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).

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).

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EP

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

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The past is often viewed as being either ‘history from above’ (the ‘great man theory’ of history), or ‘history from below’ (the Marxist emphasis on economic and social forces). Of course, any astute practitioner knows that history is neither of these – it is both. Indeed, the past would be so much easier to understand if only one of these two alternatives was adopted. The events surrounding Philip Herbert, 4th earl of Pembroke, in the three months from May to July 1641 are a clear demonstration of the interaction between these two forces.

Pembroke had risen to prominence as a favourite of Charles I’s father, James I. According to Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon, Pembroke (then plain Philip Herbert) ‘had the good fortune, by the comeliness of his person, his skill, and indefatigable industry in hunting, to be the first who drew the king’s eyes towards him with affection …’ (Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, i. 74). As evidence of James’s favour, Herbert was made earl of Montgomery in May 1605. Like George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, with whom he was on good terms, Montgomery successfully managed the transition from James I to Charles I in 1625. In August 1626, he succeeded his brother, William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, as lord chamberlain. In April 1630, he became 4th earl of Pembroke on his brother’s death, inheriting the third earl’s role as a champion of the Protestant cause in Europe. Pembroke now had a substantial income, which enabled him to cut a figure at court. He also entertained the king every summer at his country seat at Wilton House, near Salisbury in Wiltshire. As a mark of royal favour, Pembroke, who was a keen connoisseur of art, was present in January 1637 when the king opened cases containing a consignment of pictures, which were a present to Charles from Pope Urban VIII to Charles. The earl was clearly an important part of the king’s court as well as being a provider of counsel in the late 1630s.

However, by the middle of 1641, Pembroke had completely lost Charles’s favour. The immediate cause was his role in the trial of the king’s former first minister, Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford. In March 1641, Pembroke, as lord chamberlain of the household, was key in stage-managing the impeachment trial of Strafford in Westminster Hall. Pembroke was then deeply involved in the House of Lords passing Strafford’s bill of attainder in early May. Notably, he whipped up the crowd in Old Palace Yard just outside the House of Lords to encourage his fellow peers to pass Strafford’s attainder. Pembroke is reported as telling the anti-Strafford demonstrators that ‘Justice [would be done] very shortly’ (BL, Add. MS 19398, fo. 72: letter of intelligence, 3 May 1641).

The king never forgave Pembroke for his role in the attainder and the ensuing execution of Strafford in May. Just over two months later, on 19 July, Pembroke was involved in a physical argument with Henry Howard, Lord Mowbray, striking that peer twice with his staff. Charles took this opportunity to revenge himself on the earl and to remove him from his office of lord chamberlain, conferring it instead on another opposition peer, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, as part of a belated effort to woo the latter. (Charles had been advised to offer Essex preferment as early as September 1640 immediately before Parliament sat.) As one discerning observer put it, ‘My lord of Pembroke did not loose his place [as lord chamberlain] for this faulte [the fracas with Lord Mowbray], but for countenancing of those tumultuous people’ outside Parliament during the debate on Strafford’s bill of attainder (TNA, SP16/482, fo. 178: Thomas Wiseman to Sir John Pennington, 29 July 1641).

The events outlined above link high politics (the Lords and the passing of Strafford’s bill of attainder in May 1641), popular action (Pembroke’s courting of the crowd in Old Palace Yard supporting some peers – and pressuring others – into passing Strafford’s bill of attainder, again in May), together with royal courtly revenge (Charles’s replacement of Pembroke as Lord Chamberlain with Essex in July). These events centred around one individual (Pembroke) over a short timeframe of three months, and support the premise of the interaction of ‘history from above’ and ‘history from below.’

These two historical architypes would continue to feature in the remainder of the crisis of 1641-2 and, indeed, into the civil war. In January 1642, the London Trained Bands, representing ‘history from below,’ would side with Parliament against Charles, forcing the king from the city and depriving him of its resources and wealth for the duration of the civil war. The London Trained Bands would then be decisive in turning away Charles’s thrust towards London at Turnham Green in November. Similarly, there are examples of ‘history from above’ in the civil war. In 1643, the property-owning elite in Parliament would greatly extend the tax base by introducing an excise tax, which, as a form of regressive indirect taxation, fell hardest on the commonality. And, over the winter of 1644-5, political infighting in Parliament would create the New Model army, leading to the king’s ultimate defeat in 1645-6.

F.D.

Further reading

John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007)

Dianne Purkis, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006)

David Smith, ‘Herbert, Philip, first earl of Montgomery and fourth earl of Pembroke (1584-1650)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

Biographies of the peers named in this blog will be covered in the forthcoming House of Lords, 1640-60. Pembroke, in his role as MP for Berkshire in the Rump Parliament, is also included in the recently published House of Commons, 1640-60.

The seminar takes place between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. You can attend online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Sir Thomas Wentworth (later earl of Strafford) served as an MP in English parliaments held during the reigns of James I and Charles I. But by the end of the 1620s, Wentworth had ‘changed sides’ from parliamentary champion to court supporter. He was appointed lord president of the council of the North in December 1628 and then became a member of the English privy council in November 1629. His rise to power continued when he was appointed lord deputy of Ireland in 1632.

From the mid sixteenth century, the colonisation of Ireland had intensified. To try and maintain control, English monarchs appointed a lord deputy or lieutenant of Ireland to rule on their behalf, although with limited powers which meant that this vice-regent was reliant on the king and English privy council. Wentworth, like previous deputies, had to try to control a kingdom which was not only divided religiously, but also between the Old and New English and the native Irish. In addition, he could be undermined by his political enemies from within England whilst he was away. On a practical level, the deputy experienced communication difficulties with letters between Ireland and England sometimes taking weeks to arrive, and was required to take long absences from Ireland when his attendance on the king was required.

Wentworth negotiated additional rights which previous lord deputies had not had, in order to try and overcome these issues. Complaints against the Irish administration had to be first heard by Wentworth’s court in Dublin rather than being taken directly to England, grants relating to Ireland could not be passed in England without his prior knowledge, and Wentworth was also permitted to clear Ireland’s debt before the king used any of Ireland’s revenues. He also acquired the right to appoint his preferred candidates to official posts in Ireland.

On his arrival in Ireland to take up his post in 1633, Wentworth chose Christopher Wandesford, whom he had known since their schooldays, as his master of the rolls and installed him on the Irish privy council. Sir George Radcliffe, who had also had a long relationship with Wentworth, became a member of the Irish privy council. The importance of these two men was noted by Wentworth when he wrote to the earl of Portland from Ireland stating that ‘there is not a Minister on this Side, that knows any Thing I either write or intend, excepting the Master of the Rolls and Sir George Radcliffe.’ Although Wentworth himself has been the subject of much attention by historians, the role of the men that he surrounded himself with has usually only been mentioned in passing, perhaps because much of their work was carried out behind the scenes. Christopher Wandesford is also particularly interesting as in Wentworth’s absences from Ireland, he acted as a lord justice during the 1630s, and then lord deputy of Ireland in 1640. Exploring Wandesford’s role as the ‘deputy’s deputy’ highlights the difficulties of governing Ireland from afar, especially when the king’s chosen representative was absent.

The particular focus here is the role of Wentworth’s close associates in the parliaments held in Ireland during Wentworth’s time in office. He relied heavily upon Wandesford and Radcliffe to help him to prepare parliament, including managing the make-up of the House. Whilst parliament was in session, he relied upon these men to generate and maintain support for governmental policy. They acted as conduits of information to Wentworth, assessing the mood of the House, acting as controllers of debate and reporting back to the lord deputy on discussions within committees. However, despite outward appearances that the Parliament of 1634–35 had been a success, the 1640 sessions of the 1640–49 Parliament were much more difficult to control. After the first session where supply was granted in spring 1640, Wentworth was then recalled to England to support the King. In his absence during the second and third sessions of parliament, Radcliffe and Wandesford struggled to maintain the government’s initiative over parliament. This culminated in the Irish House of Commons presenting the Humble and Just Remonstrance to lord deputy Wandesford on 9 November 1640. This accused Wentworth of introducing arbitrary government in Ireland and formed the basis of the later impeachment case brought against him by the English Long Parliament in November 1640.

Wandesford and Radcliffe’s Irish parliamentary careers provide an insight into how Wentworth used his associates to support his policies in Ireland. This initially appeared successful whilst Wentworth’s government was strong, but, in Wentworth’s absence, they were unable to control parliament, and this contributed significantly to the collapse of the administration.

CB

The seminar takes place on 14 November between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. You can attend online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Further reading

The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Dispatches ed. W. Knowler (2 vols., 1739)

Hugh Kearney, Strafford in Ireland 1633-41 (1959/1989)

In the second half of the 1630s, England presented the appearance of stability. One cause of this state of affairs was that at court Charles I could rely on a triumvirate of support from the ‘Protestant Party’ (or the ‘Northumberland-Leicester’ circle), the ‘Spanish Party’ and his Queen, Henriette Marie, and her associates. This blog considers these three groups, and how, over the space of a few months, the king lost the support of two of them, with catastrophic results.

The Northumberland-Leicester circle consisted of a number of important officeholders – Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland, the lord admiral; Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester, the extraordinary ambassador to France; Philip Herbert, 4th earl of Pembroke, the lord chamberlain; William Cecil, 2nd earl of Salisbury, captain of the band of the king’s gentlemen pensioners; Sir John Coke, senior secretary of state; and Sir Henry Vane senior, Coke’s replacement. Similarly, the Spanish party comprised principal persons of state, notably William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury; Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford and lord lieutenant of Ireland; Francis Cottington, 1st Baron Cottington, chancellor of the exchequer and master of the Court of Wards; and Sir Francis Windebanke, the junior secretary of state.

This triad of support held great benefits for Charles, as he could use it to strike his own balance of policies. The king had access to a wide spread of counsel ranging from doctrinal Calvinists, who promoted the ‘Protestant cause’ in Europe and the Thirty Years War, to individuals who were also Protestants (albeit that some were Arminians, while others were crypto-Catholics), who leaned towards the Habsburgs. Members of the two groups, notably, Northumberland and Leicester and Laud and Strafford, were able individuals. Participants across the circles, particularly, Northumberland and Strafford, got on well, though others, such as Strafford and Vane senior, hated each other.

All this changed in 1641 and 1642. The Spanish party had been destroyed by the middle of 1641. Strafford and Laud were proscribed at the end of 1640, with Strafford being executed in May 1641. Windebanke fled abroad in December 1640. Cottington relinquished his offices in the summer of 1641. Equally damaging, the erstwhile loyalist Northumberland-Leicester circle deserted Charles, and began to oppose him. Pembroke was important in securing a majority in the House of Lords for Strafford’s attainder in May, and Vane senior was also deeply involved in the lord lieutenant’s downfall. None of the group would side with the king in the civil war. Northumberland, Pembroke, Salisbury and Vane senior would all oppose him actively, while Leicester and Coke would remain neutral.

The origins of the fall of the Spanish Party and the alienation of the Northumberland-Leicester circle went back to the change in Caroline foreign policy that occurred in the final months of 1639. The battle of the Downs, which in October had witnessed the defeat of a Spanish armada by a Dutch fleet in English waters, radically altered the diplomatic and strategic balance in Europe. The outcome of the battle meant that Charles could transfer his efforts from trying to finalize the Anglo-French alliance that he had sought since 1636 to realizing a league with Spain to provide him with aid in his war against the Scots Covenanters. Negotiations for a Spanish alliance began in April 1640, with terms being agreed in August. Yet, the Spanish party paid the price for what turned out to be the failed league with the Spaniards, which Strafford had championed and negotiated. (Spain’s problems in the Iberian peninsula in1640 meant it could not deliver the money and possibly the troops that Charles needed to re-establish control over his realms.)

The estrangement of the Northumberland-Leicester circle began with the Spanish negotiations in April 1640 and the dissolution of the Short Parliament in May, crystalizing in the advent of the Long Parliament in November. Northumberland now felt confident enough to break with Charles and align with the other Protestant group at court – the circle on its fringes based around Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, and Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford – the godly ‘Warwick-Bedford’ group. From the end of 1640, Northumberland and Vane senior played an important role in bringing about an Anglo-Dutch marriage alliance in May 1641 – something that the Warwick-Bedford circle espoused, but which the king and the queen opposed. Leicester’s move away from Charles came in the first quarter of 1641, when he gave up on the Anglo-French alliance that he had been trying to finalize. The ambassador then set his sights on Strafford’s position of lord lieutenant of Ireland, a post that he attained in June.

The political implications of these changes were enormous. Charles’s position was greatly weakened in 1641 and 1642 by the loss of the Spanish party and the withdrawal of the backing of the Northumberland-Leicester circle. He could no longer rely on a broad base of support as he had in the second half of the 1630s. The result was that the king fell back on the problematic (from the perspective of many, if not all, of his Protestant subjects) advice of his already very influential Catholic queen. With wider support in 1642, Charles might have been able to secure victory in the Civil War in that year. He might even have avoided conflict, and achieved a favourable peaceful resolution of the crisis of 1641 and 1642. Either outcome would have been better for the king than the four years of conflict that ensued from 1642 onwards, ending in his defeat in 1646.

F.D.

Further reading

John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007)

Richard Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625-1642 (Cambridge, 2013)

Fraser Dickinson, ‘The French Connection’, History Today, 72, 1, January 2022, pp. 50-63

Biographies of Sir Henry Vane senior and Sir Francis Windebanke can be found in House of Commons 1640-60. The peers named will be covered in the forthcoming House of Lords, 1640-60.

With the old frame of government shattered by civil war, the soldiers-turned-politicians of the New Model Army gathered at Putney in October 1647 to thrash out their terms for settlement not only with the defeated King Charles but also with their paymasters at Westminster. Historians have focused on the opening salvos in these ‘Putney debates’, when the Levellers – a group of radical agitators with friends among the soldiery – ambushed the army leadership with their manifesto An Agreement of the People, sparking passionate exchanges about electoral reform. Yet discussion on day four at Putney remained as vigorous as ever, and dominating the agenda was not whether the ‘poorest he’ should have the vote, but what role the king and Lords would play in any future settlement. Where the army’s blueprint for overhauling England’s ‘ancient constitution’, the Heads of Proposals, included a place for Charles and his nobles, the Agreement, with its emphasis on popular consent and political accountability, was much less accommodating. As the radical soldier William Allen put it, ‘the difference between us I think is in the interest of king and Lords’ (The Clarke Papers ed. C.H. Firth [Camden Society, new series xlix, 1891], p. 376).

What followed was a complex debate about the future constitutional status of the king and House of Lords, a debate in which the participants differentiated carefully between the two. And the records we have suggest that contrary to Allen’s opinion there was a large degree of common ground. Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton, the army’s chief political strategist, was swift to clarify that no one denied that the safety and preservation of the people must come first, before the ‘interest’ of the king and Lords. The question was rather what kind of interest they should have – and how this might in fact be consistent with the army’s political priorities.

Even the leading Leveller spokesman John Wildman was anxious to make clear that distrust of the king did not extend to the Lords. ‘None have any exception against the persons of the Lords or the name of Lords’ (The Clarke Papers, p. 386) he insisted – the issue was rather the scope of their power. He was apparently comfortable with the continuing existence of the peerage, of a society that was stratified and in which some enjoyed high status by virtue of their birth. But since, in his view, the ‘foundation of all justice is the election of the people’ (The Clarke Papers, p. 386), then it would be wrong to give peers, as members of the Lords, a special power over the definition or dispensing of such justice.

Wildman’s comments allowed Ireton to mount a staunch defence of the Lords, appealing to ideas of justice and equity. If a core principle for the Levellers was that no one could be bound by laws to which they had not consented, then, by rights, this rule should extend to the nobility as well. Assuming the continuing existence of the peerage, there needed to be a forum through which they too could consent to laws which affected their person and estates. That forum, Ireton suggested, was the House of Lords. Of course, he explained, if peers became officers of state then they would be subject to the House of Commons like anyone else; but as members of the Lords with their titles and privileges they were different, they stood apart from the body of the people as represented in the Commons. Similarly, the right to trial by one’s peers could surely not be denied to the nobility. ‘I would fain know’, asked Ireton, ‘how we can take away that right of peers to be tried by their peers when that it is a point of right for the Commons to be tried by their peers’? (The Clarke Papers, p. 392).

Warming to this theme, Ireton claimed that his position on the Lords actually had a firm basis in Wildman’s own arguments. After all, if government were based upon consent and the people had consented to set up a king and Lords, then there was no reason to abolish them. Moreover, the existence of the Lords was perfectly consistent with the safety of the people, because the exemption of some few individuals from the laws made by the Commons was a minor matter as long as every man was properly protected in their rights. But Ireton was clear that if all were to be protected by the law then all must be bound by it – no one could be completely exempt. Peers no less than the king were, as he put it, ‘suable, impleadable in any court’, though he added that ‘a Lord may be sued and tried per pares [by his peers] only’ (The Clarke Papers, p. 405). For Ireton, England was a law-governed polity, and though over time and through consent those laws might apply differently to some social groups, no one could stand above or outside the law itself.

We know little of the subsequent debates at Putney, but Ireton’s views evidently carried considerable weight in the army. The next day a committee convened and agreed that although all officers and ministers of state must be subject to the Commons, ‘the persons of peers, otherwise than in such capacity as aforesaid, shall bee tried and judged only by their peers’ (The Clarke Papers, p. 408) – with the obvious implication that the House of Lords would be necessary to this process. The clerk recorded that no one present dissented from this position.

Although the contours of settlement may have been uncertain in autumn 1647, it is clear that they were expected to include a House of Lords at least in some form. This was not simply conservative inertia, though there was no doubt plenty of that; it also reflected a genuine feeling within the army that if the principles of justice and rule by law were to hold, then this meant the retention of legal protection for the peerage and therefore of certain kinds of privilege and hierarchy. Only when the House of Lords refused to go along with these principles, and objected to the trial of the king, would positions change and the peers find themselves cast out of Parliament.

SM and DS

Biographies of John Wildman, Henry Ireton and Oliver Cromwell appear in the House of Commons 1640-60 volumes which are available to purchase here.

Further reading:

S. Mortimer, ‘Henry Ireton and the limits of radicalism 1647-1649’ in Revolutionary England, c.1630-c.1660: Essays for Clive Holmes ed. G. Southcombe, G. Tapsell (Routledge, 2017), pp. 55-72

P. Baker, E. Vernon, The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Palgrave, 2012)

The Putney Debates of 1647: the Army, the Levellers and the English State ed. M. Mendle (CUP, 2001)

Little went right for Charles I in the opening months of his reign. Following his accession in March 1625, a major outbreak of the plague in London forced him to delay his coronation. His war against Spain, which had initially boosted his popularity, was fast becoming a liability, prohibitively expensive to maintain, and with no prospect of a decisive victory. His marriage to the Catholic princess Henrietta Maria was intended to seal a military alliance with France, but almost from the start this union was prone to tensions and misunderstandings, at both the personal and diplomatic levels. The marriage was also unpopular with Charles’s Protestant subjects, while anxiety about the king’s commitment to reformed religion only deepened when he publicly endorsed anti-Calvinist clerics such as William Laud, bishop of St Davids. Charles’s first Parliament, in the summer of 1625, failed to grant enough taxes to fund the war effort adequately, and ended in an acrimonious attack on the king’s overmighty favourite, the duke of Buckingham. A disastrous English assault on the Spanish port of Cadiz that autumn piled further pressure on the government.

By mid-December, it was clear that a further Parliament was needed to raise fresh funds for the war. It was summoned to meet on 6 February 1626, and Charles decided that his coronation would also take place four days beforehand. The timing was surely deliberate. For a king who took very seriously the idea that he derived his power directly from God, there was great symbolism to be drawn from a coronation on 2 February, the feast of Candlemas, which commemorates the presentation of the infant Jesus in the Temple at Jerusalem. Indeed, the order of service as revised by Laud included a long-disused medieval prayer which presented the king as a mediator between God and the people of England.

If one of the coronation’s intended themes was the divine right of kings, the other was the power and splendour of the monarchy. The initial planning documents envisaged the full ceremonial trappings decreed by tradition: a grand procession (or ‘entry’) through the city of London; the crowning of both Charles and Henrietta Maria before the assembled peers and bishops of the realm; and a lavish concluding banquet. The king was also determined that his most favoured servants would receive prominent roles in proceedings. Buckingham was appointed high constable of England for the day, meaning that he would serve as one of Charles’s principal escorts, and also supervise the homage of the peers. Similarly, Laud was made acting dean of Westminster Abbey, with oversight of the whole coronation ceremony. The actual dean, John Williams, bishop of Lincoln, who had recently incurred the king’s displeasure and been dismissed as lord keeper of the great seal, was abruptly instructed to stand aside, and banned from attending the coronation at all. In effect, Charles was seizing the opportunity to affirm his commitment to his inner circle of advisors, in the knowledge that they were likely to face fresh attacks in the new Parliament.

This assertive strategy unravelled with remarkable speed. Quite apart from the lingering presence of the plague in London, which made large gatherings inadvisable, it quickly became apparent that the king simply couldn’t afford a spectacle on this scale. With the royal finances so overstretched by the war that the crown jewels were being offered as collateral in loan negotiations, on 17 January the grand ‘entry’ was formally postponed for five months. The coronation banquet was scrapped entirely a day or two later. These economy measures reportedly saved Charles £60,000, but in the words of one contemporary commentator the coronation was now ‘private without any show or feast’ [Letters of John Chamberlain ed. N.E. McClure, ii. 627]. Next, a key element of the coronation service itself was axed, after Henrietta Maria insisted that only a Catholic bishop could crown her, a condition unacceptable to the Anglican establishment. A rapid burst of cross-Channel diplomacy failed to generate a compromise solution, and by 27 January it was clear that the queen would not even be present in Westminster Abbey to witness her husband’s crowning. However, she was by no means the only absentee. Letters of summons for the nobility were not issued until 19 January, barely a fortnight before the coronation. With the winter roads in poor condition, these messages took a week or more to reach the peers in farther-flung counties, leaving them too little time to make the journey to London. While a handful stayed away because they were Catholic or currently in disgrace, a substantial number more were prevented from attending simply by these logistical difficulties. In total some 47 noblemen, nearly half of the English and Welsh peerage, missed the ceremony.

When the coronation day finally dawned, Charles went by boat from Whitehall Palace to Westminster, accompanied by Buckingham and a handful of other favoured courtiers. The earl marshal, the earl of Arundel, had arranged for the royal party to disembark at a private water-gate near the House of Commons, belonging to Sir Robert Cotton. However, both Arundel and Cotton were viewed at court as Buckingham’s enemies, and, in what was seen as a deliberate snub to them, the royal barge sailed straight past the assembled welcoming party and on to Parliament Stairs, the landing stage closest to the House of Lords. Unfortunately, as it approached land, the barge became stuck in the Thames mud some distance short of the jetty, and the king was obliged to clamber across several other small boats in order to come ashore.

After robing up in the Lords, and proceeding with rather more decorum to Westminster Hall, Charles was formally presented with the regalia. He then continued on foot in a somewhat smaller-than-planned procession to the abbey. Here further mishaps ensued. In the first set-piece of the coronation itself, the king was introduced to the assembled throng by the archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot. Following a short speech by the primate, the congregation was supposed to acclaim Charles as its rightful monarch. However, ‘whether some expected he should have spoken more, [or] others hearing not well what he said hindered those by questioning which might have heard, … or that those which were nearest doubted what to do, … not one word followed, till my lord of Arundel told them they should cry out “God save King Charles”’ [Original Letters illustrative of English History ed. H. Ellis, series 1, iii. 217]. The sermon, a further affirmation that the king derived his authority direct from God, was inaudible to most of those present; the preacher, Richard Senhouse, bishop of Carlisle, was terminally ill, and reportedly looked like his days were numbered. During the communion service, the choir missed the musical cue for the Gloria, which was consequently said rather than sung. Fortunately the rest of the ceremony went broadly according to plan, a complacent Laud noting in his diary that ‘amidst an incredible concourse of people, nothing was lost, or broke, or disordered’ [Works of William Laud ed. J. Bliss, iii. 181].

Four days later Parliament met again, and within weeks it was clear that the coronation had failed completely to improve the political climate. No new taxes were granted, several of Laud’s fellow anti-Calvinists once again came under attack, and Charles eventually dissolved the session to save Buckingham from impeachment. Relations between the king and queen continued to deteriorate, and by the end of the year England and France were on the brink of war. Charles even contrived to offend the city of London, on whose financiers he depended heavily, by cancelling the postponed ‘entry’ in May 1626 after significant sums had already been spent by the citizens on preparations. Nevertheless, the coronation’s shortcomings pale into insignificance against the dramas of the next 23 years, and no one who witnessed it can have known that the medieval regalia were being used for the last time – prior to their destruction in 1649 after the king’s execution.

PMH

Further reading:

Roy Strong, Coronation: a History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (2005)

The Manner of the Coronation of King Charles the First ed. C. Wordsworth (1892)

Biographies of Charles I as prince of Wales, George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, Thomas Howard, 21st earl of Arundel, William Laud, bishop of St Davids (later archbishop of Canterbury), John Williams, bishop of Lincoln (later archbishop of York), and Richard Senhouse, bishop of Carlisle feature in our volumes on The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (2021).