Parliaments had first met in the thirteenth century, when the king began summoning noblemen to court to parler, demanding that they pledge to obey his laws and pay his taxes. After a while, those noblemen began pretending that they weren’t making these pledges for themselves alone but that, instead, in some meaningful way, they “represented” the interests of other people, their vassals. In the 1640s, those parleying noblemen, now called Parliament, challenged the king, countering his claim to sovereignty with a claim of their own: they argued that they represented the people and that the
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