rliament existed to pass laws of its own conception, such has never
been the practice, except when there has been chronic opposition
between the executive and the legislature. Parliament has generally
been the instrument of Government, a condition essential to strong and
successful administration; and it is still summoned mainly to discuss
such measures as the executive thinks fit to lay before it. Certainly
the proportion of Government bills to other measures passed in Henry's
reign was less than it is to-day. A private member's bill then stood
more chance of becoming law, and a Government bill ran greater risks
of being rejected. That, of course, is not the whole truth. One of the
reasons why Henry's House of Commons felt at liberty to reject bills
proposed by the King, was that such rejection did not involve the fall
of a Government which on other grounds the House wished to support. It
did not even entail a dissolution. Not that general elections possessed
any terrors for sixteenth-century Parliaments. A seat in the House of
Commons was not considered a very great prize. The classes, from (p. 265)
which its members were drawn, were much more bent on the pursuit of
their own private fortunes than on participation in public affairs.
Their membership was not seldom a burden,[737] and the long sessions
of the Reformation Parliament constituted an especial grievance. One
member complained that those sessions cost him equivalent to about
five hundred pounds over and above the wages paid him by his
constituents.[738] Leave to go home was often requested, and the
imperial ambassador records that Henry, with characteristic craft,
granted such licences to hostile members, but refused them to his own
supporters.[739] That was a legitimate parliamentary stratagem. It was
not Henry's fault if members preferred their private concerns to the
interests of Catherine of Aragon or to the liberties of the Catholic
Church.

[Footnote 737: Some at least of the royal
nominations to Parliament were due to the fact that
nothing less than a royal command could produce a
representative at all.]

[Footnote 738: _L. and P._, vii., 302.]

[Footnote 739: _Ibid._, v., 120.]

Henry's greatest advantage lay, however, in a circumstance which
constitutes the chief real difference between the Parliaments of the
sixteenth century and t