Parliament, assembling again in late spring, is…
May 1679 CE
Parliament, assembling again in late spring, is known as the Habeas Corpus parliament or the First Exclusion Parliament.
The procedure for issuing a writ of habeas corpus is first codified on May 27 by the Habeas Corpus Act 1679, following judicial rulings which had restricted the effectiveness of the writ.
The Act had come about because the Earl of Shaftesbury had encouraged his friends in the Commons to introduce the Bill where it passed and was then sent up the Lords.
Shaftesbury is the leading Exclusionist—those who want to exclude Charles II's brother James, Duke of York, from the succession—and the Bill is a part of that struggle as they believe James would rule arbitrarily.
The Lords decide to add many wrecking amendments to the Bill in an attempt to kill it; the Commons has no choice but to pass the Bill with the Lords' amendments because they had learned that the King would soon end the current parliamentary session.
The Act is often wrongly described as the origin of the writ of habeas corpus, which had existed in England for at least three centuries before.
A previous law (the Habeas Corpus Act 1640) had been passed forty years earlier to overturn a ruling that the command of the King was a sufficient answer to a petition of habeas corpus.