The seminar takes place on 17 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.

The mid-Victorian artistic decoration of the Palace of Westminster, the home of UK Parliament, has long been understood as a fundamentally masculinised scheme. This ambitious art project was overseen by the Royal Commission on the Fine Arts (1841-1863), and was part of the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster after the 1834 fire.

The new interior in the Palace of Westminster offered an opportunity to promote British art and cultivate national political identity through carefully constructed imagery. My paper for the Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on 17 February demonstrates that female visual representation was a central concern of the commission.

The 1841-1863 Fine Arts Commission made a conscious effort to include and increase imagery of women throughout the Palace of Westminster’s principal chambers. In doing so, the commissioners conceptualised women as integral to the development of the British political constitution. Their choice of artworks also reflected Queen Victoria’s position as monarch, foregrounding women as religious and military leaders, and as channels and sometimes exercisers of political power.

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Dr Cara Gathern is a heritage professional with a PhD from the University of Brighton. She works as a Researcher and Curatorial Assistant for UK Parliament Heritage Collections, where she has an academic interest in the 19th-century scheme under the Commission of Fine Arts, and the 20th-century mosaics. Her Oxford DNB entry on Master Mosaicist Gertrude Martin was published in December 2024 and her journal article on early female contributions to Parliamentary art, co-authored with Caroline Babington, is due to be published in Women’s History Review in July 2026.

The seminar takes place on 17 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.

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.

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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)

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.

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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 seminar takes place on 28 October 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

In 2024, the family of J H Whitley, former Speaker of the House of Commons, most generously gave two items to the Parliamentary Art Collection. These were a rosette attached to a medal from Gladstone’s 1884 reform campaign; and a broken chain with padlocks which had been passed down the generations and reputed to be a ‘suffragette chain’.

John Henry Whitley (1866-1935), known as ‘J H’, was Liberal MP for Halifax between 1900 and 1928. His first wife, Marguerita née Marchetti (1872-1925), was President of the Halifax Liberal Women’s Association; her father Guilio fought with Garibaldi in Italy before settling in the UK.

J H Whitley is best known today for giving his name to Whitley Councils, consultative councils between employers and workers, set up following a committee he chaired during the First World War. Whitley Councils continue today in the public sector. In Parliament, he was elected Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means in 1910 and then Chairman of Ways and Means, and therefore also Deputy Speaker, from 1910 to 1921.

As Speaker between 1921 and 1928 he oversaw the decorative scheme for St Stephen’s Hall. On retiring as Speaker, Whitley refused the customary peerage and went on to other public roles until his death in 1935. He married again in 1928 and his second wife, Helen née Clarke (1882-1981), had been a member of the British community in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Whitley was generally known to be a supporter of women’s suffrage, but this had not been researched in detail until I began to investigate the ‘suffragette chain’. As Deputy Speaker, and then Speaker, Whitley had to be politically neutral, of course; and yet office holders have their own personal opinions, and sometimes these may influence political events.

This image is from a report into all Liberal MPs’ attitudes on suffrage from the papers of David Lloyd George, which shows Whitley as a supporter of the first Conciliation Bill in 1910. He expressed support for married women in particular having the vote a year later; and made it clear in 1913 that he had not changed his mind. The Conciliation Bills were unsuccessful cross-party suffrage bills between 1910 and 1912 which would have given a limited measure of women’s suffrage. As private members’ bills they stood little chance of success without government backing.

The Speaker during the years of militant activism before the First World War was James William Lowther, an opponent of women’s suffrage. Lowther had to respond to various suffragette protests in the Palace of Westminster, including at least two known to involve chains. However, Lowther became most infamous in suffrage history for a controversial procedural ruling which scuppered a women’s suffrage amendment to a government bill in 1913. If Whitley had been in the chair, this may not have happened.

In one of history’s ironies, Lowther went on to (reluctantly) chair the Speaker’s Conference on Electoral Reform during the First World War, which under his leadership recommended a measure of votes for women, implemented in the 1918 Representation of the People Act. The Act gave the parliamentary vote to women aged 30 and over who met a property qualification. The battle for equal franchise went on in Parliament for the next ten years. During this time Lowther took the opportunity to scupper another women’s suffrage bill through a Speaker’s ruling in 1920. He stood down as Speaker in 1921, when he was elevated to the House of Lords as Viscount Ullswater.

In 1924 the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin made a pledge on equal franchise that his party ‘would if returned to power propose that the matter be referred to a Conference of all political Parties on the lines of the Ullswater Committee’. The Conservatives were elected and in due course Baldwin asked Whitley if he would chair another Speaker’s conference. Whitley refused, much to the relief of most of the Cabinet, who wanted to avoid discussion of wider electoral reform issues.

Despite strong opposition led by Winston Churchill, the Cabinet finally agreed to support equal franchise in 1927 and the 1928 Equal Franchise Act was passed the following year. Whitley oversaw all its stages in the Commons, standing down as Speaker shortly before it achieved royal assent in July 1928. It’s impossible to be sure, but it’s entirely possible that the ‘suffragette chain’ had remained in the Speaker’s Office all these years, until the issue received closure and this suffrage-sympathetic Speaker took it home as a retirement souvenir of his long parliamentary career.

The seminar takes place on 28 October 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

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Some of this material was first presented by Mari Takayanagi at ‘Breaking the chains: Women’s suffrage and Parliament from the time of J.H. Whitley’, the 12th annual J H Whitley lecture at the University of Huddersfield on 17 October 2024. This year’s lecture will be given by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, on 30 October 2025.

Mari would like to credit Beverley Cook, Curator of Social and Working History at the London Museum; Kathryn Rix, Assistant Editor at the History of Parliament; and Elizabeth Hallam Smith, academic historian and archives consultant, for their assistance with research on the ‘suffragette chain’.

Further reading:

J. Hargreaves, K. Laybourn & R. Toye (eds.), Liberal Reform and Industrial Relations: J.H. Whitley (1866-1935), Halifax Radical and Speaker of the House of Commons (2018).

M. Takayanagi, Votes for Women and the Speaker’s Conference on Electoral Reform 1916-17. History of Parliament blog (2017).

M. Takayanagi, ‘Women and the Vote: The Parliamentary Path to Equal Franchise, 1918–28’, Parliamentary History, 37:1 (2018).

The seminar takes place on 17 June 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.

John Rickman (1771-1840) is best known for overseeing the first four censuses in Britain, 1801-31. These were indeed a considerable achievement, though they were beset with shortcomings, only some of which he acknowledged.

Rickman has also been considered in relation to his contribution to debates over political economy, particularly through his relationship with Robert Southey, Poet Laureate from 1813 to 1843, who like Rickman ditched an early enthusiasm for the French Revolution for Toryism. Southey, along with other leading literary figures of the time, valued Rickman for the breadth of his knowledge and the pugnacity of his views.

While those two elements to Rickman’s life were very important, they were predicated on his parliamentary work, which deserves to be better known. He was Charles Abbot’s secretary as Speaker from 1802-14 and then a clerk in the Commons for the rest of his life.

These led to his considerable roles in building roads, bridges, harbours and churches in Scotland. He also played a major part in producing the printed records of the Commons, notably the Votes, while also indexing the Commons Journals and Hatsell’s Precedents. He was a witness to many select committees, some concerned with wider matters of the day, leading him to innovative tabulations, including counts of acts, attendance in the Commons and local taxation.

He was lauded for these efforts. Five MPs heaped praise on him when the Commons noted his death, including Lord John Russell, Henry Goulburn and Joseph Hume. Yet privately Rickman disdained much of his routine work and savaged most parliamentarians, of both houses, including Russell and Hume.

These criticisms reflected a misanthropic streak in his personality. Rickman’s rich and revealing correspondence with Southey is littered with slurs of individuals, not only Whigs, and of positions he was hostile to, especially ‘liberality’ and ‘mock humanity’. Rickman hated the ‘mob’ and the press. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), and despite becoming independently wealthy in 1817 and seriously considering retirement in the early 1830s, he kept his shoulder to the wheel. Rickman worked ferociously hard in and for Parliament over nearly four decades.

How to interpret this? An obvious starting point is with Rickman’s role as an administrator and civil servant. Yet he ill fits Max Weber’s typology, showing characteristics of both the pre-modern and the modern bureaucrat. The same could be said regarding Aylmer’s more historically informed ‘old administrative scheme’.

Rickman was a one-off, which means it is more helpful to place him in his immediate context. The route to his parliamentary career began with George Rose, his local MP. It was from Rose, usefully described as a ‘man of business’ by Joanna Innes, that the connection to Charles Abbot was made, in around 1800. Abbot was not just Rickman’s employer, but his patron, promoting his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, while Abbot’s wife was godmother to Rickman’s first child.

As is reasonably well known, though historians might have made rather more of it, from 1796 Abbot was a leading figure in various significant efforts to improve practices in the House of Commons, including financial management, the promulgation of statutes, the Journals and its library. Abbot, Jeremy Bentham’s stepbrother it might be remembered, used Rickman in these reform efforts, which Rickman then took further when Abbot’s Speakership ended in 1817.

Associated with this was Rickman’s steadfast commitment to hard work. This might have been a more general psychological state and he never set out why he gave so much to his parliamentary roles, but it seems likely that it was to show that the Commons, as it was, could function effectively, in the process advancing its dignity.

Rickman’s effort was commensurate with Bagehot’s later remark that ‘The House of Commons needs to be impressive … but its use resides not in its appearance, but in its reality.’ Abbot and Rickman both sought to improve practices in the Commons, based on better information of what it had done previously rather than abstractions, and without embracing the language of reform. This was Burkean in its way. But Rickman was suspicious of economical reform and defended payment by fees rather than salaries, while relishing his lack of specific expertise.

Despite Rickman’s lack of enthusiasm after 1800 for reform in any guise, his own work was, in its own way, revolutionary. The census allowed the state much greater knowledge not only of demographic matters but, as David Green has shown, the complexities of ecclesiastical and civil administrations.

The rag bag of jurisdictions that had evolved over the centuries was hard to justify, even harder to engage with to ensure equity in central-local relations. Municipal reform in 1835 rested on this, along with raw head counts of urban populations. The census was also, as Stephen Thompson has shown in a brilliant doctoral thesis, employed heavily in the debates that led to the Reform Act of 1832. Rickman placed great faith in facts, but failed to see how corrosive they could be of the world he cherished.

Rickman’s contradictions were also evident in his faith. The son of a clergyman of the Church of England, he conscientiously attended St Margaret’s, Westminster from 1802, late in life publishing a brief commentary on its historical curiosities. He was interred there. Yet he deplored the ‘baseness’ of the episcopal bench over the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and Catholic Emancipation and bemoaned the abilities and energy of many clergy when called upon to provide him with data.

But there was more to his religious disposition than this. He set firm limits to the scope of providence, denying its continuing role; as a young man he refused a lucrative offer to take holy orders, unwilling as he was to tell ‘lies once a week’; and in his will he forcefully expressed his opposition to his son’s long expressed aim of taking holy orders. At best, clearly his views were complex.

That the History of Parliament project focuses upon biographies of members is understandable. It is rarely possible to delve far into the lives of those many others who made Parliament work. There is no claim here that Rickman was in any ways typical, but he alerts us to the fact that even those playing supporting roles could influence, sometimes significantly, what MPs and peers could and did do.

The seminar takes place on 17 June 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

On Iorweth’s death, his alma mater recalled:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WU

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

The seminar takes place on 20 May 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.

Protest marches in central London today usually follow a regular route. Assembling on the Thames Embankment, they march towards Westminster Bridge, past the Houses of Parliament, to Trafalgar Square or down the Mall to Hyde Park, where a big rally is held. This route has immense political symbolism and significance, following in the footsteps of previous generations of marchers.

Londoners of all political persuasions and social status witnessed or took part in processions at some point in their lives. The Lord Mayor’s parade and local guild processions marked key points in the civic and religious calendar, while royal processions at coronations and jubilees developed in grandeur during the long nineteenth century.

Electoral processions to and from the hustings at Covent Garden, and the ‘chairing of the member’ around the main streets of Westminster (and on boats along the Thames in the case of Middlesex constituency), enabled popular participation in the era before the 1832 Reform Act. Many of these traditions continued as the franchise widened.

However, this route through central London wasn’t always the same as it is today. The choice of streets and meeting places wasn’t regularised until at least the 1870s. Trafalgar Square wasn’t completed until the late 1840s. So before then, political gatherings assembled in various locations on the fringes of urban London such as Copenhagen Fields and St George’s Fields – which were built upon by the mid-nineteenth century.

Political rallies were banned in Hyde Park until members of the Reform League pulled up the railings to gain access in 1866. Ever since, protest march routes through the capital have been subject to debate and negotiation between protesters, government and police.

With the rise of the working-class parliamentary reform movements and trades unions from the 1790s, political processions became a central element of protest. Processions and marches were active claims by the working classes to form part of the wider body politic. Reform processions were a show of representing the ‘people’ to the public. Leaders and orators of the parliamentary reform movement employed the ‘grand entry’ into the city, in the mode not only of successful MPs after an election, but also of military leaders returning home after a victory, or with biblical allusions to Jesus Christ entering Jerusalem. ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ was a popular hymn played by bands at both electoral and radical processions.

Holding a political procession became a fraught process of negotiation between the political group holding the procession, and various overlapping layers of power in the capital, from the magistrates to the home office and sheriff of London. Legislation aimed at the democratic reform movement further shaped the locations and routes of the protests. The 1817 Seditious Meetings Act prohibited political meetings within a mile radius of the palace of Westminster while Parliament was in session. Protest marches, therefore, tended to avoid starting, ending or stopping in this area.

The Westminster Reform Society advertised the route of a procession to protest against the Peterloo Massacre on 1 November 1819, starting at the Crown and Anchor on The Strand to march down Fleet Street to Finsbury Square in the City, a distance of around four kilometres. The demonstration was held while Lord Liverpool’s government was pushing the ‘Six Acts’ through parliament, including another Seditious Meetings Act that prohibited the display of political banners and ensigns at demonstrations.

Procession routes, of all types of political and social composition, began to coalesce from the mid-nineteenth century into regular routes across London. The dominant direction of processions was pulled westwards as the built environment of the capital morphed, and Hyde Park became the main site for rallies.

The processional geography of London further evolved as the city expanded eastwards around the docklands from the mid nineteenth century. The increasing density of population in the East End pulled the start of trades’ processions to meeting sites of Mile End Waste, Stepney Green, and, after its opening, Victoria Park. Trades and unemployed marches in and out of the East End and the docklands intensified as newly formed socialist movements, most notably the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), took up street meetings and marches as key tactics during the severe economic downturn of the late 1880s.

The right to march was hard fought, and political movements asserted agency by claiming routes physically as well as symbolically. The period after the First World War brought new challenges and movements that again brought the right to march debates to the fore of policing and legislation.

Earlier compromises of non-interference were no longer effective. The emergence of the communist movement and violent clashes between police and the unemployed in the 1920s and 1930s continued the conflicts of the earlier decades. Culminating in the Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936, the provocative militant marching of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was opposed by a physical and material defence of territory by Jewish and communist communities in the East End. In response, the 1936 Public Order Act was rushed through Parliament and became law on 1 January 1937.

The legislation did not completely interfere with the popular right of assembly and protest. The tensions between protecting the freedom of passage and the liberty of assembly and free speech became inextricably entangled with issues of race, class and national politics for the rest of the twentieth century.

KN

Katrina’s seminar takes place on 20 May 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 seminar takes place on 6 May 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.

There are many ceremonial traditions associated with the Speaker of the House of Commons, but in most cases their origins are obscure.

One thing known for certain is that in 1794 the Speaker acquired an official residence at Westminster for the first time. Speaker Henry Addington was granted a large townhouse within the precincts of the Palace of Westminster, and his successors continued to occupy it until the old Palace was ravaged by fire in 1834. 

My paper for the IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on 6 May explores the political impact of this first Speaker’s House, explaining how successive Speakers used it to support their official duties.

In particular, it demonstrates that the Speaker’s House facilitated political sociability, both formal and informal. It argues that the facilities provided by the house facilitated the continuing development of the Speaker’s role, and the growth of their political stature. 

For more on Speaker’s House you can read Murray’s short article ‘‘A palace within a Palace’: an introduction to the Speaker’s House’ here.

Dr Murray Tremellen graduated from the University of York with a PhD in History of Art in 2023. His interdisciplinary research explored the history of the first Speaker’s House from both political and architectural perspectives.

His wider interests span eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture. He has also published research on the architecture of the Southern Railway. Since completing his PhD, Murray has worked as Curator of Social History at York Museums Trust. 

The seminar takes place on 6 May 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 seminar takes place on 11 March 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

In the opening years of the Long Parliament, subjects from across the realm eagerly embraced the opportunity to petition both the Commons and the Lords. After eleven years without a Parliament, during the period known as Charles’s ‘personal rule’, and following the abrupt Short Parliament in April-May 1640, petitioners sought to channel their complaints to a new body of authority which they hoped would prove more receptive to their complaints than had the King and Privy Council.

One such petitioner was the Levant Company merchant Thomas Symonds. Penning his suit in 1641, Symonds informed the Commons of his refusal to pay customs duties on currants and the subsequent imprisonment he had faced at the hands of Charles’s custom farmers. He appealed to the Commons to consider the costs and damages he had incurred, including £40 to the farmers and £100 defending himself at law, as he sought compensation for his troubles. Like so many other petitioners approaching the Long Parliament, Symonds sought redress for grievances which had occurred in the 1630s.

However, Symonds went further than lamenting his own personal troubles. To appeal to the Commons, he also invoked the memory of events which had transpired in the Parliament of 1628-1629. Then, Charles’s use of a range of unpopular fiscal measures, including monopolies, impositions, and tonnage and poundage had been thoroughly investigated. The latter was particularly contentious as, despite Parliament usually granting the monarch the right to collect this custom duty for life, MPs in Charles’s first Parliament had only granted this for a year.

Charles’s continued collection of tonnage and poundage throughout his reign was therefore perceived as illegal. In a remonstrance presented by MPs to the King in 1628, they had articulated their concern that this was a form of taxation without consent. And amongst the raucous proceedings which saw MPs forcibly keep the speaker in the chair to avoid adjournment on 2 March 1629, the MP Sir John Eliot also attempted to have read a declaration which included tonnage and poundage as a key grievance in the realm. Any merchants who paid it, he had claimed, were traitors to the realm.

Over ten years later, Symonds referred to these events in his petition to the Commons. He made the rather bold claim that, ‘in obedience to the Parliament’, he had been the ‘first merchant of London that did deny the payment of the said subsidy after the unhappy dissolution of the Parliament’. His refusal to pay customs on currants was therefore presented as driven by Parliament’s direct commandment. He therefore moved to depict himself as a staunch protector of both ‘the public right of the subject and of himself’, protesting a duty which was harmful to the liberties of subjects throughout the realm.

Symonds’s petition illustrates two important themes which will be the focus of this paper. Firstly, the prevalence of petitioners approaching what they termed as a ‘great court of justice’, many of whom were driven to approach both the Commons and Lords by their economic concerns. Secondly, it reveals the important ways through which memory was tactically utilised by petitioners. Despite years between parliamentary sittings, petitioners proved able and willing to draw on the actions of preceding sessions, maintaining lines of continuity between different Parliaments and, in the process, contributing to the fostering of Parliament’s institutional memory.

In pre-existing historiography, the opening years of the Long Parliament are often analysed in terms of high politics, as a crucial period of escalating tensions which would lead to the outbreak of conflict in 1642. Yet for many subjects approaching it in these years, Parliament was not necessarily seen as a staging post to the Civil War, but as an institution with the time and inclination to offer redress. Many subjects looked backwards, not forwards, as they framed their requests.

Scholars have spent much time examining the large-scale petitions presented by subjects from across the realm, calling for root and branch reform or combining their concerns with the decay of trade with reflections on the rise of popery. Comparatively less attention has been paid to the plethora of manuscript petitions surviving in the papers of individuals MPs and in the Parliamentary Archives. An important exception has been the work of James Hart, which revealed the rise in the number of petitioners approaching the Lords with private suits and petitions. Indeed, such was the volume of petitions presented that both the Lords and the Commons periodically issued orders calling for the cessation of any new petitions, as they cleared this backlog.

A closer analysis of the rhetoric and argumentative strategies deployed by petitioners seeking relief for economic grievances sheds light on the importance of memory for supplicants approaching this Parliament. Petitioners’ interactions with past parliaments, including those of the Jacobean period (1603-1625), influenced which House they decided to approach, whilst others harkened back to decisions made in sessions in 1621 and 1624 as they sought to appeal to MPs.

As this paper will show, this was especially true for the realm’s glassmakers, who sought to challenge a patent of monopoly held by the courtier Sir Robert Mansell. Their success in securing parliamentary condemnations of his monopoly in 1614 and 1621 shaped their complaints and emboldened them to direct their complaints to the Commons in 1641-42.

Not all petitioners were necessarily truthful in their presentation of past parliamentary proceedings. One of the realm’s most important regulated companies, the Merchant Adventurers, manipulated the memory of actions against them in 1624 as they sought to persuade MPs that they had always been staunch protectors of their corporate regulation of trade.

Memory could be manipulated and selectively deployed by petitioners, as yet another tool in an already sophisticated armoury of petitioning tactics. This occurred at the same time as Parliament’s own record-keeping practices were evolving and developing, and its institutional memory was being forged.

By exploring the ways through which petitioners looked back to past parliamentary decisions, subjects’ contributions to this process will be revealed. It was not just sitting members or record-keepers who helped to create memory. Through their actions, it becomes clear that Parliament was perceived not as an event, but as an institution.

EP

Ellen’s seminar takes place on 11 March 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Further reading:

J. S. Hart, Justice upon Petition: The House of Lords and the reformation of justice 1621-1675 (London, 1991)

P. Seaward, ‘Institutional Memory and Contemporary History in the House of Commons, 1547-1640’, in P. Cavill and A. Gajda (eds.), Writing the History of Parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England (Manchester, 2018), pp. 211-28.

J. Peacey and B. Waddell (eds.), The Power of Petitioning in early modern Britain (London, 2024)

J. Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013).

C. Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621-1629 (Oxford, 1979)

S. K. Roberts (ed.), The House of Commons 1640-1660 (9 vols, Suffolk, 2023).