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.

The 1st November this year is the two-hundred-and-thirtieth anniversary of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. A 230th may not seem the most noteworthy of anniversaries, but, then again, because the questions which Reflections raised are of contemporary concern every one of its anniversaries is significant. I’d like to draw attention to one of its themes which has not attracted attention hitherto and which is basic to our political experience today.

We think nowadays about political representation as analytically linked to election. Your MP is your representative, but the Queen and Lord Bew are not. Such is now the normal position not just here in the United Kingdom, but also throughout the Western world and beyond. Wherever we go, political representation and election are regarded as one.

Burke’s position contrasts with such an identification of representation with election. This is in one way no surprise. Everyone who reads anything about Burke knows that he defended the independence of MPs’ judgement from the instructions of their constituents. But that is not what I have in mind.

Burke’s Reflections uses the notion that King, Lords and Commons alike represent the nation. ‘The King is the representative of the people; so are the Lords … as well as the Commons’, he had written. How can this be? King, Lords and Commons all acted on its behalf. All three were part of the sovereign, and so all were equally needed for legislation. This understanding about the sovereign had been established for sure at and after the revolution of 1688. Its legislative action was complemented by executive action – because the King could be understood as chief magistrate. As such, he not only executed laws within the realm but also was Britain’s chief representative in relation to the world. In short, the sovereign, whether the King or King, Lords and Commons represented the realm.

All this contrasts with election. In the distant past, Burke could state, monarchs were elected, but now, so long as they kept to the terms of the contract between them and the people, there they stood; and it is the monarch who gave their roles to the Houses of Lords and Commons. MPs represented not human beings as such but places. The Lords were either appointed by the King or were descendants of those whom a king had appointed. The link between election and this King, or any election and any peer was not a current one. Of course, individual MPs were elected. Yet the Commons was at most one part of the representative sovereign. Anyhow, the election was in many instances a formality – many seats were uncontested at Georgian general elections for a variety of familiar reasons.

All this sounds very disconcerting. It was not so in Burke’s time. It was understood that Parliament embodied the estates of the realm – the different sorts of people who are useful to the well-being and good functioning of the state – rather than being those who represented ‘the people’ as such.

Burke assumed these positions in 1790. He alluded, for instance, to conventions about government, namely ‘the common agreement and original compact of the state’, and ‘the compact of sovereignty’. He considered that ‘the nation … acted’ to make the Glorious Revolution according to ‘the ancient organized states in … their old organization’. He referred to the action of ‘the states of the kingdom’ in removing James II, and suggested that the Revolution was made so that no future monarch could ‘compel the states of the kingdom’ to use ‘violent remedies’ again. Burke controverted the view that the House of Lords was ‘no representative of the people’, contradicted the claim that the peers were ‘not representing any one but themselves’, and defended the Crown to the same effect.

All of this implied a striking contrast between the British constitution as Burke understood it and what was happening in the France of 1789 to 1790. There the estates of that kingdom were being collapsed into a legislative based on popular representation election, and the king was not to be part of the legislative. But Burke was not alone. One could quote Blackstone and Chatham amongst others for the view that Parliament embodied the estates of the realm.

Not everyone thought that way. There were some in Britain whose opinions were closer to those being developed within the French Revolution. But the institutional response accorded to Burke suggests that their views were not the ones that were central in 1790. That being so, do historians not need to think again about eighteenth-century Parliaments? For instance, was parliamentary reform so central to contemporaries as it has come to seem to posterity? Have we understood very well how Parliament was representative?

From Burke’s time to ours much has changed. Election has become necessary for all would-be MPs to enter the Commons, and they can be recalled in a sort of reverse election. Membership of the Lords is now principally non-hereditary. Some peers are elected by other peers (though the principle of election had been recognized from 1707). But not everything has changed. Parliament remains the political sovereign. It still consists of monarch, Lords and Commons. What would Burke make of this situation? Would he suppose that the fact that elections are more important than in his day has deprived the Queen and the peers of their role as representatives? Would he consider that representation had changed its meaning, or at least its emphasis? These are questions about the present that the student of the past leaves the reader to ponder.

I.H.

The view that Parliament as a whole was understood to be representative in Burke’s time is explored by the present writer in ‘The Authentication of Burke’s Reflections: Church, Monarchy and Universities, 1790-91’, which will be appearing in the journal History of Political Thought.

The paper described the changing composition of the Commons between the majority of Richard II and the death of Mary I, a significant period in its evolution. The most apparent change was the reversal of an earlier one: in the early fourteenth century the Commons had contracted in numbers as some of the smaller boroughs abandoned representation but, at an accelerating pace from the late fifteenth century onwards, the Commons expanded with the creation of many new seats. The Parliament of 1386 had 262 members; that of 1558 more than 50% more at 396. Yet, although these new seats expanded representation geographically, most notably into Wales, this did not mean that the Commons, conceived as a body of individual MPs, became more geographically representative.

The expansion of numbers was matched by the erosion of the historic link between representation and locality. From the late 14^th century local merchants and tradesmen, who had traditionally represented the smaller boroughs, were replaced by men whose horizons extended beyond the local. In many cases, this new generation of MPs’ locality, as lawyers or government officials, was Westminster. As a result the corporate standing and professionalism of the Commons was markedly improved but at the cost, or so it might be argued, of their independence from the Crown. As the principle of local representation came to be increasingly flouted, despite the statutory protection given to it in 1413, it became easier for royal servants to find seats and they did so in increasing numbers. In the 1380s they took only a small number of seats, but in the Reformation Parliament of 1529-36 some 40% of the Commons were (on a broad definition that included those employed outside the royal household) servants of the Crown. It would, however, be wrong to attribute their emergence as so large a grouping to any politically-contentious electoral engineering on the part of royal government. Into the sixteenth century and beyond, freedom of election remained a meaningful concept in the counties and larger boroughs.

It was, therefore, in the smaller and some of the new boroughs that the pattern of representation was transformed. These provided the Crown with a sufficient and, with new creations, an expanding reserve of seats. In these there was no uncomfortable tension between the ‘nomination’ of members and freedom of election, for to nominate was to provide a constituency with a member where none (or none of suitable standing) could be found by the unaided process of local election or selection. Further, the seats of most small boroughs could be filled with royal servants without the Crown’s direct intervention. With the electoral patronage institutionally available through the regional councils in the north, the marches of Wales, the duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster and also informally through sympathetic regional magnates and the networks of friendship and kinship, the Crown could leave its own men to find their own seats.  The Commons that emerged from this transformation was more unwieldy than that of the late-fourteenth century but it was also corporately better informed about the processes of government and thus better able, at least from the perspective of the Crown, to discharge its legislative and financial function.

S.J.P.

We’re still on the lookout for potential speakers for our ‘Parliaments, Politics and People’ seminar, which will return again in the new academic year. For more information, see our website.