Access To The Sovereign
The Sovereign is traditionally advised by various counsellors, including the peers of the realm. After the Norman conquest of England, peers were summoned to form the magnum concilium, or Great Council, which was one of the four councils belonging to the Sovereign. The other three were the Privy Council, Parliament (which was called the commune concilium, or Common Council), and judges (who are considered counsellors of the Sovereign on legal matters).
A council composed only of peers was often summoned by early English Kings. Such a council, having been in disuse for centuries, was revived in 1640, when Charles I summoned all of the peers of the realm using writs issued under the Great Seal. Though such a council has not been summoned since then, and was considered obsolete at the time, each peer is commonly considered a counsellor of the Sovereign, and, according to Sir William Blackstone in 1765, "it is usually looked upon to be the right of each particular peer of the realm, to demand an audience of the King, and to lay before him, with decency and respect, such matters as he shall judge of importance to the public weal."
The privilege of access is no longer exercised, but it is possibly still retained by peers whether members of the House of Lords or not. In 1999, the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege recommended the formal abolition of any remaining privilege of peerage.
Read more about this topic: Privilege Of Peerage
Famous quotes containing the words access to the, access to, access and/or sovereign:
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“The nature of women’s oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.”
—Jean François Lyotard (b. 1924)
“I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason
Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)