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.

Last month saw the 280th anniversary of the death of an intriguing and, in his time, prominent 18th-century aristocrat. Intriguing, because there was little in James Brydges’ origins to suggest that he would ever rise to be a duke. True, from 1676 he was heir to a barony, when his father succeeded a distant cousin as the 8th Baron Chandos. But, although landed gentry, the Brydges family did not earn enough revenue to support adequately their new noble status.

Without expectation of a substantial landed inheritance, James Brydges had to make his own way in the world. As a young man in London from 1698 he was a hard-working and shameless networker, and his years of attendance on ministers paid off when in 1705 he was appointed paymaster-general of the Allied forces abroad. Between 1705 and 1713 he managed close to £24 million of public funds for the armies. He was permitted to do with this money much as he liked as long as he met his responsibilities.

In the meantime, he ‘borrowed’ surplus funds and put them out for investment, skimming off the profits for himself. He watched the exchange rates so he could play the currency markets to his private advantage, again using public funds. As a result, he made a staggering fortune. Arthur Onslow thought it ‘the most surprising instance of a change of fortune raised by a man himself, that has happened in any age’, and calculated that in little more than a decade Brydges had accumulated a fortune of about £7,000 [Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, ed. Routh, vi. 41-42]. This would make him a millionaire several times over today. Many contemporaries were uncomfortable with this fortune amassed from public funds on the back of a costly war.

Brydges retired in 1713, as both the war ended and Parliament ordered an audit of his accounts. The audit hung over him for several years and was not wrapped up until 1718. Ultimately, he was not charged with any malfeasance.

Brydges hardly kept himself away from public notice during the audit. In 1714 he used his contacts with the incoming Hanoverian ministers to obtain a higher title than the barony he was destined to inherit. He succeeded as 9th Baron Chandos on 16 October 1714, but only three days later was promoted earl of Carnarvon among the coronation honours. He continued to court the ministers over the following years until on 29 April 1719 he was promoted duke of Chandos.

In the same period Chandos was also developing his estate at Cannons (as he spelled it), near Edgware, which he had bought from his duchess’s uncle in 1710. Chandos intended his house to be a monument to his arrival among the upper nobility. He tore down the existing Elizabethan house and began work constructing a baroque palace in its stead. It was built remarkably quickly and was finished in 1725, at a total of over £160,000. He used it as a showcase for his wealth and artistic patronage, by exhibiting his many paintings by Italian artists. Cannons also had its own orchestra and choir, led between 1716 and 1718 by George Frideric Handel, Chandos’ resident composer. Handel’s ‘Chandos Anthems’ were composed there, and Cannons also saw the premieres of Esther and Acis and Galatea.

Even as a duke Chandos continued to draw most of his income from speculation and investment, rather than from land. He invested in the development of Cavendish Square in Marylebone, where he intended to build another palace for himself. He also invested heavily in many of the speculative joint-stock ventures of 1719-20. Onslow considered him ‘a dupe to men that nobody else almost would keep company with’. Chandos was heavily involved in both John Law’s Mississippi Company and the South Sea Company. In October 1720, after the bursting of the Bubble, he calculated that he had lost close to £700,000. He was still £40,000 in debt in 1729. To recover, he sold his London townhouse, on St James’s Square, and abandoned his grand building projects on Cavendish Square. However, he always maintained his palace of Cannons, his pride and joy and symbol of his success.

By the time of his death on 9 August 1744 Chandos was ‘reduced to the difficulties of indigence’, as Onslow expressed it. He left debts amounting to £83,000 on an estate which brought in only about £8,500 p.a. His heir Henry Brydges, 2nd duke of Chandos, was even more indebted, and in 1747-8 found himself forced to dismantle Cannons and auction off its contents and materials. Its central marble staircase was transported to the Mayfair townhouse of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of Chesterfield. An equestrian statue of George I, which had adorned the park, stood in Leicester Square until 1872. Unfortunately, almost no depictions of Cannons in its setting exist, and we must build our image of this celebrated building from its many written contemporary descriptions. As a final blow, the dukedom which Chandos had worked so hard to attain became extinct in 1789 at his grandson’s death.

Some contemporaries were quick to ridicule the extravagance and baroque tastes of this nouveau riche duke, with his vast fortune derived from suspect financial practices. Alexander Pope targeted Cannons as ‘Timon’s villa’ in his ‘Epistle to Lord Burlington’, where he mocked its grandiose size and expense:

At Timon’s Villa let us pass a Day
Where all cry out, “What Sums are thrown away!”
…
To compass this, his Building is a Town
His Pond an Ocean, his Parterre a Down;
[Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle to Lord Burlington’, ll. 83-92 passim]

To Onslow, on the other hand, Chandos ‘had parts of understanding and knowledge, experience of men and business… which more qualified him for a wise man, than what the wisest men have generally been possessed with’ [Burnet’s History of His Own Time, vi. 41-42].

CGDL

Further reading:
C. H. Collins Baker and Muriel Baker, The Life and Circumstances of James Brydges, first duke of Chandos (1949)
Joan Johnson, Princely Chandos (1984)
Aaron Graham, Corruption, Party, and Government in Britain, 1702-1713 (Oxford, 2015)

In 1807, Parliament passed An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade – eighteen years after William Wilberforce first moved for abolition on 12 May 1789. The legislation sought to bring an end to the inhumane trips across the Middle Passage as well as the legality of the purchasing, transporting and selling of enslaved people. Slavery, however, continued, with an estimated 700,000 Africans still enslaved in the British West Indies when the Slave Trade Act came into force in 1808.

Accepting the continuation of slavery was a deliberate tactic of the abolitionist movement, which faced opposition from a significant pro-slavery lobby, the West India Interest, which saw an attack on slavery as an attack on their ‘property rights’. It was also the view of abolitionists that ending the slave trade would improve the conditions of the enslaved, and gradually lead to the end of slavery.

Abolitionists within Parliament re-emerged in 1823, after realising that the improvement of conditions for the enslaved they had envisaged after the 1807 Act’s passing had not materialised. Acting as the London Anti-Slavery Society, the abolitionists campaigned for the gradual emancipation of the enslaved population that remained in the British West Indies.

The Society was led in the Commons by Thomas Fowell Buxton. On 15 May 1823, Buxton urged Parliament to end the ‘repugnant’ state of slavery which went against ‘the principles of the British constitution’. He voiced his hopes that his speech ‘commenced that process which will conclude, though not speedily, in the extinction of slavery throughout the whole of the British dominions’.

‘Not speedily’ was a fitting assessment of the following ten years. Abolitionists were again faced in Parliament with the strength of the West India Interest, many of whom directly owned plantations and enslaved people. As well as advocating for the continuation of slavery, the West India Interest lobbied for the retention of protective duties on sugar and coffee grown using the labour of enslaved people. In the face of this pro-slavery lobby in Parliament, the Anti-Slavery Society adopted a gradualist approach to abolition.

Although public opinion had shifted considerably to align with the rhetoric of the abolitionist movement during the 1820s, it was not until the appointment of the Whig government of the 2^nd Earl Grey in November 1830 that abolition became a real prospect.

However, with emancipation seemingly on the horizon, some abolitionists became frustrated with the gradualism that had characterised the movement. Inspired by voices outside Parliament such as Elizabeth Heyrick, the Agency Committee was formed in 1831. It contained many younger abolitionists who now called for immediate emancipation. Additionally, the Christmas Rebellion (also known as the Baptist War) of 1831-2 saw around 60,000 enslaved people in Jamaica rise up against the plantocracy. Reports of the brutal suppression by colonial authorities reached the House of Commons, where immediate emancipation was called for to avoid further bloodshed and civil war in the colonies.

At the 1832 general election (the first to take place under the reformed electoral system), the Agency Committee sought to capitalise on widespread public backing for the abolitionist cause by securing pledges from candidates for the immediate abolition of colonial slavery. Over 200 candidates who had taken the pledge were elected to the Commons. At the same time, representatives of the West India Interest had diminished in numbers. Rotten boroughs, where planters had previously placed allies to strengthen the pro-slavery lobby in the Commons, had mostly been eradicated through parliamentary reform.

Although weakened by the 1832 election, the West India Interest maintained one of their core principles – the demand that slave owners receive compensation for the abolition of slavery. George Canning – then Foreign Secretary and leader of the Commons – had outlined this argument in 1823, when he advised MPs that

this House is anxious for the accomplishment of this purpose, at the earliest period that shall be compatible with the well-being of the slaves themselves, with the safety of the colonies, and with a fair and equitable consideration of the interests of private property.

Although the previous under-secretary at the Colonial Office, Viscount Howick, had dismissed these claims and developed his own scheme for emancipation, the appointment of Edward Smith-Stanley (later the 14^th Earl of Derby) as Colonial Secretary in 1833, and the resignation of Howick, led to a new plan for abolition.

The Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent on 28 August 1833. It had two major caveats, intended to appease the pro-slavery lobby and simultaneously frustrate the hopes of immediate abolitionists. Firstly, West Indian slave-owners were to collectively receive compensation of £20 million to account for the ‘confiscation of [their] property’. This amounted to 40% of government spending in 1833. The formerly enslaved population received no compensation.

Secondly, the enslaved population of the British West Indies were not immediately emancipated. Children under the age of six were to be liberated, but adults were forced into a system of ‘apprenticeship’ – unpaid labour for their former owners – for up to six years. The apprenticeship system was eventually abolished in the British West Indies on 1 August 1838.

JMPB

Further Reading:

Nick Draper, Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society At The End Of Slavery (2013)

S. Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (2009)

P. E. Dumas, Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition (2016)

C. Hall, K. McClelland, N. Draper, K. Donnington & R. Lang, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (2014)

D. Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016)

M. Taylor, The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery (2020)

Sir Roderick Floud’s magisterial ‘An Economic History of the English Garden’ revealed for the first time to the general public and to his fellow historians the importance of gardens and gardening to the economy over the last five centuries. Nowadays, gardening supports an industry with a turnover of £11 billion a year, the gardens of the National Trust attract 16 million visitors a year and hands on gardening is a much-loved hobby for a large part of the population. In the nineteenth century gardening was just as important, perhaps more so than now, particularly for the upper echelons of society for whom gardening was at the heart of their cultural and social life, especially so amongst parliamentarians.

The relative importance of gardening in the nineteenth century compared with the twentieth can be seen from an examination of the preferences of the political elite in the two centuries. In 1880 a cabinet of 13 led by Disraeli was replaced by a cabinet of 14 led by Gladstone. Every single member of the two administrations occupied a country seat with an ornamental garden and a fully productive kitchen garden with a gardening staff of about 20, but sometimes many more. Their involvement in gardening went much further than being responsible for a large estate. At Hawarden, it was a fixture of Gladstone’s calendar to host the annual horticultural society show in his garden, giving an address on horticulture, which was later published as a pamphlet. Disraeli coined his famous aphorism ‘The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy’ at a meeting of the Wynyard Horticultural Society, correlating happiness with the cultivation of a garden and adding ‘A woman is never seen to greater advantage than in the garden’. John Bright, a commoner member of Gladstone’s cabinet, would practice his House of Commons speeches on his gardener Benjamin Oldham and would sometimes quote him in support of his patriarchal opinions. Another member of Disraeli’s cabinet, the newsagent W.H. Smith, developed the magnificent gardens of Greenlands at Henley where he employed 30 gardeners and was a frequent winner in the local horticultural shows.

One hundred years later, in 1980, Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet had 22 members of whom only one, Michael Heseltine, owned a country seat of the kind occupied by the members of the Disraeli and Gladstone administrations. One other, Lord Carrington, owned a garden of great merit, the Manor House at Bledlow, but this was on a much smaller scale. Of his colleagues, three expressed an interest in gardening in their Who’s Who entry, but none of those possessed a garden of any importance. There were several cabinet members from old money backgrounds, notably Lord Hailsham and William Whitelaw, but Hailsham had sold his ancestral home as the cost of upkeep was too great, and Whitelaw lived in a mansion house with a garden of relatively modest size.

When Disraeli became a rising star of the Tory party his supporters provided him with the money to buy Hughenden, as it was considered essential for him to have a country estate. A mansion in Mayfair would not do; if he was to conform with the norms of upper class society he had to have the sporting and recreational facilities of an estate with an ornamental garden to enable him to entertain in style. Similar motives impelled Joseph Chamberlain, who was President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s cabinet, when he built a mansion which he called Highbury, together with accompanying parkland and garden on virgin land outside Birmingham. Chamberlain’s closest neighbour was Richard Cadbury, the enlightened Bournville factory owner, who marked his entry into society by creating an estate similar to Highbury.

The tables below record the current status of the 28 landed estates of the Disraeli and Gladstone cabinet members (there are 28 as one of the 27 cabinet members, the Duke of Richmond, occupied two estates). Three no longer exist, as the houses have been demolished, and the land redeveloped. Of the remainder, 12 of the gardens have been listed and are open to the public, two of which are run by the National Trust, and a further three are also open to public view. Most of the other houses have found an alternative use, as a hotel, a wedding venue or as flats, with a private garden attached on a much smaller scale than formerly. Of the kitchen gardens most have been destroyed or built on, but nine are either fully or partially cultivated. Of those gardens which survive, most have a skeleton workforce; at Belvoir, there is a single head gardener and a team of volunteers. This reflects the reduced scale of the gardens and the fact that the beating heart of the garden, the kitchen garden with its array of hothouses and forcing pits, no longer exists. Visitors to those gardens which survive will admire their beauty without knowing just how much more magnificent they were in the past, or their significance in the social and cultural lives of their former owners.

JD

Look out for the second part of Jonathan’s series, for a closer comparison of two great parliamentary gardeners!

Jonathan Denby holds a D.Phil in Economic and Social History from Oxford University and an MA in Garden History from Buckingham University. His research interests are gardens, gardening and economic and social conditions in the C19th. Find out about Jonathan’s own garden here.

The Post Office Act of 1711 had established a single Post Office for the United Kingdom and set the postage rates and delivery times for letters and packets. The Act further confirmed that the Post Office was a branch of the Treasury, whose primary goal was to raise state revenue through postal charges. The income had been used since the Restoration to provide pensions to Court favourites, and in the years after the Revolution pensions to peers and statesmen derived from Post Office receipts became common. By 1699 it was estimated that payments for pensions consumed about a third of the Post Office’s receipts.

There were other ways in which the postal system benefitted the nobility and the political elite. From the Restoration it was commonly accepted, although nowhere officially codified, that peers and Members of Parliament could send and receive letters free of postage charges. This privilege of ‘franking’ was widely abused in the 18th century, as peers and MPs made their signed ‘covers’ available to enclose correspondence conducted by other parties.

By 1754 the amount of franked material, representing lost revenue, amounted to £23,600. The privilege of franking, and its abuse, came before the Commons on 26 February 1735, when opposition Members raised a complaint that their privileged correspondence was being opened in the Post Office on behalf of the ministry. A Committee of the Whole House convened two days later, where evidence was produced showing that the right to frank letters had never been established by statute, but had long been maintained by successive royal warrants. The Committee interrogated Edward Cave, who had served as ‘inspector of franks’ since 1723, and had from 1731 used the newsletters and gazettes passing through the Post Office to gather, often illicitly, much of the copy for his popular serial, The Gentleman’s Magazine. Cave described his techniques for determining both the sender and intended recipient of letters, and only confirmed the MPs’ suspicions that the search for fraudulent franks gave Post Office officials licence to open and read their correspondence.

The Commons adopted resolutions confirming their privilege of franking letters and decrying the abuse of this privilege, both by those outside Parliament and by the ministry using it as a justification for monitoring private correspondence. [Cobbett, Parliamentary History, ix. 839-48]. That was hardly the end of the matter, and franking remained a live issue for the remainder of the century. In 1764 the Postage Act established the privilege of franking for peers and MPs by statute for the first time, and set out the harsh penalties for those trying to defraud the Post Office, including transportation to the colonies. Further Acts regarding franking were passed in 1784 and 1795.

Throughout the 18th century the Post Office was led by two joint postmasters-general, and in the second half of the century all of them were peers, or sons of noble families. Those appointed tended to be either ministers at the end of their careers or party followers with little desire for higher office. One postmaster-general, Thomas Villiers, Baron Hyde of Hindon (later earl of Clarendon), commented that the office was ‘a very good bed for old courtiers to rest in’. [TNA, PRO 30/8/64].

Hyde’s own career is representative of the political nature of the office. In 1759, on the advice of his prime minister Thomas Pelham Holles, duke of Newcastle, the king filled both the vacant postmasterships with Robert Hampden, a former ambassador to the United Provinces and heir to the barony of Trevor, and William Ponsonby, 2nd earl of Bessborough [I], brother-in-law of William Cavendish, 4th duke of Devonshire. Bessborough resigned in November 1762 in solidarity with Devonshire, in opposition to the peace terms ending the Seven Years’ War. Bessborough’s place was then filled by John Perceval, 2nd earl of Egmont [I], well known to the new premier John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, through their connections to Leicester House.

In September 1763, during the premiership of George Grenville, Egmont was promoted to first lord of the Admiralty and was replaced at the Post Office by Lord Hyde. Hyde had already served as a diplomat during the War of the Austrian Succession, and as an MP and lord of the Admiralty. In July 1765 both Hyde and Lord Trevor (the former Hampden), were replaced by followers of the new Whig ministry – Thomas Robinson, Baron Grantham, long one of Newcastle’s closest friends and a not particularly successful member of his 1754-6 administration, and Bessborough, returning for his second stint in the post after his 1762 demonstration of Whig loyalty. These two had barely taken their places when the Rockingham administration fell in July 1766, replaced by one led nominally by William Pitt, earl of Chatham.

Grantham and Bessborough were both elderly and unwilling to vacate their comfortable posts. They remained until November 1766, when they took part in the Rockingham Whigs’ engineered mass resignation in protest against Chatham’s dismissal of one of their colleagues. They were replaced by the dilettante and rake, Sir Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron Le Despenser, and Wills Hill, earl of Hillsborough [I], a politician clearly on the way up, ‘laid up in lavender at the Post Office till he shall be wanted elsewhere‘. [Chatham Correspondence, iii. 139] Hillsborough left in 1768 to serve as secretary of state for the colonies, where he played a principal part in the descent to war.

The rapid turnover of postmasters-general in the 1760s points to the office’s political nature and its importance as a lucrative, and relatively comfortable, reward for incoming ministries to bestow on loyal followers. That there were two positions available made the opportunities for partisan patronage more extensive.

CGDL

Further reading
Kenneth Ellis, The Post Office in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford UP, 1958)
Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton UP, 1948)

The picture sounds all too familiar: rapidly rising fuel prices; people on low incomes struggling to heat their homes; concerns about long-term supplies; and suspicions of profiteering by those in a position to manipulate the market. But these aren’t the woes of 2023. We’re talking about the reign of Elizabeth I – and the fuel in question was wood.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of wood for the Elizabethan economy. It was used for all kinds of construction, from houses to ships (a vital consideration in the era of the Spanish Armada). Converted into charcoal, it was the principal fuel employed in industry to produce everything from iron and glass to salt. Domestic heating still depended on it. However, wood was not immune to prevailing inflationary pressures, and during these decades market prices saw at least a threefold increase. As the London MP Sir Rowland Hayward explained to the House of Commons in 1572, lengths of firewood known as billets, which had cost 4s. 8d. per thousand thirty years earlier, were now being sold for anything between 10s. and 25s.  Moreover, increases on this scale were helping to drive up inflation generally. As Hayward’s colleague Thomas Norton warned the House, ‘the raising of the price thereof will make all other things rise for company’ (Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I ed. T.E. Hartley, i. 370).

It was widely agreed that the root cause of these price rises was a shortage of timber. However, there were numerous theories about how this problem had developed. The antiquary William Harrison, in his 1587 Description of England, suggested a range of different factors. These included poor management of woodlands, the clearing of trees when land was enclosed for pasture, excessive sales of timber by landlords seeking to offset falling income from other sources, more extravagant architectural fashions, and above all wasteful consumption by the iron, glass and brick industries. Convinced that fuel supplies were running out, Harrison lamented that ‘if woods go so fast to decay in the next hundred years … as they have done and are like to do in this, … it is to be feared that … straw, sedge, reed, rush, and also … coal will be good merchandise even in the city of London’ (W. Harrison, Description of England ed. G. Edelen, 281). And these shortages spawned further problems. As the stocks of timber near England’s towns and cities grew scarce, supplies had to be sourced further afield, and the additional transport costs helped to push up prices. There was also concern that purveyors, officials empowered to buy up supplies for the royal court at reduced prices, were exacerbating the general dearth of timber, and making it more expensive for everyone else. It didn’t help that purveyors were widely believed to be corrupt, demanding artificially low prices in the monarch’s name, but then selling on the timber at a profit to line their own pockets.

Parliament began to address these concerns in the final years of Henry VIII’s reign. An Act of 1544, noting ‘the great decay of timber and woods universally within this … realm of England’, imposed limitations on the size of trees that could be felled, restricted the conversion of woodland into pasture, and offered some protections to poor people who relied on common land for their fuel supplies. In 1553 a further Act updated regulations for the sale of firewood in London, in a bid to stop customers being overcharged, while two years later an almost complete ban on exports of timber was introduced.

These measures failed to allay concerns, and during Elizabeth I’s reign more than 30 bills were introduced in Parliament to address the fuel crisis. Roughly a third of these proposed general reforms to conserve existing woods and forests, effectively continuing the approach adopted in 1544. Another five bills advocated updates to the 1553 retail Act. This tactic finally bore fruit in 1601, when a new ‘Act concerning the assize of fuel’ provided further safeguards for purchasers of firewood, and ruled that wood which failed to conform to the new standards should be confiscated and distributed to the poor. Following on from the 1555 Act, one bill in 1563 proposed restrictions on coal exports, while another in 1593 called for imports of certain types of planking, both measures aiming to ease the pressure on stocks of English timber.

However, in a clear sign of rising tensions over fuel shortages, 15 of these bills addressed specific local supply problems. In 1571 legislation was presented to the Commons to ban the excessive felling of young trees within 20 miles of London. This sparked a debate on the abuses of purveyors, as a result of which the bill was scrapped and a replacement drafted to tackle both problems nationally. Unfortunately, that new measure then ran out of time in the Lords. The next year the London MPs tried again, this time seeking to prevent timber in the capital’s environs from being used to supply iron foundries with charcoal – but that bill also failed in the Lords. Finally, in 1581 an Act was passed to safeguard London’s firewood supplies by banning the iron industry from cutting timber for charcoal within 22 miles of the city, and up the Thames valley into Oxfordshire. As Elizabeth’s reign progressed, iron and glass manufacture, both of which required huge amounts of charcoal, came to be seen in Parliament as a serious threat to timber reserves, and they were targeted accordingly. At this time both industries operated primarily in south-east England, especially in Sussex, Kent and Surrey, and a string of bills sought to preserve woodlands in these counties, and to prohibit the construction of new furnaces. And over time attitudes hardened. A 1559 Act restricted charcoal manufacture around the country generally, but exempted Sussex and surrounding districts. A subsequent Act in 1585 aimed to conserve stocks of timber specifically in that region, and placed the blame for local shortages firmly on the iron industry.

So was all this legislative activity effective in tackling the decline of England’s woodlands? William Harrison had his doubts: ‘a man would think that our laws were able enough to make sufficient provision for the redress of this error and [the] enormity likely to ensue. But such is the nature of our countrymen that, as many laws are made, so they will keep none’ (Harrison, 281). That issue aside, we now know that the proposed solutions were based on flawed analysis. As at least a few contemporaries recognised, it was south-east England which experienced timber shortages most acutely; in many other parts of the country supplies were actually quite healthy, and the real problem was the logistical challenge of exploiting the more remote forests. Furthermore, Parliament took no account of underlying factors such as a rapidly increasing population; the burgeoning demand for timber in London was surely linked to the city’s growth during these years from around 120,000 residents to roughly 200,000. Consequently, those four bills which were ultimately enacted failed to deliver the desired outcome. By the early seventeenth century the price of wood was rising faster than ever, and Harrison’s prediction proved to be correct. Ultimately the early modern fuel crisis was resolved only when timber was replaced by coal – and a new set of problems.

PMH

Further reading:

William Harrison, Description of England ed. Georges Edelen (1968/1994)

The Agrarian History of England and Wales 1500-1640 ed. Joan Thirsk (1967)

Read more from our First Elizabethan Age blog series here.

The story of the rise of the English Parliament is inextricably interwoven with the Crown’s acceptance in the 13th century that it should not in ordinary circumstances tax its subjects without the prior assent of the community of the realm. Hand in hand with this went an understanding that the King could only make such demands on its subjects on particular grounds. By the later Middle Ages it was accepted that taxation voted by Parliament should be applied to the defence of the realm, although it was understood that this included the King’s possessions on the European mainland.

Grants of taxation nevertheless remained controversial:

I pray God send you the Holy Ghost among you in the parliament house, and rather the devil, we say, than you should grant any more taxes!

John Paston wrote to his brother, Sir John, then a Member of Parliament, in March 1473 (Paston Letters and Papers ed. Davis, i. 361)

This was particularly the case when the war was going badly. In the aftermath of Henry V’s great victory at Agincourt in 1415 the Commons readily acquiesced to a string of taxes to fund fresh expeditions to France. Yet, just a few years later, as England’s French territory was lost piecemeal in the reign of Henry VI, the Commons increasingly pushed back. Wherever possible, they looked for taxes to be levied in the form of customs duties on imports and exports, or on any foreigners living in England. As for direct taxation, the Commons sent Henry VI’s finances into a tailspin by authorising repeated rounds of government borrowing, while delegating the task of agreeing the taxation by which these loans might be repaid to their successors in future Parliaments.

The memory of ever fresh taxes being poured into an apparent black hole as Henry VI’s French territory crumbled away was still fresh when Edward IV replaced him on the throne in March 1461, and the Commons in the Parliament that met at Westminster in November of the same year were no doubt relieved not to be asked for money in support of the new King’s ongoing fight against residual Lancastrian resistance to his rule. Just two years later, however, King Edward could point to the threat of a Scottish invasion in support of the restoration of Henry VI to request a grant of money from Parliament. In June 1463 the Commons agreed, on condition that the tax was to be used for the defence of the realm and for no other purpose. The bulk of the money was to be levied on the basis of a long-established assessment that determined how much every locality in England owed. A supplement, by contrast, was to be raised in the form of a special income tax on everybody who owned either lands returning annual revenues in excess of £1, or moveable goods worth more than £6 13s. 4d. More than half of the money was to be collected that same summer, and Parliament went into its summer recess on 17 June.

In the event, the projected Scottish campaign never took place, and the King instead used the money to pay the wages of the garrison of Calais, and to cover other routine expenditure. He clearly anticipated trouble, for when Parliament reassembled at York on 4 November, he sent the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourgchier, to face the Lords and Commons, with instructions to prevent the assembly from any elaborate discussion by an immediate fresh prorogation until the following year.

The second half of the taxes granted earlier was to be collected about that same time, and the matter had clearly already been on the minds of the Commons, so they were ready for the King. Before the archbishop could send them packing, they found time to agree that their earlier grant of the income tax had been no grant at all, but merely an expression of intent. The chastened King had to agree to forego this special levy, as well as delaying the payment date of the remainder of the money from November to the following spring.   

Edward IV was not slow to learn his lesson. For the next four years, he did not approach Parliament for another grant of money, and when he eventually did so in May 1468, he took care to put the Commons in a good mood with plenty of blandishments and news of a royal wedding, that of the King’s sister Margaret to Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy.

H.W.K.

Find more blogs from our Commons 1461-1504 project at the Commons in the Wars of the Roses page.

In the dark winter months of 1973-1974, the Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, told a private audience of the grave implications of the soaring price of oil. ‘The assumption that had underlain the last 25 years,’ he said, ‘that the growth of the developed countries could proceed steadily on the basis of cheap energy, had been shattered almost overnight.’ Its loss, he warned, ‘would breed social instability, and the risk of radical and even violent change.’

The actions of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to quadruple the price of oil between October 1973 and February 1974 had delivered an almighty shock to the industrialised world. The events of that winter have often been pinpointed as the rupture that marked the decisive end to a golden age of stunning economic growth and rising prosperity.

The energy crisis that ensued seemingly confirmed beyond doubt that the age of postwar affluence had come to a shuddering halt. ‘The history of the twenty years after 1973’, Eric Hobsbawm wrote in the Age of Extremes, ‘is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis’.

Traditional assumptions unravelled as stagflation ripped through the economies of the industrialised world and beyond. Although by no means the sole cause of the economic turbulence, the implications of the oil crisis were profound. In the words of one of the leading historians of OPEC: ‘It shook the transatlantic, white, liberal, Keynesian civilization that had emerged from WWII to its core.’

In Britain, the immediate fallout of the energy crisis saw the fall of Heath’s Conservative Government. Amid the OPEC shock and the Government’s confrontation with the National Union of Mineworkers, Heath had decided to call an early General Election for 28 February 1974. The gamble failed as he was narrowly defeated by Harold Wilson’s Labour.

Significantly, the 1974 election witnessed the remarkable rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP). Claiming Britain’s mounting North Sea oil discoveries for an independent Scotland, the SNP won 22 per cent of the popular vote in February and elected seven MPs. In a second General Election that October, the Nationalists won 30 per cent, displacing the Scottish Conservatives as the second party in the popular vote. Suddenly, the SNP were no longer a joke; the prospect of independence, not so distant.

My paper for the Parliaments, Politics and People seminar explores the double-edged effects of the North Sea oil discoveries on the politics of Scottish autonomy in the 1970s. It has two main aims. First, the paper seeks to show how the SNP’s electoral upsurge in 1974 – fired by the slogan, ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil!’ – initially induced panic at Westminster and prompted the Labour Government and, indeed, all the main parties to enter into fresh commitments to introduce a national Scottish assembly after years of inaction.

Second, the paper then highlights how concerns relating to North Sea oil – and the designs of a growing Nationalist movement in Scotland – caused the Government to delay implementing devolution after 1974. Doubts over the wisdom of embarking upon far-reaching constitutional reforms intensified as the sheer magnitude of the North Sea discoveries began to dawn upon leading figures at the heart of the British Government.

Drawing on recently released archival materials, the paper devotes considerable attention to the Government decision of late 1975 to delay moving ahead with the assembly. Devolution’s failure in the 1974-1979 Parliament, of course, can be attributed to a number of different factors: the flawed nature of Labour’s scheme; that the proposition had ‘few principled supporters’ in the parties themselves; the vigorous opposition to the legislation mounted in Parliament; and ebbing enthusiasm among voters at large by the time the 1979 referendum rolled around.

But a close analysis of documents for this period shows how the oil issue assumed a key part in the Government’s internal deliberations. And, over the course of 1975, a number of leading Cabinet Ministers and highly influential civil servants drove a pushback against the original plan of the Leader of the House of Commons, Edward (‘Ted’) Short, to hold assembly elections in 1976-1977. Fearing that an assembly would seek to impinge on Britain’s vital oil interests, the Treasury spearheaded the effort within Government to derail the proposals.

RJ

To find out more, Robbie’s full-length paper is available by signing up to his seminar and contacting seminar@histparl.ac.uk. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

To register for this virtual seminar, please follow this link and click on ‘Book now’. If you cannot attend this session but wish to submit a question to Robbie, please send it to seminar@histparl.ac.uk.

In July 1625 Charles I faced the first crisis of his reign. England was currently at war with Spain, and the king urgently needed money to fund a fresh campaign. Parliament was meeting at Westminster to address this issue, but the House of Commons, which by tradition initiated grants of taxation, had just voted a much smaller sum than the government actually required. Meanwhile, a major outbreak of plague was sweeping through London, and the MPs, satisfied that they’d done their duty, were now anxious to get away from the capital.

By longstanding custom, monarchs requested parliamentary taxation only once per session, but on 7 July Charles controversially decided to address the financial shortfall by seeking a supplementary grant. However, it was clear that if Parliament’s deliberations were to be prolonged, then adjournment to a safer location than Westminster was unavoidable. The question was, what other suitable venues were available? Since 1548 both the Commons and the Lords had been firmly ensconced at the Palace of Westminster, where they now occupied not just their own chambers, but also a growing number of subsidiary spaces which were employed for committee meetings, conferences and assorted back-room functions. It was one thing to adjourn Parliament to a new site, but unless an equivalent array of facilities was available, its business would be severely disrupted.

The king’s solution was announced four days later, when Parliament was adjourned to Oxford. And remarkably, the session was scheduled to resume in just 20 days, on 1 August. What made this timetable feasible was the existence of what is now known as the Old Bodleian Library. The oldest section, dating from the fifteenth century, comprised just two rooms, the ground-floor Divinity School, and above it Duke Humfrey’s Library. But since 1610 work had been underway to construct a spacious, three-storey quadrangle alongside the original wing, the project finally being completed in 1624. And this brand new complex offered all the spaces that Parliament required, on a single, compact site. Not only was the Divinity School approximately the same size as St Stephen’s chapel, the Westminster home of the House of Commons, but the top floor of the new quadrangle contained broad galleries which could easily be adapted for use by the House of Lords.  In addition, the quadrangle’s lower storeys boasted a number of smaller lecture halls which effectively duplicated the Palace of Westminster’s committee rooms.

The other vital consideration, of course, was accommodation for the peers and MPs. Within hours of Parliament’s adjournment, the Privy Council wrote to the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, peremptorily instructing him to empty the colleges of students, so that their lodgings could instead be used by the members of both Houses. Shortly afterwards, workmen were dispatched to the Bodleian to prepare the spaces which would be needed there. In the Divinity School, the existing seating was ripped out, and replaced with ‘five degrees or ranks of seats … in manner of a cockpit’, imitating the normal layout of St Stephen’s chapel [Proceedings in Parliament 1625 ed. Jansson and Bidwell, 661]. The actual benches used by the MPs at Westminster were loaded onto barges, and brought up the Thames to their temporary new home. To complete the picture, a chair for the Speaker was constructed towards the west end of the room, with a gallery above the entrance for additional seating. Preparations for the Lords were a little simpler. On the top floor of the Bodleian quadrangle, the north gallery was partitioned to recreate the Lords’ chamber and entrance lobby. At the east end of the chamber, a ‘chair of state’ was installed for the king’s use, again replicating the Westminster arrangements, while the adjacent room in the east wing was fitted out as the monarch’s privy chamber. The south gallery was designated as a conference space, for meetings of both Houses – effectively a substitute for Westminster’s Painted Chamber – while the various lecture halls on the lower floors were assigned as committee rooms, or as accommodation for parliamentary officials. The total bill for this refit came to around £155 (roughly £40,000 in modern money), including materials, workmanship, and the craftsmen’s wages and living expenses.

One of the largest colleges, Christ Church, was designated as a temporary home for the Privy Council and members of the royal household, effectively standing in for Whitehall Palace. George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury, and James Ley, the lord treasurer, lodged nearby at Merton College, while the attorney general, Sir Thomas Coventry, based himself next door, in Corpus Christi College, requisitioning the president’s rooms. Other peers, bishops and MPs spread themselves out around the remaining colleges. In practice there was probably no shortage of space, since continuing concerns about the threat from plague encouraged absenteeism; just over half of the bishops and peers stayed away, while the attendance rate for the Commons was possibly even worse. The king sensibly avoided the Oxford crowds, and took up temporary residence at Woodstock Palace, a royal retreat six miles north of the city.

From a logistical perspective, Parliament’s relocation was a great success (the absenteeism aside), despite some inevitable teething troubles. When a joint meeting of both Houses was called for 8 August in the Bodleian’s south gallery, this venue was vetoed by the Commons, since the MPs doubted whether the floor was strong enough to support so many people. The nearby church of St Mary the Virgin was considered as an alternative, before the meeting went ahead in Christ Church hall. However, in general the new facilities seem to have served their intended purposes well, albeit briefly. In political terms, the adjournment to Oxford was a disaster. The Commons reacted badly to the king’s demand for additional taxation, and launched an attack on Charles’s favourite, the 1st duke of Buckingham. Recognizing that in this heated atmosphere there was no real chance of further military funding being agreed, the king dissolved Parliament on 12 August, less than a fortnight after the first Oxford sitting. The whole exercise had been an expensive mistake. Nevertheless, the city’s potential as a substitute for Westminster had been demonstrated, and further assemblies would meet there in 1644-5, 1665, and 1681.

PMH

Further reading:

Proceedings in Parliament 1625 ed. M. Jansson and W.B. Bidwell (1987)

G. Tyack, Oxford: An Architectural Guide (1998)

Biographies or further biographies of Charles I as prince of Wales, George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury, James Ley, 1st earl of Marlborough, Thomas Coventry, 1st Lord Coventry and George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, appear in our recent volumes on The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (2021).

William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), four-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the later Victorian era, is today perhaps best remembered as a financial reformer and advocate of Irish home rule. Historians have seldom sought to explore the relationship between these two political commitments, yet they were, in fact, closely related. 

From the 1840s, Gladstone was a proponent of ‘sound’ finance: that combination of fiscal policies involving low taxation, minimal government expenditure, balanced budgets and free trade which he claimed to have learned from his ‘great teacher and master’, Sir Robert Peel.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Aberdeen, Palmerston and Russell ministries (1852-55, 1859-66), Gladstone sought to extend ‘sound’ finance to Ireland. This involved eliminating Irish tax exemptions through the imposition of the British income tax and the augmentation of the spirit duty, approving tariff reforms that exposed Irish farmers to international competition on the British market, and working to constrain Irish civil government expenditure.

Large claims have been made for ‘sound’ finance in the British context where, historians maintain, Gladstone’s policies established a durable consensus on taxation and fostered widespread acceptance of the state as legitimate. But their reception in Ireland—an agrarian, sparsely populated and economically laggard region of the United Kingdom—was quite different.

In Ireland, conservatives and nationalists alike associated Gladstonian finance with over-taxation, chafed at the regressive structure of the Irish tax code, and expressed scepticism about the supposedly beneficent effects of free trade. Many Irish commentators came to advocate an active, managerial state in preference to the minimal state embraced by Gladstone, seeing increased public expenditure as the best hope for Irish economic development.

As Liberal Prime Minister between 1868 and 1874, Gladstone was hostile to Irish demands for exceptional financial treatment. He associated equality of taxation with the rights of full citizenship, insisted that free trade benefitted both Irish consumers and Irish producers, and doubted the government’s ability to pump prime the Irish economy.

His policy preferences served as an unintentional stimulus to Irish nationalism, convincing politicians and opinion-makers that a reform of public finance tailored to Irish economic needs would only be possible if Ireland received self-government. Fiscal grievances, then, were near the heart of the home rule movement when it was launched in 1870.

During Gladstone’s second premiership (1880-85), ‘sound’ finance foundered on the exigencies of Irish economic crisis. A run of poor harvests, accompanied by collapsing commodity prices, resulted in severe hardship for Irish farmers, particularly in the west.

Distress stimulated rural discontent, which found an outlet in the Land War of 1879-82. Irish expenditure, which had been increasing since the 1860s, escalated rapidly, as Gladstone’s government responded to unrest by making money available for land improvement, land purchase, arrears of rent, seed, labourers’ dwellings, fisheries and emigration, while also enhancing the sums spent on policing. Attempts to offset this spending by augmenting Irish taxation failed, with the ministry’s proposal to raise the Irish spirit duty over the objections of Conservatives and home rulers contributing to the government’s resignation in 1885.  

For Gladstone, home rule offered an escape from the Irish fiscal vice. Here, as in other areas of his mature Irish policy, colonial parallels were important. As early as 1848 he had supported ‘responsible government’ in the colonies, in part, because it enabled the Treasury to shift costs to local legislatures. Though colonial precedents did not necessarily apply to Ireland, they came to seem increasingly relevant to the Prime Minister as Irish expenses mounted. As in the colonies, so in Ireland, self-government provided an opportunity to constrain the growth of the British state.

When Gladstone returned to the premiership and drew up his first home rule bill in 1886, the fiscal provisions of the measure were a major concern. Though some historians have argued that the legislation offered Ireland a financially generous settlement, this contention does not stand up to scrutiny.

Under the bill’s fiscal terms, the Irish legislature would have continued to contribute substantial sums to the Treasury. In the first three decades of home rule, it is certain that a self-governing Ireland would have contributed more to the Exchequer than Ireland under the Union. The British Parliament would have retained control of the rates of Irish customs and excise, ensuring the maintenance of free trade despite nationalist misgivings about laissez-faire.

The Irish government’s working budget would have been modest, inhibiting the ability of Irish politicians to develop an economically interventionist state. The home rule bill was thus designed to augment Ireland’s imperial contribution, limit Irish spending, and secure British-Irish free trade—in short, to safeguard ‘sound’ finance.

Though the fiscal details of the second home rule bill, introduced by Gladstone in 1893 during his fourth and final premiership, differed considerably from those of its predecessor, the intent was the same. This provoked nationalist objections and ensured that the financial scheme was admittedly provisional when the bill left the House of Commons in September, on its way to defeat by the Lords.

A financial approach to Gladstone’s Irish policy is important both for what it reveals about Gladstone, and for what it suggests about the nature of British-Irish relations in the nineteenth century. Gladstone’s engagement with Irish affairs has often been described in terms of dramatic disjuncture, variously attributed to a ‘conversion’ experience, political opportunism, anxieties about Irish political instability, or a growing sensitivity to Irish historical and cultural distinctiveness.

Yet the stubborn persistence of Gladstone’s commitment to ‘sound’ finance indicates that there were significant continuities in his attitude to Irish governance, which had a meaningful impact on policy decisions throughout much of his career. This assessment also reveals some of the material underpinnings of Irish hostility to the Union, as fiscal grievances were channelled into the home rule movement by nationalist politicians.

More positively, it may be noted by way of conclusion, Gladstone’s decision to extend the income tax to Ireland in 1853 modernised Irish finance, which was decades ahead of other early adopters of income taxation in Europe, North America and the Pacific. And while Victorian nationalists denounced ‘sound’ finance, their twentieth-century successors acted more pragmatically—as Gladstone had anticipated—when faced with the responsibilities of self-government.

After independence, Ireland’s first post-revolutionary government embraced ‘sound’ finance as an emblem of political maturity, and Gladstonian nostrums imbued Ireland’s Department of Finance into the 1950s. Therefore, despite the failure of the first and second home rule bills, Gladstone’s fiscal legacy gives him some claim to be considered an architect of the modern Irish state.   

DK

To find out more, Douglas’s full-length paper ‘Gladstone and Ireland: A Financial Approach’ is available here. Douglas will be taking questions about his research between 5.15 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. on Tuesday 7 December 2021.

To register for this virtual seminar, please follow this link and click on ‘Book now’. If you cannot attend this session but wish to submit a question to Douglas, please send it to seminar@histparl.ac.uk.