[66] The attempt upon charters and the privileges of the corporate bodies of the kingdom in the reigns of Charles the Second and James the Second was made by the crown.  It was carried on by the ordinary course of law, in courts instituted for the security of the property and franchises of the people.  This attempt made by the crown was attended with complete success.  The corporate rights of the city of London, and of all the companies it contains, were by solemn judgment of law declared forfeited, and all their franchises, privileges, properties, and estates were of course seized into the hands of the crown.  The injury was from the crown:  the redress was by Parliament.  A bill was brought into the House of Commons, by which the judgment against the city of London, and against the companies, was reversed:  and this bill passed the House of Lords without any complaint of trespass on their jurisdiction, although the bill was for a reversal of a judgment in law.  By this act, which is in the second of William and Mary, chap. 8, the question of forfeiture of that charter is forever taken out of the power of any court of law:  no cognizance can be taken of it except in Parliament.

Although the act above mentioned has declared the judgment against the corporation of London to be illegal yet Blackstone makes no scruple of asserting, that, “perhaps, in strictness of law, the proceedings in most of them [the Quo Warranto causes] were sufficiently regular,” leaving it in doubt, whether this regularity did not apply to the corporation of London, as well as to any of the rest; and he seems to blame the proceeding (as most blamable it was) not so much on account of illegality as for the crown’s having employed a legal proceeding for political purposes.  He calls it “an exertion of an act of law for the purposes of the state.”

The same security which was given to the city of London, would have been extended to all the corporations, if the House of Commons could have prevailed.  But the bill for that purpose passed but by a majority of one in the Lords; and it was entirely lost by a prorogation, which is the act of the crown.  Small, indeed, was the security which the corporation of London enjoyed before the act of William and Mary, and which all the other corporations, secured by no statute, enjoy at this hour, if strict law was employed against them.  The use of strict law has always been rendered very delicate by the same means by which the almost unmeasured legal powers residing (and in many instances dangerously residing) in the crown are kept within due bounds:  I mean, that strong superintending power in the House of Commons which inconsiderate people have been prevailed on to condemn as trenching on prerogative.  Strict law is by no means such a friend to the rights of the subject as they have been taught to believe.  They who have been most conversant in this kind of learning will be most sensible of the danger of submitting corporate