Ahead of next Tuesday’s Parliaments, Politics and People roundtable seminar, we hear from Alex Beeton and Patrick Little of the History of Parliament. On 13 February Alex and Patrick will join Andrew Barclay, Vivienne Larminie and David Scott to discuss the recently published History of Parliament, House of Commons, 1640-60 volumes
The roundtable seminar takes place on 13 February 2024, between 17:30 and 19:00. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here
Few periods of British history are as action-packed as 1640-60. During this epoch, a political crisis became a civil war in which the Westminster Parliament confronted, and ultimately defeated King Charles I, putting him on trial and executing him in 1649. Over the following eleven years, the struggle to establish a stable and legitimate government saw invasions of Ireland and Scotland, the young Republic displaced in 1653 by the army under Oliver Cromwell, Cromwell’s assumption of the title of Lord Protector, and, after his death a contest for power that ended with the collapse of the revived Republic and the ultimate Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II.
Even for scholars of the period, keeping track of who, what, when and where in such an intensely eventful era can be daunting. Yet, in recent decades the importance of understanding basic questions of prosopography has become evident for students of the parliamentary state. As scholarship by historians such as David Como, Jason Peacey, John Adamson and others has revealed, both parliamentary and radical politics were extremely personal, often based on networks of familial, religious, economic, or geographical relations.
In other words, to understand what happened in mid-seventeenth century England it is important not to skimp on biography. Yet to do so for the revolutionary Parliaments, the beating heart of political history during those decades, poses unique challenges, not least as the number of MPs makes the dramatis personae of Proust or Tolstoy seem few by comparison.
This enormous challenge has been taken up and answered by the History of Parliament. Thirty years of research by leading scholars of revolutionary Britain have now culminated in the publication of nine volumes and more than 8,000 pages of The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640-1660. These volumes provide an enormous resource that will surely be the most comprehensive collection of information and analysis ever compiled of this critical and dramatic period of English – as well as Irish and Scottish – history.
The work’s main components are the 1,800 biographies of everyone who was elected to the House of Commons between these years, including substantial reinterpretations of the lives of all of the major figures – Cromwell, Pym, Hampden and many others. Members of Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Other House’, the second chamber of 1658-9, are also covered. Complementing these biographies are accounts of the politics and elections of each constituency that returned members to the House of Commons.
There are studies of the series of executive committees that were set up by Parliament to manage the enormous tasks of raising money for the war, directing its forces, maintaining its relationships with its allies (especially the Scots), and negotiating with foreign powers. And, finally, there is an introductory survey, summarising and analysing all this material as well as providing an essential political narrative of the period.
These volumes contain huge amounts of previously unknown information about the personalities and backgrounds of those involved in politics, and fresh and authoritative interpretation of their manoeuvrings and motivations. They include the lives of the many lesser-known, lower-status figures who came to prominence and entered national politics through service in the military or administrative roles in the parliamentarian war effort, as well as the grander gentry figures who were more familiar at Westminster. They embrace the charismatic and powerful men who were the backbone of the parliamentary regime such as Henry Marten, or the younger Sir Henry Vane; front-rank soldier-politicians like John Lambert, Henry Ireton or George Monck; and key polemicists such as William Prynne or Edward Hyde.
Although the primary purpose of the volumes is biographical, they also represent a major historiographical intervention in understandings of the early modern parliamentary state, not least through their exploration of parliamentary committees. As many contemporaries recognised, they were living in the age of the committee. In part this was a response to the demands of the war: as the work of the government expanded, so it established committees to handle the onerous business of state.
The increased role of committees also demonstrated the factional and bicameral nature of politics in these years. As recent decades of scholarship have helped to uncover, the relatively small partisan groups which dominated proceedings in the two Houses tried to circumvent scrutiny of their actions by passing on business to powerful committees. There factions were able to exert a disproportionate influence in the affairs of state.
The committee articles contained in the volumes expose for the first time not only the administrative machinery of Parliament’s war effort but also the factional struggles of those involved, not least when it came to Irish affairs.
Given the detail and comprehensiveness of the biographies, these volumes will be vital not only for political historians, but for military, literary, social and economic historians of the period; while the constituency histories make a major contribution to local histories across the British Isles. Overall, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640-1660 constitutes an essential resource that will transform the way in which we study and think about the period.
The current seminar brings together four of the contributors to the project — Dr Andrew Barclay, Dr Vivienne Larminie, Dr Patrick Little, and Dr David Scott — to introduce the volumes, to reveal their major findings, to explain their historiographical significance, and to discuss how historians might best make use of them. The seminar will be chaired by Dr Alex Beeton.
AB and PL
The seminar takes place on 13 February 2024, between 17:30 and 19:00. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here
AB & PL
For further information see https://boydellandbrewer.com/history-of-parliament/
See also the History of Parliament’s blog series, ‘Revolutionary Stuart Parliaments’: Revolutionary Stuart Parliaments – The History of Parliament (wordpress.com)
