FRAME OF THE COMMONWEALTH, THE, the written constitution adopted at the Grand Convention (q.v.) on the 21st of March 1660, amended twice since in its whole structure (see SECOND FRAME, THE; THIRD FRAME, THE) and in countless particulars by ordinary statute, but never suspended and never, in two hundred and fifty years, set aside by force. Its authors drew avowedly upon the political writings of James Harrington (q.v.), and the Frame remains, of all the paper constitutions attempted in that turbulent age of Europe, the only one that has governed the polity for which it was drawn continuously from its adoption to the present day.
The Frame's first principle is the separation of proposing from resolving. A Senate of three hundred members, chosen by ballot for terms of three years, one third retiring annually and none immediately re-eligible, alone may debate and propose measures of state. The Assembly of the Tribes — one thousand and fifty members, and called in the Frame's own language "the Prerogative," a phrase whose meaning has shifted a good deal since 1660 — resolves what the Senate lays before it, and did so for two centuries without formal debate of its own, the framers having judged, not without some justice, that a numerous body debating everything twice would settle nothing. The Widening Acts (q.v.) of the last century relaxed that bar, and the Assembly now debates measures of the first importance nearly as freely as the Senate itself, though its older habit of deference has not wholly disappeared.
Executive authority is vested in a Council of State of one-and-twenty, renewed by thirds and presided over by the Lord President (q.v.), the chief magistracy of the Commonwealth and an office its framers were at evident pains to make unlike any single ruler of a neighbouring crown: elected by both houses, removable by both houses, and possessed of no power the Frame does not name. Command of the forces of the republic belongs to the Strategus (q.v.), elected by the Senate for a single year and renewable only while the Commonwealth is actually at war — a provision that has more than once returned a victorious general to private life at the very height of his repute, most memorably in the case of the first Strategus himself (see LAMBERT, JOHN). Interpretation and revision of the Frame belong to the Rota (q.v.), twelve former senators chosen by lot from a ballot of the eligible, who sit as the constitution's guardian in the narrow but real sense that no amendment touching the Senate, the Assembly, or the Council may take effect without their concurrence.
The Agrarian Law, capping landed revenue at two thousand pounds a year in England and five hundred in Scotland or Ireland, was reckoned by the framers the surest safeguard against the return of the very concentration of power that had made the old constitution seem, to them, no longer tolerable. That the plantations of the Western Provinces were left outside the cap until the Second Frame, and that even the ceiling then imposed upon them left chattel property untouched altogether, is a history this article does not propose to rehearse at length, the matter being treated more fully, and more searchingly, under AGRARIAN LAWS (q.v.); it is enough to record here that the omission was real, that its consequences were not trivial, and that the Severance (q.v.) of the last century cannot be understood apart from it. On religion the Frame established a broad reformed profession with liberty for gathered congregations, excluding at the outset what its own text called "popery and prelacy"; both exclusions have since been relaxed by slow practice and by statute, most formally in the Act of Relief of 1832, and the establishment of 1911 bears only a family likeness to that of 1660 (see PUBLIC PROFESSION, THE).
The Second Frame of 1691 answered the Remonstrance of the Plantations (q.v.) by admitting the five Western Provinces to representation, each returning senators and tribesmen under written instructions from its own assembly, and establishing at Westminster a standing Committee of the Plantations through which colonial business was thereafter transacted; from 1701 every third session of the Assembly was held, as a Western Session, at Oceana itself. The Third Frame of 1867, following the completion of the permanent Atlantic cable the year before, made the arrangement genuinely bicoastal: sessions now alternate between Westminster and Oceana as a matter of course, the binding instructions of 1691 were abolished as no longer necessary to a legislature that could take counsel with its constituents in hours rather than months, the Senate was enlarged to three hundred and sixty, and the franchise of the freedmen of the southern provinces was declared, in terms that have proved rather more generous on paper than in the provincial circuits that administer them, to be universal.
The Commonwealth's arms — the cross of St George impaling the Irish harp, to which a western star was added by the Second Frame — are perhaps as fair an emblem of the whole design as any: a constitution built by addition rather than replacement, each enlargement laid over what preceded it without erasing it, so that a careful eye can still find, beneath the Frame of 1911, the outline of the paper the Convention ratified in the spring of 1660. Its endurance is not, on the evidence, owed to any special virtue of the men who first drew it, who were as capable of oversight as their successors; it is owed rather to the mechanism the Rota supplies for correcting an old oversight without discarding the instrument that contains it, a mechanism few of the Frame's continental imitators troubled to provide. (E. H. V.)