[!tag=NNP] [word=allow | □=□]
[!tag=NNP] [word=allow | tag=□]
[!tag=NNP] [word=allow | word=□]
An Act of Indemnity is a statute , the object of which is to make legal transactions which when they took place were illegal , or to free individuals to whom the statute applies from liability for having broken the law ; enactments of this kind were annually passed with almost unbroken regularity for more than a century ( 1727-1828 ) to free Dissenters from penalties , for having accepted municipal offices without duly qualifying themselves by taking the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England . It is further noticeable that in 1785 the power to create Parliamentary boroughs was still looked upon as in theory an existing prerogative of the Crown . The recognition of this moral triumph is seen in the constitutional practice , almost , one may now say , the constitutional rule , that a member once placed in the Speaker 's chair shall continue to be re-elected at the commencement of each successive Parliament irrespective of the political character of each successive House of Commons . Mr. Gardiner 's History of England has suggested to me the conclusion on which , confirmed as I found it to be by all the information I could collect about French administrative law , stress is frequently laid in the course of the following pages , that the views of the prerogative maintained by Crown lawyers under the Tudors and the Stuarts bear a marked resemblance to the legal and administrative ideas which at the present day under the Third Republic still support the droit administratif of France . But wills of land were only exceptionally allowed by custom until the reign of Henry VIII ., and as the main doctrines of conveyancing had been settled long before that time , we must look further back and to other sources for their explanation .