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)

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This blog was originally posted on 23 November 2021, written by Mark Goldie, Professor Emeritus of intellectual History, University of Cambridge and Honorary Professor of History, University of Sussex.

The dog that did not bark. It is one of the mysteries of the history of English thought on parliaments and representation that between the era of the Levellers in the 1640s and the Wilkesite movement in the 1760s the question of the franchise disappeared almost entirely. The franchise remained narrow and was not overhauled until the Reform Act of 1832. The Levellers have often been called ‘the first English democrats’, and, while there remains room for dispute about the extent of their commitment to adult male suffrage, it was surely an epochal moment when rank-and-file soldiers sat down in Putney Church, after the defeat of the king in the Civil War, to debate a new constitution. But, after the Levellers, silence. Neither the radical Whigs nor the neo-republicans of the late seventeenth century showed much interest in the franchise. And, when fleetingly the Whigs did do so, it was to propose reducing it, on the grounds that only a substantial income gave a man enough sturdy independence to resist the bribery of courtiers and the bullying of caucuses.

The silence is the more strange when we remind ourselves that in this same period the idealisation of parliament as the embodiment of the nation reached its apogee. Unquestionably central to the Revolution of 1688 was the claim that Stuart monarchs posed a mortal threat to parliaments. The idea that legislative sovereignty lay with parliament and that parliament was the nation became dogma.

And yet we surely wish to avoid the condescending anachronism, which filled twentieth-century democratic textbooks, that dismisses pre-1832 Britain as the era of the ‘Unreformed’ House of Commons. Finding the post-Leveller period wanting by the standards of the modern mass franchise won’t do as intellectual history. So, rather than dwell on the silent franchise question, I’d like to highlight four themes that ran through Anglophone debate and practice after the Levellers.

The first is the weight given to the doctrine of virtual representation. The few were taken to stand for the whole. (Before the Civil War, sometimes a person was made MP by public acclamation, without a poll and without ascertaining the voting rights of those who gathered to ‘huzza’.)  We are apt to boggle at the elasticity of the doctrine of virtual representation in the eighteenth century. But all electoral systems in modern democracies still rely unavoidably on the notion. Everybody is deemed represented even when the turnout is tiny (one ward in Hull had a turnout of 12.7% in the 2019 general election). And everybody is deemed represented even when most people voted for different candidates.

This first doctrine, virtual representation, entrenched and underwrote the alchemy by which parliament represented even though the franchise was small. The second theme pushed in the opposite direction…

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

Mark Goldie

This blog was initially posted on 18 November 2021, written by Michel Hébert, Emeritus Professor, Université du Québec à Montréal.

Is there any such thing as a parliamentary culture in pre-modern Europe, before Thomas More’s England, before the great Polish Sejm held at Radom in 1505 or before the revolutionary States General in the sixteenth-century Low Countries? Admittedly, the first laid claim to free speech in the House of Commons, the second was granted the privilege of common consent and the third ousted a king and founded a republic. Such significant advances, however, were not and, indeed could not, be born from scratch. They belonged to a recognizable form of parliamentary culture, a transnational inheritance of ideas melting into a common European tradition. As such, they rested upon an age-old culture, or rather a mix of common practices, pertaining to such multifarious spheres as voting patterns, petitioning cultures, assembly practices, altogether embedded in nascent legal frameworks, ideological representations of society and the rise of the Modern State, from the thirteenth century onward, if not even earlier.

The history of medieval representative assemblies is largely dominated by a functional paradigm that tends to emphasize the study of their role in the institutional development of the states and principalities that were being formed during the closing centuries of the Middle Ages. This role was twofold: first, submission by the people of a number of grievances in the form of petitions or supplications, to which princes were requested graciously to respond; and second, the granting of extraordinary fiscal resources that princes could not reasonably obtain without the consent of their subjects so assembled. Medieval assemblies have been thriving, under different names (parliaments, states general, cortes), throughout the Latin Christian world, from Poland to Portugal and from Scotland to Sicily. They originated from ancient feudal, and highly ceremonial, gatherings such as public crownings or solemn judicial sentencings, often staged in ecclesiastical settings such as general councils, from where they migrated to secular polities from the thirteenth century onward. It has been stressed that such assemblies could not by any means be deemed constitutional, nor could they be considered representative in a modern sense.

Nevertheless, and this is a key figure of early medieval political assemblies, they foreshadowed future developments of representation, inasmuch as they acted as impersonations of political communities, equating ritually formalized bodies to the featuring of the entire community of given regnal or seigneurial entities. One landmark of this evolution was the admittance in such bodies, at a fairly early stage, of subjects beyond the traditional elites of lay and clerical aristocracies: knights of the shire in England, and local magistrates of cities, towns and boroughs in continental Europe, which, in some places, included guild craftsmen. Initial steps toward institutionalization followed, through the election of members, through the crafting of cautiously worded proxies, through the allocation of rights to seat, through the granting of special safeguards to such participants. All in all, though immensely variable in such a vast array of polities, these steps led to what might be the most significant contribution of medieval assembly practices to the modern parliamentarian culture, that of the symbolization of a community through a body empowered to effectively and legally bind each and every member of these communities to the decisions enacted in their name.

Such wordings as « the community of the realm » in England, assemblies « constituting and representing the three estates » in France or the « general of the land » in Catalonia, all in their own way, tend toward a more accurate expression of this new political abstraction, that of a people simultaneously created by and empowered through its’ own representation. This cultural accomplishment clearly epitomizes what John Austin defined as performativity, as the art of doing things with words by following general principles of time, place, authority and so on. More generally, it rests on a number of legal fictions typical of a widely, albeit at times diffuse and ecclesiastically mediated, tradition of Roman legal culture: the general principle according to which what concerns everybody must be approved by everybody, the general standards of elections and voting through the rising practice of strict majority rules, forcing, in turn, the recognition of the fundamental equation of the democratic mind: that the majority’s will perfectly enacts the general will.

A central feature of medieval parliaments – or pre-parliaments, as they should rather be called – is their dependence on regal or princely authority. As G.O. Sayles bluntly put it many years ago, the medieval English parliament is clearly the “king’s parliament” and, across continental Europe, assemblies hinge upon princely authorizations to be convened. Numerous attempts to gain rights of self-summoning, for instance, were met with unwavering opposition; and princely presence, in formal wear and dominant seating positions, was required in order to legitimate words pronounced and deeds enacted in such solemn venues. Unsurprisingly, the symbolic features of such gatherings prevailed in every aspect of their celebration…

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

Michel Hébert

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

This blog was originally posted on 29 September 2021, written by Professor Paulina Kewes, Professor Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves and History of Parliament director Dr Paul Seaward.

The authors of this blog may have a claim to the invention of the concept ‘early modern parliamentary culture’. A simple Google search produces only three results, and none of them defines the concept, let alone placing it centre stage. Which is odd, given that political assemblies – parliaments, diets, states, estates, Sejm, Cortes, Riksdag – were common in late medieval Europe and have long been a staple subject of national and international historiographies focusing on the big themes of power and its distribution. But while the cultures of the other major institutions which structured political life – notably monarchies and royal courts – have been the subject of intensive and transnational study, the culture of parliaments, the ideas, habits of mind and routine practice which shaped them, is usually passed by. We believe that by bringing the tools of intellectual, transnational and cultural history to the study of parliaments, we can begin to transform the way in which we think about early modern political institutions.

First, through intellectual history. Intellectual historians of the early modern era naturally think in terms of concepts – representation, republicanism, absolutism – rather than institutions. And while they have recognised the importance of understanding the context within which those concepts are wielded as moves in current political arguments, the dominant legal-constitutional approaches to parliamentary history and nation-specific scholarly traditions have, perhaps, tended to put off intellectual historians from thinking more closely about the institutional contexts in which they are wielded.

But political assemblies, especially when they play the role of representative institutions, are at the centre not only of politics, but also of how politics is conceived. They function in the social world and are shaped by language and discourse; and yet they also shape it. The rich and eclectic political language of early modern Europe, indebted to classical antiquity for many of its concepts, categories and comparisons, was deployed to describe or to criticise these existing institutions. What marked the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm in the eyes of Jean de Monluc, the leader of the French envoys promoting the election of Henry Valois to the Polish throne in 1573, was its uprightness and freedom. Addressing the Polish senators and noble delegates whose favour he sought, Monluc stressed that their large assemblies, to which so great a multitude of nobles were accustomed, had always been free from the corruption endemic to Roman assemblies. And upon his election, Henry was required to promise the nobility of Poland-Lithuania that he would convene a general Sejm at least once every two years for six weeks and to acknowledge that as king he had no right to impose new taxes without approval of the Sejm. Thereafter, an oath to uphold these provisions, called the Henrician Articles, was required of every king-elect. The Sejm, composed of the king, the senate and the house of delegates, thus became a constitutionally guaranteed institution, and was situated at the centre of the political life of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Discussion of politics was steeped in, and centred around, its existence.

Something similar might be said of England or of the Netherlands: there has been a lively debate about the existence in England of republicanism, or ‘monarchical republicanism’, and participatory politics in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This debate is placed remarkably rarely in the context of a vigorous, and intensifying, parliamentary culture. Yet, when thinking about how politics worked, people were thinking as much about interactions in political assemblies as they were of the limited circles of courtly counsel.

Second, through a transnational history of parliamentary cultures…

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

Paulina Kewes

Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves

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.

This week the Bodleian Library in Oxford launched an exhibition marking the quatercentenary of the foundation in 1621 of the city’s Botanic Garden. ‘Roots to Seeds’ explores the development of the physic garden, originally intended to supply medicinal herbs, into a resource for research into and teaching about all types of plants. As we face global issues of environmental change and food security, such activity seems every bit as vital as did the search for health cures in the seventeenth century.

The Garden’s founder, Henry Danvers, 1st earl of Danby (1573-1644), was, like several other noble contemporaries, a veteran of military campaigns in Ireland and continental Europe. During his travels he encountered (in person or by repute) the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, dating from 1597, and perhaps its equivalent in Montpellier, founded four years earlier. Inspired by this, he acquired five acres of meadowland on the banks of the river Cherwell, opposite Magdalen College, which had once been a Jewish cemetery. Eventually, he employed Brunswick-born former soldier Jacob Bobart to collect and propagate plants.

The University was very grateful to its benefactor, who gave them the gardens ‘for the advancement … of the faculty of medicine’. In 1632 a bust of the earl was prominently placed in its splendid gateway. Already in 1621 the University had given proof of its appreciation by choosing as one of its MPs Danby’s younger brother, Sir John Danvers (c.1585-1655). He was re-elected in 1625, 1626, 1628 and the spring of 1640.

Sir John shared his brother’s interests, being in contact with an international circle of horticulturalists and botanists. Indeed, like numerous other MPs and peers, he had a made a continental tour which took in the University of Padua, home to the world’s oldest botanical garden still in its original location (1545-2021). He acquired expensive tastes in Italianate architecture, replicated in his villa built at Chelsea in the 1620s, and had the sculptor Nicholas Stone work statues for its garden in complementary style. But his interests were much wider than that. As noted in a recent blog, he was stepfather to the poet George Herbert, and alongside that, associated with literati, scholars and inventors, in person at home and in correspondence abroad. According to John Aubrey, he knew everyone of note.

Yet Danvers was also an enigma. Handsome, charming, intelligent, sophisticated and devoted to his much older first wife Magdalen and her Herbert offspring, he was also known for litigiousness, acquisitiveness and indebtedness. Having been returned again to Parliament in 1645 for his own pocket borough of Malmesbury, he used his position to his own financial advantage. In time he emerged as an adherent of the war party in Parliament and a sympathiser with the New Model army. In January 1649 he astounded contemporaries by not only attending almost every session of the trial of Charles but also then signing his death warrant. The cultivated courtier became a regicide.

Delving into the career trajectory and the motivation of a complex politician like Danvers is the bread and butter of History of Parliament research. As with many other MPs and peers in the pre-modern era and beyond, this must be conducted in the absence of potentially illuminating private papers. In the nominations to committees and tellerships in divisions recorded in the Commons Journal and the signatures to orders issued by Parliament’s executive organs, there is the evidence of activity pointing to public priorities – solidarity with more radical elements in the House and army before 1649; commitment to the republican Rump Parliament thereafter. But in Danvers’s case this is often at startling variance with the periodic glimpses of his life outside Westminster and Whitehall. Here he could be subversive. That realisation is a reminder not to approach civil war politics simplistically.

Even before the regicide, and while among those drafting legislation to pursue and punish defeated royalists, some observers spotted that he was ‘a patron to distressed and cashiered cavaliers’, assisting them to make their peace with the new regime on the most benign terms [John Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 196]. A member of committees for the visitation of the University of Oxford and for the ordinance for excluding ‘malignant’ ministers and college fellows, in practice he used his influence to protect his old constituency and his old college (Brasenose), to thwart zealous Presbyterians intent on remoulding the University, and to support royalist clergy. In 1648, in defiance of the Visitors, the grateful Brasenose fellows secretly chose as their principal Thomas Yate, one of their number who had fled to the refuge of Danvers’ house in Chelsea. Danvers also sheltered the sequestered (dismissed) minister Thomas Fuller and encouraged him to preach at Chelsea and to publish his sermons; one depicted Danvers as the God-fearing biblical king Hezekiah [T. Fuller, Life out of Death (1655)]. He supervised the remoulding of young Robert Villiers (illegitimate son of Frances, Lady Purbeck and Sir Robert Howard) from Catholic resident of the Oxford royalist court to respectable Protestant and husband of his elder daughter. One of his final actions before his death in 1655 was to marry his younger daughter to Sir Henry Lee, stepson of the exiled royalist Henry Wilmot, earl of Rochester.

After Danvers’ death, and even more after the Restoration, Danvers’ reputation plummeted, much of his covert support for royalists, in Oxford and elsewhere, going unacknowledged. Compromising aspects of the past of Robert Danvers alias Villiers were unmasked in the 1659 Parliament. However, Thomas Fuller lived briefly to become a chaplain to Charles II, while Yate lived longer to dispense, with their grandmother the countess of Rochester, the electoral patronage inherited by Danvers’s infant granddaughters, and to run, with John Fell, the University Press which did so much to uphold the monarchist values of Restoration Oxford.

VL

Further reading:

John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark (1898)

Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (1979)

Margaret Willes, The Making of the English Gardener: Plants, Books and Inspiration 1560-1660 (2011)

A biography of Henry Danvers, earl of Danby, appears in The House of Lords 1604-29, ed. Andrew Thrush (2021).

Biographies or further biographies of Sir John Danvers, Robert Danvers alias Villiers, Sir Robert Howard, Sir Henry Lee and Henry Wilmot are being prepared by the Commons 1640-1660 project.

Uncertainty has long surrounded the eligibility of clergy to sit as MPs. Only in 2001 was legislation passed explicitly permitting all ministers of religion to stand for election. This repealed the Clergy Disqualification Act of 1801, which had excluded men ordained by bishops of the Church of England but left ambiguous the status of ministers in other Christian denominations.

Ambiguity pre-dated the 1801 bill by several centuries. Following the Reformation, Parliaments not infrequently discussed curbing the clergy’s involvement in temporal affairs, but, after an initial onslaught on their secular power and privileges under Henry VIII, failed to make further lasting changes. There was a ‘well-established convention’ that clergy did not sit in the Commons, but this was periodically forgotten. In 1553 Alexander Nowell, canon of Westminster, was elected at East Looe, while in 1621 voters in Morpeth, Northumberland, chose their rector, John Robson. After investigations by the privileges committee, both men were excluded from the Commons. The chief rationale was that these men had ‘a voice’ in the clergy’s assembly, Convocation, and were thus represented elsewhere.

While denied his place in Parliament, Robson continued in public life as a justice of the peace, member of the unpopular court of high commission and promoter of the controversial policies of Archbishop William Laud. These were exactly the kind of activities which prompted Parliament in the early 1640s to renew its assault on clerical power. Bishops were disabled from sitting in the Lords; later episcopal government of the church was abolished altogether. Convocation, which in summer 1640 had broken with tradition to meet outside Parliament time and produce Canons supposedly binding on the laity, was suppressed. In 1641 the Commons repeatedly considered bills to ‘disable the clergy to exercise any temporal or lay office’ and prevent them ‘intermeddling with secular affairs’. One result was the Clerical Disabilities Act (13 Feb. 1642, 17 Car. I c.27), which forbade persons in holy orders not only from sitting in Parliament but also from voting in elections.

Yet in succeeding years, ordained MPs may still be found, often with experience in local government. The law might be ignored if politically convenient or invoked if politically expedient. By the 1650s the issue had been muddied by the existence of clergy ordained by persons other than bishops and by the fact that numerous lay politicians, especially army officers, took to the pulpit occasionally. John St Nicholas seemingly received Presbyterian ordination some years before he was selected to represent Warwickshire in the Nominated Parliament of 1653. In this ‘assembly of the saints’, he rubbed shoulders with several lay and sectarian preachers, including Baptist pastor Samuel Hyland, MP for Southwark. John Sadler, MP for Cambridgeshire, had been episcopally ordained (perhaps only as a deacon), but there is no sign that this was mentioned in the Commons chamber, where he was vocal in defence of the payment of tithes.

In the 1654 Parliament clerical MPs had mixed fortunes. By that date Jenkin Lloyd, MP for Cardiganshire, was quite possibly already (as he was by 1658) rector of his native parish of Llandysul, but if so, no-one objected. On the other hand, Colonel Nathaniel Barton, who had sat without problem in 1653, was challenged by a defeated rival at his re-election for Derbyshire in 1654 on the grounds that he was in holy orders. His counter-argument, that the abolition of episcopal ordination made this irrelevant, was still under consideration when Parliament was dissolved. More mysterious was the case of the most high-profile clerical MP. John Owen, frequent preacher and adviser to Parliament, and former chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, was elected by Oxford University. Since he was a controversial vice-chancellor, it is surprising that his enemies there did not immediately invoke his ineligibility to overturn the election. But it is not certain he ever took his seat.

Among MPs in the next Parliament was Lewis Audley. Ordained deacon in 1641, he had later been an army officer under Sir Thomas Fairfax and participated as a radical agitator in the Putney debates. In 1656 – now a (still radical) Surrey gentleman – he encountered no visible obstacle to taking his seat, in the first session alone receiving 31 committee appointments and acting twice as a teller.

But by 1659 the situation was more unstable and MPs more alert for opportunities to remove political opponents from the Commons. John Sadler, rather implausibly, re-surfaced as MP for Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, and a leading republican. His election was challenged, but unsuccessfully, and not on the grounds of his ordination. Seeking election for Gatton, Lewis Audley was apparently defeated by Edward Bysshe, a conservative. Presenting himself at Westminster Hall to contest the result, he clashed with Bysshe and the other Gatton candidate, Thomas Turgis, and, it was alleged, called Bysshe ‘a rascal’ and Turgis ‘a stinking base fellow and a shit-breech’ [Journal of the House of Commons vii. 597]. This earned Audley a spell in the Tower for breach of privilege, but it was only later that anti-army elements in the House articulated the objection that, since he was still technically ‘in orders’, he had no right to sit at all. Major-general Thomas Kelsey’s defence that while Audley ‘might at first exercise as a minister’, he had ‘found himself unfit’, and ‘rather than to be unprofitable’ had decided to ‘forbear the calling’, seems plausible in this case and perhaps applicable to some others across the centuries [Burton’s Diary, iii. 40].

VL

Further reading:

Journal of the House of Commons, vols. ii, vii [via https://www.british-history.ac.uk/search/series/commons-jrnl]

Diaries of Thomas Burton, ed. J.T. Rutt (1828) [via https://www.british-history.ac.uk/search/series/burton-diaries]

Biographies or further biographies of Lewis Audley, Nathaniel Barton, Edward Bysshe, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Thomas Fairfax, Thomas Kelsey, Jenkin Lloyd, John Owen, John Sadler, John St Nicholas and Thomas Turgis are being prepared by the Commons 1640-1660 section.

Dismal: adjective (dizmәl): ‘of a character or aspect that causes gloom and depression; depressingly dark, sombre, gloomy, dreary, or cheerless.’ [OED]

“Dismal” was the nickname given to Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham. He was born on 2 July 1647, the eldest son of Heneage Finch, a lawyer and a future lord chancellor of England.  He was educated at Westminster School, the Inner Temple and Christ Church, Oxford and it was while a student that his serious demeanour first became apparent: in 1663, his father cautioned him not to lose his hard-earned reputation for ‘diligence and sobriety’. Finch was first returned to the House of Commons for the Wiltshire borough of Great Bedwyn in a by-election in 1673, which he served until 1679. He was appointed to the Admiralty Board in 1679 and sat in two of the Exclusion Parliaments for Lichfield in Staffordshire.

By the time he succeeded his father as earl of Nottingham on 18 Dec. 1682, his reputation as man with a serious outlook was entrenched: in 1685, Doctor John Fell, bishop of Oxford, called him ‘grave’, and after the Revolution, Queen Mary also referred to his ‘formal, grave look’. During the early years of William and Mary Nottingham served as secretary of state (1689-1693), and was particularly influential as an advisor in ecclesiastical matters. Moving into opposition, his interventions in the House of Lords were often long set-piece speeches, full of legal precedent and classical erudition. Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, described him as ‘a copious speaker. But too florid and tedious’, being full of ‘pompous and tragical declamations.’ The reign of Queen Anne saw Nottingham restored to his role and secretary of state, but he lost office again in 1704. In an age conspicuous by its hard-hitting journalism, Nottingham acquired the nickname “dismal”.

The MP and co-founder of The Tatler and Spectator, Richard Steele, may have popularized the nickname in The Tatler on 28 May 1709, when introducing the character ‘Don Diego Dismallo’, a formulation also used by John Arbuthnot in his John Bull pamphlets. When Nottingham changed sides in December 1711 and joined the Whigs in opposing a peace with France which did not include the acquisition of the Spanish crown by the Habsburg candidate, Thomas Wharton, earl of Wharton, was heard to say, at least as recorded by Jonathan Swift on 5 Dec. 1711, ‘it is “Dismal” (so they call him from his looks) will save England at last.’ It would seem from this that contemporaries took his nickname from a combination of his severe demeanour and the swarthy complexion which characterized the Finch family members (dubbed collectively the Funereal Finches).

Swift, indeed, used the nickname on several occasions when attacking Nottingham’s defection to the Whigs over the peace. An Excellent New Song, Being the Intended Speech of a Famous Orator against Peace, published on 6 Dec. 1711 began with the lines:

An orator dismal of Nottinghamshire

Who has forty years let out his conscience to hire.

The following year, Swift used it again in Toland’s Imitation to Dismal to Dine with the Calves-head Club, opening with the lines:

If dearest Dismal, you once can dine

Upon a single dish, and tavern wine.

Not that Nottingham took Swift’s criticisms lying down. In Parliament he denounced him as ‘a person who had wrote lewdly, nay even atheistically’, who might in the future ‘by having a false undeserved character given him, be promoted to a bishop.’

The controversy over the Peace with France might have ensured that Nottingham remained out of office and disliked by Queen Anne, but it cemented his favour with the Hanoverian Court. Upon the accession of George I, it was revealed on 1 Aug. 1714 that Nottingham was one of those named to govern the country as a lord justice, in the interval before the monarch’s arrival in his new realm. Once in England, the new king rewarded Nottingham with the office of Lord President of the Council, although as Charles Ford informed Swift shortly after the Queen’s death ‘Dismal begins to declare for his old friends and protests he was really afraid for the Protestant Succession which made him act in the manner he did.’ Nevertheless, Nottingham retained his post until his advocacy of clemency for some of the defeated Scottish Jacobite peers ensured his dismissal in 1716.

Thereafter, although he remained interested in politics, Nottingham retired to his house at Burley, Rutland, upon which he lavished much of the income he had gained from public office, and planned the marriages of his many daughters.  In the final few months of his life, he succeeded to the peerage held by the elder branch of his family (as 7th earl of Winchilsea), although he refused to give up signing his name with the title for which he had been known for so long. He died on 1 Jan. 1730.

SNH

Further reading: Henry Horwitz, Revolution Politicks: the career of Daniel Finch second earl of Nottingham 1647-1730 (Cambridge, 1968)

University degrees are the preoccupation of many students at this time of year. They are a passport to employment. It was ever thus, with the tenure of certain positions in the Church of England requiring a higher degree as a necessary qualification. This seemingly straightforward matter could become fraught with difficulty if political considerations intruded into the appointment process, or if the procedure by which the degree was acquired was open to question.

Thus, when Walter Offley was appointed dean of Chester in March 1718, he was worried that it might be blocked by the bishop, Francis Gastrell, as the statutes of the cathedral expressly required the incumbent to be either a Doctor or Bachelor of Divinity or a Doctor of Laws, while Offley was only a Master of Arts. His fears were unfounded and he seems to have exercised his official duties without question until his death three years later. Offley had powerful backers, having been suggested by the earl of Cholmondeley, one of Cheshire’s pre-eminent political figures. Also, his appointment perhaps generated little controversy because Bishop Gastrell was more determined to block the advancement of Samuel Peploe.

On 1 January 1718, Dr. Richard “Silver-tongued” Wroe, the Warden of the Collegiate Church in Manchester had died. The wardenship had long been in Gastrell’s sights, who wished to see it annexed to the bishopric in order to augment its meagre revenues.  Gastrell had been allowed to hold his canonry of Christ Church, Oxford, in commendam with his bishopric in order to supplement his income; his predecessor, the independently wealthy, Sir William Dawes, Bt., had kept his living of Bocking, in Essex, and previously to that, both Bishops Pearson and Stratford had also been the rectors of Wigan.

The Whigs had other ideas, however, securing the appointment of Samuel Peploe, vicar of Preston (since 1700), and a man who had distinguished himself in the pulpit against the Jacobite rebels when they occupied the town during the 1715 rebellion. However, for the Tory Gastrell, Peploe lacked the requisite theological qualifications for such an important post as the wardenship – he could not block Peploe’s appointment, but he could refuse to institute him in the post on the grounds that he did not possess an appropriate degree, claiming as his authority the statutes of the Manchester Church, which insisted upon a higher degree, than the BA possessed by Peploe. Peploe’s alma mater of Oxford, Tory dominated as it was, could expect to give Peploe trouble, if he applied for a higher degree.

In order to circumvent this requirement, Peploe sought to use his good standing with both the ministry and the Church hierarchy by asking the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, to use his power to grant such a “Lambeth” degree. Archbishop Wake duly obliged and in March 1718 Peploe was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Divinity.

Rather than give up the fight, Bishop Gastrell decided to contest the Archbishop’s right to grant such degrees, and when Peploe attended the Bishop in May 1718 in order to be instituted to the wardenship, Gastrell refused on the grounds that he did not possess a legal degree. Faced with this direct challenge to his authority, and what he considered to be the rights of his archiepiscopal office, Archbishop Wake determined to back Peploe and force his institution.

Legal proceedings were begun, with Bishop Gastrell using the full complexity of the law to retard Peploe’s progress. In June 1720 he challenged the legality of a summons to appear at Lancaster Assizes on the grounds of lack of the requisite notice.  In March 1721 Gastrell went into print, publishing The Bishop of Chester’s Case, with relation to the Wardenship of Manchester, in which it is shewn that no other Degrees but such as are taken in the University, can be deemed Legal Qualifications for Ecclesiastical Preferments in England. When Peploe obtained a verdict in 1722, Gastrell appealed, and at the time of his death on 14 November 1725, the Bishop was still intent upon a further appeal.

Peploe was instituted warden [dean] of Manchester on 26 February 1726 by the Archbishop of York, Lancelot Blackburne, as the bishopric of Chester was vacant. The Whigs then decided to reinforce their victory by suggesting that the new bishop should be none other than Peploe himself, which was seen by Tories, like Thomas Hearne as ‘to insult the ashes of Dr. Gastrell’. Peploe was consecrated as bishop in April 1726 and retained the wardenship of Manchester, thereby (ironically) bringing to fruition Gastrell’s plan to unite the two offices.

SNH