The Regulation of Mercy. The Royal Pardon Legislation in Late Medieval England and France

Verreycken, Quentin [UCL]

In late medieval Europe, the legal power to pardon criminals was one of the most important manifestations of royal sovereignty. From the thirteenth century onwards, the kings of England and France massively granted pardon or remission letters to individuals who petitioned for their mercy, allowing them to escape prosecution and punishment. Yet, the king’s right to pardon was not completely above law, as the English Parliament and the French General Estates repeatedly compelled the monarchs to promulgate a legislation about royal pardon. In reaction to the alleged threats to public order caused by the high number of criminals who escaped punishment, the kings of France and England had to restrain the access to royal mercy. This paper will examine how the politics of pardon led by the French and the English monarchs were debated in Parliament and General Estates, and how such debates resulted in an attempt to regulate the power to pardon. Some of these measures met with mixed success and were not even respected by the monarchs themselves – such as the limitation of the categories of pardonable crimes –, but others helped to make the pardon process a bureaucratic procedure integrated to the course of royal justice. Therefore, although the pardon legislation may be seen as the product of a confrontation between the kings and their representative institutions, it ultimately benefited to the monarchs and the extension of royal justice. Finally, the comparative approach of this paper will show that although the French and English pardon legislations were the products of two very different political, institutional, and legal contexts, the history of the regulation of the power to pardon in England and France followed a similar pattern.