The House of Commons in the eighteenth century.
The House of Commons is the lower house of the Parliament of Great Britain.
The origins of Parliament can be traced back to the Great Council of the Norman Kings of England, a meeting of major landowners and senior clergy that served to advise the monarch. The Great Council underwent a major change in the mid-thirteenth century when Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, seized control of the government by defeating in battle and capturing King Henry III and his son the future King Edward I. Montfort sought to legitimize his control by calling together a Great Council that included minor landowners, the Knights of the Shires and the burgesses of the towns. Although Montfort was soon defeated in battle and killed by Edward, the future king retained the innovation of including minor landowners in his Parliaments. Starting in 1341, during the reign of Edward III, the knights and burgesses began meeting separately from the nobles and churchmen, in doing so dividing Parliament into the two houses of Lords and Commons. Edward's attempts to evade Parliamentary control led to the rule that no law could be made or tax levied without the consent of both houses.
Initially, the knights exercised more power in the Commons than the burgesses, since the monarch had the power to enfranchise or disenfranchise boroughs at will. During the Good Parliament of 1376, the Commons appointed Sir Peter de la Mare to convey to the Lords their complaints of heavy taxes, demands for an accounting of the royal expenditures, and criticism of the King's management of the military. The Commons even proceeded to impeach some of the King's ministers. Although Mare was imprisoned for his actions, the benefits of having a single voice to represent the Commons were recognized, and the office which became known as Speaker of the House of Commons was thus created. Mare was soon released after the death of King Edward III and in 1377 became the second speaker of the Commons.
In the sixteenth century, the Tudor monarchs Henry VIII and Elizabeth made skillful use of Parliament to gain popular support for their policies, including the establishment of Protestantism in England and Henry's divorce from his first wife Katherine of Aragon. The Stuart monarchs of the seventeenth century proved considerably less skillful, eventually provoking a civil war with Parliament in the 1640s that ended with the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the establishment of a republic.The attempt at republicanism proved to be unstable, and the monarchy was restored in 1660, but the balance of power between the monarch and the House of Commons had permanently shifted in the latter's favor. When James II provoked a confrontation with Parliament in 1688 he was deposed and replaced with his daughter Mary II and her husband William III.
In the century after the accession of Mary and William the office of Prime Minister evolved as a combination of First Lord of the Treasury and leader of the majority party in the Commons. During the American Crisis, the notion that the Commons derived its power to levy taxes from its role as representatives of the common people gave rise to the colonists' insistence that since they had no representation in Parliament, it had no power to levy taxes on them.
In the wake of the North American Rebellion of 1775-78 the ministerial government secured its independence from the monarch when Lord North was able to secure passage of the Britannic Design despite the determined opposition of King George III. In the Britannic Design, the House of Commons served as a model for the Grand Council, the lower house of the legislature of the Confederation of North America.