As politicians continue to debate the House of Lords’ future, including legislation to eliminate its remaining hereditary peers, they might draw lessons from its past. Particularly instructive are the events of the English Revolution, which saw the House of Lords and monarchy abolished in 1649. Both were collateral damage in the single-minded pursuit of King Charles I’s trial by a radical minority of MPs abetted by the parliamentarian army. The unicameral parliaments that followed in the 1650s proved unmanageable, or at least unserviceable to what Oliver Cromwell and the godly believed should be the agenda for settlement.

Even after expelling the torpid Rump Parliament by force in 1653, and assuming the title of Lord Protector under Britain’s first written constitution, The Instrument of Government, Cromwell struggled with his parliaments. Desperate measures, including the exclusion of around a hundred MPs before the meeting of the Second Protectorate Parliament in 1656, failed to bring that assembly to heel. Cromwell was particularly alarmed when that same parliament gave rein to its religious intolerance, not least by claiming the power to define, judge and punish the alleged misdemeanours of a Quaker named James Naylor, who MPs unilaterally found guilty of ‘horrid blasphemy’ and voted a suitably savage punishment. As Cromwell warned a meeting of army officers in February 1657, the ‘case of James Naylor might happen to be your own case’. As far as he was concerned, the Commons needed ‘a check, or balancing power’ in the form of a second chamber (John Morrill et al, The Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, iii. 340-1).

His wishes were answered in March 1657 when MPs presented Cromwell with a new written constitution, The Humble Petition and Advice, which created an ‘Other House’ of parliament. This was no straightforward revival of the House of Lords. Its membership would consist of a maximum of seventy men, sitting not by hereditary right, but chosen by the Protector and approved by the Commons. Members would serve for life, or until removed for misdemeanours, whereupon new ones would be chosen to fill vacant places. While Cromwell was no political theorist, he found hereditary systems of rule inherently unsound. He failed to see the logic in an arrangement where it mattered little if a person was ‘a fool or wise, honest or not’, for ‘whatever they be’, they ‘must come in’ (Morrill et al, iii. 144). Instead, admission to the Other House was based on what Cromwell perceived to be individuals’ merits or principles. He claimed to chose men who valued ‘not titles’, but ‘a Christian and an English interest’ (Morrill et al, iii. 493).

This does not mean Cromwell was unwilling to select noblemen for the Other House. Ultimately, though, only seven old English peers received summons: the earls of Manchester, Mulgrave and Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele and Lords Eure, Fauconberg and Wharton. These were men who had either shown a willingness to play some role in the Cromwellian regime, or were erstwhile allies from the 1640s who Cromwell hoped to win back. Many other peers were overlooked, however, including some, like the earl of Salisbury, who had sat in the House of Commons during the 1650s. Other noblemen were chosen who had not been eligible to sit in the English House of Lords, including the Irish Lord Broghill and the Scottish earl of Cassillis, perhaps suggesting that Cromwell aimed to make the new chamber representative of the fragile union achieved by the English republic’s conquest of Scotland and Ireland.

Yet, the vast majority of the sixty-two members summoned to the Other House were not noblemen but new men: Cromwell’s ‘sons and kindred, flattering courtiers, corrupt lawyers, degenerated swordmen, and… self-interested salarymen’, as one critic put it (A Second Narrative of the Late Parliament (so called) (1658), pp. 23-4). The charge had substance: over a quarter of the members were closely related to the Protector, including two sons and three sons-in-law. They also included all but one of Cromwell’s privy councillors, and many administrators, court officials and judges.

It is hardly surprising, given Cromwell’s desire for the new chamber to act as a balance on the Commons, that he selected those who shared his political and religious vision. But this made the Other House a very different animal to the old Lords. Its membership was more socially diverse: several had amassed fortunes only after rising through the ranks during the civil wars, such as the shoemaker John Hewson, the brewer Thomas Pride, and James Berry, who was a clerk at an ironworks before the conflict. Of course, this made it easy for critics to suggest the Other House was an assemblage of men of mean birth and low principles, but from Cromwell’s perspective it represented a meritocracy not an aristocracy.

Those old peers summoned to the ‘Other House’ recognised its novelty. Writing to Lord Wharton in late 1657, Viscount Saye was clear that they must not accept Cromwell’s writ of summons. To do so would make them complicit in the ‘laying aside of the Peers of England who by birth are to sit’; they would ‘disown their own rights and the rights of all the Nobility of England’. By breaking the ancient link between hereditary nobility and parliamentary membership, Saye believed the Other House was ‘a stalking horse’ to ‘carry on the design of over-throwing the House of Peers’ (Bodl. Carte MS 80, f. 749).

Saye’s warning was prophetic. When the Other House assembled in January 1658, Cromwell pointedly referred to it as ‘our House of Lords’, implying it now assumed the position of its predecessor (Morrill et al, iii. 467). To complete the charade, its members were styled ‘lords’ and sat in the Lords’ chamber at Westminster. Yet, the Commons were not easily deceived. As the republican MP Thomas Scot mischievously put it, if the Other House was really the House of Lords, Cromwell must summon all ‘the old peerage’, but the ‘old nobility, will not, do not, sit there’. The Other House were ‘but Commoners’; its members were ‘part of the Commons, in another place’ (The Diary of Thomas Burton, ed. J.T. Rutt (1828), ii. 389-90). Other MPs stressed that the new chamber must be styled the ‘Other House’ to make clear it derived its authority from the Humble Petition and Advice alone. As the MP William Brisco explained, it must have a ‘new name’ because it was a ‘new constitution’; its members and powers were ‘new’. The ‘Other House’ was not a ‘revival’ of the old upper chamber but was a new creation, brought into being by the Commons through the written constitution. As Brisco informed the Commons, it was ‘a House set up by you’ and ‘the derivative power shall never exceed the primitive power’ (Burton, ii. 410-11). The old House of Lords was a different matter because its membership sat by virtue of their birthright, not election; their membership and authority had been independent of the Commons.

The parliamentary session ground to a halt as the Commons failed to agree on how to address, or define, the new chamber. The feeling of exasperation was best summed up in the speech of Griffith Bodurda, who pleaded with the Commons to give the new chamber ‘some name… You must call them a House, of men, or women, or something that have two legs’ (Burton, ii. 432). His calls fell on deaf ears and Cromwell angrily dissolved the parliament on 4 February 1658. Ironically, Cromwell’s hope that a second chamber would better control the Commons foundered upon MPs’ unwillingness to own that chamber as a balance over them.

So much about the Other House was novel: a membership of life peers, fixed in number, and more socially and geographically diverse than any House of Lords had been. Yet, in a society that revered precedent, it was always going to be a hard sell. Cromwell failed to convince others that it was a suitable replacement for the House of Lords: styling it as such was never enough. The lack of the old peers left many questioning the extent to which it was a legitimate, or independent, component of the parliamentary trinity.

Perhaps, as the final hereditary peers are removed from the House of Lords, politicians will emulate their counterparts from the 1650s by reflecting on the identity crisis posed by a House of Lords without the ancient nobility. Will it essentially become another House, an ‘Other House’? On what basis will its remaining members sit, and what will be the chamber’s constitutional foundation? Is it destined to become a cipher for the government, or a House of Commons sitting elsewhere?  These are thorny issues, but the Cromwellian era has lessons to offer.

JF

Further Reading:

The biographies of James Berry, Griffith Bodurda, Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle), William Brisco, the earl of Salisbury (William Cecil), Oliver Cromwell, John Hewson and Thomas Pride are in the recently-published Commons 1640-60 volumes.

J. Fitzgibbons, Cromwell’s House of Lords: Politics, Parliaments and Constitutional Revolution, 1642-1660 (2018)

C.H. Firth, The House of Lords during the Civil War (1910)

P. Little and D.L. Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (2007)

J. Fitzgibbons, ‘Hereditary Succession and the Cromwellian Protectorate: The Offer of the Crown Reconsidered’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), 1095-1128.

Oliver Cromwell is blamed for many things without any basis. There are ruined castles said to have been destroyed by him (even though he never went near them); Christmas was famously banned by him (it wasn’t – blame the Long Parliament); and his hatred of entertaining sports and pastimes, including racing, is also well known. In this summer of sport, it might be appropriate to reconsider this last accusation.

When Cromwell, responding to popular complaints about bans on racing and other sports in September 1656, told Parliament, ‘I do not think these are unlawful, but to make them recreations, that they will not endure to be abridged of them’ would be the greatest ‘folly’ (Letters, Writings and Speeches ed. Morrill, iii. 316), he was considering them as occasions of vice, where people would (certainly) gather to drink and gamble and (probably) plot against the regime. Plotting was the principal reason for a series of bans on racing in England during the protectorate. The earliest ban was imposed on 4 July 1654, after intelligence that such meetings would be used as a cover by royalists to muster cavalry, and this was renewed for six months in February 1655, and, after the rising in Wiltshire instigated by John Penruddock in the spring of the same year, the policy was adopted by the major-generals who governed the English and Welsh localities. Yet Parliament’s decision to end the major-generals scheme at the end of January 1657 also ended the ban on racing, and a new injunction was not imposed until April 1658, when new plots were suspected. Such inconsistency suggests that there was no ideological opposition to racing in itself. This is also suggested by the fact that a similar ban in Scotland – also imposed for security reasons – was not matched by one in Ireland, where popular meetings, as at the Strand at Youghal in County Cork, continued throughout this period.

To reinforce the point, it is clear that racing was something of a passion within the Cromwell family during the protectorate. In March 1654 – a few months before the first ban came into force – the protector’s own horse, the ‘Dun Arabian’, competed on Banstead (that is, Epsom) Downs in Surrey. In April 1657, after the ban had lapsed, the protector’s son and heir, Richard, gave £30 to the corporation of Winchester for a race cup. In August 1658, a race at Youghal was held in honour of the protector’s younger son, the lord deputy of Ireland, Henry Cromwell. The devotion to the turf shown by the Cromwells was shared by others at the protectoral court. Surviving evidence shows that such key figures at court, such as the protector’s sons-in-law, Viscount Fauconberg (Thomas Belasyse), and John Cleypoole, as well as political advisers such as Viscount Lisle (Philip Sidney), Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle), and Charles Howard (later 1st earl of Carlisle), all shared the Cromwellian passion for horses and racing. Other former parliamentarians, including the earls of Northumberland and Warwick, were also enthusiasts. It was not just royalists who were keen on a day at the races.

In banning racing, Cromwell was limiting his own pleasure and that of his friends for the greater good. But there were other ways to promote the sport. The protector devoted much time, money and effort in establishing his own stud, including importing valuable horses from abroad to improve the blood-lines, including Barbs from North Africa and Spanish Jennets. Although occasional Arabian horses (probably Turcoman-Arabians) had been seen in Britain in the early seventeenth century, they did not impress contemporaries, and their potential was only accepted at the end of the century, after three Arab stallions were capture at the siege of Vienna in 1683 (the famous ‘foundation sires’ of modern-day thoroughbreds: the Darley Arabian, the Godolphin Arabian and the Byerley Turk). Yet Cromwell was ahead of his time in showing great interest in the breed, trying to secure them at source from Aleppo, even though the Turkish authorities went to great lengths to ban their export. At least one stallion made it to England during the protectorate – the ‘White Turk’, which later joined Charles II’s stud, where it was probably matched with the king’s ‘Royal Mares’, whose bloodlines are also considered foundational. It is an odd thought that, despite being famous for banning racing, Cromwell may have contributed to the genetic make-up of the thoroughbred race-horses of today.

P.L.

Further reading:

Patrick Little, ‘Uncovering a protectoral stud: horses and horse-breeding at the court of Oliver Cromwell, 1653-8’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), pp. 252-67.

Peter Edwards, Horse and Man in Early Modern England (2007)

C.M. Prior, The Royal Studs of the 16th and 17th Centuries (1935).

The biographies of Oliver, Richard and Henry Cromwell, as well as Thomas Belasyse, Roger Boyle, John Cleypoole, Charles Howard and Philip Sidney, appear in the House of Commons, 1640-60 volumes.

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.

John Browne, the Clerk of the Parliaments (i.e. the House of Lords) in the Long Parliament, did not have an easy job. His primary purpose was, with the help of a team of assistants, to write the Journal of the House of Lords, the official record of the House’s daily business. The journal was not a verbatim account of what was said and done and forging the final product was a lengthy and convoluted affair which began with rough notes being made in the House. In the early Stuart Parliaments, it appears that these jottings were entered into something called a ‘Scribbled Book’. Browne seems to have broken with this practice and instead made his entries in the Scribbled Book after the day’s sitting, basing them on hurried notes made on loose sheets. However, like those of his predecessors, Browne’s Scribbled Books are essentially the first version of what would become the journal and much of the material they contained was never transferred to the finished product. They are a treasure trove of information for historians of the British Civil Wars.

The eight surviving Scribbled Books of the Long Parliament, ranging from November 1640-April 1642, have long been known of by scholars but have never been investigated in their own right. The History of Parliament’s House of Lords 1640-1660 section is currently working through these volumes, bringing to light new detail but also using them to explain how the journals were constructed. The latter task is especially important since, with the notable exception of Elizabeth Read Foster’s work, there is relatively little research into how these important records were created. There was no official rubric for making the journals, though there were some traditions which a previous clerk, Robert Bowyer, helpfully summarised:

The Clerk of the Parliament doth every day (sitting in the House or Court) write into his rough or scribbled book, not only the reading of the Bills and other proceedings of the House. But as far forth as he can, whatsoever is spoken worthy of observation. Howbeit into the Journal Book, which is the record, he doth, in discretion, forbear to enter any things spoken, though memorable, yet not necessary or fit to be registered and left to posterity of record.

Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Library of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, ed. J.C. Davies (3 vols, Oxford, 1972), ii. 612

Browne appears to have shared Bowyer’s concern with omitting embarrassing details from the journal. His Scribbled Books contain many details of physical brawls or verbal slugging matches which, sadly for those reading them, did not make it into the journal.

Along with discretion, the other key guiding principle behind the construction of the journal was brevity. The journals of both Houses were intended to be user friendly. MPs, Lords, interest groups, and private citizens all needed to be able to locate relevant entries and to navigate the material quickly. One of the most notable revelations of the Scribbled Books is the degree to which Browne summarised business in order to meet these needs. In reality, business in the House dripped rather than flowed. Often, topics were discussed before being dropped due to an interruption or not concluded by the end of the day’s sitting. To overcome the obstacles, Browne tended to condense. Speeches were summarised and business which had fitfully dealt with over the course of the day or even several days was shortened into a brief, sequential summary. In the pursuit of conciseness and respectability much of the actual business conducted by the Lords fell onto the cutting room floor when the journals were written. Much of this lost evidence is of an inconsequential nature but a great deal of it is not and is of enormous interest to scholars of the English Revolution.

To give one significant example of the evidence which can be found in the Scribbled Books, we might look at the events of 28 December 1641. It was not a tranquil time at Westminster. Tumultuous crowds, aggressively calling for the exclusion of bishops from the Lords, milled about the Parliament house. There was a significant political dimension to these protests: the removal of the prelates would break the king’s party in the upper house, removing a significant obstacle to the anti-Caroline junto. In a febrile atmosphere, the Lords’ journal baldly records a vote being held over whether the Parliament was free. This was a highly significant moment in the prelude to the Civil Wars. Had the Lords decided that Parliament was not free then Parliament would have effectively ceased operations giving Charles control of the political scene. Historians since Gardiner have discussed it at length. They have also dwelt on the role of George Lord Digby since it was he who supported the motion with an impassioned speech in which he took several digs at the MPs encouraging the crowds and, in the report of one witness, ‘bespattered the House of Commons as much as one would do his cloak in riding from Ware to London’. (HMC Montagu, p. 137) Accordingly, it was on Digby, a parliamentarian ‘hate figure’ and advisor of the king, that the ire of the Commons was focussed the next day.

However, the Scribbled Book and other notes kept by Browne present a much more complicated image. It appears that Digby did indeed make the original motion, prompting the House to adjourn itself into a committee (a procedure which allowed members to speak freely and as much as they liked to an issue) during which Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton, actually proposed the question of whether the House was free or not. The Lords then resumed their sitting in order to vote on Southampton’s question. It was this vote which was then recorded in the journal. Browne, desirous of a concise summary, had cut out all the fat and simply left a record of the final vote without the convoluted process by which it was reached. In the process, the extremely revealing actions of Southampton were concealed. Southampton had been drifting towards the king’s camp before 28 December and his actions were further evidence of a political realignment. His intervention was as provocative as Digby’s but seems to have been overlooked by the Commons due to their antipathy towards the latter and desire to remove one of Charles’s most belligerent advisors from the king’s counsel. However, one person who did not ignore the earl’s actions was the king: two days later Southampton was rewarded for his endeavours by being made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber.

These and many other important facts about the Lords are contained in the Scribbled Books but are little known. Their recovery has the potential to illuminate the House of Lords which is by far the more dimly lit of the two parliamentary chambers in modern historiography. A greater awareness of what occurred in the Upper House and the actions of individual peers does not just improve historians’ understandings of a few lords. As is now widely acknowledged, parliamentary politics was fundamentally bicameral with events in both Houses closely connected. This point is evident in the Southampton/Digby episode. Both peers were implicitly attacking the Commons-men and their allies in the Lords who tried to dominate the Parliament through mob-intimidation. The attack by the Commons on Digby rather than Southampton reflected the belief of the anti-Caroline faction that it was the former who was the more serious threat to their actions and so needed to be removed in order to facilitate the erosion of the royalist roadblock in the Lords. As this brief example suggests, the Scribbled Books reveal much about the Lords. A greater understanding of the Lords allows in turn a better comprehension of parliamentary affairs as a whole, an understanding which is not always helped by the Houses’ journals which tend to be curt, formulaic, and impersonal and so suppress the more messy, eventful, and revealing reality of mid-seventeenth century politics.

A.B.

Note:

Browne’s record of 28 December 1641 can be found in: Parliamentary Archives, BRY/90 and BRY/93 (entries for 28 December 1641).

Further reading:

Elizabeth Read Foster, The House of Lords 1603-1649, Structure, Procedure, and the Nature of It Business (London, 1983).

Elizabeth Read Foster, ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’, in Barbara C. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J.H. Hexter (Philadelphia, 1980), pp. 129-146

John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Fall of Charles I (London, 2007).

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 Stuart brothers George Lord d’Aubigny, Lord John Stuart and Lord Bernard Stuart came from a powerful aristocratic family. Their father, Esmé Stuart, 3rd duke of Lennox, was a cousin and favourite of King James I, and their elder brother James, who succeeded as 4th duke of Lennox in 1624, became a gentleman of the bedchamber to King Charles I and lord steward of the royal household, the most senior position at court. However, only one of the six Stuart brothers would survive to see the Restoration in 1660, with three alone – George, John and Bernard – dying in combat in the English civil war.

At the outbreak of war in England in the summer of 1642 the three brothers became cavalry officers in the king’s army. All three fought at the first major battle of the war in October at Edgehill, where George was killed taking part in such a one-sided cavalry charge that it prompted suspicions that he had been accidentally shot by one of his own troopers. The royalist statesman Edward Hyde, the future earl of Clarendon, who was a friend of the 4th duke of Lennox, described George as ‘a gentleman of great hopes, of a gentle and winning disposition, and of very clear courage…’ (Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1888), ii. 368).

Lord John Stuart was just 22-years of age when he, too, made the ultimate sacrifice to the royalist cause – in his case, at the battle of Cheriton in Hampshire in March 1644. Commanding the royalist cavalry he was mortally wounded and was carried from the battlefield to Oxford, the king’s wartime headquarters. Hyde, who was then living in the city, wrote several years later that Lord John

died of his wounds within three days [of Cheriton], to the great grief of the King … He was the second brother of this noble family who had lost his life in this fatal war, and was a man of great courage, and, with a different roughness in his nature from all the rest of his race [i.e. family], had proposed to himself the profession of a soldier…’ (Clarendon, History, iii. 313)

Lord Bernard Stuart fought on and even survived the royalists’ crushing defeat at Naseby in June 1645, which ended any real prospect of the king winning the civil war. But like his two brothers, he would not live to see the war’s outcome. That September, at the battle at Rowton Heath, just outside Chester, he was killed within sight of the king himself, who was observing the engagement from the city walls. This, for Hyde, was perhaps the cruellest blow of all to the Stuart family: ‘He was a very faultless young man, of a most gentle, courteous, and affable nature, and of a spirit and courage invincible; who[se] loss all men exceedingly lamented and the King bore it with extraordinary grief’ (Clarendon, History, iv. 115-16).

By ‘all men’, Hyde meant, of course, all royalists. The parliamentarians, on the other hand, far from lamenting Lord Bernard’s death used it as a prime example of royalist hubris. Reflecting on the battle at Rowton Heath, and on Lord George’s fate in particular, the editor of the leading parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Britanicus declared that God and the nation’s destiny had pronounced against the king, and that resistance to these forces was not only futile but immoral: ‘it is not for men to fight against Heaven, and the Genius of Great Britaine’ (Mercurius Britanicus no. 100 (29 Sept.-6 Oct. 1645), 890 (E.304.2)). Lord Bernard and his brothers had merely been ‘Martyrs to this Truth’ – that is, to the futility of resisting Parliament’s victory. For the parliamentarians, their deaths only had meaning in revealing the ultimate pointlessness of their sacrifice. This interpretation would prevail, at least in public discourse, until the restoration of monarchy in 1660. Indeed, in their determination to exclude the brothers from any share in the nation’s ‘Genius’,  the parliamentarians may have erased all visible trace of their burial in Oxford’s cathedral; certainly not even the smallest inscription survives to mark their graves.

The Stuart brothers’ memory was revived after 1660 during the reign of their royal cousin Charles II, although, again, it was twisted for polemical purposes. The royalist hagiographer David Lloyd, in his 1668 publication Memoires of the Lives…[etc.], invented glorious deaths for them that likely bore little relation to fact. Lord George, claimed Lloyd, had received twelve wounds at Edgehill and had fought on until the blood had all but run from his veins. Lord John, at Cheriton, had not been ‘daunted with the fall of two horses under him, nor with six wounds given and the death of near five hundred men round about him’. Lord Bernard, we are told, had commanded the royalists’ rearguard at Rowton Heath ‘to the amazement of all that saw him’ – in fact he had been killed in a confused melee that had preceded the main battle. Regardless – in Lloyd’s telling the three brothers had ‘died Martyrs to this great Cause’ (Lloyd, Memoires of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings & Deaths…[etc.], pp. 321-30).

The fate of the Stuart brothers, as lords of the blood royal, was emblematic for both royalists and parliamentarians in the struggle to define and defend ‘this Truth’ or ‘this great Cause’. Their high birth and the political circumstances in which they were memorialised thus dictated what moral should be drawn from their deaths. If truth is invariably a casualty of war then Lloyd’s fanciful reconstruction of their last moments is further evidence that the conflicts of the 1640s were still being fought in the 1660s, albeit with pens rather than swords. Lloyd’s own service in this protracted war of words did credit neither to the brothers nor to himself. The Restoration antiquarian Anthony Wood thought the Memoires contained ‘almost as many errors as lines’, lending its author ‘not only the character of a most impudent plagiary [plagiariser], but a false writer and meer scribbler’ (Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis ed. P. Bliss (1820), iv. 349). Evidently the Stuart brothers continued to pay the cost of royalist martyrdom long after the true facts about their deaths had been forgotten.

Thomas Fallais and David Scott

The research for this blog was undertaken as part of a UNIQ+ internship at the University of Oxford in conjunction with the History of Parliament Trust. For further information, see UNIQ+ (UNIQ plus) | Graduate Access | University of Oxford

Further reading

Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion : a New Selection ed. P. Seaward (OUP, 2009)

C. Gray, ‘Wild civility: men at war in royalist elegy’, in J. Feather and C.E. Thomas (eds.), Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture (Palgrave, 2013), pp. 169-89

E. Peters, Commemoration and Oblivion in Royalist Print Culture, 1658-1667 (Palgrave, 2017)

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.

Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland [S], was killed fighting for the king in the English Civil War on 20 September 1643. Explanations for his death range from suicide to an accident of curiosity. But perhaps more interesting to consider is how his fatality would be contested in print. As secretary of state to King Charles I, Falkland was a high-profile casualty and yet his death was largely ignored at the time. Examination of the immediate response to his death compared with the accounts in the 1660s makes clear the symbolic importance of Falkland to Restoration politics. The man who did more than any other to revive his memory for this later generation was Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon and Charles II’s chief minister in the period 1660-7. And like other Restoration authors, Hyde could not resist invoking Falkland’s ghost for polemical effect.

Falkland’s willingness to fight, and for whom, was clouded by his politics. Throughout the 1630s he patronised the Great Tew circle – a group of gentleman intellectuals who studied and socialised at his house in Oxfordshire. It was through this circle that Falkland met Hyde. They would go on to forge a lifelong friendship based on shared political ideals. Contemporaries knew of the circle’s lukewarm support for Charles I’s authoritarian style of government. Falkland’s theorising on how England ought to be governed was best reflected in a speech he made to the Commons in 1641, where he claimed that ‘all the miseries we have suffered’ were the result of those advising Charles that ‘he might well do as he pleased’ (L. Cary, The Lord Faulkland His Learned Speech in Parliament (1641), 1-6 (E.196.9)). Despite his political anxieties, Falkland sided with the royalists at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 and accepted the office of secretary of state at Hyde’s urging. At the first battle of Newbury, he volunteered for action and was killed following a reckless charge at enemy lines. It is little surprise, then, that the royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus offered few words on Falkland’s death, only referring to him as being ‘most unfortunately slaine’ (Mercurius Aulicus no. 38 (17-24 Sept. 1643), 528-29 (E.69.18)). Falkland’s past criticisms of Charles’s rule may well explain why the response to his demise in the royalist press was so muted.

The response in Parliament’s leading newsbook, Mercurius Britanicus, implied that Falkland’s involvement in the battle had been an act of military necessity: ‘the King … was forced to command his principal Secretary of State … to help or all was lost’ (Mercurius Britanicus no. 5 (19=26 Sept. 1643),39 (E.68.5)). A man of Falkland’s status being killed on the battlefield did not conform to Renaissance ideals concerning the role of ‘civil’ gentlemen in society. Instead, anachronistic concepts of masculine conduct are invited onto the page. Martial manliness, a product of an earlier age, was back in fashion as gentlemen took once again to their horses and armour. Falkland may have accepted this trend, and ‘rather chose to bury himself in the tomb of honour, than to see the nobility of his nation vassalaged, [or] the dignity of his country captivated by any base domestic enemy’ (E. Symmons, A Militarie Sermon (1644), 16 (E.53.19)).

Following the restoration of monarchy in 1660, royalist politicians and polemicists sought to capitalise on Falkland’s memory for political and personal advantage. Chief among Falkland’s votaries was Hyde. As the main architect of the post-Restoration political order, he worked to establish ‘firmness and constancy’ (Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey of … Leviathan (1676), 124) within the new regime by promoting the ideals of the Great Tew circle. Hyde recast Falkland’s life and death to further the cause of constitutional royalism and promote a policy of reconciliation with former parliamentarians. He claimed that Falkland had willingly faced death at Newbury so that ‘all might see that his impatiency for peace proceeded not from pusillanimity or fear to adventure his own person’ (Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1888), iii. 189). By offering Falkland’s body as an object of political violence, Hyde presented his death as an act of self-sacrifice in the cause of peace and settlement.

Hyde’s rise and, in 1667, fall influenced Restoration accounts of Falkland’s death. The poet and biographer William Winstanley, writing in 1665, was predictably admiring in his treatment of Hyde’s dead friend. According to Winstanley, Falkland achieved honour through the ‘just Defence of his Majesty, and the Laws … whose Cause they had so stoutly maintained’ (W. Winstanley, The Loyall Martyrology (1665), 60). Here, Winstanley sought to further Falkland’s (and Hyde’s) view that the king was bound by the law, and that the body politic could not operate without reverence for both.

Writing a year after Hyde’s fall from power, in 1668, another biographer, David Lloyd, could treat Falkland and his political legacy more critically: ‘This excellent Personage [was] among the Demagogues, that had been for twelve years silenced, and were now to play the prize in Parliament’ (D. Lloyd, Memoires (1668), 332). Lloyd was alluding here to Falkland’s cooperation with the parliamentarian politicians who had forced Charles I to recall Parliament in 1640 after over a decade of ‘personal’ royal government – a Parliament that would end up killing the king and abolishing monarchy altogether. In recounting Falkland’s death, Lloyd’s description was this: ‘his Curiosity engaging him at Newbury, he was strangely slain there, dying as he lived till then, between his Friends and his Enemies’ (Lloyd, Memoires, 333). Lloyd’s words were intended to highlight the conciliatory nature of Falkland’s politics and its ambiguous legacy for the adherents of the Stuart kings – both Charles I and Charles II. Hyde’s political supremacy and subsequent exile thus determined how Falkland was remembered and how his memory was exploited for political ends.

The death and memorialisation of Falkland encapsulate the complex interplay of politics and conceptions of masculinity and honour during the mid-seventeenth century. Although his death received limited attention in 1643, it would later be re-contextualised for the political purposes of Restoration statesmen and writers. Hyde’s influential account of Falkland reflected their shared commitment to constitutional royalism and the search for settlement. The symbolic importance of Falkland was enduring as he was textually elevated from reluctant royal adviser to royalist martyr. Ultimately, his death provided a canvas on which portraits of the man and the cause for which he died could alternately be fleshed out and painted over anew.

WP

William Poulter is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds, currently exploring the building of prodigy houses in Elizabethan England

The research for this blog was undertaken as part of a UNIQ+ internship at the University of Oxford in conjunction with the History of Parliament Trust (for further details, see UNIQ+ (UNIQ plus) | Graduate Access | University of Oxford).

Further Reading:

A. Hughes, ‘Manhood and Civil War’, in Gender and the English Revolution (Routledge, 2012), pp. 98-132.

C. Gray, ‘Wild civility: men at war in Royalist elegy’, in J. Feather, C.E. Thomas (eds.), Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture (2013), pp. 169-89.

D. Smith, ‘Cary, Lucius, second Viscount Falkland (1609/10–1643)’, ODNB, (Oxford University Press, 2014).

S. Mortimer, ‘Great Tew circle’, ODNB, (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Biographies of Falkland and Hyde 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.