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:
“In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
“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)
“If these were only words that I am speaking
Indifferent sounds and not the heraldic-ho
Of the clear sovereign that is reality,
Of the clearest reality that is sovereign,
How should I repeat them, keep repeating them....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)