In April 1784, George Nevill, 17th Baron Abergavenny, was approached to ask whether he would accept promotion to an earldom. In the wake of Pitt the Younger’s success in the general election, it was time for debts to be repaid and right at the front of the queue was John Robinson. Robinson had formerly worked for Lord North as a political agent but had chosen to switch his allegiance to Pitt and put all of his energy into securing Pitt a handsome victory. Robinson’s daughter was married to Abergavenny’s heir, Henry, so the new peerage would ensure that Robinson would ultimately be grandfather to an earl.

Abergavenny had also made a political journey. Married back in the 1750s to a member of the Pelham clan, he had naturally found himself within the orbit of the Old Corps Whigs and then of the Rockinghams. A consistent opponent of North and his handling of the American crisis, he had distanced himself from the former Rockinghamites who had entered the coalition with North and ultimately helped to bring the Fox-North administration down. So, the earldom was a double reward.

It might all have been very different, as exactly 37 years previously, while a student at Christ Church, Oxford, Abergavenny had narrowly avoided being tried for murder.

The story, as told in the press and in private correspondence, was that one of the Christ Church scouts (servants) named John or William Franklin (the papers could not agree which) had been found early in the morning of 4 April 1747 in one of the college quadrangles, badly bruised and with a fractured skull. His hair had been shaved and his eyebrows burnt off. There were also tell-tale indications of him having been very drunk.

What appeared to have happened was that a group of students, one of them Claudius Amyand, had been holding one of their regular shared suppers in their rooms, but had decided to entertain themselves by making Franklin, who seemed to have had a reputation as being somewhat eccentric, extremely drunk. The regular attendees had taken the prank (as they viewed it) so far, but things had become more extreme when they were joined by others, who had not been part of the original group. The newcomers were Abergavenny, Lord Charles Scott, a younger son of the duke of Buccleuch, Francis Blake Delaval and Sackville Spencer Bale (later a clergyman and domestic chaplain to the 2nd duke of Dorset). They appear to have handled Franklin very roughly – making fun of him by shaving his head – and to have left him so drunk that he was utterly incapable. According to Frederick Campbell, Abergavenny and Scott retreated to their own rooms at this point, leaving it to the remainder of the party to drag Franklin ‘out to snore upon the stair-case’. [Hothams, 42]

It was unclear what happened next, but it was assumed that after being abandoned on the stairs, Franklin had fallen down, fracturing his skull. On being discovered in the morning, Abergavenny’s valet took Franklin home, where he was examined by a surgeon, but nothing could be done for him. That there may have been a more sinister explanation for his injuries was, however, indicated early on by the news that most of those believed to have taken part in the drinking session had fled, and it was gossiped that the two most responsible for his injuries had been Abergavenny and Scott. [Ward, 169]

Certainly, the coroner’s jury considered that there had been foul play and brought in a verdict of ‘wilful murder by persons unknown’. Some observers took a different view. Frederick Campbell reckoned that it had been a joke that had been carried too far and he was certain that none of those in the frame would ever be convicted. He also added that ‘there was not three of the jury but was drunk’. [Hothams, 42] Horace Walpole’s sympathies, unsurprisingly, were also with the students, commenting: ‘One pities the poor boys, who undoubtedly did not foresee the melancholy event of their sport’. He had nothing to say about the unfortunate Franklin, who had lost his life. [Walpole Corresp, xix. 387] The only one of the group who seemed to have played no role in what had happened to Franklin was Amyand, who had quit the supper party early.

Had Abergavenny been charged with murder, he would have been able to apply to the House of Lords to be tried before them, in the same way that had happened to Lord Mohun in the 1690s and was to happen again soon afterwards to Lord Ferrers and Lord Byron.

In the event, there was no need for Abergavenny to face the prospect of a trial in Westminster Hall. While the coroner’s jury had concluded that Franklin’s death had been murder, the grand jury that sat on the case during the summer assizes refused to bring in the bill triggering a trial. The grand jury was said to have been made up of some of the principal gentlemen of the county and to have deliberated for several hours before reaching their decision. No doubt they were reluctant to agree to a trial of students from gentry (or noble) backgrounds, but they may also have been swayed by the convenient death of Lord Charles Scott just a few weeks before the assizes, which left the proceedings lacking a key witness (or a likely defendant).

Whatever his role had been, Abergavenny walked away unscathed. In 1761 he applied to be recognized as Chief Larderer at the coronation of George III and Queen Charlotte, and in 1784 he had his status enhanced with promotion to the earldom. Blake Delaval was also able to cast off whatever opprobrium had attached to him, and just two years after Franklin’s death stood for Parliament for the first time (unsuccessfully). He later represented Hindon and Andover and in 1761 was made a knight of the Bath. What happened, truly, on that night in April 1747 was never discovered and justice for Franklin – or at least a full explanation of what had happened to him – was never achieved.

RDEE

Further reading:

The Hothams: being the chronicles of the Hothams of Scorborough and South Dalton…, ed. A.M.W. Stirling (2 vols, 1918)

Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (Yale edition)

W.R. Ward, Georgian Oxford: University Politics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1958)

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The seminar takes place on 11 November 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 1881 the House of Lords select committee on the law relating to the protection of young girls recommended the passage of a criminal law amendment bill. The bill proposed raising the age of consent from 13, increasing the power of the police over brothels and criminalising acts of what it called ‘gross indecency’ between men. Despite passing repeatedly through the Lords, the legislation twice failed to pass through the House of Commons in the face of parliamentary inertia.

A campaign to win popular support for raising the age of consent as a means of combating juvenile prostitution had been promoted by the social purity movement from the 1870s. The movement advocated for a single standard of morality between men and women. Its members included Alfred Dyer, who highlighted the traffic of English women to European brothels, and Ellice Hopkins who founded both the Church of England Purity Society and the working-class White Cross Army. Dyer’s journal The Sentinel was the official organ of the social purity movement, which had grown out of the success of the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, led by Josephine Butler. Butler had set up the first purity association, the Social Purity Alliance, in 1873.

The Contagious Diseases Acts (the first of which passed in 1864) covered certain areas of the UK around military bases and gave the police powers to compel women suspected of being sex workers to be medically inspected for venereal disease and detained until they were cured. These acts were designed to control the spread of venereal disease within the armed forces but there was no equivalent compulsory examination or detention for men. The ultimately successful campaign for their repeal mobilised middle class women and gave them an unprecedented political voice.

The criminal law amendment bill failed to pass the House of Commons in 1883 and 1884, due primarily to extraordinary pressures on Gladstone’s Liberal government. These included the third reform bill, the Mahdist uprising and the very real prospect of war with Russia in 1885. The bill was also held up, in part, by conflict within the social purity movement, some of whom wanted to focus parliamentary time on the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts after they were suspended in 1883. One source of planned pressure on Parliament to pass the bill surrounded the revelatory trial of the high-class brothel keeper, Mary Jeffries, in May 1885. However, her unexpected guilty plea prevented the giving of evidence and the plan collapsed.

The next attempt to force the bill through Parliament was a series of sensational articles in the Pall Mall Gazette. This series, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, was written by the Gazette’s editor, W. T. Stead, over the course of a week in July 1885. The articles highlighted the issue of juvenile and coercive prostitution. They were the result of an investigation by a ‘secret commission’ headed by Stead and including members of the Salvation Army. He described the revelations in these articles as ‘abominable, unutterable, and worse than fables’.

Stead’s articles made repeated reference to Parliament and sometimes directly addressed Lord Salisbury’s new Conservative government, which had taken office a month earlier. The articles had to make a careful and considered appeal to legislators to achieve a change in the law, while also rousing public opinion about the ‘protection of women and girls’.

While the earlier failures of the bill to pass the Commons were mainly due to pressure on parliamentary time, during 1885 the likely success of the bill was bolstered by allegations that some MPs would be personally embarrassed by revelations in Stead’s articles in the Pall Mall Gazette. Josephine Butler commented that ‘there are guilty men on the Treasury bench who now begin to be most uneasy’.

Some MPs actively supported the bill. They were all Liberals and mainly Nonconformists in religion. These included Samuel Morley, Henry Broadhurst, Samuel Smith, James Stuart and James Stansfeld, who was a veteran of the Contagious Diseases Acts campaign. Two MPs, Morley and Richard Reid, sat on a committee of inquiry which verified the truth of W. T. Stead’s articles, alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Catholic Cardinal Manning.

The Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed by Parliament in August 1885.  The new Act raised the age of consent to 16, increased the power of the police over brothels and criminalised acts of ‘gross indecency’ between men. Clauses relating to the latter, which criminalised sexual activity between men, were added to the bill by the Liberal MP Henry Labouchere.

Following the Act, the social purity movement coalesced itself into the National Vigilance Association to ensure the legislation was effectively enforced. Their campaigns and subsequent police prosecutions would focus primarily on the anti-brothel legislation, rather than the age of consent clauses. The impact of the Criminal Law Amendment Act’s criminalisation of male homosexuality would continue to be felt until its partial repeal by the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.

SS

To find out more, Steven’s seminar takes place on 11 November 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.

For a 20 minute talk about the Reform Act by Dr Philip Salmon please click here.

Much attention used to be focused on the number of voters enfranchised by the 1832 Reform Act. The extent to which the overall increase of around 314,000 electors in the UK (from around 11 to 18% of adult males) amounted to some form of democratic advance, however, has always been complicated by the Act’s limitations as an enfranchising measure, especially given the huge expectations aroused by the popular outdoors campaign in its support. Not only were most working-class voters excluded from the Act’s new occupier franchises, helping to inspire the important Chartist movement, but also many working-class electors were actually deprived of their former voting rights.

In Maldon, for example, the number of electors dropped from over 3,000 in 1831 to just 716 in 1832. This was owing to the Act’s new restrictions on non-resident voters, honorary freemen and freemen created by marriage. Abolishing the votes obtained by marrying a freeman’s daughter was an aspect of the Reform Act which evidently caused all sorts of problems in some boroughs. Similar reductions occurred in Lancaster (72%), Ludlow (64%), Bridgnorth (50%) and Sudbury (49%), as the History of Parliament‘s detailed constituency articles reveal.

Add to this all the bureaucracy involved in the new yearly voter registration system – form filling, paying up arrears of rates, one shilling registration fees – and it is easy to see why so many people failed to benefit as expected from 1832. ‘Many doggedly refused to register’, noted one paper. ‘To the poor man’, complained another, ‘a shilling is a serious amount’. Taken as a whole, for every three new borough electors enfranchised by the 1832 Reform Act, at least one pre-1832 voter was deprived of their voting rights. Another restriction with lasting cultural connotations was the Act’s formal limitation of the franchise, for the first time, exclusively to ‘male persons‘.

County voters faced fewer new restrictions, both in terms of continuing to exercise their old franchise (the 40 shilling freehold) even if they were non-resident, or claiming one of the new occupier (tenant, copyholder and leaseholder) franchises. But this did not make the impact of 1832 any more democratic.

One of the most strikingly resilient interpretations of county politics, put forward by the American sociologist D. C. Moore, has been the idea of ‘deference voting’. Vast numbers of newly enfranchised tenant farmers, Moore argued, overwhelmingly polled the same way as their landlords – willingly or otherwise – as part of ‘deference communities’, effectively bolstering the power of the aristocratic landed elite in Britain’s political system and the influence of traditional landed interests (see cartoon below). The tensions between agriculture and industry that underpinned so many 19th century political developments at Westminster, including of course the famous repeal of the corn laws in 1846, have often been linked back to this reconfiguration of British politics in 1832.

Another boost to the ‘county interest’, which is sometimes overlooked, resulted from the Reform Act’s redistribution clauses. As well abolishing the infamous ‘rotten’ boroughs and allocating new MPs to unrepresented towns and cities, almost the same number of extra MPs were given to the English counties. This was done by turning 26 existing county constituencies into 52 double member seats and allocating a third MP to seven counties. The impact on the House of Commons of increasing the number of English county MPs in this way, from 82 in 1831 to 144 in 1832, was arguably just as profound as the Act’s allocation of 63 new MPs to rapidly industrialising English towns, where most attention has traditionally been focussed.

New research by Dr Martin Spychal, published in his book Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act, helps to show just how important this reconfiguration of ‘interests’ and the complex boundary changes of the 1832 Reform Act were in reshaping Britain’s political landscape after 1832. Other pioneering research, carried out by Dr James Smith, has explored the Act’s broader impact on the evolving relationship between the four different nations of the UK and on Parliament’s use of UK-wide legislation in the early Victorian era.

In our own ongoing research on MPs and constituency politics for the 1832-68 project, it has been the cultural impact of reform that has really stood out. The way MPs behaved and the way their constituents expected them to behave clearly shifted as a result of reform, with many MPs – particularly those elected as radicals – becoming far more active and accountable and publicising their activities in the press and through constituency meetings as never before. The growing ‘rage for speaking’ in debate, the introduction of a new press gallery, new public access (including a ladies’ gallery), new voting lobbies and the formal publishing of votes of MPs were just some of the ways in which parliamentary politics began to become more open and ‘representative’ after 1832, just as many anti-reformers had feared. All this, however, was complicated by the parallel survival of many older traditions, especially in the pre-reform constituencies. Here almost tribal patterns of non-party voting, the cult of ‘independent’ MPs, the survival of many ‘pocket’ boroughs and above all the widespread use of bribery, drink and corruption at election time all helped to limit the pace of change after 1832.

Ultimately it would take many other reforms to Britain’s representative system, including the abolition of public voting in 1872 with the introduction of the secret ballot to really bring about more fundamental change.

Further Reading:

‘The English reform legislation, 1831-32’, in The House of Commons, 1820-32, ed. D. Fisher (Cambridge University Press, 2009), i. 374-412  VIEW

‘Nineteenth-century electoral reform’, Modern History Review, xviii (2015), 8-12 VIEW

‘Electoral reform and the political modernization of England’, Parliaments, Estates, and Representation, xxiii (2003), 49-67  VIEW

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 7 June 2022, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

The structure of mid-eighteenth-century politics was often defined as much by social custom as by constitutional form. What Leslie Mitchell has called the ‘circle of acquaintances’ of the ruling, largely Whig, elite revolved around familiar settings: the Court, the clubs of St James’s, the country house, grand residences of Piccadilly and, not least, the racecourse. (Mitchell, 23) In these arenas powerbrokers met, exchanged intelligence, and frequently determined the fate of ministries.

Horse racing in particular lay at the heart of the intersection between politics and courtly society. One of the clearest examples came with the formation of the 2nd marquess of Rockingham’s first ministry in July 1765, an unlikely coalition negotiated not in the council chamber, but at Newmarket in May and at Ascot in June. Horace Walpole remarked drily that ‘the new ministry was formed at the races’. (Albemarle, i. 199)

By the spring of 1765, George III was determined to be rid of his overbearing minister, George Grenville, who had been in office since April 1763. The task of taking the pulse of the political nation, fell to the king’s uncle, William Augustus, duke of Cumberland. (Brooke, 88–89)

The choice of alternatives was limited. William Pitt the Elder, still sulking in opposition, twice refused to serve. The veteran duke of Newcastle, nearing 72, was unpalatable to most. A younger generation of Whigs: Henry Bilson Legge, Philip Yorke, earl of Hardwicke, and William Cavendish, 4th duke of Devonshire, had all died in the preceding two years.

Cumberland had toured the great country houses in the summer of 1764, including Chatsworth, Wentworth Woodhouse and Woburn, discovering that the Whigs remained unenthusiastic about a return to power without Pitt. The stalemate seemed unbreakable. Yet the solution would not be found in the names listed in the London Gazette, but in the pages of the Newmarket Calendar.

By the 1750s and 1760s horse racing had become a central ritual of aristocratic and political life. Already favoured by Charles II in the seventeenth century, by the 1740s Newmarket was the undisputed capital of the turf. The Racing Calendar, first published in 1727 by John Cheny, recorded results and pedigrees, turning the turf into a semi-official world of statistics and reputations. Ascot, founded in 1711 by Queen Anne, had by the 1760s become a highlight of the London season, attracting large crowds and royal patronage. (Morton, 56–61) Both courses were more than sporting venues: they were theatres of status, where political alliances were cultivated over wagers, where a minister could be sounded out between heats, and where a successful stable enhanced a nobleman’s standing. As one contemporary put it, ‘the turf is the true parliament of our nobility’. (Lowerson, 14)

By 1765, Rockingham was already a figure of considerable weight within the Whig aristocracy, though not yet tested as a statesman. Born into immense wealth and heir to Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire, he inherited his title in December 1750. In politics he aligned with the ‘Old Corps’ Whigs grouped around Newcastle, and from 1752 served as a gentleman of the Bedchamber to George II and George III, before resigning in 1762 in protest over Newcastle’s dismissal. Contemporaries described him as reserved, upright, and cautious: ‘[his] talents were not brilliant, but his integrity and firmness of purpose were unimpeachable’. (Albemarle, i. 73) Though ‘naturally diffident, he never failed in the discharge of what he considered a public duty’. (i. 74)

Rockingham’s early military service during the 1745 rebellion had brought him into contact with Cumberland, though he was too young to serve at Culloden. Nevertheless, the brief experience fostered a respect for Cumberland which endured. Their connexion was renewed in later years on the turf. Like Cumberland, Rockingham was a passionate breeder and owner of racehorses, and he became known as ‘the Racing Marquess’. (Albemarle, i. 165)

Cumberland was equally at home on the turf, and in June 1765 he held court at Ascot, where the outlines of a new administration were hammered out. As well as Rockingham, the new ministry was to include Augustus Henry Fitzroy, 3rd duke of Grafton, a great-grandson of Charles II. Not yet 30, Grafton brought youth and royal blood; Rockingham brought wealth, influence, and respectability. Their conversations at Ascot and Newmarket were, as Albemarle noted, ‘held not in the closet, but at the races’. (i. 199)

After the private conversations at Ascot and Newmarket, the decisive moment came at Claremont, Newcastle’s Surrey residence, on 10 June 1765. Gathered there were the ‘Old Corps’, Newcastle, Rockingham, Grafton, and leading allies from the Hardwicke and Devonshire factions to decide whether to enter office and, if so, on what terms. Crucially, Cumberland presided over the discussions. As Albemarle recorded, Cumberland ‘placed before them the situation of the King and pressed upon the leading Whigs the necessity of union if they were to serve with credit and effect’. ( i. 197)

The meeting was animated but uncertain. Pitt’s refusal to serve left the field open, yet no single candidate commanded unanimous enthusiasm. It was Cumberland who resolved the impasse. Having already sounded out Grafton and secured his willingness to serve under Rockingham, he now urged the party to unite behind the young marquess. Newcastle, initially hesitant, yielded when Cumberland assured him that George III would accept Rockingham as a conciliatory figure around whom the Whigs could rally.

The following day, Cumberland carried Rockingham’s name to the king, who accepted Cumberland’s counsel. With royal assent secured, the outlines of the ministry began to take shape.

Rockingham later admitted to Newcastle that he accepted office only reluctantly, ‘from a sense of duty to the King and to the cause’. (Albemarle, i. 207) His modesty stood in contrast to Pitt’s hauteur and Newcastle’s scheming. Pamphleteers and satirists delighted in the horse racing connexion: ‘From Jockeys to Ministers’, they jibed, suggesting the Newmarket Calendar was a better guide to government than the London Gazette.

The Rockingham ministry of 1765 was born out of weakness as much as strength. It was a government of compromise, stitched together by Cumberland’s personal authority and the trust he could command in the convivial world of the turf. Rockingham himself, inexperienced and cautious, owed his elevation less to dazzling ability than to the combination of fortune, birth, and connexions that made him acceptable when others were impossible. Yet the path by which he entered office reminds us how profoundly mid-eighteenth-century politics was embedded in aristocratic sociability. Walpole dismissed him as ‘a very insignificant young man’ (Albemarle, i. 218), while Edward Gibbon sneered that ‘the nation was governed by the jockey club’ (i. 220). In the eyes of many contemporaries, he remained ‘the Racing Marquess’, proof that what happened on the turf could have consequences far beyond the paddock. After Rockingham’s resignation in 1766, the independent Member, Velters Cornewall, quipped that he was ‘a jockey, but a good and high-bred racer, indeed.’

ICdeF

Further Reading
Albemarle, Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and his Contemporaries (1852)
John Brooke, King George III (1972)
John Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes (1993)
L.G. Mitchell, The Whig World (2005)
Charles Morton, History of Horse Racing (2004)

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.

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)

One of the seminal moments of Pulteney’s career occurred at the end of the parliamentary session on 31 May 1725 when he was dismissed from his post as cofferer of the household, on account of his opposition earlier in the session, most notably over the Civil List bill. There followed a period of opposition which ended only with the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole from the Treasury on 3 February 1742. Pulteney then entered the Cabinet, but consistent with his oft-repeated pledge not to take office, he did not take an administrative post. On 14 July, the penultimate day of the 1741-2 session, he was raised to the earldom of Bath, taking his seat in the Lords on the following day.

Pulteney lost a lot of popularity when entering the House of Lords, and he failed twice to attain major office in the years following: he was overlooked in favour of Henry Pelham, as first lord of the Treasury, upon the death of the earl of Wilmington in July 1743 and failed to construct a ministry when the Pelhams and most of their colleagues resigned in February 1746. From then on, his political career is deemed to have been over and he spent his time in ‘retirement’.

However, there was another side to Pulteney, related to the accumulation of power and influence. On the very day he took his seat in the Lords, a bill to prevent the marriage of lunatics received the royal assent. This was managed through the Commons by Pulteney’s long-term associate Phillips Gybbon and served to offer some protection to Pulteney’s investment in the reversion of the estates of the Newport, earls of Bradford.

The heir to the estates of Pulteney’s friend, Henry Newport, 3rd earl of Bradford (1683-1734) was Bradford’s illegitimate son, John Newport, whose mother Ann Smyth was on her deathbed. The reversion of Bradford’s estates had been granted to Pulteney (in return for paying for Newport’s maintenance and the debts of the third earl). Now Newport could not be married off by unscrupulous operators for the estates. Similarly, the third earl’s brother, Thomas Newport, who succeeded to the title as 4th earl of Bradford, was a certified lunatic.

The Bradford estates were destined for Pulteney’s son, William, Viscount Pulteney, who pre-deceased his father in June 1763. Sir Lewis Namier detailed the battle waged by Bath to become lord lieutenant of Shropshire following the accession of George III. Bath used his connexions with the new king and John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, to overcome the claims of his rival, Henry Arthur Herbert, created Baron Herbert of Chirbury in 1743 and promoted earl of Powys in 1748. In 1736 when Ann Smyth had petitioned for a bill to allow her son (at the time known as John Harrison) to be adopt the surname Newport, the first two-names on the drafting committee were Herbert and Pulteney, with Herbert managing the bill through the House.

The death of Viscount Pulteney did not end Bath’s interest in the Bradford estates. On 21 March 1764 a bill received the royal assent allowing the guardians of John Newport to make leases of his estates during his lunacy. It was managed through the Lords by Pulteney’s ally, Samuel Sandys, Baron Sandys, and through the Commons by John Rushout, the future Baron Northwick (son of Pulteney’s friend, Sir John Rushout, 4th bt.).

Bath turned 80 on 22 March, but continued to exhibit considerable vigour, sitting on eight of the 18 days remaining in the session, including on 2 April despite being begged by Lady Elizabeth Montagu ‘not to lose all this lovely morning in the House of Lords’ [https://emco.swansea.ac.uk/emco/letter-view/1297/]. Following the end of the session, Bath travelled to Shropshire, where he reviewed the militia at the end of May. Upon his return to London, he fell asleep in a garden, caught a fever and died on 7 July 1764.

The dynastic implications of Bath’s actions become clear if we look beyond the contemporary criticism levelled at him for leaving his estate to his elderly brother, General Harry Pulteney. In fact, the descent of the estates followed the intentions laid down by Henry Guy in his will of 1711 (which provided the basis of Bath’s wealth). Guy’s list of remainders ended with the male heirs of Daniel Pulteney, Bath’s cousin.

The ultimate beneficiary in 1767 was Frances Pulteney, daughter of Daniel and the wife of William Johnstone, who took the name Pulteney after Frances succeeded to the Pulteney estates. This William Pulteney succeeded his brother (Sir James Johnstone) as 5th baronet in 1794 and spent over 30 years as MP for Shrewsbury. His daughter and heir, Henrietta, was created successively Baroness Bath (1792) and countess of Bath (1803). Upon her marriage to Sir James Murray, 7th bt. in 1794 he also took the name Pulteney.

SNH

The term ‘One Nation’ comes from Disraeli’s 1845 novel Sybil; or the two nations. After the young aristocrat Charles Egremont complacently observes that Britain is the ‘greatest nation that ever existed’, Walter Gerard, a working-class radical, tells him that there are in fact

‘ “Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”

“You speak of –“ said Egremont, hesitatingly

“The RICH and the POOR.”’

Disraeli never actually used the phrase ‘One Nation’, but it was certainly implied. His belief was that political leadership should aim to overcome the social divisions between classes to make the country ‘One Nation’.

Disraeli was one of a number of novelists and social critics to address the ‘condition of England’ question, the poverty and squalid living conditions of the urban working classes, in the 1840s. A Conservative backbencher at this time, Disraeli used his novels to sketch out a social critique of laissez-faire philosophy. The selfish individualism propagated by Liberal manufacturers and Whig aristocrats influenced by Utilitarianism denied the organic, social ties that existed between people, classes and communities. Disraeli was a paternalist who stressed the social obligations of the nobility to the poor. In his view, social measures to improve the lot of the poor would be the best way of safeguarding traditional institutions such as the Church, the monarchy and the House of Lords. ‘The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy’, he once wrote.

With his ‘Young England’ group of young aristocratic followers, Disraeli looked towards an alliance between a paternalistic nobility and the working classes against the selfish Liberal middle classes in the 1840s. As a political project this was a non-starter, but it was not without some successes. For example, the votes of paternalist Tory MPs, including Disraeli, were crucial in passing the 10 hour day for factory workers in 1847. The measure was popular with workers, but many Liberal MPs had opposed the measure as unjustifiable state interference.

Despite the success of his novels, Disraeli only came to political prominence in 1846 when the Conservative prime minister Sir Robert Peel split his party by repealing the corn laws. Disraeli made his name with a series of witty attacks on Peel for betraying his party. By 1849 Disraeli was the undisputed leader of the Conservative party in the Commons, although Lord Derby remained in overall charge. Disraeli served as chancellor of the exchequer in Conservative minority governments in 1852, 1858-9, and 1866-8 and was prime minister in 1868 and 1874-80.

How far the ideas of Disraeli’s novels informed his political career continues to be debated. Disraeli was in government for a relatively short period due to the dominance of the Liberal party. However, in the 1870s his government passed a number of measures relating to working-class housing, sanitary improvements, education and other social issues. Whether Disraeli could claim much credit for them is debatable, as he was never a man for detailed policy making and most of the measures were due to the efforts of individual ministers. Furthermore, most of these social reforms were low-key, limited and permissive rather than compulsory.

However, the social reforms of the 1870s were of considerable political importance. As a mass electorate was developing, these social reforms and the 10 hour day allowed Conservatives to highlight their record of supporting social measures to improve the lot of the working classes. After his death in 1881, the party developed a Disraeli personality cult.  Local branches of the Primrose League (named after his favourite flower) were established to attract the working classes, including women, with particular emphasis placed on Disraeli’s support for social reform and empire. The Disraelian legacy has been invoked by Stanley Baldwin, Conservative prime minister in the 1920s and 1930s, by the One Nation group of Conservative MPs founded in 1950, and by political leaders of both parties since.

Further Reading:

R. Blake, Disraeli (1966)

J. Parry, ‘Disraeli, Benjamin’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessible from www.oxforddnb.com (available free through many libraries)

M. Pugh, The Tories and the people, 1880-1935 (1985) (on the Primrose League)

P. Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform (1967)

J. Vincent, ‘Was Disraeli a failure?’, History Today, 13 (1981), 5-8

R. Walsha, ‘The One Nation Group and One Nation Conservatism, 1950-2002’, Contemporary British History, 17 (2003), 69-120

Lord Lexden, ‘The centenary of One-Nation Conservatism’

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 5 October 2012, written by Dr Henry Miller.

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.