The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century.
The Parliament of Great Britain is the legislature of the Kingdom of Great Britain. It is made up of two chambers, the House of Lords and the House of Commons.
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.
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. 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.
The traditional division between the Whig Party and the Tory Party that endured through the eighteenth century was temporarily replaced in the early nineteenth century by the industrially-based Liberal Party and the land-based Conservative Party before the economic crisis brought on by the bankruptcy of Barings Bank in 1835 brought about a restoration of the older parties. The Whigs and Tories remained the dominant parties through the end of the twentieth century.