The Triennial Act of February 1641 was the first piece of legislation passed by the ‘Long Parliament’ in its momentous thirteen-year history of reform, rule and, in 1649, regicide. Of course, none of the peers and MPs who had assembled late in 1640 anticipated that Parliament would overthrow Charles I and seize the reins of government. But what they did foresee was the need to exploit the crisis engendered by his recent and disastrous war against the Scots in order to curtail the royal prerogative – the monarchy’s traditional discretionary powers that enabled it to govern without Parliament. None of these powers was more significant than the king’s right to call and dissolve Parliaments at will. The Triennal Act was brought in to limit this right, introducing legal provisions for summoning Parliament automatically in the event that the king had failed to do so after a three-year period. Here was the first step in a hoped-for revolution in royal government whereby parliamentary laws and taxation, based upon consent, would replace what many at the time saw as the king’s ‘arbitrary’ rule over their lives and property.

The fact that the Act originated in the Commons and was sponsored by Oliver Cromwell and other radicals has persuaded some historians that it was a power-grab by MPs determined to prove that they were now ‘the active agency of Parliament’ (G. Yerby, The Economic Causes of the English Civil War (Abingdon, 2020), p. 236). Yet even supposing the Commons viewed their handiwork in these terms they faced a major obstacle, for draft legislation still required the endorsement of both the Lords and the king to become law. As sent up to the Lords early in 1641 for their consent, the triennial bill (i.e. the draft Act) was indeed a radical document. It stipulated that if the king did not call a Parliament when required then the task would fall to the county sheriffs and other returning officers and then – if they too failed in this duty – to the electors themselves. Laws for calling regular Parliaments to redress ‘Mischiefs and Grievances’ had been on the statute books since the fourteenth century (The Statutes of the Realm (1810), vol. 1, p. 374); but none, so far as is known, had authorised people this far beyond the normal circles of government to act for the crown independently of their political masters. Charles was appalled that his ‘Ancient Prerogative’ would be exercised by ‘Sheriffs and Constables and I know not whom…’ (J. Rushworth, Historical Collections (1721), vol. 4, p. 155).

When the triennial bill was read in the Lords late in January 1641 it provoked ‘serious Debate’ and was referred to a committee to make ‘Additions and Amendments’ (Journals of the House of Lords (1782), vol. 4, p. 247). The king had even bigger problems with the bill and proposed to the Lords ‘that the Lawes for houlding of Annuall Parliam[en]tes be dulie kept and observed’, but that if this safeguard failed then the power of summoning a new Parliament should be vested either in the lord chancellor or the lord keeper (Parliamentary Archives, Main Papers, 28 Jan. 1641). These crown officers were royal ministers of state, appointed by the monarch, and the king seems to have calculated that if push came to shove they would remain answerable to him. The peer who chaired the committee to amend the bill was another royal minister – the lord privy seal, Henry Montagu, 1st earl of Manchester. He was a firm believer in the authority, indeed duty, of the peerage to act for the good of the commonwealth in disputes between the monarch and the people. He and his fellow committeemen did not object to royal ministers or, if necessary, local returning officers summoning Parliament independently of the king. Instead, they inserted between the two groups their own choice as guardians of the public interest – the aristocracy.

Manchester’s committee proposed that if the king or one of his ministers did not summon Parliament as required then the peers of the realm, ‘or any twelve or more of them’, should meet at Westminster and issue the necessary writs for holding elections (The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625-1660 ed. S.R Gardiner (Oxford, 1906), p. 147). The number twelve in this context was a highly controversial one and loaded with political significance. In 1601 a group of English noblemen led by Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, had justified their rebellion against Elizabeth I by claiming authority under a precedent of 1265 for twelve peers to seize power and summon Parliament. Five members of Manchester’s 1641 committee, among them Essex’s son, the 3rd earl, had invoked this same authority just the previous year, joining seven other noblemen – making twelve peers in all – to petition Charles, demanding that he call Parliament. This demand, backed by Scottish force, had worked; the disaffected peers of 1640, unlike their Elizabethan predecessors, had prevailed.

The Lords’ amended triennial bill was returned to the Commons where it was referred to a committee dominated by Cromwell and like-minded MPs and was approved with only minor changes. A delegation of peers then attended the king on the understanding that if he withheld his royal assent to the bill he would be threatened with ‘the most extreme designs’; Charles ‘yielded to necessity’ and complied (Calendar of State Papers Venetian, 1640-1642 ed. A.B. Hinds (1924), p. 126). To him the Act represented a slippery slope towards an aristocratic republic and, in time perhaps, full parliamentary sovereignty. But a more immediate challenge to royal power – certainly once Parliament had been dissolved – was the baronial authority that the twelve petitioner peers had wielded and to which the Triennial Act now gave legal expression. The Commons had acquiesced in the Lords’ re-drafting of their bill because they shared the reformist ideals of the twelve peers. Indeed, some of the leading MPs had conspired with these noblemen to bring down Charles’s ‘personal rule’ the year before.

The two Houses were determined not just to affirm the lordly interest evident in the Triennial Act but to strengthen it. In their final overture to the king before the outbreak of civil war in 1642 they insisted on aristocratic control of royal government in the intervals between Parliaments; but Charles scorned the idea of reigning as a ‘Pupil or Ward’ of his over-mighty subjects (His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions (1642), p. 14). On raising an army against him that summer, parliamentarian peers and MPs declared allegiance to their new lord general with the baronial pledge that they would ‘live and die with the [3rd] Earl of Essex’ (Journals of the House of Lords (1786), vol. 5, p. 206).

DS

Further reading:

John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London: Weidenfild & Nicolson, 2007)

Esther S. Cope, ‘The inconveniences of long intermissions of Parliament and a remedy for them’, Albion, 13 (1981), pp. 1-11

Pauline Croft, ‘The debate on annual Parliaments in the early seventeenth century’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 16 (1996), pp. 163-74

Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘The earl of Essex and Elizabethan Parliaments’, Parliamentary History, 34 (2015), pp. 90-110

Note: the biography of Oliver Cromwell has been published in House of Commons, 1640-60. The biographies of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex and Henry Montagu, 1st earl of Manchester, will appear in House of Lords, 1640-60. For a study of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, see House of Lords, 1558-1603 (forthcoming).

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

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

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

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

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

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

PS

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

On Monday 20 July 1789, Henry Beaufoy, MP for Great Yarmouth, moved the third reading of a bill he had sponsored through the House of Commons for instituting a perpetual commemoration of the 1688 Revolution. The bill was a relatively simple one, seeking merely to insist that in December every year, clergy in the Church of England would read out the Bill of Rights, thereby reminding their congregations of the events that had seen James II expelled and William III and Mary II installed as monarchs.

Beaufoy’s bill had to compete with other rather more urgent measures. These included one for continuing an Act passed in the previous session for regulating the shipping of enslaved people in British ships from the coast of Africa; and another for granting over £20,000 towards defraying the costs of the Warren Hastings trial, which had commenced the previous year and would continue to annoy the House until 1795. Consequently, it was late in the day when Beaufoy got to his feet and, although his motion carried by 23 votes to 14, it was determined that as the House now lacked the requisite 40 members present to make a quorum, the Commons should adjourn.

Next day, Beaufoy tried again. Once more, there was opposition. During the two days when the bill was debated objections were raised by Sir William Dolben and Sir Joseph Mawbey, the latter arguing that Beaufoy was merely mimicking the Whig Club in seeking popularity, while Henry James Pye considered the measure ridiculous as it would result in two commemorative events each year. Others were warmly in favour, though and, when it came to a division, the motion to give the bill a third reading was carried. Following a failed effort by Mawbey to introduce an amendment granting to each clergyman required to read the declaration 20 shillings, the bill was passed and sent up to the Lords. [Commons Journal, xliv. 543-7]

Beaufoy’s bill had its origins in the centenary celebrations of the Revolution, which had been marked across the country the previous autumn. Like his bill, not everything had proceeded smoothly. Not least, there were obvious rivalries between the clubs and societies heading up the various events. There was even disagreement on precisely when to mark the day. The Revolution Society had chosen 4 November, on the basis that this was both William III’s birthday (and wedding anniversary) and the day that he had made landfall. The Constitution Club, on the other hand, chose to hold its entertainment on 5 November, which chimed with the date chosen by John Tillotson (soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury), when preaching his 1689 commemorative sermon. It also echoed celebrations of the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot and this dinner was rounded off with toasts to the ‘three eights’: 1588 (Armada), 1688 and 1788. [Gazetteer and Daily Advertiser, 6 November 1788]

Aside from somewhat petty disagreements about whether 4 or 5 November was most apt, several of the societies also had strikingly different political outlooks and exhibited fierce rivalry. Speaking at the Whig Club, Richard Sheridan concluded his remarks with proposing a subscription for erecting a monument to the Revolution, which appeared to get off to a fine start with £500 being pledged almost at once. The plan was for the edifice to be located at Runnymede, emphasizing the links between the safeguarding of English liberty with Magna Carta, and the completion of the process with William of Orange’s successful invasion.

Not everyone liked the idea of a physical monument, though, and when the proposal was read out at other clubs, it received either muted or downright hostile responses. Speaking at the Constitution Club’s dinner at Willis’ Rooms, presided over by Lord Hood and featuring around 700 diners, John Horne Tooke made no secret of his contempt for the Whig Club’s plan. It was at this meeting that Beaufoy first raised his idea for a day of commemoration to be legislated for by Parliament, though at least one paper reported that his speech had been drowned out by the noise around him.

Elsewhere, there was more harmony. One of the grandest celebrations of 1688 took part at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, where Thomas Coke (future Earl of Leicester) laid on a spectacular firework display as well as mounting a recreation of William’s landing at Brixham having brought in squadrons of horses and loaded them onto miniature ships, which were launched on a canal. Perhaps the most evocative event, though, was one of many held in London taverns, where an unidentified man, said to be 112 years old, was reported to have been in attendance and chaired by the company. According to the paper he was one of ten centurions residing in the French hospital on Old Street, but at 112 he was likely the only one of them who actually remembered the Revolution taking place. [E. Johnson’s British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, 9 November 1788]

All of this was cast thoroughly into the shade by the very unhelpful timing of the king’s illness, which had commenced that summer but become steadily more acute through October and finally reached a crisis on the symbolic date of 5 November. The Prince of Wales had been on his way to Holkham to take part in Coke’s celebrations, but was forced to turn back after being alerted to the king’s deteriorating condition. At a time when the stalwarts of the Revolution Settlement were trying to make the case for the stability it had provided in settling the throne on the House of Brunswick, the prospect of a king no longer able to fulfil his constitutional functions was a disaster.

By the time Beaufoy finally made his motion in the Commons, the king had recovered but that did not ease the progress of what always seems to have been a rather unwanted bill. Having made its way through the Commons, the measure was presented to a thinly attended House of Lords on Thursday 23 July 1789, and a motion for the bill to be given a first reading was moved by Earl Stanhope – a leading member of the Revolution Society.

Stanhope’s motion was objected to by the Bishop of Bangor, who insisted that a prayer was already said for the Revolution in church each year. Stanhope attempted to argue in favour of the ‘pious and political expediency’ of the bill, insisting that the event was not commemorated satisfactorily in church. [Oracle, 24 July] The Lord Chancellor left the wool sack to enable him to offer his own opinions on the matter, backing up Bangor’s view and arguing the bill to be absurd, before a final contribution was made in favour of the proposed measure by the Earl of Hopetoun. The motion for the first reading was then negatived by six votes to 13, after which the Lords resolved without more ado to throw the unwanted bill out. [Diary or Woodfall’s Register, 24 July; The World, 24 July] Sheridan’s wish for a grand monument met with a similar fate, though an obelisk celebrating the centenary was raised at Kirkley Hall near Ponteland in Northumberland, by Newton Ogle, Dean of Winchester, and another at Castle Howe near Kendal in Cumbria.

As far as commemoration of 1688 was concerned this was far from the end of the story. Two centuries on, the tercentenary witnessed an unusual expression of unity from the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock. Moving a humble address to the Queen, expressing the House’s ‘great pleasure in celebrating the tercentenary of these historic events of 1688 and 1689 that established those constitutional freedoms under the law which Your Majesty’s Parliament and people have continued to enjoy for three hundred years’, Thatcher was answered by Kinnock, agreeing that it was: ‘a worthy act, not only because it celebrates a significant advance, as the Prime Minister just said, but because it requires us all to consider the character of our democracy…’

Father of the House, Sir Bernard Braine, was next to speak. He welcomed the rare moment of political harmony and underlined the key principal about what 1688 meant to everyone in the chamber:

‘It is the knowledge that the parliamentary system which we jointly serve is greater than the sum total of all who are here at any one time.’

RDEE

Further Reading:

John Brooke, King George III (1972)

Journals of the House of Commons

Journals of the House of Lords

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.

S.A.

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RDEE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RDEE

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

It had started so well. Francis Leak, the son of Sir Francis Leak, a prosperous landowner in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, was the first of his family to try to establish himself on the national stage. He had already taken the important first step of marrying the sister of a rising star at court, Sir Henry Carey (later Viscount Falkland in the Scottish peerage). Yet Leak’s ambitions were undermined by a fierce row with his father, who had resigned the patrimonial estate to him in return for a relatively high rent-charge. Once the documents were sealed, Leak refused point-blank to pay anything to his father, on the preposterous grounds of poverty. His true financial state was revealed in 1624, when he paid James I’s favourite, George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, £8,000 to be made Baron Deincourt. The son’s ennoblement enraged the father, who was already engaged in a lengthy legal battle with his son. Even the death of Sir Francis in 1626 did not stop the wrangling, as Deincourt’s mother and half-brother disputed the will and won a chancery order for him to pay them rent arrears; this was upheld by the Lords in 1629. Deincourt’s parliamentary service in the later 1620s had been overshadowed by this constant rowing, and the dispute continued into the early 1630s, ending only with the intervention of the privy council, which ruled against the baron. His reputation at court and among the aristocracy never recovered.

Although Deincourt was treated with distain by the royal court during the 1630s, his son, also Francis, was able to succeed where the father had failed, joining the royal family for racing at Newmarket and being given minor ceremonial roles at court. His career was, however, spoiled by his father’s parsimony. Two potential marriages were ruined by Deincourt’s refusal to make realistic financial provision for his son, and by the end of the decade, Francis was languishing in debtors’ prison. Deincourt was equally mean when it came to public affairs. Although a supporter of the king, he was reluctant to give the king money to fight the bishops’ wars against the Scots in 1639-40, and he went on to play very little part in the Short and Long Parliaments. At the outbreak of civil war in 1642, he sided with the king. Francis, who had gone to France (possibly to avoid his creditors) died at about this time, leaving the second son, Nicholas, heir to the barony. Needless to say, Deincourt and Nicholas Leak immediately fell out, with Nicholas joining the parliamentarians.

Civil war did not improve Deincourt’s miserliness. In September 1642, the prominent courtier, John Ashburnham, was sent to Deincourt to secure £5,000 for the king, while Arthur Capell (later 1st Baron Capell), went on a parallel mission to the equally parsimonious Robert Pierrepont, 1st earl of Kingston-upon-Hull. The cunning Kingston deflected the request by suggesting the wealthy Deincourt – ‘who was good for nothing and lived like a hog, not allowing himself necessaries’ – could easily supply the money instead. Deincourt, who had ‘so little correspondence with the court that he had never heard his name’, did not accept Ashburnham’s credentials until he had consulted with his wife’s nephew, Lucius Carey, 2nd Viscount Falkland, but afterwards reacted ‘with so different a respect’ that the envoy became hopeful of receiving the money after all. He was soon ‘undeceived’:

The lord, with as cheerful a countenance as his could be (for he had a very unusual and unpleasant face), told him that though he had no money himself, but was in extreme want of it, he would tell him where he might have money enough … that he had a neighbour, who lived within four or five miles, the earl of Kingston, that never did good to anybody, and loved nobody but himself, who had a world of money, and could furnish the king with as much as he had need of. (Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, ed. Macray, ii. 332-4)

Despite being something of a joke at royalist Oxford, Deincourt did serve the king faithfully, not least in the defence of Newark, and in sending two of his younger sons to serve in the king’s army – both were killed in combat. He was made earl of Scarsdale at the end of 1645, probably in a deal in which he finally agreed to give material support to the king. At the end of the war, the new earl of Scarsdale refused to do a similar deal with Parliament. Unlike almost all peers who were given the option, he declined to compound for his estates, which continued to be sequestered. His heir, Nicholas Leak, who had managed to rent the Derbyshire properties from Parliament, now made a concerted effort to secure legal title to the whole estate, not least to ensure that his mother and the younger children were provided for. He finally succeeded in 1651.

Overriding Scarsdale’s wishes was easy to justify, as his mental health appears to have deteriorated in the immediate aftermath of the first civil war, reaching a low point after the execution of Charles I in 1649, when ‘he apparelled himself in sack-cloth, and causing his grave to be digged some years before his death, laid himself down in it every Friday, exercising himself frequently in divine meditations and prayers’. (W. Dugdale, Baronage of England, ii. 450). That this was not normal behaviour is underlined by the strangeness of earl’s will, written in 1651. He gave unusually detailed instructions about his burial at Sutton Scarsdale church: he was not to be disembowelled or embalmed, and he was to be buried without a coffin, covered only by a sere-cloth or winding sheet, and ‘a little round board of an inch think laid upon my face’. (TNA, PROB11/251, f. 139v). As if this was not odd enough, in the main body of the will the earl completely ignored the fact that the estate had effectively been taken out of his hands: his younger son, Henry, was provided with lands; his four unmarried daughters were given their full marriage portions of £4,000 each; and, in a highly unusual move, these younger daughters were appointed executors. Reality reappeared only after the old man’s death. When probate was passed in 1655, it was granted to Nicholas Leak, now 2nd Baron Deincourt and 2nd earl of Scarsdale, his sisters and widowed ‘having renounced the execution of the said will’. (PROB11/251, f. 140)

PL

Further reading

The biography of Francis Leak will appear in the forthcoming House of Lords 1640-60 volumes; for his earlier career, see House of Lords 1604-29.

Biographies of Sir Henry Carey and Sir Francis Leak in House of Commons 1604-29; George Villiers in House of Lords 1604-29; John Ashburham, Arthur Capell and Lucius Carey in House of Commons 1640-60; Nicholas Leak in House of Lords 1660-1715.

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

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

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

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

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

ALB

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.

On 6 March 1725, Pope Benedict XIII (1724-30) was roused from a period of private prayer with the news that ‘Queen’ Clementina, consort of the exiled James Edward Stuart (to his Jacobite supporters, James III and VIII) had given birth to a son in the Palazzo Muti in Rome. In spite of James and Benedict having decidedly tricky relations, the Pope hurried over to greet the new infant and promptly baptized him Henry Benedict (along with perhaps as many as ten other names).

Unlike his older brother, Charles Edward, Henry Benedict has attracted comparatively little attention. This is hardly surprising given his reputation for caution and his eminently sensible decision not to follow his brother to Scotland in 1745. Instead, it was left to Henry to undertake the thankless but necessary task of remaining in France, rallying support, while Charles tried and failed to regain a crown, and ultimately to organize a ship to rescue the by then rather battered Young Chevalier after his months hiding in the heather.

The failure of the 45 Rebellion no doubt confirmed Henry in his view that further escapades were ill-advised, and helped convince him to follow an alternative path. In 1747, he made the momentous decision to enter the church and was fast-tracked through the clerical ranks, emerging as a Cardinal that summer. It was by no means welcome to his family, though James seems to have become reconciled to it sooner than Charles, writing to ‘My dearest Carluccio’ that he was:

Fully convinced of the sincerity and solidity of his vocation; I should think it a resisting of the will of God, and acting directly against my conscience, if I should pretend to constrain him in a matter which so nearly concerns him. [Kelly, 36]

It seems, in any case, that Henry’s decision was not wholly a surprise, and that plans may have been afoot to have him made a cardinal as far back as 1740. [Corp, 225] James was not minded to agree to a suggestion by Pope Benedict XIV (1740-58) that Henry be made Cardinal Protector of England, Scotland or Ireland, [Corp, 232] though the British press reported that ‘when’ the exiled dynasty was back in possession, Henry was to be sent as Papal Legate. [St James’s Evening Post, 25-28 July 1747]

Henry’s decision to abandon a potential military career did not prevent him from being an occasional focus for disloyalty in England. His birthday, the year after he entered the church, was celebrated by five inebriated students of Balliol College, Oxford, with minor hooliganism committed against staunchly Whig Exeter College, while one of them shouted out ‘God bless King James, God damn King George’. Two of the ringleaders were later sentenced to two years in prison for their actions. [Monod, 276-7]

In stark contrast to his undergraduate fan club, Henry appears to have set about his new vocation with studied seriousness. That he had not altogether forsaken his position as a claimant to the British throne is indicated, though, by his decision to issue a medal with his image on it following the death of his father in 1766, even though Charles (Charles III to the Jacobites) chose not to bother. The same medal was then reissued 22 years later, after Charles’s death, when Henry became (again, according to the Jacobite succession) Henry IX. On the reverse was a diplomatically worded Latin motto, taken from Peter’s first epistle: ‘Non desideriis hominum, sed voluntate dei’, which as Monod observes ‘was so inoffensive as to lack any real seditious import’. [Monod, 88, 91]

As the medal demonstrated, while Henry chose not to do anything to encourage rebellion against his cousin, George III, he was keen to insist on his royal status and to keep up certain rites and standards. Insisting on wearing ermine was one, but perhaps most important, he persisted with the family tradition of ‘touching’ for scrofula, issuing special tokens for people afflicted with the condition. His brother, Charles had touched at least one sufferer while in Edinburgh in 1745 [Brogan, 213, 217]

If Henry trod a cautious path from his entry into the church through to his own ‘succession’ on Charles’s demise, he was unable to prepare for the dramatic changes ushered in by the French revolution. In 1796, Bonaparte invaded Italy, and Pope Pius VI (1775-99) was forced to hand over vast sums to prevent widespread pillaging in and around Rome. Henry made his own contribution by parting with a ruby, once the property of his maternal family, worth an estimated £60,000. [Kelly, 97] The following year, a new invasion force proved less willing to be bought off, and Henry became an exile twice over – quitting his villa outside Rome for Messina, thence to Corfu before finally returning to the Italian peninsula and settling in Venice.

It was there, that the cardinal’s journey in some ways came full circle. Having spent his whole life a representative of a rival dynasty to the ruling Hanoverians, it was to his cousins that Henry was ultimately indebted for saving him from penury. Thanks to an intercession from Cardinal Borgia, contact was made with a sympathetic Catholic gentleman in England, whose contacts ultimately passed the petition for assistance to the king. Advised by William Pitt that Henry ‘the last relick of an Illustrious Family’ was now ‘reduced to a state of distress which bordered on wretchedness’, George concurred that something needed to be done and through Lord Minto, ambassador at Vienna, he offered Henry an annual pension of £4,000. [Hampshire/Portsmouth Telegraph, 30 Dec. 1799] Acknowledging the king’s ‘noble way of thinking’, Henry accepted.

Having been saved from eking out his final days in a state of poverty, Henry was able to focus on the Conclave, summoned following Pius VI’s death in August 1799, and which convened in Venice from the winter of 1799 through to the spring of 1800. While there had been various reports in the British press late the previous year of efforts being made ‘to seat Cardinal York in the Papal Chair’, he seems never to have been a serious candidate for the papacy himself. [Hampshire/Portsmouth Telegraph, 9 Dec. 1799] Rather, it was left to him to play a supporting role in the eventual election of Cardinal Chiaramonti as Pope Pius VII (1800-23). Later that year, he was able to stage a return to Rome, where he lived out his remaining days in comparative luxury.

To the very end, Henry maintained the careful course he had always navigated. In his will of 1802, signed (rather optimistically) Henry Roi, he repeated an earlier declaration that the de jure succession to the British throne lay (after him) with the reigning king of Sardinia. However, on his death five years later he was also careful to acknowledge the assistance he had received from his Hanoverian cousins by returning to George, Prince of Wales, some of the regalia carried overseas by his grandfather, James II and VII, almost 120 years earlier.

RDEE

Further Reading:
Stephen Brogan, The Royal Touch in Early Modern England (2015)
Edward Corp, The Stuarts in Italy, 1719-1766: A Royal Court in Permanent Exile (2011)
Bernard Kelly, Life of Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York (1899)
Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English people, 1688-1788 (1989)