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

In 1760 Thomas Worsley of Hovingham, a close friend of George III’s favourite, the earl of Bute, penned a letter to his friend and patron insisting on his family’s antiquity. In their possession, he claimed, were ‘authentic documents of coming over with William the Conquerer’. Worsley’s concern to prove that he was no johnny-come-lately had originally been seen when he was appointed to the privy chamber back in the 1730s, but he was still clearly concerned to emphasise his suitability at the time of his appointment as surveyor general of the king’s works (thanks to Bute).

He had nothing to worry about. The Worsleys were an old family, who could trace their ownership of estates in Lancashire to at least the 14th century. Another branch of the family, ultimately settled in Hampshire (and on the Isle of Wight), produced a parliamentary dynasty of their own.

Supporting Thomas Worsley’s assertion of descent from a companion of William the Conqueror were accounts in ‘ancient chronicles’ recording the family’s progenitor as the giant Sir Elias de Workesley, who had followed Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, on ‘crusade’. The 1533 Visitation of Lancashire referred to this character as Elias, surnamed Gigas on account of his massive proportions, and suggested he was a contemporary of William I.

It took some time for the northern Worsleys to establish themselves but by the 15th century a number of distinguished figures had already emerged. The marriage of Seth Worsley to Margaret Booth linked the family to two archbishops of York, Margaret’s uncles, William Booth (archbishop 1452-64) and Lawrence Booth (1476-80). Their son, William, later became dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and towards the end of his life became caught up in the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, for which he was sent to the Tower.

William Worsley may have conspired against Henry VII, but by the 16th century other members of the family had managed to establish themselves on the fringes of the Tudor court in the retinue of the earl of Derby and it seems to have been thanks to the 3rd earl (Edward Stanley) that Sir Robert Worsley was returned to Parliament in 1553 as knight of the shire for Lancashire. Nine years earlier, he had been knighted at Leith in recognition of his services in the English army. Worsley’s return in 1553 seems to have been somewhat accidental, only occurring as a result of a by-election after one of the other recently elected members had declared himself too ill to serve. By becoming one of the Lancashire knights of the shire, Worsley was following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Thurstan Tyldesley, who had been elected to the same seat in 1547.

Sir Robert’s son, another Robert, continued the family tradition of following the Derbys by attaching himself to the retinue of the 4th earl (Henry Stanley). A passionate Protestant, as keeper of the gaol at Salford he had numerous recusant (Catholic) prisoners in his care, whom he tried to persuade away from their faith by organising time dedicated to reading from the Bible. How successful that policy was is uncertain, but he found the burden of his role intolerable and by the end of his life he had lost all of his principal estates in Lancashire. Like his father, he seems to have owed his election to Parliament to his patron, Derby, though in his case he was returned for the Cornish borough of Callington.

The best part of a century passed before another Worsley was returned to the Commons. In the interim, having lost their original estates, the family had relocated to Hovingham, near Malton in North Yorkshire. The manor had been acquired by Sir Robert Worsley in 1563 from Sir Thomas Gerard, and the connection was reinforced by the subsequent marriage of the younger Robert to Gerard’s daughter, Elizabeth. In 1685, it was one of the Hovingham Worsleys, Thomas (great-great-grandson of Robert and Elizabeth), who succeeded in being returned for Parliament, where he proved to be ‘totally inactive’.

Inactive he may have been, but this did not prevent him from making his views clear to the lord lieutenant when he was faced with the ‘Three Questions’, framed to tease out opposition to James II’s policies. In response to them he insisted that he would ‘go free into the House, and give my vote as my judgment and reason shall direct when I hear the debates’. This was not at all the response required by the king’s officials, and he was removed from his local offices. He regained them shortly after at the Revolution but it was not until 1698 that he was re-elected to Parliament, again for Malton. In 1712 he was removed from local office again, this time probably on account of his Whiggery.

The older Thomas lived to see the Hanoverian accession, which he doubtless welcomed. Three years before that his son (another Thomas) had been returned to Parliament as one of the Members for Thirsk, after failed attempts in 1708 and 1710. This Thomas Worsley also seems to have played little or no role in the Commons. This was perhaps ironic, given that his marriage to Mary Frankland linked him directly to Oliver Cromwell. Efforts by his father to secure him a government post through the patronage of the earl of Carlisle came to nothing.

The trio of Thomas Worsleys in Parliament was completed by the election for Orford of the second Thomas’s son in 1761. It was this Thomas Worsley, the friend of Bute, who had been so concerned to prove his family’s antiquity. Although he was to sit first for Orford and then (like his forebear, Robert) for Callington, Parliament was not Thomas’s passion. Rather, his interests lay in equestrianism, collecting and architecture. His true claim to fame was rebuilding the family seat at Hovingham, creating the elegant Georgian house that endures to this day, but his dedication to horseflesh was equally strong and he seems to have looked out for suitable mounts for his contacts, the king among them. Writing to Sir James Lowther, 5th bt. (future earl of Lonsdale) in 1763, he mentioned trying out one of Lowther’s horses in front of the king and queen. They liked the animal, but concluded it was not ‘strong enough to carry [the king’s] weight’. [HMC Lonsdale, 132]

Thomas Worsley died in December 1778 at his London residence in Scotland Yard. [Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1778] Just a few months before, he had been contacted by the duke of Ancaster, the lord great chamberlain, requiring him to see to the repair of the House of Lords, which was reported to be ‘in bad condition’. [PA, LGC/5/1, f. 279] By then, he was probably in no fit state to oversee the work.

This Thomas seems to have been the last member of his family to show much interest in national politics until the 20th century. His eldest son, another Thomas, had died four years before him, leaving the inheritance to a younger son, Edward. In 1838 Edward’s nephew, Sir William Worsley, was created a baronet but his interests appear to have been largely confined to his immediate surroundings in North Yorkshire. The 4th baronet was a talented cricketer, serving as captain of Yorkshire, as well as president of the MCC. It was his son, Sir Marcus Worsley, 5th bt., who finally broke the family duck and returned to Parliament, first as MP for Keighley and latterly for Chelsea. In November 1969 he presented a bill to encourage the preservation of collections of manuscripts by controlling and regulating their export. His other chief preoccupation was as one of the church commissioners.

The late duchess of Kent was Sir Marcus’s younger sister. She continued the family’s long tradition of interest in sport (in her case tennis) and quiet dedication to their locality.

RDEE

Further reading
Estate and Household Accounts of William Worsley, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral 1479-1497 (Richard III & Yorkist Trust and London Record Society, 2004), ed. H. Kleineke and S. Hovland
VCH Yorkshire North Riding, volume one
Visitation of Lancashire and a part of Cheshire, 1533, ed. William Langton (Chetham Soc. 1876)

It is a familiar theme in medieval chronicles, whether monkish or secular, that extreme weather, natural disaster or even just unusual events were, or, at least, could be interpreted as, manifestations of divine interaction with the temporal world. At the most extreme, they were seen as expressions of God’s displeasure, as punishment for some recent transgression. The chronicle of Henry Knighton (d.c.1396), a monk in Augustinian abbey of St. Mary, Leicester, provides a diverting and unsubtle example. He writes, with strong disapproval, of a recent and remarkable development. In the late 1340s troops of women, sometimes as many as 50, had taken to travelling to tournaments, riding on fine horses and ‘dressed in men’s clothes of striking richness and variety’. These women, disparagingly described as, ‘hardly of the kingdom’s better sort’, ‘wantonly with disgraceful lubricity displayed their bodies’.  From Knighton’s point of view, however, the story had a happy ending: God ‘had a marvellous remedy to dispel their wantonness’, visiting great storms upon them (Knighton’s Chronicle, ed. G.H. Martin, p. 93).  Such specific connexions were, however, rarely drawn. Much more commonly, extreme events were seen as portent rather than punishment, as predictors of some upcoming misfortune in human affairs. Curiously, one of these concerns Parliament. The Monk of Westminster relates that, on 1 February 1388 near Abingdon, the bed of the Thames was empty of water for the length of a bowshot and remained so for an hour, ‘conveying a striking omen of events that were to follow’.  He then, although without making the connexion explicit, describes in detail the violent and disturbing events of the ‘Merciless Parliament’ that began two days later (Westminster Chronicle, ed. L.C. Hector and B.F. Harvey, p.234). 

Such examples could be multiplied, but it is worth asking whether the chroniclers were as credulous and unthinking as they appear to the modern observer.  One may doubt whether the Monk of Westminster really believed that a lack of water in the Thames was a predictor of grave parliamentary events, the juxtaposition looks more like a literary device to relate human to natural events.  He was usually content simply to describe the most extreme natural phenomena free of the overt implication that they were omens. He was not moved to speculate even on the meaning of the ‘amazing marvels’ seen in Cheshire on 1 August 1388 when ‘the heavens were seen to open and angels carrying lights to flit about in the air’. This far-from sinister apparition encapsulates a difficulty chroniclers had in interpreting omens.  Imaginatively, within the thought processes of the time, it was just about coherent to see some grave natural disasters as a harbinger of some more general crisis in human affairs; it was less easy (or at least chroniclers were less ready) to see some positive natural event, like the apparent appearance of angels, as portending some happy one. Thomas Walsingham, the most sophisticated of the monastic chroniclers of the late-medieval period, overcame this difficulty by offering both positive and negative interpretations.  His account of two major political events shows his interpretative ingenuity. He reports that, as Anne of Bohemia arrived at Dover in December 1381 (for her marriage to Richard II), a sudden ‘disturbance of the sea’ caused the ship she had come in to be dashed to pieces, just after its passengers had safely alighted. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some thought this a forecast of future misfortune; others, however, took the view that it ‘showed the favour of God and presaged future happiness for the land’. Walsingham concluded that, ‘Subsequent events will show why it was a dark, perplexing omen of doubtful meaning’ (Chronica Maiora, ed. D. Preest, pp. 170-1). The same duality is apparent in his account of another event.  Although Henry V’s coronation took place in the spring, Walsingham reports that, to everyone’s surprise, there was a great fall of show.  Some feared that this harsh weather presaged an unhappy fate, for the new King ‘would be a man of cold deeds and severe in his management of the kingdom’; but others believed it to be the ‘best of omens’, predicting that the new King ‘would cause to fall upon the land snowstorms which would freeze vice and allow the fair fruits of virtue to spring up’ (p.389).

On this evidence, one must wonder whether these monastic chroniclers believed that portents, as manifestations of divine intervention in the real world, could be meaningfully discerned. Although Knighton seems to have thought that God was ready to punish female jousters by visiting storms upon them, this was an isolated expression of a belief in God’s active intervention.  Like the Monk of Westminster, he was generally content to report extreme natural events, like a fatal heatwave in Calais in August 1347, without seeking to draw any lessons from them. Walsingham, although clearly ready to believe in portents, was so playful in his interpretation of them as to reduce them almost to meaninglessness. Characteristically, he could also employ them as expressions of his own prejudices. He was hostile to the Welsh rebel leader, Owain Glyndwr, and was thus happy to report the ‘dreadful omens’ that were said to have attended his birth, namely that his father’s stables became flooded with blood. Prejudice of a different sort probably informed Knighton’s story of the female jousters.  He did not really believe that they were punished by God; he was rather claiming divine endorsement for the sexual and social prejudices of the cloister.

S.J.P.

Every 30 January, the rhythm of the parliamentary session in the 17th and 18th centuries was adjusted to make way for the annual commemoration sermon, marking the death of Charles I in 1649. It usually fell to the most junior of the bishops to preach to the Lords in Westminster Abbey, while a senior member of the clergy would perform the same service for the Commons in St Margaret’s. Themed as they were around the subject of expiation for the sins of the nation, the sermons became steadily less well attended as the years went by and by the second half of the 18th century some, like John Wilkes, thought that they should be scrapped and replaced with a day of national rejoicing. Wilkes always made a point of staying away from the chamber on 30 January.

In a similar (though more celebratory) way, the date of the current monarch’s accession was also the occasion for the Members decamping from their chambers and heading across the way to listen to a sermon. For those living under George I, this took place on 1 August and the very first anniversary of his accession in 1715 was marked with an address by the newly minted bishop of Oxford, John Potter (1673/4-1747).

Potter’s background was unusual, though not entirely unique, for an 18th-century bishop. His father had been a linen draper in Wakefield and, more to the point, had been a nonconformist. Potter had been raised as such and educated at the local grammar school (now one of the constituent parts of the Wakefield Grammar School Foundation). From there he proceeded to Oxford, where he transformed himself into a high church Anglican, much to his father’s disgust. Although high church, and with a particular interest in patristics (the study of the early church), Potter remained a confirmed Whig and quickly attracted patronage from some extremely influential people.

From University College, where he had been an undergraduate, Potter proceeded to Lincoln College as a fellow and in 1699, the year of his ordination to the priesthood, he was appointed one of the chaplains to Bishop Hough of Lichfield and Coventry. In 1704, he traded up becoming one of Archbishop Tenison’s chaplains and was thought so closely tied to Tenison that he was known as his ‘darling scribbler’. Two years later, he achieved the key promotion to royal chaplain.

As a clergyman at Court and with close connexions to Oxford, it is perhaps not surprising that he came to the notice of the duke and duchess of Marlborough, and when the regius professorship of divinity became vacant at Oxford, he was their candidate for the place. In his way was the rival claim of George Smalridge, backed by Robert Harley and others, but in the end the Marlboroughs won out (as was so often the case) and in 1708 Potter became Professor Potter.

For the next few years, Potter focused his attentions on his role at the university, never apparently being considered seriously for any of the vacant bishoprics that came up. Indeed, in 1714 it was Smalridge who was promoted first, taking on the poverty-stricken bishopric of Bristol. However, soon after the accession of George I another opportunity arose following the death of Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury. Thus, when Bishop Talbot of Oxford was translated to Burnet’s vacant see, Potter was appointed to replace him at Oxford.

Potter’s 1 August sermon was his first major opportunity to make his mark in his new role. Unsurprisingly, he attracted criticism from Jacobite Tory opponents like Thomas Hearne, at that point still in post as one of the librarians at the Bodleian, but soon to be forced out as he was unwilling to take the oaths to George I. Recording the sermon a few weeks later, Hearne noted that it had been preached by ‘our present sneaking, poor-spirited, cringing, whiggish bishop’. The content, he thought, was ‘vile, silly, injudicious, illiterate, & roguish stuff, sufficiently showing what the author is’. [Hearne, v. 122] Hearne never lost an opportunity of deriding Potter using terms like ‘snivelling’ or ‘white-livered’ to describe him. [Hearne, vi. 123; ix. 360]

Potter’s chosen text was Psalm 20, verse 5: ‘We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of our God we will set up our banners’. His theme, obviously enough, was the blessings the nation had received by the peaceful succession of the House of Hanover, and how narrowly they had avoided the prospect of civil war. Not only was the nation peaceful, he urged but he may also have had half a mind on his own significant progress when he argued:

Neither can there be any just complaint, that arts and industry, virtue and public services want suitable encouragement; where the way lies open for ever man to advance himself to the highest honours and preferments and after he hath enjoyed the fruits of all his labour in his own person, there is as great certainty… that he shall transmit them entire to his posterity…

As well as lauding the prospect before them under the house of Hanover, Potter also allowed himself some predictable venting against the horrors of life under a Catholic sovereign. Even other religions, he suggested, might be ‘kind and merciful’. He also trotted out the familiar theme of the importance of divine providence in settling King George among them.

Over the next few years, Potter developed his role in the Church, becoming a close associate of William Wake, archbishop of Canterbury, and co-operating with him closely in opposing two pieces of government-backed legislation. He attracted attention for wading into the ‘Bangorian controversy’, criticizing the apparent Arianism of Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Bangor. Even Hearne had to acknowledge that he did so ‘very deservedly’. [Hearne, vii. 82] He also became close to the Princess of Wales, the future Queen Caroline.

When George I died it was widely rumoured that Potter would be promoted to Bath and Wells. Although that proved not to be the case (he seems to have turned the promotion down) he was the person selected to preach the new king and queen’s coronation sermon in October 1727. Controversially, for a Whig, he used high church terminology to justify George’s claim to the throne by hereditary right. [Smith, 37] More controversially, for a Whig, he also emphasized the need for the new king’s subjects to give their ‘entire submission to his authority’.

It was to be another decade before Potter was finally rewarded with a richer diocese. On Wake’s death in 1737, it was Potter who became Archbishop of Canterbury, rather than Bishop Hare of Chichester, backed by Sir Robert Walpole. The translation was widely attributed to the queen’s personal intervention and came just a few months before her death later that year.

Potter may not be the best-remembered of 18th-century bishops, or indeed a particularly memorable Archbishop of Canterbury. Much more attention is paid to his younger son, Thomas, a Member of Parliament, associate of the so-called Hellfire Club and a generally archetypal Georgian rake. But Potter was important in showing that the Church of England was able to adapt in the period, adopt language used by the Jacobites to justify the Hanoverian monarchy and was open to advancing the son of a Yorkshire linen draper, and a nonconformist one at that, to the highest place in the Church.

RDEE

Further reading:
J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688-1832
Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. C.E. Doble
Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714-1760
The Theological Works of the most reverend Dr John Potter, late Archbishop of Canterbury

In March 1559, Elizabeth I’s government had a serious problem on its hands. The first Parliament of the reign had been meeting for two months, but the crown’s flagship legislation to bring back Protestantism had run into trouble. With some difficulty, a bill had been passed to restore the royal supremacy over the Church, but the powers granted fell short of what Elizabeth wanted, while plans for reviving Protestant worship had stalled. The House of Commons was broadly in favour of these changes, but in the Lords, where committed Protestants were in the minority, the Catholic bishops were very effectively obstructing the government programme. As the Protestant observer John Jewel reported on 20 March:

the bishops are a great hindrance to us; for being … among the nobility and leading men in the upper House, and having none there on our side to expose their artifices … they reign as sole monarchs in the midst of ignorant and weak men, and easily overreach our little party, either by their numbers or their reputation for learning. (Zurich Letters ed. H. Robinson (Parker Society, 1842), 10-11)

By this point, the situation was so bad that Elizabeth was seriously contemplating an early dissolution of Parliament, so that she could use her new powers to deprive the existing bishops and appoint new Protestant ones, before pressing on with the reform programme. In the event, the queen decided against this course, but action was clearly needed to weaken the bishops’ hold over the lay peers.

The government’s solution was to arrange a public conference or disputation between two panels of Catholic clergy and Protestant divines. According to a subsequent official account of this exercise, the objective was to thrash out differences of opinion about religion, and reach agreement on the best way forward for the Church. In reality, the government’s objective was to discredit the bishops, and sway public opinion in favour of Protestantism. From the outset, everything possible was done to place the Catholic participants at a disadvantage. Their leader in the Lords, the widely respected Nicholas Heath, archbishop of York, was appointed to help preside over the disputation in his capacity as a privy councillor, a move which would effectively sideline him during the debates. Similarly, the three propositions which the Privy Council selected for discussion were all designed to win support for the government’s reform programme: that church services should be conducted in the vernacular tongue rather than in the traditional Latin, which most congregations didn’t understand; that national Churches had the power to alter the format and content of services; and that the Catholic doctrine of the sacrificial mass was not based on the teachings of the bible.

There’s some confusion over exactly how many people took part in the disputation, though there seem to have been eight or nine men on each side. The Catholic camp comprised a mix of bishops and other senior clergy, while the Protestant delegation was made up almost exclusively of clerics who had spent Mary I’s reign in exile on the continent. In effect, they represented the existing and prospective hierarchies of the English Church. The Catholics wanted to debate in Latin, which would have made it harder for the audience to follow the arguments, but the government insisted on proceedings being conducted in English, and selected the spacious Westminster Abbey as the venue, to allow as many people as possible to attend. As expected, a substantial number of lay peers turned up, precisely the individuals whom the government most wanted to influence.

Perceiving that the odds were stacked heavily against them, the Catholic camp looked for ways to sabotage the debates. The Privy Council had ruled that each side should prepare a written statement on each proposition, which would be circulated in advance to the opposing group, and read out on the day. The Protestants seem to have stuck to this format, but the Catholics chose not to cooperate. Invited to open debate on the first day of the conference, 31 March, they claimed that they’d misunderstood the rules, and therefore didn’t have a written statement to present. Instead, Henry Cole, dean of St Paul’s cathedral, launched into a violent and colourful diatribe against Protestantism in general, before finally sketching out the Catholic position on the correct language for worship, essentially defending the use of Latin by appealing to tradition. Once Cole had finished, his opponent Robert Horne read out a learned argument in favour of the local vernacular, with copious references to the bible and early Christian writings. Horne prefaced his remarks with a lengthy prayer appealing to God to reveal the true way forward. As this prayer was introduced, all the privy councillors present except Archbishop Heath fell to their knees, further demonstrating which side the government favoured. Once Horne had finished presenting the Protestant case, the Catholic disputants asked to respond, but were told to wait until the next debate, three days later.

When the conference resumed on 3 April, the Catholic camp tried to pick up where they’d left off, but were informed that they must first set out their arguments on the second proposition, concerning the power of national churches to modify their liturgies. However, the bishops began to complain that they were being treated unfairly, and the conference rapidly descended into a row over the format of the disputation. Recognising that if the Protestants always spoke second, their arguments were likely to carry more weight with the audience, the Catholics called for the order of debate be switched around. When this demand was rejected, the bishops again tried to change the topic, asserting that they represented the true Church, and attacking their opponents as schismatics. At length, once it became clear that the Catholics had no intention of addressing the second proposition, the disputation was brought to a premature close.

Predictably, Catholic commentators on the conference, such as the Spanish ambassador, the Count de Feria, maintained that the bishops had trounced the Protestant divines. John Jewel, who had been present as one of the Protestant disputants, took a rather different view: ‘It is altogether incredible, how much this conduct has lessened the opinion that the people entertained of the bishops; for they all begin to suspect that they refused to say anything only because they had not anything to say.’ (Zurich Letters, 16)

Whether or not Jewel himself was exaggerating, the conference had a decisive impact on developments in Parliament. The five bishops who participated in the debates were all charged with contempt of the crown for failing to follow the agreed format. Two of them, the bishops of Winchester and Lincoln, were imprisoned in the Tower of London until after the end of the session. This unsurprisingly served to dampen opposition in the Lords to the government’s programme. Several staunchly Catholic lay peers suddenly decided to absent themselves, while others dropped their objections to the Protestant legislation. The bill for the royal supremacy was duly revised, though the measure to reintroduce the Book of Common Prayer still only scraped through the upper House by three votes.  Without the Westminster conference, it might not have passed at all. The disputation strategy was clumsy and underhand, but it weakened the Catholic cause, broke the parliamentary deadlock, and helped pave the way for the Elizabethan religious settlement.

PMH

Further reading:

N.L. Jones, Faith by Statute (1982)

G. Burnet, History of the Reformation of the Church of England ed. N. Pocock (1865), vol. 5

The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe ed. S.R. Cattley (1839), vol. 8

Biographies of all the clerics mentioned above will appear in due course in our volumes on the House of Lords 1558-1603.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RDEE

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

In the early modern period, both England’s Church and its Parliament changed. A Catholic country split from Rome and the importance and prominence of the two Houses of Parliament dramatically increased. These two seismic shifts were not isolated from one another. Parliament’s role in the transformation and governance of England’s ecclesiastical settlement has been much debated, especially since the seminal work of Sir Geoffrey Elton, who argued Parliament’s role in enacting the early stages of the Reformation was a formative moment in parliamentary history. To address this complex relationship, the History of Parliament hosted a colloquium on 26 April 2025 entitled ‘Parliament and the Church, c.1530-c.1630’. Convened by Dr Alexandra Gajda (University of Oxford) and Dr Alex Beeton (History of Parliament), eight speakers and almost twenty audience members, many of them leading academics, debated a myriad of issues and topics in an energising and convivial atmosphere.

The eight speakers, split between three chronological panels, had produced their papers, (which will be published in a special edition of Parliamentary History) for pre-circulation; this meant the majority of the day was spent in discussion of their findings. In the first panel, Dr Gajda and Dr Paul Cavill (University of Cambridge) delved into the first half of the sixteenth century. Dr Cavill launched a vigorous attack on a famous essay of Elton’s, ‘Lex Terrae Victrix: the triumph of parliamentary law in the sixteenth century’ which argued that in the 1530s emerged the twin ideas of the supremacy of parliamentary law (i.e. common law) and the notion of the king-in-Parliament being the ultimate authority in the kingdom. Using the example of the court of delegates, Dr Cavill’s paper skilfully showed how laws other than common law continued to be used, and that the monarchy ruled through the common law rather than under it. Dr Gajda took the discussion forward into the mid-century, showing that the Parliaments of Edward VI deserve to be known as Reformation Parliaments which enacted sweeping reforms via statute. This process did not occur because the crown believed the two Houses to be particularly appropriate as authorities on religious matters, but because parliamentary statute reached all the monarchy’s subjects and because the lay members of Parliament were more amenable to changes in religious practices than Convocation.

After a lunch break, the second panel of the day focussed largely on the reign of Elizabeth I. Dr Paul Hunneyball (History of Parliament) produced an excellent study of the bishops in the Lords as a group during the 1584-5 Parliament. Drawing on the cutting-edge research of the Lords 1558-1603 project, Dr Hunneyball teased out a number of insights about the bishops and their political activities, showing the value of investigating the Lords Spiritual as a body. Dr Esther Counsell’s (Western Sydney University) fascinating contribution focussed on the same Parliament, investigating a manuscript speech-treatise written by Robert Beale, clerk of the privy council, which was intended for the Parliament but never delivered. Dr Counsell argued that Beale was representative of a group within the English establishment which was eager for further religious reformation, worried about the encroachment of Catholicism, opposed to the jurisdictional overreach of ecclesiastical authorities and courts, and concerned that the denial of Parliament’s authority to determine ecclesiastical matters would undermine the stability of Elizabeth’s reign. The third speaker, Adam Forsyth (University of Cambridge), took the panel into the early seventeenth century with an impressive analysis of statutory interpretation and multilateralism in judicature, delineating the disputes between civil and common lawyers about who could interpret statutes and the different positions which civil lawyers adopted concerning the prerogatives of statutory interpretation.

Despite the hot weather and the lack of air conditioning in the History of Parliament’s common room, spirits and energy remained high for the third and final panel of the day. Professor Kenneth Fincham (University of Kent), who was chairing, prefaced the panel with an elegantly concise set of remarks about Parliament and religion in the 1630s before introducing the speakers. Emma Hartley’s (University of Sheffield) paper insightfully investigated the early Jacobean Parliaments, showing how their disputes and proceedings demonstrated that the future of the English Church was still considered to be uncertain at the time. Enormous tensions existed over ecclesiastical jurisdiction, Parliament’s role in religious matters, and the constitutional positions and authority of bishops and Convocation. She was followed by Dr Kathryn Marshalek (Vanderbilt University) whose paper offered a brilliant account of how, pace earlier revisionist historiography, religious issues and constitutional crisis became a deadly combination in English politics well before the end of the 1620s. Dr Marshalek’s study of the 1620s Parliaments argued that the European geo-political situation made a re-negotiation of the English religious settlement, and the place of English Catholics within it, possible. It was in this context that calls from Parliament for the enforcement of religious conformity became more forceful and provoked a broader consideration of the relationship between the king, royal prerogative, and parliamentary statute. Closing the day’s proceedings, Dr Andrew Thrush (History of Parliament) offered a thought-provoking overview of the right of the House of Commons to debate religious matters between 1566-1629. He discussed why the Commons right to do so was not clearcut and why the crown, despite strenuous efforts, repeatedly failed to prevent the lower House from considering religious matters. He finished by concluding that the Commons achieved little in the way of tangible results through their extensive debates since they lacked the ability to enforce their will.

As with their predecessors, this final panel stimulated plenty of questions and debate between speakers and audience which continued in a more relaxed atmosphere following the end of official proceedings. As the vivacity of the day demonstrated, the relationship between Parliament and Church in early modern England remains a topic with potential for important discoveries and exciting insights.

ALB

It may seem surprising to some that popular anti-Catholic sentiment continued to flourish in the decades after Catholic emancipation (1829). But although this major reform ended 151 years of Catholics being formally excluded from the Commons, it was not conceived out of a mood of religious toleration. Instead, it was primarily a tactical response to events in Ireland, where Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association had created an army of Catholic voters willing to do his bidding. By allowing Irish Catholics to sit as MPs, but at the same time severely restricting the number of Irish voters, the Tory government led by the Duke of Wellington aimed to avert civil unrest in Ireland, whilst also dismantling O’Connell’s electoral powerbase.

For many staunch Anglicans the influx of a new breed of Irish Catholic MPs was a high price to pay for silencing O’Connell, who in any case soon began a new campaign for Ireland to leave the Union. For Irish Protestants, in particular, the presence of Irish Catholics was complete anathema, threatening both the position of the Irish Established Church and the ‘Protestant ascendancy’ of the Irish landed ruling elite. Furious clashes between these two groups, over virtually every aspect of Irish policy, helped infuse the Victorian Commons with an almost daily dose of sectarian conflict.

The curious position of English Catholics is often lost sight of in all of this, not least because of the way Irish affairs tended to dominate Victorian attitudes to Catholicism. But in many respects the prospect of English Catholic MPs sitting for English constituencies, at the heart of the Protestant nation, was even more of a threat to the Protestant constitution than Irish Catholic MPs representing predominantly Catholic constituencies. Where would the loyalties of such English Catholics lie, with their constituents or their creed?

These kinds of questions were never far away when Catholics stood for election in England, as some of our recently completed biographies have shown.

In 1832 Thomas Stonor of Stonor Park, whose ancestors were some of Oxfordshire’s most prominent recusants, became one of just five Catholic MPs to be returned for an English constituency at the general election. His election for Oxford was, as one commentator suggested, ‘extraordinary’ given the city’s well-known antipathy to Catholic emancipation. Indeed, historic graffiti against Robert Peel, the Home secretary responsible for passing emancipation, can still be seen in Oxford’s colleges today.

Speaking at his victory dinner, Stonor went out of his way to allay fears that he would ‘confederate with the Irish demagogues in their diabolical endeavours to revolutionize the kingdom’. He also looked forward to proving ‘that a Catholic was not necessarily an enemy to the establishment’. Stonor barely had time to take his seat, however, before he was unseated on petition for corrupt practices that were endemic in the city.

Stonor’s short-lived triumph in 1832 was unusual. The kind of reception more commonly encountered by Catholic candidates was amply demonstrated when he decided to stand for the county in 1837. Placards with ‘Will Oxfordshire add another joint to O’Connell’s tail?’, and ‘No farmers’ friend can vote for Stonor, the Papist’, set the tone for what became a highly charged campaign. After he was defeated at the bottom of the poll, the local Tory paper rejoiced that ‘Protestant feelings are triumphant in this county’.

The additional difficulties faced by English Catholic MPs (as opposed to their Irish counterparts) were perhaps nowhere better illustrated than when a sitting Anglican chose to convert. When John Simeon, Liberal MP for the Isle of Wight, adopted the Roman Catholic faith in 1851, he resigned his seat, believing that he had forfeited the electoral mandate given to him ‘whilst he was a member of the Anglican church’. When Edward Hutchins, Liberal MP for Lymington, refused to do the same after ‘embracing Rome’ five years later, he caused a political scandal. ‘Such conduct is an abuse of the representative principle’ since he ‘is no longer the same man’, protested one local paper. ‘That Mr Hutchins was returned to Parliament by Protestants, will scarcely be denied’, remarked another observer. ‘As a Romanist, then, he is in a false position and it behoves the constituency to call upon the recusant to resign’.

Given these kinds of sentiments in the English constituencies, one of the more surprising features to emerge from our ongoing work on the Victorian Commons is the intellectual attraction that Roman Catholicism was still able to exert over an entire generation of English MPs, many of whom, even if they didn’t convert, clearly came pretty close.

To obtain access to our recent articles, including those referred to above, click here.

PS

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 5 November 2014, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

The tomb was probably commissioned by her husband, Sir William Lichfield, a veteran of Agincourt, whose friendship with her father had enabled him to marry above his birth rank. Although, however, one of the couple’s children died with her, Elizabeth, aged in her early thirties on her death in about 1422, left two young daughters as her coheiresses. Her inheritance was thus destined to pass through the female line for a second successive generation.

That descent, however, for reasons that are unclear, did not follow predictable lines.  One of her daughters survived to have a daughter of her own, and the Cornwall inheritance should eventually have passed to this daughter, Margaret, the wife of Humphrey Stafford of Halmond’s Frome (Herefordshire), but it did not. Instead, it came to Humphrey Blount, to whose memory, and that of his wife, Elizabeth Winnington, the second tomb was erected. He was a descendant of the Cornwalls in the female line, the great-nephew of Sir John, and was quickly and unexpectedly able to establish title after the death, in 1446, of Lichfield, who had lived at Kinlet, as tenant by the courtesy (a husband’s life interest in the lands of his deceased wife), since Elizabeth’s death. Blount, from the least wealthy of the two surviving branches of an ancient family, now found himself a man of account. He moved to Kinlet from his ancestral manor of Balterley in Staffordshire, and with this move came, both geographically and tenurially, significant new connexions. Kinlet was held of Richard, duke of York’s lordship of Cleobury Mortimer, and, in the civil war of 1459-61, Humphrey put his new gains at hazard by committing himself to the duke’s cause. He was in his ranks at the rout at Ludford Bridge, and his Yorkist credentials were further confirmed in the following autumn, when he was named as sheriff of Shropshire after Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton. This support explains his election for the Shropshire borough of Bridgnorth, about nine miles north of his home at Kinlet, to the first Parliament of the new reign. He no doubt sought the seat because he was excluded as sheriff from representing the county.

Blount’s active loyalty to the house of York was to be made further manifest in the crisis of 1470-1.  He fought for Edward IV at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, where he was knighted.  This, however marked the highpoint of his career.  At his death a few years later, he was only in his mid-fifties. By 6 September 1477, when he made his will, he had moved, perhaps due to ill-health, from Kinlet to Worcester. It was, however, at Kinlet that he was interred, and he bequeathed to the church there a velvet gown for the making of a cope and a gold chain to be sold for the support of a chaplain. 

Blount was survived by his wife, Elizabeth Winnington.  She had played an important part in his elevation, and her career is as interesting as his own. Her early marital life had been troubled.  In 1426, at the age of only four, she had been contracted in marriage to Richard, the ten-year-old son and heir-apparent of Sir John Delves, a match that represented an alliance between two leading Cheshire families. Sir John, however, died in 1429, and his friend, Ralph Egerton, saw this as a means of advancing one of his own daughters at the expense of the young Elizabeth.  He persuaded Richard to disavow his intended bride. Years of uncertainty followed before, in July 1439, William Heyworth, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, confirmed the validity of Richard’s marriage to Elizabeth.  The match, however, proved childless, with Richard dying in 1446. Lichfield died in the same month, enhancing Blount’s prospects and hence his qualifications as her suitor. For her part, Elizabeth had, as a result of her troubled marriage, a life interest in the caput honoris of the Delves family, the manor of Doddington. Her marriage to Blount, contracted soon afterwards, had obvious advantages for both bride and groom. 

Elizabeth was probably responsible for commissioning their fine tomb, for she survived her husband by some 25 years.  It is a commemoration not only of herself and her late husband, but also of their many children. The long side of the tomb appears to commemorate the three sons of the marriage, all of whom are mentioned in Sir Humphrey’s will, and the short side, at the effigies’ feet, their three daughters (the other two sides are blank).  This was a fitting to memorial to one who had elevated his family into the front rank of the Shropshire gentry, acquiring, seemingly against the odds, an inheritance to which his claim was far from unchallenged; and, early in the civil war of 1459-61, committing himself to what proved the winning side. He was unfortunate not to receive greater recognition from Edward IV.  He established a dynasty that survived at Kinlet in the male line until the death of a prominent parliamentarian, his great-grandson, Sir George, in 1581.  The most notable of the family, however, was George’s sister, Elizabeth, mistress of Henry VIII and mother of Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond.

Further reading

E. Norton, ‘The Depiction of Children on the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Tombs in Kinlet Church’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society 87 (2012), 35-46.

A biography of Sir Humphrey Blount will appear in The Commons, 1461-1504 and those of Sir John Cornwall, Sir William Lichfield and Sir George Blount are in The Commons, 1386-1421, ii. 661-3; 1422-61, v. 275-8 and 1509-58, i. 445-7 respectively.

As politicians continue to debate the House of Lords’ future, including legislation to eliminate its remaining hereditary peers, they might draw lessons from its past. Particularly instructive are the events of the English Revolution, which saw the House of Lords and monarchy abolished in 1649. Both were collateral damage in the single-minded pursuit of King Charles I’s trial by a radical minority of MPs abetted by the parliamentarian army. The unicameral parliaments that followed in the 1650s proved unmanageable, or at least unserviceable to what Oliver Cromwell and the godly believed should be the agenda for settlement.

Even after expelling the torpid Rump Parliament by force in 1653, and assuming the title of Lord Protector under Britain’s first written constitution, The Instrument of Government, Cromwell struggled with his parliaments. Desperate measures, including the exclusion of around a hundred MPs before the meeting of the Second Protectorate Parliament in 1656, failed to bring that assembly to heel. Cromwell was particularly alarmed when that same parliament gave rein to its religious intolerance, not least by claiming the power to define, judge and punish the alleged misdemeanours of a Quaker named James Naylor, who MPs unilaterally found guilty of ‘horrid blasphemy’ and voted a suitably savage punishment. As Cromwell warned a meeting of army officers in February 1657, the ‘case of James Naylor might happen to be your own case’. As far as he was concerned, the Commons needed ‘a check, or balancing power’ in the form of a second chamber (John Morrill et al, The Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, iii. 340-1).

His wishes were answered in March 1657 when MPs presented Cromwell with a new written constitution, The Humble Petition and Advice, which created an ‘Other House’ of parliament. This was no straightforward revival of the House of Lords. Its membership would consist of a maximum of seventy men, sitting not by hereditary right, but chosen by the Protector and approved by the Commons. Members would serve for life, or until removed for misdemeanours, whereupon new ones would be chosen to fill vacant places. While Cromwell was no political theorist, he found hereditary systems of rule inherently unsound. He failed to see the logic in an arrangement where it mattered little if a person was ‘a fool or wise, honest or not’, for ‘whatever they be’, they ‘must come in’ (Morrill et al, iii. 144). Instead, admission to the Other House was based on what Cromwell perceived to be individuals’ merits or principles. He claimed to chose men who valued ‘not titles’, but ‘a Christian and an English interest’ (Morrill et al, iii. 493).

This does not mean Cromwell was unwilling to select noblemen for the Other House. Ultimately, though, only seven old English peers received summons: the earls of Manchester, Mulgrave and Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele and Lords Eure, Fauconberg and Wharton. These were men who had either shown a willingness to play some role in the Cromwellian regime, or were erstwhile allies from the 1640s who Cromwell hoped to win back. Many other peers were overlooked, however, including some, like the earl of Salisbury, who had sat in the House of Commons during the 1650s. Other noblemen were chosen who had not been eligible to sit in the English House of Lords, including the Irish Lord Broghill and the Scottish earl of Cassillis, perhaps suggesting that Cromwell aimed to make the new chamber representative of the fragile union achieved by the English republic’s conquest of Scotland and Ireland.

Yet, the vast majority of the sixty-two members summoned to the Other House were not noblemen but new men: Cromwell’s ‘sons and kindred, flattering courtiers, corrupt lawyers, degenerated swordmen, and… self-interested salarymen’, as one critic put it (A Second Narrative of the Late Parliament (so called) (1658), pp. 23-4). The charge had substance: over a quarter of the members were closely related to the Protector, including two sons and three sons-in-law. They also included all but one of Cromwell’s privy councillors, and many administrators, court officials and judges.

It is hardly surprising, given Cromwell’s desire for the new chamber to act as a balance on the Commons, that he selected those who shared his political and religious vision. But this made the Other House a very different animal to the old Lords. Its membership was more socially diverse: several had amassed fortunes only after rising through the ranks during the civil wars, such as the shoemaker John Hewson, the brewer Thomas Pride, and James Berry, who was a clerk at an ironworks before the conflict. Of course, this made it easy for critics to suggest the Other House was an assemblage of men of mean birth and low principles, but from Cromwell’s perspective it represented a meritocracy not an aristocracy.

Those old peers summoned to the ‘Other House’ recognised its novelty. Writing to Lord Wharton in late 1657, Viscount Saye was clear that they must not accept Cromwell’s writ of summons. To do so would make them complicit in the ‘laying aside of the Peers of England who by birth are to sit’; they would ‘disown their own rights and the rights of all the Nobility of England’. By breaking the ancient link between hereditary nobility and parliamentary membership, Saye believed the Other House was ‘a stalking horse’ to ‘carry on the design of over-throwing the House of Peers’ (Bodl. Carte MS 80, f. 749).

Saye’s warning was prophetic. When the Other House assembled in January 1658, Cromwell pointedly referred to it as ‘our House of Lords’, implying it now assumed the position of its predecessor (Morrill et al, iii. 467). To complete the charade, its members were styled ‘lords’ and sat in the Lords’ chamber at Westminster. Yet, the Commons were not easily deceived. As the republican MP Thomas Scot mischievously put it, if the Other House was really the House of Lords, Cromwell must summon all ‘the old peerage’, but the ‘old nobility, will not, do not, sit there’. The Other House were ‘but Commoners’; its members were ‘part of the Commons, in another place’ (The Diary of Thomas Burton, ed. J.T. Rutt (1828), ii. 389-90). Other MPs stressed that the new chamber must be styled the ‘Other House’ to make clear it derived its authority from the Humble Petition and Advice alone. As the MP William Brisco explained, it must have a ‘new name’ because it was a ‘new constitution’; its members and powers were ‘new’. The ‘Other House’ was not a ‘revival’ of the old upper chamber but was a new creation, brought into being by the Commons through the written constitution. As Brisco informed the Commons, it was ‘a House set up by you’ and ‘the derivative power shall never exceed the primitive power’ (Burton, ii. 410-11). The old House of Lords was a different matter because its membership sat by virtue of their birthright, not election; their membership and authority had been independent of the Commons.

The parliamentary session ground to a halt as the Commons failed to agree on how to address, or define, the new chamber. The feeling of exasperation was best summed up in the speech of Griffith Bodurda, who pleaded with the Commons to give the new chamber ‘some name… You must call them a House, of men, or women, or something that have two legs’ (Burton, ii. 432). His calls fell on deaf ears and Cromwell angrily dissolved the parliament on 4 February 1658. Ironically, Cromwell’s hope that a second chamber would better control the Commons foundered upon MPs’ unwillingness to own that chamber as a balance over them.

So much about the Other House was novel: a membership of life peers, fixed in number, and more socially and geographically diverse than any House of Lords had been. Yet, in a society that revered precedent, it was always going to be a hard sell. Cromwell failed to convince others that it was a suitable replacement for the House of Lords: styling it as such was never enough. The lack of the old peers left many questioning the extent to which it was a legitimate, or independent, component of the parliamentary trinity.

Perhaps, as the final hereditary peers are removed from the House of Lords, politicians will emulate their counterparts from the 1650s by reflecting on the identity crisis posed by a House of Lords without the ancient nobility. Will it essentially become another House, an ‘Other House’? On what basis will its remaining members sit, and what will be the chamber’s constitutional foundation? Is it destined to become a cipher for the government, or a House of Commons sitting elsewhere?  These are thorny issues, but the Cromwellian era has lessons to offer.

JF

Further Reading:

The biographies of James Berry, Griffith Bodurda, Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle), William Brisco, the earl of Salisbury (William Cecil), Oliver Cromwell, John Hewson and Thomas Pride are in the recently-published Commons 1640-60 volumes.

J. Fitzgibbons, Cromwell’s House of Lords: Politics, Parliaments and Constitutional Revolution, 1642-1660 (2018)

C.H. Firth, The House of Lords during the Civil War (1910)

P. Little and D.L. Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (2007)

J. Fitzgibbons, ‘Hereditary Succession and the Cromwellian Protectorate: The Offer of the Crown Reconsidered’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), 1095-1128.