The seminar takes place on 3 February 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Political discourse is rooted in speech, and students of modern parliamentary politics have a wealth of material to draw on – Hansard, TV broadcasts of debates, newspaper reports, even WhatsApp messages. The picture for the House of Lords in the reign of Elizabeth I is very different. The principal source, the Lords’ Journal, was conceived by the Tudor clerks quite narrowly as a record of business transacted and decisions reached, but with a veil drawn over the accompanying discussions, which were, after all, meant to be confidential.

A typical page in the manuscript Journal has the date of the current sitting at the top, the date of the next sitting at the bottom, and three columns down the rest of the page; of these, two are used for recording which bishops and lay peers attended that day, while the third column, on the right-hand side, is reserved for any actual proceedings. (Not until 1597 was it thought necessary to allocate more than one page per sitting, to allow for a more detailed account of events.)

The final column might list bills read, and the verdicts agreed on them, reports of conferences with the Commons or audiences with the queen, or such mundane matters as apologies for absence. Or it might not – for some sittings no business is listed at all, creating the impression that the peers were twiddling their thumbs or perhaps nodding off to sleep.

By comparison, the Commons’ Journal, augmented in the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign by several private diaries, is full of summarised speeches, disputes and other incidents which give a good sense of the moods, initiatives and objectives of the lower House. Unsurprisingly, historians have tended to rely on these sources to reconstruct the political narrative of the Elizabethan parliaments, in the process exaggerating the importance of the Commons at the expense of the poorly reported Lords.

In recent decades some effort has been made to correct this imbalance, utilising a variety of different approaches. During the 1980s and 1990s the Lords’ management of legislation was examined in great detail by Sir Geoffrey Elton and David Dean. In conjunction with their research, T. E. Hartley published three volumes of material supplementing the Lords’ and Commons’ Journals, including a few actual speeches made by bishops or lay peers. Around the same time, a ground-breaking study of the 1559 Parliament by Norman Jones demonstrated how manoeuvrings in the Lords could be illuminated through reports from outside Parliament, close reading of the chronology of events at Westminster, and careful examination of the wider political context.

What was missing from these endeavours was a detailed understanding of the individuals who sat in the upper House, a gap in our knowledge which is now close to being filled by the History of Parliament’s project on the Elizabethan Lords. Since 2020 nearly 250 new biographies have been researched and written, reconstructing the lives of the bishops and lay peers who participated in Elizabeth’s 13 parliamentary sessions, identifying their political networks and personal objectives at Westminster, and pondering the place that Parliament occupied in their wider careers.

In following these men’s careers in the Lords over several decades, it has become possible to develop a sense of what ‘normal’ business may have involved and the routine patterns by which things got done. That in turn allows us to observe anomalies in those patterns, and to consider the political forces which operated in those grey areas for which we have only patchy documentation.

However, it is still enormously helpful to pursue these questions in a scenario where we have enough contextual data to speculate with some confidence on how individual peers may have behaved. Accordingly, the focus of this seminar is the Parliament of 1584-5, and specifically the struggles over religion that gave this session much of its flavour.

A quarter of a century after the Elizabethan church settlement of 1559, English Protestantism had reached another crossroads. The first generation of Elizabethan bishops, many notable for their evangelical fervour, were mostly dead, their hopes of continuing reformation disappointed. Their successors, headed by the recently appointed archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, were mostly content to defend what was now the ecclesiastical status quo, despite the poor quality of many clergy, and numerous abuses in appointments and funding.

Indeed, upon becoming archbishop, Whitgift had attempted to clamp down on Protestant clergy who refused to conform to those aspects of the Elizabethan settlement that seemed to hark back to Catholicism. In the process, Whitgift incurred the wrath of Elizabeth’s two most powerful advisers, Lord Burghley and the earl of Leicester, who believed that the primate’s tactics would weaken the Protestant cause at a time when English Catholic numbers were rising again and the threat of war with Catholic Spain was also increasing. Despite enjoying the continuing support of the queen, Whitgift was forced to scrap his plans. Even so, when Parliament met in November 1584, the archbishop came under attack again, this time from the fervently Protestant House of Commons, which petitioned for major reform of the Church, and introduced numerous bills to the same end.

But what of the Lords? When this Parliament opened, only 11 out of a possible 25 other bishops were present to offer the primate their support. On the face of things Whitgift was isolated and on the back foot. He continued to face hostility from Burghley and Leicester, and three of the Commons’ provocative bills were passed by the peers, before being vetoed by Elizabeth.

The bare facts look bad – but they are not the full picture. By exploring the group dynamics of the bishops in 1584-5, and drawing on contextual documentation both from the Commons and from outside Parliament, this paper will argue that Whitgift stood his ground, gathering his closest allies around him, and in the process consolidating the Church hierarchy’s revised priorities. Moreover, although Burghley and Leicester were broadly sympathetic to the demands of the Commons, they also knew that they could not afford to oppose the queen’s own views on the Church too strongly, and were therefore obliged to moderate their attacks on the archbishop. That sense of royal protection for the bishops in turn sheds light on their status within the Lords during Elizabeth’s reign.

The seminar takes place on 3 February 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

PMH

Further reading:

G.R. Elton, The Parliament of England 1559-1581 (1986)

David Dean, Law-making and Society in Late Elizabethan England (1996)

T. E. Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I (3 volumes, 1981-95)

Norman L. Jones, Faith by Statute (1982)

On 10 February 1793, 21 Members of the Commons gathered at 106 Pall Mall. Over 50 had been expected only for the invitations to be sent out late. The attendees were mainly conservative Foxite Whigs, and all were horrified by events in France and the stance of Charles James Fox. They resolved to secede and form a ‘Third Party’ while providing qualified support for William Pitt’s Ministry. This secession, which augured the disintegration of the Foxites and the formation of the Pitt-Portland coalition, was pursued with considerable hesitation.

The anguished path towards secession was illustrated well in the man reluctantly acclaimed as leader, William Windham (1750-1810).

The scion of an old Norfolk family, Windham began his political career in 1778 with a well-received address opposing the American War. After a brief, difficult tenure as Chief Secretary for Ireland, he was returned as one of the Members for Norwich in 1784. Windham slowly grew into his role as a parliamentarian, occasionally crippled by anxiety and hypochondria, and first achieving note as one of the managers of the impeachment of Warren Hastings. Initially moderately liberal, Windham became increasingly conservative by the early 1790s, influenced by his close friend Edmund Burke.

Like many in the political nation, Windham was initially sympathetic to the French Revolution, visiting Paris in August 1789 and writing approvingly of the situation to Burke. Fox’s nephew, Lord Holland, thought him a ‘warm admirer’ of the Revolution. Windham was among a group of British visitors to Paris in August 1791 observing the formal ratification of the new Constitution, where the treatment of Louis XVI horrified him. Windham had come to France, as Lord Auckland recorded, ‘a great admirer’ of the Revolution and returned increasingly alarmed.

The schism of his close friends Burke and Fox over the Revolution by May 1791 anguished Windham profoundly. Like other conservative Foxites, he agreed privately with Burke, but was deeply reluctant to split from Fox and the Whigs’ de jure leader, the respected but indecisive conservative 3rd duke of Portland. By 1792 Windham was increasingly prominent as an anti-Jacobin, fostering social links with French royalist émigrés and supporting anti-sedition measures at home. Still, he was resistant to give way to secession, wishing that the Foxites ‘should act as cordially together as if no such difference had ever occurred’.

The increasing violence of the Revolution by 1792 and Fox’s continued sympathies eventually convinced conservative Foxites they could not sway Fox towards their position. With Portland more interested in avoiding a split, conservative Foxites looked increasingly to Windham for political direction. Fellow conservative Sir Gilbert Elliot opined in December that with Portland’s ‘indecision’, conservatives looked to Windham, who ‘stands higher at present, both in the House and in the country, than any man I remember’.

The execution of Louis XVI and the outbreak of war by early February 1793 finally provoked the secession with the aforementioned meeting of 10 February followed by another a week later. ‘The meeting has a good effect’, wrote Elliot:

It must show the Duke of Portland that we are determined to take our own line even without him; and it has pledged Windham more distinctly than he was before to a separation from Fox.

Despite this the ‘Third Party’ hoped to convince Portland to split from Fox and take ‘his natural place as our leader’. The seceders were thus forced into a curious situation of defecting from a faction whose nominal leader they still pined for. Their resolve was, however, demonstrated further with the secession of 45 men from the Whig Club in late February 1793.

Windham initially hoped for around 86 defectors, yet the number settled ultimately to 38, of which at most 28 were ex-Foxites. Of the 45 Whig Club seceders, 18 were MPs and only ten joined the Third Party. The party’s membership illustrates the Opposition’s ideological fluidity before the polarization of the 1790s. It included the ‘High Tory’ Foxite Sir Francis Basset; Lord North’s son Frederick North; John Anstruther, whose political trajectory mirrored Windham’s, and Thomas Stanley who abandoned his reformist-leaning sentiments after witnessing the storming of the Tuileries Palace. Crucially, however, prominent conservative Whigs such as Earl Fitzwilliam, Earl Spencer, Tom Grenville, and Portland opposed the move, considering Whig unity paramount.

Described by Elliot as ‘dilatory and undecided’, after this period of political activity Windham was initially a reluctant leader expressing to John Coxe Hippisley how ‘much against my will I have been obliged to act as a sort of head of a party’ nicknamed ‘as the sect of Alarmists’. Windham believed that if Portland continued to dither, they would ‘dwindle away and be dispersed in various channels till the very name and idea of the party will be lost’. Windham was finally roused into political action with his spirited opposition to Charles Grey’s motion on parliamentary reform in May 1793, after which he focused on urging Portland’s secession from Fox and preventing Pitt from poaching Alarmist MPs.

Under Windham the Alarmists pursued an independent line, providing outside support for Pitt while insisting that they would only rally to him as a collective and not individually. The latter, Pitt’s preferred strategy, had already seen Lord Loughborough (the future earl of Rosslyn) defect to become Lord Chancellor in January 1793, followed by other conservative Whigs such as Gilbert Elliot and future Member, Sylvester Douglas. Over summer 1793 Pitt attempted to coax Windham over to the Ministry with offers of high office, which Windham refused despite considerable pressure from Burke and others.

Windham persisted with his independent stance, stressing in August 1793 that a coalition was only possible ‘if others could surmount those objections’. September saw Windham appeal to Portland to lead his followers from Fox, feigning a wish to be ‘a mere member of Parliament’. He stressed that a Whig reunion was impossible and that the only options were to ‘remain a third body’ or join en masse with Pitt. Portland continued awkwardly to affirm his support for the war and opposition to Pitt.

Conservative horror was heightened further by the execution of Marie Antoinette in October and the fall of Toulon in December. Realizing the inefficacy of his stance, Portland finally led an exodus of 51 MPs. The Portlandites adopted the independent line at a meeting attended by Windham and Burke and joined the Third Party, now under Portland’s leadership. ‘Being able to form an independent Party under so very respectable a head’, Frederick North expressed to Windham, was ‘the most desirable political Event’. Despite Portland assuming leadership, though, Windham remained a significant presence.

With around 77 former Whigs among their ranks, the seceders now outnumbered the remaining 66 Foxites. What had begun with a mere 21 MPs in Pall Mall had grown to include over half of all Foxite Whigs. Despite some individual defections to Pitt, Windham’s line of ‘no longer answer[ing] separate’ remained. After negotiations, a Pitt-Portland coalition was agreed with the new ministers receiving their seals on 11 July, Windham among them as Secretary at War.

While short-lived, the party ultimately succeeded in its central objectives. An independent, hawkish, conservative Whig faction was later seen in the form of the Grenvillite ‘New Opposition’, which opposed Henry Addington’s Ministry from 1801. That stridently anti-peace faction was led in the Commons, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the resident of 106 Pall Mall.

JO

Further Reading

Herbert Butterfield, ‘Charles James Fox and the Whig Opposition in 1792’, The Cambridge Historical Journal, ix (1949), 293-330.
Leslie Mitchell, Charles James Fox and the disintegration of the Whig Party, 1782-1794 (1971).
Frank O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (1967).
Max Skjönsberg, The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2021).
David Wilkinson, ‘The Pitt–Portland Coalition of 1794 and the Origins of the ‘Tory’ Party’, History, lxxxiii (1998), 249-64.

All long-lived institutions have their antecedents, and the antecedents of Parliament (or, perhaps more accurately put, the origins of the House of Lords) are to be found in the Anglo-Saxon witan which brought the leading men of the realm periodically together with the King for ceremonial, legislative and deliberative purposes.  In its earliest history ‘Parliament’, first used as a technical term in 1236, was a gathering of the same type, an assembly of prominent men, summoned at the will of the King once or twice a year, to deal with matters of state and law. It remained largely in that form for much of the thirteenth century. Occasionally, however, these assemblies were afforced by the summons of a wider grouping.  At first these extended assemblies – the first known dates from 1212 – served as a means by which the King could communicate with men who, although below the ranks of his leading tenants, were of standing in their localities and well-informed about local grievances. 

Had the Crown been able to subsist financially upon its landed and feudal revenues alone, these representatives of the localities, the precursors of the Commons, might have remained, from its point of view, no more than conduits of information and recipients of instruction. The decline in the real value of its traditional revenues and the financial demands of war, however, transformed these local representatives from an occasional to a defining component of Parliament.  Above all else, this was because the levy of taxation came to be understood as depending on their consent. The theoretical principle of consent had been stated in Magna Carta, but that consent was conceived, on the feudal principle, as residing exclusively in the King’s leading subjects, his tenants-in-chief.  But as the thirteenth century progressed this principle gave way to another, namely that consent must also be sought from the lesser tenants as the representatives of the localities.  There was both a theoretical and practical reason for this: on the one hand, there was the influence of the Roman law doctrine, ‘what touches all shall be approved  by all’, cited in the writs that summoned the 1295 Parliament; and, on the other, there was the practical consideration that the efficient collection of a levy on moveable property, the form that tax assumed, depended on some mechanism of local consent.  Hence, from the 1260s, no general tax was levied without the consent of the representatives of local communities specifically summoned for the purpose of giving their consent, and only Parliaments in which the Crown sought no grant of taxation met without these representatives.  The Crown’s increasing need for money meant it was a short step to the Commons becoming an indispensable part of Parliament.  After 1325 no Parliament met without their presence.

None the less, although this right of consent gave the Commons their place in Parliament, it did not give them any meaningful part in the formulation of royal policy.  In so far as that policy was determined in Parliament, it was determined between the King and the Lords, who came to Parliament not through local election, as was the case with the Commons, but by personal writ of summons from the monarch.  Further, the Commons’ right of consent was as much an obligation as it was a privilege.  Since subjects had a duty to support the Crown in the defence of the realm, the Commons had few grounds, even had they sought them, on which to deny royal requests for taxation.  What did, however, remain to them was some scope for negotiation.  To make demands on his subjects’ goods, the Crown had to demonstrate an exceptional need, a need generally arising from the costs of war; and, in making a judgment on the level of taxation warranted by this need, the Commons were drawn into a dialogue with the Crown over matters of policy, at least in so far as those matters  concerned expenditure.  Hence the Crown had to measure its demands to avoid exciting criticism of its government.  The consequences of its failure to do so are exemplified most clearly by the ‘Good Parliament’ of 1376, when the Commons, in seeking to legitimate the extreme step of refusing to grant direct taxation, alleged misgovernance, accusing certain courtiers of misappropriating royal revenue.

Aside from the granting of taxation, the other principal function of the medieval Parliament was legislative.  Even before the early Parliaments lawmaking was theoretically established as consensual between King and subjects, yet, in the reign of Edward I, legislation arose solely out of royal initiative and was drafted by royal counsellors and judges.  As the medieval period progressed, however, the assent of Parliament, first of the Lords and then of the Commons, became an indispensable part of the legislative process.  Here, however, the question was not, as in the case of taxation, simply one of parliamentary assent, it was also one of initiative.  New law came to be initiated not only by the Crown but also by the Commons.  In the early fourteenth century, in what was a natural elaboration of Parliament’s role as the forum for the presentation of petitions of individuals and communities, the Commons began to present petitions in their own name, seeking remedies, not to individual wrongs, but to general administrative, economic and legal problems.  The King’s answers to these petitions became the basis of new law. Even so, it should not be concluded from this important procedural change that Crown conceded its legislative freedom.  Not only could it deny the Commons’ petitions, but, by the simple means of introducing its own bills among the common petitions, it could steer its own legislative program through the Commons.  

By the end of the medieval period, Parliament was, in both structure and function, the same assembly that opposed the Stuarts in the seventeenth century. It bargained with the Crown over taxation, formulated local grievances in such a way as to invite legislative remedy, and, on occasion, most notably in 1376, opposed the royal will. Yet this is not to say that Parliament had yet achieved, or even sought, an independent part in the polity.  The power of the Lords resided not in their place in Parliament, but in the landed wealth of the great nobility.  For the Commons, a favourable answer to their petitions remained a matter of royal grace, yet they were under an obligation to grant taxation as necessity demanded (a necessity largely interpreted by the Crown); and their right of assent to new law was a theoretical rather than a practical restraint on the King’s freedom of legislative action.  Indeed, Parliament amplified, rather than curtailed, royal power, at least when that power was exercised competently.  Not only were the Crown’s financial resources expanded by the system of parliamentary taxation, so too was its legislative force and reach extended by the Commons’ endorsement of the initiatives of a strong monarch, a fact strikingly demonstrated by the legislative break with Rome during the Reformation Parliament of 1529-36. 

S.J.P.

This is a revised version of the article ‘Parliament and politics before 1509’ by Dr Simon Payling, originally posted on historyofparliamentonline.org.

Bloomsbury Square, and its immediate surroundings, have long been associated with prominent political figures. In 1706, several peers had residences in the square, notably the (2nd) duke of Bedford and the earls of Northampton and Chesterfield. Close neighbours residing in Great Russell Street, were the duke of Montagu (whose house later became the British Museum), the earl of Thanet and Lord Haversham, and John Hough, at that point bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. By 1727, things had changed somewhat. Montagu was still living in Great Russell Street, now joined by William Baker, bishop of Bangor, shortly after translated to Norwich. But Northampton’s heir had left Bloomsbury Square for Grosvenor Street, though another house had been taken by the earl of Nottingham. [Jones, ‘London Topography’]

Jump forward half a century, and Bloomsbury Square remained a place closely associated with the aristocracy. It was still home to the (5th) duke of Bedford and he had been joined by one of the foremost legal minds of the time: William Murray, earl of Mansfield, who had moved there from Lincoln’s Inn Fields a few years previously. According to Mansfield’s biographer, the square ‘conveyed a delightful atmosphere of leisure and repose, where often the only sounds came from the twittering and chirping of birds’. [Poser, 167] In June 1780, this ‘delightful’ haven was to be turned on its head and Mansfield’s residence was to become one of the principal targets of the Gordon rioters, who flocked to the square on the night of 6/7 June determined to torch the place.

Much has been written about the Gordon riots, which brought London (and other cities) to a virtual standstill for several days in June 1780. The immediate cause was the Protestant Association’s petition calling for the repeal of the 1778 Catholic Relief Act. Having gathered in St George’s Fields on Friday 2 June, members of the Association, led by their president, Lord George Gordon, processed to Parliament to present the petition. While things had begun calmly enough, in the course of the day more unruly elements flocked to Westminster and MPs and members of the Lords found themselves besieged within their chambers.

Thus, what began as a relatively focused cause was soon taken over by general lawlessness, and as Bob Shoemaker and Tim Hitchcock have argued persuasively, many of those involved in the later stages of the rioting had as their target the criminal justice system itself and were far less driven by concerns about religion. [Hitchcock and Shoemaker, 346, 349-50] Consequently, several prisons were attacked and the inmates released; lawyers in and around the inns of court went in fear of assault (or worse) and prominent judges, like Mansfield, became very obvious targets. The fact that Mansfield had also been vocal in his support of the Catholic Relief Act made him doubly susceptible.

Mansfield had been singled out for special treatment even on that first day. Arriving at Westminster, his carriage had been attacked and he had had to be rescued by the archbishop of York. After the day’s proceedings were adjourned, Mansfield was forced to make his way out of the Lords via a back door and travelled home by river as his coach had since been torn to pieces.

Over the next few days rioting gripped London. By Tuesday 6 June Mansfield’s nephew (and eventual heir) David, 7th Viscount Stormont, felt the need to advise the officer commanding the guards in London that he had received ‘reliable information’ that several houses were in need of additional protection, among them those of the marquess of Rockingham and Mansfield. [TNA, SP37/20/54, ff. 76-6] Despite Stormont’s efforts, Mansfield himself decided that too visible a military presence might only infuriate the crowd, so he requested the guards remain at a distance. It was a fatal mistake. When a band of rioters arrived outside Mansfield’s house on the night of 6/7 June, they found it undefended and set to work pulling down the railings before breaking into the house itself. There, they gave vent to all their destructive power, burning his library and gutting the building. Mansfield and Lady Mansfield only narrowly escaped, by using the back door onto Southampton Row.

Mansfield’s losses were significant. Consigned to the flames were his own legal notebooks, along with his library and pretty much the entire contents of the house. Efforts to save the building were stymied because when firefighters arrived on the scene, they refused to get involved until the soldiers (who had by then made themselves known) withdrew, in case they got caught in the middle of fighting between the crowd and the troops.

According to one paper, Mansfield’s losses amounted to £30,000, the library constituting a third of the total. [Morning Chronicle, 9 June 1780] Another paper attributed the destruction to Mansfield’s own ‘ill-judged lenity’, after he had ‘humanely requested [the troops] not fire upon the deluded wretches’. The same paper detailed some of the irreplaceable items that had been destroyed, including a portrait of Viscount Bolingbroke by the poet, Alexander Pope, ‘which, though not having the merit of a professed artist, was always esteemed a great likeness’. [Whitehall Evening Post, 10-13 June 1780]

The tragedy of the Gordon Riots and its impact on Bloomsbury Square did not end on 7 June. Precisely how many people were killed and injured in the rioting remains unclear, but among the rioters well over 300 were killed. Some troops were also among the dead, one of them a cavalrymen posted in Bloomsbury Square, who came off his horse and was finished off by the crowd. [Whitehall Evening Post, 8-10 June 1780] Retribution for some of those involved came quickly and within days there were numerous arrests. By the end of the month the first trials were underway.

As was so often the case, it was the very recognizable among the most marginalized who ended up being handed in. One such was John Gray, whose case has been written about extensively. A native of Taunton in Somerset, who had made his way to London, Gray was one of many on the fringes of society, eking out a living by feeding horses for hackney carriages. [London Courant, 24 July 1780] Although described as ‘a stout made man’, he appears to have had a clubfoot and to have needed a crutch to walk. He seems also to have had mental health issues. He stood out in the crowd taking part in pulling apart one of Mansfield’s outhouses and a few days later was arrested after being spotted trying to pick someone’s pocket.

Gray was convicted at the Old Bailey (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/) and, in spite of a petition for mercy subscribed by several prominent Taunton residents, one of them the chaplain to Lord Bathurst, [TNA, [SP37/21/132, f. 250] and other recommendations that his case was one worthy of the king’s consideration, [TNA, SP37/21/91] the appeals for clemency were rejected. On Saturday 22 July, he was conveyed back to Bloomsbury Square with two others and hanged on a gallows positioned so that their last view was the remains of Mansfield’s burnt-out former residence.

RDEE

Further reading:
Clyve Jones, ‘The London Topography of the Parliamentary Elite: addresses for peers and bishops for 1706 and 1727-8’, London Topographical Record, xxix (2006)
Norman S. Poser, Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (2013)
Tim Hitchcock and Bob Shoemaker, London Lives: poverty, crime and the making of a modern city 1690-1800 (2015)

For a young man seeking political independence and prestige but having little by way of financial stability to obtain it otherwise, Pitt’s strategy for targeting Cambridge made sense. But even with his failure at the 1780 election and his rapid turn of fortune, Pitt held onto his conviction. Once the opportunity arose in March 1784, Pitt opted to contest the University again, against the backdrop of his dramatic ascent to power. Standing alongside him was George FitzRoy, Earl of Euston, son of the University’s Chancellor. Opposing them were the two sitting members, James Mansfield and John Townshend, who represented Foxite interests.

While Pitt’s success in the University election seems inevitable in retrospect, this was not the case at the time of the dissolution of Parliament. From the outset, the contest was projected to be very fierce. Writing to his friend the Duke of Rutland, Pitt admitted that Cambridge was ‘unexplored ground’, though he was ‘sanguine in [his] expectations’. Owing to its position as a respectable and pious institution, the electoral culture and processes of the University significantly differed from the disorder often associated with Hanoverian elections. Hustings, dinners, and speeches were prohibited and its erudite electorate was expected to make independent choices which benefitted the nation at large.

Nevertheless, voters still expected to be courted, and with the official canvassing period being only nine days, all candidates had much to keep them occupied. Written correspondence was a key part of the canvassing process. Generic letters from candidates ‘taking the liberty’ to request ‘the honour’ of the recipient’s support were sent to all voters. But more important were the ‘personal application’ letters, used to solicit votes directly. James Talbot, Regius Professor of Hebrew, advised a prospective candidate for the 1700 election that electoral success at the University ‘must be gained by personal application, and the solicitation of private friends, letters from patrons, relations’. [Cook, Representative History, 228-9]. This was an established practice, and Pitt and his agents managed an extensive operation of sending these applications throughout the short and intense canvassing period. Some were sent directly to voters, but they often went to a ‘middle-man’ (sometimes middle-woman) – a friend of Pitt and/or the administration who could make applications to the voter(s) on their behalf.

The relationship between the ‘middle-man’ and the voter varied from patronage and friendship to kinship. In a letter between Pitt’s friends and election agents, John Charles Villiers and Thomas Pretyman-Tomline, an extensive list of ‘connexions’ which ‘sh[oul]d be immediately attended to’ was attached. Unfortunately, the list was quite rudimentary, consisting mostly of pairs of names connected by a single line, for instance: ‘[Thomas] Lund [of St John’s] – L[ad]y Irwine’. A few items contained clues regarding particular connections, such as: ‘L[or]d Aylesford c[oul]d perhaps get us even a single vote from Rev[erend] Mr Barnard of St John’s to which he has just been given a living’. [TNA, PRO 30/8/315]

Pitt and his agents had at their disposal an expansive network of contacts which covered a broad geographical, ideological and institutional range, from the reformers of the Association Movement in Yorkshire to the friends of the King such as William Hayward Roberts, Provost of Eton. The applications were not always successful, but not for reasons one might expect. Mistakes, such as targeting disenfranchised voters, were extremely common. Pre-existing personal obligations or attachments to other candidates also prevented voters from committing to Pitt. Carrington Garrick of St John’s, for example, could not vote for Pitt, having already made promises to Mansfield and Townshend, but was happy for Pitt to instruct him on the vote he also possessed for the Cambridgeshire county election [TNA, PRO 30/8/315]. Rather than political partisanship, it was often the influences and obligations associated with personal relationships which swayed the voters towards particular candidates.

Besides the letters, candidates themselves were expected to be involved on the ground, and their every move was reported in the national press. Letters exchanged between Pitt’s agents emphasised the importance of Pitt being physically present at the University, as he was expected to pay in-person visits to certain key University figures, such as the heads of the colleges. Richard Watson, bishop of Llandaff and Regius Professor of Divinity, recalled in his memoir that during Pitt’s visit, he set out some policy expectations for the Prime Minister-to-be. [Watson, Anecdotes, 211-15]

Throughout the nine days, the contest remained unpredictable. Townshend was projected to top the poll, but Pitt soon took the lead. Mansfield, whose odds were poor from the beginning, reportedly planned to oust Pitt by transferring his votes to Townshend on election day. Euston’s prospects were uncertain, but his affiliation with Pitt would save him from his father’s poor reputation. By election day, set for 3 April, most of the English boroughs had already made their returns, making the University one of the last constituencies to go to the polls before the county elections began.

The University’s election took place, as it always had, in the Senate House, accompanied by the ‘notable Bustle’ from its learned population. The University enjoyed relative control over its electoral process: unlike other constituencies in this period, votes were cast in ‘secret’. Each voter would inscribe his own and his chosen candidates’ names onto a ballot paper (in Latin) before depositing it at a designated table. Each ballot was then read aloud, and subsequently recorded in the poll book. Voting took place throughout the day, with an adjournment in the early afternoon, at which point the number of votes was read out. Once voting resumed, it lasted until the end of the day, and the final count was announced. [Ceremonies Observed in the Senate-House, Wall ed. Gunning, 230-33].

According to the accounts of William Ewin and John Robinson, Pitt was ‘secure’ quite early on in the count, at two o’clock in the afternoon, and there were ‘sanguine hopes’ for Euston. For Ewin, however, Euston’s success was little more than the results of ‘the little Electioneering Tricks of making over Votes & people breaking their words & promises’. Never one to shy away from gossip, Ewin suggested that this was the result of the ‘art’ and machinations used by ‘a Certain great man’. It is unclear whom this comment targeted – Pitt certainly seemed a prime suspect, but it is not unreasonable to assume that it could be the King, who was certainly pleased with the Ministry’s sweeping victory at the University.

Pitt would faithfully represent the University until his death in 1806. Though history has been kind to him, it has been less kind to the University as a political institution. Much like other features of Hanoverian politics, it was lambasted by the Victorians as corrupt and anachronistic. By examining some of its unique characteristics, however, we can begin to recalibrate our understanding not only of Pitt or Cambridge but also of the inner workings of political life in this period.

NSJ

Further Reading
John Cannon, The Fox-North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution, 1782-4 (Cambridge, 1969)

David Cook, The Representative History of the County, Town, and University of Cambridge, 1689-1832 (University of London PhD thesis, 1935)

John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989)

Joseph S. Meisel, Knowledge and Power: The Parliamentary Representation of Universities in Britain and the Empire (Parliamentary History: Texts & Studies, 4, 2011)

Peter Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1997)

‘William Pitt and Pembroke’, Pembroke Annual Gazette (Pembroke College Society, Vol. 8, 1934), held in Pembroke College Archive, Cambridge

Burns first published his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in Kilmarnock in 1786 and, encouraged by his local supporters, arrived in Edinburgh in January 1787 to arrange a second edition. He quickly found a patron there in James Cunningham, 14th earl of Glencairn making an introduction through common Ayrshire connections. Both the earl and his mother, the dowager countess, strove to ensure that his poems would appear in a new edition from an Edinburgh publisher, with Glencairn putting Burns in touch with bookseller William Creech, Glencairn’s tutor during his Grand Tour, who agreed to produce it.

Glencairn encouraged Burns to dedicate the new volume to the Royal Caledonian Hunt, an elite social and sporting club. At a meeting on 10 January Glencairn persuaded the members of the Hunt to pledge to purchase 100 copies, bringing Burns £25 in advance. Glencairn also sent blank subscription forms to James Graham, marquess of Graham, in order to have them filled up by the ‘first Scottish names about Court’. He also enlisted William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, 3rd duke of Portland, to solicit subscriptions from other peers in London [Letters, i. 73]. Few English subscribers signed up, apart from the duchess of Devonshire and countess of Derby. When Burns’s revised Poems appeared in April, it was dedicated to the Caledonian Hunt, which headed the list of subscribers. Between them Glencairn and his mother pledged to purchase 24 copies, the countess dowager alone subscribing for sixteen.

Glencairn had succeeded to his peerage in 1775, and three years later was commissioned a captain of the Western Fencible Regiment, a temporary outfit raised to defend the Scottish west coast. Like many Scots, he was angered by Westminster’s unwillingness to trust the Scots with a more established domestic military force, on the lines of the English militia.

Elected one of the 16 representative peers in 1780, Glencairn quickly joined the patriot movement for an independent Scottish militia. In spring 1782 he witnessed the unsuccessful attempts of Lord Graham to promote a Scottish militia bill in the Commons. Glencairn took up the cause himself and was its main driver from the summer. He was in Westminster in June 1783 when Graham once again brought the Scots’ desire for their own militia before the Commons. However, the session was prorogued a month later without the militia bill having been introduced.

Glencairn supported the Fox-North coalition and voted for its East India Company bill in December 1783. He failed to be included on the Court’s list of representative peers for the general election, and was heavily defeated when standing as an independent. For the rest of his life he opposed William Pitt and his Scottish manager Henry Dundas. On 6 Dec. 1785 he was named to an Ayrshire committee tasked with countering Dundas’s planned diminution of the number of judges on the Court of Session. [Public Advertiser, 26 Dec. 1785] He was also a member of the Independent Friends, a society of Scottish Whigs. As he had done in 1784, Glencairn threw his interest behind the Opposition candidate in Ayrshire elections in 1789 and 1790, but without success.

Thus, when Glencairn met Burns in late 1786 he already had extensive credentials as a Scottish patriot and quickly became an enthusiastic supporter of Burns’s wish to project a genuine Scottish voice. Burns was solicitous of Glencairn’s opinion on his poems, especially those with political content. He submitted his piece on the American war, When Guilford Good, for Glencairn’s approval, worried that ‘my political tenets… may be rather heretical in the opinion of some of my best friends’ [Letters, i. 77]. Glencairn countenanced its inclusion in the Edinburgh edition, and would have agreed with Burns’s positive view of the Americans’ cause.

Burns and Glencairn also found common cause on the issue of the Scottish militia. Burns’s 1784 poem The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer urged the 45 Scottish MPs to fight back against an Act that had increased the excise on whisky. He felt that if the measure were allowed to continue, Scotland, already on edge because ‘Her lost Militia fir’d her bluid’ [blood], would be ready to resort to violence.

Burns did not have many years to enjoy his friendship with Glencairn and the earl’s death on 30 Jan. 1791 while returning from a trip abroad distressed Burns greatly. He composed a Lament, which concluded: ‘The mother may forget the child / That smiles sae sweetly on her knee;/ But I’ll remember thee Glencairn / And a’ that thou hast done for me!’. In 1794, Burns even named his newborn son James Glencairn Burns.

Another Ayrshire native and peer who encouraged Burns’s poetry in 1787 was Archibald Montgomerie, 11th earl of Eglinton, a fiercely proud Highlander. He had commanded a regiment in America during the Seven Years War and served as a representative peer for 20 years. James Boswell described him to Dr. Johnson as ‘a person who was as violent a Scotsman as he [Johnson] was an Englishman’ [Life of Johnson, iii. 170, 503]. In January 1787 Eglinton provided Burns with an unsolicited donation of 10 guineas [Letters i. 79, 84], and subscribed to 42 copies of his Poems, one of the largest individual subscriptions.

In 1796 all these connections were abruptly severed, beginning with Burns’s own death on 21 July, aged just thirty-seven. On 24 September Glencairn’s younger brother, John, the 15th earl, died childless, and the title became extinct. Eglinton died without a male heir on 31 October, and his distant cousin Hugh Montgomerie of Coilsfield (mentioned in The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer) succeeded him in the peerage.

CGDL

Further reading:
Ian McIntyre, Robert Burns: A Life (1995)
The Letters of Robert Burns, Vol. 1: 1780-89, ed. G. Ross Roy (1985)
J. Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (1985)
Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill (6 vols., 1934-1950)

The story of the Gordon Riots is well known and has been told many times before. However, one aspect that has not been considered so much is what they tell us about access to the old Palace of Westminster. Key to this is the evidence that was presented at Lord George Gordon’s treason trial in February 1781, when several well-placed MPs and parliamentary officials offered their testimony on how the crowds had pressed their way into the heart of the palace.

While the original delegation bringing the Protestant Association’s petition to Westminster had been orderly enough, by the late afternoon of 2 June 1780 the Palace of Westminster was clogged with protesters. Protesting later turned to rioting, and in London there were days of lawlessness, with houses and chapels pulled down, prisons broken open and widespread looting. Only after several days was order restored by the army and militia.

One of the most useful witnesses summoned to give evidence at Gordon’s trial was Thomas Bowen, officiating as the Commons’ chaplain on the day the petition was presented. Bowen had accompanied the Speaker to the chamber at the beginning of proceedings, but already found the lobby ‘crowded, and the people… clamorous’. After leading those MPs present in prayers, Bowen retreated to a place ‘under the gallery, by the door’. He was, thus, well-placed to observe Gordon interacting with the crowd outside the chamber. He witnessed Gordon going to the door frequently, and repeating what was being said by the Members. Gordon assured the crowd that the Speaker considered them ‘good people’, while (likely) George Rous, who had form on calling for aggressive action to quell troublemakers, was calling for the magistrates to be called. Lord North dismissed them as ‘a mob’.

When the motion to consider the petition was eventually called for, Bowen exited the chamber and made his way to an adjoining room, but noticed that the crowd was refusing to quit the lobby, making a division impossible. He was prevailed on to speak to them to encourage them to retire, but without success. At least one person insisted they would only go if Gordon told them to do so.

Bowen then left the lobby and went to ‘the eating room’, where he was joined by an exhausted Gordon. He told Gordon what he had heard, and Gordon made his way to the gallery overlooking the lobby so that he could speak to his supporters. Bowen followed, and deposed that Gordon spoke to those gathered below, urging them to be peaceable, though Gordon also took Bowen by the gown, introduced him to the crowd and tried to get Bowen to give his opinion on the Catholic Relief Act. According to Bowen, this was the only time in the whole proceedings when he felt unsafe. John Anstruther, who was in the lobby, gave his own account of Gordon addressing the crowd, but made no mention of Bowen. He agreed, though, that there ‘was great confusion in the lobby’.

Following Bowen, MP John Cator offered his evidence of the events of 2 June. He said he had been ‘going from some of the committee-rooms to the gallery over the lobby’ and found the lobby packed with people and the Commons stymied in their efforts to hold a division, as the officers of the House were unable to get the lobby cleared. He heard someone call Gordon by name, and then witnessed him make his way ‘to the rails, and looked over’. Cator followed suit to observe Gordon’s interaction with the crowd. Gordon advised that most of the MPs were opposed to considering the petition at that point, but asked what the crowd wished: ‘they cried out, “Now, now.”’

Two more Commons’ staff were summoned to give their evidence. One was Joseph Pearson, one of the doorkeepers. He had been posted in the lobby, and his testimony confirmed Bowen’s, that Gordon had come to the door on several occasions to pass on what was happening to the crowd outside. He reckoned the ‘mob’ had finally dispersed by nine in the evening, but ‘so great was the confusion I cannot say how [the lobby] was cleared’. Another doorkeeper, Thomas Baker, supported Pearson’s account, noting that the crowds only disappeared after soldiers arrived.

What was clear from several of the witnesses was how easy it was for the crowd to make their way deep into the parliamentary estate. Sampson Rainsforth deposed being in New Palace Yard when about 200 people had made their way over Westminster Bridge and at about 2pm ‘the whole cavalcade came from Charing Cross down to New Palace Yard, with flags and music’. He also observed that ‘they had blue cockades in their hats’: the colour of the Protestant Association. This tallied more or less with at least one newspaper report that related that the delegation arrived at the Houses of Parliament at about half past two. [Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 3 June 1780] Like Anstruther, Rainsforth then made his way into the lobby where he observed Gordon standing at the door leading into the Commons’ chamber, though he did not catch what was said. Clearly, though, it was still possible to access the lobby in spite of the reports of large crowds making the passageways impassable.

Witnesses to what took place in the lobby generally agreed that while potentially unruly, the crowd there was reasonably well behaved, though at least one MP, Philip Jennings Clerke, reckoned that the original petitioners were distinct from those in the lobby, whom he dismissed as ‘a different class of person’. Certainly, all was not peaceful. Constable Charles Jealous, stationed in Palace Yard, witnessed the bishop of Lincoln’s coach being attacked as he arrived to attend the House of Lords. The coach, he said:

was stopped by the mob, and the wheels were taken off. I saw a gentleman taken out of it, who, they said was the Bishop: they pulled off his wig, and struck him in the face… He got into the house in order to escape.

Jealous observed that those involved in roughing up the bishop were not wearing blue cockades, suggesting they were not part of the more organized group who had been involved with presenting the petition. One newspaper also reported six peers being ‘extremely ill-used… their bags pulled off, and their hair left flowing on their shoulders’. Several chose not to hang around and summoned hackney carriages to get them away.

Dispersing the crowds from around Parliament proved just the beginning of the business as protests turned to riot and a general breakdown in law and order. But what the opening moments of those chaotic days in June 1780 showed was how intimate the palace could be. Access was easy right up to the doors of the Commons, with spaces – like the gallery over the lobby – available for Members to address people gathered below. It all goes to show that Parliament was a dynamic space, where Lords, MPs, officials and the general public rubbed shoulders and where so much depended on a sense of what was and was not reasonable behaviour.

RDEE

Further Reading:
The Trial of the Honourable George Gordon, commonly called Lord George Gordon, for High Treason… On Monday, the 5th Day of February, 1781.
The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, eds. Ian Haywood and John Seed (Cambridge, 2012)

Henry Fox, who died 250 years ago this July, was the father of the now much better remembered Charles James Fox, but in his day was one of the period’s most recognizable and controversial politicians. His own father, Sir Stephen, had risen from obscurity to a place in the royal household, acquiring great wealth along the way. Henry had then started out in life as a Tory standing unsuccessfully for the ‘notoriously venal’ borough of Hindon in Wiltshire in a particularly brutal election. In 1728 he had tried again at Old Sarum, gaining just one vote to the successful candidate’s two but in 1735 it was third time lucky for him as he finally secured election standing at Hindon once again, this time at a by-election, having by then gone over to the Whigs. Nine years later he scandalized society by eloping with the duke of Richmond’s daughter, thereby effectively marrying into the royal family.

For the rest of his career in the Commons, Henry Fox enjoyed office of some sort, but only twice was he able to secure the kind of high office that might have been expected. Indeed, he shied away from opportunities to become Prime Minister more than once. It was a perhaps unexpected quality given his reputation as a bruiser and for employing particularly strident language when speaking in Parliament.

There was certainly no hesitancy in the way he went about weeding out the Bute ministry’s opponents and, having taken on the role of Bute’s fixer in the House of Commons, Fox became synonymous with the brutal culling of the Pelhamite Whigs, who had previously dominated in administrations. He had actually been reluctant to take on the role, summoned out of effective retirement by the king, who offered him the office of secretary of state. He declined that, but agreed to be Leader of the Commons, and as such oversaw the removal of many of his old colleagues from their posts. He started at the top with the old duke of Newcastle, advising Bute to ‘Strip him of his three lieutenancies immediately’. He himself would then proceed ‘to the general rout’. It was a bloody business and he was in no doubt about how he would emerge from it, though he insisted ‘I don’t care how much I am hated’ as he believed it was ‘honest and essential service to the King’.

When Bute stepped down in 1763, he recommended Fox as his successor, but the king would not stomach it, pointing out Fox was ‘a man void of principles’. After some delay, the king was forced to rethink and offer Fox the job, but now Fox’s familiar streak of uncertainty reasserted itself. His wife, Lady Holland, also proved key in his decision-making and helped persuade him not to accept. He walked away from the prospect of leading the administration and, bar the office of paymaster general, which he retained for another two years, never held significant office again.

In place of being Prime Minister Fox went to the Lords as Baron Holland. This too his wife had opposed but, on this occasion, Fox stuck to his guns. In many ways his path to the Lords was unusual. Lady Holland had been made a peeress in her own right in May 1762, taking the title Baroness Holland of Holland (Lincolnshire). Now Fox secured his own peerage, as Baron Holland of Foxley (Wiltshire). The curious double grant meant that in time his heir, Stephen, succeeded as Baron Holland and Holland. Lord Holland, as Fox now was, was disappointed at being fobbed off with a mere barony. He had wanted a viscountcy at least, and preferably an earldom. Securing the higher title would dominate the remainder of his career, though it was something he would never achieve. He always felt that he had been short-changed and thereafter there would be an air of resentment both in the way he conducted himself and in the way his middle son, Charles James, responded to people he felt had stood in Holland’s way.

Holland spent much of the remainder of his career overseas. In October 1766 he announced to his friend John Campbell: ‘I leave all thoughts of a Court & politicks, (incomprehensible if not absurd) and of all business, behind me…’ [Campbell Correspondence, 305]. If he did not escape altogether, his hopes turned increasingly to the precocious Charles, who was looked to, to revive the family’s political fortunes. But here, once more, Holland was to be disappointed.

Holland died on 1 July 1774, ‘embittered by the extravagance and callousness of his two elder sons’ [Namier]. That this had not always been the case was shown by how Holland had doted on Charles. According to Leslie Mitchell, when Charles was only three years old, his father ‘enjoyed breakfasting with him’ and when not very many years older, it was a nuisance to Holland that business in the Commons interrupted time he would much rather have spent in his son’s company. [Mitchell, 4] Latterly, Charles may have caused Holland considerable worry, but he remained loyal to his father’s memory long after his own career had taken him off in a very different direction and he spoke up for his father against all comers. As Mitchell put it, ‘This was Henry Fox’s reward for his indulgence of “the Boys, who together shall ever govern me”.’ [Mitchell, 6]

RDEE

Further Reading:

LG Mitchell, Charles James Fox (1992)

JE Davies, ed., The Correspondence of John Campbell MP… (2013)

In the eighteenth century, when the ability and opportunity to vote was heavily restricted, songs and music were a key aspect of election campaigns and the political process.

Songs and music accompanied, and were an important part of, the kind of election events satirically depicted by Hogarth, from election ‘entertainments’ to the polling. Competing campaigns used the memorable and emotive power of music and verse to appeal to voters, and wider opinion. Election agents and committees paid for the printing and distribution of partisan election ballads, set to well-known tunes, such as ‘Chevy Chase’, and ‘God Save the King’. Voting often took place over a number of days, and rapidly printed ballads could also appear during the course of the poll in a bid to influence events. A note on a Somerset ballad of 1768 stated that it was ‘dispersed by the agents’ of one of the candidates, while, in Lincoln in 1823, it was reported that copies of a satirical election song were ‘scattered in great profusion’ from the windows of an inn during polling.

Ballad singers were also paid to sing election ballads in the vicinity of the polling place: this happened so frequently that Frederick Pilon’s 1780 play on the ‘humours’ of an election included a scene in which a ballad singer sings voting advice to ‘crowds of people’ gathered at the hustings. Similar figures appear in satirical prints, such as one on the 1780 Westminster election, showing a man standing on a barrel in front of the hustings, singing a ballad to the tune ‘Derry Down’.

As well as celebrating and attacking particular candidates and parties, election ballads could instruct on the practicalities of voting – for example, by encouraging people to meet at a certain place in order to go to vote. Ballads could also promote eighteenth-century versions of tactical voting, including encouraging voters only to use one of the two votes they were allowed, to avoid helping other candidates (‘plumping’). It was claimed that particular ballads had an effect on the outcome of an election, including in Yorkshire in 1784, and Coventry in 1826. There is also plenty of evidence for songs and music being used in the campaigns of those who weren’t elected. 

Election ballads also impacted elections more broadly. They were read and performed in a wide variety of settings – including inns, polling places, and in the streets – where they fuelled the political engagement of voters and non-voters who heard, sung, read, and danced to them. By encouraging interest in, and opinion about political issues and the political process across the social spectrum, ballads contributed to a wider ‘culture’ of elections and electioneering in the era before democracy.

Certain songs particularly caught the public imagination and became vehicles for political expression and protest. One of these was Handel’s famous chorus, ‘See, the Conqu’ring Hero Comes!’ (from his oratorios Joshua and Judas Maccabaeus). Indeed, Handel reportedly foresaw the piece’s great popularity. Moving from the theatre to the street, the chorus was regularly performed during election ‘chairings’. This was when victorious candidates – or temporarily or would-be victorious candidates – were seated in decorated chairs and carried, typically through major streets, often accompanied by banners, flags, and musicians playing drums, trumpets, and fifes. Such processions could be attended by many thousands, gathered in the streets and watching from windows – including women, children, and men who didn’t have the vote. The ceremony is famously satirized in Hogarth’s Chairing the Member, in which the member is about to be toppled by unruly bearers.

The songs and music that accompanied chairings often used martial tunes to figure electoral victory as a form of military triumph, and could also be played by military bands. The words to Handel’s chorus were well suited to this ‘heroic’ fashioning: ‘See, the conqu’ring hero comes! / Sound the trumpets, beat the drums!’. At the Wiltshire by-election of 1819, John Benett’s triumphal procession through Salisbury featured banners with the words ‘See, the conquering hero comes’ and it was reported that, as soon as the band ‘struck up’ the accompanying tune, ‘the multitude joined in the chorus’.

Handel’s chorus was also adapted to address particular political circumstances. Electoral adaptations of Handel could be printed and circulated as broadsides and slip songs; one song printed after the turbulent Coventry contest of 1784 reworked Handel to comment on perceived ‘illegal’ proceedings during the election, and assert the legitimacy of the result. This song called on its audience to ‘See the legal members come, / Sound your fifes and beat the drum’. 

As well as being used by the ‘winning side’ to assert the legality of their victory and expose perceived electoral abuses, chairing songs could also be used to challenge a result. Although often thought of as taking place at the end of an election, chairings could also take place at various other points in the campaign (and repeatedly during the electoral process), and they could serve the rhetorical function of willing, or asserting, a victory that had yet to be – and perhaps was unlikely ever to be – officially confirmed. Chairing songs could circulate and be performed during a campaign as a means to dishearten an opponent, and were also enlisted in post-election challenges, by celebrating those seen (at least by some) as the ‘true’, if unofficial, victors.

In the Worcester election of 1774, when Sir Watkin Lewes finished in third place, it was reported that he immediately ‘protested against the return’ on the grounds of ‘illegal’, ‘unjust’, and ‘corrupt’ proceedings, and declared his intention to challenge the result in Parliament. It was also reported that, as soon as he left the polling place, Lewes was ‘chaired’ and ‘carried through the principal streets, amidst the acclamations of a vast concourse of people, singing their favourite song, “See the legal member come”’.

Lewes’ own protest was amplified by a general chorus of disapproval against perceived electoral injustice: a protest also publicized more widely through newspaper reporting of the incident. (And this episode suggests how the later Coventry song hailing the ‘legal members’ belongs to wider political and musical tradition.) When sung at chairings, songs not only had the potential to reach a large audience (if they could be heard above the noise). They could also be a way to involve this audience in a form of active, very public and collective political expression, by getting them to sing together, and making them performers. (It is important to remember that chairing songs could also be used ironically, and could be provocative, and produce different responses, including jeering and parody.)

The performance of these ‘victory songs’ during elections in the eighteenth century can perhaps invite some comparison with the playing and singing of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, a song associated with a previous Labour victory, during the speech in which Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the date of the 2024 UK general election. While the playing of this piece during the Prime Minister’s speech had a range of different effects on different audiences, like the chairing songs of the past, it brought to the fore the use of political and musical memory – and the songs and music of victory – to engage with a current election.

KP

Further Reading

Kendra Packham, ‘Literature and the Culture of Elections and Electioneering in Eighteenth-Century England’, The Review of English Studies, 72 (2020), pp. 104–28.

T. W. Whitley, The Parliamentary Representation of the City of Coventry (Coventry, 1894).

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

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

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

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

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

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

AB

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