Institutional memory and contemporary history in the House of Commons, 1547–1640

Parliament in the course of a century after 1547 became almost certainly the best-recorded institution in Britain. This essay considers the nature of institutional memory in the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century House of Commons. It concerns firstly the nature and quality of institutional memory, and how, while it relied considerably on non-inscribed memory, it changed with the growth of the written record. It discusses the importance of precedent to parliamentarians, and how precedents were identified and selectively used. But more broadly it considers how written records, both of a formal and official nature and a private and unofficial kind, were developed over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to generate a narrative about parliament that helps to consolidate its landmark status. As a result, parliament came to be recognised and revered as the key institution in the relationship between the state and the individual.

The politic history of early Stuart parliaments

This essay traces the development of a particular way of writing the history of parliament: the politic history. A creation of the late Renaissance, politic histories preferred to explain events neither through divine intervention, nor through imperceptible forces and contingency, but rather through human intentionality. Following classical and contemporary models such as Tacitus, Commynes and Guicciardini, English politic historians wove narratives of vice, secrecy and dissimulation. The essay explores how, in the early seventeenth century, historians appropriated the modes of politic composition and applied them to new institutional settings: university elections, church councils and especially parliaments. It concludes with an analysis of the most impressive politic history of the early Stuart parliament, Sir John Eliot’s Negotium posterorum. Composed during Eliot’s imprisonment after 1629, the Negotium posterorurm is clearly the first part of a formal, politic history of Charles I’s reign, heavily modelled on Tacitus and with parliament as its central stage. Eliot’s project suggests how politic narration could be applied to the recent past, helping to produce historicised accounts of the present.

Elizabethan chroniclers and parliament

Chronicles remained the dominant form of historical writing throughout the sixteenth century, and contained much material about the relationship of parliament and the crown and the wider political community. But how coherent a view of parliament could be derived from the chronicles? That is the question addressed by this essay, primarily through Holinshed, but with reference to the other chronicles on which his account was built. Holinshed included some key texts on parliament, including William Harrison’s reworking of Sir Thomas Smith’s account in De republica Anglorum (1583), significantly enhancing parliament’s role on the succession and church reform, and John Hooker’s Order and Usage (1572), inserted into the Irish section. But Holinshed famously left his chronicles open to variant readings. There was little interest in parliament’s institutional development, or commonwealth legislation, but much more interest in parliament as the bringer of hated taxes, and in the politics of parliaments, particularly relating to monarchical succession. It is argued that readers might take away various understandings from the chronicles, but that in any case the chronicles tended to focus less on institutional structures than on the moral qualities of the country’s leaders who operated them.

‘That memorable parliament’: medieval history in parliamentarian polemic, 1641–42

This essay examines how England’s medieval parliamentary history – from Henry III to Henry IV – was deployed for polemical purposes in the months surrounding the outbreak of the Civil Wars. In particular, the aim is to both acknowledge and move beyond the ‘baronial context’ of the English Civil Wars, in which reflections on medieval history were used to justify a form of ‘parliamentarian’ rhetoric that afforded the peerage a decisive role. By examining a range of neglected popular pamphlets that appeared in print during the months leading up to conflict, the essay demonstrates instead how evidence relating to the fourteenth century began to be used to reflect on parliamentary power and on the House of Commons, and to discuss the possibility of deposing and executing ‘unprofitable’ kings and of electing and binding their successors. Attention is drawn to an important shift in parliamentarian rhetoric regarding the king and parliament. It is argued that the treatment of medieval parliaments reveals incipient political radicalism in the opening weeks and months of the Civil Wars.

Afterword

This piece discusses the individual and collective contribution of the essays in the volume to debates framed by modern scholars on the English Reformation and its impact, a field dominated by Sir Geoffrey Elton and Patrick Collinson; on the origins of the English Civil War, established by the work of Conrad Russell; and on the connections drawn between historiography and political thought or political thinking, a world dominated by J. G. A. Pocock and more recently by the series of studies prompted by the seminal work of Lisa Jardine, Anthony Grafton and Blair Worden.

The Elizabethan Church and the antiquity of parliament

Modern historians have long recognised that conceptions of the ‘ancient’ history of both parliament and the Protestant Church were vital to the political, legal and religious argument of the period, but the relationship between these two types of historical thinking has rarely been established. This article contends that the need to establish a pre-Reformation history of the Royal Supremacy, so as to counter Catholic challenges of religious innovation, required Elizabethans to create related myths of kings-in-parliament through the ages, exercising jurisdiction over the national Church. It was therefore under Elizabeth that the antiquity of parliament, its centrality to an ‘ancient constitution’, was first asserted by Elizabethan divines to validate the parliamentary framework of the English Protestant Church. It is argued that historical argument about parliament’s origins and evolution derived from the polemical battles fought by various religious interest groups on both sides of the confessional divide who defended, criticised or denounced the type of Church established in 1559. The history of parliament, then, first emerged in the war of ideas waged around the Royal Supremacy.

‘The consent of the body of the whole realme’: Edward Hall’s parliamentary history

Modern scholars have often presented Henry VIII and his chief ministers as the prime movers behind the reform of religion in 1530s England. Edward Hall, a Protestant-minded MP in the Reformation parliament, sharply contested this view in his chronicle, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York (1548). Hall presented not the king, but parliamentarians in general and the burgesses of the House of Commons in particular as the true driving forces behind statutory ecclesiastical reform. Insisting upon a pre-existing widespread zeal for reform among his fellow MPs and suppressing almost all sense of the strong support for the clergy expressed by the Commons’ more conservative members, Hall made the Henrician Reformation above all parliament’s Reformation. Hall’s Chronicle therefore broadens our appreciation of the significance of history in the thinking of England’s first generation of reformers.

The significance (and insignificance) of precedent in early Stuart parliaments

Precedents were frequently invoked in early modern parliaments, particularly by lawyers, whose profession used ‘artificial reason’ to elucidate legal precedents, and who attempted to impose this paradigm upon constitutional debates. If laws and precedents were straightforwardly bastions of the subject’s liberties (as lawyers claimed), then they might have been deployed only in specific contexts. However, many invocations of precedent occurred along the ill-defined borderlands between the common law and the prerogative. This essay considers the role of precedent in four important parliamentary debates of the early Stuart period: over the proposed union of England and Scotland, over impositions, over impeachment, and over the liberty of the subject in relation to the Five Knights’ Case and the Petition of Right. It stresses how ineffectual precedents proved in resolving political disputes, and argues that more pragmatic considerations were paramount.

Introduction

This introduction explores the relationship between intellectual, political and religious history, and how they should fruitfully be integrated with classic parliamentary history. It argues that the early modern parliament must be understood through broader developments in historical thought and practice. The first part of the introduction examines the changing and unchanging character of history in this period, which provides the context for the essays in the volume. Thereafter the introduction relates approaches to the past to the growing historical consciousness within and about parliament and the historicised modes through which early modern authors chose to think and write about it. These new perspectives are analysed in the context of the historiography of parliament of the past century. It is argued that the constitutionalist mode of thinking so dominant at the end of our period grew out of the interaction of history, law and politics in, around and about parliament. The collection thus restates the crucial role of institutions for the study of political culture and thought.

Polydore Vergil and the first English parliament

In the text of his Anglica historia of 1513, the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil did something unprecedented: he dated England’s first parliament to the year 1116 and hence to the reign of Henry I. While debate continues about the evolution of parliament, modern authorities agree that the assembly held in that year is unremarkable. As none of Vergil’s chronicle sources identified this meeting as significant, scholars have been unable to account for his reasoning. This article seeks to explain why Vergil singled out that particular assembly. It argues that the origin of parliament was an uncontroversial subject when Vergil composed his history. Over the course of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century, writers and scholars supported and contested Vergil’s dating, but debates about the parliament’s origins cannot be associated with any particular ideological outlook.