In 1642, the houses of Parliament articulated England's first clear, widely understood theory of parliamentary sovereignty. The development had its consequences. The assertion of sovereignty brought the country to the constitutional impasse that, joined with religious and political strains, brought on the Civil War. Then and later, it also encouraged a constitutionalist backlash against the parliamentary regime, leading to the development of a new liberal sensibility and other kinds of parliamentary sovereignty.

Yet that first assertion of parliamentary sovereignty has been belittled or denied. Taken part by part, it was far from revolutionary – even banal, so much so that some scholars detect no significant difference on the eve of civil war between the political theory of parliament and the theory of the king. Nevertheless, as a whole the theory was quite remarkable, as much in the rejection of possible positions as in the selection of its components. For all its seeming moderation, it was a theory that Charles would not accept, and no conceivable king – no king, that is, in the Tudor or Stuart mould – could have accepted, without forfeiting the most essential and traditional rights of the English monarchy.

In two important respects, the theory of parliamentary sovereignty of 1642 was absolutist. In the first place, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘absolutism’ were overlapping terms. Bodin himself defined sovereignty as the ‘most high, absolute, and perpetual power’;. Recollecting Bodin in the debates on the Petition of Right, Edward Alford argued that ‘“sovereign” power [was] free from any condition’.