At the end of 1425, just three years into the reign of the infant Henry VI, the English polity, such as it was, was in turmoil. Although arrangements for the conduct of government during the King’s minority had been agreed shortly after Henry V’s death in 1422, these were now called into question by an acrimonious quarrel between the protector of England, the boy-king’s uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and the chancellor of England, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester.

Each man had his own ideas of how the king’s affairs should be managed in his name, although, it is fair to say with the benefit of hindsight, Duke Humphrey perhaps emerges from the affair with less credit. The decision of assembling Parliament at Leicester (very much in the heartland of Lancastrian power in England) was taken in view of the armed might that the two squabbling magnates brought to bear: Bishop Beaufort in his manor at Southwark, and Humphrey in the streets of London itself. In the autumn of 1425, their enmity had found an outlet in an actual armed fight on London bridge, and it was thus deemed necessary for Humphrey’s elder brother, John, duke of Bedford, to return from France, where he otherwise served as regent, and to preside over Parliament.

The Parliament was convened in something of a hurry: just 42 days were to elapse between its summons and assembly (the fourteenth-century tract, the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum stipulated a minimum of 40 days to allow the northern counties whose shire courts met in six-week intervals to conduct their elections). Conversely, the Commons rather dragged their feet in choosing their Speaker, at nine days taking rather longer than the two days this process normally demanded.

But what (according to a chronicler) gave the Parliament its name, were the armed retinues that the various lords brought to the assembly. The administration thus harked back to the fourteenth century, when it had been common practice for a proclamation to be made in Westminster Hall at the beginning of each Parliament, prohibiting the wearing of swords and other weapons. Also prohibited was the playing of silly games, as it had apparently become common practice to pull men’s hoods off their shoulders. Now, in 1426, the prohibition of bearing arms was reiterated. According to a London chronicler, ‘every man was warned and it was cried throughout the town that they should leave their weapons in their inns, that is to say their swords and shields, bows and arrows’.

Yet, the lords’ men were not cowed: ‘And then the people took great bats on their shoulders, and so they went. And the next day they were charged that they should leave their bats at their inns, and then they took great stones in their bosoms and their sleeves, and so went to the parliament with their lords.’ And so, the chronicler concluded, ‘some men called this Parliament the “Parliament of bats”.

In the event, it seems, it proved possible to get the session under way, and for Humphrey and Beaufort to plead their respective cases. The pleadings have come down to us in the form in which the clerk of the Parliament recorded them. There has to be some suspicion that he was a partisan of Beaufort’s, for much of what Duke Humphrey put forward sounds little short of petty to the modern observer. Among the stories he dredged up was one dating back to Henry V’s lifetime, when he had been accommodated in the palace of Westminster’s Green Chamber, and by virtue of the barking of a spaniel a man had been discovered hiding behind a wall hanging. This man had allegedly been induced by Bishop Beaufort to murder him, and for his pains was drowned in the Thames.

Beaufort for his part kept his statements dignified, and above all pointed to his ecclesiastical dignity in his defence. In the event, Bishop Beaufort was dismissed as chancellor, but at long last granted permission to accept the papal offer of a cardinal’s hat. He and duke Humphrey were made to seal their reconciliation with a formal handshake.

With that, the first session of a parliament was drawn to a close and the Lords and Commons were dispatched to their homes for Easter. The bulk of the assembly’s business was probably transacted in the month that followed their return on 29 April, a period during which the young king (still only four years old) was knighted by his uncle, the duke of Bedford.  

H.W.K.  

Further Reading:

R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (London: Benn, 1981), 73-81

The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (16 Vols., Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), x. 276-317

Following the prorogation of Parliament at the end of Mary 1775, the situation changed for the worse, as news of the armed confrontation at Lexington and Concord in April reached Britain. Following that, reports of Britain’s bloody pyrrhic victory in June at Bunker Hill (Charlestown) arrived in London on 25 July. Almost immediately the government of Lord North decided on sterner measures against the unruly colonists. The principal minister co-ordinating the deployment of troops was North’s step-brother, William Legge, 2nd earl of Dartmouth, secretary of state for America. The office had only existed since 1768 and Dartmouth, who came from a family that had long contributed officials, had held it since August 1772.

Dartmouth’s papers suggest that he was efficient in preparing for an increased military presence in America. As someone who had always sought conciliation, more troublesome to him were plans for a Royal Proclamation declaring the American colonies ‘in rebellion’ and thus that a state of war existed between Britain and America. On 1 February 1775, he had refused ‘to pronounce any certain opinion’ regarding the earl of Chatham’s conciliation bill, and even admitted he ‘had no objection to the bill being received’. [Almon, Parl. Reg., ii. 23] Similarly, in August, Dartmouth had feared that a formal declaration of war would jeopardize negotiations. He held off on agreeing to the Proclamation for as long as he could on the news that the Continental Congress was sending new proposals for a settlement: the so-called ‘Olive Branch Petition’. By late summer, however, the government was in belligerent mood, and on 23 August the Proclamation of Rebellion was promulgated.

Thus, when Parliament resumed on 26 October, Britain and the colonies were formally at war. Even Lord North ‘had changed his pacific language and was now for vigorous measures’. [H. Walpole, Last Journals, i. 490] One result was a ministerial reshuffle over 9-10 November. This gave the government a radically new complexion, and Dartmouth was moved from the American office, apparently unwillingly.

To soften the blow, the king offered Dartmouth his choice of being appointed groom of the stole, secretary of state for the southern department, or taking a pension. Dartmouth turned them all down and instead insisted on taking over as lord privy seal. The king had intended the place for Thomas Thynne, 3rd Viscount Weymouth, but made him secretary of state for the southern province instead. Dartmouth, George III complained, was not ‘in the least accommodating’ by ‘carrying obstinacy greatly too far’. [Fortescue, iii. 282-88]

The man who Replaced Dartmouth as secretary of state for America was Lord George Germain, a younger son of the duke of Dorset. Horace Walpole described him as ‘of very sound parts, of distinguished bravery, and of an honourable eloquence, but hot, haughty, ambitious, obstinate’. [Walpole, Mems. of George II (Yale), i. 190]

In 1758 Germain (at that point known as Sackville) had been sent to Germany as second-in-command of the British forces and was later promoted commander-in-chief. At the battle of Minden on 1 August 1759, though, he failed to obey orders given by his superior, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, commander-in-chief of the Allied army, to lead the British cavalry against the shattered French forces. The prince charged him with disobedience, while Sackville held that he had received conflicting orders, often delivered in German, and had been stationed on difficult terrain. He was castigated as a coward, even a traitor, by the enemies he had gained by his high-handed behaviour. Ever self-confident, Sackville insisted on convening a court martial so he could justify himself. According to Walpole, ‘Nothing was timid, nothing humble, in his behaviour’ [Mems. of George II, iii. 101-105], but the court declared him ‘unfit to serve… in any military capacity whatsoever’.

The shame of Minden always hung over Sackville, and for the next decade and a half he worked to rehabilitate his reputation. His chances were improved by the death of George II, who had developed a violent personal dislike of him. Sackville looked forward to better treatment from George III, but even he was unwilling to take a disgraced soldier back into favour immediately. Sackville relied for his slow recovery on his service in the Commons, where he advocated a firm line against the colonists, arguing at one point that ‘The ministers… must perceive how ill they are requited for that extraordinary lenity and indulgence with which they treated… these undutiful children’.[HMC Stopford-Sackville, i. 119]

In 1769 Sackville took the surname Germain, after inheriting property from Lady Elizabeth Germain. He continued speaking against the colonists throughout the first half of the 1770s and on 7 February 1775 he was the Commons’ messenger to the Lords requesting a conference on the address declaring Massachusetts in rebellion. He seemed, thus, an obvious choice as North looked for a new direction in the morass of the American crisis. Walpole summarized the effect that the change had on the war and the ultimate loss in America: ‘Till Lord George came into place, there had been no spirit or sense in the conduct of the war… [He was] indefatigable in laying plans for raising and hiring troops’. [Walpole, Last Journals i. 511, ii. 49]  Some contemporaries went so far as to suggest that Germain’s belligerence towards the Americans was an attempt to put to rest the shame of Minden. As Edward Gibbon put it, Germain hoped to ‘reconquer Germany in America’.

CGDL

Further reading:

P.D.G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773-1776 (Oxford, 1991)

Andrew O’Shaughnessy, The Men who Lost America (Yale, 2013), esp. ch. 5

Alan Valentine, Lord George Germain (Oxford, 1962)

HMC Dartmouth

HMC Stopford Sackville, vols. I and II

Peter starts with the received wisdom that, in the late 1450s, Coventry was militantly Lancastrian. Such a view had the endorsement of the greatest authority on the reign of Henry VI, Ralph Griffiths (who, incidentally, supervised Peter’s thesis on the Kentish gentry), who described its citizens as ‘fiercely loyal to the Lancastrians’ (R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI, pp. 777-8). This conclusion has a persuasive context, which Peter sets out.  The city had close and historic ties with the Crown. The royal earldom of Chester, part of the endowment of the heir to the throne, was overlord of its southern half; and, when Crown and duchy of Lancaster were united on Henry IV’s accession in 1399, its proximity to the great duchy castle of Kenilworth brought it closer to the centre of the political nation.  In the late 1450s the increasing power of Queen Margaret, who held Kenilworth as part of her dower, brought these connexions into the most intense political focus. The court spent extended periods there, and the notorious Parliament of November 1459, which confiscated the lands of the Yorkist lords, was convened in the city’s Benedictine priory.  

This was the well-established picture Peter set out to re-examine. A small doubt had already been raised by Michael Hicks, who, in 2010, pointed out that the court’s residence in the city in the late 1450s was more intermittent than is generally supposed (M. Hicks, The Wars of the Roses, 126).  Peter took this doubt very much further.  Indeed, he entirely subverted the argument.  In his formulation the court’s periodic sojourns there, even if less prolonged than was once thought, eroded rather than strengthened the city’s ties with the house of Lancaster. He describes the tensions evident from the outset.  On 11 October 1456, during a great council in the city, there was ‘a gret affray’ between the followers of Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and the city’s watchmen in which two or three of the citizens were killed. By 1460 there are clear signs that the court had become an unwelcome visitor. Royal signet letters to the city authorities on 8 February of that year, cited reports that ‘diuers of thinhabitantes of oure Cite of Couentre haue …. vsed and had right vnfittyng langage ayenst oure estate and personne’ and in favour of the recently-attainted Yorkist lords, a curious circumstance in a city of unquestioned loyalty.  

The next evidence Peter cites is yet starker. On 17 February 1461, in signet letters in the name of the young prince of Wales and dated at St. Albans, where the Lancastrians had just defeated the  leading Yorkist lord, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, the mayor and aldermen were peremptorily ordered to be ‘assystent, helping and faverable’ to three local Lancastrian loyalists, the King’s carver, Sir Edmund Mountfort, Sir Henry Everingham of Withybrook, only a few miles from the city, and William Elton, MP for the city in 1453. This reads, Peter suggests, as a desperate attempt to recall the city to its earlier Lancastrian allegiance. If so, it failed. When it was read before the ‘Comyns’ in St. Mary’s Hall, they were so ‘meved’ against its bearer, a priest in Everingham’s service, that they would, but for the mayor’s intervention, ‘A smytt of the prestes hed’.  Soon after, according to one chronicle, its erstwhile resident, Queen Margaret, singled out the city for punishment.  In this context, it is not surprising that the city authorities soon came to share the Yorkist sympathies of the ‘Comyns’. They provided £100 for soldiers to accompany Edward, earl of March, to London in the wake of Neville’s defeat at St. Albans, and a further £80 for 100 men to go with him to what proved to be the decisive battle of Towton.

To explain this support for the Yorkist cause in a city with long-standing Lancastrian connexions, Peter pointed not only to the tensions inherent in the court’s presence but also to influence of the earl of Warwick, whose castle of Warwick lay only ten miles away. It is instructive here that, in the crisis of 1469-71, the city appears to have sided, albeit rather equivocally, with the earl when he rose against Edward IV. Peter shows that, in the campaign of the spring of 1471 during which the earl met his death at the battle of Barnet, Coventry provided him with at least 40 soldiers and was fined by the restored Edward IV for its temerity in doing so. He might also have cited other evidence for the city’s support for the earl. Two of its leading citizens, Richard Braytoft, a former MP, and Robert Onley, were accused of complicity in the execution at Gosford Green, just outside the city, of the King’s father-in-law Earl Rivers, one of the principal victims of Warwick’s rising against Edward IV (TNA, KB27/836, rot. 61d). The reception accorded to Everingham’s priest may, therefore, have been an expression of the city’s support not for the Yorkist cause in general but for the earl of Warwick in particular. Even so, one thing is clear: Peter has shown that Coventry was not a Lancastrian stronghold, even in the late 1450s when its ties with the Lancastrian ruling house were, at least to outward appearances, at their closest.

S.J.P.

Further reading

P. Fleming, Coventry and the Wars of the Roses (Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, 2011)

and Late-Medieval Bristol: Time, Space and Power (2024).

The Commons,1422-61, ed. L. Clark, iii. 497-9 (for Braytoft), iv. 235-8 (for Elton), 281-3 (for Everingham), v. 547-56 (for Mountfort).

On 6 July 1943 the Speaker informed the House of Commons of the deaths of two of its members, Brigadier John Whiteley, MP for Buckingham, and Colonel Victor Alexander Cazalet, MP for Chippenham. They had been killed in a plane crash at Gibraltar alongside the Polish Prime Minister General Sikorski, to whom Cazalet had been acting as Britain’s political liaison officer. They were among the estimated 165 MPs who served with the forces during the Second World War. An initial flurry of enlistment among MPs in 1939 was followed by a further wave after Germany’s invasion of France in 1940.

Commenting on the deaths of Cazalet and Whiteley, Winston Churchill voiced regret that ‘the list of Members who have given their lives in this second struggle against German aggression is lengthening’. He declared that when the Commons chamber – destroyed by German incendiary bombs on the night of 10-11 May 1941 – was rebuilt after the war,

‘we shall take care to inscribe their names and titles on its panels to be an example to future generations’.

Churchill’s proposal was incorporated within the reconstructed House of Commons chamber, opened in October 1950, in the form of 23 heraldic shields commemorating the MPs who died during the Second World War. These featured each MP’s family coat of arms or initials, with their surnames inscribed above. This format emulated the 19 shields installed in 1921 to commemorate the MPs who died during the First World War, which were replicated in the rebuilt chamber.

All those commemorated were sitting MPs at the time of their death, except Roger Keyes, elevated to the Lords in 1943. While most represented English constituencies, they included the MPs for the Welsh seat of Barry and Llandaff and for County Antrim in Northern Ireland, as well as MPs with Scottish connections. Two of the group had first been returned to Westminster at the 1922 election, although the MP with the longest continuous service was Cazalet, who had represented Chippenham since 1924. After his sister Thelma was elected for Islington East in 1931, they had the distinction of being the second-ever pair of brother and sister MPs.

The wartime service of these 23 individuals reflected the wide-ranging nature of Britain’s war effort between 1939 and 1945. Many of the 165 MPs who served undertook home duties, performing valuable organisational roles while remaining engaged in parliamentary and constituency business. Those commemorated in the chamber included James Despencer-Robertson, Military Secretary at Southern Command Headquarters in his Salisbury constituency, where he died suddenly in 1942; Frank Heilgers, who was returning from his Bury St Edmunds constituency to duties as an Assistant Quartermaster General at the War Office when he was killed in the 1944 Ilford train crash; and Anthony Muirhead, who was helping to mobilise an anti-tank regiment in Oxfordshire when he died by suicide in 1939.

Not all the commemorated MPs were on active military service. James Baldwin-Webb was travelling to North America on a fundraising mission for the British Volunteer Ambulance Corps on the SS City of Benares when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat on 17 September 1940. The vessel was also transporting evacuees to Canada and Baldwin-Webb was praised for his bravery in assisting women and children into the lifeboats, while refusing a place himself. John Dermot Campbell – the most recently elected member of this cohort, having been an MP since February 1943 – was part of a delegation of six MPs visiting troops in Italy and Greece in January 1945. He and another MP, Robert Bernays, who had been serving with the Royal Engineers, were killed when the plane transporting them between Rome and Brindisi was lost in bad weather.

Bernays, a former journalist, had been a notable early critic of the Nazi government after visiting Germany in the early 1930s. This was in contrast with the position taken by another commemorated MP, Sir Arnold Wilson, who had attracted controversy because of his perceived pre-war sympathies with fascist regimes. Once the war was underway, however, Wilson trained for the dangerous role of an air gunner in the RAF, despite being in his mid-fifties. He was killed in May 1940 when the Wellington bomber in which he was a crew member crashed near Dunkirk.

Several more MPs also died in air crashes. Rupert Brabner, a flying ace with the Fleet Air Arm, had narrowly escaped the German attack on Crete in 1941 and the sinking of the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle in 1942, but was travelling to Canada to attend a ceremony as Joint Under-Secretary of State for Air when he was killed in a plane crash near the Azores in January 1945. Although he served with the army, Lord Apsley, a keen amateur pilot before the war, had used his flying experience to transport fellow officers while serving in the Middle East with the Arab Legion. He was travelling home on leave for Christmas 1942 when the RAF plane in which he was a passenger crashed in Malta. His widow Violet was elected in his place as MP for Bristol Central.

This was not the only example among these 23 MPs of a widow taking her husband’s seat. John Rathbone had a family tradition of parliamentary service, including his great-aunt Eleanor. He was serving with the RAF when he was reporting missing while piloting his crew’s first operational flight, a bombing raid on the German-occupied port of Antwerp in December 1940. After Rathbone’s death was confirmed, his widow Beatrice was elected unopposed for his Bodmin seat.

Also killed while piloting a plane was Peter Eckersley, who was training with the Fleet Air Arm in Hampshire when his aircraft crashed in August 1940. An experienced amateur pilot, before he entered the Commons Eckersley had captained the Lancashire county cricket team, 1929-35, earning nicknames such as ‘the flying cricketer’ because he often flew himself to matches.

Eckersley was not the only notable sportsperson in this group. Cazalet had been four times British amateur squash champion and competed in tennis at Wimbledon, while Patrick Munro had been an international rugby player and twice captained Scotland. Aged 58, Munro was the oldest MP to die on war service, as a member of the Home Guard. He was taking part in a major military exercise at the Palace of Westminster in May 1942 when he collapsed and died. A year earlier he had been the last MP to speak in the Commons chamber before it was destroyed by bombing.

Munro was not, however, the oldest person among the 23 commemorated. That was the 73 year old retired Admiral of the Fleet Roger Keyes, a peer at the time of his death. He had spent over half a century in the navy, serving across the globe before retiring shortly after his election as MP for Portsmouth North in 1934. In 1940-1 he served as Director of Combined Operations, organising and training the Commandos. Tragically his son Geoffrey died during a commando raid in North Africa in November 1941, posthumously receiving the Victoria Cross. Keyes was an unofficial observer with the U.S. fleet at a battle in the Philippines in October 1944 when he suffered smoke inhalation, which contributed to his death in December 1945. In contrast with the high-ranking Keyes, Dudley Joel was a lieutenant in the navy when he was among 63 crew members killed in the bombing of HMS Registan off Cape Cornwall in May 1941.

Almost half of the MPs commemorated for their Second World War service had also served during the First World War. Others had since gained military experience as members of the Territorial Army. In contrast, the youngest MP of this group, George Charles Grey, was born just after the 1914-18 conflict ended. He interrupted his university studies to serve with the Grenadier Guards after war broke out in 1939 and took part in the evacuation from Dunkirk. The ‘Baby of the House’ (and the youngest MP of the twentieth century), he was just 22 when he was elected unopposed for Berwick-on-Tweed in August 1941. He was killed by a sniper in July 1944 as his tank was advancing through Lutain Wood, Normandy.

While Grey had survived the 1940 retreat through France, two other MPs were less fortunate. The first MP killed in action during the Second World War, Richard Porritt, a captain with the Lancashire Fusiliers, died on 26 May 1940 during a German bombing raid near Seclin, France, where the British army was trying to establish a defensive line behind which troops could retreat to Dunkirk. Ronald Cartland, a major with the Worcestershire Yeomanry, was listed as missing in action during the retreat to Dunkirk, with initial reports suggesting he may have been taken prisoner. However, a few months later his family received confirmation that he had been killed by German fire near Watou, Belgium on 30 May 1940. His sister, the novelist Barbara Cartland, paid tribute to him with a memoir published in 1942.

These 23 MPs served in many different theatres of war. Somerset Maxwell initially served with the Royal Corps of Signals in France, before his duties took him to Palestine, Crete, Libya, Iraq and Syria. He became a welfare officer for forces across the Middle East in May 1942, but requested a return to combatant duties, and was placed in command of signals with an armoured division. Wounded in both knees when Allied troops were machine-gunned from the air during fighting in Libya, he died of septicaemia in a Cairo hospital in December 1942. Another casualty of the North Africa campaign was Edward Kellett, second in command of the 8th Armoured Brigade in Tunisia. He was killed during preparations for attacking the Mareth Line in March 1943, when a shell exploded beside his tank while he was standing up shaving.

Stuart Russell was serving in Sicily with the Coldstream Guards when he contracted a fever, and died in hospital in Egypt in October 1943. After spending time on home defence duties, John Macnamara, who had experience in both the regular and the territorial army, was keen for more active service. He was stationed in the Middle East before being appointed as Chief of Staff with the Land Forces Adriatic. Having been involved in operations in Crete and Yugoslavia, he was killed by a German mortar bombardment in Italy while visiting his former regiment, the London Irish Rifles, shortly before Christmas 1944. He was the last sitting MP to die as a result of enemy action.

KR

Short biographies of these 23 MPs written by the History of Parliament can be found on the UK Parliament website.

On Monday 20 July 1789, Henry Beaufoy, MP for Great Yarmouth, moved the third reading of a bill he had sponsored through the House of Commons for instituting a perpetual commemoration of the 1688 Revolution. The bill was a relatively simple one, seeking merely to insist that in December every year, clergy in the Church of England would read out the Bill of Rights, thereby reminding their congregations of the events that had seen James II expelled and William III and Mary II installed as monarchs.

Beaufoy’s bill had to compete with other rather more urgent measures. These included one for continuing an Act passed in the previous session for regulating the shipping of enslaved people in British ships from the coast of Africa; and another for granting over £20,000 towards defraying the costs of the Warren Hastings trial, which had commenced the previous year and would continue to annoy the House until 1795. Consequently, it was late in the day when Beaufoy got to his feet and, although his motion carried by 23 votes to 14, it was determined that as the House now lacked the requisite 40 members present to make a quorum, the Commons should adjourn.

Next day, Beaufoy tried again. Once more, there was opposition. During the two days when the bill was debated objections were raised by Sir William Dolben and Sir Joseph Mawbey, the latter arguing that Beaufoy was merely mimicking the Whig Club in seeking popularity, while Henry James Pye considered the measure ridiculous as it would result in two commemorative events each year. Others were warmly in favour, though and, when it came to a division, the motion to give the bill a third reading was carried. Following a failed effort by Mawbey to introduce an amendment granting to each clergyman required to read the declaration 20 shillings, the bill was passed and sent up to the Lords. [Commons Journal, xliv. 543-7]

Beaufoy’s bill had its origins in the centenary celebrations of the Revolution, which had been marked across the country the previous autumn. Like his bill, not everything had proceeded smoothly. Not least, there were obvious rivalries between the clubs and societies heading up the various events. There was even disagreement on precisely when to mark the day. The Revolution Society had chosen 4 November, on the basis that this was both William III’s birthday (and wedding anniversary) and the day that he had made landfall. The Constitution Club, on the other hand, chose to hold its entertainment on 5 November, which chimed with the date chosen by John Tillotson (soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury), when preaching his 1689 commemorative sermon. It also echoed celebrations of the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot and this dinner was rounded off with toasts to the ‘three eights’: 1588 (Armada), 1688 and 1788. [Gazetteer and Daily Advertiser, 6 November 1788]

Aside from somewhat petty disagreements about whether 4 or 5 November was most apt, several of the societies also had strikingly different political outlooks and exhibited fierce rivalry. Speaking at the Whig Club, Richard Sheridan concluded his remarks with proposing a subscription for erecting a monument to the Revolution, which appeared to get off to a fine start with £500 being pledged almost at once. The plan was for the edifice to be located at Runnymede, emphasizing the links between the safeguarding of English liberty with Magna Carta, and the completion of the process with William of Orange’s successful invasion.

Not everyone liked the idea of a physical monument, though, and when the proposal was read out at other clubs, it received either muted or downright hostile responses. Speaking at the Constitution Club’s dinner at Willis’ Rooms, presided over by Lord Hood and featuring around 700 diners, John Horne Tooke made no secret of his contempt for the Whig Club’s plan. It was at this meeting that Beaufoy first raised his idea for a day of commemoration to be legislated for by Parliament, though at least one paper reported that his speech had been drowned out by the noise around him.

Elsewhere, there was more harmony. One of the grandest celebrations of 1688 took part at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, where Thomas Coke (future Earl of Leicester) laid on a spectacular firework display as well as mounting a recreation of William’s landing at Brixham having brought in squadrons of horses and loaded them onto miniature ships, which were launched on a canal. Perhaps the most evocative event, though, was one of many held in London taverns, where an unidentified man, said to be 112 years old, was reported to have been in attendance and chaired by the company. According to the paper he was one of ten centurions residing in the French hospital on Old Street, but at 112 he was likely the only one of them who actually remembered the Revolution taking place. [E. Johnson’s British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, 9 November 1788]

All of this was cast thoroughly into the shade by the very unhelpful timing of the king’s illness, which had commenced that summer but become steadily more acute through October and finally reached a crisis on the symbolic date of 5 November. The Prince of Wales had been on his way to Holkham to take part in Coke’s celebrations, but was forced to turn back after being alerted to the king’s deteriorating condition. At a time when the stalwarts of the Revolution Settlement were trying to make the case for the stability it had provided in settling the throne on the House of Brunswick, the prospect of a king no longer able to fulfil his constitutional functions was a disaster.

By the time Beaufoy finally made his motion in the Commons, the king had recovered but that did not ease the progress of what always seems to have been a rather unwanted bill. Having made its way through the Commons, the measure was presented to a thinly attended House of Lords on Thursday 23 July 1789, and a motion for the bill to be given a first reading was moved by Earl Stanhope – a leading member of the Revolution Society.

Stanhope’s motion was objected to by the Bishop of Bangor, who insisted that a prayer was already said for the Revolution in church each year. Stanhope attempted to argue in favour of the ‘pious and political expediency’ of the bill, insisting that the event was not commemorated satisfactorily in church. [Oracle, 24 July] The Lord Chancellor left the wool sack to enable him to offer his own opinions on the matter, backing up Bangor’s view and arguing the bill to be absurd, before a final contribution was made in favour of the proposed measure by the Earl of Hopetoun. The motion for the first reading was then negatived by six votes to 13, after which the Lords resolved without more ado to throw the unwanted bill out. [Diary or Woodfall’s Register, 24 July; The World, 24 July] Sheridan’s wish for a grand monument met with a similar fate, though an obelisk celebrating the centenary was raised at Kirkley Hall near Ponteland in Northumberland, by Newton Ogle, Dean of Winchester, and another at Castle Howe near Kendal in Cumbria.

As far as commemoration of 1688 was concerned this was far from the end of the story. Two centuries on, the tercentenary witnessed an unusual expression of unity from the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock. Moving a humble address to the Queen, expressing the House’s ‘great pleasure in celebrating the tercentenary of these historic events of 1688 and 1689 that established those constitutional freedoms under the law which Your Majesty’s Parliament and people have continued to enjoy for three hundred years’, Thatcher was answered by Kinnock, agreeing that it was: ‘a worthy act, not only because it celebrates a significant advance, as the Prime Minister just said, but because it requires us all to consider the character of our democracy…’

Father of the House, Sir Bernard Braine, was next to speak. He welcomed the rare moment of political harmony and underlined the key principal about what 1688 meant to everyone in the chamber:

‘It is the knowledge that the parliamentary system which we jointly serve is greater than the sum total of all who are here at any one time.’

RDEE

Further Reading:

John Brooke, King George III (1972)

Journals of the House of Commons

Journals of the House of Lords

The troubled politics of the mid-fifteenth century are illuminated by the histories of leading gentry families just as much as they are by those of Neville, Stafford and other great aristocratic families. In one sense, lesser families offer a more subtle perspective in that, while great families were so central to politics that they could hardly avoid active involvement in the struggle between York and Lancaster, the leading gentry had the third option of neutrality. Those families that did commit themselves thus have a particular interest. Some, like the Yorkist Devereuxs or the Lancastrian Treshams, were consistent in their loyalty.  Others, however, transferred allegiance, whether through perceived self-interest, as a reaction (even a principled one) to political events or as a calculated gamble.  The story of the Blounts, one of a small coterie of gentry families that dominated Derbyshire politics, is particularly revealing in this regard. Their two changes of allegiance – in 1454 and 1484 – were examples of anticipating, rather than swimming with, the political tide. 

They were a family to whom commitment came naturally. In the early fifteenth-century they served the house of Lancaster with great distinction. Sir Walter Blount was killed at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 (according to some reports, acting as a decoy Henry IV); his son, Sir John Blount, a soldier notable enough to be promoted to the Order of the Garter, fell at the siege of Rouen in 1418; and Sir John’s brother and successor Sir Thomas, spent his best years in the service of Lancastrian arms in France. Sir Thomas’s eldest son, Walter, looked set to continue this tradition, entering the household of Henry VI in about 1440.

Soon, however, Walter, was to commit himself to the house of York with the same enthusiasm as his predecessors had supported Lancaster. The decisive moment came on 28 May 1454 with the famous sack of his manor of Elvaston.  This was a particularly acute example of the damaging interaction of local rivalries among the leading gentry with the crisis in national affairs. Sir Nicholas Longford of Longford, head of another family long connected with the house of Lancaster, led an armed band of 1,000 men to a raid on Elvaston. There they allegedly quartered tapestries charged with the Blount arms, justifying their action on the grounds that Blount ‘was gone to serve Traytours’.  They clearly believed that Blount had come to identify himself with the duke of York, who, the King mentally incapacitated, had become protector two months earlier.            

Whatever Blount’s prior connexion with the duke, the sack of Elvaston drove him further into the Yorkist camp. In the late 1450s he was serving both York and his ally, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, who, as captain of Calais, appointed him as his marshal there.  The outbreak of civil war in 1459 thus presented him with opportunities. Just as his grandfather, Sir Walter, had actively supported the Lancastrian usurpation of 1399, he fought for its end. He was in the Yorkist ranks in March 1461 at the decisive battle of Towton, where he was knighted.

Blount’s support for York brought him substantial rewards, not least a great marriage. In the aftermath of the earlier Yorkist victory at Northampton in the previous July, he had tried to win the hand of Elizabeth Butler, widow of one of the Lancastrian victims of that battle, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, but she repudiated him on the incontestable grounds that he ‘unequal and inferior to her in nobility and wealth’.  Fortunately for Blount, a widow of yet greater rank did not share her scruples. He soon married another of those widowed at Northampton, namely the King’s maternal aunt, Anne Neville (who was also Warwick’s aunt), dowager-duchess of Buckingham, the wealthiest widow in England.  It is hard to believe that Blount did not owe the match to royal patronage. With this marriage came a greater status: he served in the great office of treasurer and, in June 1465. was elevated to the peerage as Lord Mountjoy.

In the great crisis of Edward’s reign from 1469 to 1471, provoked by the King’s alienation from the earl of Warwick, Blount, after a brief period of equivocation, firmly committed himself to Edward. He fought for him in the victorious campaign of the spring of 1471, during which his son and heir, William, was killed at the battle of Barnet. In April 1472 he followed his uncle, Sir John, in having the honour of installation to the Order of the Garter.

On Blount’s death in 1474, effective headship on the family devolved on his son, James. Although land and title passed to James’s elder brother, John, it was James who was the most politically active, and it was James who took the lead in the next major event in the family’s history. At the beginning of his rule, Richard III confidently placed his trust in the Blounts, giving them a central role in the defence of Calais (with which the family had long been associated), In James’s case this trust proved spectacularly misplaced, for he soon dealt the new King a major blow. Among the captives at Hammes castle, of which James was lieutenant, was the militant Lancastrian, John de Vere, the attainted earl of Oxford, who had been imprisoned there since 1474. The two men must have known each other well, and, at some date shortly before 28 October 1484, Oxford persuaded James not only to release him but to join him in fleeing to join Henry of Richmond at the French court. The probability is that Blount, alienated by the deposition of Edward V, needed little persuasion to revert to the family’s Lancastrian loyalties. He was now wholly committed to Richmond. He landed with him at Milford Haven on 7 August. 1485 and fought at the battle of Bosworth two weeks later. Unsurprisingly, albeit not as mightily as his father had done after the change of regime in 1461, James prospered in the early years of Henry VII’s rule. Sadly, he died childless in 1492 at the height of his career.

Whether Lord Mountjoy shared James’s dramatic change of allegiance cannot be known.  It may be that James, as a younger brother, took the active role because his forfeiture, should Richmond have failed, would not endanger the family’s future. John may also have been restrained by a natural caution.  The striking and well-known provision of his will is suggestive: he advised his sons (the eldest of whom, William, was only seven) , ‘never to take the state of Baron upon them if they may leye it from them nor to desire to be grete about princes for it is daungeros’.  Given that between 1403 and 1471 three of his family, including his eldest brother, had met violent deaths serving ‘princes’, such caution is understandable. Yet this was to be balanced by the positives: the family had been advanced to the peerage by their service to the Yorkists, and, when he drew up his will, his brother’s support for Henry VII promised further promotion.  In any event, the new Lord Mountjoy disregarded his father’s well-meaning advice.  Most famous as a friend and patron of Erasmus, he made a very successful career at the court of the most dangerous of princes, Henry VIII.

S.J.P.

Further reading

H. Castor, ‘Sack of Elvaston’, Midland History, xix. 21-39.

For biographies of Sir Walter Blount (d.1403), Sir Thomas Blount (d.1456) and Walter Blount, Lord Mountjoy: The Commons, 1386-1421, ii. 258-60, 262-5; 1422-61, iii.  382-91.  A biography of Sir James Blount will appear in The Commons, 1461-1504.

In defeating the rebellion of the Percys at the battle of Shrewsbury, Henry IV overcame an existential threat to the infant Lancastrian regime. It was a threat that came upon him suddenly and undeservedly. The rebellion had but one cause, the overweening ambition of the Percys, and no justification, or at least no meaningful one. The best the Percys could offer was Henry’s alleged duplicity in the deposition of Richard II in 1399: they claimed that they had supported him because he had sworn to claim only his great Lancastrian patrimony and not the Crown.  Given their readiness to accept the rewards the new King bestowed upon them (and their belief that even these were not enough), this justification must have been widely perceived as hollow as it was. 

It was these rewards that made the rising so dangerous to Henry IV. Not only did they give the Percys a virtual monopoly of the local exercise of royal authority in their northern heartland, the east march towards Scotland, but also in north Wales, where the earl of Northumberland’s son, Henry Hotspur, was made justiciar.  Hotspur, a renowned soldier with a military career extending back to the late 1370s, repaid the King’s trust by fighting against Glyn Dŵr in the early stages of the Welsh rebellion, and, much more significantly, by defeating an invading Scottish force at Homildon Hill on 14 September 1402.  This victory, however, was to drive a wedge between the Percys and the King, or, perhaps to put it more accurately, to give the aggressively acquisitive Percys expectations of reward beyond anything a prudent monarch could give. The Scottish commander, Archibald Douglas, earl of Douglas, was among those captured, and the King exercised his legitimate right to deny the Percys permission to ransom a soldier whose reputation was almost as elevated as Hotspur’s.  This rebuff was added to another unjustified grievance over a ransom. At the battle of Pilleth on the previous 22 June Hotspur’s brother-in-law, Sir Edmund Mortimer, had been captured by Glyn Dŵr, and the King refused to assent to his ransom, taking the view, correctly as it transpired, that Mortimer (who subsequently married one of the Welsh rebel’s daughters) was a traitor. 

This was the immediate background of a rising that took the King entirely by surprise.  On 9 July Hotspur raised rebellion in Cheshire, as the King, with a small force, was advancing north from London, ironically with the aim of supporting the Percys against the Scots on the northern border, ‘to the last unaware of the yawning danger that was opening at his very feet’ (as the great Victorian scholar, James Hamilton Wylie, elegantly put it).  He was at Nottingham when, on 12 July, he heard that Hotspur had rebelled. Perhaps acting on the advice of the experienced Scottish soldier, George Dunbar, earl of Dunbar, whose feud with the earl of Douglas had brought him into Henry’s ranks, he determined to risk the hazard of an immediate battle rather than return to London.  Here he had one advantage. The great Lancastrian retinue was particularly strong in the Midlands, and many of its leading gentry rallied to his cause, as they had done in 1399.

The King was also aided by what appears to have been a miscalculation of the rebel side.  No one could dispute Hotspur’s choice of Cheshire as the locus of rebellion, for not only had it been a Ricardian stronghold but its geographical position offered the prospect of joining the Welsh rising with his own.  If, however, the location of the rising was logical, its timing was not.  Hotspur’s plan appears to have been to seize Shrewsbury, the headquarters of the heir to the throne, Henry, prince of Wales, who, despite his youth, had been appointed royal lieutenant in Wales in the previous March, and there to await reinforcements from his father in the north and from the Welsh rebel leader.  This plan, however, was thwarted by the King’s swift and decisive action.  Had Hotspur delayed making plain his intentions until the King had reached the north, he would have had time to seize Shrewsbury and the prince. The King would then have been faced a long march back to intercept Hotspur, who would probably have made for London. The timing of the rebellion was also unfortunate in another sense, although one that was not apparent at its beginning. On 12 July Glyn Dŵr was defeated near Carmarthen by the Pembrokeshire levies, headed by Sir Thomas Carew, constable of Narberth, so diminishing any aid he might have been able to offer Hotspur in a future campaign. Carew, something of an unsung hero of the campaign, was later fittingly rewarded by a grant of Sir Edmund Mortimer’s forfeited estates.

These considerations aside, the rapid approach of the royal army forced Hotspur to abandon his plan of taking Shrewsbury, and draw up in battle array on its outskirts.  None the less, although much had run in the King’s favour in the lead up to the battle, when that battle was joined, it was still a close-run thing.  Although it appears to have lasted no more than two hours, it was, in the words of the later Gregory’s Chronicle, ‘one of the wyrste bataylys that ever came to Inglonde,, and unkyndyst’.  The casualty rate was very high, a product of the intense exchange of longbow fire with which it began, with, according to the St. Albans chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, men falling ‘as fast as leaves … in autumn’.  These casualties were heaviest on the royalist side, certainly in respect of the leading men (the most notable casualty on his side was the young Edmund, earl of Stafford), and it is probably fair to say that, if Hotspur had not fallen on the field, the result of the battle, if not that of the rebellion, might have been different. Indeed, if the accidents of battle had brought death to the King rather than to Hotspur, the civil war, the ‘Lancastrian’ title against the ‘Yorkist’, (represented in 1403 by the young Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, nephew of Hotspur’s wife) would have begun in 1403 rather than 1459.

SJP

Further reading

J.M.W. Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, History xliv (1959), pp. 212-27.

P. McNiven, ‘The Scottish Policy of the Percies and the Strategy of the Rebellion of 1403’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library lxii (1979-80), pp. 498-530.  

For biographies of some of the casualties on the royalist side: The Commons, 1386-1421, ed. Clark, Rawcliffe and Roskell, ii. 262-5 (Sir Walter Blount of Barton Blount, Derbyshire), 467-9 (Sir John Calverley of Stapleford, Leicestershire), 593-4 (Sir John Clifton of Clifton, Nottinghamshire); iv. 364-6  (Sir Hugh Shirley of Shirley, Derbyshire), 607-9 (Sir Thomas Wensley of Wensley, Derbyshire). For a probable casualty on the rebel side see ii. 384-6 (Sir Hugh Browe).

It had started so well. Francis Leak, the son of Sir Francis Leak, a prosperous landowner in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, was the first of his family to try to establish himself on the national stage. He had already taken the important first step of marrying the sister of a rising star at court, Sir Henry Carey (later Viscount Falkland in the Scottish peerage). Yet Leak’s ambitions were undermined by a fierce row with his father, who had resigned the patrimonial estate to him in return for a relatively high rent-charge. Once the documents were sealed, Leak refused point-blank to pay anything to his father, on the preposterous grounds of poverty. His true financial state was revealed in 1624, when he paid James I’s favourite, George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, £8,000 to be made Baron Deincourt. The son’s ennoblement enraged the father, who was already engaged in a lengthy legal battle with his son. Even the death of Sir Francis in 1626 did not stop the wrangling, as Deincourt’s mother and half-brother disputed the will and won a chancery order for him to pay them rent arrears; this was upheld by the Lords in 1629. Deincourt’s parliamentary service in the later 1620s had been overshadowed by this constant rowing, and the dispute continued into the early 1630s, ending only with the intervention of the privy council, which ruled against the baron. His reputation at court and among the aristocracy never recovered.

Although Deincourt was treated with distain by the royal court during the 1630s, his son, also Francis, was able to succeed where the father had failed, joining the royal family for racing at Newmarket and being given minor ceremonial roles at court. His career was, however, spoiled by his father’s parsimony. Two potential marriages were ruined by Deincourt’s refusal to make realistic financial provision for his son, and by the end of the decade, Francis was languishing in debtors’ prison. Deincourt was equally mean when it came to public affairs. Although a supporter of the king, he was reluctant to give the king money to fight the bishops’ wars against the Scots in 1639-40, and he went on to play very little part in the Short and Long Parliaments. At the outbreak of civil war in 1642, he sided with the king. Francis, who had gone to France (possibly to avoid his creditors) died at about this time, leaving the second son, Nicholas, heir to the barony. Needless to say, Deincourt and Nicholas Leak immediately fell out, with Nicholas joining the parliamentarians.

Civil war did not improve Deincourt’s miserliness. In September 1642, the prominent courtier, John Ashburnham, was sent to Deincourt to secure £5,000 for the king, while Arthur Capell (later 1st Baron Capell), went on a parallel mission to the equally parsimonious Robert Pierrepont, 1st earl of Kingston-upon-Hull. The cunning Kingston deflected the request by suggesting the wealthy Deincourt – ‘who was good for nothing and lived like a hog, not allowing himself necessaries’ – could easily supply the money instead. Deincourt, who had ‘so little correspondence with the court that he had never heard his name’, did not accept Ashburnham’s credentials until he had consulted with his wife’s nephew, Lucius Carey, 2nd Viscount Falkland, but afterwards reacted ‘with so different a respect’ that the envoy became hopeful of receiving the money after all. He was soon ‘undeceived’:

The lord, with as cheerful a countenance as his could be (for he had a very unusual and unpleasant face), told him that though he had no money himself, but was in extreme want of it, he would tell him where he might have money enough … that he had a neighbour, who lived within four or five miles, the earl of Kingston, that never did good to anybody, and loved nobody but himself, who had a world of money, and could furnish the king with as much as he had need of. (Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, ed. Macray, ii. 332-4)

Despite being something of a joke at royalist Oxford, Deincourt did serve the king faithfully, not least in the defence of Newark, and in sending two of his younger sons to serve in the king’s army – both were killed in combat. He was made earl of Scarsdale at the end of 1645, probably in a deal in which he finally agreed to give material support to the king. At the end of the war, the new earl of Scarsdale refused to do a similar deal with Parliament. Unlike almost all peers who were given the option, he declined to compound for his estates, which continued to be sequestered. His heir, Nicholas Leak, who had managed to rent the Derbyshire properties from Parliament, now made a concerted effort to secure legal title to the whole estate, not least to ensure that his mother and the younger children were provided for. He finally succeeded in 1651.

Overriding Scarsdale’s wishes was easy to justify, as his mental health appears to have deteriorated in the immediate aftermath of the first civil war, reaching a low point after the execution of Charles I in 1649, when ‘he apparelled himself in sack-cloth, and causing his grave to be digged some years before his death, laid himself down in it every Friday, exercising himself frequently in divine meditations and prayers’. (W. Dugdale, Baronage of England, ii. 450). That this was not normal behaviour is underlined by the strangeness of earl’s will, written in 1651. He gave unusually detailed instructions about his burial at Sutton Scarsdale church: he was not to be disembowelled or embalmed, and he was to be buried without a coffin, covered only by a sere-cloth or winding sheet, and ‘a little round board of an inch think laid upon my face’. (TNA, PROB11/251, f. 139v). As if this was not odd enough, in the main body of the will the earl completely ignored the fact that the estate had effectively been taken out of his hands: his younger son, Henry, was provided with lands; his four unmarried daughters were given their full marriage portions of £4,000 each; and, in a highly unusual move, these younger daughters were appointed executors. Reality reappeared only after the old man’s death. When probate was passed in 1655, it was granted to Nicholas Leak, now 2nd Baron Deincourt and 2nd earl of Scarsdale, his sisters and widowed ‘having renounced the execution of the said will’. (PROB11/251, f. 140)

PL

Further reading

The biography of Francis Leak will appear in the forthcoming House of Lords 1640-60 volumes; for his earlier career, see House of Lords 1604-29.

Biographies of Sir Henry Carey and Sir Francis Leak in House of Commons 1604-29; George Villiers in House of Lords 1604-29; John Ashburham, Arthur Capell and Lucius Carey in House of Commons 1640-60; Nicholas Leak in House of Lords 1660-1715.

On 7 Feb. 1775 the House of Lords considered an address from the Commons claiming for the first time that ‘a Rebellion at this time actually exists’ in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The inflammatory language was accepted, and in consequence a bill to restrain the trade of the Massachusetts Bay colony was introduced. Both its committal at second reading on 16 March and its eventual passage five days later led to violent debate. Another bill to extend trading restrictions to the colonies south of Massachusetts was debated at third reading on 12 April.

Inevitably, events on the ground in America overtook many of these discussions, as on 19 April American militiamen and British troops exchanged gunfire at Lexington and Concord. Crucially, news of their confrontation did not reach Britain until the end of May, and the House continued unaware that armed conflict had already begun. On 17 May Charles Pratt, Baron Camden, brought in a bill to repeal the Quebec Act, one of the so-called Coercive Acts of 1774. The government’s motion to reject the repeal bill occasioned yet another debate.

In all, these matters occasioned eight divisions in the Lords between 7 February and 17 May 1775. The government won every one handily, with the numbers in the minority ranging between 21 and twenty-nine. In other words, there was a core of about 22 lords who consistently opposed the government’s bellicose policies towards the colonies during the tense spring of 1775. Both then and in the years following, the opposition’s main concern was domestic, as they fought against what they saw as the corruption, ‘secret influence’, and tendency to arbitrary rule of George III’s government.

The opposition used the ministry’s mismanagement of the American crisis as a means to attack the Crown and seek for ‘new measures and men’ in government. With a few exceptions, however, they did not apply themselves to addressing the substantive constitutional questions raised by the colonists.

There were some within the opposition who came close to an actively pro-American stance, or at least made an attempt to understand the colonists’ complaints, such as Willoughby Bertie, 4th earl of Abingdon. Charles Lennox, 3rd duke of Richmond, also took a ‘radical’ Whig stance both in 1775 and for the following 30 years, and remained one of the most frequent, and forceful, speakers for the opposition.

A third, was Thomas Howard, 3rd earl of Effingham, who was summed up by Horace Walpole as ‘a rough soldier, of no sound sense [Walpole’s Last Journals, i. 439]. As a captain in the 22nd Foot Regiment, Effingham had adopted a pro-American stance as early as 1774. On his estates near Rotherham, he built a hunting lodge which he dubbed Boston Castle, where he forbade the drinking of tea, in honour of the Boston Tea Party.

Throughout the spring of 1775 Effingham acted with the opposition, acting as a teller for the minority in three of the eight divisions. On 18 May the government sought to block an opposition motion that a memorial from the New York Assembly should be read out. Effingham intervened, but quickly turned away from the technical procedural issues with which the House was embroiled. He made clear his sympathy with the colonists, declaring ‘Whatever has been done by the Americans I must deem the mere consequence of our unjust demands’. He predicted imminent bloodshed (which, of course, had already occurred), for all it would take was ‘a nothing to cause the sword to be drawn and to plunge the whole country into all the horrors of blood, flames and parricide’. He then turned to himself. Speaking of his love for the military life, he confessed that he now found himself bound to resign his commission in the Army, as:

‘the only method of avoiding the guilt of enslaving my country and embruing my hands in the blood of her sons. When the duties of a soldier and a citizen become inconsistent, I shall always think myself obliged to sink the character of the solider in that of the citizen, till such time as those duties shall again, by the malice of our real enemies, become united’. [John Almon, Parliamentary Register, vol. 2 (1774-5). 154-56].

Effingham was briefly the toast of the country for his act of self-sacrifice. Walpole was asked, ‘Was there ever anything ancient or modern better either in sentiment or language than [Effingham’s] late speech?’. [Walpole Corresp., xxviii. 208-9] Although Walpole thought that Effingham ‘was a wild sort of head’, he admitted the intervention had been ‘very sensible’. [Walpole’s Last Journals, i. 466] Effingham was apparently a bit of a showman. It was widely reported that in a dramatic conclusion, he flung his sword clattering down on to the floor of the House.

Effingham’s speech was the last in this particular debate, and at 8.30 at night the House rejected hearing the memorial from New York. Parliament was prorogued a week later, about the time news of the armed confrontation at Lexington reached Britain. That changed everything, and although the Second Continental Congress made one last-ditch effort at peace with its ‘Olive Branch Petition’ of 8 July, the king rejected it out of hand. On 1 August he issued a royal proclamation declaring that the colonists were ‘engaged in open and avowed rebellion’. The declaration left Britain and the American colonists formally at war.

CGDL

Further reading:
John Almon, The Parliamentary Register, vol. 2, (1775)
Frank O’Gorman, ‘The Parliamentary Opposition to the Government’s American Policy, 1760-1782’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the American Revolution (1998), pp. 97-123
Alison Olson, The Radical Duke: The Career and Correspondence of Charles Lennox, 3rd duke of Richmond (1961)

The seminar takes place on 3 June 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The commanding Recording Angel memorial in St Stephen’s Porch, Westminster Hall, is dedicated to peers, MPs, officers, and their sons who lost their lives in the First World War. Designed by the Australian sculptor, Sir Bertram Mackennal, and unveiled in November 1922, the Recording Angel memorial includes three English-born sons of Welsh MPs – Iorwerth Glyndwr John (1894-1916), William Pugh Hinds (1897-1916), and William Glynne Charles Gladstone (1885-1915), himself an MP.

Through naming, it demonstrates the ways in which the Houses of Parliament captured expressions of English Welsh dualities within its political iconography in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The memorial also provides a useful vehicle through which to examine the performance of English Welsh dual identities during the war itself and the fluidity of identity formation back and forwards across the borders of England and Wales in the first decades of the twentieth century.

One of the ninety-four sons recorded on the memorial was Iorwerth Glyndwr John, son of the MP for East Denbighshire, Edward Thomas (E. T.) John. The Pontypridd-born MP, a keen advocate of home rule for Wales, had been an iron ore merchant in Middlesbrough before entering parliament. His son Iorwerth, born in Middlesbrough in 1894, was educated at New College, Harrogate and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read jurisprudence. Serving with the South Wales Borderers, he was killed near Loos in February 1916.

On Iorweth’s death, his alma mater recalled:

While at Oxford he showed keen interest in Welsh music and in the political and national life of Wales generally… Doubtless, if he had lived, he would have played a prominent part in the public life of Wales.

For Iorwerth’s epitaph, E. T. John chose an inscription which was drenched in Welsh symbolism, using lines adapted from the bard Hedd Wyn’s wartime poem, Nid â’n Ango ([It] Will Not Be Forgotten):

Un O Feibion Hoffusaf Cymru |  Ei Aberth nid el heibio | a’i enw annwyl nid a’n ango (One of Wales’s favourite sons | His sacrifice will not be passed over | And his dear name will not be forgotten)

This commemorative act signifies a clear desire by the bereaved father to emphasise the deceased’s links to Wales and the Welsh language, and to maintain linguistic communion with his son beyond death, despite Iorwerth’s ostensibly English upbringing.

William Pugh Hinds, who died from wounds in February 1916, was the only son of the Blackheath draper and MP for West Carmarthenshire, John Hinds. Born and educated in Blackheath, Hinds was studying engineering at the Electrical Standardising, Testing, and Training Institution, London before he enlisted in November 1914. He served as an officer in France with the 15^th (1^st London Welsh) Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers (RWF), a unit deliberately set up to accommodate Londoners of Welsh heritage and enthusiastically sponsored by his father.

Within months of volunteering, Hinds was severely wounded by a sniper’s bullet. Just days before his death, he was visited in an emergency field hospital by the then Minister for Munitions, David Lloyd George. This encounter had such an impact on the politician that when he returned to London, he confided to his mistress, Frances Stevenson, ‘The horror of what I have seen has burnt into my soul, and has almost unnerved me for my work.’

Hinds’s death continued to haunt Lloyd George. When he returned to France in late 1916, he made a pilgrimage to Hinds’s grave at Merville Communal Cemetery, subsequently receiving a note of gratitude from Hinds MP that he ‘found time to visit our dear lad’s grave.’ As with E. T. John, Hinds selected a Welsh inscription for his offspring’s headstone: Yn Anghof Ni Chant Fod (They Will Not Be Forgotten), from the poem ‘Dyffryn Clwyd’, so that even in death he embraced his Londoner son in a Welsh martial identity.

The final MP’s son listed on the Recording Angel was William Glynne Charles Gladstone (William), also an MP in his own right. He was killed in 1915 whilst serving as an officer with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (RWF) in France. William was born at 41 Berkeley Square, London in 1885, the son of William Henry Gladstone MP, and grandson of the former Liberal Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone.

Like his grandfather, William embodied an attachment to both England and Wales, inheriting the family estate at Hawarden Castle, Flintshire when he was twenty-one. As the Squire of Hawarden, William encouraged those in the district to join up and military service in the RWF further deepened his ties with Wales. In April 1915, for example, William and his mother exchanged correspondence on an orphanage at Hawarden which was being used for RWF convalescent soldiers, the former writing, ‘Please let the Orphanage soldiers know that they can wander over the Park Woods and Old Castle in case they don’t do it.’

William maintained a connection with his Welsh home through discussion of his family’s patronage, on both military and domestic fronts, of RWF soldiers. Following his death, William was often characterised in obituaries as ‘a border hero’ whose life criss-crossed the boundaries between England and Wales; the Liverpool Post noting, ‘the border counties lost a true and devoted son in the late W G C Gladstone, of Hawarden.’

Notably, John, Hinds and Gladstone all served with Welsh regiments: the South Wales Borderers, the 15^th (London Welsh), and the Royal Welsh Fusiliers respectively. This suggests that within Welsh diasporic families in England, those of military age were often prompted by patrilineal ties to approach their military enlistment through the lens of Welshness, seeking to serve in a Welsh regiment.

Ultimately, the Recording Angel memorial is important in acknowledging the existence of English Welsh dualities within wartime memorialisation which, in turn, acts to shore up a sense of shared Britishness. The memorial also highlights the functioning of a form of militarized Welsh patriotism amongst the male diasporic elite, some of whom were MPs, which occasionally demanded the sacrifice of their own sons.

WU

Wendy’s seminar takes place on 3 June 2025, 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.