e
necessary oaths. Even so the difficulty of securing submissive juries
was again so great in 1682 that a general attack on the borough
franchises was begun by the crown. A London jury having returned a
verdict hostile to the crown, after various attempts to bend the city to
his will, Charles II. issued a _quo warranto_ against the mayor and
commonalty in order to charge the citizens with illegal encroachments
upon their chartered rights. The want of a sound philosophical
principle in the laws which were intended to regulate the actions of
organized groups of men made it easy for the crown judges to find flaws
in the legality of the actions of the boroughs, and also made it
possible for the Londoners to argue that no execution could be taken
against the mayor, commonalty and citizens, a "body politic invisible";
that the indictment lay only against every particular member of the
governing body; and that the corporation as a corporation was incapable
of suffering a forfeiture or of making a surrender. The judges gave a
judgment for the king, the charters were forfeited and the government
placed with a court of aldermen of the king's own choosing. Until James
II. yielded, there was no common council in London. The novelty of the
proceedings of Charles II. and James II. lay in using the weapon of the
_quo warranto_ systematically to ensure a general revocation of
charters. The new charters which were then granted required the king's
consent for the more important appointments, and gave him power to
remove officers without reason given. Under James II. in 1687 six
commissioners were appointed to "regulate" the corporations and remove
from them all persons who were opposed to the abolition of the penal
laws against Catholics. The new appointments were made under a writ
which ran, "We will and require you to elect" (a named person). When
James II. sought to withdraw from his disastrous policy, he issued a
proclamation (October 17, 1688) restoring to the boroughs their ancient
charters. The governing charter thenceforth in many boroughs, though not
in all, was the charter which had established a close corporation, and
from this time on to 1835 the boroughs made no progress in
constitutional growth. The tendency for the close corporation to treat
the members of the governing body as the only corporators, and to
repudiate the idea that the corporation was answerable to the
inhabitants of the borough if the corporate property was