unwittingly undermined the throne that he was seeking and the
thrones of all other princes.

The answers which Harold either made, or which writers of his time
thought that he ought to have made, are of the greatest moment in
our constitutional history. The King is the doer of everything;
but he can do nothing of moment without the consent of his Witan.
They can say Yea or Nay to every proposal of the King. An
energetic and popular king would get no answer but Yea to whatever
he chose to ask. A king who often got the answer of Nay, Nay, was
in great danger of losing his kingdom. The statesmanship of
William knew how to turn this constitutional system, without making
any change in the letter, into a despotism like that of
Constantinople or Cordova. But the letter lived, to come to light
again on occasion. The Revolution of 1399 was a falling back on
the doctrines of 1066, and the Revolution of 1688 was a falling
back on the doctrines of 1399. The principle at all three periods
is that the power of the King is strictly limited by law, but that,
within the limits which the law sets to his power, he acts
according to his own discretion. King and Witan stand out as
distinct powers, each of which needs the assent of the other to its
acts, and which may always refuse that assent. The political work
of the last two hundred years has been to hinder these direct
collisions between King and Parliament by the ingenious
conventional device of a body of men who shall be in name the
ministers of the Crown, but in truth the ministers of one House of
Parliament. We do not understand our own political history, still
less can we understand the position and the statesmanship of the
Conqueror, unless we fully take in what the English constitution in
the eleventh century really was, how very modern-sounding are some