The British Parliament

Parliament serves as Common Sense's primary institutional antagonist, with Paine framing its villainy as structural rather than personal. The issue lies not with corrupt individual members but with a system built to create the illusion of representation while maintaining aristocratic and monarchical power. This distinction is significant as it dismisses the possibility of reform — no change of personnel can rectify a fundamentally flawed structure.

Paine presents two interlocking arguments: first, that colonists possess no meaningful voice in Parliamentary legislation, rendering every act of taxation, trade restriction, or punishment an exercise of authority without consent; second, that a body located thousands of miles across the Atlantic cannot — due to geographic distance — legitimately claim the consent of those it governs. Distance alone, in his view, disqualifies its authority.

Instead of checking royal power, Parliament amplifies and legitimizes it. Paine contends that the celebrated constitutional balance between king and Parliament is a fiction — the two institutions are co-conspirators, each providing the other with legitimacy neither could sustain on its own. Parliament does not hold the Crown accountable; instead, it legitimizes its authority.

Paine traces the hereditary peerage of the House of Lords back to the Norman conquest, arguing that the upper chamber's seats originate from the violent spoils of William the Conqueror's seizure of England. This genealogy undermines Parliament's aristocratic component, stripping it of any claim to consensual or organic origin and recasting inherited privilege as institutionalized plunder.

Paine asserts that Parliament's corruption is inherent in its design, rather than stemming from individual misconduct. The hereditary peerage protects privilege derived from conquest, while the elected commons are compromised by their closeness to monarchical patronage. Because the flaw is structural, simply replacing bad actors or adjusting procedures cannot create a legitimate institution — only complete independence can fulfill colonial interests.

Paine implicitly refers to the Intolerable Acts as concrete proof of Parliament's antagonism. He highlights this punitive legislation — taxation, trade restrictions, and direct punishment — as the tangible mechanisms through which colonial grievances arise and are systematically ignored, transforming his constitutional critique into lived colonial experience.

Paine recognizes that the House of Commons is elected by commoners, providing it with a nominal popular mandate, but he argues this formal representation has little practical meaning. Elected members remain closely linked to monarchical patronage and function within an overarching hereditary system, rendering their popular mandate a superficial credential that legitimizes rather than challenges the broader machinery of royal and aristocratic power.

Parliament acts as Paine's central evidence for why no British institution can genuinely serve colonial interests. By illustrating that its two chambers are each corrupt — one through hereditary conquest, the other through royal proximity — and that geographic distance makes consent impossible, Paine effectively closes off every argument for petition or reconciliation, leaving independence as the only logical conclusion for a reasonable reader.