Fenwick’s case was one of the consequences of the deposition of the Catholic James II and his replacement by the Protestant Dutch prince William III and his wife Mary (James’s daughter) in the Revolution of 1688. Over the next decade, English politics was overshadowed by James’s efforts, in collaboration with France’s King Louis XIV, to retrieve his throne. He was assisted by a number of English people, whose religious and political attitudes were revolted by the idea of the removal of a monarch, anointed by God. Many more who accepted the Revolution were nevertheless troubled by its implications for the constitution and government of the country, and although political divisions in the 1690s were far less clear than the two- or three-party divisions we know now, there was a broad gulf between those who believed that the Revolution was to be celebrated as a means of preserving the constitution and religion of England (‘Whigs’), and those who worried that it might threaten the survival of the Church of England and the integrity of the English monarchy (‘Tories’).

Fenwick – a man of whom it was once said that ‘his temper was good; but his headpiece was none of the best’ – was undoubtedly one of the Jacobite conspirators, although whether he posed a real threat to William III’s regime was another matter.  An officer in the Flanders campaigns of the 1670s, Fenwick had singularly failed to impress the then Prince William of Orange. At the Revolution with his career prospects blighted, he had resigned his commission in the army. He, with his wife (nicknamed ‘Lady Addleplot’ by the playwright Thomas D’Urfey) was involved as a second rank figure in various conspiracies in the early 1690s, from which he gained some unreliable knowledge about the contacts between James’s court and highly placed figures in William’s government. When a plot to assassinate William III was discovered in February 1696, Fenwick, like other Jacobites, went into hiding. Though he had opposed the assassination plot, there was enough in the evidence of two of those involved who had turned king’s evidence – George Porter and Cardell Goodman – to implicate him in a conspiracy to assist a French invasion. Having failed to bribe Porter to leave the country, Fenwick was captured in June 1696 trying to escape.

Fenwick offered to expose his fellow conspirators. He made a string of unsupported allegations about key members of the government and their contacts with the Jacobite court. William, abroad on the battlefield, gave the allegations little credence and was sure that Fenwick was simply playing for time, but back home the duke of Devonshire was shocked – and probably fearful that the king would blame him if the allegations proved to be true. His indecision allowed Fenwick’s trial to be repeatedly delayed – and allowed Goodman to disappear. There was now only one witness to Fenwick’s alleged treason; the law required two.

Under pressure from the king and with London full of wild speculation about whom Fenwick had implicated the government decided to deal with Fenwick’s claims head-on. On 6 November Admiral Russell, one of those named by Fenwick, with the permission of the king and backed by carefully primed members of the Whig party’s Rose Club, attempted to vindicate himself by laying Fenwick’s allegations before the Commons. They then introduced into the Commons a bill of attainder – a device that meant Fenwick could be declared guilty and sentenced to death by Act of Parliament, without the necessity to provide the two witnesses. The House accepted that Fenwick’s claims had little truth in them. Nevertheless, there was profound unease about proceedings that aped a trial but lacked any legal or evidential safeguards. Those doubts were reflected in the division lobbies: a majority of 92 for the first reading dwindled steadily. On the third reading, held on 25 November 1696, the majority was no more than 33: 189 votes to 156.

There is unfortunately no good account of the debates in the Commons– as there was no formal published report until very much later, we have to rely on informal notes or reports of debates in this period, and sadly none survive of the Fenwick debates. But even the terse official record of the House’s decisions, the Journal, shows that it was a stormy debate, with the House deciding after a vote to lock the doors to prevent anyone else entering. In the vote, Tories like Edward Jones and Fenwick’s fellow Northumbrian William Forster might have been expected to oppose the attainder; but so too did a number of Whigs, such as Ralph Warton and Nathaniel Bond. Even Lord Wharton (regarded by Tories as close to the devil incarnate) interpreted what happened in the Commons as no more than a pretence at ‘fair dealing’.

We know much more about what happened subsequently in the Lords, where, with the Christmas recess looming, Whig anxiety about the bill became increasingly obvious. In three days’ debate on the second reading of the bill in December the House recorded probably the highest attendances at any time between 1660 and 1714. Many peers had attended the debates in the Commons and were already familiar with the issues. Court Whigs argued that punishing Fenwick was a matter of necessity whilst Tories recited the objections to accepting a lower standard of proof than in a court of law, argued that allowing such a bill to start in the Commons undermined the Lords’ right to be the highest court in the land, and derided the government for being in ‘a very tottering condition, when for its preservation, it’s forced to leap over all our laws and fly to so extraordinary a method to take away the life of one poor man.’ The third reading was carried by just seven votes as even reliable government supporters deserted the cause. But the bill received the royal assent on 11 January. The king allowed Fenwick to be beheaded rather than suffer the ignominy of being hanged, and the sentence was carried out on Tower Hill on 28 January 1697.

PS

This is a revised version of the article ‘On this day: 25 November 1696, the passing of the bill of attainder against the Jacobite Sir John Fenwick’, 1798-1813′ by Dr Paul Seaward, originally posted on historyofparliamentonline.org.

The seminar takes place on 29 October 2024, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. 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.

Our histories of politics rarely engage with so mundane a subject as dinner. Politics, we like to think, consists of a great clash of beliefs spiced with personal ambition; parliamentary debate is a matter of the contest of ideas enlivened by powerful rhetoric. Like any other human activity, however, the conduct of politics rests not just on the ideological commitments, but also on the personal habits, convenience and energy of individuals. Furthermore, the operation of great institutions relies on a host of complex and interlocking arrangements, an underlying social ecology that is sensitive to subtle change and easily prone to collapse.

The history of the ‘dinner hour’ in the late nineteenth century provides a window into the relationship between politics and the social and domestic habits of politicians in a period of rapid change.

While, impelled by electoral reform, the structures of party organisation entrenched themselves ever deeper in the political process, the Irish party pioneered practices of political disruption that forced governments to accelerate their dominance of the parliamentary agenda. Meanwhile, a broadening of the political and social elite by the end of the century started to alter the conventions and rhythms of London society. For those managing parliamentary politics one of the most obvious points of stress in all this was the crucial period of social interaction (and also parliamentary business) in the mid-evening, the dinner hour.

For the already grand or the seriously ambitious, the focus of everyday life during the London season (which coincided with the climax of the parliamentary session) was dinner, a matter of conspicuous feeding and competitive socialising that mixed the worlds of society and politics.

Unfortunately, the curious habit of the United Kingdom Parliament beginning its daily proceedings well into the afternoon, and continuing them way beyond the time most decent people were tucked up in bed, meant that dinner inconveniently came in the middle of the House of Commons’ daily timetable. The risk was that between the hours of around 8 and 10 or 11 p.m. Members would stream away to more enticing appointments, creating a constant threat that the House would lose its quorum and end up adjourning prematurely, with the business set down for the day forcibly abandoned.

This was a nuisance for lots of people, but especially so for the stressed and chronically underpowered government whips, whose job it was to try to ensure that government legislation was safely processed through the House. Their task became more essential and more difficult as Irish members embarked in the 1870s and 1880s on their deliberate campaigns of disruption, and other opposition politicians later followed them in adopting ruthless parliamentary tactics.

For the whips, the sharpening of opposition tactics coincided with a change in the nature of their Members: they complained that the busy professionals and businessmen who (they claimed) formed a growing proportion of MPs were less and less willing to while away the evening hours in the House when they had more important things to attend to elsewhere.

The issue had always been closely related to the provision of dining facilities enticing (but also cheap) enough to encourage Members to stay put during the evenings. Dining rooms had been provided in the new palace, which had been rebuilt gradually since the fire of 1834, but many Members were disappointed by the quality of the food and service provided.

For those in charge it proved extremely difficult to run a restaurant profitably when it operated for only four days a week, around half the year. Subsidies (to the immense annoyance of some, for whom it was the thin end of the wedge of a professionalised political system) were required to fill the profitability gap.

One answer to the whips’ problem was a proper adjournment of the House during dinner time. It would mean that Members would not be required in the early evenings, and that the whips would not have to worry about the collapse of business. It was a theoretically attractive solution, which the whips pushed on the government in 1902, claiming that the change would suit  professionals and businessmen who were now reluctant to go into politics. When it was debated the Opposition poured scorn on this argument, and when the new system was tried in 1902 it proved (as they predicted) unworkable. 

If it had worked, it would probably have made running a dining room in the Palace completely impossible. But meanwhile the increasing importance of the House of Commons itself as a social destination, as part of the ‘Season’, was rescuing the refreshment rooms, as they were called, from insolvency.

From the 1880s onwards the Terrace became renowned as a pleasant venue for afternoon tea or early evening drinks, and was thronged with Members entertaining (especially) their female friends and relatives while they were within hailing distance of a division. Quite soon too came the development of private dining rooms where Members could hold their own dinner parties rather than leaving the Palace of Westminster. By the beginning of the twentieth century such private dining was helping the House’s catering service to be profitable.

It was not a solution to the whips’ problem – which was overcome more by a changing understanding and acceptance of the obligations of party politicians – and yet by making Parliament more central to the social, as well as the political, life of an expanding elite it helped along that changing understanding of how a new type of democratic, but still highly elitist, politics might work in practice.

PS

The seminar takes place on 29 October 2024, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. 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.

Both Britain’s electoral system and the arrangements for seating in the House of Commons seem to be based on the assumption of a two-party system. As first-past-the-post delivers disproportionate numbers of seats for dominant parties, so the opposing benches in the House dramatises the apparently binary nature of the result. So what happens when, as in 2024, the election delivers a much more confusing outcome?

One question which has now been sorted out is which party should claim the mantle of the ‘official’ Opposition. When the 1918 general election returned a landslide for the Conservative/Liberal coalition, led by David Lloyd George, it left an Opposition composed of just 57 Labour Members, 36 Liberals, and 7 from the Irish Parliamentary Party. The largest Opposition party with 73 seats, Sinn Féin, did not come to London: they met independently in Dublin as the Dáil Éireann instead. The Labour party, disappointed at a poorer than expected showing, nevertheless moved to claim their status as the official Opposition, arranging a meeting with the Speaker before Parliament met. They put out an announcement in the Labour press that they would be occupying the front bench. The Rump of the Liberal party led in theory by Herbert Asquith (who had failed to secure a seat and would only come back later at a by-election) cried foul. The Speaker eventually negotiated a compromise, while pointing out that the position of official Opposition was essentially a matter of convention, rather than rules on which he could adjudicate. On the one point on which he was able to pronounce, the role of asking the business question every week, the outcome was that the leaders of the two parties would fulfil the function of the leader of the Opposition in alternate weeks. Presumably something similar was decided as for seating, though it’s not quite clear who sat where in the 1919-22 Parliament. The point was settled in 1937, when the Ministerial and Other Salaries Act authorised a salary for the leader of the largest Opposition party. One by-product was to give the Speaker a statutory power to determine which was the largest Opposition party in the case of any dispute.

The problem about who should sit where is complicated further by the fact that there are not enough seats for everyone anyway – there are only 364 marked places on the floor of the House, though if additional seating in the galleries is taken into account, there are said to be 437 seats available in all. The Government side obviously sits on the government benches to the Speaker’s right; the Opposition (once one has worked out who they are) sit on the other side, with the main Opposition party’s leading members sitting on the front bench. But if (as now) there are too many on the Government side to fit on the right hand side of the House, they will naturally spill over to the Opposition benches; and if the opposition consists of a number of different and competing parties they may jostle for some of the best seats. Added to that there are coveted seats in the House, which individual Members or groups are keen to plant a flag on. The front bench on the government side below the gangway which bisects the House, for example, was as early as 1857 regarded (as Gladstone wrote) as ‘traditionally the place of men who, having been out of office, may be either practically connected with, or wholly dissociated from the existing government’.

On Thursday 29^th October 1931, The Daily Telegraph carried a cartoon showing George Lansbury, the Leader of the Labour Party, sitting alone on the Opposition front bench, with the caption ‘The Shadow Cabinet’. The drawing illustrated a piece reflecting on several aspects of the just finalised election results. Ramsay Macdonald’s national government, a coalition of the dominant Conservatives and a much smaller number of formerly Liberal and Labour MPs who had accepted Macdonald’s explosive decision to form a coalition, had won a total of 552 seats. The opposition won only 56. Four of them were Independent Liberals – including Lloyd George, his son and his daughter. The remainder was the Rump of the Labour Party, which, as The Telegraph pointed out, could scarcely field enough Members to make up a Shadow Cabinet. The problem was made worse by the fact that its 52 MPs included the five remaining Independent Labour Party Members, a Labour party affiliate which, under the leadership of James Maxton, had become a belligerent thorn in the side of the party leadership. Its position within the Party had been rendered largely untenable after the pre-election Labour Party conference at which it had been made obligatory on candidates to ‘accept and act in harmony with the Standing Orders’, rather than pursue, as they had been doing, a virtually autonomous policy. After the election they did not receive the party whip and were not invited to party meetings. The Speaker, at Maxton’s request, recognised them as a separate party. But where were they going to sit? At the beginning of the new Parliament, the papers singled out the issue.

This time the Labour Party (perhaps remembering the precedent of 1919) was said to have left room for what The Graphic called ‘the Lloyd George Family Party, Papa, son and Megan’, though few of them spent much time in the chamber. But the ILP were determined to ensure possession of the front Opposition bench below the gangway – where the Liberals had sat in the previous parliament, and which they had claimed on the day when the House assembled for the election of the Speaker, though they had to share it with Conservatives. Reports described how, a week later, on the day of the state opening, at 8am, when the Chamber was opened, 80 members were already waiting at the doors to claim their seats by putting place cards in the holders fixed to the benches. ‘It was the largest seats contest seen in the House for many years’, wrote one newspaper, which described the rush for the favoured bench. The ILP secured their seats, though again they were mixed up with Conservative Members. A few days later Maxton was complaining that the right-wing Sir Henry Page-Croft ‘and his cohorts’ had attempted to ‘rush him and other Labour members out of their proper places in the House – because the landladies of Bournemouth won’t wait’ (Bournemouth was Page-Croft’s constituency, but the reference is obscure).

Four years later, after the 1935 election, an article in The Sphere noted how the new political complexion of the House of Commons was reflected in the seating arrangements. This time the contest had been between Maxton and the ILP and the official Labour party, a contest which ‘Mr Maxton won. There is no member with sufficient personality to oust him from a position which enables him not only to hurl diagonal shafts across the floor at the Treasury Bench, but also to make sudden flank attacks upon the official Opposition.’

PS

Read more from Dr Paul Seaward via his blog Reformation to Restoration, or follow him on Twitter/X @PSeaward1.

Patrick Cormack was something of an institution in Parliament: not just because of his old-fashioned courtesy and his habit of pronouncing all the syllables in ‘Parliament’, but also as a man of strong will, generous disposition, and definite and independent views, who counted many political opponents as friends and collaborators. In part this was because of a range of passionately pursued interests and activities that crossed the political divide, most notably on heritage. Among them was a long-term interest in history: he read history at Hull University with the great historian of the English Reformation Professor A.G. Dickens, and he worked as history teacher before becoming an MP in 1970. There was also a deep appreciation of the Palace of Westminster, on the history of which he published a successful book. It was no doubt inevitable that he should have become a Trustee of the History of Parliament in 1983, and chairman (never chair, on the grounds that he didn’t wish to sound like a piece of furniture) of the Trust in 2002. He held the position until he stepped down in 2017, but he retained a close and lively interest in the History thereafter.

Patrick had politics in his blood: both of his parents were involved in local politics, and he remembered being taken to local Conservative party meetings at the age of eleven or twelve. In 1963, at the age of 24, he was chosen to second the speech of the leader of the Conservative party, Iain Macleod, at the party conference in Blackpool; a year later he was standing as a parliamentary candidate. Though he lost that election, he achieved a famous win in 1970 over the grand dame of the Labour Party, Jennie Lee, at Cannock in Staffordshire. Often out of sympathy with the leadership of his party, especially during the Thatcher years, and rather more recently, it perhaps isn’t a surprise that he never became a minister, though he served on the opposition front bench in various roles, and chaired the Northern Ireland select committee in the 2005 Parliament. He also stood for election to the Speakership of the Commons, twice, and (after he received a peerage in 2010) for the Lord Speakership in the Lords, though was unsuccessful.

His great contribution to public life was in a series of effective campaigns: most famous, perhaps, was the ‘Heritage in Danger’ campaign in the mid-1970s, an attempt to resist the decay and destruction of some of England’s greatest historical assets. His love of Parliament also translated into active involvement in its administration: the House of Commons Works of Art Committee was a bailiwick for many years; he was closely engaged in the committees overseeing the design of Portcullis House in the 1990s; he served, too, on the House of Commons Commission, the statutory committee chaired by the Speaker, which acts as the House’s decision making body in relation to its own organisation.

Patrick’s contribution to the Trust was perhaps second only to that of its founder, the Liberal and Labour MP Josiah Wedgwood, Lord Wedgwood (1872-1943), whom he resembled in many of his interests, in his independent-mindedness and in his cultivation of friendships across political boundaries. Throughout Patrick’s tenure of the chairmanship, he encouraged us in many new departures, including the start of our series of projects on the House of Lords, our oral history project, our engagement activities including an annual lecture, prizes for undergraduates and sixth formers and much else. The History will miss his encouragement, counsel and support.

P.S.

We’re delighted to say that our latest publication with St James’s House is now freely available online. Hardback and paperback versions can be obtained as well. The book is our contribution to the celebrations of the 75th anniversary of the National Health Service in July 1948. Weaving together the medical and the political stories of the development of the United Kingdom’s system of healthcare, it begins with the early history of health provision, from its origins in mostly religious communities to its increasing prominence as a major question of public policy in the nineteenth century. Two chapters chart the growth of the idea of a National Health Service in the early Twentieth Century, up to the refining of those plans in the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. Two chapters cover its sometimes chequered history since 1948, as the growth in demand and advances in what was technologically possible constantly stretched the capacity of the state to fund it. A final chapter looks at some big recent themes and recent challenges faced by the NHS, and how the Service has become so prominent a feature of British national identity

Throughout, the book focuses on the politics of the NHS: the politicians whose decisions laid its foundations and brought it into existence, and the politicians who were faced with running it once it was in operation, trying to match demand and resources and struggling with the complex business of planning multi-level healthcare for an entire nation. The book draws on, among other things, the interviews with parliamentarians conducted for the History of Parliament’s Oral History Project, with stories of local and national campaigns, for saving hospitals, exposing scandals, securing – and opposing – abortion. But the book also draws in other stories from the work done by our friends at Manchester University in creating the Voices of Our National Health Service, a collection of oral history interviews with a huge variety of people involved in the NHS, as practitioners of all kinds, managers, and patients. Their work has provided the other side of the coin: the NHS as perhaps the most familiar part of the state, one which millions interact with every day.

The text is written by a team of specialist historians who have written widely on medicine and healthcare and the history of the NHS: Agnes Arnold-Foster, Michael Brown, Jennifer Crane, Ed Devane, Michael Lambert, peter Mitchell, Emma Peplow, Andrew Seaton, Stephanie Snow and Angela Whitecross. You can access a free digital version of the book, which also includes articles by businesses and other organisations involved in healthcare provision, by clicking here.

The book is also available in a hardback version from St James’s House. A paperback version containing only the historical chapters, is available direct from The History of Parliament.

PS

In the parish church at Mildenhall, Suffolk, close by the chancel, there is a pair of modest, but distinctly odd monuments, placed side by side. One bears a plain inscription noting the death in 1671 of Sir Henry North, who lived close by at the manor house rebuilt by his grandfather. It lists his various children and their connections. The other is a more puzzling affair, with the North family arms and above them, a pair of clasped hands, and a set of enigmatic texts. The monuments are unusual for a start because of their construction. North’s own is made using the scagliola technique, a way of imitating inlaid marble using a polished and coloured paste laid on top of ordinary stone. It is probably one of a handful of works by an itinerant Italian artist, Diacinto Cawley. The other is a simple wood tablet: perhaps it was intended to be replaced later by a more elaborate memorial. But however unusual their form, it is the story behind them that is more striking, and poignant.

North was a member of an important Suffolk family, whose senior branch was based at an enormous mansion at Kirtling, close to Newmarket. His father had sided with Parliament during the Civil War; the son’s role and allegiance had been rather less clear, though after a series of false starts he managed to secure election for Suffolk to the parliament held in 1656, under the rule of Cromwell. Maybe North’s political career was more one of imagination than reality. At some point probably in the late 1650s he composed an enormous prose romance called Eroclea, or The Mayd of Honour, a piece vaguely reminiscent of works like Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, mixing stories of courtly love with discussions of political theory and as doses of pastoral poetry; it may have been intended as a sort of tribute to the dead King Charles I, executed by Parliament in 1649. On the threshold of the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 it perhaps was designed to develop the impression that North had all along been devoted to the royal cause.

North had married in 1631 a woman called Sarah Rayney, the daughter of a successful London draper. We know little of her life, or whether she was the muse who inspired Eroclea. But we know something of North’s dramatic and ghastly reaction to her death, which took place on 1 July 1670. The memorial North had erected in Mildenhall church speaks eloquently of his extreme grief, and his desperate desire to be reunited with his departed wife. The clasped hands are an emblem, the tablet says, of a link that would last till, and even beyond, death. The text below it claims that she is happy because she has been taken from earth – presumably to heaven; whereas he is miserable, because he is unable to die.

It was not true for long. On 29 August 1671, fourteen months after her death, North was found dead in bed, beside him the double-barrelled pistol with which he had shot himself. The wound, said a contemporary account, was as big as a man’s hand. It described how he had apparently been entirely composed, doing all things the day before in the same order and manner as usually. Nevertheless the coroner’s inquest found him to have been not of sound mind, thereby avoiding the risk of the forfeiture of his estate, or that his body be treated ‘to that scorn and contempt that attends such deaths’. It seems that he had planned his death quite deliberately, for it was said that his estate had been ‘all made over to his son some time before’. Unable to contemplate life without his wife of 39 years (as was said in the memorial) North had taken his own life.

It has to be said that this may not be as completely the sad but affecting tale of marital devotion that it appears, though. North was widely rumoured to have another liaison, with Catherine, the wife of another gentleman, Sir Robert Crompton of Skerne in Yorkshire, who came from another Suffolk family, the Hollands, with whom the Norths were closely connected. Her son, Charles Crompton, was brought up within the North household, and was thought to be North’s son. He turned out to be a bad lot, a wild character, a fantasist who was frequently returning to the family for money. Possibly, therefore, the profound depression into which North had fallen was not unmixed with an element of guilt.

P.S.

Further Reading

A biography of Sir Henry North by Andrew Barclay (from which much of this blog is drawn) will appear in the volumes of the History of Parliament covering 1640-1660, to be published in the early summer.

Extracts from Eroclea were published by one of North’s descendants, Sir Thomas Bunbury, in the nineteenth century and can be found at on Google books from p. 320

There are two articles about the work in Suffolk and elsewhere of Diacinto Cawley available in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, vols. XL part 4 and XLII part 4.

Speakers of the Commons in the seventeenth century were, though notionally elected by the House, effectively government appointees. At the beginning of a new Parliament, or whenever a vacancy arose through the speaker’s death, or his appointment to a different office (usually as a judge, for they were generally prominent lawyers), it was always a senior government official who was expected to propose the new speaker. Sometimes there would be some opposition, or at least a feeling of distaste for its choice, but it was rare that there was much of a dispute. The speaker was usually regarded as the king, or the queen’s man, who would do what they could to advance government business. They would always need to temper that, though, with the need to maintain the broad confidence of the House. A House that distrusted the speaker could become impossible to manage.

It is rare to find a document that records the discussion within government of who should be nominated. It’s the sort of discussion of personalities and tactics that is usually conducted in person, rather than by correspondence, and rarely minuted. But there is a note of a discussion held in 1672 by the inner circle of the king’s advisers, with the king present, in which they chewed over the question of who should take over the speakership of the Commons following the appointment of the previous speaker, Sir Edward Turnor, as a senior judge. Turnor had been speaker since 1661, in the Parliament which had been elected that year.

The parliament had already been in existence for longer than any other apart from the Long Parliament – the body that had fought and defeated Charles I in the Civil War. Elected about a year after the Restoration of the monarchy, it was thought of as still full of the royalist enthusiasm of that time; certainly Charles was reluctant to dissolve it, on the assumption that any new parliament was likely to reflect the huge decline in the popularity of the government that had taken place since then. Its members, though, were also regarded as keen supporters of the Church of England, and hostile to the quite large numbers of dissenters who wanted to be able to worship in their own chapels and meeting-houses, outside a religious framework that they regarded as ‘Popish’: the king himself was less committed to the Church, and even found the idea of greater religious freedom quite attractive – at least if it enabled him to give Catholics the same freedom. The king’s dilemma was worsened by his decision to wage war against the Dutch republic, in concert with King Louis XIV of France. He had tried to neutralise the discontent of those who felt that the Dutch – a strongly Protestant country – should be an ally, not an enemy by conceding in the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence a measure of toleration for dissenters. But that was unlikely to go down well in the House of Commons. And the Commons’ attitude towards the war was untested. The war had been started – deliberately – while parliament was adjourned; but sooner or later it was almost inevitable that the king would need to ask it for money, if he was to be able to continue fighting for long.

In these circumstances, every aspect of the management of a forthcoming session of parliament was going to be crucial. In November 1672, about three months before the meeting was expected, the inner circle – the so-called ‘Foreign Affairs Committee’ – met to consider the options. The meeting was minuted by the under-secretary of state, Sir Joseph Williamson, in his scrappy and barely legible handwriting. All agreed to start with that the best option was Robert Milward. A senior lawyer, a member of the Commons who had served in the chair in the committees of ways and means and supply, he was throroughly experienced and a safe pair of hands. He was already a key manager for the government in the House. The only problem was he didn’t want to do it. Milward was at the meeting, and he hastily told everyone that ‘by reasons of his indispositions of body’ he couldn’t do it. The speakership was a notoriously punishing job: he had to spend long periods in the chair, without being able to leave at all, even to answer ‘the usual calls of nature’ as a newspaper put it reporting a discussion on the provision of a deputy speaker a hundred years later. In the eighteenth century the problem was far worse, as the House was increasingly sitting far into the night. But it was bad enough in the 1670s.

The meeting in November 1672 struggled to find an alternative to Milward. Various of those present tried to persuade him, including both Thomas Osborne, the future earl of Danby, and the lord chancellor, the earl of Shaftesbury (an unusual pairing). Milward vehemently insisted that he could not do it: ‘before God by his great infirmities he cannot serve in that place’. One of the two secretaries of state, Lord Arlington, suggested that he might occupy the chair on a purely temorary basis. Milward, sensibly, was having none of it. They considered, and dismissed, several other options – Edward Thurland, Sir Thomas Meres, Sir John Maynard, and Edward Seymour. There was much to recommend all of them. But Meres and Seymour were not practising lawyers: both were powerful personalities, who might easily get out of hand. Meres, a great supporter of the Church, might ‘boggle the Declaration’, the king thought: he ‘loves his own opinion’. One official present responded that that was not a problem – ‘he’ll be of yours’. But those present at the meeting kept returning to what was probably the most obvious choice, Sir Job Charlton. Like Milward, Charlton was a Welsh judge, very experienced in the chair, having chaired the committee of privileges and elections and also the committee of ways and means. But there was a problem with Charlton: he was one of the strongest advocates of the Church of England in the Commons. He was unlikely to be much enamoured of the king’s latest policy on toleration of dissenters and the Declaration of Indulgence. Shaftesbury fretted about Charlton’s ‘zeal’ and ‘his own opinion against the king’s measures’; others weighed in complaining about Charlton’s ferocious temper. The other secretary of state, Henry Coventry, a friend and ally of Charlton’s, responded that Charlton would ‘submit to the king in this great conjuncture’.

It took another meeting to decide finally on Charlton; and Charlton, rather to everyone’s surprise, accepted. But Charlton’s encounter with the House when it finally met in February 1673 was a real baptism of fire. Before any other business was entered into, he had to deal with a torrent of complaints against the action of the lord chancellor in issuing writs for new elections before the House had met – generally regarded as a blatant attempt to manipulate the membership. Within ten days the speaker declared himself indisposed, and shortly after a letter of resignation of the office was read by the Clerk to the House. Did Charlton jump or was he pushed? Charlton’s illness was probably genuine, and his acceptance of the post probably a mistake. But it was widely assumed that he had been given some sort of payment for quitting. If so, it suggests that the king at least decided that the appointment had been a mistake too; though given the subsequent history of the session, in which the government spent weeks trying to defend the Declaration before abandoning it, it might have been better to have used Charlton to effect a more graceful climbdown than the one it eventually managed.

P S

Read more blogs from our Speakers of the House series here and follow Dr Seaward’s blog at the Reformation to Restoration page.

On 15 March 1672, 350 years ago, the English government issued a document headed His Majesty’s Declaration to all his loving subjects, but which has become known as the Declaration of Indulgence. It was an astonishing statement, reversing the position of English monarchical governments since Elizabeth I towards Protestant religious dissent or nonconformity. Not only that, but in explicitly suspending a large body of parliamentary legislation which required church attendance and forbade the holding of alternative religious meetings (‘conventicles’) outside the framework of the Church of England it overrode the authority of parliament itself.

Astonishing, but not entirely unpredictable. During the Civil War, in the 1640s, the so-called ‘penal laws’ against protestants who failed to conform to the established rites and ceremonies had been unenforceable. Neither the Republic nor the Protectorate in the late 1640s and 1650s had been able or willing to recreate a national Church. At the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the future of the Church was one of the most pressing issues for the new government of Charles II. The preferences of the king and his leading ministers, as well as their anxieties about the subversive potential of religious diversity, led them to resurrect the established Church in (almost) its full glory. A new parliament (the ‘Cavalier Parliament’) elected in 1661 in the first flush of enthusiasm for the return to pre-Civil War stability not only enthusiastically supported its reinstatement, but went about bolstering it with new measures that would draw the boundaries more sharply between those who conformed to all of its doctrine and litury, and those who didn’t. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 squeezed out of the Church many ministers who had hoped that the edges of conformity would remain fuzzy enough; the Conventicle Act of 1664 introduced additional penalties for those trying to build their own communities of worship.

There were two problems, though, with these efforts to stamp out protestant nonconformity and force everyone back into Church. The first was that it was never very easy to enforce: nonconformity had in the 1650s put down some quite firm roots, and many local communities were not particularly active in suppressing it. The other was that the king himself, and some of his chief ministers, became less keen on it – not because they were necessarily in favour of protestant nonconformists (whom many continued to regard with suspicion as potential subversives), but because they had other fish to fry. At least one of them, Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, was hostile to the power of the Church itself. Others, including the king himself, were more interested in the removal of the restrictions on Catholics, rather than Protestants. In this, the king reflected the interests of his mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, and his formative years in the cosmopolitan courts of Europe. But he was firmly at odds with his Protestant subjects, who regarded Catholics, in theory at least, as a subversive fifth column who would, if given half a chance, take over the government, invite in the armies of the Catholic powers and the Roman inquisition to forcibly convert Protestants, or, failing that, burn them.

Charles II had already made one attempt to lift the restrictions on his Catholic subjects, announcing in the Declaration of Indulgence of 1662 an intention to introduce legislation to ‘exercise with a more universal satisfaction that power of dispensing which we conceive to be inherent in us’ – in other words to allow the king to issue some sort of licence that would enable people to escape the penalties prescribed in the penal laws against both Protestants and Catholics. But some royal ministers, particularly the Earl of Clarendon, the lord chancellor, as well as the House of Commons, were horrified when plans were unveiled that would effectively give full personal authority to the king – rather than parliamentary statute – to determine the religious regime of the country. The Commons protested and the idea was unceremoniously dropped. After Clarendon’s dismissal and exile in 1667, further attempts were made to get parliament to legislate on the subject, but they got nowhere.

The 1672 Declaration constituted a radical rethink of the whole scheme. It has long been associated with the king’s shady alliance with France in 1670, whose publicly unstated purpose was to initiate an invasion of the Dutch republic, and with the even more shady intrigue of the conversion to Catholicism not only of the king’s brother, James, Duke of York, but of the King himself. A huge amount of uncertainty surrounds these events and exactly how Charles believed they would all play out: his on-off negotiations with France in the course of 1670 and 1671 suggest rapid cold feet about the whole business. But the Declaration was clearly part of the plan. Part of its motivation seems to have been to keep Protestant nonconformists quiet since they might be expected to be loudest in their denunciation of a Catholic-led attack on the Protestant Netherlands. But it was also designed to bring about the toleration of Catholics which the king had long promised to his international Catholic allies, and to firmly establish the king’s personal authority over the Church and religious law. It was predicated on the assumption that the king could avoid having to meet a parliament – which would surely demand the declaration’s abrogation – for the moment, at least.

The Declaration was issued a few weeks before the attack on the Dutch republic. It announced that the religious penal laws were suspended forthwith, and that those Protestant ministers that wanted to establish their own congregations, outside the Church, could do so if they applied for licences. It placed dissenting ministers and their communities in an acute dilemma: if they applied for a licence to set up a dissenting conventicle, they would be implicitly acknowledging a royal authority that many regarded as illegal, as well as associating themselves with Catholic liberty and the attack on one of Europe’s foremost Protestant powers. Nevertheless, thousands did and enjoyed for a brief time a flourishing culture of free nonconformist worship.

It didn’t last. The war with the Dutch went badly, and in less than a year the king was forced to return to parliament after all to request new taxation in order to keep fighting. Inevitably, the price was the cancellation of the Indulgence, which was done just short of a year after it had been published. It had, though, given an impetus to the development of dissenting organisations and networks which survived, the basis for the Toleration Act passed in the wake of the Revolution of 1689 and the English tradition of nonconformity.

P.S.

Read more of Dr Seaward’s blogs at the Reformation to Referendum: Writing a New History of Parliament blog site.

This blog was originally published on 29 September, written by the History of Parliament’s director, Dr Paul Seaward.

Ideas, politics and institutions tend to go in separate intellectual boxes. Historians of politics bury themselves in the exciting histoire événementielle of national politics; historians of ideas go for the concepts and questions that loom over their arguments. Sometimes they mix them together, dipping into ideologies or sampling context. Institutional historians seem a sort of poor relation: smelling of archives and pipe tobacco, conducting a minute scrutiny of the stage, rather than what was actually going on upon it, or the arguments among the critics about whether it was any good.

Should this be so? It certainly hasn’t always been true. Indeed, the Whig tradition in England recognised little difference between them, for to its exponents the big ideas were embodied in institutional politics. Politics was about power expressed through constitutions, about freedom embedded in parliament, and about how ‘parliament’, acting somehow corporately, met threats to curtail it in a series of confrontations with Tudor, Stuart and Georgian kings. But the reaction in Britain against whiggism and its favourite tropes in the 1970s and 1980s made parliaments and this sort of constitutional history historiographically unfashionable, in the same way as the contemporary reaction against a series of canonical texts in the history of political thought made a ‘great men’ approach to the subject feel as dead as a doornail. As the history of political thought spread into a broader history of intellectuals thinking more or less politically and the history of politics moved, through several turns, to the less formal arenas of print culture, the public sphere or the agency of those excluded from mainstream engagement with the institution, institutions themselves felt unexciting and unloved.

Perhaps the separation of these spheres has not been quite so true in other countries in Europe, where ‘parliamentarism’ marked the elevation of the institution to an idea, even an ideal, and politicians and political theorists like the Abbe Sièyes, Benjamin Constant and Francois Guizot grappled with the relationship between representative and parliamentary institutions, democracy and monarchy; and German political scientists like von Gneist, Josef Redlich and Weber struggled to understand how history, procedure or sociology influenced their effectiveness. William Selinger has recently explored this world in Parliamentarism, bringing a welcome new recognition to parliaments as theory. But despite the greater interest in these matters abroad, they can still seem like an English, Whiggish obsession. While welcoming the transnational turn in the Anglophone history of political thought, Peter Ghosh in a blog for this Centre suggested that while ‘the term “parliamentarism” was a Continental neologism’, it was ‘designed to convey an alien English peculiarity.’ Of course it is true that the pattern that Sièyes and Constant had in mind, initially at least, was the mad bear-garden over the channel, and the context for the invention of ‘parliamentarism’ was the post-1789 conceptual difficulty of preserving an aristocratic style of government within an increasingly democratic framework. And yet the concept was freighted with a much broader baggage of ideas about national political assemblies, which, if it had survived in Britain, had once existed rather more widely across Europe.

That baggage has indeed been widely investigated by the historians of political thought. Always, though, it is investigated as individual abstract ideas: sovereignty, liberty, representation; aristocracy; mixed government; resistance theory; civic humanism; republicanism and so on. Parliaments themselves are treated simply as a vehicle, a mere mechanism, their significance as an idea often boiled down just to the notion of representation. But most of these ideas are embodied, in large part, at least, in the idea and practice of political assembly…

To continue reading this blog on the University of Oxford Centre for Intellectual History’s website, click here.

Paul Seaward

There had been irregular naval reviews since the 1770s, sometimes with mock sea-battles, laid on to entertain the royal family and to display the extent of British seapower. But it seems to have been only in the 1850s, perhaps in response to the huge review put on by the French navy at Cherbourg in 1850, that the admiralty turned such things into enormous PR exercises, and encouraged the attendance of large numbers of parliamentarians. At the great review of the fleet in August 1853 only months before the outbreak of hostilities in the Crimean war members of both houses were accommodated on the Bulldog and Stromboli steamsloops to watch ‘such a spectacle as hardly any man living has witnessed, and no one living could witness elsewhere’ (for a moment, according to The Times, the two ships were caught between the two fleets playing the role of opposing forces and ‘exposed to the entire fury of the cannonade, and it is expected that, in consequence, for some time there will be a marked diminution in the number of interjectional “Hear, hears” observable in our parliamentary reports’).

Just under three years later, at the conclusion of the war with Russia, the admiralty planned another review, and again made arrangements for members to attend. They must have often wished they hadn’t bothered. In advance of the event, Colonel French complained that members of the House of Lords had been allowed to bring along their wives, while the Commons were not. The request of the Speaker that the Commons be allotted the Himalaya, ‘a large and commodious vessel’, had been turned down; the ship that they had been given, the Perseverance, was known to have previously capsized. In the event, just about everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. It was described in excruciating detail the following day in the House of Lords by Lord Ravensworth.

Nothing could be more perfect in theory than the plan which was originally devised by the Government, by which the yacht which convoyed Her Majesty on her progress through the magnificent line of ships was to be followed by one which was to contain Her Majesty’s faithful advisers, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and this was to be succeeded by the vessel on board of which were the Members of the House of Commons—symbolising the monarchial, the hereditary, and the popular estates of the realm, the representatives of which were to float together in the midst of that great display of the naval power of Britain. The theory was perfect; the misfortune was that it entirely failed of realisation.

‘The Naval Review‘, House of Lords Hansard: Volume 141, column 1385 (debated Thursday 24 April 1856)

To start with, the train had broken down, rendering the delegation two hours late in arriving at Southampton. Then the tenders provided for ferrying the members onto their steamers were woefully inadequate: as a result by the time they were all embarked and underway, much of the display had finished. In the end the maligned Perseverance turned out to be a better ship than that provided for the peers, the Transit: not only did the Perseverance overtake the slower Transit – thus, as Lord Ravensworth remarked acidly, rendering the House of Commons the second estate of the realm, rather than the third – but on its way back the Transit’s fires went out and she became ‘almost like a log upon the water’. Even so, she managed to run foul of a gunboat, seriously injuring a marine. She eventually reached Southampton at ten at night, when there was further delay when the tender that had been provided to take the peers ashore lost her steering. In the end their lordships reached London at three o’clock in the morning. The foreign secretary (Earl Granville), attempting to make an explanation on behalf of the government, complained that ‘several noble Lords on board were kind enough to try to fix the whole responsibility of the affair on me, which, as your Lordships may imagine, did not at all increase my enjoyment of the day. I was particularly desired by some to go down and poke the fire, but, with an unusual degree of modesty, I declined to undertake the command of even a small fraction of the Channel fleet.’ The earl of Malmesbury pointed out that Granville had in fact, ‘with his usual sagacity and acuteness, about half-past three, seeing how matters went, and how unlikely it was that he should see his home that night if he stayed with us, deserted the ship, and, having found very comfortable quarters on the coast of the Isle of Wight, to our great consternation hailed a small boat and left us to our fate’. Sir Charles Wood provided a lengthy explanation in the Commons the following day, to much hilarity and some scepticism.

The PR coup was turned into a disaster, as far as Parliament was concerned. It was perhaps emphasised by the success of the visit to the grand inaugural celebrations for the new fortifications at the French naval base of Cherbourg in 1858, attended by the Queen, a number of royal navy vessels, and a self-selected delegation of MPs. The Directors of the Peninsular and Oriental Navigation Company offered the use of their ship the Pera. In an anonymous article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (‘The Commons at Cherbourg, by One of Themselves’, Vol. lxxiv, No. DXV, Sept. 1858, 352-84) described the event in detail, from conversations with colleagues who remembered all too well the Perseverance and the Transit about whether they should go, the train down to Southampton with the deputy serjeant-at-arms in charge to be installed on the Pera. This time 85 MPs and only two peers attended, and despite a certain disgruntlement at the lack of attention paid to the delegation by the consul at Cherbourg or the ambassador at Paris, all concerned seem to have had a marvellous time.

The custom of a delegation from the Lords and Commons visiting naval reviews, officially or unofficially, continued: in 1878 the Birmingham Daily Post complained about the consequent poor attendance on the Indian budget (actually this was a common complaint anyway); in 1897 the admiralty accepted the offer of the RMS Campania to accommodate the parliamentary party. The arrangements made for the 1911 review – for which the admiralty chartered nine vessels for the Lords and the Commons – resulted in several bad-tempered exchanges in advance. Thereafter, penny-pinching limited the number of members who could attend: ballots were held for places in 1902, 1924 and 1953. As far as one can tell, the tradition died out at some point during the reign of the present queen: perhaps because of the cost, or because reviews themselves have largely petered out (the last was the 2005 review marking the bicentenary of the battle of Trafalgar).

P S

Follow Dr Seaward’s work in his blog, ‘From Reformation to Referendum: Writing a New History of Parliament’.