Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England

Paul Cavill, Alexandra Gajda

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526115911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This volume of essays explores the rise of parliament in the historical imagination of early modern England. The enduring controversy about the nature of parliament informs nearly all debates about the momentous religious, political and governmental changes of the period – most significantly, the character of the Reformation and the causes of the Revolution. Meanwhile, scholars of ideas have emphasised the historicist turn that shaped political culture. Religious and intellectual imperatives from the sixteenth century onwards evoked a new interest in the evolution of parliament, framing the ways that contemporaries interpreted, legitimised and contested Church, state and political hierarchies.
Parliamentary 'history' is explored through the analysis of chronicles, more overtly 'literary' texts, antiquarian scholarship, religious polemic, political pamphlets, and of the intricate processes that forge memory and tradition.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Alexandra Gajda and Paul Cavill

The Speaker of the House of Commons had a difficult brief when he addressed James VI and I and the House of Lords at the prorogation of the new king’s first parliament on 7 July 1604. After a tetchy session, Sir Edward Phelips attempted to re-establish the rapport between the monarch and the Commons. Faced with this tricky assignment, Phelips began his speech with an unobjectionable platitude:

HISTORY, most high and mighty Sovereign, is truly approved to be the Treasure of Times past, the Light of Truth, the Memory of Life, the Guide and Image of Man’s present Estate, Pattern of Things to come, and the true Work-mistress of Experience, the Mother of Knowledge; for therein, as in a Crystal, there is not only presented unto our Views the Virtue, but the Vices; the Perfections, but the Defects; the Good, but the Evil; the Lives, but the Death, of all precedent Governors and Government, which held the Reins of this Imperial Regiment.¹

The king and most of Phelips’s audience doubtless recognised that he was quoting Cicero’s praise of history.² By then extolling the settled laws of kingdoms, Phelips encouraged James to respect the time-hallowed political arrangements of his new southern realm. England, he stated, ‘hath ever been managed with One Idea, or Form of Government’, a happy blend of princely, senatorial and magisterial virtues. Yet the session had demonstrated that history, far from illuminating truth, rather served or even exacerbated disagreements over the Union of the Crowns and over the king’s ancient prerogative rights of purveyance and wardship. The famous Apology, drafted by a Commons’ committee, went so far as to claim that the House’s privileges had been ‘more universally and dangerously impugned than ever (as we suppose) since the beginnings of Parliaments’.³ The Lords thought that the Commons were asking ‘more of the king than of any of his predecessors since before the conquest, no, not in the barons’ wars’ of the thirteenth century.⁴

How history was understood in early modern England therefore underpinned parliamentary debates. This book contends that history did more than inform such deliberations: history also altered perceptions of parliament’s role in the polity, both among members and among those whom they represented. When contemporaries historicised parliament, it ceased to be a one-off ‘event’ and came instead to be regarded as an institution, a permanent presence in the body politic’s imaginary. This evolution helps to explain why parliament moved to centre stage in the English state by 1642. Therefore, the early modern parliament, we argue, must be understood through broader developments in historical thought and writing.

The essays in this book thus address the changing nature and increasing diversity of early modern historical writing. Scholarship on early modern historical practice has identified, and then contested, its supposedly revolutionary character. Modernising narratives of generic innovation, evidential refinement and greater accuracy have been asserted, but then critiqued.⁵ This modernising framework certainly does not do justice to the complexity and non-linear development of early modern historical thought. During our period, though, distinct modes of historical thinking and interpretation emerged which had practical implications for the ways that participants in parliaments interpreted events and that a wider public came to understand the assembly itself.

Meanwhile, the essays in this volume demonstrate that ‘parliamentary history’ itself was a product of the post-Reformation and pre-Revolutionary world. The narrative histories of classical and humanist writers, which provided the major historiographical models emulated by early modern authors, offered no obvious template for writing histories that took secular institutions as their object. The stimulus for the first systematic interrogation of, and writing about, parliament’s history was the potent dynamic of religious, political, intellectual and social change in post-Reformation England. The changing, and unchanging, character of history in this period therefore provides the context for our volume of essays, and this is where we begin. Thereafter the Introduction will relate contemporary 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. Taken together, these factors, we propose, explain parliament’s transformation.

As well as identifying his quotation, the audience hearing Phelips’s oration would have shared the Speaker’s vision of the significance of history in public life. Following the most ancient ruminations, early modern writers reiterated that the study of history offered moral education: as the anonymous preface to Henry Savile’s translation of Tacitus famously claimed, the res gestae of eminent individuals afforded readers exemplary ‘patternes either to follow or to flye,, [sic] of the best and worst men of all estates, cuntries, and times’.⁶ Since the classical period, though, history was also praised less as a tutor of morals but more as the unrivalled repository of prudentia, the practical wisdom derived from experience that was deemed essential for establishing authentic political understanding. Contemporaries affirmed Polybius’s observation (already a cliché in the ancient world) that ‘History is in the truest sense an education, and a training for political life’.⁷ So Thomas Blundeville, author of the earliest English-language treatise on the purpose of history, The True Order and Method of Writing and Reading Histories (1574), recommended his subject-matter to the earl of Leicester ‘as well to direct your priuate actions, as to giue Counsell lyke a most prudent Counseller in publyke causes, be it matters of warre, or peace’.⁸

In early modern England, would-be ‘prudent counsellors in public causes’ enthusiastically subscribed to these commonplaces. The papers of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, are strewn with extensive notes on historical sources about every conceivable matter of policy, including debates in parliament. Worrying over the unsettled succession during the session of 1566–67, Cecil made notes upon the civil war of the mid-twelfth century between Stephen and Matilda.⁹ He and other leading privy councillors also exploited the learning of clients and associates: the voluminous collections of Francis Walsingham’s brother-in-law Robert Beale – lawyer, diplomat and clerk of the privy council – were an armoury of antiquarian advice on diplomatic and domestic politics and the Church.¹⁰ Another erstwhile servant of the inner regime was another brother-in-law of Walsingham, Thomas Norton. Poet, lawyer, pamphleteer, translator of Calvin’s Institutes, and remembrancer to the mayor of London, the polymath Norton also wrote the preface to Richard Grafton’s Chronicle of 1569. In the early 1580s, as he languished in the Tower (allegedly for speaking out against the queen’s proposed marriage to the duke of Anjou), Norton was commanded by Walsingham to compile compendia of historical notes on war, laws and rebellions.¹¹

The relationship between statesmen and scholars persisted under James VI and I. Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, the most highly educated of all noble privy councillors, consistently tapped historical experts for political counsel.¹² The Catholic antiquarian Edmund Bolton presented the earl with a disparate range of antiquarian disquisitions on heraldry, royal finance and the problem of overpopulation. Bolton also exhibited particular concern to elevate and regulate both the production and the study of national narrative history, because of its peculiar relevance to governance. His treatise Hypercritica, or a Rule of Judgement, for Writing or Reading our Histories (composed between 1618 and 1621, but unpublished in his lifetime) urged future authors of English history to found their scholarship on thorough interrogation of archival materials.¹³ Closer, though, was Northampton’s relationship with the greatest archivist of the age, Sir Robert Cotton, whose collections from the Anglo-Saxon to the Tudor past rivalled anything that the crown held, and formed the basis of his advice to Howard on an exhaustive range of state affairs, such as peace with Spain in 1604, the treatment of Catholics in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, the dire straits of royal finances, and the reform of the system of noble honours.¹⁴

The ambitions of these historically minded counsellors support the thesis advanced in Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s famous essay ‘How Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’: that an understanding of history was deemed an advantageous skill to the aspirant public servant, one which could be continually developed by a gentleman well beyond formal education at grammar school, university or inn of court.¹⁵ Fulke Greville, another gentleman with great prospects, was advised by a weighty mentor – perhaps the earl of Essex, perhaps Francis Bacon – to employ a university scholar to ‘gather’ for him ‘Epitomes’ from the most important ancient and modern writers in order to advance his political career.¹⁶ Nor was appreciation of the value of history limited to those fixed on advancement at court. As studies of Sir John Newdigate and Sir William Drake have shown, gentry bearing important local office and possessing social prestige pursued rigorous regimes of self-improving study, mining histories to enhance their understanding of their own political world and their capacity to govern it wisely.¹⁷

These members of the elite pursued a variety of occupations in central and local government, as councillors, courtiers, administrators, diplomats, soldiers, lawyers and magistrates; another career open to members of the educated gentry was, of course, the Church. These were also the varieties of ‘public men’ who comprised parliament’s membership. When gathered together in the two Houses, the nobility, gentry, senior clergy and urban elites viewed themselves not so much as legislators but ever more as counsellors in the largest advisory body to the monarch, with an active duty to offer informed opinion on the greatest matters of state.¹⁸ As well as serving the privy council, Thomas Norton and Robert Beale were also prominent MPs, embroiled in the greatest parliamentary controversies of their day: the question of the Elizabethan succession and the reform of the ecclesiastical laws. Norton – ‘the great parliament man’, as his son defined him – was one of the foremost orators in the Elizabethan Commons: his speeches in the parliament of 1572 are notorious for their sense of patriotic Protestant duty, as he urged the necessity of the execution of the duke of Norfolk and Mary, queen of Scots.¹⁹

Cotton, too, enjoyed an extensive career in the Jacobean and Caroline parliaments. A ‘known Antiquary’, as he was described in the Commons Journal of 1607, Cotton was an authority on parliamentary precedents. His library, which he would move next door to the Commons in 1622, was already a much-frequented resource for statesmen, scholars, parliamentarians and government officers. Cotton’s collections provided the historical weight behind efforts to impeach the duke of Buckingham and compose the Petition of Right, but also to bolster the king’s finances and identify dormant royal prerogatives. In November 1629, a matter of months after the acrimonious dissolution of parliament, Charles I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Alexandra Gajda and Paul Cavill
• 2 Polydore Vergil and the first English parliament: Paul Cavill
• 3 ‘The consent of the body of the whole realme’: Edward Hall’s parliamentary history: Scott Lucas
• 4 The Elizabethan Church and the antiquity of parliament: Alexandra Gajda
• 5 Parliament and the principle of elective succession in Elizabethan England: Paulina Kewes
• 6 Elizabethan chroniclers and parliament: Ian W. Archer
• 7 The significance (and insignificance) of precedent in early Stuart parliaments: Simon Healy
• 8 The politic history of early Stuart parliaments: Noah Millstone
• 9 ‘That memorable parliament’: medieval history in parliamentarian polemic, 1641–42: Jason Peacey
• 10 Institutional memory and contemporary history in the House of Commons, 1547–1640: Paul Seaward
• 11 Afterword: Peter Lake
• Index