The clerks of the Commons in the 17th century have often been depicted as people who simply recorded the events of the Commons. However, as Dr Stephen Roberts, editor of the House of Commons 1640-1660, explains, there is a lot more to the role of a clerk…

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