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).

This seminar takes place between 5.30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The diaries of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1602-50), MP for Sudbury 1640-1648, have been the bedrock of studies of the Long Parliament and its members since at least the early Victorian period. The best-known of these, his parliamentary diary, composed in English, runs from 3 November 1640 until 3 November 1645. The portion of it that extends from 1640 until 17 September 1642 has at various times and formats been edited and published, leaving the remainder in unpublished transcript only. The explicit aim of D’Ewes’s modern editors has been to produce a text that sheds light on parliamentary proceedings, with much less focus on the text and how it came to be produced.

On 1 January 1644 D’Ewes began to keep a parallel diary, in Latin, which he kept up, as far as we know, until 24 March 1647. None of this material has yet been published, although a project at the History of Parliament to make a transcript and English translation has been in progress for many years. A third parallel diary, in cypher, covering the whole of 1643, remains the unconquered Everest of D’Ewes studies.  All of this material is essential to an understanding of the daily life of the Long Parliament, but of course also to penetrating the mind and outlook of D’Ewes himself as diarist, autobiographer and self-analyst.

Essential to understanding D’Ewes’s practice and motives in diarizing is his long habit of it, engrained by 1640. It has long been known that he kept a personal diary as early as 1620, but recently it has been shown that he was keeping one, now lost, from 1618-20, and that there was once another diary, also missing, for the years 1627-35.[1]  Just as important in shaping the diaries were his expertise and learning in antiquarian pursuits, to which because of inherited wealth he had been able to devote himself virtually full-time for many years.    

By early 1642 D’Ewes was seeking to distance himself from his fellow parliamentary diarists and what he considered their inferior method of simply consulting the Commons clerk, Henry Elsying, while he was writing up the official Journal. D’Ewes prided himself on relying instead on his own memory, which may seem to us a fallible and inferior way of proceeding, but it is an early indication that the diarizing was a self-conscious intellectual act, not a simple exercise in gathering information. He sat in the Commons chamber to create his diary until 23 July 1642 when he was the subject of a mortifying put-down by Speaker Lenthall which provoked unkind laughter at D’Ewes’s expense. Thereafter he wrote up back at his house in Covent Garden, very often as the first activity of the day after the events he was recording.

The process of writing was more complex than the printed editions would suggest. There were notes, sometimes in Latin, and rough drafts, only some of which have survived on what would become the fair copy. D’Ewes’s secretary, James Hornigold, was an active participant in helping shape the final copy, with differences of wording evident between the rough and fair drafts. June 1643, by which time the parliamentary diaries occupied ‘three great tomes’, marks a point at which D’Ewes was reappraising his own diarizing motives. Disillusioned at what seemed like a failure of the war effort against the king, the unwillingness of radicals in the Commons to contemplate peace, and the serial abuse and disregard of what he considered proper parliamentary process, he decided to persist with the diary ‘to transmit not only the story but the very secret workings and machinations of each party as well of the two houses of parliament chiefly led and guided by some few members of either house as of the king’s party’. 

This reappraisal also involved a change of method. D’Ewes adopted what he considered a more artless process, including only ‘remarkable passages’, which he thought useful to posterity because he ‘set down matters with the same freedom with which others spake or acted them’.

His motives for beginning a new diary from January 1644, in Latin, parallel to the parliamentary diary, are never explicitly stated. Because the Latin diary gives a more rounded picture of D’Ewes’s personal day than the parliamentary diary does, it is easy to assume that securing privacy from prying, unlearned eyes might have been the aim. But an important clue is offered by the record in the diary of how much reading and writing in Latin the author has achieved each month (usually not a great deal, in fact). The diary was partly a significant Latin exercise in itself.

D’Ewes has a habit of repetitive, formulaic writing evident in passages in both diaries. In the parliamentary diary he usually prefaces a précis of one of his own speeches with ‘I rose and spake in effect following’; in the Latin he starts each day with letter-writing and diarizing. But the Latin diary involved him in many literary decisions about which Latin vocabulary and constructions were most appropriate for describing parliamentary job titles and committees. Having started with delegatus for MP, in December 1644 he hit on assessor, meaning not one who assesses or levies taxes, but one who sits next to another (from ad-sedere), suggesting a borrowing or invention inspired by classical not medieval Latin sources. He comes up with half a dozen terms for the Committee for Plundered Ministers. 

Both diaries are in fact part of an iterative process, both the result of selection, in which material from one could find its way into the other, from what seemed sometimes even to D’Ewes a jumble of notes ‘abstractedly and confusedly taken’. Sometimes the Latin diary provides the key to understanding the parliamentary diary. There is no better example than D’Ewes’s explanation for why he abandoned the parliamentary diary on 3 November 1645. It did not peter out. Rather, the author gave it up on it because exactly five years of the parliament had passed, ‘with the outbreak of war ancient usages had been neglected, and new MPs chosen in a new way, completely contrary to my own view’. In other words, the recruiter elections were the final straw.  

D’Ewes records his many antiquarian, intellectual pursuits in the Latin diary. Important among these was his numismatic work. His coin collection arrived in London from Suffolk in January 1645. Had any highwaymen or marauding royalists intercepted the wagon, their relish would quickly have turned to disgust on realising the estimated 6,000 coins were mainly minted in imperial Rome. D’Ewes found at least seven Latin verbs to describe his activities with coins, and they all involve separating and classifying. Processes of selection are evident in his other studies, among the manuscripts he consulted at the Tower of London, and his own library of 700 manuscripts and 7,800 charters. Unsurprisingly, therefore, his mind was pre-disposed to classifying when it came to analyzing the behaviour of his fellow MPs, evident in his commentary on ‘parties’ in June and December 1643.  

The price paid for wrenching from the D’Ewes diaries the daily summaries of parliamentary activity is an understanding of their value as autobiography. Only a holistic approach to D’Ewes’s diaries will restore their full scholarly potential as a source for understanding one individual’s perceptions of the world around him. The texts deserve to be treated as artefacts in their own right, not simply as quarry for fact-gathering in pursuit of parliamentary history.  

SKR

[1] M. Lockett, M. Leach, ‘The Search for a Lost Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 16 (2017), 161-80.

This seminar takes place on 25 June 2024 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 last decade, it has become common to describe parliamentary democracy in England and the West more generally as in a ‘permacrisis’. Yet, how did the English Parliament of the mid-seventeenth century negotiate an actual crisis? The revolutionary decades saw the constitutional, social, ecclesiastical, theological, and cultural framework of Britain and Ireland altered beyond recognition in the furnace of civil war. The parliamentary military fiscal state which emerged from the battles of the 1640s was unrecognisable from its ante bellum compatriot. No king, no bishops, no lords – and in their place a republican regime which morphed into the protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. Explaining why such events took place, their significance, and who was involved is at the heart of the History of Parliament’s mission. In 2023, the History’s nine-volume set covering the House of Commons between 1640-1660 was published, an achievement which represents a major milestone in studies of the British Civil Wars. In 2022, the History launched a new section to cover the House of Lords for the same period. To celebrate the publication of the former and the beginning of the latter, the History organised a one-day colloquium on the theme of ‘Parliament and Revolutionary Britain’ which was held on 27 April 2024.

Nine academics ranging from early careers researchers to established professors were invited to write papers for pre-circulation among a small audience of leading scholars. The event was bound together by three key questions: how was Parliament understood in the revolutionary years by those inside or outside of it; how did it change or remain the same; and how did it function? To investigate these questions, the day was divided between three panels: ‘Parliament and the People’, ‘Parliament in Action’, and ‘Parliament beyond England’. In each panel the speakers gave a short recapitulation of their papers with the majority of time devoted to discussion with the audience.

‘Parliament and the People’ began the day. As the title implies, this panel discussed the relationship between Parliament and the English people. Dr Alex Beeton (History of Parliament) and Dr Ellen Paterson (University of Oxford) approached this issue from different ends of the spectrum. Dr Paterson demonstrated, through an analysis of industrial petitioning, that the Long Parliament was believed by many to be, like its early Stuart predecessors, a site where grievances could be aired and redressed. As a result, a range of companies and individuals barraged the Houses with their complaints. Dr Beeton looked at the other side of the interaction by investigating the place of the House of Lords in popular politics. Using the relatively underused source-base of the Scribbled Books (notes of proceedings in the Lords kept by their clerk), he argued that the Lords was a well-integrated part of a popular and participatory political culture. This fact, he suggested, had been masked by the conventions of parliamentary record-keeping. Professor McDowell complemented these papers with an insightful analysis of how Parliament was understood and represented in the writings of John Milton. Contributing to scholarship on popular disillusionment with the Long Parliament, Professor McDowell used Milton’s prose texts of the 1640s to show that the writer’s serial disappointment with Parliament’s actions led to an acceleration of his radical beliefs.

After a lunch break, proceedings resumed with ‘Parliament in Action’, a panel designed to consider how parliamentary politics functioned during the revolutionary years. Dr David Scott (History of Parliament) made a powerful case for seeing the 1640s as a time of bicameral party politics. He argued that throughout the decade the Lords were divided into factions. Parties coordinated activities with their allies in the Commons and individual peers were willing to subsume their personal interests for the party good. Addressing the lower House, Dr Rebecca Warren (University of Kent) gave a practical example of how parliamentary business took place through the example of local propagation schemes. In addition to making an important point about the necessity of considering propagation beyond the best-known schemes, such as the 1650 propagation act for Wales, Dr Warren demonstrated both how proceedings at Westminster could be influenced by localities with sympathetic allies in government and the importance of historians attending to the relationship between local and national concerns. Both Dr Warren and Dr Scott’s papers predominantly considered the 1640s. Professor John Morrill (University of Cambridge) took matters into the 1650s by considering Oliver Cromwell’s relationship with Parliament. In a thoughtful piece which conversed with Hugh Trevor-Roper’s influential piece on the same topic while also moving away from it, Professor Morrill explored the lord protector using four case studies which brought out intriguing angles on the issue, such as the phalanx of Cromwell’s relations sitting in the Protectorate Parliaments.

As with the first panel, there was a lively question and answer session which continued into the afternoon break for tea and cake. After this came the final panel of the day on ‘Parliament Beyond England’. The three panellists each offered papers on how those outside England understood the Westminster Parliament and interacted with it. Dr Karie Schultz (University of St Andrews) showed how Scottish understandings of Parliament were sui generis and differed from their English neighbours. These differences ensured that Anglo-Scottish interactions were often fraught and much was lost in translation. A similarly tense dynamic between different countries was delineated by Dr Lloyd Bowen (Cardiff University). Dr Bowen used his paper to consider the parliamentary reconquest of north Wales and showed that the various campaigns were influenced by Walian concerns, but were also closely linked to ongoing factional politics at Westminster. Dr Patrick Little (History of Parliament) demonstrated the existence of a similar interplay between local and national politics when discussing the Irish Protestant Agents sent across the Irish sea in 1644. These commissioners endured a generally fruitless sojourn in England. Going first to the king at Oxford they were largely treated as unwanted guests by a camp hoping to utilise Irish Catholic forces in England. Moving onto Westminster they found a more sympathetic audience but one riven by factional bickering which stalled their business.

Formal proceedings ended in the early evening. Taken together, the various papers offered a rich contribution to understandings of the seventeenth-century Parliament and the great changes and unexpected continuities which were evident at Westminster during the British Civil Wars. As the lively discussions during the day evidenced, there is still plenty to discover and debate about Parliament and the crisis of those critical decades.

AB

The colloquium on ‘Parliament and Revolutionary Britain’ was held on 27 April 2024 at the History of Parliament’s office in Bloomsbury Square. The History would like to thank Dr Alexandra Gajda (University of Oxford), Dr Andrew Barclay (History of Parliament), and Professor Laura Stewart (University of York) for chairing panels on the day and the invited audience for their contributions.

The roundtable seminar takes place on 13 February 2024, between 17:30 and 19:00. 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

Few periods of British history are as action-packed as 1640-60. During this epoch, a political crisis became a civil war in which the Westminster Parliament confronted, and ultimately defeated King Charles I, putting him on trial and executing him in 1649. Over the following eleven years, the struggle to establish a stable and legitimate government saw invasions of Ireland and Scotland, the young Republic displaced in 1653 by the army under Oliver Cromwell, Cromwell’s assumption of the title of Lord Protector, and, after his death a contest for power that ended with the collapse of the revived Republic and the ultimate Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II.

Even for scholars of the period, keeping track of who, what, when and where in such an intensely eventful era can be daunting. Yet, in recent decades the importance of understanding basic questions of prosopography has become evident for students of the parliamentary state. As scholarship by historians such as David Como, Jason Peacey, John Adamson and others has revealed, both parliamentary and radical politics were extremely personal, often based on networks of familial, religious, economic, or geographical relations.

In other words, to understand what happened in mid-seventeenth century England it is important not to skimp on biography. Yet to do so for the revolutionary Parliaments, the beating heart of political history during those decades, poses unique challenges, not least as the number of MPs makes the dramatis personae of Proust or Tolstoy seem few by comparison.

This enormous challenge has been taken up and answered by the History of Parliament. Thirty years of research by leading scholars of revolutionary Britain have now culminated in the publication of nine volumes and more than 8,000 pages of The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640-1660. These volumes provide an enormous resource that will surely be the most comprehensive collection of information and analysis ever compiled of this critical and dramatic period of English – as well as Irish and Scottish – history.

The work’s main components are the 1,800 biographies of everyone who was elected to the House of Commons between these years, including substantial reinterpretations of the lives of all of the major figures – Cromwell, Pym, Hampden and many others. Members of Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Other House’, the second chamber of 1658-9, are also covered. Complementing these biographies are accounts of the politics and elections of each constituency that returned members to the House of Commons.

There are studies of the series of executive committees that were set up by Parliament to manage the enormous tasks of raising money for the war, directing its forces, maintaining its relationships with its allies (especially the Scots), and negotiating with foreign powers. And, finally, there is an introductory survey, summarising and analysing all this material as well as providing an essential political narrative of the period.

These volumes contain huge amounts of previously unknown information about the personalities and backgrounds of those involved in politics, and fresh and authoritative interpretation of their manoeuvrings and motivations. They include the lives of the many lesser-known, lower-status figures who came to prominence and entered national politics through service in the military or administrative roles in the parliamentarian war effort, as well as the grander gentry figures who were more familiar at Westminster. They embrace the charismatic and powerful men who were the backbone of the parliamentary regime such as Henry Marten, or the younger Sir Henry Vane; front-rank soldier-politicians like John Lambert, Henry Ireton or George Monck; and key polemicists such as William Prynne or Edward Hyde.

Although the primary purpose of the volumes is biographical, they also represent a major historiographical intervention in understandings of the early modern parliamentary state, not least through their exploration of parliamentary committees. As many contemporaries recognised, they were living in the age of the committee. In part this was a response to the demands of the war: as the work of the government expanded, so it established committees to handle the onerous business of state.

The increased role of committees also demonstrated the factional and bicameral nature of politics in these years. As recent decades of scholarship have helped to uncover, the relatively small partisan groups which dominated proceedings in the two Houses tried to circumvent scrutiny of their actions by passing on business to powerful committees. There factions were able to exert a disproportionate influence in the affairs of state.

The committee articles contained in the volumes expose for the first time not only the administrative machinery of Parliament’s war effort but also the factional struggles of those involved, not least when it came to Irish affairs.

Given the detail and comprehensiveness of the biographies, these volumes will be vital not only for political historians, but for military, literary, social and economic historians of the period; while the constituency histories make a major contribution to local histories across the British Isles. Overall, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640-1660 constitutes an essential resource that will transform the way in which we study and think about the period.

The current seminar brings together four of the contributors to the project — Dr Andrew Barclay, Dr Vivienne Larminie, Dr Patrick Little, and Dr David Scott — to introduce the volumes, to reveal their major findings, to explain their historiographical significance, and to discuss how historians might best make use of them. The seminar will be chaired by Dr Alex Beeton.

AB and PL

The seminar takes place on 13 February 2024, between 17:30 and 19:00. 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

AB & PL

For further information see https://boydellandbrewer.com/history-of-parliament/

See also the History of Parliament’s blog series, ‘Revolutionary Stuart Parliaments’: Revolutionary Stuart Parliaments – The History of Parliament (wordpress.com)

The signing of the death warrant condemning Charles I on 29 January 1649 was, one must imagine, a moment of the highest drama. At least 57 of the 135 men who had been appointed to sit in judgement on the king assembled that day in the Painted Chamber at Westminster and added their signatures and seals to the parchment document. The original warrant is preserved as one of the most famous treasures of the Parliamentary Archives. Yet accounts of that fateful meeting are few and those that do exist are heavily coloured by hindsight and self-exculpation. Did Oliver Cromwell and Henry Marten playfully mark each other’s faces with ink? Such hijinks would actually not have been out of character for either man and the claim that they had done so was made under oath by a supposed eyewitness. But that sworn testimony was taken when Marten was on trial for high treason in 1660 after the Restoration. The idea that these regicides had been insufficiently serious even when committing the worst possible crime was, for the restored monarchy, most convenient.

The other celebrated tale relating to these events was that of Cromwell physically forcing his kinsman, Richard Ingoldsby, to sign the warrant. That too dates only from 1660. The 1660 Act of Indemnity and Oblivion exempted the regicides by name from its general pardon. When that bill had received its second reading on 12 May 1660, the Commons allowed six of its current Members who had in 1649 been named as judges for the king’s trial to speak in defence of themselves. Ingoldsby, who by then was the MP for Aylesbury, could not deny that he had signed the death warrant. But in an emotional speech, he claimed that Cromwell had literally forced his hand and then affixed his seal for him. Several contemporaries, including the 1st earl of Clarendon and Lucy Hutchinson, later repeated this story, not always uncritically, in their memoirs. Ingoldsby’s colleagues in Parliament were only too happy to accept this excuse and he was one of two men (the other being Matthew Thomlinson) specified in the Act of Indemnity as not liable for punishment for their roles in the regicide. Ingoldsby subsequently received a royal pardon from Charles II.

Little about Ingoldsby’s career before 1649 sheds much light on whether his story was true. He had been an officer in the parliamentarian armies since the very beginning of the civil war and he had been MP for Wendover since 1647. But, kept busy by his military duties, he had left few traces at Westminster. He probably did not attend the king’s trial at all. The idea that his cousin once removed metaphorically twisted his arm to sign the death warrant is possible. But that Cromwell had literally done so is rather less convincing; Ingoldsby’s signature on the surviving warrant looks normal.

It is his later career that is probably more relevant. During the 1650s Ingoldsby continued to serve in the army and as an MP. In 1657 he supported the offer of the crown to Cromwell and he was called to sit in the Other House. He remained conspicuous in his loyalty to the protectorate right up until the final removal of Richard Cromwell. But his real loyalties were to the Cromwells rather than the republic. Once Richard Cromwell had been removed, Ingoldsby was soon in contact with royalist agents acting for the exiled Charles II. In early 1660 he backed George Monck and supported the re-admission of the secluded MPs to the Rump. John Lambert, after escaping from the Tower of London in April 1660, attempted to raise an army in support of the doomed republic. Ingoldsby was sent to stop him. Their two forces met at Daventry on 24 April, whereupon Lambert was captured. There was then nothing to stop the new Parliament, which assembled the following day, restoring Charles II. This Parliament congratulated Ingoldsby for removing the threat from Lambert.

Even then Charles II was careful not to make any firm promises to Ingoldsby. One of the crucial provisions in Charles’s Declaration of Breda was that the fate of the regicides would decided by Parliament. As we have seen, this did end up working in Ingoldsby’s favour, as he was able to appeal to MPs directly and in person. But Ingoldsby had been unable to take anything for granted. While his capture of Lambert easily justified his reprieve, his claims of being suborned into being a regicide, handily further blackening Cromwell’s character, provided a very expedient pretext. Those newly re-established in power in 1660 had no reasons to interrogate his story too closely. Ingoldsby could be so bold in making a claim few were likely to believe because he knew that his more recent services counted for so much. He went on to sit for Aylesbury again in the next four Parliaments and was appointed as one of Charles II’s gentlemen of the privy chamber. Very different fates were met by 13 of the other men who had signed the death warrant, who, unable or unwilling to come up with their own cynical excuses, had been hanged, drawn and quartered.

AB

Further reading:

C.V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (1964)

The Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell ed. J. Morrill (2022), i. 650-2 (death warrant)

Biographies and articles of the MPs and constituencies mentioned in this blog can be found in the newly-published House of Commons 1640-60 volumes.

On trial for his life in 1662, the former parliamentarian statesman Sir Henry Vane referred to the ‘most great and unusual Changes and Revolutions’ of the mid-seventeenth century (The Tryal of Sir Henry Vane (1662), 40). For him, the profoundest of these unusual changes was ‘the disjoynting [of] that Parliamentary Assembly among themselves’ and the subsequent emergence of ‘formed divisions among the people’. The most serious of these formed divisions was that between the parliamentarians and royalists. But Vane also had in mind a different kind of disjointing and division – the formation of opposing political parties within Parliament itself.

The clash of contending political groups at Westminster was a prominent theme in accounts of parliamentary proceedings during the 1640s. The MP Sir Simonds D’Ewes felt compelled to persist with his parliamentary diary in 1643 ‘to transmitt not onlie the storie but the verie secrett workings and machinations of each partie … chiefelie ledd and guided by some few members of either Howse’ (BL, Harley ms 165, f. 93). But although the language of party was widespread in the 1640s, historians have generally traced the emergence of parties properly-speaking to the struggle from the late 1670s between the Whigs and Tories. Were Vane and D’Ewes wrong therefore to think and write in terms of parties? Not according to the History of Parliament’s recently published House of Commons 1640-1660 volumes, which reveal that the first age of party was indeed the civil-war period. It was evidently during the 1640s that many of the political identities, behaviours and structures that constituted a recognisable party-political system first came together in Parliament.

The emergence late in 1642 of rival factions within Parliament with contrasting programmes for national settlement had never been seen before at Westminster and was a watershed moment in English history. It coincided with and contributed to the sharp rise in contested votes in the Commons, known as divisions, that occurred from November 1642. There was a pronounced spike in the frequency of these divisions in the debates on Parliament’s peace proposals to the king during the winter of 1642-3 – and this upward trend was never reversed. Conflict between organised parliamentary factions, or parties as we might properly call them, that competed for power and political resources, and not simply to carry a particular debate, was decisive in accelerating the disintegration of the Commons’ consensual traditions and their replacement by the majoritarian tactics of party-based politics. In the life or death struggle to decide Parliament’s and the nation’s fate, winning mattered as much at Westminster as it did on the battlefield. The priority for leading politicians – the men who could expect to lose their heads if they bungled the war – was building and sustaining voting majorities. That process demanded management and organisation – in short, it both required and produced parties.

The parties at Westminster assumed their most stable and coherent form in 1645 and the rivalry between the Independents and the Presbyterians. The leadership of each party comprised small groups of politicians known as ‘the grandees’. These were the politicians in both Houses with a programme as to how and on what terms to restore Charles as king and who expected to dominate his court and counsels once they had done so. By no means all MPs were consistent followers of either set of grandees; not a few of them shifted their ground as their views and political circumstances changed. Even so, historians have probably over-estimated the number of true neutrals in the Commons.

Given their ambitious plans for settling Charles’s war-torn kingdoms and the considerable risks involved in failing to achieve them, the grandees had to resort to a variety of arts and instruments in an effort to steer the public and the generality of their less resolute or partisan colleagues. Now for the first time, Parliament-men began to use the press for propaganda purposes in a systematic fashion. In 1643, for example, a long-running propaganda war broke out between the parties in which the parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Britanicus was one of numerous weapons used by both sides to blacken their opponents and bolster public support for their own terms for settlement.

Managing business in the often divided and troubled Commons of the 1640s also required an unprecedented degree of planning and coordination, and on a scale and with a sophistication that was unrivalled before the 1670s. The dark arts of party-political manipulation worked best when they were least visible, so in an effort to cover their tracks in the Commons the grandees recruited in-House enforcers and influencers to help manage business on the floor of the chamber. By the mid-1640s a variety of informal party agents seem to have operated in the Commons, each with their own specialised role: there were ‘teazers’ and ‘sticklers’ to prompt and steer debate, ‘Beagles’ to nose out controversy, ‘dividers’ – either tellers or division-managers – and ‘vote-drivers’ to marshal the party faithful during crucial divisions. Evidence suggestive of whipping by both parties can be detected in Commons’ divisions from the mid-1640s.

The party system that emerged at Westminster during the 1640s did not survive Charles I’s execution in 1649 and the establishment of a republican regime. Yet this narrowing of the political horizon could not hide the fact that something new had occurred in the practice of politics. Most significantly, perhaps, parties had become not merely political means but to some extent ends in themselves. Their existence had been tied not to the attainment of specific rewards or policies but to the maintenance of a particular way of government and to imposing and then sustaining a permanent shift in constitutional relations between Parliament and the crown and between England and the other Stuart kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland. The Independents and Presbyterians had been more than parties therefore, they had been governments-in-waiting; their rivalry had been that between competing organisations for the very future of England and its status within the British Isles.

The partisan politics born of the civil war would outlive all the purges from office and all the loyalty tests that Parliament introduced from the mid-1640s in an attempt to kill it. The clash of organised parties at Westminster ended in 1649, but the networks they had helped to create across the country survived and exacerbated the politicisation of local affairs in the aftermath of civil war. Pioneered at Westminster under the pressure of military events, the politics of majoritarian decision-making also spread to the provinces and gradually became standard practice in parliamentary elections and municipal government. A society that would long continue to define political disagreement as against the natural order was now awash with dissident groups. Political associations that had emerged from the civil war would harden again in the 1670s and 1680s. Once again, Parliament became the principal battleground in a struggle between organised parties that managed elections, mobilised public opinion, and contended for control of royal government. This time, however, unlike in the 1640s, the rage of party at Westminster would grip the entire nation – and it would never let go.

DS

Further reading:

William J. Bulman, The Rise of Majority Rule in Early Modern Britain and its Empire (CUP, 2021),

Paul D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns 1650-1730 (CUP, 1998)

Stephen K. Roberts (ed.), The House of Commons 1640-1660 (Boydell, 2023), volume 1

UK Parliament is celebrated for its traditions: consider the Speaker’s daily procession, the spectacle of the State Opening of Parliament with its customs such as Black Rod’s summons at the door of the Commons, and the show of resistance in response. Yet the culture of Parliament, whether meaning the customs and habits of MPs or the political interactions influencing them, is a continuously evolving process, as the Houses respond to wider social and political change. The 20 years between the opening of the first Parliament of 1640 and the final dissolution of the Long Parliament in 1660 can be considered a micro-environment of rapidly changing parliamentary culture. Two instances of invented tradition can be attributed to Puritan ideals of godly conduct. The Christmas Day holidays of 1640 and 1641 proved to be the last for many years. In 1643 and the subsequent 10 Christmases, 25 December was a normal working day if Parliament was in session. Disapproval of ‘holy days’ was of course behind this, and the same ideology gave impetus to the inauguration of fast sermons as a custom of the Commons. Established early in 1642, immediately following the king’s failed attempt to arrest the parliamentary leadership, the fast sermons were delivered every last Wednesday of the month. On these ‘days of public humiliation’ and fasting, two invited clerics would preach at St Margaret’s, Westminster, morning and afternoon. For seven years, the monthly fast day was a fixture in the parliamentary calendar, but after the Presbyterians, the principal devotees of the Fast Sermons, had been purged by the New Model Army from Parliament in December 1648, the custom was quietly dropped.  

As the deepening political crisis led to armed civil hostilities in 1642, pressure of parliamentary business dictated a new custom, that of the whole House sitting in the afternoons. By the late 1640s, this was regarded as normal, certainly by the 276 new MPs recruited to the House after August 1645, for whom this was the standard practice they encountered on entry. Different dimensions of parliamentary work competed for available time. Whole day sittings impacted on committee activity, which until the 1640s was reserved for afternoons. Commons orders to regulate the working day, for example by confining the whole House sitting to an hour on a Wednesday and Friday, leaving the rest of the day for committees, were soon overridden. An absurdist-sounding ‘committee for lessening committees’, was another failed expedient. Beyond attempts to corral committee meetings into particular times of the day, or to determine how particular days of the week were to be used, the very duration of the working day offered a new front in the battle for time. Occasional early starts – earlier, that is, than the usual 8 or 9 am. – were uncontroversial. It was a different story with late nights. The first division of the House on whether to continue to sit after darkness had fallen took place on 15 December 1641, after it had become ‘so dark as the clerk could not see to write’. Dusk lent itself to a ritual: the order to illuminate the chamber and the bringing in of sconces of candles. Throughout the following three years, the House sat frequently beyond the usual 5 or 6 pm, with no orders for candles; but in the three years of 1646, 1647 and 1648 there were 24 motions on candles and 12 divisions on whether they should be brought in. The reason for these motions is not hard to discover: they coincided with the period of bitterest faction-fighting in the Commons between the Presbyterians and the Independents, and the party politicization potentially of every aspect of parliamentary culture. 

Regardless of calls for illumination, late nights were always times of heightened drama in the chamber. On 9 August 1641, when the House rose around 10 pm, Members had debated the highly contentious question of how England was to be governed after Charles I had travelled to his other kingdom of Scotland. On 31 March 1645, Speaker Lenthall used his casting vote around 8 pm to continue proceedings, after a tied vote in a division and a sitting already of 9 or 10 hours’ duration. Extra time failed to deliver the Independents their desired censure of peers accused of corresponding with the king. Sir Simonds D’Ewes, a ‘peace party’ advocate, took comfort from the failure of the ‘candle-work’. On 6 May 1646 it was the fate of the king himself that was in dispute. After a division on candles, the Independents were successful in a motion calling for the king to be brought from the custody of the Scots to Warwick Castle. The House rose after 10 pm. But these were short sittings compared to two exceptional late nights in 1641 and 1648. On 22 November 1641 the House had debated the Grand Remonstrance, the draft petition that brought together myriad grievances against the king’s government. Opponents of the Remonstrance were particularly hostile to having it published. At around 1 am, just as the House had seemingly postponed the debate for another day, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, Member for Stamford, sought a protestation against the Remonstrance. Pandemonium ensued, some MPs waving hats, others taking swords and scabbards off their belts, and holding them by the pommels in front of them: ‘there was very great danger that mischief might have been done’, recorded D’Ewes. The MPs left the chamber just as the clock was striking 2 in the morning.

But even this marathon sitting takes second place to that on 4 December 1648 and the debate on the motion ‘that the answers of the king to the propositions of both Houses are a ground for the House to proceed upon for the settlement of the peace of the kingdom’. Here was the dramatic culmination of the years of factional conflict between Presbyterians and Independents over the future constitution of the kingdom and the place in it of both king and Parliament. The king was in forced residence on the Isle of Wight: should Parliament continue to negotiate with him? The motion for candles was carried, and the debate continued through the night. Three hours of it were taken up by the speech of one Member, the irrepressible Presbyterian, William Prynne, who had modified his earlier hostility to the king to become an advocate for continuing constitutional discussions with him. Despite the drift homewards of over 100 MPs before the night was out, the sitting ended no earlier than 8 the following morning, the 5th, the clerk misleadingly recording in the Journal the single sitting as occurring on two days. The Presbyterians won the final division to continue negotiations, and as in November 1641, those who felt themselves to be on the losing side of the drift of events demanded a protestation, to no avail.

The record sitting of 4/5 December 1648 led directly to the purge of Parliament by the army on the 6th, and paved the way to the trial and execution of the king weeks later. Orders and divisions on candles would next be a regular feature in the winter of 1654, when the written constitution of the protectorate was hotly contested. For the time being, Members were cured of all-night sittings, but the 1640s nevertheless marked the start of night as part of parliamentary day.

SR

More about the MPs mentioned in this blog can be found in the newly published, The History of Parliament, House of Commons 1640-60 volumes.

Other than the official record of Parliament, enshrined in the Journals of Commons and Lords, probably the most significant source available to the historian is the parliamentary or private diary. ‘Diary’ is the word used conventionally to describe this kind of writing, though it encompasses a range of manuscript writings, marked by a variety of styles. The most immediate are the diaries written by serving members of the House of Commons, on a daily basis, on the day of the events they describe, or very shortly afterwards, and the most useful are the diaries sustained over a significant length of time. Though there are significant gaps in coverage, the surviving diaries of Walter Yonge, MP for Honiton, run from September 1642 to December 1645. That of Laurence Whitaker, MP for Okehampton, covers the period October 1642 to June 1647. Sir Simonds D’Ewes, MP for Sudbury, not only kept a diary of events in the Commons from November 1640 to November 1645, but also kept a diary in Latin which from January 1644 complemented his parliamentary diary. For the following decade, the supply of diaries nearly dries up, but the most important of the 1650s are the diaries of Thomas Burton, MP for Westmorland, surviving for the duration of the two Cromwellian parliaments in which he sat, those of 1656 and 1659.

It was probably the drift into civil war in 1642 that impelled Walter Yonge into keeping his diary. Yonge was of a strongly puritan persuasion, an associate of the unsuccessful Dorchester Company of the 1620s, a puritan-inflected, Dorset based venture to colonize lands in Massachusetts. His first diaries date from this period. They are an eclectic mix of national, international and local news, stories and reports that came his way: a chronicle of happenings that struck him as particularly significant. Yonge was strongly providentialist in outlook, seeing for example the hand of God in the death by lightning strike of some people who had defied a call for a public fast. In his diary of the Long Parliament, the same impulse towards compiling a chronicle of public events is clearly visible. In 1642-3 he highlighted reports of the civil war that flooded into Westminster from all over England, the lurid ones attracting more of his attention.  As civil war deepened, so Yonge began to take more notice of speeches in the Commons, trying to capture, often in a broken form hard to penetrate fully, the essence of MPs’ speeches that made their mark on him. His primary interest remained in the public affairs of the west of England. Like the 1620s diaries compiled in East Devon, the Westminster ones of the 1640s reveal next to nothing of the character of Walter Yonge himself. He even describes himself in the third person, in lists of committees he records: ‘Mr Yonge’.

A comparable impersonal register of voice is apparent in the diary of Laurence Whitaker. Though he sat for a Devon constituency, Whitaker had before 1640 been a very active JP in Middlesex, particularly zealous in enforcing the laws against Roman Catholicism. This particular enthusiasm carried over into the Long Parliament. His experience in examining suspects took him to prominence in efforts by the Commons to investigate alleged Catholic conspiracies, and to chairmanship of the powerful Commons Committee for Examinations, a shape-shifting body that sent out warrants for arrest and interrogated suspects across a range of offences against parliamentary authority. In his diary, Whitaker habitually uses the plural personal pronoun ‘we’ to describe events in the House, but rarely the singular ‘I’: and then only to record reports he made to the House, never his own thoughts or feelings. Of all the diarists, Whitaker was the closest to power, because of his chairmanships of committees, but also the most impersonal in his writing, as if he were striving to create a journal of record after the model of the Commons Journal itself.    

The reader has no struggle to discover the authentic voice of D’Ewes, by some margin the most readable, interesting and insightful of the Long Parliament diarists. Justifiably claiming to be an authority on parliamentary history and procedure, even more devotedly than Walter Yonge he had developed a diary habit before entering the House. It was his intention at the outset to create a record of the Long Parliament. He tells us that his method down to July 1642 was to write up his diary while sitting in the chamber, talking to colleagues and fellow-diarists to capture the essence of a day’s proceedings. Ever sensitive to slights, however, he was offended by allegations in 1642 that he simply cribbed his material from the official Journal. Henceforth, he wrote up in his Westminster lodgings from memory, insisting always that diary-keeping was an exacting task, undertaken ‘until head and knee weary’.

Of these diaries, only in D’Ewes’s is a narrative arc visible. Essentially, it is the story of disappointment. In 1640 he saw Parliament as ‘the greatest means under heaven now left for the preservation of the church and state’, but he quickly became disillusioned by the growth of faction, appalled by the outbreak of civil war and horrified by the reluctance of the parliamentary leadership to compromise with the king. These public disasters coincided with a series of insults to his personal pride: none more cutting than a humiliating sneer directed his way by Speaker Lenthall in front of the whole House, calling into question his integrity as an authority on parliamentary procedure. The cumulative effect of these blows was to sour D’Ewes’s love affair with Parliament. While some MPs, the radicals, or ‘fiery spirits’ as D’Ewes famously described them, threw themselves into managing the war effort against the king, keeping longer hours in the House, D’Ewes shortened his working day, becoming progressively more marginal to its proceedings. The diary became reduced in scope and coverage. The number of unflattering references in it to colleagues increased, as did dismissals by D’Ewes of whole areas of parliamentary business as trivial. Nevertheless, his detachment has brought us some benefits. After his idealism had evaporated, he adjusted his purpose in diarizing. From mid-1642, he kept writing ‘in some measure so to transmit not only the story but the very secret workings and machinations of each party’. In other words, he saw himself as the historian of faction.

In Thomas Burton, member of Oliver Cromwell’s 1656 Parliament and Richard Cromwell’s only Parliament, we have a diarist uniquely gifted at capturing speeches. D’Ewes devoted space only to recording his own orations; Yonge often left only obscure summaries, and Whitaker recorded orders and actions, not a word-picture of oratory. Burton was more interested in regional legislation rather than great affairs of state, so perhaps his limited range of interests qualified him for the role of dispassionate diarist. His six volumes, in a crabbed hand, focus on MPs’ speeches, which he somehow took down almost verbatim, seemingly writing virtually as members were on their feet speaking. The principle of self-effacement once more asserted itself in the case of Burton, whose diaries reveal almost nothing of their author’s politics. But diary as autobiography is hardly the principal value of these sources. Rather, we rely on them to bring life to the dry record of parliamentary transactions: any insights into the lives of the diarists are an added treasure.

SR

The English Civil War divided communities along religious and political lines. But those divisions did not always extend to social networks, the ties of family, friendship or even neighbourhood, which often survived intact. Even the most convinced parliamentarian or most extreme royalist had personal connections with those on the other side. The initial choice of sides in the conflict may have been determined by religious or political beliefs, but it did not remove the bonds of friendship, family or community, which were maintained not just by affection and by a prudent need for an insurance policy against defeat, but also by the notion of ‘honour’ and of private obligation. It was within this context that the ‘turn-coat’ (or side-changer) became a relatively common phenomenon, and one that did not always meet with the condemnation usually meted out to a ‘traitor’, who served another nation and thus betrayed his own.

There are numerous turn-coats in the 1640-60 Commons volumes. Some, like Sir John Hotham and his son John, were executed by Parliament for defecting to the king; others were treated more leniently, such as Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper and George Monck, who both served the king before joining Parliament, re-emerged at the Restoration as earl of Shaftesbury and duke of Albemarle, respectively. Here we shall consider two more obscure figures, both Dorset MPs, who changed their minds and switched sides: William Constantine and Sir Gerard Napper.

William Constantine, MP for Poole, was from a well-established east Dorset family, with links to Poole and also to Wimborne Minster, having married into the Hanham family. Encouraged by another local figure, Bartholomew Hall, Constantine became a successful lawyer. He became recorder of Poole in 1639, and he went on to serve the borough as an MP in both the Short and Long Parliaments. His parliamentary career was unremarkable, but from the summer of 1641 onwards he seems to have become increasingly concerned about the threat to England of Catholic fifth-columnists, and his fears were heightened by the Irish rebellion of October 1641. By the spring of 1642 he was a firm supporter of action against the king, and in the summer he returned to Poole to help organise the town’s defences. Initially, there were no doubts about Constantine’s allegiances: he continued to sit in Parliament, and he was critical of attempts by some west country gentlemen to arrange a local ceasefire in March 1643. But in mid-July he suddenly declared for the king, sending a letter to Poole resigning as recorder and advising them to surrender to the king before it was too late. The royalists were advancing from the west, and retribution would surely follow. ‘How some of you as have been most active will be handled I tremble to imagine, perhaps to the loss of life, doubtless [to the loss] of liberty and estate’ (Bodl., MS Tanner 62, fo. 170). Despite Constantine’s warnings, Poole stood firm against the royalists who arrived before their gates in later weeks. Parliament moved swiftly, summoning Constantine on 15 August, and by the end of September he had been disabled as an MP and his estates sequestered. Constantine, meanwhile, had fled to the king’s headquarters at Oxford, where he sat in the royalist parliament in January 1644.

There is no doubt that Constantine deserves the title ‘turn-coat’; but why did he do it? There was a degree of self-interest in his decision, as the king’s army approached, but that was not the only reason. As a lawyer, Constantine had become disillusioned with Parliament, not least with its increasingly irregular – even illegal – behaviour: in February 1643, for example, he opposed the arbitrary searching of chambers in the Inns of Court by Parliament’s officers. Perhaps the most important factor in Constantine’s change of sides was at once local and personal. His brother-in-law, John Hanham, a royalist officer, was the man chosen to secure the surrender of Poole just days after Constantine’s attempts to do the same. With the king’s army closing in, an already disgruntled Constantine drew closer to his royalist relatives, and was encouraged to turn his coat. Interestingly, after the parliamentarian victory at Marston Moor in July 1644, and the recapture of Dorset by the earl of Essex in the same period, Constantine tried to defect back again, surrendering himself to the governor of Poole. He was imprisoned, but not treated harshly, and by the end of 1645 he had regained both his freedom and his estates (on the payment of a fine). He was back in London, as a professional lawyer, during the summer of 1647, and there enjoyed the continuing favour of Dorset friends, including Bartholomew Hall. By using his friends and relatives on both sides of the divide, Constantine was able (in effect) to become a turn-coat twice over.

Sir Gerard Napper (or Napier) of More Crichel, was of higher social status than Constantine, being part of the East Dorset social set that included young wealthy landowners such as Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper. Despite being known as ‘a good housekeeper’ (or host) to the local gentry, and a shrewd businessman, Napper was not universally liked. As Ashley Cooper admitted in private ‘[he was] of a temper inclined to envy, not obliging, and to speak as ill as he could of the absent’. (W.D. Christie, Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, I, appx. I, p. xvii). In other respects, Napper’s views were conventional enough. Religiously, he seems to have conformed to the Church of England; politically, as MP for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, he was a moderate opponent of the crown. He was, however, increasingly unhappy with some of the demands made by the more radical elements in the House of Commons, and his absence from controversial votes may have marked him as a potential ally of the crown as early as May 1641. It may not be a coincidence that in the king, looking for allies, made Napper a baronet at this time. Napper’s attendance in the Commons ceased soon afterwards, and he became an active royalist by the beginning of June 1642, and was appointed to the king’s commission of array in Dorset.

On the surface, Sir Gerard Napper seems to be a conventional royalist; but his career during the first year of the Civil War suggests that his allegiances were in fact still very fluid. His relationship with Parliament was certainly ambiguous. He was not immediately disabled from sitting, with another Dorset MP, Sir Water Erle, defending him in the chamber in April 1643, saying that he had privately contributed money, horses and weapons to the cause. As a result, the case against Napper was dropped, and he remained an MP. The lack of evidence for Napper’s ‘delinquency’ shows that his royalism was at best passive during the early stages of the war. Only with the royalist invasion of Dorset in July 1643, did Napper emerge as an active royalist. On 3 August, Napper was appointed with Ashley Cooper to treat for the surrender of the parliamentarian garrisons at Dorchester and Weymouth. In January 1644 he went further, joining the king at Oxford, and sitting in the rival House of Commons convened there. It was only at this stage that the Westminster Parliament finally disabled him as an MP. Characteristically, once he had declared unequivocally for the king, Napper began to have second thoughts. By the beginning of March 1644, when the fortune of war was beginning to turn against the king, he joined his friend, Ashley Cooper, in defecting to the parliamentarians. Understandably, the government in London was wary of Napper. He did not regain his seat in Parliament, and his lands remained sequestered. In fact, he was perhaps unique in being sequestered by both parliamentarians and royalists in the mid-1640s! Through the good offices of Ashley Cooper, Sir Walter Erle and other major local figures, he soon became accepted in Dorset, but even ten years on he was still considered a ‘suspected person’ by the authorities in London.

Like Constantine, Napper was naturally guided by self-interest, and his allegiance depended in large part on which side held sway in Dorset. Both men were heavily influenced by friends and family – in Napper’s case by Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, whose initial royalism, and subsequent defection, had a strong bearing on his own decisions. There were differences between the two men, however. The proud and irascible Napper does not seem to have been troubled by an over-active conscience, whereas Constantine had religious and professional scruples that had a major influence on his actions. Interestingly, it was Constantine who was more successful in navigating the political landscape later in the 1640s, even returning to his legal practise, while Napper remained a suspicious presence in London. By contrast, both men still had friends in Dorset, and were readily welcomed back into local society, where their coat-turning was apparently forgiven, if not entirely forgotten.

P.L.

Biographies of William Constantine, Sir Gerard Napper, Sir John Hotham, John Hotham, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, George Monck and Sir Walter Erle all appear in the 1640-60 Commons volumes.

Further reading:

 Andrew Hopper, Turncoats and Renegadoes: changing sides during the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2012)

As depicted in contemporary images of the House of Commons of the 17th century, the clerks of the Commons seem visibly a distinct caste. When the focus of illustrators was on the corporate dignity and authority of the members of the House, the clerks were bound to be represented notionally rather than attentively. Dwarfed by the Speaker on his raised chair, uniquely hatless among the throng in the chamber, the clerks were often shown looking as wooden as the table in front of them, almost mere adornments, with sparse reading and writing materials to hand (see Illustration 1). Something more dynamic is captured in another print of the 1640s (see Illustration 2), where craned heads and books piled high at least suggest the busyness and responsibility of the job. The titles and duties of the ‘servants of the House of Commons’ were well-established by 1640.  De facto servants of the House they may have been, but before the civil war the terms and conditions on which they served made them servants of the king, not the Commons. Unsurprisingly in an age of strict hierarchy and precedent, the premier post was that of Clerk of the Parliament, whose duties lay primarily in servicing the House of Lords. When Henry Elsyinge became clerk of the Commons around the time of elections for the first parliament to meet in 1640, his patent from the king described him as ‘under clerk of the Parliament’.  When the Commons was sitting, alongside the clerk of the Commons, at his left hand, was seated the Clerk Assistant. Clerk of the House and Clerk Assistant are titles still used in the modern UK Parliament.

Routine tasks of the clerk of the House included reading bills and orders aloud, drafting orders and bills, making available any documents required by Members and, if necessary, making arrangements for translation. Elsynge, who served as clerk between 1640 and December 1648, was an accomplished linguist. A vital responsibility that fell to the clerk and his assistant was the compiling of the Journal, a daily record of proceedings in the House that served as the official record. With an expansion of parliamentary business such that it could keep Speaker Lenthall in his chair for six or seven hours at a time, came a proportionate swelling of the Journal. In the 28 months between November 1640 and the end of March 1643, Elsynge or his assistant, Henry Scobell, filled 15 folio volumes of longhand writing, probably immediately fair-copied into the half dozen manuscript volumes that now survive. In the printed volumes of the 18th century, which most students use today, the material occupies over a thousand pages in double columns. Nor was the novelty confined to the sheer volume of business: there were also new tasks. Among them were jobs springing from Parliament’s discovery of the propaganda value of the medium of mass print.  It was the clerk who took responsibility for checking for accuracy the printed versions of Parliament’s myriad declarations and orders.

However distinct their respective roles and status may have been, in practice clerks and members interacted freely and continually. In the early years of the Long Parliament, which have been quite extensively memorialized in the private journals of a number of members, the Clerk of the House facilitated the practice of independent diarizing by freely making available the official Journal to a trio of members. John Moore, John Bodvell and Sir Simonds D’Ewes were keen to capture their own record of this much-anticipated assembly. D’Ewes, Member for Sudbury, whose personality uniquely informs his diary-keeping, initially thought well of Elsynge, but his opinion of the Clerk soured in tandem with his own growing alienation from the House itself as the civil war continued. By August 1643, D’Ewes came to consider Elsynge’s work on the Journal sloppy and inaccurate. A more sanguine view, and one which probably more fairly summarises the Clerk’s role comes from Bulstrode Whitelocke, MP for Great Marlow and himself a chronicler, who praised Elsynge as ‘the most excellent Clerk, both to make and express the sense of the House that … ever sat there.’ Whitelocke’s choice of words more than hints at the central role of the Clerk in shaping, not simply recording, the proceedings of the parliamentary day.

In another sense, too, the clerks were fully integrated into parliamentary culture. Before 1640 it was not unknown for a Clerk to become an MP, and after 1640 there are examples of this ‘revolving door’ when a clerkship preceded a seat in the House and vice versa. Unlike their modern counterparts, clerks’ posts were not shielded or insulated from the political storms that assailed Westminster. Elsynge quit his job in December 1648, pleading ill-health but doubtless fearing being drawn into the trial of the king. His successor as Clerk, Henry Scobell, emerged from obscurity by virtue of the patronage of men prominent in the Long Parliament, notably Speaker Lenthall and the registrar of chancery, Miles Corbett. Scobell’s backers were Independents in politics, and this partisan support served him well. More ambitious and dynamic a figure than Elsynge, Scobell extended the scope of the Commons clerkship to include compiling and publishing legislation, but he also took advantage of the rise of Parliament-sponsored executive authority to acquire extra posts in government: in the office for sales of dean and chapter lands and later as clerk to the lord protector’s council.  Political patronage and involvement in government beyond the House are also evident in the career trajectory of John Rushworth, Clerk Assistant in the first half of the 1640s. In communication skills, if Elsynge’s particular forte lay in translating from foreign languages, Rushworth’s lay more in the very modern journalistic medium of stenography and copying. Skilled at shorthand, and with a strong interest in publishing, Rushworth was the ideal wartime emissary and intelligencer for the House. In 1645 he was poached, becoming secretary to the New Model Army’s high command.

The expansion of Parliament-sponsored executive government after 1640 naturally created job opportunities in servicing many powerful committees. Each of these bodies had its secretariat, headed by a clerk or secretary, inevitably with full- or part-time subordinates. In due course some of these individuals became powerful political figures themselves, no case more spectacular than that of the barrister John Bradshawe, solicitor to the Committee for Sequestrations in 1645, judge at the trial of Charles I in January 1649 and lord president of the council of state of the Commonwealth shortly afterwards. In his case, a seat in Parliament, in 1654, came almost as a postscript to his career in parliament-inflected government. For every Bradshawe there were a dozen lesser fry, men easily recruited by Commons committees for tasks of varying size. From the small army of reserve labour available in Westminster Hall, seat of the law courts adjacent to both Houses, attorneys, notaries, messengers and bailiffs of every description could be summoned at will. Such scattered records as the Commons Committee for Examinations has left behind it show the same attorneys repeatedly employed in drawing up bonds compelling individuals to attend the Committee’s hearings. All of this activity indicates a permeable culture of parliament and government unimaginable from the static contemporary images of the two clerks at their table below the Speaker.

SR