head of the Church of England and that all monastic land acquired after the dissolution of the monasteries remained with its current owners. The mere use of acts to declare this compromise is informative. Parliament correctly recognized that the crown would not infringe upon an act, while Mary recognized that the legitimating power of an act would facilitate the religious change she sought.

The observation that Parliament was an arena for setting policies and benefiting MPs, however, is also consistent with other equilibrium theories of Parliament. The evidence, however, confirms the legitimacy view. The view centered on coercive (military) power and the constitutional reforms that followed in the wake of Parliament’s military victories (North and Weingast Reference North and Weingast1989; Acemoglu and Robinson Reference Acemoglu and Robinson2012; Cox 2012) would predict that new membership in Parliament should change following military conflicts, revealing new (military) power holders. In the case under consideration, this view would predict that new entrants in Parliament would emerge in greater numbers following the Civil Wars and Glorious Revolution. The legitimacy conjecture, in contrast, implies that new entry into Parliament would rise following the Reformation. The increasing reward associated with Parliament’s higher legitimating power would attract new MPs.

The evidence confirms the prediction of the legitimacy conjecture. Figure 1 reveals that the proportion of new entrants into the House of Commons reached a peak in the years during and following the Reformation. In sharp contrast, this fraction declined following the Civil Wars and Glorious Revolution. The evidence contradicts the assertion that these military conflicts opened Parliament to those who were previously excluded.

Figure 1 NEW ENTRANTS (FAMILIES) INTO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, 1400–1919

Source: Wasson (Reference Wasson2000, table 3.12).

Parliament—particularly the Commons—was initially weak, and the Tudors labored to extend its reach. Election of individual members was the responsibility of the locality and beyond the reach of the crown. However, the crown could authorize the permanent acceptance of a town by the House of Commons. In the early Tudor period, representation was spotty; towns from only two counties (Cornwall and Wiltshire) were well represented, having 37 enfranchised boroughs between them. Most of the other 40 English counties were only thinly represented. The county of Durham was not represented at all, as it was an ancient palatine county under the jurisdiction of its bishop (Thrush and Ferris Reference Thrush and Ferris2012).

The Tudors increased the number of MPs much more than previous or later monarchs and expanded their geographical distribution to cover, for the first time, all of England and Wales (see Figure 2).Footnote ²⁵ This expansion was important because Acts of Parliament were valid only in areas represented in Parliament. These new MPs were not subservient to the crown, and the new localities they represented retained their independence in choosing their MPs.

Figure 2 TOTAL BOROUGH MPS ADDED BY MONARCH, 1284–1707

Sources: Powell and Cook (Reference Powell and Cook1977), Cook and Wroughton (Reference Cook and Wroughton1980), and Cook and Stevenson (Reference Cook and Stevenson1988).

Historians of the Tudor period have emphasized that the crown and Parliament cooperated in governing England. The prominent historian of the dynasty, Conrad Russell (Reference Russell1971, p. 44), noted that “Tudor England was a one-party state.” As he explains, this means that the crown and Parliament were different components of the same machinery of the state. As such, they had to work with each other, and they were successful in doing so. From the perspective developed earlier, they were successful because legitimacy-based cooperation was beneficial to both sides.

Crown-Parliament cooperation was not always smooth, and MPs—as individuals and factions—objected to various policies advocated by the crown. But such disagreements were political, not structural. The crown and Parliament cooperated in confronting common internal and external adversaries and used acts of Parliament in doing so. A prominent example, mentioned previously, is their cooperation in confronting the Catholic Church and confiscating its wealth. Although the crown directly benefited from the wealth transfer, the gentry class that dominated Parliament benefited indirectly in two ways: lower taxation to finance Henry VIII’s wars and the acquisition of much of the confiscated land at fire-sale prices.

In cooperating on other matters, such as taxation, Parliament often obtained from the grateful crown concessions. Such reciprocity was taken for granted, as suggested by the observation that under the Tudors, Parliament did not condition acts granting taxation on reciprocity by the crown. Moreover, Parliaments did not delay voting on taxation until their last session (i.e., after the crown addressed their concerns). Stanford E. Lehmberg (1977, p. 275), the prominent historian of the Parliaments of Henry VIII, concluded that although “the burden of taxation laid on subjects by the later Parliaments [of Henry VIII] was unprecedented … the King used no threats or force save persuasion to obtain money. Parliament never insisted on redress of grievances before voting supply, nor did the King dissolve Parliament as soon as tax bills were passed in order to prevent enactment of unpalatable legislation.”

Moreover, it is possible to evaluate crown-Parliament cooperation during the Tudor and Stuart periods directly by measuring the number of days it took a sitting Parliament to agree on a public act. Recall that Parliament met at the discretion of the crown, who had the action-based legitimacy to call Parliament, have it seated, and dismiss it. Thus, Parliament sat only when the crown wanted to cooperate with Parliament. Such cooperation manifested itself in acts of Parliament, implying that the time it took a sitting Parliament to issue an act measures crown-Parliament cooperation.

Table 4 presents the data. The last column presents the number of public acts issued per day a Parliament sat for each monarch between the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution. It reveals that the Tudors cooperated with their Parliaments. For every 10 days Parliament was in session under the Tudors, they passed between 2.1 acts under Mary 1 and 6.3 acts under Edward VI. In comparison, under the Stuarts, they passed between 0.2 acts under Charles I (one act every 50 days in session) and 1.2 acts under James II. The Tudors cooperated with their Parliaments; the Stuarts did so much less.

Legitimacy and the Structure of Parliament

The transition to Parliamentary (legal) legitimacy had important implications for many aspects of England’s polity and economy. This subsection illustrates this point—and contributes further evidence supporting our conjecture—by considering the impact of the distribution of political power in England.

One important question is why the decline in the number of Spiritual Lords in the House of Lords was permanent. Prior to the Reformation, the Spiritual Lords regularly held more seats than the Temporal Lords and thus had veto power over any act of Parliament.Footnote ²⁶ The Reformation, however, marked the end of the Spiritual Lords’ majority in the House of Lords. Figure 3 presents the composition of the Lords at various points in time and illustrates that the Spiritual Lords held the majority of the seats in the model Parliaments of the thirteenth century and the first Tudor Parliament after the Wars of the Roses in 1485. The Spiritual Lords were still almost at par with the Temporal Lords in the Reformation Parliament; they held 50 out of 107 seats (Lehmberg Reference Lehmberg1970, p. 37). But the Spiritual Lords never held the majority again. During the seventeenth century, their share was always lower than 35 percent and averaged around 20 percent.

Figure 3 COMPOSITION OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS, 1265–1601

Sources: Pike (Reference Pike1894), Lehmberg (Reference Lehmberg1970), Cook and Wroughton (Reference Cook and Wroughton1980), and Cook and Stevenson (Reference Cook and Stevenson1988).

This change is puzzling. Temporary factors reduced the relative share of the Spiritual Lords in the Reformation Parliament.Footnote ²⁷ But why was the decline permanent? Why did the Protestant Tudor and Stuart monarchs not pack the House of Lords with Protestant clergy? After all, the crown had the prerogative to invite whomever it wished to the House of Lords, while as the head of the Anglican Church, the crown had discretion regarding who to nominate as high clergy.

The reason is transparent if, as argued here, Parliament was a legitimating agent. The post-Reformation Spiritual Lords were dependent on the crown and thus had lower legitimating power and higher delegitimating power than their pre-Reformation counterparts. The pre-Reformation clergy had greater legitimating power because the papacy provided them with an outside option in case they faced the crown’s ire after they declined legitimating his policies. The opposite holds, however, regarding delegitimation. The lower personal cost of delegitimating rendered a refusal to legitimate less informative. This argument also implies, however, that the post-Reformation Protestant clergy had lower legitimation and higher delegitimation power than the pre-Reformation Catholic clergy. A refusal to legitimize was more personally costly to a post-Reformation Spiritual Lord, rendering such an action highly informative. The high cost is well reflected in the executions of the high clergy who refused to support Henry VIII, such as Fisher and More.

The transition away from legitimation by high clergy—Catholic or Protestant—is also revealed by the details of coronation ceremonies. Traditionally, during a coronation, two bishops escorted the monarch to the coronation throne. This was still the case in Henry VIII’s (Catholic) coronation, but not in the ceremonies of subsequent Protestant Tudors. In the coronation ceremony of Edward VI—the first post-Reformation coronation—the role of religion was either reduced from previous ceremonies or altogether absent. Perhaps the most important difference was the identity of Edward’s escorts. Instead of the two customary bishops, he was escorted by a single bishop and a secular lord, the Earl of Shrewsbury (Strong Reference Strong2005, pp. 199–200). In addition, the order of homage to the new king differed: Lord Somerset was the first to render homage, followed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chancellor, and then the lords and clergy collectively. These were important changes because they reflected a shift in the identity of the important legitimating agents. Strong (Reference Strong2005, pp. 199–200) notes that the general feel of the ceremony was vastly different than its predecessors: “What must have struck potently those present was the shift in emphasis away from the clergy in favour of the laity … When the young king was carried in a chair to the four sides of the scaffold, with Cranmer at his side, it was not for a ritual which could be regarded in any way as election, but for the recognition of Edward as the ‘rightful and undoubted enheritour by the laws of God and man to the Royal Dignitie and Crowne Imperiall of this realme’ … Edward was the first king to issue a proclamation declaring that he had come to the throne fully invested and established in the crown imperial of the realm.”Footnote ²⁸