A New Curia Regis: The Judicature of the House of Lords in the 1620s

Abstract

On I9 March i 62 I the Lord Chancellor of England, Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans, was charged with corruption by the House of Commons before the House of Lords. Eight weeks later the House of Lords was presented with a writ of error in a suit of common law involving land in Ireland. Later in the same session SirJames Cunningham, a Scottish adventurer, petitioned the House for help in his dispute with the Muscovy Company over rights to fish for Greenland whales. During the fall session of the same Parliament, SirJohn Bouchier tried to have the House alter a decision of Bacon's successor asjudge in Chancery. Finally, throughout the session the House, while enforcing its privileges, released the servants of various lords who were arrested during ordinary litigation. Thus, within one parliamentthat of i 62 1 the House of Lords received cases posing the problems that provided the history of the judicature of the House for the rest of the seventeenth century. Impeachments, appeals (both common law and equity), privilege claims, and causes not previously decided elsewhere were included in these instances, as were Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen. The parliament of i 62 I was the first in which all such matters appeared together in the House of Lords. The definition of judicature usually included all of these disputes in the early seventeenth century. This communication will describe and analyse the judicature of the House of Lords in the I 620S in order to cast some light on the House's claim, which historians have accepted, to be, as a court, 'the Highest from whence others ought to draw their light... '.I An investigation of the House's judicature will also give an indication of what lords did with some of their time and energy during a parliament such a study is a step in the process of remedying the over-concentration of historians' attention on the House of Commons. However, this paper makes a modest claim because judicature was not the sole reason for a lord to come to a parliament, and the judicature of the I620S was only occasionally of great importance to the politics or the law of that decade. While the focus will be on the events of the I620S, the foundations were being laid for later developments, most importantly during the reign of Charles II and the nineteenth century. As a word, 'judicature' is not easily defined and men of the I62os did not use it consistently. Perhaps, short of a complete description of the House's activities, Sir