The Triennial Act of February 1641 was the first piece of legislation passed by the ‘Long Parliament’ in its momentous thirteen-year history of reform, rule and, in 1649, regicide. Of course, none of the peers and MPs who had assembled late in 1640 anticipated that Parliament would overthrow Charles I and seize the reins of government. But what they did foresee was the need to exploit the crisis engendered by his recent and disastrous war against the Scots in order to curtail the royal prerogative – the monarchy’s traditional discretionary powers that enabled it to govern without Parliament. None of these powers was more significant than the king’s right to call and dissolve Parliaments at will. The Triennal Act was brought in to limit this right, introducing legal provisions for summoning Parliament automatically in the event that the king had failed to do so after a three-year period. Here was the first step in a hoped-for revolution in royal government whereby parliamentary laws and taxation, based upon consent, would replace what many at the time saw as the king’s ‘arbitrary’ rule over their lives and property.

The fact that the Act originated in the Commons and was sponsored by Oliver Cromwell and other radicals has persuaded some historians that it was a power-grab by MPs determined to prove that they were now ‘the active agency of Parliament’ (G. Yerby, The Economic Causes of the English Civil War (Abingdon, 2020), p. 236). Yet even supposing the Commons viewed their handiwork in these terms they faced a major obstacle, for draft legislation still required the endorsement of both the Lords and the king to become law. As sent up to the Lords early in 1641 for their consent, the triennial bill (i.e. the draft Act) was indeed a radical document. It stipulated that if the king did not call a Parliament when required then the task would fall to the county sheriffs and other returning officers and then – if they too failed in this duty – to the electors themselves. Laws for calling regular Parliaments to redress ‘Mischiefs and Grievances’ had been on the statute books since the fourteenth century (The Statutes of the Realm (1810), vol. 1, p. 374); but none, so far as is known, had authorised people this far beyond the normal circles of government to act for the crown independently of their political masters. Charles was appalled that his ‘Ancient Prerogative’ would be exercised by ‘Sheriffs and Constables and I know not whom…’ (J. Rushworth, Historical Collections (1721), vol. 4, p. 155).

When the triennial bill was read in the Lords late in January 1641 it provoked ‘serious Debate’ and was referred to a committee to make ‘Additions and Amendments’ (Journals of the House of Lords (1782), vol. 4, p. 247). The king had even bigger problems with the bill and proposed to the Lords ‘that the Lawes for houlding of Annuall Parliam[en]tes be dulie kept and observed’, but that if this safeguard failed then the power of summoning a new Parliament should be vested either in the lord chancellor or the lord keeper (Parliamentary Archives, Main Papers, 28 Jan. 1641). These crown officers were royal ministers of state, appointed by the monarch, and the king seems to have calculated that if push came to shove they would remain answerable to him. The peer who chaired the committee to amend the bill was another royal minister – the lord privy seal, Henry Montagu, 1st earl of Manchester. He was a firm believer in the authority, indeed duty, of the peerage to act for the good of the commonwealth in disputes between the monarch and the people. He and his fellow committeemen did not object to royal ministers or, if necessary, local returning officers summoning Parliament independently of the king. Instead, they inserted between the two groups their own choice as guardians of the public interest – the aristocracy.

Manchester’s committee proposed that if the king or one of his ministers did not summon Parliament as required then the peers of the realm, ‘or any twelve or more of them’, should meet at Westminster and issue the necessary writs for holding elections (The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625-1660 ed. S.R Gardiner (Oxford, 1906), p. 147). The number twelve in this context was a highly controversial one and loaded with political significance. In 1601 a group of English noblemen led by Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, had justified their rebellion against Elizabeth I by claiming authority under a precedent of 1265 for twelve peers to seize power and summon Parliament. Five members of Manchester’s 1641 committee, among them Essex’s son, the 3rd earl, had invoked this same authority just the previous year, joining seven other noblemen – making twelve peers in all – to petition Charles, demanding that he call Parliament. This demand, backed by Scottish force, had worked; the disaffected peers of 1640, unlike their Elizabethan predecessors, had prevailed.

The Lords’ amended triennial bill was returned to the Commons where it was referred to a committee dominated by Cromwell and like-minded MPs and was approved with only minor changes. A delegation of peers then attended the king on the understanding that if he withheld his royal assent to the bill he would be threatened with ‘the most extreme designs’; Charles ‘yielded to necessity’ and complied (Calendar of State Papers Venetian, 1640-1642 ed. A.B. Hinds (1924), p. 126). To him the Act represented a slippery slope towards an aristocratic republic and, in time perhaps, full parliamentary sovereignty. But a more immediate challenge to royal power – certainly once Parliament had been dissolved – was the baronial authority that the twelve petitioner peers had wielded and to which the Triennial Act now gave legal expression. The Commons had acquiesced in the Lords’ re-drafting of their bill because they shared the reformist ideals of the twelve peers. Indeed, some of the leading MPs had conspired with these noblemen to bring down Charles’s ‘personal rule’ the year before.

The two Houses were determined not just to affirm the lordly interest evident in the Triennial Act but to strengthen it. In their final overture to the king before the outbreak of civil war in 1642 they insisted on aristocratic control of royal government in the intervals between Parliaments; but Charles scorned the idea of reigning as a ‘Pupil or Ward’ of his over-mighty subjects (His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions (1642), p. 14). On raising an army against him that summer, parliamentarian peers and MPs declared allegiance to their new lord general with the baronial pledge that they would ‘live and die with the [3rd] Earl of Essex’ (Journals of the House of Lords (1786), vol. 5, p. 206).

DS

Further reading:

John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London: Weidenfild & Nicolson, 2007)

Esther S. Cope, ‘The inconveniences of long intermissions of Parliament and a remedy for them’, Albion, 13 (1981), pp. 1-11

Pauline Croft, ‘The debate on annual Parliaments in the early seventeenth century’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 16 (1996), pp. 163-74

Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘The earl of Essex and Elizabethan Parliaments’, Parliamentary History, 34 (2015), pp. 90-110

Note: the biography of Oliver Cromwell has been published in House of Commons, 1640-60. The biographies of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex and Henry Montagu, 1st earl of Manchester, will appear in House of Lords, 1640-60. For a study of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, see House of Lords, 1558-1603 (forthcoming).

In 1760 Thomas Worsley of Hovingham, a close friend of George III’s favourite, the earl of Bute, penned a letter to his friend and patron insisting on his family’s antiquity. In their possession, he claimed, were ‘authentic documents of coming over with William the Conquerer’. Worsley’s concern to prove that he was no johnny-come-lately had originally been seen when he was appointed to the privy chamber back in the 1730s, but he was still clearly concerned to emphasise his suitability at the time of his appointment as surveyor general of the king’s works (thanks to Bute).

He had nothing to worry about. The Worsleys were an old family, who could trace their ownership of estates in Lancashire to at least the 14th century. Another branch of the family, ultimately settled in Hampshire (and on the Isle of Wight), produced a parliamentary dynasty of their own.

Supporting Thomas Worsley’s assertion of descent from a companion of William the Conqueror were accounts in ‘ancient chronicles’ recording the family’s progenitor as the giant Sir Elias de Workesley, who had followed Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, on ‘crusade’. The 1533 Visitation of Lancashire referred to this character as Elias, surnamed Gigas on account of his massive proportions, and suggested he was a contemporary of William I.

It took some time for the northern Worsleys to establish themselves but by the 15th century a number of distinguished figures had already emerged. The marriage of Seth Worsley to Margaret Booth linked the family to two archbishops of York, Margaret’s uncles, William Booth (archbishop 1452-64) and Lawrence Booth (1476-80). Their son, William, later became dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and towards the end of his life became caught up in the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, for which he was sent to the Tower.

William Worsley may have conspired against Henry VII, but by the 16th century other members of the family had managed to establish themselves on the fringes of the Tudor court in the retinue of the earl of Derby and it seems to have been thanks to the 3rd earl (Edward Stanley) that Sir Robert Worsley was returned to Parliament in 1553 as knight of the shire for Lancashire. Nine years earlier, he had been knighted at Leith in recognition of his services in the English army. Worsley’s return in 1553 seems to have been somewhat accidental, only occurring as a result of a by-election after one of the other recently elected members had declared himself too ill to serve. By becoming one of the Lancashire knights of the shire, Worsley was following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Thurstan Tyldesley, who had been elected to the same seat in 1547.

Sir Robert’s son, another Robert, continued the family tradition of following the Derbys by attaching himself to the retinue of the 4th earl (Henry Stanley). A passionate Protestant, as keeper of the gaol at Salford he had numerous recusant (Catholic) prisoners in his care, whom he tried to persuade away from their faith by organising time dedicated to reading from the Bible. How successful that policy was is uncertain, but he found the burden of his role intolerable and by the end of his life he had lost all of his principal estates in Lancashire. Like his father, he seems to have owed his election to Parliament to his patron, Derby, though in his case he was returned for the Cornish borough of Callington.

The best part of a century passed before another Worsley was returned to the Commons. In the interim, having lost their original estates, the family had relocated to Hovingham, near Malton in North Yorkshire. The manor had been acquired by Sir Robert Worsley in 1563 from Sir Thomas Gerard, and the connection was reinforced by the subsequent marriage of the younger Robert to Gerard’s daughter, Elizabeth. In 1685, it was one of the Hovingham Worsleys, Thomas (great-great-grandson of Robert and Elizabeth), who succeeded in being returned for Parliament, where he proved to be ‘totally inactive’.

Inactive he may have been, but this did not prevent him from making his views clear to the lord lieutenant when he was faced with the ‘Three Questions’, framed to tease out opposition to James II’s policies. In response to them he insisted that he would ‘go free into the House, and give my vote as my judgment and reason shall direct when I hear the debates’. This was not at all the response required by the king’s officials, and he was removed from his local offices. He regained them shortly after at the Revolution but it was not until 1698 that he was re-elected to Parliament, again for Malton. In 1712 he was removed from local office again, this time probably on account of his Whiggery.

The older Thomas lived to see the Hanoverian accession, which he doubtless welcomed. Three years before that his son (another Thomas) had been returned to Parliament as one of the Members for Thirsk, after failed attempts in 1708 and 1710. This Thomas Worsley also seems to have played little or no role in the Commons. This was perhaps ironic, given that his marriage to Mary Frankland linked him directly to Oliver Cromwell. Efforts by his father to secure him a government post through the patronage of the earl of Carlisle came to nothing.

The trio of Thomas Worsleys in Parliament was completed by the election for Orford of the second Thomas’s son in 1761. It was this Thomas Worsley, the friend of Bute, who had been so concerned to prove his family’s antiquity. Although he was to sit first for Orford and then (like his forebear, Robert) for Callington, Parliament was not Thomas’s passion. Rather, his interests lay in equestrianism, collecting and architecture. His true claim to fame was rebuilding the family seat at Hovingham, creating the elegant Georgian house that endures to this day, but his dedication to horseflesh was equally strong and he seems to have looked out for suitable mounts for his contacts, the king among them. Writing to Sir James Lowther, 5th bt. (future earl of Lonsdale) in 1763, he mentioned trying out one of Lowther’s horses in front of the king and queen. They liked the animal, but concluded it was not ‘strong enough to carry [the king’s] weight’. [HMC Lonsdale, 132]

Thomas Worsley died in December 1778 at his London residence in Scotland Yard. [Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1778] Just a few months before, he had been contacted by the duke of Ancaster, the lord great chamberlain, requiring him to see to the repair of the House of Lords, which was reported to be ‘in bad condition’. [PA, LGC/5/1, f. 279] By then, he was probably in no fit state to oversee the work.

This Thomas seems to have been the last member of his family to show much interest in national politics until the 20th century. His eldest son, another Thomas, had died four years before him, leaving the inheritance to a younger son, Edward. In 1838 Edward’s nephew, Sir William Worsley, was created a baronet but his interests appear to have been largely confined to his immediate surroundings in North Yorkshire. The 4th baronet was a talented cricketer, serving as captain of Yorkshire, as well as president of the MCC. It was his son, Sir Marcus Worsley, 5th bt., who finally broke the family duck and returned to Parliament, first as MP for Keighley and latterly for Chelsea. In November 1969 he presented a bill to encourage the preservation of collections of manuscripts by controlling and regulating their export. His other chief preoccupation was as one of the church commissioners.

The late duchess of Kent was Sir Marcus’s younger sister. She continued the family’s long tradition of interest in sport (in her case tennis) and quiet dedication to their locality.

RDEE

Further reading
Estate and Household Accounts of William Worsley, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral 1479-1497 (Richard III & Yorkist Trust and London Record Society, 2004), ed. H. Kleineke and S. Hovland
VCH Yorkshire North Riding, volume one
Visitation of Lancashire and a part of Cheshire, 1533, ed. William Langton (Chetham Soc. 1876)

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.

The death of Thomas Cromwell, late earl of Essex, in 1540 brought to a dramatic end the extraordinary rise of someone who had been born in obscurity but progressed at Court to become Henry VIII’s chief minister. Subject to an act of attainder, all of Cromwell’s titles were stripped from him, leaving his heir, Gregory, without a peerage to inherit. Just as suddenly, though, the king determined to make amends for bringing down his former favourite [Graves, 35]. Just a few months after Thomas Cromwell’s execution, then, Gregory, described in stark contrast to his brilliant father as ‘rather slow but diligent’, if rather helpfully married to Jane Seymour’s sister, was created, once more, Baron Cromwell. As such, he attended the Lords until his death in 1551 with a degree of diligence that bore out his old tutor’s earlier assessment. [Graves, 225]

For the next century or more, there would be Lords Cromwell in Parliament – kinsmen of the more famous Oliver, who was himself a descendant of Thomas Cromwell’s nephew, Sir Richard Williams alias Cromwell.

By the 17th century, changing fortunes had left the Cromwells more Irish than English magnates. Edward, 3rd Baron Cromwell, had entangled himself in the Essex Rebellion in 1601, but was luckier than his ancestor. Although charged with treason, he got away with a hefty fine rather than the loss of his head. He was, though, forced to sell most of his English lands and relocate to County Down. His heir, Thomas, 4th Baron Cromwell, followed in the family tradition as a capable soldier and in 1645 was created earl of Ardglass in the Irish peerage (having previously been made an Irish viscount) in return for his support for the king in the Civil War.

If capable soldiers, none of the earls of Ardglass came near to the eminence of the original Thomas Cromwell. They did, however, exhibit considerable capacity to survive, sometimes at the expense of others. Thomas, 3rd earl of Ardglass, was probably the last person one wanted to spot on the passenger list for the packet service to Ireland. He was one of 23 survivors of a boat going down in 1672, and three years later was widely blamed for causing the loss of another packet ship, which foundered with the earl of Meath on board. The ‘drunken’ Ardglass, who was transporting several bottles of wine at the time, was believed to have plied the captain and crew with too much of his excess supply, leaving them incapable of carrying out their duties. He survived.

Along with surviving shipwrecks, Ardglass’s other party trick was granting protections to people unconnected to him. At that time, peers were allowed to offer limited protection from arrest to their immediate family and servants, but many abused the system. Queried by the Lords, Ardglass claimed he was not aware of there being any problem with the protections he had handed out, but promised to abide by the rules thereafter. He died without heirs, probably not much regretted, and was succeeded by his uncle, Vere Essex Cromwell, as the last of the earls of Ardglass.

Like many of the family, the new earl had been a soldier and was principally based in Ireland, but he attended the House of Lords at Westminster on James II’s accession and proved fairly diligent in his attendance of Parliament for the remainder of his brief career. On his death in November 1687 the earldom became extinct, as almost certainly did the barony of Cromwell, though that did not prevent it having an intriguing afterlife.

On the extinction of Thomas Cromwell’s honours in 1540, one of the titles to go was the original barony of Cromwell, which had been created by writ. The later title conferred on Gregory in the winter of 1540 was by patent, and so not communicable to heirs general. That did not stop the last earl of Ardglass’ daughter, Elizabeth, assuming the title Baroness Cromwell, though. As such she walked in the funeral procession of Queen Mary (1695) and at the coronation of Queen Anne (1702), when she should not have been at either – or at least not in the guise of a peeress.

Confusion over the nature of the original creation may have led contemporaries to believe that Elizabeth had inherited the peerage, but some clearly understood the distinction. A portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller at Kings Weston, depicting her striking a pose in a maritime setting and with (pace her kinsman, the 3rd earl) a small sailing boat in the distance, is subscribed ‘Lady Eliz. Cromwell’, as is an engraving likely based on the same image, which was produced after her father’s death (in the latter case her name is given in full). This suggested, correctly, that she was styled Lady Elizabeth as the daughter of an earl; not the holder of a title in her own right.

In 1704 Elizabeth married Edward Southwell, secretary of state for Ireland: ‘a particularly polished example of the class of middling administrators who… served with exemplary skill and industry’ [HP Commons 1690-1715], having rejected the advances of a planter from Virginia. At some point she also seems to have attracted the attention of Lord Raby (later earl of Strafford), as around the time of her death in 1709 Lady Wentworth informed him of the death of his ‘old mistress’, leaving behind ‘three lovly boys… and a dismall mallancolly husband…’ That confusion over the Cromwell barony still persisted, though, was suggested by Lady Wentworth’s comment that Elizabeth’s ‘eldist son will be Lord Crumwell, but som say he will not.’ [Wentworth Papers, 70]

The ‘mallancolly husband’ survived his wife for over two decades [Wentworth Papers, 462] and Elizabeth’s son, another Edward Southwell, chose not to claim the title, satisfying himself with a seat in both the Irish and British House of Commons instead. It was left to his heir, also Edward Southwell, to reclaim the family’s seat in the Lords. Having sat as MP for Bridgwater and Gloucestershire, following a thoroughly independent line, he finally took advantage of an opportunity of promotion to the peerage towards the end of his career. Like his father, though, he made no effort to revive the Cromwell barony, rather establishing his claim as the 20th Baron de Clifford following the death of his maternal great-aunt.

The 26th Baron was the last peer to be tried before the Lords for manslaughter (he was acquitted). A descendant of the 20th Baron, and hence of Thomas Cromwell, Miles Southwell Russell, 28^th Baron de Clifford, still sits in the Lords as a cross-bencher.

RDEE

Further Reading:

David Grummitt, ‘Cromwell, Edward, third Baron Cromwell’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Michael Graves, The House of Lords in the Parliaments of Edward VI and Mary I: an institutional study (Cambridge, 1981)

William Montgomery, The Montgomery Manuscripts: 1603-1706, ed. George Hill (Belfast, 1869)

Notes and Queries (4th ser. vi. 1870)

The Athenaeum, No. 885 (1844)

The History of Parliament: the Commons 1690-1715, ed. D.W. Hayton, S.N. Handley and E. Cruickshanks (Cambridge, 2002)

The History of Parliament: the Lords 1660-1715, ed. Ruth Paley (Cambridge, 2016)

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.

The roundtable seminar takes place on 13 February 2024, between 17:30 and 19:00. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AB and PL

The seminar takes place on 13 February 2024, between 17:30 and 19:00. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here

AB & PL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AB

Further reading:

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

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

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

With the old frame of government shattered by civil war, the soldiers-turned-politicians of the New Model Army gathered at Putney in October 1647 to thrash out their terms for settlement not only with the defeated King Charles but also with their paymasters at Westminster. Historians have focused on the opening salvos in these ‘Putney debates’, when the Levellers – a group of radical agitators with friends among the soldiery – ambushed the army leadership with their manifesto An Agreement of the People, sparking passionate exchanges about electoral reform. Yet discussion on day four at Putney remained as vigorous as ever, and dominating the agenda was not whether the ‘poorest he’ should have the vote, but what role the king and Lords would play in any future settlement. Where the army’s blueprint for overhauling England’s ‘ancient constitution’, the Heads of Proposals, included a place for Charles and his nobles, the Agreement, with its emphasis on popular consent and political accountability, was much less accommodating. As the radical soldier William Allen put it, ‘the difference between us I think is in the interest of king and Lords’ (The Clarke Papers ed. C.H. Firth [Camden Society, new series xlix, 1891], p. 376).

What followed was a complex debate about the future constitutional status of the king and House of Lords, a debate in which the participants differentiated carefully between the two. And the records we have suggest that contrary to Allen’s opinion there was a large degree of common ground. Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton, the army’s chief political strategist, was swift to clarify that no one denied that the safety and preservation of the people must come first, before the ‘interest’ of the king and Lords. The question was rather what kind of interest they should have – and how this might in fact be consistent with the army’s political priorities.

Even the leading Leveller spokesman John Wildman was anxious to make clear that distrust of the king did not extend to the Lords. ‘None have any exception against the persons of the Lords or the name of Lords’ (The Clarke Papers, p. 386) he insisted – the issue was rather the scope of their power. He was apparently comfortable with the continuing existence of the peerage, of a society that was stratified and in which some enjoyed high status by virtue of their birth. But since, in his view, the ‘foundation of all justice is the election of the people’ (The Clarke Papers, p. 386), then it would be wrong to give peers, as members of the Lords, a special power over the definition or dispensing of such justice.

Wildman’s comments allowed Ireton to mount a staunch defence of the Lords, appealing to ideas of justice and equity. If a core principle for the Levellers was that no one could be bound by laws to which they had not consented, then, by rights, this rule should extend to the nobility as well. Assuming the continuing existence of the peerage, there needed to be a forum through which they too could consent to laws which affected their person and estates. That forum, Ireton suggested, was the House of Lords. Of course, he explained, if peers became officers of state then they would be subject to the House of Commons like anyone else; but as members of the Lords with their titles and privileges they were different, they stood apart from the body of the people as represented in the Commons. Similarly, the right to trial by one’s peers could surely not be denied to the nobility. ‘I would fain know’, asked Ireton, ‘how we can take away that right of peers to be tried by their peers when that it is a point of right for the Commons to be tried by their peers’? (The Clarke Papers, p. 392).

Warming to this theme, Ireton claimed that his position on the Lords actually had a firm basis in Wildman’s own arguments. After all, if government were based upon consent and the people had consented to set up a king and Lords, then there was no reason to abolish them. Moreover, the existence of the Lords was perfectly consistent with the safety of the people, because the exemption of some few individuals from the laws made by the Commons was a minor matter as long as every man was properly protected in their rights. But Ireton was clear that if all were to be protected by the law then all must be bound by it – no one could be completely exempt. Peers no less than the king were, as he put it, ‘suable, impleadable in any court’, though he added that ‘a Lord may be sued and tried per pares [by his peers] only’ (The Clarke Papers, p. 405). For Ireton, England was a law-governed polity, and though over time and through consent those laws might apply differently to some social groups, no one could stand above or outside the law itself.

We know little of the subsequent debates at Putney, but Ireton’s views evidently carried considerable weight in the army. The next day a committee convened and agreed that although all officers and ministers of state must be subject to the Commons, ‘the persons of peers, otherwise than in such capacity as aforesaid, shall bee tried and judged only by their peers’ (The Clarke Papers, p. 408) – with the obvious implication that the House of Lords would be necessary to this process. The clerk recorded that no one present dissented from this position.

Although the contours of settlement may have been uncertain in autumn 1647, it is clear that they were expected to include a House of Lords at least in some form. This was not simply conservative inertia, though there was no doubt plenty of that; it also reflected a genuine feeling within the army that if the principles of justice and rule by law were to hold, then this meant the retention of legal protection for the peerage and therefore of certain kinds of privilege and hierarchy. Only when the House of Lords refused to go along with these principles, and objected to the trial of the king, would positions change and the peers find themselves cast out of Parliament.

SM and DS

Biographies of John Wildman, Henry Ireton and Oliver Cromwell appear in the House of Commons 1640-60 volumes which are available to purchase here.

Further reading:

S. Mortimer, ‘Henry Ireton and the limits of radicalism 1647-1649’ in Revolutionary England, c.1630-c.1660: Essays for Clive Holmes ed. G. Southcombe, G. Tapsell (Routledge, 2017), pp. 55-72

P. Baker, E. Vernon, The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Palgrave, 2012)

The Putney Debates of 1647: the Army, the Levellers and the English State ed. M. Mendle (CUP, 2001)

On 6 March 2023, the History of Parliament, in collaboration with Oxford University’s ‘Britain in Revolution Seminar’, helped to organise a roundtable to celebrate the publication of a new edition of The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. The general editor of the volumes, Professor John Morrill, was joined by four commentators: Professor Ann Hughes, Dr George Southcombe, Dr Grant Tapsell, and Professor Blair Worden. Originally, several members of Professor Morrill’s team were supposed to join him onstage but were unable to come due to reasons of circumstance. Fortunately, one co-editor, Dr Andrew Barclay, was able to attend, but the absence of others from the editing team was regrettable as the new edition is a truly collaborative endeavour. The editorial team includes a number of eminent names in early modern history (not least two current members of the History of Parliament, Dr Barclay and Dr Patrick Little, and a former member, Professor Jason Peacey). In Professor Morrill’s words his team had been ‘loyal to the end: nobody quit; nobody died’. The result of their efforts is a magnificent achievement: three volumes of Cromwell’s words surpassing in scope, academic rigor, and utility previous editions by such luminaries as Thomas Carlyle and Wilbur Cortez Abbott.

In her opening remarks, Sophie Aldred, co-convenor of Oxford University’s Britain in Revolution Seminar, noted that the launch event was dedicated, at Professor Morrill’s request, to the late Dr Clive Holmes, one of the leading historians on seventeenth-century England, with the intention of raising the type of rigorous questions he would have asked. With introductions finished, Morrill delivered the first part of the roundtable. He explained why there was a great need for a new version of Cromwell’s writings and speeches due to the deficiencies of previous editions. He moved on to pay homage to the work of the editing team and explain the division of labour they employed, working in small groups to complete each volume. As Morrill made clear, the desire to make the new edition usable (apart from the printed volumes, there will soon be a digital edition, appearing on the Oxford Scholarly Editions Online platform) was a primary ambition of the project. Doubtless, future students writing essays or scholars ferreting for references will thank the prescience of the editors with each volume containing an index for the entire edition and each document being preceded by an introduction setting out its context. If usability was a key concern, so too was something more ethereal: ‘Cromwell’s voice’. Morrill emphasised that the editors wanted Cromwell’s voice to come through the volumes and, where possible, had also paid attention to the physical appearance of the more personal letters.

Although each of the four panellists gave unique responses, the issue of Cromwell’s voice recurred frequently. Professor Hughes, who spoke after Professor Morrill, praised the new edition, particularly for demonstrating to the reader the editorial process behind it. She also sounded a cautionary note, focusing on the problems inherent in looking for Cromwell’s voice and authoritative texts without recognising dangers, such as issues of collaboration and authorial voice, and the exclusion of certain genres of documents, like routine orders. Failure to engage with such issues, she warned, risked turning the lord protector into the type of isolated, ‘great man’ of history whom Carlyle had described.

Dr Tapsell, who spoke next, also examined the problem of Cromwell’s voice but from a different angle. Tapsell, noting Dr Holmes’ distinguished career as a university tutor at Oxford, wondered how Holmes would have perceived the new edition from the vantage point of a teacher. Tapsell praised the work’s accessibility for students and how it explains the process of editing to its readers, though he did note the occasional prioritization of an academic rather than general audience in the editing of the volumes. Like Hughes, Tapsell raised the question of whether there was a risk in over-focussing on a cluster of handwritten letters by Cromwell in pursuit of his personality and mindset, not least because it had perhaps led to the inclusion of some relatively unilluminating texts and raised an insoluble question of how one can hear Cromwell’s voice through texts.

Dr Southcombe moved the conversation from Cromwell’s voice to his God. Southcombe, inspired by the work and thought of Holmes on Cromwell’s religion and witchcraft, discussed why there had been no mass-scale Cromwellian witch hunts. Southcombe explained how there was little room in Cromwell’s theology for Satan and accordingly little room for witches. Offering a practical example of the new edition’s usability, Southcombe employed its index to demonstrate the curious dearth of references Cromwell made to the devil or Satan and concluded that Cromwell’s view on liberty of conscience was influenced by his belief that men were deluded by their own actions rather than by a demonic force.

Professor Worden closed the commentaries by placing the new edition in the historiographical context of Cromwell’s words and writings. Looking back to Abbott, Carlyle, and beyond, Worden discussed how, unlike past works, the new edition is not intended to be biographical, nor is it intended to be interpretative. Both Carlyle and Morrill, Worden continued, sought to recover Cromwell’s voice through his words. In Carlyle’s case, the mission was driven by a search for artlessness: Carlyle abhorred eloquence of speech as a mark of deviousness and believed that Cromwell’s rhetorical simplicity revealed his sincerity. Morrill’s edition, Worden concluded, does not pursue such an interpretative agenda but instead provides the valuable political content and context of Cromwell’s words which Carlyle had missed.

With the commentaries finished, Professor Morrill offered a few words in response, but time was running short and, after a few questions from the audience, the event concluded. As the breadth and vivacity of discussion over the evening showed, with their magisterial work Morrill and his team have breathed new life into the study of Cromwell and his world.

AB

Note: The roundtable was held at the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre, Worcester College, Oxford. The organizers are very grateful to Worcester College and its staff for all their help and to both the Trustees of the Reynolds Fund at New College and Oxford University Press for helping to fund the event. For further information about the ‘Britain in Revolution Seminar’ please email britaininrevolution@gmail.com.

Further Reading

The Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell ed. John Morrill et al (3 volumes, Oxford, 2022).

In November 1648, after a summer and autumn of hard-fought victories against royalist insurgents and Scottish invaders, the New Model Army presented a Remonstrance to the Commons, demanding justice against the author of this second civil war – King Charles I. Ending peace talks with ‘that man of blood’ and putting him on trial were the Remonstrance’s main demands. But MPs suspected that the soldiers had another target in mind besides the king. ‘I believe they will level the Lords House to the other’ was one MP’s reaction to the Remonstrance – meaning that the army was now intent on abolishing the Lords and vesting sovereignty in the Commons (British Library, Verney mss, M636/9: Sir Roger Burgoyne to Sir Ralph Verney, 20 Nov. 1648).

Levelling the Lords was not a novel idea – it had been touted for several years by the civil-war era’s most high-profile movement for constitutional reform, the Levellers. In siding with the forces of political and religious reaction after the upheaval of the first civil war (1642-6), the dominant group in the Lords earned the Levellers’ anger and mistrust – and this quickly escalated into an attack upon the House’s very existence. In pamphlet after pamphlet, radical polemicists denounced the Lords for its ‘insolent usurpations of the common liberties and rights of this nation’. The peers, they argued, owed their power and privileges not to personal merit but to ‘the common ways your ancestors gained it for you…by adhering to kings…by pleasing their lusts, malice, revenge or covetousness…’ (An Alarum to the House of Lords (1646), frontispiece and p. 4). Moreover, while the people’s elected representatives in the Commons spoke for the entire nation, ‘…every baron in Parliament doth represent but his own person and speaketh in behalf of himself alone…’ (A Defiance against all Arbitrary Usurpations (1646), 16). The Lords fined and imprisoned its radical detractors, but the printed attacks kept on coming.

The army’s grievances against the Lords developed later than those of the Levellers and for different reasons. A number of parliamentarian peers had been instrumental in creating the New Model in 1645, and they had stuck by the soldiers in 1647 when their enemies in Parliament had tried to disband them or pack them off to Ireland. But any goodwill the soldiers felt towards the Lords evaporated in the summer of 1648; for even as they battled against the king’s forces, the peers voted with the Commons to re-open peace talks with him, and a group of crypto-royalist lords refused to declare the invading Scots enemies of the kingdom. Once the army had won the second civil war, seized the king and (on 6 December 1648) purged the Commons of its opponents, the way seemed clear for a swift reckoning not only with Charles but also the ‘useless and dangerous’ House of Lords (Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-60 ed. C.H. Firth, R.S. Rait, vol. ii, p. 24).

And yet at this point the revolution stalled. Instead of proceeding rapidly against king and Lords, the army and the ‘Rump’ of MPs who had survived the purge took almost two months to execute the king, and it was not until February 1649 that legislation was initiated for abolishing the Lords. This deferred death of the upper House puzzled contemporaries; and – although little remarked upon – it poses a challenge for modern historians. For the consensus has long been that the Lords by the late 1640s was an irrelevance. Thinly attended (usually by less than 20 peers), bullied by the Commons, its constitutional legitimacy blasted by radical critique, the upper House was simply waiting for the coup de grâce.

Or at least this has been the assumption – the facts tell a different story however. Although the Levellers might ridicule the Lords’ claim to be the nation’s ‘supreme judicature’, the number of litigants and petitioners seeking redress through the House increased hugely in the years 1646-8 – precisely the period when it was supposedly in terminal decline. Politically, too, the peers remained a force to be reckoned with. Almost half of the ten most active men on Parliament’s main executive during 1648, the Derby House Committee, were peers. And they and their fellow noblemen played a leading role in Parliament’s last-ditch attempt to negotiate a settlement with the king during the second half of 1648. 

But it was not the continued vitality of the Lords that delayed its demise after December 1648; it was more the fact that several of those driving the revolution that winter had no wish to abolish it. The army’s two most powerful figures, Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, shared the landed class’s respect for the institution of the Lords even if they despised all but a handful of the peers themselves. The Lords, said Cromwell, ‘had as true a right to their legislative and jurisdictive power as he had to the coat on his back’ (The Antient Land-mark Skreen (1659), 12). Ireton, the author of the army’s November Remonstrance, had inserted a clause in it that ‘…the House of Peers are a court sitting and [are] to be consulted with…’, at least where its own interests were concerned (Lambeth Palace Library, Ms 679, p. 177). This concession had been too much for his Leveller allies, and he had removed it in order to preserve radical unity against a sell-out peace with Charles. Even so, it is telling that whereas the army purged and, in some cases, imprisoned those MPs who had voted for a peace deal, it allowed the peers who had done so to continue sitting unmolested.

What would ultimately doom the Lords was not its inability to adapt to the supposedly egalitarian environment in which it found itself from the mid-1640s, but rather a series of political miscalculations on its part early in 1649 – above all, in blocking legislation for trying the king – that allowed those MPs fearful of its continuing influence to get the better of its friends. And even then the Commons’ vote in February to abolish the Lords passed by a narrow margin – just 15 votes in a House of 73.

The Levellers had little reason to celebrate this victory, for within months of abolishing the Lords, its foremost defenders, Cromwell and Ireton, led the political and military campaign that consigned the Leveller movement to oblivion. The Lords, by contrast, would make a triumphal return with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

SM & DS

The authors will return to this subject in a subsequent blog for this series that will look more closely at contemporary arguments in defence of the Lords against its radical opponents.

Further Reading:

J. Adamson, ‘The frighted junto: perceptions of Ireland and the last attempts at settlement with Charles I’, in The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I ed. J. Peacey (2001)

The English Levellers ed. A. Sharp (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1998)

E. R. Foster, The House of Lords, 1603-1649 (1983)