In the early modern period, both England’s Church and its Parliament changed. A Catholic country split from Rome and the importance and prominence of the two Houses of Parliament dramatically increased. These two seismic shifts were not isolated from one another. Parliament’s role in the transformation and governance of England’s ecclesiastical settlement has been much debated, especially since the seminal work of Sir Geoffrey Elton, who argued Parliament’s role in enacting the early stages of the Reformation was a formative moment in parliamentary history. To address this complex relationship, the History of Parliament hosted a colloquium on 26 April 2025 entitled ‘Parliament and the Church, c.1530-c.1630’. Convened by Dr Alexandra Gajda (University of Oxford) and Dr Alex Beeton (History of Parliament), eight speakers and almost twenty audience members, many of them leading academics, debated a myriad of issues and topics in an energising and convivial atmosphere.

The eight speakers, split between three chronological panels, had produced their papers, (which will be published in a special edition of Parliamentary History) for pre-circulation; this meant the majority of the day was spent in discussion of their findings. In the first panel, Dr Gajda and Dr Paul Cavill (University of Cambridge) delved into the first half of the sixteenth century. Dr Cavill launched a vigorous attack on a famous essay of Elton’s, ‘Lex Terrae Victrix: the triumph of parliamentary law in the sixteenth century’ which argued that in the 1530s emerged the twin ideas of the supremacy of parliamentary law (i.e. common law) and the notion of the king-in-Parliament being the ultimate authority in the kingdom. Using the example of the court of delegates, Dr Cavill’s paper skilfully showed how laws other than common law continued to be used, and that the monarchy ruled through the common law rather than under it. Dr Gajda took the discussion forward into the mid-century, showing that the Parliaments of Edward VI deserve to be known as Reformation Parliaments which enacted sweeping reforms via statute. This process did not occur because the crown believed the two Houses to be particularly appropriate as authorities on religious matters, but because parliamentary statute reached all the monarchy’s subjects and because the lay members of Parliament were more amenable to changes in religious practices than Convocation.

After a lunch break, the second panel of the day focussed largely on the reign of Elizabeth I. Dr Paul Hunneyball (History of Parliament) produced an excellent study of the bishops in the Lords as a group during the 1584-5 Parliament. Drawing on the cutting-edge research of the Lords 1558-1603 project, Dr Hunneyball teased out a number of insights about the bishops and their political activities, showing the value of investigating the Lords Spiritual as a body. Dr Esther Counsell’s (Western Sydney University) fascinating contribution focussed on the same Parliament, investigating a manuscript speech-treatise written by Robert Beale, clerk of the privy council, which was intended for the Parliament but never delivered. Dr Counsell argued that Beale was representative of a group within the English establishment which was eager for further religious reformation, worried about the encroachment of Catholicism, opposed to the jurisdictional overreach of ecclesiastical authorities and courts, and concerned that the denial of Parliament’s authority to determine ecclesiastical matters would undermine the stability of Elizabeth’s reign. The third speaker, Adam Forsyth (University of Cambridge), took the panel into the early seventeenth century with an impressive analysis of statutory interpretation and multilateralism in judicature, delineating the disputes between civil and common lawyers about who could interpret statutes and the different positions which civil lawyers adopted concerning the prerogatives of statutory interpretation.

Despite the hot weather and the lack of air conditioning in the History of Parliament’s common room, spirits and energy remained high for the third and final panel of the day. Professor Kenneth Fincham (University of Kent), who was chairing, prefaced the panel with an elegantly concise set of remarks about Parliament and religion in the 1630s before introducing the speakers. Emma Hartley’s (University of Sheffield) paper insightfully investigated the early Jacobean Parliaments, showing how their disputes and proceedings demonstrated that the future of the English Church was still considered to be uncertain at the time. Enormous tensions existed over ecclesiastical jurisdiction, Parliament’s role in religious matters, and the constitutional positions and authority of bishops and Convocation. She was followed by Dr Kathryn Marshalek (Vanderbilt University) whose paper offered a brilliant account of how, pace earlier revisionist historiography, religious issues and constitutional crisis became a deadly combination in English politics well before the end of the 1620s. Dr Marshalek’s study of the 1620s Parliaments argued that the European geo-political situation made a re-negotiation of the English religious settlement, and the place of English Catholics within it, possible. It was in this context that calls from Parliament for the enforcement of religious conformity became more forceful and provoked a broader consideration of the relationship between the king, royal prerogative, and parliamentary statute. Closing the day’s proceedings, Dr Andrew Thrush (History of Parliament) offered a thought-provoking overview of the right of the House of Commons to debate religious matters between 1566-1629. He discussed why the Commons right to do so was not clearcut and why the crown, despite strenuous efforts, repeatedly failed to prevent the lower House from considering religious matters. He finished by concluding that the Commons achieved little in the way of tangible results through their extensive debates since they lacked the ability to enforce their will.

As with their predecessors, this final panel stimulated plenty of questions and debate between speakers and audience which continued in a more relaxed atmosphere following the end of official proceedings. As the vivacity of the day demonstrated, the relationship between Parliament and Church in early modern England remains a topic with potential for important discoveries and exciting insights.

ALB

The seminar takes place on 10 December 2024, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Should the fancy ever strike a scholar to investigate the early modern House of Lords, they would know where to look: the Lords Journals, conveniently available on British History Online. These mammoth works, kept by the clerks and printed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, are the official record of the upper House.

The Lords Journals acted as minute books of decisions made by the peers and are foundational to parliamentary history. So important are they that it is easy to assume that they are the record of the Lords in its totality. In one important sense such an assumption is correct. The House of Lords was a court of record, that is a court whose decisions had to be enrolled and accessible. As such, the journal had a unique legal importance unmatched by other records of Lords proceedings.

Sir Simonds D’Ewes, an important parliamentary diarist in the seventeenth century, noted in January 1642 during a heated debate about events in the upper House that the Commons:

may take notice of anything that is upon record, of which nature the Journal of the peers house is and may be produced as evidence in any court of Westminster the next day after it is entered.

The Journal was the official record of the Lords and has a position of primacy in the minds of historians, yet was this perception shared by those in the early modern period? The answer appears to be no. Evidence from the 1640s suggests that those living through the seventeenth century had a much broader conceptualisation of what made up the record of the Lords and included a mixture of official and semi-official texts.

This point can be evidenced by examining the manuscripts of proceedings kept by the Lords’ clerks and particularly the marginalia within them. Alongside the Journals, these officials created Books of Orders (which contain orders made by the House) and minute books (the so-called Scribbled Books kept by the Clerk of the Parliaments and Manuscript Minutes kept by his Deputy) which essentially acted as draft Lords Journals, being used to create the more perfected version later.

These three types of manuscripts, and other materials kept in the Main Papers at the Parliamentary Archives, all contain information not found in the Journals. This outcome is to be expected. As anyone who has used them will know, the Journals are skeletal. They did not contain details of debates or (usually) individual interventions for reasons of brevity and to protect the freedom of the peers to debate matters freely. They also observed the norms of early modern recordkeeping, seen in the records of town corporations, trade companies, or the Privy Council, by presenting the body in question as driven by consensus and characterised by harmony between its members.

Concerns with streamlining and presenting the Lords in a particular light meant that a huge amount of information about events in the upper House was left out of the Journals. This was certainly to the detriment of the casual reader as the Lords appears to have been, in reality, quite entertaining, with fiery exchanges between irascible peers, lords chatting near the fire to escape the cold and boredom, and earls using the aisles as urinals.

Anyone trying to figure out what had happened in the Lords would therefore have been struck by a simple fact – the Journals were not always terribly useful. The Books of Orders, for example, regularly contain items which are either abbreviated in the Journals or only mentioned in passing. There would therefore have been a great incentive for contemporaries to make use of these semi-official sources.

This point leads to two linked questions: did people make use of them and what status did they enjoy? The evidence from the manuscripts themselves, especially indexing and the frequent marginalia on the pages, suggests a resounding yes to the former question. Clearly, contemporaries were aware of the need to track business not only over a period of time, but over a number of manuscripts with the clerks often noting next to items where other, relevant, entries were to be found.

Contemporaries also appear to have been interested in the fuller proceedings of events in the Lords, with a booming interest, stretching back to earlier parliaments, in the manuscript circulation of reporting about parliamentary affairs. This interest at times took them beyond the Journals to the much fuller semi-official sources.

However, it is much less easy to determine the status of these sources. They clearly were significant: the Books of Orders were orders of the House; the clerk used the Scribbled Books to create books of parliamentary precedents for future use; and all the manuscripts contain information of proceedings written by the Lords’ principal clerk or his assistants.

Yet the Scribbled Books and Manuscript Minutes were also very clearly unofficial. There appears to have been no method by the Lords to vet these materials (in contrast, the Lords had several mechanisms to check the Journals, including the subcommittee of privileges which intermittently checked the Journals during the 1640s). They were also, to some extent, the private property of the clerks who treated them as such, scrawling graffiti on them and even occasional disparaging remarks about the Lords and their decisions.

All told, terming them semi-official (though such a description does not feel quite right for the Books of Orders) seems broadly accurate and an awareness of their importance shows that it is necessary to incorporate them into a revised understanding about what constituted parliamentary records in the seventeenth century.

AB

The seminar takes place on 10 December 2024, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

In the last decade, it has become common to describe parliamentary democracy in England and the West more generally as in a ‘permacrisis’. Yet, how did the English Parliament of the mid-seventeenth century negotiate an actual crisis? The revolutionary decades saw the constitutional, social, ecclesiastical, theological, and cultural framework of Britain and Ireland altered beyond recognition in the furnace of civil war. The parliamentary military fiscal state which emerged from the battles of the 1640s was unrecognisable from its ante bellum compatriot. No king, no bishops, no lords – and in their place a republican regime which morphed into the protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. Explaining why such events took place, their significance, and who was involved is at the heart of the History of Parliament’s mission. In 2023, the History’s nine-volume set covering the House of Commons between 1640-1660 was published, an achievement which represents a major milestone in studies of the British Civil Wars. In 2022, the History launched a new section to cover the House of Lords for the same period. To celebrate the publication of the former and the beginning of the latter, the History organised a one-day colloquium on the theme of ‘Parliament and Revolutionary Britain’ which was held on 27 April 2024.

Nine academics ranging from early careers researchers to established professors were invited to write papers for pre-circulation among a small audience of leading scholars. The event was bound together by three key questions: how was Parliament understood in the revolutionary years by those inside or outside of it; how did it change or remain the same; and how did it function? To investigate these questions, the day was divided between three panels: ‘Parliament and the People’, ‘Parliament in Action’, and ‘Parliament beyond England’. In each panel the speakers gave a short recapitulation of their papers with the majority of time devoted to discussion with the audience.

‘Parliament and the People’ began the day. As the title implies, this panel discussed the relationship between Parliament and the English people. Dr Alex Beeton (History of Parliament) and Dr Ellen Paterson (University of Oxford) approached this issue from different ends of the spectrum. Dr Paterson demonstrated, through an analysis of industrial petitioning, that the Long Parliament was believed by many to be, like its early Stuart predecessors, a site where grievances could be aired and redressed. As a result, a range of companies and individuals barraged the Houses with their complaints. Dr Beeton looked at the other side of the interaction by investigating the place of the House of Lords in popular politics. Using the relatively underused source-base of the Scribbled Books (notes of proceedings in the Lords kept by their clerk), he argued that the Lords was a well-integrated part of a popular and participatory political culture. This fact, he suggested, had been masked by the conventions of parliamentary record-keeping. Professor McDowell complemented these papers with an insightful analysis of how Parliament was understood and represented in the writings of John Milton. Contributing to scholarship on popular disillusionment with the Long Parliament, Professor McDowell used Milton’s prose texts of the 1640s to show that the writer’s serial disappointment with Parliament’s actions led to an acceleration of his radical beliefs.

After a lunch break, proceedings resumed with ‘Parliament in Action’, a panel designed to consider how parliamentary politics functioned during the revolutionary years. Dr David Scott (History of Parliament) made a powerful case for seeing the 1640s as a time of bicameral party politics. He argued that throughout the decade the Lords were divided into factions. Parties coordinated activities with their allies in the Commons and individual peers were willing to subsume their personal interests for the party good. Addressing the lower House, Dr Rebecca Warren (University of Kent) gave a practical example of how parliamentary business took place through the example of local propagation schemes. In addition to making an important point about the necessity of considering propagation beyond the best-known schemes, such as the 1650 propagation act for Wales, Dr Warren demonstrated both how proceedings at Westminster could be influenced by localities with sympathetic allies in government and the importance of historians attending to the relationship between local and national concerns. Both Dr Warren and Dr Scott’s papers predominantly considered the 1640s. Professor John Morrill (University of Cambridge) took matters into the 1650s by considering Oliver Cromwell’s relationship with Parliament. In a thoughtful piece which conversed with Hugh Trevor-Roper’s influential piece on the same topic while also moving away from it, Professor Morrill explored the lord protector using four case studies which brought out intriguing angles on the issue, such as the phalanx of Cromwell’s relations sitting in the Protectorate Parliaments.

As with the first panel, there was a lively question and answer session which continued into the afternoon break for tea and cake. After this came the final panel of the day on ‘Parliament Beyond England’. The three panellists each offered papers on how those outside England understood the Westminster Parliament and interacted with it. Dr Karie Schultz (University of St Andrews) showed how Scottish understandings of Parliament were sui generis and differed from their English neighbours. These differences ensured that Anglo-Scottish interactions were often fraught and much was lost in translation. A similarly tense dynamic between different countries was delineated by Dr Lloyd Bowen (Cardiff University). Dr Bowen used his paper to consider the parliamentary reconquest of north Wales and showed that the various campaigns were influenced by Walian concerns, but were also closely linked to ongoing factional politics at Westminster. Dr Patrick Little (History of Parliament) demonstrated the existence of a similar interplay between local and national politics when discussing the Irish Protestant Agents sent across the Irish sea in 1644. These commissioners endured a generally fruitless sojourn in England. Going first to the king at Oxford they were largely treated as unwanted guests by a camp hoping to utilise Irish Catholic forces in England. Moving onto Westminster they found a more sympathetic audience but one riven by factional bickering which stalled their business.

Formal proceedings ended in the early evening. Taken together, the various papers offered a rich contribution to understandings of the seventeenth-century Parliament and the great changes and unexpected continuities which were evident at Westminster during the British Civil Wars. As the lively discussions during the day evidenced, there is still plenty to discover and debate about Parliament and the crisis of those critical decades.

AB

The colloquium on ‘Parliament and Revolutionary Britain’ was held on 27 April 2024 at the History of Parliament’s office in Bloomsbury Square. The History would like to thank Dr Alexandra Gajda (University of Oxford), Dr Andrew Barclay (History of Parliament), and Professor Laura Stewart (University of York) for chairing panels on the day and the invited audience for their contributions.

John Browne, the Clerk of the Parliaments (i.e. the House of Lords) in the Long Parliament, did not have an easy job. His primary purpose was, with the help of a team of assistants, to write the Journal of the House of Lords, the official record of the House’s daily business. The journal was not a verbatim account of what was said and done and forging the final product was a lengthy and convoluted affair which began with rough notes being made in the House. In the early Stuart Parliaments, it appears that these jottings were entered into something called a ‘Scribbled Book’. Browne seems to have broken with this practice and instead made his entries in the Scribbled Book after the day’s sitting, basing them on hurried notes made on loose sheets. However, like those of his predecessors, Browne’s Scribbled Books are essentially the first version of what would become the journal and much of the material they contained was never transferred to the finished product. They are a treasure trove of information for historians of the British Civil Wars.

The eight surviving Scribbled Books of the Long Parliament, ranging from November 1640-April 1642, have long been known of by scholars but have never been investigated in their own right. The History of Parliament’s House of Lords 1640-1660 section is currently working through these volumes, bringing to light new detail but also using them to explain how the journals were constructed. The latter task is especially important since, with the notable exception of Elizabeth Read Foster’s work, there is relatively little research into how these important records were created. There was no official rubric for making the journals, though there were some traditions which a previous clerk, Robert Bowyer, helpfully summarised:

The Clerk of the Parliament doth every day (sitting in the House or Court) write into his rough or scribbled book, not only the reading of the Bills and other proceedings of the House. But as far forth as he can, whatsoever is spoken worthy of observation. Howbeit into the Journal Book, which is the record, he doth, in discretion, forbear to enter any things spoken, though memorable, yet not necessary or fit to be registered and left to posterity of record.

Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Library of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, ed. J.C. Davies (3 vols, Oxford, 1972), ii. 612

Browne appears to have shared Bowyer’s concern with omitting embarrassing details from the journal. His Scribbled Books contain many details of physical brawls or verbal slugging matches which, sadly for those reading them, did not make it into the journal.

Along with discretion, the other key guiding principle behind the construction of the journal was brevity. The journals of both Houses were intended to be user friendly. MPs, Lords, interest groups, and private citizens all needed to be able to locate relevant entries and to navigate the material quickly. One of the most notable revelations of the Scribbled Books is the degree to which Browne summarised business in order to meet these needs. In reality, business in the House dripped rather than flowed. Often, topics were discussed before being dropped due to an interruption or not concluded by the end of the day’s sitting. To overcome the obstacles, Browne tended to condense. Speeches were summarised and business which had fitfully dealt with over the course of the day or even several days was shortened into a brief, sequential summary. In the pursuit of conciseness and respectability much of the actual business conducted by the Lords fell onto the cutting room floor when the journals were written. Much of this lost evidence is of an inconsequential nature but a great deal of it is not and is of enormous interest to scholars of the English Revolution.

To give one significant example of the evidence which can be found in the Scribbled Books, we might look at the events of 28 December 1641. It was not a tranquil time at Westminster. Tumultuous crowds, aggressively calling for the exclusion of bishops from the Lords, milled about the Parliament house. There was a significant political dimension to these protests: the removal of the prelates would break the king’s party in the upper house, removing a significant obstacle to the anti-Caroline junto. In a febrile atmosphere, the Lords’ journal baldly records a vote being held over whether the Parliament was free. This was a highly significant moment in the prelude to the Civil Wars. Had the Lords decided that Parliament was not free then Parliament would have effectively ceased operations giving Charles control of the political scene. Historians since Gardiner have discussed it at length. They have also dwelt on the role of George Lord Digby since it was he who supported the motion with an impassioned speech in which he took several digs at the MPs encouraging the crowds and, in the report of one witness, ‘bespattered the House of Commons as much as one would do his cloak in riding from Ware to London’. (HMC Montagu, p. 137) Accordingly, it was on Digby, a parliamentarian ‘hate figure’ and advisor of the king, that the ire of the Commons was focussed the next day.

However, the Scribbled Book and other notes kept by Browne present a much more complicated image. It appears that Digby did indeed make the original motion, prompting the House to adjourn itself into a committee (a procedure which allowed members to speak freely and as much as they liked to an issue) during which Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton, actually proposed the question of whether the House was free or not. The Lords then resumed their sitting in order to vote on Southampton’s question. It was this vote which was then recorded in the journal. Browne, desirous of a concise summary, had cut out all the fat and simply left a record of the final vote without the convoluted process by which it was reached. In the process, the extremely revealing actions of Southampton were concealed. Southampton had been drifting towards the king’s camp before 28 December and his actions were further evidence of a political realignment. His intervention was as provocative as Digby’s but seems to have been overlooked by the Commons due to their antipathy towards the latter and desire to remove one of Charles’s most belligerent advisors from the king’s counsel. However, one person who did not ignore the earl’s actions was the king: two days later Southampton was rewarded for his endeavours by being made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber.

These and many other important facts about the Lords are contained in the Scribbled Books but are little known. Their recovery has the potential to illuminate the House of Lords which is by far the more dimly lit of the two parliamentary chambers in modern historiography. A greater awareness of what occurred in the Upper House and the actions of individual peers does not just improve historians’ understandings of a few lords. As is now widely acknowledged, parliamentary politics was fundamentally bicameral with events in both Houses closely connected. This point is evident in the Southampton/Digby episode. Both peers were implicitly attacking the Commons-men and their allies in the Lords who tried to dominate the Parliament through mob-intimidation. The attack by the Commons on Digby rather than Southampton reflected the belief of the anti-Caroline faction that it was the former who was the more serious threat to their actions and so needed to be removed in order to facilitate the erosion of the royalist roadblock in the Lords. As this brief example suggests, the Scribbled Books reveal much about the Lords. A greater understanding of the Lords allows in turn a better comprehension of parliamentary affairs as a whole, an understanding which is not always helped by the Houses’ journals which tend to be curt, formulaic, and impersonal and so suppress the more messy, eventful, and revealing reality of mid-seventeenth century politics.

A.B.

Note:

Browne’s record of 28 December 1641 can be found in: Parliamentary Archives, BRY/90 and BRY/93 (entries for 28 December 1641).

Further reading:

Elizabeth Read Foster, The House of Lords 1603-1649, Structure, Procedure, and the Nature of It Business (London, 1983).

Elizabeth Read Foster, ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’, in Barbara C. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J.H. Hexter (Philadelphia, 1980), pp. 129-146

John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Fall of Charles I (London, 2007).

The roundtable seminar takes place on 13 February 2024, between 17:30 and 19:00. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here

Few periods of British history are as action-packed as 1640-60. During this epoch, a political crisis became a civil war in which the Westminster Parliament confronted, and ultimately defeated King Charles I, putting him on trial and executing him in 1649. Over the following eleven years, the struggle to establish a stable and legitimate government saw invasions of Ireland and Scotland, the young Republic displaced in 1653 by the army under Oliver Cromwell, Cromwell’s assumption of the title of Lord Protector, and, after his death a contest for power that ended with the collapse of the revived Republic and the ultimate Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II.

Even for scholars of the period, keeping track of who, what, when and where in such an intensely eventful era can be daunting. Yet, in recent decades the importance of understanding basic questions of prosopography has become evident for students of the parliamentary state. As scholarship by historians such as David Como, Jason Peacey, John Adamson and others has revealed, both parliamentary and radical politics were extremely personal, often based on networks of familial, religious, economic, or geographical relations.

In other words, to understand what happened in mid-seventeenth century England it is important not to skimp on biography. Yet to do so for the revolutionary Parliaments, the beating heart of political history during those decades, poses unique challenges, not least as the number of MPs makes the dramatis personae of Proust or Tolstoy seem few by comparison.

This enormous challenge has been taken up and answered by the History of Parliament. Thirty years of research by leading scholars of revolutionary Britain have now culminated in the publication of nine volumes and more than 8,000 pages of The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640-1660. These volumes provide an enormous resource that will surely be the most comprehensive collection of information and analysis ever compiled of this critical and dramatic period of English – as well as Irish and Scottish – history.

The work’s main components are the 1,800 biographies of everyone who was elected to the House of Commons between these years, including substantial reinterpretations of the lives of all of the major figures – Cromwell, Pym, Hampden and many others. Members of Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Other House’, the second chamber of 1658-9, are also covered. Complementing these biographies are accounts of the politics and elections of each constituency that returned members to the House of Commons.

There are studies of the series of executive committees that were set up by Parliament to manage the enormous tasks of raising money for the war, directing its forces, maintaining its relationships with its allies (especially the Scots), and negotiating with foreign powers. And, finally, there is an introductory survey, summarising and analysing all this material as well as providing an essential political narrative of the period.

These volumes contain huge amounts of previously unknown information about the personalities and backgrounds of those involved in politics, and fresh and authoritative interpretation of their manoeuvrings and motivations. They include the lives of the many lesser-known, lower-status figures who came to prominence and entered national politics through service in the military or administrative roles in the parliamentarian war effort, as well as the grander gentry figures who were more familiar at Westminster. They embrace the charismatic and powerful men who were the backbone of the parliamentary regime such as Henry Marten, or the younger Sir Henry Vane; front-rank soldier-politicians like John Lambert, Henry Ireton or George Monck; and key polemicists such as William Prynne or Edward Hyde.

Although the primary purpose of the volumes is biographical, they also represent a major historiographical intervention in understandings of the early modern parliamentary state, not least through their exploration of parliamentary committees. As many contemporaries recognised, they were living in the age of the committee. In part this was a response to the demands of the war: as the work of the government expanded, so it established committees to handle the onerous business of state.

The increased role of committees also demonstrated the factional and bicameral nature of politics in these years. As recent decades of scholarship have helped to uncover, the relatively small partisan groups which dominated proceedings in the two Houses tried to circumvent scrutiny of their actions by passing on business to powerful committees. There factions were able to exert a disproportionate influence in the affairs of state.

The committee articles contained in the volumes expose for the first time not only the administrative machinery of Parliament’s war effort but also the factional struggles of those involved, not least when it came to Irish affairs.

Given the detail and comprehensiveness of the biographies, these volumes will be vital not only for political historians, but for military, literary, social and economic historians of the period; while the constituency histories make a major contribution to local histories across the British Isles. Overall, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640-1660 constitutes an essential resource that will transform the way in which we study and think about the period.

The current seminar brings together four of the contributors to the project — Dr Andrew Barclay, Dr Vivienne Larminie, Dr Patrick Little, and Dr David Scott — to introduce the volumes, to reveal their major findings, to explain their historiographical significance, and to discuss how historians might best make use of them. The seminar will be chaired by Dr Alex Beeton.

AB and PL

The seminar takes place on 13 February 2024, between 17:30 and 19:00. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here

AB & PL

For further information see https://boydellandbrewer.com/history-of-parliament/

See also the History of Parliament’s blog series, ‘Revolutionary Stuart Parliaments’: Revolutionary Stuart Parliaments – The History of Parliament (wordpress.com)

On 6 March 2023, the History of Parliament, in collaboration with Oxford University’s ‘Britain in Revolution Seminar’, helped to organise a roundtable to celebrate the publication of a new edition of The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. The general editor of the volumes, Professor John Morrill, was joined by four commentators: Professor Ann Hughes, Dr George Southcombe, Dr Grant Tapsell, and Professor Blair Worden. Originally, several members of Professor Morrill’s team were supposed to join him onstage but were unable to come due to reasons of circumstance. Fortunately, one co-editor, Dr Andrew Barclay, was able to attend, but the absence of others from the editing team was regrettable as the new edition is a truly collaborative endeavour. The editorial team includes a number of eminent names in early modern history (not least two current members of the History of Parliament, Dr Barclay and Dr Patrick Little, and a former member, Professor Jason Peacey). In Professor Morrill’s words his team had been ‘loyal to the end: nobody quit; nobody died’. The result of their efforts is a magnificent achievement: three volumes of Cromwell’s words surpassing in scope, academic rigor, and utility previous editions by such luminaries as Thomas Carlyle and Wilbur Cortez Abbott.

In her opening remarks, Sophie Aldred, co-convenor of Oxford University’s Britain in Revolution Seminar, noted that the launch event was dedicated, at Professor Morrill’s request, to the late Dr Clive Holmes, one of the leading historians on seventeenth-century England, with the intention of raising the type of rigorous questions he would have asked. With introductions finished, Morrill delivered the first part of the roundtable. He explained why there was a great need for a new version of Cromwell’s writings and speeches due to the deficiencies of previous editions. He moved on to pay homage to the work of the editing team and explain the division of labour they employed, working in small groups to complete each volume. As Morrill made clear, the desire to make the new edition usable (apart from the printed volumes, there will soon be a digital edition, appearing on the Oxford Scholarly Editions Online platform) was a primary ambition of the project. Doubtless, future students writing essays or scholars ferreting for references will thank the prescience of the editors with each volume containing an index for the entire edition and each document being preceded by an introduction setting out its context. If usability was a key concern, so too was something more ethereal: ‘Cromwell’s voice’. Morrill emphasised that the editors wanted Cromwell’s voice to come through the volumes and, where possible, had also paid attention to the physical appearance of the more personal letters.

Although each of the four panellists gave unique responses, the issue of Cromwell’s voice recurred frequently. Professor Hughes, who spoke after Professor Morrill, praised the new edition, particularly for demonstrating to the reader the editorial process behind it. She also sounded a cautionary note, focusing on the problems inherent in looking for Cromwell’s voice and authoritative texts without recognising dangers, such as issues of collaboration and authorial voice, and the exclusion of certain genres of documents, like routine orders. Failure to engage with such issues, she warned, risked turning the lord protector into the type of isolated, ‘great man’ of history whom Carlyle had described.

Dr Tapsell, who spoke next, also examined the problem of Cromwell’s voice but from a different angle. Tapsell, noting Dr Holmes’ distinguished career as a university tutor at Oxford, wondered how Holmes would have perceived the new edition from the vantage point of a teacher. Tapsell praised the work’s accessibility for students and how it explains the process of editing to its readers, though he did note the occasional prioritization of an academic rather than general audience in the editing of the volumes. Like Hughes, Tapsell raised the question of whether there was a risk in over-focussing on a cluster of handwritten letters by Cromwell in pursuit of his personality and mindset, not least because it had perhaps led to the inclusion of some relatively unilluminating texts and raised an insoluble question of how one can hear Cromwell’s voice through texts.

Dr Southcombe moved the conversation from Cromwell’s voice to his God. Southcombe, inspired by the work and thought of Holmes on Cromwell’s religion and witchcraft, discussed why there had been no mass-scale Cromwellian witch hunts. Southcombe explained how there was little room in Cromwell’s theology for Satan and accordingly little room for witches. Offering a practical example of the new edition’s usability, Southcombe employed its index to demonstrate the curious dearth of references Cromwell made to the devil or Satan and concluded that Cromwell’s view on liberty of conscience was influenced by his belief that men were deluded by their own actions rather than by a demonic force.

Professor Worden closed the commentaries by placing the new edition in the historiographical context of Cromwell’s words and writings. Looking back to Abbott, Carlyle, and beyond, Worden discussed how, unlike past works, the new edition is not intended to be biographical, nor is it intended to be interpretative. Both Carlyle and Morrill, Worden continued, sought to recover Cromwell’s voice through his words. In Carlyle’s case, the mission was driven by a search for artlessness: Carlyle abhorred eloquence of speech as a mark of deviousness and believed that Cromwell’s rhetorical simplicity revealed his sincerity. Morrill’s edition, Worden concluded, does not pursue such an interpretative agenda but instead provides the valuable political content and context of Cromwell’s words which Carlyle had missed.

With the commentaries finished, Professor Morrill offered a few words in response, but time was running short and, after a few questions from the audience, the event concluded. As the breadth and vivacity of discussion over the evening showed, with their magisterial work Morrill and his team have breathed new life into the study of Cromwell and his world.

AB

Note: The roundtable was held at the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre, Worcester College, Oxford. The organizers are very grateful to Worcester College and its staff for all their help and to both the Trustees of the Reynolds Fund at New College and Oxford University Press for helping to fund the event. For further information about the ‘Britain in Revolution Seminar’ please email britaininrevolution@gmail.com.

Further Reading

The Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell ed. John Morrill et al (3 volumes, Oxford, 2022).