In April 1784, George Nevill, 17th Baron Abergavenny, was approached to ask whether he would accept promotion to an earldom. In the wake of Pitt the Younger’s success in the general election, it was time for debts to be repaid and right at the front of the queue was John Robinson. Robinson had formerly worked for Lord North as a political agent but had chosen to switch his allegiance to Pitt and put all of his energy into securing Pitt a handsome victory. Robinson’s daughter was married to Abergavenny’s heir, Henry, so the new peerage would ensure that Robinson would ultimately be grandfather to an earl.

Abergavenny had also made a political journey. Married back in the 1750s to a member of the Pelham clan, he had naturally found himself within the orbit of the Old Corps Whigs and then of the Rockinghams. A consistent opponent of North and his handling of the American crisis, he had distanced himself from the former Rockinghamites who had entered the coalition with North and ultimately helped to bring the Fox-North administration down. So, the earldom was a double reward.

It might all have been very different, as exactly 37 years previously, while a student at Christ Church, Oxford, Abergavenny had narrowly avoided being tried for murder.

The story, as told in the press and in private correspondence, was that one of the Christ Church scouts (servants) named John or William Franklin (the papers could not agree which) had been found early in the morning of 4 April 1747 in one of the college quadrangles, badly bruised and with a fractured skull. His hair had been shaved and his eyebrows burnt off. There were also tell-tale indications of him having been very drunk.

What appeared to have happened was that a group of students, one of them Claudius Amyand, had been holding one of their regular shared suppers in their rooms, but had decided to entertain themselves by making Franklin, who seemed to have had a reputation as being somewhat eccentric, extremely drunk. The regular attendees had taken the prank (as they viewed it) so far, but things had become more extreme when they were joined by others, who had not been part of the original group. The newcomers were Abergavenny, Lord Charles Scott, a younger son of the duke of Buccleuch, Francis Blake Delaval and Sackville Spencer Bale (later a clergyman and domestic chaplain to the 2nd duke of Dorset). They appear to have handled Franklin very roughly – making fun of him by shaving his head – and to have left him so drunk that he was utterly incapable. According to Frederick Campbell, Abergavenny and Scott retreated to their own rooms at this point, leaving it to the remainder of the party to drag Franklin ‘out to snore upon the stair-case’. [Hothams, 42]

It was unclear what happened next, but it was assumed that after being abandoned on the stairs, Franklin had fallen down, fracturing his skull. On being discovered in the morning, Abergavenny’s valet took Franklin home, where he was examined by a surgeon, but nothing could be done for him. That there may have been a more sinister explanation for his injuries was, however, indicated early on by the news that most of those believed to have taken part in the drinking session had fled, and it was gossiped that the two most responsible for his injuries had been Abergavenny and Scott. [Ward, 169]

Certainly, the coroner’s jury considered that there had been foul play and brought in a verdict of ‘wilful murder by persons unknown’. Some observers took a different view. Frederick Campbell reckoned that it had been a joke that had been carried too far and he was certain that none of those in the frame would ever be convicted. He also added that ‘there was not three of the jury but was drunk’. [Hothams, 42] Horace Walpole’s sympathies, unsurprisingly, were also with the students, commenting: ‘One pities the poor boys, who undoubtedly did not foresee the melancholy event of their sport’. He had nothing to say about the unfortunate Franklin, who had lost his life. [Walpole Corresp, xix. 387] The only one of the group who seemed to have played no role in what had happened to Franklin was Amyand, who had quit the supper party early.

Had Abergavenny been charged with murder, he would have been able to apply to the House of Lords to be tried before them, in the same way that had happened to Lord Mohun in the 1690s and was to happen again soon afterwards to Lord Ferrers and Lord Byron.

In the event, there was no need for Abergavenny to face the prospect of a trial in Westminster Hall. While the coroner’s jury had concluded that Franklin’s death had been murder, the grand jury that sat on the case during the summer assizes refused to bring in the bill triggering a trial. The grand jury was said to have been made up of some of the principal gentlemen of the county and to have deliberated for several hours before reaching their decision. No doubt they were reluctant to agree to a trial of students from gentry (or noble) backgrounds, but they may also have been swayed by the convenient death of Lord Charles Scott just a few weeks before the assizes, which left the proceedings lacking a key witness (or a likely defendant).

Whatever his role had been, Abergavenny walked away unscathed. In 1761 he applied to be recognized as Chief Larderer at the coronation of George III and Queen Charlotte, and in 1784 he had his status enhanced with promotion to the earldom. Blake Delaval was also able to cast off whatever opprobrium had attached to him, and just two years after Franklin’s death stood for Parliament for the first time (unsuccessfully). He later represented Hindon and Andover and in 1761 was made a knight of the Bath. What happened, truly, on that night in April 1747 was never discovered and justice for Franklin – or at least a full explanation of what had happened to him – was never achieved.

RDEE

Further reading:

The Hothams: being the chronicles of the Hothams of Scorborough and South Dalton…, ed. A.M.W. Stirling (2 vols, 1918)

Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (Yale edition)

W.R. Ward, Georgian Oxford: University Politics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1958)

General Advertiser

Whitehall Evening Post

In July 1625 Charles I faced the first crisis of his reign. England was currently at war with Spain, and the king urgently needed money to fund a fresh campaign. Parliament was meeting at Westminster to address this issue, but the House of Commons, which by tradition initiated grants of taxation, had just voted a much smaller sum than the government actually required. Meanwhile, a major outbreak of plague was sweeping through London, and the MPs, satisfied that they’d done their duty, were now anxious to get away from the capital.

By longstanding custom, monarchs requested parliamentary taxation only once per session, but on 7 July Charles controversially decided to address the financial shortfall by seeking a supplementary grant. However, it was clear that if Parliament’s deliberations were to be prolonged, then adjournment to a safer location than Westminster was unavoidable. The question was, what other suitable venues were available? Since 1548 both the Commons and the Lords had been firmly ensconced at the Palace of Westminster, where they now occupied not just their own chambers, but also a growing number of subsidiary spaces which were employed for committee meetings, conferences and assorted back-room functions. It was one thing to adjourn Parliament to a new site, but unless an equivalent array of facilities was available, its business would be severely disrupted.

The king’s solution was announced four days later, when Parliament was adjourned to Oxford. And remarkably, the session was scheduled to resume in just 20 days, on 1 August. What made this timetable feasible was the existence of what is now known as the Old Bodleian Library. The oldest section, dating from the fifteenth century, comprised just two rooms, the ground-floor Divinity School, and above it Duke Humfrey’s Library. But since 1610 work had been underway to construct a spacious, three-storey quadrangle alongside the original wing, the project finally being completed in 1624. And this brand new complex offered all the spaces that Parliament required, on a single, compact site. Not only was the Divinity School approximately the same size as St Stephen’s chapel, the Westminster home of the House of Commons, but the top floor of the new quadrangle contained broad galleries which could easily be adapted for use by the House of Lords.  In addition, the quadrangle’s lower storeys boasted a number of smaller lecture halls which effectively duplicated the Palace of Westminster’s committee rooms.

The other vital consideration, of course, was accommodation for the peers and MPs. Within hours of Parliament’s adjournment, the Privy Council wrote to the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, peremptorily instructing him to empty the colleges of students, so that their lodgings could instead be used by the members of both Houses. Shortly afterwards, workmen were dispatched to the Bodleian to prepare the spaces which would be needed there. In the Divinity School, the existing seating was ripped out, and replaced with ‘five degrees or ranks of seats … in manner of a cockpit’, imitating the normal layout of St Stephen’s chapel [Proceedings in Parliament 1625 ed. Jansson and Bidwell, 661]. The actual benches used by the MPs at Westminster were loaded onto barges, and brought up the Thames to their temporary new home. To complete the picture, a chair for the Speaker was constructed towards the west end of the room, with a gallery above the entrance for additional seating. Preparations for the Lords were a little simpler. On the top floor of the Bodleian quadrangle, the north gallery was partitioned to recreate the Lords’ chamber and entrance lobby. At the east end of the chamber, a ‘chair of state’ was installed for the king’s use, again replicating the Westminster arrangements, while the adjacent room in the east wing was fitted out as the monarch’s privy chamber. The south gallery was designated as a conference space, for meetings of both Houses – effectively a substitute for Westminster’s Painted Chamber – while the various lecture halls on the lower floors were assigned as committee rooms, or as accommodation for parliamentary officials. The total bill for this refit came to around £155 (roughly £40,000 in modern money), including materials, workmanship, and the craftsmen’s wages and living expenses.

One of the largest colleges, Christ Church, was designated as a temporary home for the Privy Council and members of the royal household, effectively standing in for Whitehall Palace. George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury, and James Ley, the lord treasurer, lodged nearby at Merton College, while the attorney general, Sir Thomas Coventry, based himself next door, in Corpus Christi College, requisitioning the president’s rooms. Other peers, bishops and MPs spread themselves out around the remaining colleges. In practice there was probably no shortage of space, since continuing concerns about the threat from plague encouraged absenteeism; just over half of the bishops and peers stayed away, while the attendance rate for the Commons was possibly even worse. The king sensibly avoided the Oxford crowds, and took up temporary residence at Woodstock Palace, a royal retreat six miles north of the city.

From a logistical perspective, Parliament’s relocation was a great success (the absenteeism aside), despite some inevitable teething troubles. When a joint meeting of both Houses was called for 8 August in the Bodleian’s south gallery, this venue was vetoed by the Commons, since the MPs doubted whether the floor was strong enough to support so many people. The nearby church of St Mary the Virgin was considered as an alternative, before the meeting went ahead in Christ Church hall. However, in general the new facilities seem to have served their intended purposes well, albeit briefly. In political terms, the adjournment to Oxford was a disaster. The Commons reacted badly to the king’s demand for additional taxation, and launched an attack on Charles’s favourite, the 1st duke of Buckingham. Recognizing that in this heated atmosphere there was no real chance of further military funding being agreed, the king dissolved Parliament on 12 August, less than a fortnight after the first Oxford sitting. The whole exercise had been an expensive mistake. Nevertheless, the city’s potential as a substitute for Westminster had been demonstrated, and further assemblies would meet there in 1644-5, 1665, and 1681.

PMH

Further reading:

Proceedings in Parliament 1625 ed. M. Jansson and W.B. Bidwell (1987)

G. Tyack, Oxford: An Architectural Guide (1998)

Biographies or further biographies of Charles I as prince of Wales, George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury, James Ley, 1st earl of Marlborough, Thomas Coventry, 1st Lord Coventry and George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, appear in our recent volumes on The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (2021).

This blog was originally posted on 13 December, written by William J. Bulman, Professor of History, Lehigh University.

Over 120 years ago the legal historian F.W. Maitland remarked that ‘one of the great books that remain to be written is The History of the Majority.’ He also realized why this book had not yet been written. ‘Our habit of treating the voice of the majority as equivalent to the voice of an all is so deeply engrained,’ he wrote, that we ‘hardly think that it has a history. But a history it has.’ Today national, elected representatives in democracies make important decisions by enumerated majority vote all over the globe, and we still make little of it. This way of deciding together is in a sense merely a procedure. But it is also the defining feature of these political systems. It is the way democracies decide. By contrast, prior to the modern era, as Maitland seemed to realize, humans mostly made important decisions in national, representative bodies by forging consensus. Conflict was often present, of course, but it was ultimately suppressed prior to the moment of decision.

Arguably the crucial episode in the turn from consensus decision-making to majority rule as a global standard—at least in popular, national, representative bodies—occurred in England during late 1642 and early 1643. As the English people met each other on battlefields, their representatives in the House of Commons were waging civil war by other means. The House of Commons had found itself paralyzed by the excruciating choice between continued bloodshed and significant concessions in their peace negotiations with Charles I. Under these conditions, the members of Parliament grudgingly and repeatedly decided to accept persistent disagreement instead of working to eliminate it. They abandoned their cherished tradition of consensual decision-making and began to resort repeatedly to enumerated majority votes.

This transformation was structured by the well-known obsession with status that characterized the elites of early modern Europe. Consensual decisions had always been deeply valued in the Commons because they were taken to be essential to the honor of the House, its members, the Parliament, and the monarchy. In contrast, the status implications of divisions (the apt English term for enumerated votes in the Commons) were harrowing. They signified disunity, corruption, untruth, and ultimately, weakness. Yet just a few months after the outbreak of the Civil War, members of Parliament were regularly forced to make particular decisions whose stakes with regard to status clearly trumped the ordinary status considerations built into every question put to them. When two factions found themselves at odds with each other in such situations, they were willing to resort to majority votes to end the standoff. By the spring of 1643, the Commons was resorting to divisions as often as a modern legislature. Enumerated majority votes had been held prior to that moment, of course, in England and elsewhere. But arguably, not since antiquity had they been held with frequency by a popular, national assembly. As the House resorted again and again to protecting its status in emergencies by dividing, Parliament’s status became detached from the achievement of consensus and attached to its ability to repel external threats to its authority. Accordingly, aggressively partisan tactics no longer seemed so dishonourable.

This revolution in practice turned out to be a permanent one, outliving England’s mid-century constitutional revolution and indeed becoming institutionalized shortly following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660…

To continue reading this blog on the University of Oxford Centre for Intellectual History’s website, click here…

William J. Bulman 

As has been noted previously, four times in the seventeenth century alone, a Parliament met at Oxford. Epidemic or the threat of popular unrest led to relocation. But what made the Oxford Parliament convened for January 1644 different from all the others across the centuries was that, far from being the Westminster body meeting elsewhere, it was a rival assembly, proceeding for a while in parallel.

On 22 December 1643 Charles I issued a proclamation from Oxford, where he had established his capital nearly 14 months earlier after the inconclusive battle of Edgehill. With what may now carry a chilling resonance, it began by referencing a previous statement, on 20 June, which ‘upon due consideration of the miseries of this Kingdom, and the true cause thereof’ had warned ‘all our good Subjects no longer to be misled by the Votes, Orders and pretended Ordinances of one or Both Houses [of Parliament], which appears by several instances of Force and Violence, and by the course of their proceedings…’. Since that time, Charles’s Scottish subjects had ‘made great and Warlike preparations to enter and invade this Kingdome with an Army, and have already actually invaded the same, by possessing themselves, by force of Armes, of our Towne of Barwick, upon pretence that they were invited thereunto by the desires of the two Houses’. The king was in no doubt that ‘all Our good Subjects of this Kingdome’ would regard this ‘as the most insolent Act of Ingratitude and disloyalty’; it was ‘indeed no other then a designe of Conquest, and to impose new Lawes upon this Nation’. Confident that ‘the Major part of both Houses of Parliament, doe from their souls abhorre the least thought of introducing that Forraigne Power to increase and make desperate the miseries of their unhappy Country’, and protesting his willingness to forget previous ‘injuries & indignities’ offered to him, Charles called them to assemble at Oxford. To those who ‘may be conscious to themselves of having justly incurred Our displeasure by submitting to, or concurring in unlawfull actions’, he promised a ‘free and Generall Pardon’ if they presented themselves at Oxford on or by 22 January 1644 [Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. J. F. Larkin (2013), vol. 2, pp. 987-9].

From one perspective, this justification had compelling logic and might be expected to command acceptance. There was ‘misery’ in the country. It was the king’s prerogative to summon a Parliament and traditionally his to dissolve it; it was he who had inaugurated what was becoming the Long Parliament. The Scots, who had been in rebellion for six years, had previously occupied parts of northern England and were preparing to do so again. But this was also war propaganda. While the Scots and the Westminster Parliament had sealed an alliance with the passing in September 1643 of the Solemn League and Covenant, and while on 1 November the latter had indeed ordered the rendezvous of an invasion force, the Scots did not cross the Tweed until late January 1644, and they did not at first succeed in capturing Berwick.

There were also diverging narratives of how many obeyed Charles I’s call. According to MP Edward Hyde, who had rallied to the king as early as spring 1642 and who claimed responsibility for suggesting an Oxford Parliament, the response was overwhelming. ‘Very near 300 of the House of Commons appeared [there], when there were not above 100 remained at Westminster’ [Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, iii. 370]. Yet other sources tell a different story. It is evident from divisions and committee nominations recorded in the Commons and Lords Journals, from diarists and commentators at Westminster, and from the London newspapers, that even if a majority of peers were loyal to the king, the figures for the Commons were closer to the inverse of what Clarendon asserted.

Furthermore, the assembly at Oxford proved to be less pliable and less productive than Charles had hoped. After an audience with him at his headquarters in Christ Church – where the college was too crowded with his entourage to accommodate them – peers and MPs repaired to the Bodleian Library to hold their meetings. The visible result of their preliminary deliberations was not the securing of funds to crush the rebellion and defeat the Scots but, on 19 March 1644, what was published as The Declaration of the Lords and Commons assembled at Oxford. This was an appeal to the parliamentarian commander-in-chief, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, to promote peace – something to which he was well-known to be predisposed. The document was signed by 43 peers and 118 MPs, giving Hyde’s claim the lie. At few of those, like Oxfordshire MP John Whistler, were probably present under duress; rather more probably had complex allegiances.

Since the Oxford Parliament destroyed its own records later rather than see them fall into enemy hands once parliamentarian sieges secured their objective (as they did in June 1646), our knowledge of its other activities is very limited. Apart from the Declaration, it is largely from testimonies given by those who later applied to compound with Parliament that we can piece together who participated and for how long. Those concluded to have ‘been at Oxford’ were individually expelled from their seats at Westminster.

As for the king, he prorogued the Parliament in April 1644 and adjourned it in March 1645, after which it met only spasmodically. It was a ‘mongrel Parliament’ as he told his wife Henrietta Maria in exasperation.

VL

Biographies of Edward Hyde and John Whistler are being prepared by the Commons 1640-1660 project.

This blog was originally published on 29 September, written by the History of Parliament’s director, Dr Paul Seaward.

Ideas, politics and institutions tend to go in separate intellectual boxes. Historians of politics bury themselves in the exciting histoire événementielle of national politics; historians of ideas go for the concepts and questions that loom over their arguments. Sometimes they mix them together, dipping into ideologies or sampling context. Institutional historians seem a sort of poor relation: smelling of archives and pipe tobacco, conducting a minute scrutiny of the stage, rather than what was actually going on upon it, or the arguments among the critics about whether it was any good.

Should this be so? It certainly hasn’t always been true. Indeed, the Whig tradition in England recognised little difference between them, for to its exponents the big ideas were embodied in institutional politics. Politics was about power expressed through constitutions, about freedom embedded in parliament, and about how ‘parliament’, acting somehow corporately, met threats to curtail it in a series of confrontations with Tudor, Stuart and Georgian kings. But the reaction in Britain against whiggism and its favourite tropes in the 1970s and 1980s made parliaments and this sort of constitutional history historiographically unfashionable, in the same way as the contemporary reaction against a series of canonical texts in the history of political thought made a ‘great men’ approach to the subject feel as dead as a doornail. As the history of political thought spread into a broader history of intellectuals thinking more or less politically and the history of politics moved, through several turns, to the less formal arenas of print culture, the public sphere or the agency of those excluded from mainstream engagement with the institution, institutions themselves felt unexciting and unloved.

Perhaps the separation of these spheres has not been quite so true in other countries in Europe, where ‘parliamentarism’ marked the elevation of the institution to an idea, even an ideal, and politicians and political theorists like the Abbe Sièyes, Benjamin Constant and Francois Guizot grappled with the relationship between representative and parliamentary institutions, democracy and monarchy; and German political scientists like von Gneist, Josef Redlich and Weber struggled to understand how history, procedure or sociology influenced their effectiveness. William Selinger has recently explored this world in Parliamentarism, bringing a welcome new recognition to parliaments as theory. But despite the greater interest in these matters abroad, they can still seem like an English, Whiggish obsession. While welcoming the transnational turn in the Anglophone history of political thought, Peter Ghosh in a blog for this Centre suggested that while ‘the term “parliamentarism” was a Continental neologism’, it was ‘designed to convey an alien English peculiarity.’ Of course it is true that the pattern that Sièyes and Constant had in mind, initially at least, was the mad bear-garden over the channel, and the context for the invention of ‘parliamentarism’ was the post-1789 conceptual difficulty of preserving an aristocratic style of government within an increasingly democratic framework. And yet the concept was freighted with a much broader baggage of ideas about national political assemblies, which, if it had survived in Britain, had once existed rather more widely across Europe.

That baggage has indeed been widely investigated by the historians of political thought. Always, though, it is investigated as individual abstract ideas: sovereignty, liberty, representation; aristocracy; mixed government; resistance theory; civic humanism; republicanism and so on. Parliaments themselves are treated simply as a vehicle, a mere mechanism, their significance as an idea often boiled down just to the notion of representation. But most of these ideas are embodied, in large part, at least, in the idea and practice of political assembly…

To continue reading this blog on the University of Oxford Centre for Intellectual History’s website, click here.

Paul Seaward

With their expertise at a premium in the drafting of legislation, lawyers have always found a place in Parliament. When professional experience was combined with long service in the House and a reputation for learning, integrity or judicious pronouncements, a lawyer MP might command such respect that it was considered difficult to operate without him. This was the case with John Selden, a jurist with a European reputation who, when the Long Parliament assembled in November 1640, had the added kudos of having suffered more than two years’ incarceration in the Tower of London for his part in opposition to crown policies and ministers in the 1628 Parliament. Although not always in tune with the trajectory of politics through the civil war period, Selden remained a go-to provider of independent professional advice within the Commons until he fell victim to Pride’s Purge in December 1648, and even afterwards his scholarly retirement was punctuated by requests for counsel.

One colleague whose advice at one point seemed equally indispensable to the House was John Whistler. His story had a less happy ending. A few years older than Selden, he was about 60 in November 1640; like Selden, he was entering his fifth stint in Parliament. He too had defied royal policies, albeit with less dramatic consequences. Recorder of the city of Oxford since 1627, he had represented it in every Parliament from 1624 except in the Short Parliament of spring 1640. At that election, candidates backed by the economically-dominant university had squeezed him out, but when town-gown relations deteriorated sharply over the succeeding summer, he was briefed by the city authorities to put their case to the privy council. As pre-eminent councillor – and university chancellor – Archbishop William Laud remarked in a characteristically heavy joke, the corporation had ‘whistled up their recorder to come and complain at the council table’ [Anthony Wood, History of the University of Oxford ed. J. Gutch (Oxford, 1796), ii. 421-2].

Such jibes did Whistler’s standing among Long Parliament MPs nothing but good. He was nominated to investigate numerous grievances arising from the personal rule of Charles I. He was a frequent and thoughtful speaker in debates, coming up with useful precedents and pointing out flaws in the detail of proposed legislation. He managed the grand committee on Irish affairs and prepared papers for the prospective trial of the king’s chief minister in Ireland, the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth). He was involved in everything from the regulation of salt marshes and disorders in elections to the promotion of preaching the gospel and the limitation of the secular power of bishops. As the pressure of work apparently took its toll, on 17 April 1641 there was a proposal that the ‘ancient lawyer’ be allowed leave of absence for his health. Diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes noted that some MPs ‘out of their respect for him as conceiving him a necessary Member opposed it’, but himself endorsed the grant of a week’s absence that ‘we might the longer enjoy his assistance’ [Procs. LP iii. 604, 605, 608].

Whistler did eventually take a short break, but was soon back in harness. He continued to be an important actor in key aspects of Commons’ business and a guardian of law and precedent until June 1642. As armed conflict looked increasingly likely, he then went back to his constituency. On 10 August he was present in Oxford to hear Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Berkshire, and the vice chancellor, Robert Pinke, outline their plans to implement royal instructions to fortify the city against attack by any forces sent by Parliament. In response, he declared that the plans were impracticable and ‘would draw enemies upon us, and make [the city] a seat of war’ but ‘that night Mr Whistler’s windows were broken, and it was generally given out that he should be mischiefed for speaking against that fortification’ [HMC Portland i. 56-8]. Further intimidation prompted him and others to flee to Abingdon.

Subsequently Whistler made the miscalculation of returning to his home at Great Haseley. As Charles I’s forces converged on Oxford in the aftermath of the indecisive battle of Edgehill, he was taken prisoner into what became the royalist capital, leaving ‘the place of his habitation, and almost all his goods, to the spoil’ as he later claimed [R.F. Whistler, ‘Annals of an English family’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, xxxv. 66-7]. A hostile witness explained that he was committed to the custody of the dean of Christ Church for ‘his adhering to the Parliament, and ever and anon by letters advising citizens not to take up arms, or be helping or contributing towards the fortifying of their city for the king’ [Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii. 457]. His readiness to speak out and his piety were decried in the local cavalier press: Abraham Cowley in The Puritan and the Papist (Oxford, 1643) bracketed him in this with Oliver Cromwell in a very early sign of the latter’s growing profile.

After a few months Whistler was freed, and – indispensable again? – reappointed by the king to local office. Voluntarily or otherwise he participated in the royalist Oxford Parliament in 1644. As a result he was thrown out of the Westminster Parliament as a delinquent, although his plea that his property ‘lately burnt’ had brought no income for three years averted the imposition of a fine. He died in 1647 having made a will in which he acknowledged the frailty of the flesh, ‘especially of mine that am aged’ [TNA, PROB11/200/317].

VL

Further reading:

Proceedings in the Opening Sessions of the Long Parliament ed. M. Jansson (7 vols. 2000-)

Further biographies of John Selden, John Whistler and Oliver Cromwell are being prepared for publication by the House of Commons 1640-1660 section.

At the time of George I’s accession, Oxford had a clear reputation as a hive of Toryism. The city’s perceived loyalty to the Stuarts had been one of the reasons for Charles II opting to hold two parliaments there. The corporation was Tory, the university was perceived to be a thorough bulwark of Toryism and both MPs returned in January 1715 were Tory. One, Sir John Walter, a former member of Queen’s College, had held the seat since 1706 and retained it until his death; the other, Thomas Rowney, who had attended St John’s College, had represented Oxford since 1695. Both voted against the administration at every turn.

In appearance, Georgian Oxford was undergoing considerable alterations, carrying on the high-profile building projects started in the second half of the previous century and continued under Queen Anne. A brand new college, Worcester, had been founded in 1714 on the site of the defunct Gloucester Hall, while mediaeval Queen’s College was being reborn in fashionable classical guise. In May 1715 the resident Jacobite Tory antiquarian Thomas Hearne noted the completion of the new hall at Queen’s, and how it had been used for the first time, at which

old Smooth-Boots exerted himself according to his usual pride.

An attempt to do the same to Magdalen in the 1720s and 30s stalled and a scheme to tear down the 15th-century cloisters (now Grade 1 listed) was prevented. All that was completed of the grand vision for a shiny new classical college was the New Buildings range.

If some colleges were busy rebuilding and reimaging themselves, in other respects the city was faced with occasional moments of violent altercation.

Within months of George I coming to the throne Oxford had become a problem for the new regime. There were riots in the city in the summer of 1715. George I’s birthday was marked by some, though the extremely partial Hearne was disparaging about the attempt:

some of the bells were jambled in Oxford, by the care of some of the Whiggish fanatical crew

He believed few else paid any attention, except to ridicule the celebration. So concerned were the authorities at the time of the Jacobite rising that year that in October a regiment of dragoons (described by Hearne as ‘a parcel of pitiful, tired raw fellows’) marched into the city under the command of Colonel Pepper in search of 13 wanted individuals. According to one newsletter they were successful in rounding up a dozen of them, but the 13th, a recently cashiered guards officer called Colonel Owen, who had been lodging at the Greyhound Inn, managed to evade capture by fleeing over Magdalen’s wall. There was an unfortunate incident before the troops sloped off when one of them, indulging in a pint outside Christ Church, shot two children when his gun went off by accident.

Oxford’s reputation as pro-Stuart meant there were often troops on the ground to help keep order. Even so, problems continued into the following year when there was further rioting around the time of the king’s birthday in May 1716, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the presence of Colonel Handasyde’s regiment, which made a show of strength marching around the town. One of those to suffer was Thomas Rowney, who had a house on St Giles next door to his old college, whose windows were broken by the troops.

The following year, in April 1717, yet another riot coinciding with another royal birthday celebration became a subject of enquiry in Parliament. In the Lords, there was lively disagreement about exactly who should be censured for the latest disturbances. Some were for censuring the soldiers quartered there, under the command of Major Franks, while others believed the respective heads of the colleges were the ones who should be upbraided. Lord Coningsby made it clear that he did not believe the soldiers were to blame but the ‘citizens and scholars’.

The situation was complicated because the university was able to argue that royal celebrations in favour of the Prince and Princess of Wales implied loyalty, while others suspected that it was really a demonstration of precisely the opposite, citing previous examples when William III was on the throne and the university had been noisy in support of the heir presumptive, Princess Anne. The Lords ultimately came to the resolution that the heads of houses and the mayor had neglected their duty by not arranging public rejoicing, and that when some fellows and students, along with the officers, gathered for their own celebrations they were set on by the rabble, breaking windows and sparking the ensuing rioting.

Oxford continued to be a problem for future administrations, eager to check the university’s apparent disloyalty. There were even serious proposals to bring the institution under royal control. In spite of all that the administration could do, though, the office of Chancellor of the University remained firmly identified with the Tories; some of the holders were firmly Jacobite. One of the most prominent of these, the 4th duke of Beaufort, who succeeded his brother in the title in 1745 shortly before the outbreak of the latest Jacobite rebellion, lavished gifts on the university. In April 1749 he took a prominent role as one of the trustees for the new Radcliffe Camera, when it was opened formally amid general celebration.

Oxford retained its Tory reputation well into the century. In spite of this, it is striking that of those peers who received a university education, many continued to prefer Oxford over Cambridge. Of these, the vast majority flocked to the largest of the colleges, Christ Church, with other popular options being Magdalen, Trinity, University and New College. [Cannon, Aristocratic Century, 48-50]

Popular perceptions of Oxford may have been of town versus gown, but quite as often the fault-lines were blurred. There were famous rivalries between some colleges, notably Balliol and Trinity, and it was noticeable that whereas both the 3rd and 4th dukes of Beaufort were students at University College, they opted to shower prizes on Oriel College, instead, which was presumably more to their political inclinations. As had been apparent at the time of the 1716 investigations, both the heads of houses and the mayor were jointly upbraided, while some members of colleges, fellows and students alike, along with soldiers and, presumably townspeople, made a point of demonstrating their good Whig credentials in the face of hostility from their Tory counterparts. Early Georgian Oxford was not, thus, always a case of Town v. Gown, but not infrequently a lively expression of partisan politics that cut across the social (and educational) divide.

RDEE

Further Reading:

John Cannon, Aristocratic Century (Cambridge, 1984)

Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, eds. Doble, Rannie and Salter (Oxford Historical Society, 1885-1921)

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The past few weeks have witnessed the beginning of a new academic year in universities across the country. For many it is an exciting if unsettling time: getting used to a new environment, knuckling down to work, finding or confirming new lodgings. Students at Oxford in the 17th century experienced an additional difficulty on four separate occasions when the normal pattern of their terms was interrupted by the decision to convene Parliament there.

The earliest Parliaments had met frequently in locations away from London (Oxford had been the venue for the ‘Mad Parliament’ of 1258) but by the 17th century it was all but unheard of for Parliament to meet anywhere but in the usual rooms in the palace of Westminster. In 1625, 1644, 1665 and 1681 this pattern was interrupted by plague, war, plague again and finally by political unrest that persuaded the Stuart kings to summon the Lords and Commons to a city famed for its loyalty to the monarchy.

The purpose may have been to avoid problems in London, but the result was turmoil for the students (and citizens) of Parliament’s new temporary home. In 1665, the students were encouraged to stay away while members took over the majority of the lodgings both in the colleges and in the local hostelries. Christ Church became the royal court; the queen took over Merton; Parliament itself was housed in rooms in the Bodleian Library. Unsurprisingly, the price of everything soared. The antiquary Anthony Wood recorded how those students who had decided to remain behind were subjected to abuse by the MPs roaming the streets.  Worse still, when they were eventually able to return to their chambers after the session was brought to a close at the end of October, the students found that the peers and MPs had been none too careful with their rooms. As Wood described it, though the courtiers were ‘neat and gay in their apparel, yet they were nasty and beastly, leaving at their departure their excrement in every corner’. They were, in short, ‘rude, rough, whoremongers; vain, empty, careless’.

Given all this, the colleges can hardly have welcomed the decision to hold Parliament in Oxford again in 1681. The preceding election had been particularly bad-tempered, punctuated by the cry of ‘no universities! no scholars! no clergy! no bishops!’ none of which can have offered the university authorities much comfort. Following on from the problems arising out of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis and reflecting the heightened tensions between the king and opposition grouping headed by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, there were large numbers of soldiers present both in the city itself and lining the route from Oxford back to London. Wood noted the changed atmosphere. Whereas before they had been proud and rude, now the courtiers were ‘very civil’ to the scholars, even being willing to give way to them when passing in the street. They were still, though, keen to entrap the unwary into speaking of state matters so that they could bring them on their knees before one or other of the Houses.

However, while  the members may have been better behaved to their hosts they proved recalcitrant in their dealings with the king and when he realized that they were unwilling to press on with business without turning once more to the question of excluding the Duke of York from the succession, he determined to bring proceedings to a premature conclusion. Thus on 28 March, with the session just seven days old, Charles arrived at the Bodleian with his regalia hidden in an accompanying coach. He then surprised everyone by bringing the session to a close and quit the city. The members were furious. So were the workmen who had only just finished converting the Sheldonian Theatre into a Chamber for the Commons, carefully ferrying away the paraphernalia of the University Press that was housed in its basement. The subsequent confusion resulted in a spectacular explosion in the cost of carriages as the members press-ganged the city’s available transport for their use. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the final occasion on which Parliament convened away from Westminster.

RDEE