The central act of King Charles III’s coronation on 6 May will be his crowning with the St Edward’s Crown. He will be only the seventh monarch to wear it. That is because the current crown was made for Charles II at the Restoration and was not used during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Its name however recalls a much older crown. As early as the twelfth century the monks of Westminster Abbey possessed what they claimed was the crown of St Edward the Confessor. In time some even said that it had belonged to Alfred the Great. This was the crown with which English monarchs were crowned. It however had been broken up and melted down in 1649 when the Rump Parliament ordered the destruction of the old coronation regalia. New regalia therefore had to be created for Charles II on his return from exile in 1660.

The circumstances surrounding the creation of that new crown were less than straightforward. They were further confused during the twentieth century by speculation that it was made using gold from the old crown. Every aspect of that theory has been refuted. What had confused scholars was that the new crown was probably produced in two stages. In both, the 1660 Parliament took the lead.

A new Parliament assembled at Westminster on 25 April 1660. Its Members had been elected in elections authorised by the Long Parliament before it had dissolved itself the previous month. The big questions confronting it were whether they would recognise Charles II, then in exile in the Dutch Republic, as king and, if so, on what terms. The big breakthrough came on 1 May, when Parliament received a message from Charles setting out a series of promises which MPs were then able to accept. On that basis, the Commons and the Lords agreed that he should be invited back.

Both Houses moved quickly to prepare for the king’s arrival. The palaces needed to be made ready and the complicated process of recovering Charles I’s possessions, many of which had been sold off a decade earlier, was begun. MPs were also mindful that the new king would need new regalia. On 15 May, they therefore ordered a crown, a sceptre and ermine robes for the king. The crown and the sceptre were to be supplied by Sir Thomas Vyner, the pre-eminent London goldsmith. The cost was set at £900. These gifts were clearly intended by MPs as symbols of their eagerness to welcome their new sovereign.

This crown was certainly made. Vyner mentioned it in a petition he submitted to the king only a few months later. It was also mentioned by Garter king of arms in a memo written later that year. But there is no evidence that Charles had yet worn it. The usual practice in England was that monarchs did not wear crowns prior to their coronation and Charles seems to have followed this tradition. This new crown would therefore not be needed until the coronation, which did not take place until 23 April 1661.

There was one important development in the meantime. By December 1660 it was clear that the king planned to dissolve this Parliament in order that new parliamentary elections could be held. A new Parliament elected on the basis of royal writs would, in royalist eyes, be legitimate in a way the existing Parliament arguably was not. But some MPs in the departing Parliament were determined to make one final statement of their loyalty. In a debate on 17 December a backbencher, Sir John Northcote, proposed that they grant up to £6,000 to buy jewels for the new coronation regalia. Other MPs were enthusiastic. Another backbencher, Sir William Lewis, then proposed a far more generous gift of an assessment tax for one month for the same purpose. That was worth roughly twice what would end up being the total bill for the entire 1661 coronation. This was accepted by the Commons, possibly without demur.

Royal officials had already decided that the coronation would take its traditional form. Other new items of regalia would therefore be needed. Those included an almost identical second crown, which would be used as the ‘state crown’, worn by the king when addressing Parliament. Orders for those pieces had probably already been placed with the new royal goldsmith, Robert Vyner, Thomas’s nephew. The Commons’ generosity ensured that the new regalia could be as impressive as possible. It probably also enabled the crown recently supplied by Sir Thomas Vyner to be further embellished. This was why a later document would speak only of alterations to the St Edward’s Crown, which is what so confused those historians who wanted to believe that the old St Edward’s Crown had somehow survived. The real story was that the 1660 Parliament wanted to augment and enhance the crown they had commissioned and presented to the new king earlier that same year.

One other modern myth, which dates back only to the 1990s, must also be rejected. It has sometimes been claimed that Charles II never paid Robert Vyner the full amount due to him for the new crown jewels. Historians suggesting this made the mistake of relying only on printed sources. The unpublished official documents record all the payments in full and reveal that, if anything, Charles was uncharacteristically prompt in settling this bill. He could make those payments because Parliament had been so munificent. Most of the regalia commissioned in 1660 and 1661 will be used again this May in exactly the way that the 1660 Parliament intended.

AB

Further reading:

A. Barclay, ‘The 1661 St Edward’s Crown – refurbished, recycled or replaced?’, The Court Historian, 13, pp. 149-70

A. Keay, The Crown Jewels (2011)

R. Strong, Coronation (2005, reissued 2022)

Read more blogs from our coronation series here.

In the 1630s the venom-filled pen of pamphleteer William Prynne had excoriated the court of Charles I for what he regarded as immorality and corruption. But by the later 1640s, a seemingly perpetual Long Parliament held the reins of power, Prynne was an MP, and Westminster was itself the target of fierce criticism from the press for its perceived greed, venality and dereliction of duty. Perhaps other commentators did not equal Prynne in the language of vituperation, but some copied his favourite lines of attack.

Certain queries lovingly propounded to Mr William Prynne (1647) employed his habit of posing rhetorical questions, to which the answer was intended to be damningly obvious. Was it ‘more in the power of Parliament-men’ to receive ‘the Kingdomes moneyes, and distribute them amongst themselves … on whatsoever pretences; then it is for so many Apprentices or other servants to … to pick their masters pockets’ [p. 2]? Should not this money ‘be brought into a publike Treasury for paiment of the Kingdomes just debts’ [p. 3]? That only bribery would secure the attention of the House was strongly implied in the proposition ‘whether in this present Parliament have not Petitions been chiefly admitted through favour, or rejected through want of friends?’ Should there not be punishment for Members who failed to voice local concerns? Should there not be greater penalties for non-attendance and a voting record kept for each MP?

Some posed questions with a familiar ring to modern ears. In Englands birth-right justified (1645) the Leveller John Lilburne asked ‘whether it be not most agreeable to Law, Justice, equitie and conscience, and the nature of a Parliament mans place, that during the time of his being a member, hee should lay aside all places of profit in the Common-wealth, and tend only upon that function, for which he was chosen’ [p. 30]? Surely, as Parliament paid its soldiers only 8d a day, MPs could rest content with the daily allowances of 4 shillings to knights and 2 shillings to the others, as laid down in the time of Henry VIII? Among those who should be ‘turned out of their places’ were Sir Henry Mildmay, master of the Jewel House, and Sir Robert Harley, master of the Mint. Lawyers like Speaker William Lenthall and ‘all the Chancery judges’ should resign, ‘for to me it is one of the most unjust things in the world, that the Law-makers should be the Law executors’ [p. 31].

The Self-Denying Ordinance of 1645, by which most MPs and peers were supposed to relinquish any commissions in the army or navy, prompted numerous attempts to publish what amounted to registers of Members’ interests, including any office or reward from the state. These ostensibly exposed substantial profiteering, often at the expense of royalists penalised for their loyalty to Charles. Unsurprisingly, outrage was expressed where the recipients had once themselves been courtiers. Thus Sir Henry Vane the elder was ‘made master of the Roles [i.e. Rolls] ‘for his eagernesse against the King on all occasions, besides, [£2000] given him out of the Earle of Canarvans estate; hee and his son … though they received their first being from his Majesty, are the maddest dogs of the whole pack against him’. Puritan zeal could easily appear hypocritical. MP for Warwick William Purefoy, ‘was the hammer that beat downe all the ancient monuments in the Earles Chappell at Warwick, and in St Maries Church, for which hee received at one time a thousand pounds, at another time five hundred pounds’. MPs whose background was in trade could readily be disparaged. ‘Tom Scot the Brewers Clarke’, son of a very respectable member of a London livery company, ‘whose braines worke perpetually like bottle ale against his Majestie, and who once said openly in the house, that the King was guilty of all the innocent bloud that hath been shed and for it ought to bee brought to a legall triall, and to be hangd’, had received £2,000 and ‘also an Office in Brewers Hall, worth [£500] per annum’ [A second list of the names offices, and rewards of the Parliament men (1648)].

Ten years later, in the context high taxation, the 1656-8 Parliament of ‘upstart Protector’ Oliver Cromwell, was attacked in much the same manner. An unprecedented ‘Company of false-hearted, low-spirited, mercenary Englishmen Sitting in that House’ had countenanced the exclusion from it of MPs deemed politically subversive. The protectoral councillors responsible drew £1,000 a year from their office, but their colleagues in the Commons were doing well too. Sir Thomas Widdrington, for instance, received £35 a week as Speaker, £1,000 a year as a commissioner of the Treasury, £5 for every private bill passed and for every immigrant naturalised, and an unknown amount as recorder of York, while Attorney-general Edmund Prideaux got £5 for every patent and pardon and supposedly £2,000 ‘by great fees’ for pleading at the bar, ‘supposed to amount to in all neer’ £6,000 a year [A narrative of the late Parliament (1658, BL E.935.5), 5, 10].

So were MPs guilty as charged? Indisputably, confiscated estates were acquired by Parliament loyalists; offices were re-allocated to those who could be trusted.  But that had been a fact of political life under the crown, as had the exaction of fees for processing petitions and bills. Members received salaries for work in government and also associated sweeteners, but, particularly as the state expanded, that might be justified by the labour involved. The critical questions are whether remuneration was outrageously generous during this period and whether bribery substantially impacted decisions? There was concern within the Commons. Committees to investigate bribery and misuse of privilege were established. In the most high-profile case, Edward Howard, Lord Howard of Escrick, chairman of the Committee for Compounding (which handled royalist submissions to Parliament), was expelled from his seat in 1651 for egregious corruption. Undoubtedly, some modest fortunes were made – and often lost at the Restoration. Clearly, some MPs took undue advantage of opportunities for profit and advancement, and a few were unscrupulous – arguably the otherwise charming Sir John Danvers among them. However, on close examination many allegations by critics of Parliament appear simplistic or exaggerated. Long-time Speaker William Lenthall expected retainers and received presents, but if his interminable hours in the chair, and navigation of multiple complex, tense and dangerous situations gained him the immense fortune his enemies claimed, its fruits were not very visible.

VL

Further reading:

M. Knights, Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600-1850 (2021)

G. E.Aylmer, The State’s Servants (1973)

A. B. Worden, The Rump Parliament (rev. edn, 2008)

Biographies or further biographies of all MPs mentioned are being prepared for publication by the House of Commons 1640-1660 project.

By late 1640 the government of Charles I was in deep trouble. A treaty signed at Ripon on 26 October signalled the end of three years of war against his Scottish subjects – the so-called Bishops’ Wars – but peace came at a price. The Scots maintained an army of occupation in Northumberland and were to be paid £850 a day until a final settlement was ratified by the English Parliament. That Parliament assembled on 3 November in no mood to oblige the king, but instead set about attacking key components of royal policy. On 11 November, impeachment proceedings were launched against Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford, Charles’s chief minister in Ireland; a fortnight later he was languishing in the Tower of London. On 7 December Ship Money, a tax the cash-strapped king had imposed on inland counties when Parliament was not sitting and which had led to the controversial conviction of objector John Hampden, was declared illegal. Before Christmas the judges who had supported the crown against Hampden were also impeached, as was Charles’s other political right-hand man, William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury.

In time-honoured fashion, the king tried to win over new allies. Earlier in the year he had already cultivated support among the nobility – the great council of peers he had called to York in September had been behind the treaty – and now he sought to increase his influence in the House of Lords. One new recruit from an ancient family of courtiers was Charles Howard, viscount Andover, the heir of Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Berkshire. Although tinged with suspicion of Catholicism like most of the clan, through his father’s patronage he had been re-elected on 12 October as an MP for Oxford. But on 19 November he was summoned to the Lords as baron Howard of Charlton, and he took his seat there the next day. Inasmuch as the new peer was to be a keen promoter of the royalist cause in the months leading up to the outbreak of civil war – to the extent that he too was impeached by the Commons in June 1642 – the ploy worked. However, his replacement in the Oxford seat, elected within a few days, was a mere John Smith, who was at least at first aligned with those who resisted the king’s friends in the city, so there was a trade-off.

In the meantime, Charles had good reason to believe that even the more determined of his critics in the Commons might be ‘turned’, to become loyal servants. After all, in the 1620s Strafford himself had been a troublesome MP. A particularly eloquent ennumerator of subjects’ grievances against an encroaching central government in the early months of the Long Parliament was Sir Francis Seymour, younger brother of William Seymour, 2nd earl (and soon to be 1st marquis) of Hertford. In the Short Parliament he had been pre-eminent in attacking ‘innovations and errors’ in religion and in the law courts, especially Star Chamber, which imposed ‘heavy and deep fines which were so insupportable that they tended to the utter ruin and destruction of men’s estates and fortunes’. His apparently sincere Calvinist faith was far removed from Charles’s theological and ecclesiastical preferences, while his assertion of the need for MPs to speak truth to power seems to have been the more effective and incisive because he avowed subjects’ loyalty to the crown and acknowledged the king’s need for money. For the opening weeks of the Long Parliament he was as vigorous as ever in pursuit of rectifying grievances, yet on 19 February 1641 Charles raised him to the peerage as baron Seymour of Trowbridge, and he departed the Commons for the Lords. Probably Seymour was already uneasy at the extent of reform being contemplated by MPs and the heated language in which debate was being conducted. At any rate, Charles had once again identified a loyal supporter for the future.

But the king’s judgement was not always vindicated. Also on 19 February, hoping to win them over to mercy for the earl of Strafford, Charles appointed seven opposition leaders in the Lords to his privy council. In two cases – Seymour’s brother Hertford and John Digby, 1st earl of Bristol – he gained long-term friends, and in another – Thomas Savile, 1st baron Savile – loyalty for a while. But Strafford was not saved from the executioner’s block; Savile was to prove a turn-coat; Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford was dead within three months; Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, and Edward Montagu, viscount Mandeville, were to command parliamentarian armies from 1642; and William Fiennes, 1st viscount Saye and Sele, became a key member of the Independent war party at Westminster. Other favours sometimes missed their target too. For instance, the MP for Bletchingley, usually called by contemporaries John Evelyn of Surrey to distinguish him from his somewhat more prominent nephew, Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire, was given a knighthood in June 1641, but he was not deflected from his role in ensuring security for Parliament and keeping arms and gunpowder out of the hands of Strafford’s friends during that summer’s proto-royalist Army Plots.

Once armed conflict was underway and Charles had established his capital at Oxford, his opportunities to buy new friends were limited, although he continued to reward existing ones with honours. Savile became earl of Sussex, for example. Lesser men had to be content with degrees, as the king handed out accolades that were not his to give and which cost him nothing – to the fury of some in the University. Among MPs who chose to attend Charles’s Oxford Parliament, one of several unlikely recipients of a doctorate in civil law in 1644 was John Bodvell, constable of Caernavon Castle, whose sole preparation was a spell spent studying common law at the Inner Temple in earlier days. Robert Croke, awarded a doctorate in medicine [and later party to a particularly colourful inheritance dispute played out in Parliament], had at least qualified as a barrister, but the same degree granted to Sir John Poulett appears to have rested solely on his record as a royalist administrator in Somerset. By this time, however, Parliament was also coming under fire for dispensing other people’s resources to inappropriate people…

VL

All the MPs mentioned are the subject of biographies or further biographies by the House of Commons 1640-1660 project, to be published in 2023, while the later careers of those who became peers are being investigated by the new House of Lords 1640-1649 project.

It’s tempting to assume that present-day politics has little in common with government 400 years ago, but in fact there are quite strong parallels.  Then as now, to get to the top an aspiring politician needed the right personal profile, good connections in government, the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and a certain amount of luck.  In the early Stuart context, the targets were of course somewhat different. Under the system of monarchical government, central administration was intimately linked to the royal court, and almost everything depended on access to the king, and the latter’s personal favour. However, competition for the principal royal offices such as lord treasurer, lord privy seal and lord chamberlain, the 17th-century equivalents of major ministerial roles in a modern cabinet, played out in a recognizable fashion. Individual courtiers jockeyed for position, building and breaking political alliances, their relative standing at court and chances of promotion carefully monitored by the political commentators of the day. And, then as now, certain figures emerged who were seen as big hitters, most likely to get the best jobs.

One of the biggest beasts in the Jacobean political jungle was William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke. Regarded by his contemporaries as almost the perfect courtier, he was good looking, cultured, generous, a skilled jouster and huntsman, dignified but affable, a master of the art of dissembling, so that he got on well, at least superficially, with almost everyone he met. The owner of great estates in south Wales and the West Country, with strong ties to numerous other noble families, he was also a competent administrator who espoused the most popular political views of the day – international Protestantism, hostility to Spain, and domestic government by consensus, with king and Parliament working in harmony. Such opinions could in fact be a disadvantage under James I and Charles I, who periodically espoused prerogative rule and rapprochement with the Habsburgs. However, both monarchs recognised that Pembroke was fundamentally loyal to the crown, a consummate insider with no real desire to rock the boat. And because his presence at court helped give balance and credibility to the regime, it was sound policy to keep him actively involved in the inner circles of government.

That’s not to say that the earl’s path towards England’s political summit ran smoothly. Having entered public life while still a teenager, his early success as a courtier was temporarily derailed in 1601 by a sex scandal. Not only did he get one of Elizabeth I’s maids of honour pregnant, but he then compounded his fault by refusing to marry her. The outraged queen banished him from court, and his disgrace lingered until the end of her reign. Fortunately the next monarch, James I, quickly took a liking to both Pembroke and his younger brother Philip Herbert, who became one of the king’s minor favourites, and acquired the earldom of Montgomery. Pembroke’s personal relationship with James guaranteed him regular privileged access to the king, which in turn meant that he possessed status and influence at court. Even so, the earl still needed other allies in order to secure one of the major offices of state and a real say in government policy. Accordingly, he attached himself to James’s powerful chief minister, Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury, and by 1611, aged just 31, Pembroke was a privy councillor and one of Salisbury’s closest friends, trusted to handle the most sensitive government business.

Then in 1612, just when Pembroke’s rise to the top seemed assured, Salisbury died. For the next two years, the most influential royal adviser was Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, a crypto-Catholic Hispanophile, who loathed Pembroke and did everything in his power to marginalize him at court. Pembroke responded to this setback by trying to win round Northampton’s nephew, Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk. In 1614 Northampton himself died, prompting a government reshuffle.  Suffolk became lord treasurer, and Pembroke was widely expected to succeed him as lord chamberlain, having to that end surrendered a claim he possessed on the mastership of the horse. However, Suffolk double-crossed Pembroke, and instead handed the chamberlainship to the king’s principal favourite, Robert Carr, earl of Somerset, who had recently married Suffolk’s daughter. Once again, Pembroke found himself frozen out.

Recognising that Suffolk had strengthened his own position by forming an alliance with Somerset, Pembroke now tried using similar tactics to bring down the Howard clan. A handsome new arrival at court, George Villiers, had started to catch the king’s eye, and Pembroke took the young man under his wing, grooming him as a potential successor to Somerset as royal favourite. The clear expectation was that would undermine Suffolk, and allow Pembroke to replace him. Unfortunately, this scheme backfired spectacularly. Villiers did indeed supplant Somerset, but once he felt secure in the king’s affections he quickly repudiated Pembroke as his mentor, and set about building his own power base. To make matters worse, the Howard faction imploded of its own accord, Somerset being brought down by his complicity in the Overbury murder case, while Suffolk succumbed to a corruption scandal. Had Pembroke simply bided his time, he might well have got what he wanted. Instead, while he did succeed Somerset as lord chamberlain in 1615, his career then stalled again, since Villiers, better known to history as the 1st duke of Buckingham, achieved a virtual monopoly over government patronage, and Pembroke was too proud to do the bidding of his former protégé. In the country at large the earl continued to be seen as a serious candidate for high office. There was talk in 1618, 1620, 1621 and 1624 of him becoming lord treasurer, but nothing came of these rumours, because no candidate stood a chance without Buckingham’s backing.

Matters came to a head in 1626, when Pembroke mobilised his own allies to launch the impeachment of Buckingham in Parliament. When this attack also failed, due to the duke’s hold over the new king, Charles I, Pembroke was finally forced to come to terms with his bitter enemy. On paper, he secured a reasonable deal, gaining promotion to the post of lord steward, and passing the chamberlainship to his brother Montgomery. However, Buckingham ruthlessly dismantled Pembroke’s powerbase, and ensured that he lost any real influence at court. Even so, there were more twists yet to come. Following Buckingham’s assassination in 1628, Charles repudiated many of the unpopular policies associated with the duke, and rehabilitated Pembroke as a clear signal that he wanted a fresh start. The earl eagerly embraced the role of elder statesman, sensing that his time had finally come. By early 1630 it was even reported that he would become lord admiral, filling the vacancy left by Buckingham. In the event, this appointment was delayed, but Pembroke’s prospects were still looking bright when, without warning, he died on 10 April that year, two days after his fiftieth birthday. After a lifetime of waiting, success had come too late.

PMH

Further reading:

Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of James I ed. R.F. Williams, 2 vols. (1848) [online resource]

Roger Lockyer, Buckingham (1981)

Biographies or further biographies of William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery, Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury, Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk, Robert Carr, earl of Somerset, George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, and Charles I as prince of Wales may be found in our recent publication, The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (2021).

Reporting on events at Whitehall palace on 6 April 1659, weekly newspaper The Publick Intelligencer depicted a harmonious outcome to a potentially dangerous political confrontation. That evening, ‘in one of the publick rooms of audience’, Lieutenant-general Charles Fleetwood and others from the general council of the officers of the armies of England, Scotland and Ireland had presented a petition to Protector Richard Cromwell. The Humble Representation began by stressing the patience and forbearance of forces constituted ‘for the just Rights and Liberties, Civil and Religious of our Countreys, and not as a Mercenary Army’, but went on to state dramatically ‘the crying necessities of the Armies for want of pay’ and their perception of ‘the approaching danger’ that all they had fought for since 1642 ‘was in danger to be lost’. ‘The good old Cause against Tyranny and intolerable oppression’ to which they had signed up, which God had endorsed in their victories in the field, and for which there had ‘been such a plentiful powring forth of Treasure, Prayers, Tears, and Blood’ had been publicly mocked. Disaffected cavaliers were assembling; they and the press were on the warpath. ‘The famous Actions of the Parliament, His late Highness, of blessed memory [i.e. Oliver Cromwell], and the Army’ were ‘vilified and evil spoken of’. The beleaguered officers therefore sought from Richard and his Parliament then sitting both arrears of pay and indemnity for their past actions.

Notwithstanding the tension, according to The Publick Intelligencer, Protector Richard – who happened to be Fleetwood’s brother-in-law – received the address ‘with a very great affection and respect to the whole body of Officers which presented it, using many expressions of tenderness and endearment to them, as the old friends of his renowned Father, and the faithful servants of the Publick Interest of these Nations’. He expressed solidarity with them, and indeed ‘so great a satisfaction appeared on either side at this meeting, as that it speaks nothing less then a vigorous asserting of the present Government, to the terror and confusion of the common enemy’. Thus the newspaper offered the reassurance that, no doubt, a constituency of its readers desperately wanted.

Up to that point a fragile political alliance had held somewhat against the odds. Protector Oliver Cromwell had died on 3 September 1658, having recently declined an offer of the crown but also having, in traditional mode, named his eldest surviving son as his successor. The heir’s character and experience were not promising. Although he had done brief military service in 1647-8, he could not begin to match the tactical brilliance, godly dedication, meritocratic outlook and appreciation of his men that had endeared his father to the army. Unlike his brother Henry Cromwell, who earned respect through his competence in governing Ireland, Richard had made next to no impression as an MP in his first Parliament (1654) and little in his second (1656-7). Rare glimpses of his political stance revealed him as more conservative than Oliver, inclining towards Presbyterians antipathetic to the army. He was known to the public principally for his love of hunting and horse-racing; his laziness and self-indulgence exasperated his father. In August 1657 a serious injury sustained in a hunting accident removed him for months from the political stage.

Yet the succession went smoothly, all things considered. Government officials like John Thurloe were quick off the mark with proclaiming Protector Richard and with orchestrating public endorsement. Richard stirred himself to the challenging tasks of maintaining good relations with the officers and finding the funds for paying their arrears. Members of the council of state including Henry Lawrence, Nathaniel Fiennes, Sir Charles Wolseley, Philip Jones and the future naval commander Edward Montagu gave him solid backing.

But financial contingencies necessitated a general election. From the opening of Richard’s Parliament on 27 January 1659, there were contentious issues to negotiate. Through February and March, civilian republicans led by Sir Arthur Hesilrige tried to block the bill for the recognition of the new protector, and it was finally passed subject to a closer definition of his powers. There were heated debates over the existence and composition of the second chamber, set up in late 1657 to replace the abolished House of Lords, and over the inclusion of MPs for Scottish and Irish constituencies, although both were eventually accepted by majority vote. There were objections to the high number of army officers sitting in the Commons. Richard still hung on.

After its up-beat account of 6 April, for the next month The Publick Intelligencer gave little attention to domestic affairs under the weight of foreign news, although it reprinted the officers’ petition, rectifying a printer’s error. It did, however, note an officers’ prayer meeting (13 April); a petition to Parliament by ‘certain persons commonly called Quakers’ and the response – pleasing to conservatives in the House but not the army – ordering them to return to ‘their respective Habitations, and there apply themselves to their Callings, and submit themselves to the Laws of the Nation, and the Magistracy they live under’ (16 April); and a petition from the trained bands (a volunteer force) of London highlighting ‘Designs to the destruction of your Highness [Richard] both Houses of Parliament, the faithful Army, and good people of the three Nations’ (20 April). It then printed without comment Richard’s proclamations dissolving Parliament on 22 April and commanding Catholics and cavaliers to leave London within three days (23 April).

This last appeared in the 25 April-2 May issue. By the following week Richard’s government had ceased to exist in any meaningful sense. Absent from the newspaper was an account of another confrontation at Whitehall on 21 April. Responding to an order from Richard that the council of officers be dissolved and attempts by MPs to reorganise the army, Fleetwood and his colleagues had turned out in force demanding the dissolution. Richard had had no option but to capitulate. Without mentioning the protector, The Publick Intelligencer’s 2-9 May issue reported an order from Fleetwood and the council of officers for the printing of their declaration seeking the return of the Long Parliament, terminated abruptly by Oliver and the army in 1653. As Richard remained in residence at Whitehall, afraid to move for fear of apprehension by his creditors, there was confusion over whether the protectorate had ended, but eventually, in mid-July, he vacated the palace with an assurance his debts would be paid. For the time being, the English republic had definitively returned. The next chapter can be followed here.

VL

Further reading

To his Highness Richard Lord Protector … the humble representation of the General Council of the Officers (1659)

The Publick Intelligencer, nos. 171-5 (April, May 1659)

Biographies or further biographies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Cromwell, Richard Cromwell, Nathaniel Fiennes, Charles Fleetwood, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Henry Lawrence, Edward Montagu, John Thurloe and Sir Charles Wolseley are being prepared for publication by the Commons 1640-1660 project.

In the context of contemporary British government, the office of lord privy seal – more correctly lord keeper of the privy seal – is a non-job, a sinecure which in recent decades has been used to provide the leader of the House of Lords or House of Commons with a salary and a seat in cabinet. The privy seal as an instrument of government was effectively abolished in 1884. However, a few centuries ago, it was a key feature of the crown’s executive power. Royal orders issued under the sign manual (the monarch’s signature) or the signet (the monarch’s personal seal) were almost always transmitted to the Privy Seal Office, where warrants were prepared, authorizing action by the Exchequer or Chancery, the latter department being the home of the great seal – literally the final seal of approval of government decisions. In addition to this pivotal role in the crown’s bureaucracy, the privy seal was sometimes used to approve payments by the monarch or, conversely, to confirm royal requests to individuals for financial assistance, in the shape of ‘privy seal loans’.

In 1625 the lord privy seal was Edward Somerset, 4th earl of Worcester. The last of Elizabeth I’s courtiers to retain a senior government role under the Stuarts, he was now aged around 73, and his reappointment that year by Charles I was probably a reward for his decades of loyal service to the crown. In practice the Privy Seal Office was run by its clerks, who could operate without Worcester’s direct supervision, but the steady flow of warrants generated substantial fees, a proportion of which found their way into the earl’s pockets. Nevertheless, he took his responsibilities seriously, and does seem normally to have retained custody of the privy seal itself. For example, in 1624 he entrusted the seal to George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury, before leaving London for a summer break at his country seat, Raglan Castle in Monmouthshire.

Charles I’s reign began badly. A military campaign against the Habsburgs on the continent had stalled, and the king wanted to try a naval attack on Spain instead, but for this he needed extra tax revenues. When he summoned Parliament, MPs voiced concerns that taxes voted in 1624 for the war had been squandered, and declined to grant fresh ones on the scale that Charles needed. To complicate matters further, a serious plague outbreak had recently hit London, and it became clear that a long session at Westminster was out of the question. Accordingly, Parliament was adjourned to Oxford, where the king intended to appeal for a supplementary tax grant. And because no one knew how long these discussions would last, most key government personnel went too, no doubt relieved to get away from the capital. Among them was the earl of Worcester, bringing with him the privy seal.

In the event, the 1625 Parliament’s second phase proved even more acrimonious than the first, and lasted less than a fortnight, before an angry Charles dissolved the session on 12 August without securing any more financial assistance. Two days later, the government decided to press on regardless with the naval strategy, resolving to address the tax revenue shortfall by means of privy seal loan requests. Meanwhile, as the plague was still raging in London, government ministers scattered in all directions, rather than returning to Whitehall. The king went hunting in Hampshire, while a much-depleted privy council met at Southampton.  Worcester himself was excused from his official duties, and retired to Raglan for the remainder of the summer. And for reasons that have never been explained, he took the privy seal with him. Presumably in the confused exodus from Oxford he failed to find anyone else to whom he could hand the seal, and decided that the safest option was to keep it himself. At any rate, it seems highly unlikely that he packed it by accident.

Given the general disruption to the government’s operations, some days passed before anyone noticed that the seal was missing, and then no doubt inquiries were made to establish where it had gone. In the meantime, the usual flow of official warrants ground to a halt, and the new policy of privy seal loans also had to be paused. Finally, on 30 August the lord treasurer, James Ley, Lord Ley, informed the privy council ‘that the lord privy seal was gone to his house in Wales, far remote from this place, and had taken the seal with him’ [Acts of the Privy Council, 1625-1626 ed. J.V. Lyle, 148]. As an emergency measure, the council agreed that warrants under the privy signet should temporarily be treated as equivalent to those under the privy seal, so that the normal business of the Exchequer might resume. However, the king’s approval was needed for this change of practice, and that seems to have taken another few days to secure. Not until 7 September did Charles write to Worcester, explaining with remarkable restraint: ‘We find that the want of our privy seal is prejudicial to our service, by the stop it gives to many things of importance, that may not suffer delay’ [TNA, SP16/6/26]. The earl was instructed to return the seal to the king without delay, though ‘by some person of trust’, rather than in person.

Remarkably, Worcester seems never to have been formally reprimanded over this episode. The privy council, resuming discussion of the privy seal loans on 7 September, speculated that the earl would shortly be relieved of his office, but this assumption proved to be misplaced. In the short term the privy seal was entrusted to the comptroller of the royal household, Sir John Suckling, but once Worcester returned to London in October he resumed his duties, and played a major part in managing the loan requests over the next nine months. He was still in post when he died in 1628, and it’s clear from official records that he’d retained custody of the seal. Charles had evidently decided that the episode of the missing seal was a temporary aberration by an old, loyal and trusted servant. And as the king would demonstrate many times subsequently, loyalty was a quality that he prized more highly than efficiency.

PMH

Further reading:

R.P. Cust, The forced loan and English politics: 1626-1628 (1987)

G.E. Aylmer, The king’s servants: the civil service of Charles I (1961)

Biographies or further biographies of Edward Somerset, 4th earl of Worcester, George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury, James Ley, Lord Ley (later 1st earl of Marlborough), and Charles I (as prince of Wales) may be found in the History of Parliament’s recent volumes on The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (2021).

The breakdown in relations between Charles I and Parliament which led to civil war and ultimately to the execution of the king in 1649 has been charted in previous posts. But what was the attitude of MPs and peers towards Charles’s consort, Henrietta Maria? How did she compare with other queens whom they knew, or thought they knew?

The marriage between Charles and the then fifteen-year-old French princess, celebrated by proxy in May 1625, got off to a rocky start. However, the assassination in 1628 of the king’s favourite, George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, removed a rival for his affections, and the royal couple became devoted to each other, presenting a picture of domestic bliss very rare among contemporary monarchies. Ironically, it was their intimacy that fuelled a negative image of a queen who exerted undue influence, steering her husband in the direction of Catholicism and absolutism. At first she had her defenders even among those for whom the survival of Protestantism was a priority. Decades on from the Armada, Spain, with its Inquisition, apparent closeness to the pope, and onslaught on Protestant territories in the Thirty Years’ War, was still the main bugbear. France, on the other hand, was allied with the Protestants and exercised a limited toleration for adherents of the religion, while Henrietta Maria was a daughter of the much-admired Henri IV. But the colourful rhetoric of detractors, of whom William Prynne was the most excoriating, had a corrosive effect. Charles’s own practice of sometimes referring to his wife publicly as ‘Queen Mary’, intended to be a more accessible name than the unfamiliar Henrietta or Henriette, misfired. She disliked it and for British subjects it evoked uncomfortable memories of Catholic Mary Tudor or Mary, Queen of Scots.

A few weeks into the Long Parliament, in December 1640, the king promoted a bill to confirm several letters patent that he had issued during the years when no Parliament had met, making financial provision for ‘his Majesty’s dearest Consort’. In subsequent months, amid unprecedently intense activity in the Commons, ‘the committee for the queen’s jointure’ continued to meet. The following spring she frequented the Lords for the trial of her husband’s adviser and lord deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, and later claimed to have negotiated with various parliamentary leaders on his behalf.

However, with the revelation from early May 1641 of the ‘army plots’, allegedly formulated to spring Strafford from the Tower of London and to stage a coup to reassert royal authority, tension mounted. The ‘priests, Jesuits and Capuchins’ surrounding the queen in her (Catholic) private chapel and court at Somerset House came under intense scrutiny. She was required by Parliament to submit a list of her servants; those who refused to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance (to the monarch as head of the Church of England) were threatened with deportation. Meanwhile, the Commons heard on 11 May that another ‘Queen Mary’, the queen mother, Marie de’ Medici, visiting England to escape political troubles in France, had ‘sent twice or thrice to express her apprehension, and her fear, and desired a guard’ against popular disorder. Henry Rich, earl of Holland, as lord lieutenant of Middlesex, directed that ‘a guard of one hundred musqueteers’ be despatched, but found ‘great unwillingness in some of them to go; they thought it fitter to do other things, than guard any stranger’. Peers were reportedly keen to impress on MPs that ‘if anything should happen to the queen [mother], it would be a great dishonour to the nation’; she had conducted herself in England with ‘modesty and moderation’ and had ‘often desired his Majesty might so govern, as to have the Affections of his People, and particularly, by Parliament’ [Journal of the House of Commons, ii. 143].

That August Marie de’ Medici departed the kingdom with the promise from Parliament of a pension of £10,000, to be paid in instalments. In the interim, her daughter also planned a trip abroad, ostensibly for the sake of her health but actually to pawn some of the crown jewels to raise money for her husband, but abandoned it in response to Parliament’s opposition. Over the summer and autumn she grew more fearful of the rising levels of violence in and around London and of rumours that she, like Strafford, would be impeached. In February 1642, following the publication by Parliament of intercepted letters between the king and queen and their closest supporters revealing the measures they were prepared to take against it, she left for the Netherlands, and was not to return to London until after the Restoration.

This was not the last set of intercepted letters to damage the royal cause. A collection including coded messages from Henrietta Maria, captured after the battle of Naseby in June 1645, and published by parliamentary order as The Kings Cabinet Opened, persuaded many at a critical point that Charles was not to be trusted. The reputation of others was also sabotaged by such means. Loyalty to the king’s elder sister Elizabeth Stuart, who had married Frederick, elector palatine of the Rhine and briefly king of Bohemia, had been a keynote of 1620s Parliaments; calls for military intervention to restore them to their territories had had considerable support. Sentimental attachment to Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, a Protestant heroine now widowed and exiled in The Hague, endured into the 1640s. Representations in the Commons outlining her parlous financial circumstances yielded both sympathy and funds for her and her numerous children. But the discovery of letters from her to her brother and to her son, Prince Rupert, a royalist commander, revealed that she too was no friend of the Long Parliament. Her letter to Rupert, reproduced in its original French in the Commons Journal, urged him to do whatever he could to support his uncle and lamented the fact that his elder brother, Elector Charles Louis, had been led astray into fraternising with Parliament.

Loyalty to that other Queen Elizabeth, of England, lasted longer. In a speech at Whitehall in January 1641 in which he had announced an ‘intention to reduce all matters of religion and government to what they were in the purest times of Queen Elizabeth’s days’, Charles had told most MPs exactly what they wanted to hear. As late as 1648, those who desired a settlement with him secured the republication of Elizabeth I’s speech to her last Parliament in 1601, expressing the relationship of monarch and people to which they aspired. The queen aimed ‘to be the mean, under God, to conserve you in safety, and preserve you from danger’. Since ‘my heart was never set upon any worldly goods, but onely for my subjects’ good’, she would not hoard, but give back her riches again; ‘far above all earthly treasures I esteem my people’s love’. To ‘wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it, then it is pleasant to them that bear it’; she ‘was never so much inticed with the … royal authority of a queen, as delighted, that God hath made me his instrument to maintain his truth and glory, and to defend his kingdom from dishonor, damage, tyranny and oppression’ [Queen Elizabeth’s Speech (1648, BL E.432.15].

V L

In March 1603, following the death of Elizabeth I, her cousin James VI of Scotland became James I England as well. Just two weeks later the king crossed the Anglo-Scottish border into his new realm, vowing to come back every three years. In fact it would be another 14 years before he returned to Scotland, and the timing of this visit was dictated not by some political emergency, but by much more personal considerations. James had become king of Scotland in July 1567, shortly after his first birthday, and so the year 1617 was the 50th anniversary of his accession. Moreover, he had recently become Scotland’s longest-reigning monarch (the previous record-holder, William the Lion, had ruled for just under 49 years), and he meant to celebrate these landmark events in style.

It would be fair to say that James’s enthusiasm for this great northern ‘progress’ was not widely shared. One basic problem was his very status as a 17th-century king. A 21st-century British monarch serves as a largely symbolic head of state, and can travel about relatively freely with no impact whatever on the workings of government. However, James was in a very real sense the ruler of Great Britain, whose approval was required for all matters of policy and patronage. While his ministers were accustomed to him disappearing off on brief hunting trips, a more elaborate expedition such as a summer progress entailed a substantial number of courtiers, advisers and even bishops trailing around the country in the king’s wake, with all the logistical complications that this entailed. For his visit to Scotland, James envisaged being away from London for around six months, and for much of that time he would be difficult to contact quickly, should some emergency develop.

And then there was the prospective cost of this trip. In a context where the English exchequer and Scottish treasury were already struggling – and mostly failing – to balance the books, James’s travel plans imposed an entirely unwelcome additional financial burden on both governments. The Scottish privy council, which received roughly a year’s advance notice, was instructed to repair the principal royal residences, none of which had been properly maintained for decades, and prepare accommodation at Edinburgh for up to 5,000 visitors.  The desperate councillors were obliged to introduce an emergency levy of £200,000 Scots (more than £2 million in today’s money), so the first intimation that many of James’s Scottish subjects had of his imminent arrival was an unexpected tax demand.

Nevertheless, the king intended his much wealthier kingdom of England to cover the bulk of the costs. There, supplementary taxation was out of the question, following the failed Parliament of 1614, and instead the city of London and the farmers of the customs were approached for a loan of £200,000 sterling (more than £26 million today). Raising such a massive sum at short notice proved so difficult that, in early March 1617 the English privy council literally begged James on their knees to postpone the progress for twelve months, all to no avail. The king was by now denouncing opponents of the trip as traitors, and was determined to press on.

Accordingly, on 15 March the expedition set off, with James accompanied by favoured English and Scottish courtiers, all the principal officers of the royal household, one secretary of state, three bishops, eight chaplains, the king’s bodyguards, and over 70 other court servants, including pages, ushers, cupbearers, trumpeters and physicians. Naturally all the more senior figures in the party took their own personal servants, and the numbers were further swelled by other Scots resident in England who seized the opportunity to visit their homeland in style. More than 60 wagons were used to transport the royal luggage, while larger items were sent north by sea, since James was determined to create the most magnificent impression, and took with him not just his clothes but also furniture, wall-hangings and plate to decorate the Scottish palaces during his brief stay.

Unsurprisingly, this massive train moved slowly. Travelling north via Lincoln, York, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Berwick-upon-Tweed, James spent two whole months on the road before reaching Edinburgh. On his birthday, 19 June, he spent the night at his birthplace, Edinburgh castle, though he normally resided at the more comfortable Holyrood palace while in the Scottish capital. He also found time to visit Dunfermline, Falkland, St Andrews, Dundee, Perth, Stirling, Glasgow and Dumfries, and of course to go hunting at regular intervals. James took a smaller group of attendants with him for these subsidiary trips, leaving the bulk of the English courtiers to feast and revel in Edinburgh. If the king’s instructions were carried out, there were also displays of traditional Scottish sports such as football and bowls.

However, there was also business to attend to. Despite all of James’s assurances to the contrary, he hadn’t returned north simply for reasons of nostalgia. As the Scottish government suspected all along, he had a political agenda as well as a social one, which soon became clear. The king’s attempt to achieve a formal union of his two principal kingdoms had failed a decade earlier, but he still hankered after greater uniformity of government between England and Scotland. After 14 years down south, he also firmly believed that the English system was superior, and didn’t hesitate to say so. Opening a session of the Scots Parliament in June, he tactlessly informed the assembled members that he aimed to reduce the ‘barbarity’ of Scotland to the ‘sweet civility’ of England. He then proceeded to push through changes to local administration and the Scottish kirk, all designed to promote English practices. In another unprecedented move, five of his English courtiers were admitted to the Scottish privy council, including his controversial male favourite George Villiers, earl (later duke) of Buckingham. At Holyrood palace the church services were conducted along English lines, the Anglican ceremonial scandalizing the Presbyterian Scots.

By the latter stages of the tour, these tensions were spilling over into quarrels between English and Scottish courtiers. James spent the actual 50th anniversary of his accession, 24 July, in Glasgow, and then headed south again. As he passed through the Borders, there were reports of an assassination attempt on Buckingham, who had replaced an earlier Scottish favourite, Robert Carr, earl of Somerset. The return journey, via Carlisle, Chester, Coventry and Windsor, proved a little quicker, as many of the English courtiers peeled off to make their own way home. However, it was still mid-September by the time the king reached London. The final bill for the Scottish government was nearly £230,000 Scots. The English financial tally is not known, but was undoubtedly much higher. Unsurprisingly, James never attempted to repeat this trip, and the lasting legacy of his jubilee tour was mounting suspicion in Scotland of Stuart royal policy, which would come to an explosive climax under his successor, Charles I.

PMH

Further reading:

W.A. McNeill and P.G.B. McNeill, ‘The Scottish Progress of James VI, 1617’, Scottish Historical Review, lxxv. 38-51

Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1611-18 [online resource: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/domestic/jas1/1611-18 ]

Biographies of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, Robert Carr, earl of Somerset, and Charles I (as prince of Wales) feature in our recently published volumes on The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (2021).

As noted in previous blogs, the myth of tight and uniformly repressive puritan rule in the mid-seventeenth has proved hard to shift. Likewise, the blame for much iconoclasm – the destruction of church windows, statuary and other images and artefacts – continues to be laid primarily at the door of Oliver Cromwell and his austere East Anglian lieutenants when it should more often be attributed to a minority of his particularly austere contemporaries or, especially, to his distant kinsman more than a century earlier, Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell. In reality, religion in this period was a complex business. Ordinary people registered varied experiences of church and community life, while those in authority exhibited many shades of opinion. The kill-joy controversialist William Prynne was notable in this period for his extremism, while the contrasting lifestyles of the pious Sir Edward Hungerford and the adulterous Sir Edward Bayntun demonstrate that ‘puritans’ came in different shapes and sizes.

On 21 May a conference titled ‘Contesting the Church in England, 1640-1670’ will convene in Canterbury. It will bring together historians researching how various individuals and interest groups during this period of civil wars and reconstruction argued and acted for their vision of what the national church should be. The House of Commons 1640-1660 section will be represented. Since the Reformation, Parliament had been the place where religious change or religious settlements had been enacted, as well as the location of influential preaching. But in the 1640s it also became the place where policy was formulated. It abolished the bishops and their ecclesiastical courts. Its committees adjudicated on petitions from congregations, dismissed and appointed clergy, and launched preaching campaigns. It continued to debate religious questions, despite apparently delegating this function to its own creation, a synod of clergy meeting from 1643 as the Westminster Assembly. It outlawed use of the Book of Common Prayer and authorized the Assembly’s Directory for Worship (1645), only to turn a blind eye to some contraventions of the former and ignore the latter.

So who were the movers and shakers of religious policy in Parliament and what exactly were their views? For some of the just over 1,800 men who sat in the 1640s and 1650s, we have very little evidence: they made no revealing speeches, or are not visible in local church activities, or left no private papers or clue in their wills. At the other end of the scale were identifiable activists. For example, over his years as an MP the ubiquitous Francis Rous, scholar and Speaker of the Nominated Parliament, was a lay member of the Westminster Assembly, a member of the key central executive Committee for Preaching Ministers, a ‘trier and ejector’ regulating ministers in the localities, a commissioner for excluding unworthy persons from taking the sacrament of Holy Communion and a participant in preparing legislation for the selling off of bishops’ lands. Sir Henry Vane the elder, a former courtier and a leading figure at the fashionable church of St Martin in the Fields, had a similar profile, as did William Wheler, his equivalent at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in charge of arrangements for parliamentary fast days. But men of humbler origins were also prominent. Nathaniel Hallowes, a woollen draper and grandson of a labourer, was a churchwarden in his native Derby thirty years before he appeared on religious committees at Westminster, including for the regulation of universities. George Thomson, similarly high-profile, was an international merchant and disabled army veteran, who had spent his youth in Massachusetts.

Unsurprisingly, men of such different backgrounds had divergent perspectives on the church. In late 1640 and 1641, widespread resentment against the perceived encroachment of bishops into the realm of secular power swept MPs down the path of abolishing them altogether. Soon enough, however, some began to regret the sanctions and the popular unrest that had been unleashed. One such was Sir Edward Dering, who was excluded from Parliament early in 1642 for breaching privilege by printing his speech calling for a compromise position of ‘modified episcopacy’. In contrast stood the godly Herefordshire MP Sir Robert Harley, supporter of a firm alliance with the Presbyterian Scots, a keen iconoclast and, as time went on, an enthusiastic promoter of the Directory for Worship. But in 1648 his willingness to make peace with the king ensured he fell victim to the army’s purge of Parliament.

There was no religious unanimity among those who survived it, however – except inasmuch as many shared a distaste for a church still run by clergy. The Presbyterians, as John Milton put it, had simply proved to be ‘old priests writ large’ – worse than those who preceded them. A taste for ‘Erastianism’ or lay control was general, but differently interpreted. Some MPs, like veteran lawyer John Selden, appear to have had very little interest in the detail of theology and devotion. Others, like lawyer and memorialist Bulstrode Whitelocke and Speaker William Lenthall, quietly encouraged a reversion to earlier forms of worship. On the other hand, Miles Corbet and Oliver Cromwell were among those who moved towards a model of loosely-federated but largely autonomous congregational churches, while the Parliaments of the 1650s also recruited men like Samuel Hyland who belonged to sectarian groups and repudiated the notion of a national church.

The evolution of religious ideas and the context of experiment tested parliamentary control of the church in the later 1650s. MPs debated hotly, and concluded variously, how far they were authorised or competent to judge and punish the alleged blasphemy of James Naylor, the Quaker who rode into Bristol in what seemed like a parody of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, or the ‘Socianian’ heresy of John Biddle, who denied the Trinity. The limits of toleration were also challenged in differing views on the readmission of the Jews to England. In practice, diversity was the default, with Oliver Cromwell at the vanguard of those prepared to give almost everyone the benefit of the doubt – a disinclination to open a window into men’s souls that put him squarely in the tradition of Elizabeth I’s Church of England.

VL

Further reading:

A. Milton, England’s Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England 1625-1662 (2021)

Biographies or further biographies of all the 17th-century MPs mentioned in this blog are being prepared for publication by the House of Commons 1640-1660 project.

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).