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.

CG

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.

On 13 April 1646, a committee set up by the House of Commons to investigate an anonymously authored book ‘intituled, “Truth’s Manifest”’, reported on its findings. Passages of the book were read out by the committee’s chairperson, the political Independent and future regicide, John Lisle. He informed the House that the book was the work of ‘Mr. David Buchanon’, who ‘did avow it to be of his Writing’. It was resolved by the House that the book should be ‘forthwith burnt by the Hands of the common Hangman’ on account of the ‘many Matters false and scandalous’ contained within it. The serjeant-at-arms was instructed to locate Buchanan and summon him to the Bar of the House the following morning ‘as a Delinquent’. This was an extremely serious charge. It is little wonder that Buchanan’s response was to abscond before he could be apprehended. (CJ iv. 507).

The investigations into Truth its Manifest did more than reveal a ‘scandalous’ book. They exposed to public view a clandestine network of individuals who were using print to mobilise opinion within and beyond Parliament for partisan purposes. By the mid-1640s, Parliament was deeply divided over the conduct of the war, the terms on which peace negotiations should be pursued with the King, and perhaps most contentiously of all, the settlement of the Church of England. Although opinion on these issues remained fluid, two distinct parliamentary parties, referred to by contemporaries as the Presbyterians and the Independents, had come into existence. We can detect by this time the same people working together with a high degree of consistency, and across both Houses, in pursuit of relatively clearly defined objectives.

What had contributed much to the crystallisation of these parties was the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant in the early autumn of 1643. The Scottish government, led by the Covenanters (so called after the 1638 National Covenant), agreed to send an army to aid Parliament, supported at England’s expense once it was over the border. In return, the Scots were promised reform of the English and Irish churches along Scottish lines, meaning principally the establishment of Presbyterianism, and the strengthening of the union between England and Scotland. Some form of Presbyterian church was broadly acceptable to many parliamentarians, whether they identified with the Presbyterian or Independent parties, but the question of recognition for ‘liberty of conscience’ was far more problematic. The formal commitment of the Scottish government and its Kirk to religious unity and uniformity, as expressed in the Solemn League, caused bitter disagreements with those Independents for whom religious toleration was fundamental to any peace settlement worth the name.

Like other Presbyterian polemicists, Buchanan was outraged at the heresies and errors that he believed Independency promoted. The Independents claimed they wanted ‘to seek the Truth of God more than others’ but, opined Buchanan, ‘God knows, they seek themselves and to set up their Fancies’. Buchanan went further, by portraying the Independent party in Parliament as a corrupt faction whose leading individuals were manipulating its procedures to satisfy their own ‘ambition and avarice’. Their enthusiasm for pulling down tyranny, and their friendliness towards the Scots in the early days of the alliance, had been a ruse to bring in ‘confusion’ in religion and ‘Anarchy’ in the state. All was done to enrich and empower themselves. (Truth its Manifest (1645), pp. 81, 127).

What made these imputations so ‘scandalous’ was that they had the ring of truth about them. This conspiratorialist analysis appealed to people resentful of a tax burden far greater than that imposed by Charles I, and tired of the exactions of the war committees set up all over the country to coordinate the raising of men and supplies. To those in the know, the Independents really were masters of the committees now proliferating in Parliament, adept as they were at getting their friends appointed to them and managing votes in their favour. A particular sensitivity for the Scots and their Presbyterian allies was the way in which the Independents had first manipulated, and then sidelined, the committee that had been created to manage the Anglo-Scottish war effort, known as the Committee of Both Kingdoms. It seemed entirely plausible that certain individuals were benefiting directly from Parliament’s formidable machinery for extracting the nation’s resources on an unprecedented scale. Why else had a war that many thought would be over in months, dragged on from one year to the next, seemingly without end?

What Buchanan had written was controversial enough, but his offenses were compounded by how he had come by his information and transmitted it into the public domain. Investigations spearheaded by the Independents in the House of Commons soon truffled out Buchanan’s relationship to other publications revealing of his connections. Buchanan was a Scot by birth and a scholar. He had travelled on the Continent and his contacts there were useful to advocates of the Solemn League seeking international support. At some point, Buchanan came to the attention of Robert Baillie (1602-62), a politically active Scottish cleric. After the signing of the Solemn League, Baillie was posted to London to represent Scottish interests at the Westminster Assembly, set up by Parliament to reform the Church of England. Baillie and Buchanan both operated in Presbyterian circles that included George Thomason, bookseller and magpie collector of printed works, James Cranford, a London minister and licenser of the press, and Robert Bostock, a London stationer known for publishing Covenanter material. By early 1645, Buchanan was sufficiently trusted to be given papers for publication from the Scottish commissioners who sat on the Committee of Both Kingdoms. Over the course of about a year, it seems Buchanan moved from facilitating the publication of the commissioners’ papers, to adding in his own polemical material alongside them, to moulding them into the original composition that became Truth its Manifest. While the relationship between Buchanan and the commissioners remains shadowy, the polemicist was no mere mouthpiece simply parroting the views of more powerful men. 

Buchanan’s publications show us something of the way in which new political practices, necessitated by the expansion of the state’s infrastructure, were being subjected to intensified public scrutiny. Many contemporaries were horrified by these developments, as ideals of consensus and unity, and social deference and order, were tested to breaking point by partisan writings and publication strategies. The interrogations by the parliamentary committee chaired by Lisle revealed public men using secret means and private associates to publish opinions they could not express themselves. Buchanan the self-professed truth-teller had asserted that the only way of cleansing Parliament from its corruption by the Independents was to prevent them hiding behind ‘mysteries of state’: what concerned the public must be known to the public. (Truth its Manifest (1645), p. 9).Yet here was evidence of the Scottish commissioners and their Presbyterian friends using devious methods to blacken their rivals and, ultimately, put pressure on Parliament. Who needed enemies like the royalist newsbook, Mercurius Aulicus, when a self-proclaimed friend was printing slanderous accusations against people who were meant to be his brothers-in-arms?

It could be argued that Buchanan’s activities did most damage, not to the Independents, but to the Scottish Covenanters, by reinforcing existing hostility towards them, further alienating their Presbyterian allies in Parliament, and exposing their own weakened ability to achieve the ends of the Solemn League through legitimate channels. Arguably, too, the reputation of Parliament itself was undermined by these partisan rivalries, as revelations about murky doings on both sides raised the question of whether anybody could be trusted to put the public good ahead of the rewards of worldly power. Buchanan was amongst those writers who had opened the way to far more radical critiques of the proper relationship between ‘the people’ and the Parliament of England, one with profound consequences for all the peoples of the British union.

L.S.

Professor Laura Stewart of the University of York, is the Editorial Board member for the 1640-1660 House of Lords section.

Laura’s blog surveys her forthcoming chapter in Parliament and Politics in Revolutionary Britain and Ireland, edited by Dr Alex Beeton, Research Fellow for the House of Lords 1640-1660 section. This exciting collection of the latest research on parliamentary politics in the revolutionary period will be published by Manchester University Press in 2026.

Further Reading:

John Adamson, ‘The Triumph of Oligarchy: The Management of War and the Committee of Both Kingdoms, 1644-1645’, in Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey (eds), Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2002), 104-7.

Jason Peacey, ‘Print Culture, State Formation, and an Anglo-Scottish Public, 1640-1648’, Journal of British Studies 56:4 (2017), 816-35.

Valerie Pearl, ‘London Puritans and Scotch Fifth Columnists’, in A. E. J. Hollaender and William Kellaway (eds), Studies in London History: Presented to Philip Edmund Jones (London, 1969).

David Scott, ‘Party Politics in the Long Parliament, 1640-8’, in George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell (eds), Revolutionary England, c.1630-c.1660: Essays for Clive Holmes (Abingdon, 2017).

The finalized ‘Articles of Union’ were signed at Whitehall on 22 July 1706 and formally presented to Queen Anne the following day. They were considered by the Scottish Parliament during October 1706-January 1707, and an Act was then passed declaring Scotland’s assent. The Articles were then debated at Westminster, first by the Commons, then the Lords, during February 1707. A bill was passed for ratifying the Articles to which the Queen gave her assent in person at the House of Lords on 6 March.

After the Scottish Parliament had passed its ratifying Act it had turned to the question of Scotland’s future parliamentary representation. Article 22 of the Treaty had decreed that 16 peers and 45 commoners were to represent Scotland at Westminster, leaving it to Scotland’s Parliament to settle the detail. The Edinburgh parliament was a unicameral body which, by the eve of the Union, had grown to consist of a ‘theoretical’ total of 302, made up of some 143 hereditary peers, 92 ‘shire’ or county commissioners, and 67 burgh commissioners. Inevitably, Scotland’s loss of its representative body – symbolizing the loss of national sovereignty – in favour of a much reduced representation at Westminster produced deep resentment among the Scottish populace.

At the end of January 1707, following a series of ill-attended sittings, the Scottish Parliament passed legislation setting out the procedures for electing the 16 peers and 45 commoners. The 16 representative peers were to be chosen by the entire body of Scottish peers through ‘open election’ rather than by ballot. Each elected peer was to serve for the duration of one Parliament. Upon the dissolution of Parliament all Scottish peers would be summoned by royal proclamation to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where the names of peers were called over and each peer would then read out his list of 16 nominees. It became standard practice for governments to canvass their preferred choices, thus ensuring a controllable bloc of support in the Upper House. The practice of electing ‘representative peers’ of Scotland was to continue until it was abolished by the Peerage Act of 1963.

Far more contentious was the process of allocating the 45 commoner representatives between the shires and burghs. It was eventually fixed at 30 for the shires and 15 for the burghs, but it entailed a substantial redrawing of the electoral map of Scotland. Most of the 33 Scottish counties acquired a single Member of Parliament, but with the six smallest counties being required to alternate in pairs from one election to the next. The county franchise, however, remained unchanged. The 66 royal burghs were now grouped together into 14 ‘burgh districts’, each containing four or five burghs. Each district returned a single MP while Edinburgh retained the right to elect its own Member, making the total of 15. Within each district the place of election rotated from one election to the next according to the order of precedence used in the rolls of the Scottish parliament and as laid down in the Scottish elections act.

Since the Union was to take effect from 1 May 1707, the Treaty declared that the first Parliament of Great Britain was to last for the duration of the current parliament at Westminster. Members of the Scottish parliament who had opposed the Union pressed for a general election in Scotland to elect the 45 Scots MPs. But it was agreed instead that the first Scots MPs should be chosen from, and elected by, the existing parliament in Edinburgh rather than run the risk of allowing Scotland’s small electorate an early opportunity to elect an anti-Union majority. Virtually all the peers and commoners selected had supported the Union and most could be counted on to support the Court in the new Parliament.

The Scottish parliament gathered for the last time on 25 Mar. 1707 and was formally closed by the Queen’s lord high commissioner, the duke of Queensberry. At Westminster the current session ended on 24 Apr. when Parliament was prorogued until 30 April. On that day, a small number of peers gathered in the Upper House (to which the handful of MPs attending in the Commons was also summoned), to hear a proclamation read declaring that the new Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain had now replaced the separate English and Scottish parliaments. A further proclamation of 5 June declared that it would assemble at Westminster on 23 October.

When the new Parliament duly convened on that day the first business in the Commons was to choose a new Speaker. What was usually a political trial of strength was on this occasion a good-natured formality, with the preceding Speaker, John Smith, being unanimously called again to the Chair. In a neatly orchestrated move, the nomination was seconded by the Scots MP, Francis Montgomerie, who, having served with Smith as a Union commissioner, commended Smith’s contribution to the negotiations.

Scots MPs accustomed to the ponderous formality of proceedings in Edinburgh found it necessary to adapt to the cut and thrust style of debate at Westminster. The general election in 1708 gave Scottish voters their first chance of electing representatives to the united Parliament. But the years immediately ahead saw Scottish MPs frequently at odds with British ministers over failure to honour vital aspects of the Treaty.

Further Reading

P.W.J. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland (Manchester 1978).

M. Brown and A.J. Mann, The History of the Scottish Parliament, 1567-1707 (Edinburgh, 2005)

This is a revised version of the article ‘England, Scotland and the Treaty of Union, 1706-08′ by Andrew Hanham, originally posted on historyofparliamentonline.org.

The free seminar takes place on 3 December 2025, between 5:30 and 7:30 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.

On 3 December 2025 I will be discussing my doctoral thesis ‘Black & Political: Black Political Participation in Britain, 1750-1850’. My research re-examines the political landscape of the long eighteenth century through the lives of Black and mixed-heritage individuals active in British political culture.

Focusing on a self-built database of over 80 figures, my work combines archival research, digital methodology, and prosopography. It illuminates modes of political participation during the long eighteenth century, ranging from electoral voting and petitioning to informal political influence and community leadership.

My paper for the seminar will reflect on the methodological challenges and opportunities involved in recovering these individuals, many of whom left fragmentary archival traces. I will explore how sources such as poll books, wills, newspapers, personal correspondence and institutional records can be read together to reconstruct political agency beyond the traditional boundaries of office-holding and elite reform circles.

I will also explain how I constructed the profiles for several key individuals in my database and the methods I used to identify race and uncover instances of previously marginalised political activity.  In doing so, I will discuss how implicit markers and passing references can be used to identify race, as well as the variety of historical sources that can be used to confirm political participation.

Importantly, my case studies illustrate both the limitations and possibilities of the historical archive for demonstrating the diverse forms of political life that have been overlooked in British historiography. In doing so, my work acknowledges the entangled histories of race, empire and politics at the heart of British political history. 

HW

Helen’s seminar takes place on 3 December 2025, between 5:30 and 7:30 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.

You can read more about Helen’s work in the following History of Parliament articles:

H. Wilson, ‘Profile of an 18th century Black Voter: George John Scipio Africanus’, History of Parliament (2022)

H. Wilson, ‘The Presence of Black Voters in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, History of Parliament (2022)

H. Wilson, ‘Catherine Despard (c.1755-1815): Wife, Mother, Radical advocate’, History of Parliament (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NG

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

Further reading:

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

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

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

The 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.

Variously described as of an ‘unsociable nature and impetuous disposition’, ‘sour’, ‘surly’, and a ‘destroyer of every body’s business’, John Robartes, 2nd Baron Robartes of Truro and later earl of Radnor, was not the sort to invite affectionate remembrance. For the historian of the seventeenth century, however, the survival of his library at Lanhydrock in Cornwall, together with his notebooks and commonplace books, softens the impression. Read alongside the pronouncements of his public career, these materials show how a peer of the 1640s operated intellectually as well as practically, and how processes of reading and reflection were pressed into the day-to-day business of politics.

John Robartes was born in 1606 to the wealthy Cornish merchant Richard Robartes and Frances Robartes née Hender. In 1621 Richard bought the barony of Truro for the eyewatering sum of £10,000 at the behest of the unpopular George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham. John himself seemed keen to forget this recent ennoblement, striking out references to it in print.

Little is known of John Robartes’ early education. Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, sneered that his ‘proud and imperious’ humours were ‘increased by an ill Education; for excepting some years spent in the Inns of Court amongst the Books of the Law, he might be very justly said to have been born and bred in Cornwall’ [Clarendon, Life, ii. 238–9]. In fact, Robartes studied at Exeter College, Oxford under John Prideaux before being admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in February 1630 alongside William Lord Russell (later 5th earl of Bedford), Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke, and Oliver St John: all men later prominent in opposition to Charles I and connected to networks of godly aristocratic critics of the king’s personal rule.

John affirmed his entrée into this circle that same year when he married Lucy Rich, daughter of Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, and it was likely through Warwick that Robartes acquired a seat on the board of the Providence Island Company – a venture notable more for the godly convictions of its investors than for its colonial achievements. Robartes’ own investment was trifling (mere pounds compared to the thousand laid down by William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele) yet it was enough to place him alongside the king’s most persistent critics. There can be little doubt that Robartes shared both in the geopolitical assumptions of the Providence group, and the godly ideals that infused their perception of the world.

When Robartes took his seat in the Lords in 1640 he joined his former board members (now referred to as the ‘Pro Scots’ group, ‘Puritan Party’, or even ‘junto’ [P. Warwick, Memoirs of the Reign of Charles I, 173]) in opposition. He was often named to committees and generally voted with his allies, though not unthinkingly: in May 1641 he ‘positively’ and unusually for an associate of the junto ‘refused [the Protestation], alleging there was no law that enjoined it, and the consequence of such voluntary engagements might produce effects that were not then intended’ (Clarendon, Hist. rebellion, iii. 187). His notebooks from this period hint at the roots of this independence, revealing not only his preoccupations, but the way in which his interpretation of the nation’s ills was refracted through his reading.

One such notebook, compiled between 1640 and 1641, opens with a revealing interlude from the fifteenth century. ‘During the time of Henry V of England’, wrote Robartes, ‘the Kingdom of the French lost its freedom and noble properties’. Its Parliament had ‘urgently and under necessity’ granted the king a right to levy taxes, and ‘until this day the authority to demand taxes remains with the king … creating strife and difficulties amongst the once fierce and free peoples’. Thus, Robartes surmised, ‘the danger of necessity is known’ (BL, Harleian 2325, f. 2r).

There can be little doubt as to the lesson here drawn. If the motto scrawled on a subsequent folio – Lege historiam ne fias historia, ‘Read history, lest you become history’ – were not clear enough (BL, Harleian 2325, f. 4r), Robartes also copied from earlier editions of the Journal of the House of Lords various instances where Charles had couched his requests for money in the language of ‘public necessity’: the free gift in July 1626, the Forced Loan, Privy Seal loans in 1628, the levying of tonnage and poundage in 1629, as well as ‘ship money’ in 1637. This was not, he recognised, entirely novel. James VI & I had done the same. Yet whereas James conceded that a king was bound ‘by a double oath to the observation of the fundamentall lawes of his kingdom’ (Workes, 1616, p.531, underlining Robartes’), Robartes’ reading of Charles’s conduct suggested that his son entertained no such restraint. Worse still, as his research into the cleric Roger Maynwaring shows, were those close to the king who combined arguments from necessity with a more worrying appeal to absolutist principles. Only Parliament, it would appear from the statutes Robartes copied out, could defend against such ‘Machiavellian counsellors’, the most notorious of whom was almost certainly Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford.

Robartes was one of the most active peers in the Lords’ proceedings against Strafford, serving on the committee of 3 December 1640 to examine witnesses, and on each of the joint committees investigating his conduct. The same notebook, as well as the flyleaves of his books, are crowded with references to treason statutes – testimony not only to the energy Robartes poured into considering Strafford’s case, but also to the grounds on which he found him guilty. Whilst some historians have suggested that of the articles drawn up against Strafford only articles fifteen and twenty-three contained anything that was actually ‘treason’, Robartes’ notes suggest otherwise. Alongside the statute of 25 Edward III he noted the case of Empson and Dudley, condemned under Henry VIII for ‘withdrawing the hearts of the subjects from the king’. Marginal references to John Eliot in 1626 and Elizabeth Barton under Henry VIII point in the same direction. For Robartes, treason did not consist only in a direct act against the monarch’s person, but also in creating division between king and people.

Seen in this light, the articles against Strafford, alleging that he had ‘laboured to alienate the Hearts of the King’s liege People from His Majesty’, struck him as treason in the fullest sense. When the impeachment faltered and the bill of attainder was brought forward, Robartes had little difficulty persuading himself of its justice. He had considered other precedents – peers allowed to go at large or degraded rather than condemned – but concluded that Strafford’s offences left no such room for leniency. His later annotations, and his protests when the attainder was reversed in the 1660s, confirm that he continued to regard Strafford’s execution as both necessary and lawful.

Robartes was to read his way through many more of the debates of the Long Parliament, though the military duties that drew him away from the House between 1642 and early 1645 also drew him away from his library. His exploits in these years left little to admire. The debacle at Lostwithiel in 1644 ended in an ignominious escape by fishing boat, and when he returned to political life after 1645, his reflections reveal a man increasingly unsettled not only by the king’s duplicity but also by the radicalism of Parliament and the army. By 1649 it was not the execution of Charles I that most disturbed him, but the abolition of the House of Lords. In his notes he copied a verse from Lamentations: ‘Servants rule over us; there is none to deliver us out of their hand.’ For a peer who had long believed the Lords to be the ‘screen and bank’ mediating between king and commons, their destruction was the true calamity.

Like the House of Lords, though, it was not the end for Lord Robartes. After retreating to his library in the 1650s – on better terms with his books than with many of his former allies – he returned after the Restoration as privy councillor, lord privy seal, and eventually lord president of the council. Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon admitted that ‘for all men alive who had so few friends, he had the most followers’ (Life, ii. 239). And when, after his disastrous sojourn as lord lieutenant of Ireland – a posting he had long coveted, and just as swiftly squandered – he retired to Lanhydrock, it was once again to strike up conversation with the texts that had been his companions since the first days of the Short Parliament.

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Further Reading:

S. Aldred, ‘Medicine, Marriage and Masculinity in Early Modern England: John Robartes and the Library at Lanhydrock House 1630–85’, Historical Research 98:281 (2025), pp.333-49.

 C. Holmes, ‘Parliament, Liberty, Taxation and Property’, in J. Hexter (ed.), Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the Civil War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp.122-53.

C. Russell, ‘The Theory of Treason in the Trial of Strafford’, English Historical Review 80:314 (1965) pp.30-50.

W. R. Stacy, ‘Matter of Fact, Matter of Law, and the Attainder of the Earl of Strafford’, American Journal of Legal History 29:4 (1985), pp.323–47.

A. Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580-1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

A. Grafton, N. Popper, W. Sherman (eds.), Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading: Essays by Lisa Jardine and Others (London: UCL Press, 2024).

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).

By the late Georgian period, the buildings of the Palace of Westminster had become an accident waiting to happen. The rambling complex of medieval and early modern apartments making up the Houses of Parliament – which over the centuries architects including Sir Christopher Wren, James Wyatt and Sir John Soane had attempted to improve and expand – was by then largely unfit for purpose. Complaints from MPs about the state of their accommodation had been rumbling on since the 1790s, and reached a peak when they found themselves packed into the hot, airless and cramped Commons chamber during the passage of the 1832 Reform Act.

Unable to agree on a solution for new accommodation, in the end the decision was made for them. The long-overdue catastrophe finally occurred on 16 October 1834. Throughout the day, a chimney fire had smouldered under the floor of the House of Lords chamber, caused by the unsupervised and ill-advised burning of two large cartloads of wooden tally sticks (a form of medieval tax receipt created by the Exchequer, a government office based at Westminster) in the heating furnaces below. Warning signs were persistently ignored by the senile Housekeeper and careless Clerk of Works, leading the Prime Minister Viscount Melbourne later to declare the disaster ‘one of the greatest instances of stupidity upon record’. 

At a few minutes after six in the evening, a doorkeeper’s wife returning from an errand finally spotted the flames licking the scarlet curtains around Black Rod’s Box in the Lords chamber where they were emerging through the floor from the collapsed furnace flues. There was panic within the Palace but initially no-one seems to have raised the alarm outside, perhaps imagining that the fire – which had now taken hold and was visible on the roof – could be brought under control quickly. They were mistaken. A huge fireball exploded out of the building at around 6.30 p.m., lighting up the evening sky over London and immediately attracting hundreds of thousands of people.

The fire turned into the most significant blaze in the city between 1666 and the Blitz, burning fiercely for the rest of the night. It was fought by parish and insurance company fire engines, and the private London Fire Engine Establishment, led by Superintendent James Braidwood, the grandfather of modern firefighting theory. Hundreds of volunteers, from the King’s sons and Cabinet ministers downwards, manned the pumps on the night, and were paid in beer for their efforts. Contrary to popular opinion, onlookers in the vast crowds did not generally stand around cheering. Most were awestruck and terrified by the spectacle, and some suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result. Others were injured in the crush, and plenty were pickpocketed, but astonishingly no-one died in the disaster.

As it burned, the fire stripped away the later, and often ugly, accretions of many centuries, revealing the beautiful gothic buildings beneath, including the Painted Chamber, St Stephen’s Chapel and its lower chapel of St Mary’s, in use at the time of the fire as the Court of Claims, House of Commons and Speaker’s Dining Room respectively. In the aftermath of the fire these became a focus for much antiquarian activity and delighted the sightseers touring the ruins.   

By the middle of the evening it was clear that the fire was uncontrollable in most of the Palace. Westminster Hall then became the focus for Braidwood’s efforts and those of his men and hundreds of volunteers. The thick stone Norman walls provided an excellent barrier against the spread of fire, but the late fourteenth-century oak roof timbers were in great peril. ‘Damn the House of Commons, let it blaze away!’ cried the Chancellor of the Exchequer Viscount Althorp desperately, ‘But save, O save the Hall!’ The efforts of all, from the highest to the lowest, plus a lucky change of wind direction at midnight, and the arrival of the London Fire Engine Establishment’s great, floating, barge-mounted fire engine, finally started to quell the fire in the early hours and ultimately saved Westminster Hall.  The fire crews finally left five days later, having put out the last of the fires which kept bursting out from the ruins.

The following day revealed a shattered and smoking collection of buildings, most of which were cleared in the months that followed and the stone sold to salvage merchants or pushed into the river. Temporary chambers and committee rooms were available for occupation by February 1835, and a government competition commenced to design a new Houses of Parliament on the ruined site. Charles Barry, aided by Augustus Pugin, won the commission and together they created the most famous building in the United Kingdom. The patched-up parts of the old Palace were finally pulled down in the early 1850s. Only Westminster Hall, the Undercroft Chapel of St Mary and part of the Cloister remain today of the survivors of 1834. The damage to the wrecked and uninsured Palace was estimated at £2 million. No-one, however was prosecuted, though the public inquiry which followed found various people guilty of negligence and foolishness.  

Coming at a moment in British history between the Georgian and Victorian ages, the stagecoach and the railway, the demise of the medieval city of London and the birth of the modern one, it is easy to load the great fire of 1834 with a wider historical significance. Later commentators have seen it as symbolic of the constitutional changes brought about by the Great Reform Act of 1832, but at the time people were more likely to have seen it as a judgement from God for the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, against which Charles Dickens – a parliamentary reporter at the time of the fire – railed in Oliver Twist.

This piece is a revised version of the article ‘The Fire of 1834’ by Dr Caroline Shenton, author of ‘The Day Parliament Burned Down‘, originally posted on historyofparliamentonline.org.