The parliamentary experiment of the Lancastrians was premature and had failed.
Parliamentary institutions were discredited and people were indifferent to parliamentary rights and privileges: "A plague on both your Houses," was the popular feeling, "give us peace, above all peace at home to pursue new avenues of wealth, new phases of commercial development, peace to study new problems of literature, religion, and art"; and both Houses passed out of the range of popular imagination, and almost out of the sphere of independent political action.
Parliament played during the sixteenth century a modester part than it had played since its creation.

Towards the close of the period (p.

035) Shakespeare wrote his play of _King John_, and in that play there is not the faintest allusion to Magna Carta.[69] Such an omission would be inconceivable now or at any time since the death of Elizabeth; for the Great Charter is enshrined in popular imagination as the palladium of the British constitution.

It was the fetish to which Parliament appealed against the Stuarts.

But no such appeal would have touched a Tudor audience.