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

When the Tudor antiquarian, John Leland, visited the Shropshire church of Whitchurch in the 1530s, he saw the tomb of Sir Gilbert Talbot, a ‘knight of fame’, and noted, with apparent approval, that Talbot had brought the bones of his grandfather, the great soldier, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, from Castillon, where he had fallen in 1453, for reinternment in the church. Sir Gilbert did not have a career to compare with that of his famous ancestor; none the less, despite the disadvantage of being a younger son, he was a notable servant, as soldier, administrator, and diplomat, of three Kings, Edward IV and the first two Tudors. Such future success had appeared improbable in his boyhood. His father, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, had fallen in the Lancastrian cause in the battle of Northampton in July 1460, when Gilbert was about nine years old. Fortunately for the family, however, the new Yorkist King, Edward IV, was content for their lands to pass to Gilbert’s elder brother, another John, and, in the early 1470s, both brothers found places in Edward’s service, with the young Gilbert becoming one of the King’s cupbearers.

Gilbert’s career began in earnest with his elder brother’s death in June 1473 – in the mysterious words of Leland, ‘not without suspicion of poison’ – leaving as his heir a son, George, only five years old. This made Gilbert the effective head of the family during a long minority. As such, he led a retinue in the invasion of France in 1475, his first known military experience in what was to prove a long military career. He also advanced himself materially by marriage to a wealthy widow, as younger sons of leading families often did. In 1477 he married Elizabeth, widow of Thomas, Lord Scrope of Masham, and daughter of Ralph, Lord Greystoke, lord of the extensive lordship of Wem, about nine miles from the Talbot manor of Whitchurch.

Talbot’s prosperity was threatened by the deposition of Edward V.  He and the new King, Richard III, clearly distrusted each other. There was one obvious point of tension between them. Talbot’s stepson, Thomas, the new Lord Scrope of Masham, had been brought up in Richard’s household, and Talbot had every reason to consider this personal connexion a threat to his own wife’s interest in the Scrope lands. Probably more significant, however, was a more nebulous consideration. In constructing his title to the throne, the new King relied on the story of Edward IV’s alleged pre-contract with Gilbert’s paternal aunt, Eleanor, widow of Sir Thomas Butler of Sudeley (Gloucestershire). She had died in 1468, when Gilbert was only in his late teens, but there can be little doubt that the Talbots knew the truth (or otherwise) of the story. In this context, Gilbert can only have interpreted his removal from the Shropshire bench and the loss of his stewardship of the Talbot lordships of Blackmere and Whitchurch as evidence of the King’s hostility. 

His response was to return to his family’s earlier Lancastrian allegiance and enter communications with Henry Tudor. According to an admittedly rather doubtful source, The Song of Lady Bess, an early-modern narrative poem, there was a crucial meeting on 3 May 1485 at which he, alongside Tudor’s stepfather, Thomas, Lord Stanley, and others, firmly committed themselves to supporting Tudor. This story may be wrong in detail, but Talbot was certainly one of the first men of substance to join Henry after he landed at Milford Haven on the following 7 August. According to the Tudor chronicler, Polydore Vergil, he brought 500 men to Henry at Newport, about seven miles from the Talbot manor of Shifnal. He then went on to command the vanward of Henry’s army at the battle of Bosworth, where he was knighted.

Sir Gilbert’s reward was a place in the new King’s household, and, much more importantly, a grant of an inheritable estate in the valuable Worcestershire manor of Grafton.  These rewards were justified by further military service, both at home and abroad.

He fought for Henry at the battle of Stoke on 16 June 1487 and was there created a knight  banneret.  In June 1489 he was one of the commanders of the army, under the lieutenant of Calais, Giles Daubeney, Lord Daubeney, which repelled a Franco-Flemish force besieging the town of Diksmuide, some 50 miles to the east of the English garrison; and, in 1492, he joined with much of the political nation in the bloodless invasion of France. His military distinction was recognised in 1495 when he was admitted to the Order of the Garter, and he was again in arms in the autumn of 1497 to resist the unthreatening landing of Perkin Warbeck in Cornwall.  Later his status as soldier and courtier brought him an ambassadorial role. In February 1504 the King sent him to Rome to offer congratulations to the new Pope, Julius II, and to invest Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, with the Garter. The duke rewarded this service by commissioning Raphael, a native of Urbino, to paint an image of St. George adorned with the Garter, for presentation to his fellow Garter knight.

Not long after Sir Gilbert’s return from Rome, he was appointed as deputy-lieutenant of Calais, where he remained, on and off, for the remainder of his life.  As such, he took part in the 1513 invasion of France, commanded by his nephew, George, earl of Shrewsbury. A tantalising reference suggests that his service came at great personal cost. On 11 July it was reported that, during the siege of Thérouanne, some 30 miles south of Calais, the French artillery had done ‘great hurt’ to the besieging English camp. Talbot is said to have lost a leg and the chamberlain of the royal household, then Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert, to have been killed. In respect of Somerset’s death, the report was wrong, but it is possible that Talbot, who relinquished his Calais office soon afterwards, was severely injured.

On his death in August 1517, Sir Gilbert had an elaborate funeral, costing about £175, equivalent to the annual income of a substantial gentry family, before internment at Whitchurch (his tomb was lost when the church collapsed in 1711, rather ironically the year after his manor house at Grafton burnt down). He died a very wealthy man, in part because of the rewards of royal service but also because of his own entrepreneurial spirit.  His second wife, the widow of a London alderman and mercer, Richard Gardener, gave him an entrée into an élite commercial world, and he became a major wool merchant.  In the inventory taken on his death, his most valuable possession single possession was the store of wool he had at Calais, appraised at as much as £1850. In the longer context of the history of the comital family of Talbot, his successful career and his consequent establishment of a robust junior branch had great significance.  In 1618 his great-great-grandson, George, succeeded his childless fourth cousin, Edward Talbot, as earl of Shrewsbury.

SJP

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)

Political defections, commonly known in Westminster parlance as ‘Crossing the Floor’, have been a phenomenon in Parliament since at least the 17^th century. This has either happened en masse, as part of major schisms within pre-existing parties (such as the establishment of the Liberal Unionists in the late 19^th century, or the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and The Independent Group/Change UK in 2019), or on an individual level, motivated either by political issues of national significance, or as a result of local contexts. In the History of Parliament’s Oral History archive, multiple former MPs have recounted their decision to ‘cross the floor’ and change party affiliation. These were frequently extremely difficult decisions, often at huge personal cost, in some instances causing the end of long-term friendships or associations. They also frequently reflected major changes in British politics happening well beyond their immediate experiences.

Some MPs took the difficult decision to leave their party because of local issues, typically involving conflicts with their constituency parties. In 1973, Dick Taverne, the moderate Labour MP for Lincoln (1962-74), resigned the whip after his local party deselected him due to his pro-European views, particularly for voting in favour of the UK joining the European Economic Community (EEC).

Taverne would subsequently resign his seat to trigger a by-election, which he won under the ‘Democratic Labour’ label. It was the first time a candidate other than the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberals had won an English by-election in the post-war era. While Taverne’s parliamentary career after Labour was brief (he was defeated at the October 1974 general election by Labour’s Margaret Beckett), it anticipated later political events, most notably the defection of Labour’s ‘Gang of Four’ and the establishment of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. Taverne himself would join the SDP, and later stand again for Parliament (in Dulwich, unsuccessfully) in 1983, before becoming a Liberal Democrat peer in 1996. In 1977, Reg Prentice (Newham North-East, formerly East Ham North, 1957-79; Daventry, 1979-87) left the Labour Party due to similar local conflicts, but took the far more controversial decision of defecting directly to the Conservatives. He would later change constituencies and serve as a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s first government. Once again, Prentice’s defection partly showcased the various political divisions emerging within the Labour Party at the end of the 1970s.

Other defections were directly motivated by national political issues. In 1976, Scottish MPs Jim Sillars (South Ayrshire, 1970-79; Glasgow Govan, 1988-92) and John Robertson (Paisley, 1961-79) both resigned from Labour to set-up the ‘Scottish Labour Party’ (SLP). They were motivated by the issue of devolution, and frustration with the failure of the incumbent Labour government to establish a devolved Scottish Assembly with substantial economic powers.

While Sillars never regretted his decision to leave Labour and set up the SLP, he did admit that it was a ‘rush to the head’ and not fully thought through.  

Nevertheless, though the SLP ultimately enjoyed little electoral success, and was dissolved by 1981, Sillars and Robertson’s defections reflected the growing influence of Scottish nationalism in British politics, and anticipated the left-wing, pro-European form it would take in the following decades. In 1988 Sillars was returned to Parliament following a by-election in Glasgow Govan, this time standing as a candidate for the Scottish National Party (SNP), on a platform designed to outflank Labour from the left

Like other defections, Nicholson’s departure from the Conservatives reflected wider developments, but was also of notable personal significance, being the member of a very prominent Conservative family.  

Our interviews with both Sillars and Nicholson emphasise the emotional cost of leaving their parties. Party membership is more than a collection of people with shared political outlook; very deep relationships are made and it can be a key part of a politician’s identity.  For Sillars, leaving the Labour Party was ‘like a Catholic leaving the church […] it’s a tremendous trauma, personal trauma’ and the pressure really affected his health (he developed ulcers), his family and marriage. Nicholson described being ‘extremely angry’ with the Conservatives before she left. In part her defection was her response to feeling ‘bullied’ by the whips and a determination to resist that behaviour. Yet it was a decision she reached ‘very sadly, because I am intrinsically a Conservative.’

One of the most unusual political defections recounted in our project was that of Andrew Hunter. Having sat as the Conservative MP for Basingstoke since 1983, Hunter resigned the party whip in 2002, before joining the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in 2004. This was the first time an MP for a mainland British constituency represented a Northern Irish party since T.P. O’Connor, the Irish Nationalist MP for Liverpool Scotland (1885-1929). Hunter’s decision was motivated by conflicts with the Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, particularly over the party’s controversial links to the right-wing Monday Club (which Hunter supported), disillusionment with the Westminster system, and a desire to pursue a political career in Northern Ireland, owing to his long-standing connections to the DUP and wider unionist community, particularly the Orange Order.  

Unsurprisingly, many of these defections sparked outrage among their former colleagues. Sillars would describe the ‘vicious’ reaction he received, while others would describe being accused of opportunism, cowardice or treason. In some instances, the defectors’ new political allies were not always entirely welcoming either. Interestingly, in many cases these defections were explained as not due to any significant change in the views of the MPs themselves, but out of discontent with their former party’s trajectory. Versions of the phrase ‘I didn’t leave the party, the party left me’ was commonly used by Labour defectors to the SDP in the 1980s, as well as by Emma Nicholson in 1995. Indeed, while some of these defections proved permanent, such as in the case of the SDP or Sillars, others were ultimately temporary. In 2016, Emma Nicholson rejoined the Conservative Party ‘with tremendous pleasure’ (BBC News, 10 September 2016), while more recently, Luciana Berger, who left Labour to form The Independent Group/Change UK in 2019 and later joined the Lib Dems, now sits in the Lords as a Labour peer. Both instances suggest that while defections have often been dramatic and bitterly divisive, reconciliation has also occasionally been possible.

Ultimately, stories from our Oral History Project reveal that political defections are often highly personal decisions and experiences, but can also reflect wider political developments, and even play a role in shaping subsequent events.

A.S. & E.P.

Download ALT text for all audio clips here.

Further Reading

Andy Beckett, ‘Emma Nicholson: Not her sort of party’, Independent, 31 December 1995.

Tom Chidwick, ‘“Return Taverne”: 50 years on from the Lincoln by-election’, Mile End Institute blog, 1 March 2023

Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Geoff Horn, Crossing the Floor: Reg Prentice and the Crisis of British Social Democracy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

Ben Jackson, ‘From British Labourism to Scottish Nationalism: Jim Sillars’ Journey’, Scottish Affairs 31:2 (2022), pp.233-239.

Rebecca McKee and Jack Pannell, ‘MPs who change party allegiance’, Institute for Government blog, 12 March 2024.

Emma Peplow and Priscilla Pivatto, The Political Lives of Postwar MPs (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

During the early 19^th century the way debates and other goings-on in Parliament were reported and broadcast to the public underwent fundamental change. It was during this period that Hansard, the famous record of parliamentary speeches and proceedings, first became established, while daily accounts of discussions in both Houses began to occupy a prominent place in many leading newspapers.

Amazingly, this coverage of parliamentary debates not only occurred in contravention of the ‘official’ orders of the Commons, banning strangers and reporting, but also operated as a commercial venture. Aided by the huge public interest in issues such as the abolition of slavery, Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform, what went on in Parliament became big business. By the early 1830s an estimated 2 million people were reading parliamentary reports in the press, while Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates, launched in 1803 and taken over by Thomas Curson Hansard in 1812, sold sufficient copies to turn a reasonable profit, at least until the 1850s.

Not every attempt to cash in on the public interest in Parliament succeeded. Hansard reckoned that by 1829 he had already seen off ‘the greater part’ of 18 rival publications, ‘some promising to give a more condensed and some a more elongated account of the proceedings in Parliament’. The ill-fated Parliamentary Review, for example, rearranged all the debates by topic, providing background information and ‘critical essays’ analysing all the ‘measures discussed’ and arguments ‘on both sides of the question’. The extra work this involved, however, made it too expensive and out of date by the time it appeared.

Hansard’s approach, on the other hand, kept costs to a minimum. Rather than paying for his own reporters, Hansard concocted his account of the debates from the daily newspapers and with notes he sometimes received from MPs. His compilations, for that was what they really were, appeared in regular instalments which could later be bound together, rather than at the end of each session. His heavy reliance on the accuracy and selection criteria of the press reporters, however, was far from ideal. Debates on local or minor matters were often omitted, leading many MPs to complain, not least because of their growing need to satisfy constituency opinion. Worse still, speeches delivered late at night, after the reporters had left to file their copy, failed to get covered. Working conditions in the reporters’ gallery, as Kathryn Rix has shown, were also far from ideal and underwent major change.

Sensing a gap in the market, in 1828 Charles Dickens’ uncle, John Henry Barrow (1796-1858), a former lawyer turned journalist, launched the Mirror of Parliament. Unlike Hansard, Barrow not only employed his own dedicated team of reporters, but also paid them a ‘most liberal remuneration’ for each ‘turn’ in the press gallery. The debates that were later covered by his talented teenage nephew Charles Dickens, in particular, were singled out for praise by leading politicians, including Lord Stanley.

By 1831, at the height of the reform crisis, the Mirror had become ‘the highest extant authority’ of proceedings in Parliament. It wasn’t just that Barrow’s accounts of debates were much longer and closer to the original in terms of language and sentiment. Barrow also managed to cover far more speeches and include a broader range of MPs. The radical Henry Hunt’s brief Commons career is a case in point. Where Hansard printed 660 of his ‘speeches’, the Mirror recorded over 1,000.

By now, however, the Mirror was also in financial trouble. The main investor Henry Winchester MP pulled out after haemorrhaging ‘a considerable portion’ of £7,000 and although Frederick Gye, the famous owner of the pleasure grounds at Vauxhall Gardens, stepped in, within a few years he had also ‘lost a good deal of money’.

In 1834 the Mirror appealed to Parliament for financial assistance. The editor of The Times, however, was unimpressed. ‘That an individual who had embarked in the business of reporting for his own profit should throw the losses caused by his own unsuccessful management … upon the country… to the detriment of all other journalists [was] barefaced … impudence’, he declared.

The Commons agreed. A motion to support publication of an ‘authentic report of the debates arising in the House’ was defeated by 117 votes to 99. Although the Mirror managed to soldier on, reducing its reporters’ salaries and switching to a cheaper folio size, the writing was clearly on the wall. In 1841 it ceased operation.

Ironically, around the time that the Mirror of Parliament folded, the newspaper reports upon which Hansard relied so heavily for its commercial survival started to be replaced by a new form of coverage. By the late 1840s satirical and descriptive ‘sketches’ of parliamentary proceedings had begun to emerge as a staple of the rapidly expanding Victorian popular press.

This created an obvious problem for Hansard. With many newspapers eventually adopting some version of the ‘parliamentary sketch’, the number and range of press reports that Hansard was able to use to compile debates shrank. In 1862 the Morning Chronicle, which had continued to produce extensive daily coverage of debates, was forced to cease publication, leaving its arch-rival The Times as the pre-eminent source.

In this changing public atmosphere, and with its subscriptions falling, it was now Hansard that turned to Parliament for support. In 1855 the government agreed to purchase 100 copies for the various departments of state, providing a guaranteed annual income. In the late 1870s ministers agreed to subsidise coverage of the debates that the press usually ignored, and for the first time Hansard started to use its own reporters, rather than relying solely on newspaper reports.

Even this was not enough, however, and in 1888 Thomas Hansard junior (1813-91), who had been running the business since 1833,  retired and sold the entire operation to a new company, which reckoned it could produce an ‘authorised report’ without subsidy.

Over the next twenty years this venture and six successor operations, including one run by Reuters, all tried to succeed where Hansard had failed, and make a commercial success out of producing parliamentary debates. None of them succeeded. One even went bankrupt. In 1909 Parliament finally assumed responsibility for recording debates itself, employing its own staff of reporters and creating the department that continues to operate today.

P.S.

Details of the various historic Hansards available online can be found here. A BBC documentary about Charles Dickens and parliamentary reporting can be viewed here.

Further Reading:

J. Vice & S. Farrell, The History of Hansard (2017) VIEW

K. Rix, ‘ “Whatever passed in Parliament ought to be communicated to the public”: reporting the proceedings of the Reformed Commons, 1833-1850’, Parliamentary History (2014), xxxiii. 453-74

http://www.carolineshenton.co.uk/dickens-and-parliament/

E. Peplow, The Story of Parliament: Parliament and the press

P. Salmon, ‘The House of Commons, 1801-1911’, in A Short History of Parliament, ed. C. Jones (2009), 248-69 VIEW

A. Sparrow, Obscure Scribblers. A History of Parliamentary Journalism (2003)

M. H. Port, ‘The Official Record’, Parliamentary History (1990), ix. 175-83.

E. Brown, ‘John Henry Barrow and the Mirror of Parliament‘, Parliamentary Affairs (1956), lx. 311-23

H. Jordan, ‘The Reports of Parliamentary Debates, 1803-1908’, Economica (1931), xxxiv. 437-49

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 17 November 2017, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

Fenwick’s case was one of the consequences of the deposition of the Catholic James II and his replacement by the Protestant Dutch prince William III and his wife Mary (James’s daughter) in the Revolution of 1688. Over the next decade, English politics was overshadowed by James’s efforts, in collaboration with France’s King Louis XIV, to retrieve his throne. He was assisted by a number of English people, whose religious and political attitudes were revolted by the idea of the removal of a monarch, anointed by God. Many more who accepted the Revolution were nevertheless troubled by its implications for the constitution and government of the country, and although political divisions in the 1690s were far less clear than the two- or three-party divisions we know now, there was a broad gulf between those who believed that the Revolution was to be celebrated as a means of preserving the constitution and religion of England (‘Whigs’), and those who worried that it might threaten the survival of the Church of England and the integrity of the English monarchy (‘Tories’).

Fenwick – a man of whom it was once said that ‘his temper was good; but his headpiece was none of the best’ – was undoubtedly one of the Jacobite conspirators, although whether he posed a real threat to William III’s regime was another matter.  An officer in the Flanders campaigns of the 1670s, Fenwick had singularly failed to impress the then Prince William of Orange. At the Revolution with his career prospects blighted, he had resigned his commission in the army. He, with his wife (nicknamed ‘Lady Addleplot’ by the playwright Thomas D’Urfey) was involved as a second rank figure in various conspiracies in the early 1690s, from which he gained some unreliable knowledge about the contacts between James’s court and highly placed figures in William’s government. When a plot to assassinate William III was discovered in February 1696, Fenwick, like other Jacobites, went into hiding. Though he had opposed the assassination plot, there was enough in the evidence of two of those involved who had turned king’s evidence – George Porter and Cardell Goodman – to implicate him in a conspiracy to assist a French invasion. Having failed to bribe Porter to leave the country, Fenwick was captured in June 1696 trying to escape.

Fenwick offered to expose his fellow conspirators. He made a string of unsupported allegations about key members of the government and their contacts with the Jacobite court. William, abroad on the battlefield, gave the allegations little credence and was sure that Fenwick was simply playing for time, but back home the duke of Devonshire was shocked – and probably fearful that the king would blame him if the allegations proved to be true. His indecision allowed Fenwick’s trial to be repeatedly delayed – and allowed Goodman to disappear. There was now only one witness to Fenwick’s alleged treason; the law required two.

Under pressure from the king and with London full of wild speculation about whom Fenwick had implicated the government decided to deal with Fenwick’s claims head-on. On 6 November Admiral Russell, one of those named by Fenwick, with the permission of the king and backed by carefully primed members of the Whig party’s Rose Club, attempted to vindicate himself by laying Fenwick’s allegations before the Commons. They then introduced into the Commons a bill of attainder – a device that meant Fenwick could be declared guilty and sentenced to death by Act of Parliament, without the necessity to provide the two witnesses. The House accepted that Fenwick’s claims had little truth in them. Nevertheless, there was profound unease about proceedings that aped a trial but lacked any legal or evidential safeguards. Those doubts were reflected in the division lobbies: a majority of 92 for the first reading dwindled steadily. On the third reading, held on 25 November 1696, the majority was no more than 33: 189 votes to 156.

There is unfortunately no good account of the debates in the Commons– as there was no formal published report until very much later, we have to rely on informal notes or reports of debates in this period, and sadly none survive of the Fenwick debates. But even the terse official record of the House’s decisions, the Journal, shows that it was a stormy debate, with the House deciding after a vote to lock the doors to prevent anyone else entering. In the vote, Tories like Edward Jones and Fenwick’s fellow Northumbrian William Forster might have been expected to oppose the attainder; but so too did a number of Whigs, such as Ralph Warton and Nathaniel Bond. Even Lord Wharton (regarded by Tories as close to the devil incarnate) interpreted what happened in the Commons as no more than a pretence at ‘fair dealing’.

We know much more about what happened subsequently in the Lords, where, with the Christmas recess looming, Whig anxiety about the bill became increasingly obvious. In three days’ debate on the second reading of the bill in December the House recorded probably the highest attendances at any time between 1660 and 1714. Many peers had attended the debates in the Commons and were already familiar with the issues. Court Whigs argued that punishing Fenwick was a matter of necessity whilst Tories recited the objections to accepting a lower standard of proof than in a court of law, argued that allowing such a bill to start in the Commons undermined the Lords’ right to be the highest court in the land, and derided the government for being in ‘a very tottering condition, when for its preservation, it’s forced to leap over all our laws and fly to so extraordinary a method to take away the life of one poor man.’ The third reading was carried by just seven votes as even reliable government supporters deserted the cause. But the bill received the royal assent on 11 January. The king allowed Fenwick to be beheaded rather than suffer the ignominy of being hanged, and the sentence was carried out on Tower Hill on 28 January 1697.

PS

This is a revised version of the article ‘On this day: 25 November 1696, the passing of the bill of attainder against the Jacobite Sir John Fenwick’, 1798-1813′ by Dr Paul Seaward, originally posted on historyofparliamentonline.org.

Historically, cricketing terminology, with its allusions to ‘fair play’ and playing with a ‘straight bat’, has been a mainstay of British political discourse. This was certainly the case in the Victorian era. For example, in 1864, when the Conservative opposition brought forward a motion criticising the Liberal government’s response to the Schleswig-Holstein question, Lord Elcho, who believed the motion was politically motivated, argued that the Conservatives ‘think they have been fielding long enough, and that it is now their turn to have an innings’.

The link between the cricket pitch and the Victorian House of Commons becomes even stronger when we consider MPs who, away from the debating chamber, put on their ‘whites’ and stepped up to the crease to play in first class matches. So, in the spirit of the game, what follows is a First Eleven of cricketing MPs, elected between 1832 and 1868.

To open the batting is Henry Cecil Lowther, Conservative MP for Westmorland from 1812 until his death in 1867, when he was ‘Father of the House’. Lowther, ‘a tall man with a white beard and remarkably red face’, suffered from ‘extreme diffidence in public speaking’. Throughout a career that spanned over half a century he only spoke once in the Commons.  At the crease, however, his prowess was undoubted. He made 47 appearances in first class matches for Hampshire and Surrey, and was described as ‘a good steady batsman, forward in style’.

Lowther’s fellow opener is Edward Harbottle Grimston, Conservative Member for St Albans from 1835 to 1841. Like Lowther, Grimston’s silence in the Commons contrasted with a flair for batting. Regarded as ‘one of the best style of players ever seen’, Grimston appeared in 30 first class matches as a right-hand batsman between 1832 and 1847, playing for, amongst others, Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and the Gentlemen of England, and posting a highest score of 74 runs.

Not all cricketing MPs were silent and inactive in the Commons. At number 3 is John Henry Thomas Manners Sutton, Conservative MP for Cambridge, 1839-40 and 1841-47. The son of the former Speaker Charles Manners Sutton, he served in Robert Peel’s cabinet as Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department. Manners Sutton played ten matches for Cambridge University and the MCC between 1832 and 1836. Meanwhile, our fourth batsman, William Deedes, spoke in the Commons over 200 times as Conservative Member for East Kent from 1845 to 1862. In a brief but busy sporting career, he played first class matches for the MCC, Kent, Hampshire and Surrey.

Conservative county MPs make up our next three cricketers. William Bagge, an ‘affable, unostentatious country gentleman’ and staunch Protectionist who sat for Norfolk West, 1837-57 and 1865-80, played for Norfolk and the MCC, while Thomas De Grey, who represented the constituency with Bagge between 1865 and 1870, appeared for the MCC and the Gentleman of England. It is not known whether De Grey’s defensive skills were called into action at the 1865 general election when he was pelted at the hustings with hare-skins! Next up is Lord George Stanhope, MP for Nottinghamshire South from 1860 to 1866. His career in the Commons was unremarkable, but he appeared in five first class matches for Nottinghamshire and the Gentlemen of the North, with a batting average of 13.50. In 1870 he helped found Derbyshire Cricket Club, becoming its first president.

At 8 and 9 we have two brothers. William Thomas Spencer Wentworth Fitzwilliam (Viscount Milton), Liberal MP for Malton, 1837-41 and 1846-47, and Wicklow, 1847-57, and his younger brother Charles William Wentworth Fitzwilliam, Liberal MP for Malton, 1852-85. William, who employed a cricketing tutor, played for the United Eleven of England in a match at Dublin in 1854 and became president of the MCC in 1856, while Charles played one game for the MCC in 1849.

Finally, the Victorian Commons tail-enders comprise two MPs whose careers in the Commons and at the crease were equally perfunctory: Gervaise Tottenham Waldo Sibthorp, Conservative MP for Lincoln, 1856-6, who played four first class matches for Oxford University, and Walter Cecil Chetwynd Talbot, Conservative MP for County Waterford, 1859-65, and a noted sailor, who played one match for the MCC in 1851, scoring 9 runs.

So there we have the Victorian Commons First Eleven. Although the combined batting averages of the players is only 9.23 runs, it seems that in an age which witnessed a ‘rage for speaking’ in Commons, the majority of this team were more comfortable standing up to a bowler than standing up in the debating chamber.

The batting statistics for the MPs discussed in this article are taken from the website www.cricketarchive.com

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 10 July 2013, written by Dr James Owen. For another 19th-century cricketing MP, see https://victoriancommons.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/the-commons-and-cricket-charles-george-lyttelton-1842-1922/

The seminar takes place on 25 November 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

‘The Tartan rage has at length reached Paris,’ declared the World in June 1787. Demand for tartan fabric and accessories had swept British high society earlier that year, with the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser reporting in March that ‘the tartan plaid has obtained a complete triumph over every other ribband.’

Not everyone was pleased to see tartan becoming a fashion must-have: in March 1787 The Times archly commented that plaid ‘reminds us of the irritating constitutional disorder of its ancient wearers,’ a remark which highlights entrenched negative views of Scottish identity and history.

Some of this history was recent: during the Jacobite Rising of 1745, plaid had become indelibly intertwined with rebellion in many English minds. In the 1760s, tartan had developed a further negative connotation in England, being used in satirical images to identify the unpopular 3rd earl of Bute, a Scotsman who acted as Prime Minister between 1762 and 1763. In many of these prints (such as Figure 1) Bute was accused of advancing his fellow Scots at the expense of English politicians.

Despite its historic connotations in England, by the spring of 1787, every fashionable woman in London wanted to be seen with a bright plaid ribbon encircling her waist. Who was behind this Scottish fashion revolution?

Born the daughter of an impoverished baronet in Galloway, southwest Scotland, Jane Maxwell leapt up the social ladder when she wed Alexander, 4th duke of Gordon, in 1767. Having spent her teenage years rubbing shoulders with leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh, Jane’s social acumen saw her rise to become one of Georgian Britain’s foremost society hostesses, alongside her friend and rival, Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire.

Where Georgiana supported the Opposition, Jane was a supporter of the government, led by William Pitt the Younger. Nathaniel Wraxall, a writer and politician, remarked that Pitt’s government ‘did not possess a more active or determined partisan’ than the duchess of Gordon. 

Having already cultivated her reputation as a leading society hostess and patroness in Scotland, in the mid-1780s Jane began to spend more time in London, where she astonished contemporaries with her hectic social calendar. After recounting a long list of Jane’s activities on a single day, the writer Horace Walpole remarked: ‘Hercules could not have achieved a quarter of her labours in the same space of time.’ Jane also hosted many gatherings of her own and she quickly established her reputation as a leading society hostess in the capital.

Society hostesses like Jane participated in what Elaine Chalus has called ‘social politics’. Namely, ‘the management of people and social situations for political ends’. Social politics gave aristocratic women the chance to participate in a political system from which they were officially excluded. For these women, the home was an important site of political networking. Outside the halls of Parliament, balls, visits, and dinners were opportunities for political discussion and alliances to flourish. 

Jane was best known for hosting ‘routs’, gatherings which were more informal than balls, but which also tended to feature dancing, card-playing, and plenty of gossip. At these events, Jane’s guest lists comprised individuals from the highest echelons of British society, including the Prince of Wales and his brothers. One of Jane’s most extravagant events took place in February 1799, when the Courier reported that she had hosted ‘between five and six hundred personages of the highest rank and fashion’ at her home in Piccadilly.

When the trend for tartan swept London’s high society in 1787, it was evident that the duchess of Gordon was responsible. Jane continued to incorporate tartan elements in her clothing, including at Court celebrations for Queen Charlotte’s birthday in 1788, and again in 1792. At the latter event, Jane wore a tartan gown made from Spitalfields silk, setting off yet another frenzy for tartan in the capital.

Five months later, Isaac Cruikshank produced a print titled ‘A Tartan Belle of 1792’ (see Figure 2). It showed a lady (probably Jane herself) bedecked in tartan fabric. Far from a simple fashion statement, Jane’s endorsement of tartan was part of a wider campaign to popularize Scottish identity and culture.

Jane distinguished herself from rival society hostesses by placing her Scottish identity front and centre at her events. In May 1787, The Times reported that 500 guests of the first rank were invited to a ‘tartan ball and supper’ at Jane’s London residence.

At Jane’s parties, Highland dancing and music were the main entertainments, and guests were encouraged to wear ‘Highland’ dress. The trend for tartan among aristocratic women eventually spread to the men. In June 1789, the Star and Evening Advertiser reported that the Prince of Wales would ‘shortly appear in Highland dress’ at an upcoming ball. 

Jane’s persistent assertions of her Scottish identity through fashion had provoked criticism in some quarters, yet her advocacy for Scottish dance was viewed in a more positive light. In October 1808 La Belle Assemblée or Court and Fashionable Magazine praised Jane for making Highland dancing popular at high society events, because it discouraged people from gambling in high-stakes card games.

The popularity of Scottish dance was undeniable and many other society hostesses began to integrate reels and strathspeys into their events. Scottish dancing even received the royal seal of approval. In 1799, Jane’s two eldest children were asked to perform in front of the king and queen at a fête at Oatlands Palace.

By blending her Scottish identity with her role as a society hostess, Jane helped to shift preconceived notions of Scottishness in Georgian England. Once viewed as symbols of rebellion, markers of Scottish identity like tartan and Highland dancing became fashionable in London’s high society thanks to the influence of the duchess of Gordon.

NG

Natalee’s seminar takes place on 25 November 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Further reading:

E. Chalus, ‘Elite Women, Social Politics, and the Political World of Late Eighteenth-Century England’, The Historical Journal 43:3 (Sep. 2000), 669-697

W. S. Lewis (ed.), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols (1937-83)

H. Wheatley (ed.), The Historical and the Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, 5 vols (1884)

The devastating fire at the Palace of Westminster on 16 October 1834 made the House of Commons chamber in the former St. Stephen’s Chapel unusable. The need to prorogue Parliament a week later – amid the still smouldering ruins – prompted makeshift arrangements for both the Commons and the Lords. The small number of MPs who attended gathered in one of the surviving Lords committee rooms, before going to meet the peers in what had been the House of Lords library. A further prorogation in the Lords library took place on 18 December 1834.

By the time Parliament reassembled in February 1835, the Commons and the Lords had both been provided with far more adequate temporary accommodation, which in the case of the Commons would be in use for the next 17 years. This was rather longer than anticipated, due to the delays which beset the building of the new Palace of Westminster designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin. Some of these delays were exacerbated by the difficulties of constructing new buildings on a site still being occupied by MPs and peers in their temporary accommodation.

In the wake of the 1834 fire, the possibility of moving MPs and peers elsewhere was discussed, and several alternative locations were mooted, including St. James’s Palace, the Banqueting House in Whitehall, or Exeter Hall, a large public meeting venue on the Strand. William IV offered the recently renovated Buckingham Palace, which he apparently disliked and never moved into, as a possible solution. There were, however, strong objections to this. Its location was considered a major disadvantage: one London newspaper described it as ‘quite out of the way of all business – inconvenient of access’. In addition, it would require a substantial amount of internal remodelling to suit the requirements of parliamentarians, a process which would mean undoing much of the work recently completed at significant public expense. The government tactfully resisted the king’s attempt to foist Buckingham Palace on them.

Instead, plans to rehome MPs and peers at Westminster were rapidly drawn up by Sir Robert Smirke, an architect connected with the Office of Woods and Forests, who had been overseeing repairs to Westminster Hall when the fire took place. The House of Commons would use the building previously occupied by the House of Lords as its chamber, while the upper House was displaced into the Painted Chamber. These rooms had both been damaged by the fire and required considerable renovation work, but this began swiftly. Scaffolding was in place on the interior and exterior walls of the former House of Lords less than two weeks after the fire, in preparation for its conversion into temporary accommodation for MPs. By early November, between 300 and 400 workmen were on site roofing the two temporary chambers.

On 19 February 1835, when Parliament assembled at Westminster after a change of government – Viscount Melbourne’s Whig ministry had been replaced by Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative administration – and a general election, the temporary accommodation was ready. This speedy construction was aided by working at night, the use of prefabricated timber and iron girders, and short-cuts such as papier mâché for the ornamental mouldings. The Times gave ‘the highest credit’ to Smirke, who within the limited space allocated had provided ‘accommodation to a much greater extent than could … have been anticipated’.

The temporary Commons chamber now included the space which had been behind the throne for the king’s robing room when this building had been the House of Lords. At the opposite end of the House, space was taken out for the lobby, which was made considerably larger than that formerly used by the Lords. The strangers’ gallery was erected above this lobby, roughly where the gallery of the Lords had been, and ‘spacious galleries’ for members were erected on the two long sides of the building.

One ‘most important’ feature, according to The Times, which it had not been possible to incorporate within the confined space of the pre-1834 Commons chamber, was a dedicated reporters’ gallery above the Speaker’s chair, with its own separate entrance. In the old chamber, reporters had been allocated the back row of the strangers’ gallery, but often found themselves jostling with members of the public for seats. Their new gallery recognised the growing significance of the press in reporting on parliamentary proceedings.

Initial reactions to the temporary Commons chamber were, like that of The Times, generally positive. The Sun described it as ‘perhaps one of the most elegant specimens of taste’, noting the oak seats covered with green Spanish leather, and the ‘simple but most graceful elegance’ of the galleries. While its plainness led some later observers to compare it to ‘a railway station’, ‘a Primitive Methodist chapel’, ‘a hideous barn’ or ‘a wooden shanty’, its ‘conspicuously neat and simple’ style was widely regarded as an advantage. As one guide to London observed, the lack of ornamentation and draperies showed that this was ‘a place of business’.

The temporary chamber also had the major benefit of being able to accommodate a greater number of MPs than their previous one. According to a statement in the Commons in May 1850, it had room for 456 MPs (including in the galleries), in contrast with the 387 who could find a seat in the old chamber. John Cam Hobhouse, who as First Commissioner of Woods and Forests in the Melbourne ministry had been involved with planning the temporary accommodation, recorded in his diary on the opening day of the 1835 Parliament that he ‘was much pleased with what I had some right to call my new temporary House of Commons’. The MP for Bath, John Arthur Roebuck, declared that ‘compared with the old, ugly place, it is a beautiful and commodious room’. The diarist Charles Greville felt that MPs had got the better side of the bargain when it came to their temporary accommodation, contrasting their ‘very spacious and convenient’ chamber with the ‘wretched dog-hole’ provided for the Lords. The temporary Commons was not without its flaws, however, and there were alterations in subsequent years to improve its acoustics, ventilation and lighting.

In addition, questions were raised about the costs of the temporary accommodation. In June 1835, the Commons was asked to approve expenditure of £30,000 for the temporary buildings and £14,000 for ‘furniture and other necessary articles’. The latter was deemed ‘scandalously extravagant’ by one MP, who protested that ‘the country was called upon to pay upwards of 10,000l. for nothing but a parcel of deal tables and a few rusty old chairs’. The ‘utter absurdity’ of money being ‘squandered’ on temporarily patching up parts of the old Palace, on a site which would need to be built on as work on the new Palace progressed, was highlighted in the press. One Warwickshire newspaper drew an unfavourable comparison between the £28,000 cost of Birmingham’s new town hall, a building large enough to hold the members of both Houses, and the expenditure at Westminster. Allegations that this was ‘a job’ by Smirke were given added fuel by the fact that one of the two main contractors for the temporary accommodation, Messrs. Samuel Baker & Son, were related to Smirke by marriage.

As the temporary accommodation – not only the Commons chamber, but other facilities such as the committee rooms – continued to evolve and to require repair and maintenance over the next 17 years, the costs grew. In 1848, a select committee reported that £185,248 had so far been spent on temporary accommodation for the Lords and the Commons, ‘of which very little will be available for future service’. It argued that this ongoing expenditure was one reason to accelerate the completion of the new Palace. It would be another three years, however, before preparations were finally made in August 1851 to demolish the temporary Commons chamber.

Further reading:

C. Shenton, The Day Parliament Burned Down (2012)

J. Mordaunt Crook & M. H. Port, The History of the King’s Works. Volume VI 1782-1851 (1973)

See also this post by Rebekah Moore which discusses the temporary Commons.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 28 October 2022, written by Dr Kathryn Rix.

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.