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).

Variously described as of an ‘unsociable nature and impetuous disposition’, ‘sour’, ‘surly’, and a ‘destroyer of every body’s business’, John Robartes, 2nd Baron Robartes of Truro and later earl of Radnor, was not the sort to invite affectionate remembrance. For the historian of the seventeenth century, however, the survival of his library at Lanhydrock in Cornwall, together with his notebooks and commonplace books, softens the impression. Read alongside the pronouncements of his public career, these materials show how a peer of the 1640s operated intellectually as well as practically, and how processes of reading and reflection were pressed into the day-to-day business of politics.

John Robartes was born in 1606 to the wealthy Cornish merchant Richard Robartes and Frances Robartes née Hender. In 1621 Richard bought the barony of Truro for the eyewatering sum of £10,000 at the behest of the unpopular George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham. John himself seemed keen to forget this recent ennoblement, striking out references to it in print.

Little is known of John Robartes’ early education. Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, sneered that his ‘proud and imperious’ humours were ‘increased by an ill Education; for excepting some years spent in the Inns of Court amongst the Books of the Law, he might be very justly said to have been born and bred in Cornwall’ [Clarendon, Life, ii. 238–9]. In fact, Robartes studied at Exeter College, Oxford under John Prideaux before being admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in February 1630 alongside William Lord Russell (later 5th earl of Bedford), Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke, and Oliver St John: all men later prominent in opposition to Charles I and connected to networks of godly aristocratic critics of the king’s personal rule.

John affirmed his entrée into this circle that same year when he married Lucy Rich, daughter of Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, and it was likely through Warwick that Robartes acquired a seat on the board of the Providence Island Company – a venture notable more for the godly convictions of its investors than for its colonial achievements. Robartes’ own investment was trifling (mere pounds compared to the thousand laid down by William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele) yet it was enough to place him alongside the king’s most persistent critics. There can be little doubt that Robartes shared both in the geopolitical assumptions of the Providence group, and the godly ideals that infused their perception of the world.

When Robartes took his seat in the Lords in 1640 he joined his former board members (now referred to as the ‘Pro Scots’ group, ‘Puritan Party’, or even ‘junto’ [P. Warwick, Memoirs of the Reign of Charles I, 173]) in opposition. He was often named to committees and generally voted with his allies, though not unthinkingly: in May 1641 he ‘positively’ and unusually for an associate of the junto ‘refused [the Protestation], alleging there was no law that enjoined it, and the consequence of such voluntary engagements might produce effects that were not then intended’ (Clarendon, Hist. rebellion, iii. 187). His notebooks from this period hint at the roots of this independence, revealing not only his preoccupations, but the way in which his interpretation of the nation’s ills was refracted through his reading.

One such notebook, compiled between 1640 and 1641, opens with a revealing interlude from the fifteenth century. ‘During the time of Henry V of England’, wrote Robartes, ‘the Kingdom of the French lost its freedom and noble properties’. Its Parliament had ‘urgently and under necessity’ granted the king a right to levy taxes, and ‘until this day the authority to demand taxes remains with the king … creating strife and difficulties amongst the once fierce and free peoples’. Thus, Robartes surmised, ‘the danger of necessity is known’ (BL, Harleian 2325, f. 2r).

There can be little doubt as to the lesson here drawn. If the motto scrawled on a subsequent folio – Lege historiam ne fias historia, ‘Read history, lest you become history’ – were not clear enough (BL, Harleian 2325, f. 4r), Robartes also copied from earlier editions of the Journal of the House of Lords various instances where Charles had couched his requests for money in the language of ‘public necessity’: the free gift in July 1626, the Forced Loan, Privy Seal loans in 1628, the levying of tonnage and poundage in 1629, as well as ‘ship money’ in 1637. This was not, he recognised, entirely novel. James VI & I had done the same. Yet whereas James conceded that a king was bound ‘by a double oath to the observation of the fundamentall lawes of his kingdom’ (Workes, 1616, p.531, underlining Robartes’), Robartes’ reading of Charles’s conduct suggested that his son entertained no such restraint. Worse still, as his research into the cleric Roger Maynwaring shows, were those close to the king who combined arguments from necessity with a more worrying appeal to absolutist principles. Only Parliament, it would appear from the statutes Robartes copied out, could defend against such ‘Machiavellian counsellors’, the most notorious of whom was almost certainly Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford.

Robartes was one of the most active peers in the Lords’ proceedings against Strafford, serving on the committee of 3 December 1640 to examine witnesses, and on each of the joint committees investigating his conduct. The same notebook, as well as the flyleaves of his books, are crowded with references to treason statutes – testimony not only to the energy Robartes poured into considering Strafford’s case, but also to the grounds on which he found him guilty. Whilst some historians have suggested that of the articles drawn up against Strafford only articles fifteen and twenty-three contained anything that was actually ‘treason’, Robartes’ notes suggest otherwise. Alongside the statute of 25 Edward III he noted the case of Empson and Dudley, condemned under Henry VIII for ‘withdrawing the hearts of the subjects from the king’. Marginal references to John Eliot in 1626 and Elizabeth Barton under Henry VIII point in the same direction. For Robartes, treason did not consist only in a direct act against the monarch’s person, but also in creating division between king and people.

Seen in this light, the articles against Strafford, alleging that he had ‘laboured to alienate the Hearts of the King’s liege People from His Majesty’, struck him as treason in the fullest sense. When the impeachment faltered and the bill of attainder was brought forward, Robartes had little difficulty persuading himself of its justice. He had considered other precedents – peers allowed to go at large or degraded rather than condemned – but concluded that Strafford’s offences left no such room for leniency. His later annotations, and his protests when the attainder was reversed in the 1660s, confirm that he continued to regard Strafford’s execution as both necessary and lawful.

Robartes was to read his way through many more of the debates of the Long Parliament, though the military duties that drew him away from the House between 1642 and early 1645 also drew him away from his library. His exploits in these years left little to admire. The debacle at Lostwithiel in 1644 ended in an ignominious escape by fishing boat, and when he returned to political life after 1645, his reflections reveal a man increasingly unsettled not only by the king’s duplicity but also by the radicalism of Parliament and the army. By 1649 it was not the execution of Charles I that most disturbed him, but the abolition of the House of Lords. In his notes he copied a verse from Lamentations: ‘Servants rule over us; there is none to deliver us out of their hand.’ For a peer who had long believed the Lords to be the ‘screen and bank’ mediating between king and commons, their destruction was the true calamity.

Like the House of Lords, though, it was not the end for Lord Robartes. After retreating to his library in the 1650s – on better terms with his books than with many of his former allies – he returned after the Restoration as privy councillor, lord privy seal, and eventually lord president of the council. Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon admitted that ‘for all men alive who had so few friends, he had the most followers’ (Life, ii. 239). And when, after his disastrous sojourn as lord lieutenant of Ireland – a posting he had long coveted, and just as swiftly squandered – he retired to Lanhydrock, it was once again to strike up conversation with the texts that had been his companions since the first days of the Short Parliament.

S.A.

Further Reading:

S. Aldred, ‘Medicine, Marriage and Masculinity in Early Modern England: John Robartes and the Library at Lanhydrock House 1630–85’, Historical Research 98:281 (2025), pp.333-49.

 C. Holmes, ‘Parliament, Liberty, Taxation and Property’, in J. Hexter (ed.), Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the Civil War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp.122-53.

C. Russell, ‘The Theory of Treason in the Trial of Strafford’, English Historical Review 80:314 (1965) pp.30-50.

W. R. Stacy, ‘Matter of Fact, Matter of Law, and the Attainder of the Earl of Strafford’, American Journal of Legal History 29:4 (1985), pp.323–47.

A. Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580-1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

A. Grafton, N. Popper, W. Sherman (eds.), Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading: Essays by Lisa Jardine and Others (London: UCL Press, 2024).

It had started so well. Francis Leak, the son of Sir Francis Leak, a prosperous landowner in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, was the first of his family to try to establish himself on the national stage. He had already taken the important first step of marrying the sister of a rising star at court, Sir Henry Carey (later Viscount Falkland in the Scottish peerage). Yet Leak’s ambitions were undermined by a fierce row with his father, who had resigned the patrimonial estate to him in return for a relatively high rent-charge. Once the documents were sealed, Leak refused point-blank to pay anything to his father, on the preposterous grounds of poverty. His true financial state was revealed in 1624, when he paid James I’s favourite, George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, £8,000 to be made Baron Deincourt. The son’s ennoblement enraged the father, who was already engaged in a lengthy legal battle with his son. Even the death of Sir Francis in 1626 did not stop the wrangling, as Deincourt’s mother and half-brother disputed the will and won a chancery order for him to pay them rent arrears; this was upheld by the Lords in 1629. Deincourt’s parliamentary service in the later 1620s had been overshadowed by this constant rowing, and the dispute continued into the early 1630s, ending only with the intervention of the privy council, which ruled against the baron. His reputation at court and among the aristocracy never recovered.

Although Deincourt was treated with distain by the royal court during the 1630s, his son, also Francis, was able to succeed where the father had failed, joining the royal family for racing at Newmarket and being given minor ceremonial roles at court. His career was, however, spoiled by his father’s parsimony. Two potential marriages were ruined by Deincourt’s refusal to make realistic financial provision for his son, and by the end of the decade, Francis was languishing in debtors’ prison. Deincourt was equally mean when it came to public affairs. Although a supporter of the king, he was reluctant to give the king money to fight the bishops’ wars against the Scots in 1639-40, and he went on to play very little part in the Short and Long Parliaments. At the outbreak of civil war in 1642, he sided with the king. Francis, who had gone to France (possibly to avoid his creditors) died at about this time, leaving the second son, Nicholas, heir to the barony. Needless to say, Deincourt and Nicholas Leak immediately fell out, with Nicholas joining the parliamentarians.

Civil war did not improve Deincourt’s miserliness. In September 1642, the prominent courtier, John Ashburnham, was sent to Deincourt to secure £5,000 for the king, while Arthur Capell (later 1st Baron Capell), went on a parallel mission to the equally parsimonious Robert Pierrepont, 1st earl of Kingston-upon-Hull. The cunning Kingston deflected the request by suggesting the wealthy Deincourt – ‘who was good for nothing and lived like a hog, not allowing himself necessaries’ – could easily supply the money instead. Deincourt, who had ‘so little correspondence with the court that he had never heard his name’, did not accept Ashburnham’s credentials until he had consulted with his wife’s nephew, Lucius Carey, 2nd Viscount Falkland, but afterwards reacted ‘with so different a respect’ that the envoy became hopeful of receiving the money after all. He was soon ‘undeceived’:

The lord, with as cheerful a countenance as his could be (for he had a very unusual and unpleasant face), told him that though he had no money himself, but was in extreme want of it, he would tell him where he might have money enough … that he had a neighbour, who lived within four or five miles, the earl of Kingston, that never did good to anybody, and loved nobody but himself, who had a world of money, and could furnish the king with as much as he had need of. (Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, ed. Macray, ii. 332-4)

Despite being something of a joke at royalist Oxford, Deincourt did serve the king faithfully, not least in the defence of Newark, and in sending two of his younger sons to serve in the king’s army – both were killed in combat. He was made earl of Scarsdale at the end of 1645, probably in a deal in which he finally agreed to give material support to the king. At the end of the war, the new earl of Scarsdale refused to do a similar deal with Parliament. Unlike almost all peers who were given the option, he declined to compound for his estates, which continued to be sequestered. His heir, Nicholas Leak, who had managed to rent the Derbyshire properties from Parliament, now made a concerted effort to secure legal title to the whole estate, not least to ensure that his mother and the younger children were provided for. He finally succeeded in 1651.

Overriding Scarsdale’s wishes was easy to justify, as his mental health appears to have deteriorated in the immediate aftermath of the first civil war, reaching a low point after the execution of Charles I in 1649, when ‘he apparelled himself in sack-cloth, and causing his grave to be digged some years before his death, laid himself down in it every Friday, exercising himself frequently in divine meditations and prayers’. (W. Dugdale, Baronage of England, ii. 450). That this was not normal behaviour is underlined by the strangeness of earl’s will, written in 1651. He gave unusually detailed instructions about his burial at Sutton Scarsdale church: he was not to be disembowelled or embalmed, and he was to be buried without a coffin, covered only by a sere-cloth or winding sheet, and ‘a little round board of an inch think laid upon my face’. (TNA, PROB11/251, f. 139v). As if this was not odd enough, in the main body of the will the earl completely ignored the fact that the estate had effectively been taken out of his hands: his younger son, Henry, was provided with lands; his four unmarried daughters were given their full marriage portions of £4,000 each; and, in a highly unusual move, these younger daughters were appointed executors. Reality reappeared only after the old man’s death. When probate was passed in 1655, it was granted to Nicholas Leak, now 2nd Baron Deincourt and 2nd earl of Scarsdale, his sisters and widowed ‘having renounced the execution of the said will’. (PROB11/251, f. 140)

PL

Further reading

The biography of Francis Leak will appear in the forthcoming House of Lords 1640-60 volumes; for his earlier career, see House of Lords 1604-29.

Biographies of Sir Henry Carey and Sir Francis Leak in House of Commons 1604-29; George Villiers in House of Lords 1604-29; John Ashburham, Arthur Capell and Lucius Carey in House of Commons 1640-60; Nicholas Leak in House of Lords 1660-1715.

In the early modern period, both England’s Church and its Parliament changed. A Catholic country split from Rome and the importance and prominence of the two Houses of Parliament dramatically increased. These two seismic shifts were not isolated from one another. Parliament’s role in the transformation and governance of England’s ecclesiastical settlement has been much debated, especially since the seminal work of Sir Geoffrey Elton, who argued Parliament’s role in enacting the early stages of the Reformation was a formative moment in parliamentary history. To address this complex relationship, the History of Parliament hosted a colloquium on 26 April 2025 entitled ‘Parliament and the Church, c.1530-c.1630’. Convened by Dr Alexandra Gajda (University of Oxford) and Dr Alex Beeton (History of Parliament), eight speakers and almost twenty audience members, many of them leading academics, debated a myriad of issues and topics in an energising and convivial atmosphere.

The eight speakers, split between three chronological panels, had produced their papers, (which will be published in a special edition of Parliamentary History) for pre-circulation; this meant the majority of the day was spent in discussion of their findings. In the first panel, Dr Gajda and Dr Paul Cavill (University of Cambridge) delved into the first half of the sixteenth century. Dr Cavill launched a vigorous attack on a famous essay of Elton’s, ‘Lex Terrae Victrix: the triumph of parliamentary law in the sixteenth century’ which argued that in the 1530s emerged the twin ideas of the supremacy of parliamentary law (i.e. common law) and the notion of the king-in-Parliament being the ultimate authority in the kingdom. Using the example of the court of delegates, Dr Cavill’s paper skilfully showed how laws other than common law continued to be used, and that the monarchy ruled through the common law rather than under it. Dr Gajda took the discussion forward into the mid-century, showing that the Parliaments of Edward VI deserve to be known as Reformation Parliaments which enacted sweeping reforms via statute. This process did not occur because the crown believed the two Houses to be particularly appropriate as authorities on religious matters, but because parliamentary statute reached all the monarchy’s subjects and because the lay members of Parliament were more amenable to changes in religious practices than Convocation.

After a lunch break, the second panel of the day focussed largely on the reign of Elizabeth I. Dr Paul Hunneyball (History of Parliament) produced an excellent study of the bishops in the Lords as a group during the 1584-5 Parliament. Drawing on the cutting-edge research of the Lords 1558-1603 project, Dr Hunneyball teased out a number of insights about the bishops and their political activities, showing the value of investigating the Lords Spiritual as a body. Dr Esther Counsell’s (Western Sydney University) fascinating contribution focussed on the same Parliament, investigating a manuscript speech-treatise written by Robert Beale, clerk of the privy council, which was intended for the Parliament but never delivered. Dr Counsell argued that Beale was representative of a group within the English establishment which was eager for further religious reformation, worried about the encroachment of Catholicism, opposed to the jurisdictional overreach of ecclesiastical authorities and courts, and concerned that the denial of Parliament’s authority to determine ecclesiastical matters would undermine the stability of Elizabeth’s reign. The third speaker, Adam Forsyth (University of Cambridge), took the panel into the early seventeenth century with an impressive analysis of statutory interpretation and multilateralism in judicature, delineating the disputes between civil and common lawyers about who could interpret statutes and the different positions which civil lawyers adopted concerning the prerogatives of statutory interpretation.

Despite the hot weather and the lack of air conditioning in the History of Parliament’s common room, spirits and energy remained high for the third and final panel of the day. Professor Kenneth Fincham (University of Kent), who was chairing, prefaced the panel with an elegantly concise set of remarks about Parliament and religion in the 1630s before introducing the speakers. Emma Hartley’s (University of Sheffield) paper insightfully investigated the early Jacobean Parliaments, showing how their disputes and proceedings demonstrated that the future of the English Church was still considered to be uncertain at the time. Enormous tensions existed over ecclesiastical jurisdiction, Parliament’s role in religious matters, and the constitutional positions and authority of bishops and Convocation. She was followed by Dr Kathryn Marshalek (Vanderbilt University) whose paper offered a brilliant account of how, pace earlier revisionist historiography, religious issues and constitutional crisis became a deadly combination in English politics well before the end of the 1620s. Dr Marshalek’s study of the 1620s Parliaments argued that the European geo-political situation made a re-negotiation of the English religious settlement, and the place of English Catholics within it, possible. It was in this context that calls from Parliament for the enforcement of religious conformity became more forceful and provoked a broader consideration of the relationship between the king, royal prerogative, and parliamentary statute. Closing the day’s proceedings, Dr Andrew Thrush (History of Parliament) offered a thought-provoking overview of the right of the House of Commons to debate religious matters between 1566-1629. He discussed why the Commons right to do so was not clearcut and why the crown, despite strenuous efforts, repeatedly failed to prevent the lower House from considering religious matters. He finished by concluding that the Commons achieved little in the way of tangible results through their extensive debates since they lacked the ability to enforce their will.

As with their predecessors, this final panel stimulated plenty of questions and debate between speakers and audience which continued in a more relaxed atmosphere following the end of official proceedings. As the vivacity of the day demonstrated, the relationship between Parliament and Church in early modern England remains a topic with potential for important discoveries and exciting insights.

ALB

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 Warre was begun in our streets before the King or Parliament had any Armies’ concluded the renowned church leader Richard Baxter about the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 (R. Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth, or Political Aphorisms Opening the True Principles of Government (1659), 457). Local communities in early Stuart England – ‘our streets’ – could certainly be divided and fractious places, where puritans and church-conformists, town oligarchs and merchant interlopers, often clashed, sometimes violently. But the ideas and loyalties that would mobilise these groups for war came from other sources – the royal court, the legal establishment, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the political networks of the aristocracy. These were the seminaries of government but also potential nurseries of civil strife, and in no county were the divisions they generated more profound during the 1630s than in Oxfordshire.

In the north-east of the county, in his medieval castle at Broughton near Banbury, resided its most influential nobleman, William Fiennes, 1st viscount and 8th Baron Saye and Sele. Few peers in England had a smaller estate than Lord Saye, or a greater sense of aristocratic entitlement. His viscountcy was a recent creation, but his barony was among the oldest in England and his ancestors had been companions of William the Conqueror. With this ‘ancient precedency’ he felt a baronial duty to defend English liberties and therefore to school first King James and then King Charles to abandon their claims to personal sovereignty and to rule instead solely through Parliament and the counsel of Protestant noblemen, such as himself. His piety was equally elitist. By the late 1630s he had withdrawn from the ‘grosse corruptions’ of Church of England services – indeed, he thought the very notion of a national church was ‘popish’ (Two Speeches of the…Lord Viscount Say and Seale (1641), 15-16 (E.198.16-17)). The only true ‘Churches of Christ’ were free-standing congregations of committed puritans (Ibid, 12); how the great mass of the population that fell short of his godly ideal should worship was a matter for Parliament to decide, not King Charles or his bishops.

Saye’s circle of godly grandees was centred on Oxfordshire and neighbouring counties but extended across the Atlantic to the puritan colonies of New England. As members of the most high-profile colonising venture of the day, the Providence Island Company, he and his aristocratic friends ran what amounted to their own, anti-Spanish, foreign policy, and in 1639-40 they conspired with the Covenanter rebels in Scotland to bring down Charles’s regime in England.

Some 30 miles south of Broughton Castle, at Oxford, a very different kind of network and ethos prevailed during the 1630s. The city’s most powerful figure was the chancellor of the university and archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The son of a Reading cloth-seller, Laud owed his rise to ecclesiastical eminence entirely to royal favour. He and like-minded clerics, backed by King Charles, championed a style of worship and politics that was the opposite in almost every respect to Saye’s. The Laudian bishops exalted king over Parliament, church ceremony over preaching, and enforced religious practices designed to level and integrate the entire laity, the nobility included, in due reverence to ‘his sacred Majesty’ and ‘the beauty of holiness’. Such was Saye’s determination to inoculate his sons against this ‘popery’ that he sent them to study under the Calvinist theologian William Ames at Franeker University in The Netherlands. Ames taught that bishops had ‘brought in with them the Roman Antichrist…to the utter oppressing of the Churches of God’ (W. Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (1642), 203-4).

Saye and Laud confronted each other face-to-face in April 1640 in the Parliament that Charles called to fund the war against his Scottish rebels. Smarting at the Covenanters’ efforts to remove the Scottish bishops from civil authority, Laud tried to assert the principle that the English bishops were integral to proceedings in the House of Lords. Saye gave this notion short shrift, insisting that ‘there was no necessity at all for the presence of the Bishops … the High Court of Parliament could proceede without [them]’ (HMC Le Fleming (1890), 8; E.S. Cope and W.H. Coates (eds.), Proceedings of the Short Parliament of 1640 (Camden Society ser. 4, vol. xix, 1977), 220). In fact, their ‘absolute dependancy upon the King’ rendered them unfit for parliamentary duty altogether (Two Speeches of the…Lord Viscount Say and Seale, 6). After Charles dissolved this ‘Short Parliament’ a few weeks later for refusing to grant him taxes, Laud threatened Saye with violent retribution and called him ‘the Greatest [religious] Separatist in England’ (BL, Harl. 6424, f. 44v). But when the Scottish invasion of northern England that summer forced Charles to call another Parliament, it was Laud who would be at the mercy of his enemies. Denounced in the Commons as ‘the stye of all Pestilent filth that hath infected the State and…Church’, he was imprisoned in the Tower for high treason (Mr. Grymstons Speech in Parliament (1641), 2 (E.196.22)). Now it was Saye’s turn to ‘spit…venome’. In a speech in the Lords in March 1641 he derided the archbishop for his ‘mean birthe…violence and inconsiderateness’, and pronounced him fit only to ‘canvas for a Proctors place in the Universitie’ (Two Speeches of the…Lord Viscount Say and Seale, 11).

One of Parliament’s first military moves after the outbreak of civil war in the summer of 1642 was to send Saye and his newly-raised regiment to seize Oxford. In propaganda terms alone the city was a great prize, never mind its strategic importance. Laud had certainly understood its value; Saye was less astute. During his brief occupation of the city he neglected to fortify it against the king, fearing to anger the university, and he allowed his soldiers to take pot-shots at the ornate Laudian porch that had been added to the University Church during the archbishop’s chancellorship. After pillaging Saye’s castles at Broughton and Banbury that autumn, royalist troops occupied Oxford, which would serve as Charles’s wartime headquarters until his surrender in 1646.

By the time that Saye helped to orchestrate Laud’s execution in 1645 he was battling enemies of his own in Parliament. He lived a further 17 years – long enough to see the monarchy and the church restored in the early 1660s along lines that would have gratified the archbishop. The final twist in their rivalry would occur posthumously in the 1830s, with the university hosting the Oxford Movement that would enshrine Laud’s legacy in modern Anglicanism, while the extravagances of the 15th Lord Saye and Sele led to the great sale at Broughton of 1837, ‘in which the castle was stripped of its contents even to the swans on the moat’ (H. Gordon-Slade, ‘Broughton Castle, Oxfordshire’, The Archaeological Journal, 135 (1978), 142). Having weathered all such storms, Broughton Castle today is still home to the Fiennes family, and to swans on the moat. It remains among the best-preserved medieval castles in England; a monument to aristocratic resilience in uncertain times.

DS

The biographies of Saye and Laud will appear in the forthcoming 1640-60 Lords section.

For a related article, see: Vivienne Larmine, ‘”Cakes, Cheese and Zeal”: Puritan Banbury, the Fiennes family and civil war radicalism’, History of Parliament,  

William Seymour, 2nd earl (and later 1st marquess) of Hertford married Frances Devereux, sister of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, in 1617. This was a match between two powerful families, both of which had experienced the ups and downs of life at the Tudor and early Stuart courts. Hertford’s great-grandfather was Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset and protector of Edward VI; but it was another ancestor, Lady Katherine Grey, granddaughter of Henry VIII and sister of Lady Jane Grey, who made Hertford particularly controversial, and James I was deeply suspicious of him, as a potential pretender to the throne. Essex’s career was equally chequered: he was the son of Elizabeth I’s favourite, the 2nd earl of Essex, who rebelled against his mistress and was executed as a result. It was no surprise that both Hertford and Essex were out of favour under James I, and during the 1620s they became involved in opposition to Charles I in Parliament and without.

Yet the strength of the relationship between the two peers was not based on politics. Their friendship was obvious by the end of the 1620s. In July 1629, Hertford had invited his brother-in-law to treat one of his Wiltshire houses as his own, insisting that there must be ‘no ceremonies passed between two so nearly linked in friendship and alliance as we are’ (BL, Add. 46188, f. .114). Numerous affectionate (but undated) letters between the families survive from the 1630s, mostly concerning domestic matters such as the countess of Hertford’s pregnancies or arrangements to meet socially. In a striking example of their closeness, in 1639 Essex leased half of his London mansion, Essex House on the Strand, to Hertford and his wife for 99 years. According to this agreement, private apartments were set aside for both households, while the great hall, chapel and gardens were shared.

The political crisis of the late 1630s and early 1640s once again brought Hertford and Essex together politically. They both visited another critic of the crown, John Digby, 1st earl of Bristol, in the summer of 1639, in what looks like a counsel of war. In signing the Petition of the Twelve Peers at the end of August 1640, demanding peace with the Scots and the calling of a new Parliament, Hertford was almost certainly influenced by his brother-in-law. The two men worked closely together in the early stages of the Long Parliament, and in February 1641 they were among those peers made privy councillors, in a move designed to placate the king’s opponents. But it soon became clear that Hertford and Essex differed on policy. In the spring of 1641, Hertford backed away from executing the king’s chief adviser, Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford, while Essex famously decreed ‘stone dead hath no fellow’ (Clarendon, History of the Rebellion ed W.D. Macray, i. 320). During the summer, Hertford was won over by further promotions granted by the king, who made him marquess and then governor of the prince of Wales. The latter appointment was particularly significant, as it echoed the relationship with the crown enjoyed by Hertford’s illustrious ancestor, Protector Somerset, and promised a full reconciliation with the royal family. When the king raised his standard in Nottingham in August 1642, Hertford followed his royal master. Essex, chosen as Parliament’s lord general, now became estranged from his brother-in-law.

Although the rift between the two peers appeared unbridgeable, Essex did try to help his sister. She was made the main beneficiary of his estate when he drafted a new will in the summer of 1642, and in the following winter, Essex was involved in the recovery of her dower house, Netley Abbey, and took custody of household goods seized by Parliament. A few months later, in February 1643, he was probably also behind the grant of a pass for the marchioness to travel freely between London and the royalist capital at Oxford. That summer, Hertford arranged lodgings in Oxford for his wife, whose arrival was imminent, and, he reassured her, ‘I make no doubt your brother will secure your passage’ (HMC Bath, iv. 218). Other links also survived. The shared concern for the fate of another close relative, Essex’s half-brother Ulick Bourke, 5th earl of Clanricarde and 2nd earl of St Albans, brought the two peers together. In February 1644, for example, Clanricarde informed Francis Cottington, 1st Baron Cottington, that Essex was making every effort to protect his estate in England and had ‘written to my lord of Hertford that he would deliver the profits to my use’ (Clanricarde Letter-book ed. J. Lowe, 39). The case of Clanricarde – who was not only a royalist but also an Irish Catholic – demonstrated how far Essex was prepared to go in order to protect the financial interests of his immediate family; and the earl’s flexibility may have encouraged Hertford to hope that he might use his own leverage with Essex for other than personal reasons.

The connection between Hertford and Essex was tantalising for those who supported efforts to make peace between king and Parliament. In the autumn of 1643 and the spring of the 1644 the newsbooks reported that Hertford was one of the ‘moderate’ peers at Oxford who sought to make peace. There were also seem to have been informal peace overtures by Hertford, who wrote to Essex in May, asking for household goods of the prince of Wales to be sent to Oxford and taking the opportunity to enclose letters, on the king’s order, outlining terms for peace. Essex immediately handed the incriminating material to the parliamentary authorities. In August the king again used the Hertford interest to make another approach to Essex, who had marched with his army into Cornwall and had found himself trapped, and at the royalists’ mercy, at Lostwithiel. In the midst of this crisis, Essex was visited by Hertford’s son and heir, Robert Lord Beauchamp, on the pretext of taking leave of his uncle (and namesake) before leaving for a continental tour. However, this proved to be the cover for Beauchamp to introduce Richard Harding, a Seymour client well-known to Essex, who then delivered a private message from the king. Beauchamp’s foreign tutor, John Richaud, also went to the meeting and went on to make a full report of the assignation. Hertford, his family and servants, played every role in this drama, thus confirming the marquess’s closeness to the king and his counsels at this time, as well his commitment to peace. None of this would have been possible without the close friendship between the two peers. Yet Hertford over-estimated the political leverage he could exert on his brother-in-law. As in the previous May, Essex immediately sent the king’s letter, and all other such correspondence he had received, to his masters at Westminster.

The failure of Hertford’s efforts to influence Essex to make peace with the king suggests that Parliament’s lord general was not as weak – or as duplicitous – as his opponents at Westminster tried to portray. On the other hand, the fact that Hertford and his family were emboldened to make this approach at all in August 1644 reveals their continuing relationship with Essex, which can also be seen in the various acts of kindness between them in the previous two years. When considering the social ties between leading politicians, historians must, however, proceed with caution. As the Hertford/Essex example demonstrates, private connections did not always translate into political obligations.

PL

Further reading:

Patrick Little, ‘Blood and Friendship: the earl of Essex’s protection of the earl of Clanricarde’s interests, 1641-1646’, English Historical Review 112 (1997), pp. 927-41.

The biographies of Hertford, Essex, Clanricarde, Bristol, Strafford and Cottington will appear in the forthcoming Lords 1640-60 volumes; that of Richard Harding is available in Commons 1640-60, published last year.

The past is often viewed as being either ‘history from above’ (the ‘great man theory’ of history), or ‘history from below’ (the Marxist emphasis on economic and social forces). Of course, any astute practitioner knows that history is neither of these – it is both. Indeed, the past would be so much easier to understand if only one of these two alternatives was adopted. The events surrounding Philip Herbert, 4th earl of Pembroke, in the three months from May to July 1641 are a clear demonstration of the interaction between these two forces.

Pembroke had risen to prominence as a favourite of Charles I’s father, James I. According to Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon, Pembroke (then plain Philip Herbert) ‘had the good fortune, by the comeliness of his person, his skill, and indefatigable industry in hunting, to be the first who drew the king’s eyes towards him with affection …’ (Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, i. 74). As evidence of James’s favour, Herbert was made earl of Montgomery in May 1605. Like George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, with whom he was on good terms, Montgomery successfully managed the transition from James I to Charles I in 1625. In August 1626, he succeeded his brother, William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, as lord chamberlain. In April 1630, he became 4th earl of Pembroke on his brother’s death, inheriting the third earl’s role as a champion of the Protestant cause in Europe. Pembroke now had a substantial income, which enabled him to cut a figure at court. He also entertained the king every summer at his country seat at Wilton House, near Salisbury in Wiltshire. As a mark of royal favour, Pembroke, who was a keen connoisseur of art, was present in January 1637 when the king opened cases containing a consignment of pictures, which were a present to Charles from Pope Urban VIII to Charles. The earl was clearly an important part of the king’s court as well as being a provider of counsel in the late 1630s.

However, by the middle of 1641, Pembroke had completely lost Charles’s favour. The immediate cause was his role in the trial of the king’s former first minister, Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford. In March 1641, Pembroke, as lord chamberlain of the household, was key in stage-managing the impeachment trial of Strafford in Westminster Hall. Pembroke was then deeply involved in the House of Lords passing Strafford’s bill of attainder in early May. Notably, he whipped up the crowd in Old Palace Yard just outside the House of Lords to encourage his fellow peers to pass Strafford’s attainder. Pembroke is reported as telling the anti-Strafford demonstrators that ‘Justice [would be done] very shortly’ (BL, Add. MS 19398, fo. 72: letter of intelligence, 3 May 1641).

The king never forgave Pembroke for his role in the attainder and the ensuing execution of Strafford in May. Just over two months later, on 19 July, Pembroke was involved in a physical argument with Henry Howard, Lord Mowbray, striking that peer twice with his staff. Charles took this opportunity to revenge himself on the earl and to remove him from his office of lord chamberlain, conferring it instead on another opposition peer, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, as part of a belated effort to woo the latter. (Charles had been advised to offer Essex preferment as early as September 1640 immediately before Parliament sat.) As one discerning observer put it, ‘My lord of Pembroke did not loose his place [as lord chamberlain] for this faulte [the fracas with Lord Mowbray], but for countenancing of those tumultuous people’ outside Parliament during the debate on Strafford’s bill of attainder (TNA, SP16/482, fo. 178: Thomas Wiseman to Sir John Pennington, 29 July 1641).

The events outlined above link high politics (the Lords and the passing of Strafford’s bill of attainder in May 1641), popular action (Pembroke’s courting of the crowd in Old Palace Yard supporting some peers – and pressuring others – into passing Strafford’s bill of attainder, again in May), together with royal courtly revenge (Charles’s replacement of Pembroke as Lord Chamberlain with Essex in July). These events centred around one individual (Pembroke) over a short timeframe of three months, and support the premise of the interaction of ‘history from above’ and ‘history from below.’

These two historical architypes would continue to feature in the remainder of the crisis of 1641-2 and, indeed, into the civil war. In January 1642, the London Trained Bands, representing ‘history from below,’ would side with Parliament against Charles, forcing the king from the city and depriving him of its resources and wealth for the duration of the civil war. The London Trained Bands would then be decisive in turning away Charles’s thrust towards London at Turnham Green in November. Similarly, there are examples of ‘history from above’ in the civil war. In 1643, the property-owning elite in Parliament would greatly extend the tax base by introducing an excise tax, which, as a form of regressive indirect taxation, fell hardest on the commonality. And, over the winter of 1644-5, political infighting in Parliament would create the New Model army, leading to the king’s ultimate defeat in 1645-6.

F.D.

Further reading

John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007)

Dianne Purkis, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006)

David Smith, ‘Herbert, Philip, first earl of Montgomery and fourth earl of Pembroke (1584-1650)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

Biographies of the peers named in this blog will be covered in the forthcoming House of Lords, 1640-60. Pembroke, in his role as MP for Berkshire in the Rump Parliament, is also included in the recently published House of Commons, 1640-60.

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

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

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

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

P.L.

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

In the last decade, it has become common to describe parliamentary democracy in England and the West more generally as in a ‘permacrisis’. Yet, how did the English Parliament of the mid-seventeenth century negotiate an actual crisis? The revolutionary decades saw the constitutional, social, ecclesiastical, theological, and cultural framework of Britain and Ireland altered beyond recognition in the furnace of civil war. The parliamentary military fiscal state which emerged from the battles of the 1640s was unrecognisable from its ante bellum compatriot. No king, no bishops, no lords – and in their place a republican regime which morphed into the protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. Explaining why such events took place, their significance, and who was involved is at the heart of the History of Parliament’s mission. In 2023, the History’s nine-volume set covering the House of Commons between 1640-1660 was published, an achievement which represents a major milestone in studies of the British Civil Wars. In 2022, the History launched a new section to cover the House of Lords for the same period. To celebrate the publication of the former and the beginning of the latter, the History organised a one-day colloquium on the theme of ‘Parliament and Revolutionary Britain’ which was held on 27 April 2024.

Nine academics ranging from early careers researchers to established professors were invited to write papers for pre-circulation among a small audience of leading scholars. The event was bound together by three key questions: how was Parliament understood in the revolutionary years by those inside or outside of it; how did it change or remain the same; and how did it function? To investigate these questions, the day was divided between three panels: ‘Parliament and the People’, ‘Parliament in Action’, and ‘Parliament beyond England’. In each panel the speakers gave a short recapitulation of their papers with the majority of time devoted to discussion with the audience.

‘Parliament and the People’ began the day. As the title implies, this panel discussed the relationship between Parliament and the English people. Dr Alex Beeton (History of Parliament) and Dr Ellen Paterson (University of Oxford) approached this issue from different ends of the spectrum. Dr Paterson demonstrated, through an analysis of industrial petitioning, that the Long Parliament was believed by many to be, like its early Stuart predecessors, a site where grievances could be aired and redressed. As a result, a range of companies and individuals barraged the Houses with their complaints. Dr Beeton looked at the other side of the interaction by investigating the place of the House of Lords in popular politics. Using the relatively underused source-base of the Scribbled Books (notes of proceedings in the Lords kept by their clerk), he argued that the Lords was a well-integrated part of a popular and participatory political culture. This fact, he suggested, had been masked by the conventions of parliamentary record-keeping. Professor McDowell complemented these papers with an insightful analysis of how Parliament was understood and represented in the writings of John Milton. Contributing to scholarship on popular disillusionment with the Long Parliament, Professor McDowell used Milton’s prose texts of the 1640s to show that the writer’s serial disappointment with Parliament’s actions led to an acceleration of his radical beliefs.

After a lunch break, proceedings resumed with ‘Parliament in Action’, a panel designed to consider how parliamentary politics functioned during the revolutionary years. Dr David Scott (History of Parliament) made a powerful case for seeing the 1640s as a time of bicameral party politics. He argued that throughout the decade the Lords were divided into factions. Parties coordinated activities with their allies in the Commons and individual peers were willing to subsume their personal interests for the party good. Addressing the lower House, Dr Rebecca Warren (University of Kent) gave a practical example of how parliamentary business took place through the example of local propagation schemes. In addition to making an important point about the necessity of considering propagation beyond the best-known schemes, such as the 1650 propagation act for Wales, Dr Warren demonstrated both how proceedings at Westminster could be influenced by localities with sympathetic allies in government and the importance of historians attending to the relationship between local and national concerns. Both Dr Warren and Dr Scott’s papers predominantly considered the 1640s. Professor John Morrill (University of Cambridge) took matters into the 1650s by considering Oliver Cromwell’s relationship with Parliament. In a thoughtful piece which conversed with Hugh Trevor-Roper’s influential piece on the same topic while also moving away from it, Professor Morrill explored the lord protector using four case studies which brought out intriguing angles on the issue, such as the phalanx of Cromwell’s relations sitting in the Protectorate Parliaments.

As with the first panel, there was a lively question and answer session which continued into the afternoon break for tea and cake. After this came the final panel of the day on ‘Parliament Beyond England’. The three panellists each offered papers on how those outside England understood the Westminster Parliament and interacted with it. Dr Karie Schultz (University of St Andrews) showed how Scottish understandings of Parliament were sui generis and differed from their English neighbours. These differences ensured that Anglo-Scottish interactions were often fraught and much was lost in translation. A similarly tense dynamic between different countries was delineated by Dr Lloyd Bowen (Cardiff University). Dr Bowen used his paper to consider the parliamentary reconquest of north Wales and showed that the various campaigns were influenced by Walian concerns, but were also closely linked to ongoing factional politics at Westminster. Dr Patrick Little (History of Parliament) demonstrated the existence of a similar interplay between local and national politics when discussing the Irish Protestant Agents sent across the Irish sea in 1644. These commissioners endured a generally fruitless sojourn in England. Going first to the king at Oxford they were largely treated as unwanted guests by a camp hoping to utilise Irish Catholic forces in England. Moving onto Westminster they found a more sympathetic audience but one riven by factional bickering which stalled their business.

Formal proceedings ended in the early evening. Taken together, the various papers offered a rich contribution to understandings of the seventeenth-century Parliament and the great changes and unexpected continuities which were evident at Westminster during the British Civil Wars. As the lively discussions during the day evidenced, there is still plenty to discover and debate about Parliament and the crisis of those critical decades.

AB

The colloquium on ‘Parliament and Revolutionary Britain’ was held on 27 April 2024 at the History of Parliament’s office in Bloomsbury Square. The History would like to thank Dr Alexandra Gajda (University of Oxford), Dr Andrew Barclay (History of Parliament), and Professor Laura Stewart (University of York) for chairing panels on the day and the invited audience for their contributions.