wilfrid prest We have seen that the judicial role of the House of Lords long pre-dated the Stuart monarchs, who notoriously sought to consolidate and enhance their royal authority, following lines already mapped out by various Continental rulers. While it cannot be denied that the marked expansion of the Lords’ appellate jurisdiction after 1621 followed directly on the initiative of a foreign-born king who showed little respect for English common law or its practitioners, King James I’s referral of Bourchier’s petition to the Lords seems not to have been the result of any consciously formulated royal plan to expand the legal capacity of the Upper House, even if it was consistent with his willingness to countenance revival of the long-disused impeachment procedure in his desperate attempts to secure additional financial support from the Lower House. Ironically enough, impeachment soon proved a powerful weapon in the hands of those who opposed his government’s policies and sought to constrain them by impeaching unpopular royal ministers. But the Lords themselves were initially quite hesitant in responding to the opportunity presented by the petitions of Bourchier and others seeking review of Chancery decrees. Their eventual acceptance of an enhanced judicial role in that regard may perhaps reflect some desire on the part of the peers to seek this form of compensation for the increasingly dominant political role of the Lower House during the fraught parliaments of the 1620s. At the same time, many members of the House of Commons may well have preferred to see the Lords taking on an enlarged appellate function, if the alternative was an enhanced jurisdiction of the king’s own privy council, or the Court of Star Chamber. Further expansion in the Lords’ jurisdictional reach was aided by the collapse of various conciliar jurisdictions, most notably Star Chamber, after the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640. But the indispensable element in the Lords’s eventual emergence as a regular court of review was the commencement of annual parliamentary sittings after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, an event which itself signalled the defeat of absolutist monarchical ambitions in the British Isles, even if the continuing Jacobite threat meant that contemporaries could hardly realise immediately that this was indeed the case. 183
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