The seminar takes place on 17 February 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. 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.

The mid-Victorian artistic decoration of the Palace of Westminster, the home of UK Parliament, has long been understood as a fundamentally masculinised scheme. This ambitious art project was overseen by the Royal Commission on the Fine Arts (1841-1863), and was part of the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster after the 1834 fire.

The new interior in the Palace of Westminster offered an opportunity to promote British art and cultivate national political identity through carefully constructed imagery. My paper for the Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on 17 February demonstrates that female visual representation was a central concern of the commission.

The 1841-1863 Fine Arts Commission made a conscious effort to include and increase imagery of women throughout the Palace of Westminster’s principal chambers. In doing so, the commissioners conceptualised women as integral to the development of the British political constitution. Their choice of artworks also reflected Queen Victoria’s position as monarch, foregrounding women as religious and military leaders, and as channels and sometimes exercisers of political power.

CG

Dr Cara Gathern is a heritage professional with a PhD from the University of Brighton. She works as a Researcher and Curatorial Assistant for UK Parliament Heritage Collections, where she has an academic interest in the 19th-century scheme under the Commission of Fine Arts, and the 20th-century mosaics. Her Oxford DNB entry on Master Mosaicist Gertrude Martin was published in December 2024 and her journal article on early female contributions to Parliamentary art, co-authored with Caroline Babington, is due to be published in Women’s History Review in July 2026.

The seminar takes place on 17 February 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. 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.

By the late Georgian period, the buildings of the Palace of Westminster had become an accident waiting to happen. The rambling complex of medieval and early modern apartments making up the Houses of Parliament – which over the centuries architects including Sir Christopher Wren, James Wyatt and Sir John Soane had attempted to improve and expand – was by then largely unfit for purpose. Complaints from MPs about the state of their accommodation had been rumbling on since the 1790s, and reached a peak when they found themselves packed into the hot, airless and cramped Commons chamber during the passage of the 1832 Reform Act.

Unable to agree on a solution for new accommodation, in the end the decision was made for them. The long-overdue catastrophe finally occurred on 16 October 1834. Throughout the day, a chimney fire had smouldered under the floor of the House of Lords chamber, caused by the unsupervised and ill-advised burning of two large cartloads of wooden tally sticks (a form of medieval tax receipt created by the Exchequer, a government office based at Westminster) in the heating furnaces below. Warning signs were persistently ignored by the senile Housekeeper and careless Clerk of Works, leading the Prime Minister Viscount Melbourne later to declare the disaster ‘one of the greatest instances of stupidity upon record’. 

At a few minutes after six in the evening, a doorkeeper’s wife returning from an errand finally spotted the flames licking the scarlet curtains around Black Rod’s Box in the Lords chamber where they were emerging through the floor from the collapsed furnace flues. There was panic within the Palace but initially no-one seems to have raised the alarm outside, perhaps imagining that the fire – which had now taken hold and was visible on the roof – could be brought under control quickly. They were mistaken. A huge fireball exploded out of the building at around 6.30 p.m., lighting up the evening sky over London and immediately attracting hundreds of thousands of people.

The fire turned into the most significant blaze in the city between 1666 and the Blitz, burning fiercely for the rest of the night. It was fought by parish and insurance company fire engines, and the private London Fire Engine Establishment, led by Superintendent James Braidwood, the grandfather of modern firefighting theory. Hundreds of volunteers, from the King’s sons and Cabinet ministers downwards, manned the pumps on the night, and were paid in beer for their efforts. Contrary to popular opinion, onlookers in the vast crowds did not generally stand around cheering. Most were awestruck and terrified by the spectacle, and some suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result. Others were injured in the crush, and plenty were pickpocketed, but astonishingly no-one died in the disaster.

As it burned, the fire stripped away the later, and often ugly, accretions of many centuries, revealing the beautiful gothic buildings beneath, including the Painted Chamber, St Stephen’s Chapel and its lower chapel of St Mary’s, in use at the time of the fire as the Court of Claims, House of Commons and Speaker’s Dining Room respectively. In the aftermath of the fire these became a focus for much antiquarian activity and delighted the sightseers touring the ruins.   

By the middle of the evening it was clear that the fire was uncontrollable in most of the Palace. Westminster Hall then became the focus for Braidwood’s efforts and those of his men and hundreds of volunteers. The thick stone Norman walls provided an excellent barrier against the spread of fire, but the late fourteenth-century oak roof timbers were in great peril. ‘Damn the House of Commons, let it blaze away!’ cried the Chancellor of the Exchequer Viscount Althorp desperately, ‘But save, O save the Hall!’ The efforts of all, from the highest to the lowest, plus a lucky change of wind direction at midnight, and the arrival of the London Fire Engine Establishment’s great, floating, barge-mounted fire engine, finally started to quell the fire in the early hours and ultimately saved Westminster Hall.  The fire crews finally left five days later, having put out the last of the fires which kept bursting out from the ruins.

The following day revealed a shattered and smoking collection of buildings, most of which were cleared in the months that followed and the stone sold to salvage merchants or pushed into the river. Temporary chambers and committee rooms were available for occupation by February 1835, and a government competition commenced to design a new Houses of Parliament on the ruined site. Charles Barry, aided by Augustus Pugin, won the commission and together they created the most famous building in the United Kingdom. The patched-up parts of the old Palace were finally pulled down in the early 1850s. Only Westminster Hall, the Undercroft Chapel of St Mary and part of the Cloister remain today of the survivors of 1834. The damage to the wrecked and uninsured Palace was estimated at £2 million. No-one, however was prosecuted, though the public inquiry which followed found various people guilty of negligence and foolishness.  

Coming at a moment in British history between the Georgian and Victorian ages, the stagecoach and the railway, the demise of the medieval city of London and the birth of the modern one, it is easy to load the great fire of 1834 with a wider historical significance. Later commentators have seen it as symbolic of the constitutional changes brought about by the Great Reform Act of 1832, but at the time people were more likely to have seen it as a judgement from God for the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, against which Charles Dickens – a parliamentary reporter at the time of the fire – railed in Oliver Twist.

This piece is a revised version of the article ‘The Fire of 1834’ by Dr Caroline Shenton, author of ‘The Day Parliament Burned Down‘, originally posted on historyofparliamentonline.org.

On the night of 16 October 1834, thirty-nine year old Charles Barry was travelling back to town from business in Brighton. As his stagecoach trundled over the top of the North Downs, and began its descent towards the city,

a red glare on the London side of the horizon showed that a great fire had begun.  Eager questions elicited the news that the Houses of Parliament had caught fire, and that all attempts to stop the conflagration were unavailing. No sooner had the coach reached the office, than he hurried to the spot, and remained there all night.  All London was out, absorbed in the grandeur and terror of the sight … the thought of this great opportunity, and the conception of designs for the future, mingled in Mr Barry’s mind, as in the minds of many other spectators, with those more obviously suggested by the spectacle itself. [Alfred Barry, The Life and Works of Sir Charles Barry (1867)]

Barry had more reason than many to wonder about the future of the Palace. One of the most startling things about the enigmatic man who became the architect of the new Houses of Parliament was that he was born and brought up in Westminster itself and knew the area inside out even before the competition which changed his life.

The ninth of eleven children of a government Stationery Office supplier, Barry was born and spent his childhood at 2 Bridge Street, which ran along the side of New Palace Yard, opposite the door of Westminster Hall at the northern end of the ramshackle old Palace. He was christened at St Margaret’s, Westminster, the parish church of Parliament, only a few steps from home. Some fifty years after Barry’s birth, the Clock Tower of the New Palace of Westminster – its most well-known feature – began to be constructed just opposite his birthplace. Orphaned at ten years old, at fifteen he was articled to a firm of surveyors in Lambeth across the river. So up until he was twenty-one, Barry lived and worked in the immediate neighbourhood of the Houses of Parliament, though very different to the one which is familiar to us today.

The old Palace must have been a constant presence in his life. From his attic bedroom at the top of the Barry home it would have been possible to see the north door of Westminster Hall, still with the law courts held inside, as well as the Abbey and St Margaret’s, a view painted in the 1820s by Auguste Pugin, father of Barry’s most famous collaborator. As a trainee surveyor and architect Barry’s daily walk over Westminster Bridge to Lambeth provided fine views of its eastern flank across the Thames. Growing up in its shadow and then working across the river would have impressed on Barry’s vivid imagination the muddled shapes and textures of the Palace which had been home to the House of Lords since the thirteenth century, and to the House of Commons since the Reformation. In 1812, at the age of seventeen, he successfully entered a drawing for exhibition at the Royal Academy for the first time. Tellingly, its subject was the interior of Westminster Hall. For the rest of his life, Barry both drew on the existing iconography of Westminster and then indelibly imprinted his own vision on it.

‘What a chance for an architect!” he exclaimed on watching the terrible fire of 1834. But it was also an amazing opportunity for a local boy. For when, in 1835, he entered the competition to design a new Houses of Parliament, he had – like the other 96 entrants – to do it anonymously. They weren’t allowed to sign their drawings but instead each competitor marked the corner of every sheet with a unique symbol – or rebus, as it was called – and then placed their name in an otherwise unmarked envelope bearing the symbol on the outside, to be opened only if they won. Barry’s choice of rebus was the Portcullis: the heraldic badge of Lady Margaret Beaufort found peppered all over the Henry VII Chapel at the east end of Westminster Abbey (whose Perpendicular style Barry had already reflected across his whole design). This very personal choice from a building so well-known to Barry subsequently became the universal symbol for Parliament, and can be found decorating nearly every nook and cranny of the new Palace, thanks to Barry’s collaborator A. W. N. Pugin, who incorporated it into the carpets, wallpaper, fixtures and fittings, and woodwork of the Palace’s interior, and the stone mason John Thomas who was responsible for the exterior carvings. Today, Portcullis House, the parliamentary building which houses MPs’ offices and committee rooms, stands on the very site of Barry’s childhood home.

Despite living for a time in Hatton Garden and then the West End, in 1840 Barry moved his wife and family to 32 Great George Street, so that he could keep an eye on the growing Palace just a few hundred yards away. Great George Street was in fact simply an extension of Bridge Street westwards towards St James’s Park. In the 1850s, Barry was highly influential in the design and construction of a new Westminster Bridge whose profile he was determined had to blend with the Palace when viewed from downriver. And finally, when he died in 1860, worn out with the stress of working on the Palace for twenty-five years, Barry was buried in Westminster Abbey among the most famous of his peers, but also fittingly, just a stone’s throw from the place where he was born and had gazed upon from his attic bedroom whose walls he had once decorated with imaginary scenes of faraway places.

Caroline Shenton

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 19 September 2016, written by Caroline Shenton.

The seminar takes place on 28 November 2023, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. 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.

From the 17th to 19th centuries, the posts of Housekeeper and Deputy Housekeeper to the House of Commons and the House of Lords were frequently held by women. While most holders were married to senior male officers who stood to benefit financially, these roles often passed down through the female line within parliamentary families, and appointments could be hotly contested between rival claimants and their male relatives. In this blog we will discuss the role of the House of Lords Housekeeper and uncover the story of the little-known post of Necessary Woman to the House of Lords for the first time.

House of Lords Housekeepers

The post of House of Lords Housekeeper, known formally as the Keeper of the Palace of Westminster, can be traced back to at least 1509. Appointed by the Lord Chamberlain on behalf of the Crown, it was a grand and highly desirable office. From 1573 through to 1787 this post was the preserve of a single parliamentary family and generally passed down the female line. There was a clear presumption that, like the Housekeepers of the other royal palaces, its incumbents should be women.

During the 1780s the post was contested between Anne Blackerby and a rival claimant, Margaret Tolfrey. The matter was resolved in 1787 with the appointment of Margaret Quarme, the widow of a Yeoman Usher named Robert Quarme and the mother of his successor of the same name, who enjoyed the perquisites of her post until 1812. The next appointee to the role, Mrs Frances Brandish, by contrast, was an absentee sinecurist with no connections to the House of Lords and who took no interest in her role at all.

Yet the work needed to be done, and stepping into the breach came Doorkeeper William Wright, who from 1818 exercised a brand-new role of Deputy Housekeeper. This post came directly under the control of Black Rod and was funded from visitor fees. William’s wife Mary was named in official listings as the formal role-holder; and after Mary’s death in 1821, she was succeeded by the couple’s daughter, Jane Julia Wright. Born in 1811, Jane Julia was then still a child. So, whatever the realities, the presumption that the Lords Housekeeper roles must be held by women was evidently too strong to break.

When Jane Julia turned 16, Black Rod, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, issued her with a formal warrant of appointment in her own right: this marked the formal start of her 50-year career in the service of the House of Lords. Jane Julia Wright, later Mrs Bennett, coped valiantly right through the aftermath of the 1834 fire and the disruptions of the rebuilding of Parliament, in 1847 taking custody of the new Lords Chamber. At the same time she was rewarded with a promotion to the role of Housekeeper, becoming Parliament’s only female senior officeholder of the Victorian age: a woman in charge in an age of men.

But in 1877, following a decline in her power and influence, Jane Julia Bennett was forced into retirement and her post was downgraded. She had suffered considerable hostility from her male colleagues, compounding problems in delivering on her remit. And a little band of female sinecurists was notionally attached to her department, bringing it further into disrepute. The most prominent of these was the Necessary Woman to the House of Lords.

Necessary Women

A necessary woman was a woman who ‘did the necessary’ – providing close personal cleaning services, such as emptying chamber pots and stool pans, or managing or supervising others doing so. The post of Necessary Woman to the House of Lords emerged in the 17th century, entirely separately from the post of Housekeeper. It was a role appointed by Black Rod, alongside Doorkeepers and Firelighters.

Servants with the title ‘necessary woman’ appear in various government service staff lists from the late 17th century. Most famous perhaps was Bridget Holmes, described by the Royal Collections Trust as ‘Necessary Woman’ to King James II, who was immortalised and presented with dignity in a 7-foot-high oil painting by James Riley in 1686. Holmes was buried in Westminster Abbey, as was at least one other Necessary Woman, this time connected to Parliament: Elizabeth Bancroft. Westminster Abbey’s website notes Bancroft as ‘necessary-woman to the House of Lords’ who died in 1758. She was buried with her husband John (a House of Lords Doorkeeper).

The 1748 Necessary Women Dispute

The Parliamentary Archives holds a petition from Elizabeth Bancroft, presented in 1748. It states that she was appointed in 1732 to ‘Do and perform the business’ of the office of Necessary Woman, but having been informed there is now a ‘Dispute touching the Right of the Original Place of Necessary Woman’ is apprehensive that this may affect her.

This ‘dispute’ had been caused by the appearance of a rival, Mary Foord, whose petition was presented at the same time. Foord (also the wife of a Lords Doorkeeper, Charles Foord) alleged she had been given the post of Necessary Woman by Black Rod the previous year and had ‘quietly enjoyed’ it until Black Rod’s death a few months later, when she had been deprived of it by the machinations of Walter Bermingham (another Lords Doorkeeper).

The dispute was referred to two House of Lords Committees over the next two years, and the Committee Books in the Parliamentary Archives describe proceedings, with evidence heard from 20 witnesses. It’s a complex story shedding much light on the post of Necessary Woman, which is shown to have moved from a genuine post held by women to a sinecure held by men – first by George Guy, former gunner on the Royal Yacht Carolina, and then by Walter Bermingham. As these ‘necessary men’ were not doing the work, a Deputy Necessary Woman post was created to actually ‘do the business’ and this was the post held by Elizabeth Bancroft. Perhaps most interesting of all, the post can be seen to have originated as a hereditary post which went down the female line of one family for three generations; we have identified the earliest postholder as Margery Hatrum or Hathrum. The date of her appointment is not known but must have been before her death in 1678 – perhaps soon after the re-establishment of the House of Lords following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

Unimpressed by the uncertainty over appointments, the Lords Committee ordered that in future staff appointments should be recorded properly in a Warrant Book. Thus, the dispute also directly led to an improvement in record keeping in Parliament. The page shown here records the death of Walter Bermingham, who had triumphed at the dispute and held the post of Necessary Woman to his death in 1761 – at which point it passed to a woman, Mary Phillips.

Sadly the Warrant Book was abandoned after a few pages, but we can continue to trace the posts of Necessary Woman and Deputy Necessary Woman through other listings right up to the last Necessary Woman, Elizabeth Oldrini, appointed in 1833. Following a select committee report of 1850 which denounced both posts as sinecures, they were abolished – although as the holder of a warrant, Oldrini was able to draw her payments right up to her death in 1870.

MT & EHS

The seminar takes place on 28 November 2023, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. 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.

Further reading

Robin Eagles, Spending a penny in the old palace of Westminster (History of Parliament blog, 2022)

Elizabeth Hallam Smith, Jane Julia Bennett, Keeper of the Keys of the House of Lords (Parliamentary Archives blog, 2023)

J. C. Sainty, ‘The Office of Housekeeper of the House of Lords’, Parliamentary History, 27 (2) (2008), 256–260

John Sainty, Office-Holders in Modern Britain: Volume 4, Admiralty Officials 1660-1870 (British History Online). Includes lists of Housekeepers, 1697-1800, and Necessary Women, c.1694-1865

Mari Takayanagi and Elizabeth Hallam Smith, Necessary Women: the Untold Story of Parliament’s Working Women (History Press, 2023)

Amid news of the discovery of part of the medieval river wall of the Palace of Westminster, it is worth remembering that for many centuries the river was, for MPs and peers, the preferred route of access to the meeting place of Parliament. There were multiple landing places near the palace, the sites of which were submerged when additional land was reclaimed from the River Thames at the time of the construction of the new palace after the fire of 1834.

Boatmen were available for hire both on the South Bank, at the archbishop of Canterbury’s manor at Lambeth, and in and near Southwark where many of the inns that accommodated Members of the Commons were situated. They also plied their trade at the various quays of the city of London. Travelling to Westminster by boat spared the traveller the arduous journey through the crowded streets of London, where he would be repeatedly accosted not only by a flock of apprentices hawking their masters’ wares, but also less savoury elements, such as pickpockets and cutpurses.

In the most extreme circumstances, the traveller could even fall victim to their enemies, or their hired hitmen and assassins, from whom a journey by water offered some limited protection – provided the traveller could reach his boat in the first place. Thus, in March 1446 Sir Thomas Parr, one of the knights of the shire for Cumberland in the Parliament then in session, was making his way from his lodgings in the city of London to the river when in a place called ‘Cornewalesse grounde, besyde the Crane in the Warde of the Vyntrye’ he was attacked by the two brothers of his longstanding enemy, Henry Bellingham.

Parr managed to escape, and successfully petitioned the King to place his assailants outside the normal process of the law: a proclamation was to be made in the city of London, ordering them to appear in court. If they did so, they were to be clapped in prison and remain there without the possibility of bail until the normal (and protracted) process of the common law had taken its course. If they failed to appear, they were to be deemed convicted of felony without the possibility of suing out a royal pardon. The Commons, horrified by the attack of one of their Members, put forward a bill under the terms of which the same draconian measures should become the rule in the case of any attack on a member of either house of Parliament, but this proved a step too far for Henry VI and his ministers, who instead directed that the existing statutes covering such matters should be observed and enforced.

Of course, not all watermen who plied their trade on the river were themselves honest. At some point in the final years of the 15^th century one John Tadgas, the parish clerk of Lambeth, complained to the chancellor, cardinal Morton, of having been attacked at the landing place known as the King’s Bridge at Westminster by John Borell, a local waterman, as he came from his work at Lambeth. By Tadgas’s account, the waterman beat him unconscious and disoriented. There was evidently more to the matter, for according to the parish clerk’s tale, the waterman subsequently sought out his wife and struck her several times with a drawn sword (perhaps the flat of it, since the unfortunate woman survived her ordeal), before having his victim clapped in the abbot of Westminster’s gaol.

H.W.K.

Biographies of Sir Thomas Parr and his assailant Thomas Bellingham by Dr. S.J. Payling have appeared in The History of Parliament: The Commons 1422-61, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.

Find out more about the history of the Palace of Westminster and its famous Elizabeth Tower, home to Big Ben, in our upcoming publication with St James’s House, ‘Big Ben: An Icon of Democracy and Leadership’, due for release in December.

We ask every former MP we interview for our Oral History Project about their first impressions on arrival at Westminster, and unsurprisingly many of them discuss the buildings themselves: Westminster Hall, networks of corridors, committee rooms and offices, and of course, the Chamber. The buildings of the Palace form so much of the atmosphere of Parliament, framing the working environment and setting the tone.

The overwhelming first impression from many MPs is a sense of awe. Having worked so hard to get there, the grandeur of the buildings adds to the excitement and an awareness of the privilege of their position. Even Robert Cecil, later Marquess of Salisbury, told us that he felt like ‘a rather small ant in front of this great institution.’ [C1503/131, [1, 00:48:55-00:49:40]]. Of course not everyone was impressed – David Curry told us in no uncertain terms that he was not overwhelmed when he arrived – yet others reflected on the privilege of their new workplace. This could be because of a sense of history: David Clark remembered: ‘you suddenly realise, you know, this is where Churchill walked, Atlee walked, Gladstone, Disraeli, all the big players of British politics, and really the changes of British society were [made] here […] I couldn’t but feel impressed.’ [170, 2, 16.35-17.20]. As Eileen Gordon told us:

Of course the Chamber itself was the focus of a lot of this excitement. Again, several remarked that the Chamber was quite small and intimate, but that this only added to the atmosphere. Matthew Carrington told us that to sit in the Chamber for the first time was ‘absolutely wonderful’ and that he ‘relished’ the atmosphere in a busy and buzzing Question Time. For Ann Widdecombe, it was proof that she had made it as an MP:

Some MPs had less warm reactions to the Palace. For those who felt that Parliament was part of an elite culture they did not belong to, the architecture of the buildings themselves seemed to reinforce a feeling of not being welcome. Anthony Coombs described being ‘overawed’, telling us he was ‘too young’ when he arrived: ‘all [the] Pugin architecture, the statues of the Great and the Good – who subsequently you discover had feet of clay.’[134, 2,06-20-06.40]. For Jenny Tonge the Palace was dark, inward-looking, and cut off from the outside world. She described moths ‘fluttering everywhere’ and mice ‘running around’ in the tea rooms: ‘the whole place is like a crumbling old Dracula’s castle.’ Linda Gilroy had a similar reaction:

There was also the practical consideration of working in a historic building. At least before Portcullis House was built, many were allocated offices in unsuitable locations; asking for a noticeboard might mean having to drill through a medieval wall! Certainly many MPs complained about the state of the facilities and how that hindered their work. This was also the case in the simple practical matter of finding your way around. John Hannam remembered ‘something like 80 miles of corridors’ which meant that ‘you had no idea where you were all the time.’

For good or for bad, the Palace of Westminster formed a distinct impression on our interviewees: it shaped their experience of working in Westminster and how they related to the institution as a whole.

EP

Find more blogs based on our Oral History project here.

‘The Political Lives of Postwar British MPs: An Oral History of Parliament‘, a publication based on the History of Parliament’s Oral History project written by Dr Emma Peplow and Dr Priscila Pivatto, is now available in paperback!

Find out more about the upcoming publication ‘Big Ben: An Icon of Democracy and Leadership’ in this blog.

The story of the at times fraught development of the clock tower of the palace of Westminster is well known. A late addition to Charles Barry’s plans for the new Houses of Parliament, construction of the clock tower began in 1843 but it was not until 1863 – 20 years later – that the clock was finally functioning as intended. Delays had sparked questions in Parliament, while the cracking of the original great bell, known as ‘Big Ben’ (made in Stockton-on-Tees) had required a new bell to be cast by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. This second ‘Ben’ was finally hoisted into place in 1858 only for another crack to be discovered and it was to be another five years before the familiar sounding E flat was finally heard by the public.

What is less well known is that this was not the first clock tower of the Palace of Westminster or Ben the first great bell. According to some sources, a stone tower may have been constructed to the north of the main entrance to Westminster Hall as early as the 1290s. Records of this edifice appear hazy, but what is known for certain is that by the 1360s a tower – either the 13th-century one, or a replacement – was present on the site.

Legend told that the tower had been funded out of a fine levied on a judge for accepting a bribe. Whether that was so or not, during the reign of Henry VI responsibility for the clock tower was delegated to the dean and canons of the college of St Stephen in return for a pension of sixpence a day. Like the present Elizabeth Tower, the structure housed a clock, though in this case with a single dial facing towards the palace. There was also a great bell tolling the hours. This appears originally to have been christened Edward (possibly after Edward the Confessor) but came in time to be known as ‘Old Tom’ or ‘Great Tom’.

By the late 17th century the tower appears to have fallen into considerable disrepair. At least one anecdote suggested that the chiming mechanism was no longer reliable, with one soldier on sentry duty in Windsor claiming to have heard the bell sound 13 times at midnight as part of his defence when accused of sleeping at his post. His story was corroborated by witnesses who agreed that the old clock was given to such things.

Faced with a dilapidated tower in dire need of serious intervention, in 1698 the churchwardens of St Margaret’s Westminster petitioned for the clock house and bell to be sold for the benefit of the poor of the parish. In response, a report was submitted to the treasury commissioners by Sir Christopher Wren on how best to respond. Wren noted that some 18 years before a scheme had been laid before the then king, Charles II, for the tower to be renovated. The plan was for it to be encased in ashlar, a lantern added, the bell raised and a new clock installed, but the price – £1,500 – proved prohibitive, and nothing more had been done.

While Wren may not have advocated undertaking anything as elaborate as the previous plan, he made no effort to hide his preference for restoration over demolition. Like so many other features of the Westminster palace complex, by the 1690s the Tower had become surrounded by an array of more or less jerry-built tenements making access difficult and dangerous. Besides, Wren doubted that the materials recovered would cover the cost of the works needed to take the structure down. The bell he reckoned to weigh around two tonnes, which would yield a modest £149 6s. 8d. If it was nearer three tonnes, it might be worth £224.

Wren’s principal objection, though, aside from the practicalities of taking down ‘Old Tom’ was the principal of the thing:

Pardon your surveyor if out of duty, he modestly aske, whether it be better to pull down a public building, for so small a consideration, or to repair it with advantage to the beauty of the towne; which would most certainly be done in any of our neighbour countries, who are more sensible than wee, that to adorne their towns is a lasting benefit to the poor…

Calendar of Treasury Papers, II (1697-1702), pp. 181-2

Wren’s appeal against the cultural barbarism of those intent on demolishing the old monument clearly fell on deaf ears and at the foot of the report was a minute noting the king’s agreement to give the materials to the poor of Westminster. Two years later in April 1700 a further minute noted that the ground occupied by the ‘late clock house’ was to be leased for a period of 31 years at a ‘moderate rent’ to the inhabitants of St Margaret’s. The bell was taken down and presented to the almost completed St Paul’s cathedral for its new clock tower. During transit, or while in storage, Old Tom appears to have been significantly damaged. In 1716 it was recast by Richard Phelps, proprietor of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, and it was thus as a new bell, weighing in at over five tonnes, that it took its place in the south-west tower of the new cathedral.

There is one final puzzle about the fate of Westminster’s old clock tower. The April 1700 minute was quite plain in referring to it as the ‘late clock house’ and an entry in the Calendar of Treasury Papers in January 1705 also referred to the ‘structure being demolished’ when proposing the installation of a ‘good large sundial… near the same place’. This rather mean-spirited replacement for the old public clock was approved by the lord treasurer, on the understanding that the cost would not exceed £20.

However, a ground-plan of the coronation procession of George I in 1714 quite clearly included the clock tower in its old place opposite Westminster Hall. Had the cartographer simply relied on an older plan and failed to notice that it was no longer there, or does this suggest that in 1714 some vestiges of the old structure were still to be seen? The latter may well be the case as at least one antiquarian book on old London noted the tower being demolished as late as 1715. Possibly, it was just the clock and the upper stages that were dismantled a decade before, leaving a small portion of what had once been ‘Great Tom’ to witness the accession of the new dynasty.

RDEE

Further Reading:

Calendar of Treasury Papers II (1697-1702) and III (1702-1707)

Old and New London

David Hughson, Walks Through London including Westminster and the Borough of Southwark… (1817)

Follow Dr Eagles and the research of our House of Lords 1715-1790 project at @GeorgianLords on Twitter and find more blogs from the section here.

Here Dr Kathryn Rix, Assistant Editor of our Commons 1832-1868 project and voice behind the VictCommons twitter page, explores Queen Victoria’s approach to parliamentary ceremony…

On 17 July 1837, less than a month after becoming Britain’s first reigning queen in over a century, Queen Victoria visited Westminster to prorogue Parliament. She had been persuaded by the Whig ministry to perform this duty in person, rather than delegating it to commissioners. The presence of the youthful new monarch generated widespread interest, with an unprecedented number of applications for tickets to view the ceremony. The St. James’s Chronicle recorded that ‘at an early hour all the avenues leading to the galleries of the House of Lords were crowded with ladies, anxiously awaiting the hour for admission’. In contrast with the limited facilities usually provided for women to access parliamentary proceedings, this was an occasion on which there was a strong female presence; indeed the number of peeresses within the Lords chamber was such that ‘it was not without difficulty that many of their lordships procured seats’.

This chamber had undergone some hasty renovations ahead of the prorogation. Since the catastrophic fire of October 1834, which destroyed much of the old Palace of Westminster, the peers had been using the Painted Chamber, having surrendered their previous chamber for the temporary accommodation of the House of Commons. The diarist Charles Greville considered the temporary home of the Lords a ‘wretched dog-hole’ in comparison with the ‘very spacious and convenient’ temporary chamber occupied by MPs. The changes made in preparation for Victoria’s visit included fitting ‘a new door under the archway’ in place of ‘the old wooden planks that hitherto blocked up the entrance’, raising the level of the floor between this entrance and the throne, and replacing the previous temporary throne with ‘a splendid new one, with the words “Victoria Regina” in gold letters, surmounted with the Royal arms, also in gold’. However, the canopy behind the throne, bearing the initials ‘W.R.’, was unaltered.

As Victoria had not yet been crowned, the imperial crown was ‘borne at her side, on a cushion’, by the Duke of Somerset, while she wore ‘a circlet, or open crown, of diamonds’. She read the prorogation speech in ‘a clear and musical voice, that was heard distinctly in the parts of the house most remote from the throne’. Victoria recorded that she had ‘felt somewhat (but very little) nervous before I read my speech, but it did very well, and I was happy to hear people were satisfied’. One press report noted that ‘her spirits were evidently improved’ as she left the House, ‘and there was an elasticity in her manner that showed the removal of a heavy anxiety’.

Among the subjects referred to in her speech – drafted for her by the prime minister Viscount Melbourne in discussion with his Cabinet, but subject to the queen’s approval – were recent amendments to the criminal code, notably the removal of the death penalty for a number of offences. In expressing ‘peculiar interest’ in these reforms as ‘an auspicious commencement of my reign’, Victoria identified herself with the qualities of justice and mercy with which female rulers were often popularly associated.

Parliament was dissolved on the same day as the prorogation, and a general election took place that summer, returning Melbourne’s Whig ministry to power. Victoria appeared at Westminster for the second time that year for the state opening of Parliament on 20 November 1837. Whereas the ladies present had still been in mourning dress for the prorogation, for the state opening they wore ‘silks and velvets, of all hues of the rainbow’. The parliamentary reporter James Grant recorded that the demand for seats was so great that some of them ‘took forcible possession of the front seat in the gallery’, usually reserved for ‘the gentlemen of the press’, with the result that only three reporters were able to find seats.

It was not only the peeresses who were keen to witness proceedings. When MPs were summoned to attend by Black Rod, there was a great rush along the narrow corridors from the temporary Commons chamber into their allotted space in the Lords, and ‘two or three Members … were thrown down and trampled’. The jostling for position, during which MPs ‘squeezed each other, jammed each other’ and ‘trod on each other’s gouty toes’, according to Grant, was so rough that one of the members for Sheffield, Henry Ward, dislocated his shoulder ‘in the violent competition to be first at the bar’. In contrast with this fracas, there was ‘the most perfect stillness’ in the chamber while Victoria read her speech.

Victoria continued to open and prorogue Parliament in person throughout the late 1830s and 1840s, being absent on only a handful of occasions, mostly when she was pregnant. There were, however, various changes to the setting of these ceremonies during this period. After an initial dispute about Prince Albert’s role in proceedings following their marriage in 1840, he rode in the carriage alongside her to Westminster and had his own chair in the temporary Lords chamber and its successor. From 1842 a seat was also provided for the infant Prince of Wales.

On 14 April 1847, Victoria and Albert were given a tour of the new House of Lords chamber by its architect Charles Barry. This was used for the first time by the peers the following day. The queen’s verdict was that ‘the building is indeed magnificent … very elaborate & gorgeous. Perhaps there is a little too much brass & gold in the decorations, but the whole effect is very dignified & fine’. The lavish throne designed by Barry in collaboration with Augustus Pugin was the key feature of the new chamber, and was far grander than its predecessors in the old Palace or the temporary Lords.

The queen prorogued Parliament in the new Lords chamber for the first time on 23 July 1847, but it was not until February 1852 that she was able to use the full processional route designed by Barry with the aim of putting royal ceremonial centre stage within the new Palace of Westminster. Entering through the covered entrance under the Victoria Tower (named in her honour), the queen then ascended the Royal Staircase to the Norman Porch. From there she went to the Robing Room, and then walked in procession through the Royal Gallery to the House of Lords.

In 1854 Victoria prorogued Parliament in person for the last time, apparently because she disliked sitting through the Speaker’s end of session summary, which she felt was like ‘receiving instructions in public’. However, she continued to perform her duties at the state opening until 1861, missing it only four times between her accession and Albert’s death that year. Her husband’s demise prompted a shift in her involvement with parliamentary ceremonial. She did not attend again for several years, explaining to Lord Russell in 1864 that she ‘was always terribly nervous on all public occasions, but especially at the opening of Parliament, which … she dreaded for days before’, but had at least previously had ‘the support of her dear husband’.

However, in 1866 an impending parliamentary vote on a £30,000 dowry for her daughter Princess Helena helped to persuade Victoria out of her seclusion. In contrast with the diamonds and bright ceremonial robes she had worn at Westminster at the beginning of her reign, she opened Parliament in 1866 dressed in black, with a widow’s cap and a long veil, and delegated the duty of reading the queen’s speech to the lord chancellor. The new Palace of Westminster, which put the monarchy to the fore in its layout, its decoration and its symbolism, only hosted the queen for the state opening on six further occasions during the rest of her reign: 1867, 1871, 1876 – when the ‘throng’ of MPs from the Commons to the Lords to see the queen was ‘so tumultuous, and so violent’ that the prime minister Benjamin Disraeli was nearly trampled on while trying to keep the Speaker safe, – 1877, 1880 and, finally, in 1886.

K R

Further reading:

W. Arnstein, ‘Queen Victoria opens Parliament: the disinvention of tradition’, Historical Research, 63 (1990), 178-94

J. Grant, Random recollections of the Lords and Commons (2 vols., 1838), i. 9-26

H. C. G. Matthew & K. D. Reynolds, ‘Victoria (1819-1901), queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and empress of India’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

C. Riding & J. Riding (eds.), The Houses of Parliament. History, Art, Architecture (2000)

C. Shenton, Mr Barry’s War (2016)

M. Taylor, ‘The bicentenary of Queen Victoria’, Journal of British Studies, 59 (2020), 121-35

A. Wedgwood, ‘The throne in the House of Lords and its setting’, Architectural History, 27 (1984), 59-73

Follow the work of the Commons 1832-1868 project at the Victorian Commons blog site.

The Palace of Westminster is in a state of advanced disrepair, and faces what was described by a Joint Committee of MPs and Peers in 2016 as ‘an impending crisis which we cannot reasonably ignore’. While a major refurbishment project—Restoration and Renewal (R&R)—was approved in 2018, the future of the Palace remains uncertain, as concerns mount among some MPs about the cost and the prospect of temporarily moving out to allow the work to take place.

The risk of a catastrophic fire, flood or failure of the essential services within the Palace has developed over many decades, as vital maintenance was neglected and the infrastructure serving the building went far past its expected lifespan. Indeed, some of the mechanical and electrical plant dates back to the building’s establishment in the mid-19^th century, as a replacement for the old Palace, destroyed by fire in 1834.

The 1834 fire, as discussed previously on this blog, occurred after multiple unheeded warnings about the state of the building, a situation worryingly similar to today. It is not the only lesson from history, however, which may be relevant for current discussions. This blog posits that through historical analysis we can identify five recurrent themes that help to explain policymaking decisions relating to the Palace as a legislative building (figure 1, below).

A confused governance system has been evident in Westminster for centuries, manifested through divided patronage between the King and Prime Minister in the appointment of architects to work on the Palace in the 18^th century and delays to the rebuilding after the 1834 fire caused by contradictory instructions from ministers, MPs and Peers—an issue still present today. In addition, the emotional attachment parliamentarians feel about their workplace—for example in the form of a connection to their predecessors, transmitted through the very fabric of the Palace—influences the decisions they make about its future.

This is linked to the third recurrent theme: a clear unwillingness to make radical changes to the Palace. When disaster has occurred, there has been a tendency to recreate the past: either in the exact replica of the previous Commons chamber in the 1940s (described by one MP in 1945 as taking ‘nostalgia to the stage of absurdity’), or in Barry’s design for the new Palace after the 1834 fire. These decisions then become precedent to be followed faithfully in future, a form of path dependency that explains the reluctance to move out of the Palace, the fourth theme. Finally, historical analysis shows that you cannot explain decisions about the Palace of Westminster purely by considering what was happening within the building. The intrinsically political nature of the legislature means that wider political events have influenced the policies chosen for the building.

Looking to history helps to explain how R&R became necessary but it can also explain why its future remains unclear. While the Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Act 2019 legislated for an independent governance structure, the future of the R&R project continues to be subject to the views of the House of Commons Commission. A number of MPs remain opposed to leaving the Palace of Westminster even temporarily, demonstrating the same attachment to the building as has been witnessed for generations. There have been repeated efforts to scale back the scope of programme, in a further sign of the tendencies towards conservatism and to reflect the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. A key lesson from the historical analysis is that major work to the Palace of Westminster has tended to occur only when unavoidable: despite the approval of R&R, it may be that history repeats itself and the ‘impending crisis’ warned of in 2016 occurs.

The threat of a crisis is one major reason why the future of the Palace of Westminster matters. The risk to the Palace is not just about the potential loss of an emblem of national identity, but also the very real dangers faced by the people working in or visiting Parliament. Former Leader of the Commons, Andrea Leadsom, has warned that ‘it is only by sheer luck that no one has been injured or killed’ to date. But the future of the building also matters for the health of our democracy. Legislative buildings are not just symbols of the institution, but their architecture, design and décor affect how people—parliamentarians, staff and visitors—behave within. Through the necessary work to fix the pipes and stonework, the UK Parliament has an opportunity to think about how it can build a legislative building fit for the 21^st century, shaped by the public and designed to facilitate their engagement with democracy. Taking this opportunity before crisis occurs would demonstrate that MPs and Peers really have learnt from the past.

AM

To find out more, Alexandra’s full-length paper ‘Using the past to help us understand the future of the Palace of Westminster’ is available here. Alexandra will be taking questions about her research between 5.15 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. on Tuesday 9 November 2021.

To register for this virtual seminar, please follow this link and click on ‘Book now’. If you cannot attend this session but wish to submit a question to Alexandra, please send it to seminar@histparl.ac.uk.

In 21st-century Britain, we take it for granted that we know what our parliamentary chambers look like. At Westminster, both the House of Commons and House of Lords are open to visitors, and parliamentary debates are recorded on television and illustrated in the press. These are very familiar spaces. However, 450 years ago the situation was quite different. There are no known 16th-century views showing the internal appearance of either building, and the general public was excluded from both Houses when Parliament was in session. Even between Parliaments, access was limited. The Commons chamber, located close to Westminster Hall, was starting to become a tourist attraction, but the Lords’ chamber was more off the beaten track, and was also reserved for other government functions. Consequently, there are few written descriptions of the Lords from this period, and they are generally rather uninformative.

What we do know about in great detail is the peers’ seating arrangements. In marked contrast to the House of Commons, where no one except the Speaker and clerks had designated seats, the Lords was governed by strict rules of social and political precedence. In 1539 an Act of Parliament was even passed to ensure that these rules were followed correctly, setting out not just the order in which people sat, but also which sector of the Lords chamber they should occupy – the bishops along the east side, the lay peers to the west, and legal assistants in the centre, with the most important individuals closest to the royal throne at the south end. This was in fact essentially the same pattern that had already been followed for several centuries. Oversight of these protocols lay with the royal heralds, who were consulted about the ceremonies accompanying the state opening of each Parliament. Not surprisingly, our earliest visual representations of the Lords’ meetings are found in the heralds’ records, such as this example from the middle of Henry VIII’s reign – effectively a picture-diagram to illustrate the written conventions.

This image shows Henry opening Parliament in 1523, and follows somewhat medieval artistic conventions, with the king, the two archbishops, and a couple of other senior ministers drawn on a larger scale than the other figures. As such, it’s not physically realistic, and apart from the depiction of the floor-surfaces and furniture there are no topographical details – but it does accurately explain the seating system at the state opening (which was the whole point).

The earliest-known published depiction of the House of Lords follows very much in that tradition. Indeed, despite the attempt at more realistic perspective, three of the MPs shown in the foreground are disproportionately tall, while Elizabeth I, seated on her throne, similarly dwarfs the figures closest to her!

This image, attributed to the artist Renold Elstrack, was commissioned to accompany a written description of the state opening of Parliament in 1584, helping the reader to understand the seating arrangements just as in one of the heralds’ manuscripts. The author of the treatise in question, Nobilitas Politica vel Civilis [Political or Civil Nobility], was in fact an Elizabethan herald, Robert Glover, who would doubtless have recognised the parallels. The book was published posthumously in 1608, five years after the queen’s death, by Glover’s nephew, Thomas Milles, who presumably supplied Elstrack with a template for this picture. By the early 17th century it was no longer acceptable simply to show the human figures in a vacuum, and Elstrack added an architectural framework for greater realism. However, the proportions of this room bear little relation to what we know of the actual House of Lords, and it is questionable whether any of the stylistic details, such as the windows or ceiling, are topographically accurate.

The first reasonably reliable view of the Lords’ chamber was published nearly four decades later, by the famous engraver Wenceslaus Hollar. It shows the room being used for the trial of William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1644.

Hollar’s design gives a good sense of the tall, narrow proportions of the room, which was 70 feet long, but only around 25 feet wide [21.3×7.6m]. Unfortunately, the chamber had by this date been significantly remodelled, with a new, classical-style ceiling (designed in 1623 by Inigo Jones) and the introduction of a famous set of tapestries showing England’s victory over the 1588 Spanish Armada. The latter covered over the original fenestration, while the ceiling design, with its lofty dormer windows, offers no clues about the roof that preceded it.

The best-known image of Queen Elizabeth in the House of Lords didn’t appear until 1682, nearly eight decades after her death. By an unknown artist, it forms the frontispiece to The Journals of all the Parliaments during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, an important scholarly edition by the former MP Sir Simonds D’Ewes.

D’Ewes himself must have had first-hand knowledge of the Lords’ chamber, but he died in 1650, making the Journals another posthumous publication. The anonymous artist had clearly seen at least one other representation of a state opening, which he used as a model for his own design, and the image gives a fair sense of how cramped the room must have felt on such an occasion. However, there’s no reason to think that the topographical details otherwise tell us anything useful about the chamber’s 16th-century appearance.

So where does that leave us? The Elizabethan House of Lords was a tall, relatively narrow room (as shown by Hollar), which at the start of each Parliament filled up with bishops and lay peers much as in Elstrack’s image – thereby creating an atmosphere captured well by the artist in the D’Ewes frontispiece. We know that there were five doorways, two flanking the throne, the other three at the opposite end of the room. The long east wall boasted a large fireplace, the chamber’s only permanent heat source. Archaeological and antiquarian evidence suggests that the roof was probably medieval in character, and that there may still have been windows in the west-facing wall. Pending a major research breakthrough, most other details are mere speculation. These images collectively offer a tantalizing sense of what might have once existed – but as with any other 400-year-old document, they should be handled with care.

PMH

Further reading:

The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture ed. C. Riding and J. Riding (2000)

The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (2021), volume 1 (especially chapter 3)

A biography of William Laud appears in the History of Parliament’s new volumes on The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush. A biography of Sir Simonds D’Ewes is in preparation for our House of Commons 1640-60 project.