Review Article: The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604–1629

Abstract

Review Article: The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604-1629 Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris (eds), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604-1629, 6 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press for The History of Parliament Trust, 2010, pp. 6,496, h/b. £460.00/$760.00, ISBN: 798-1-107-00225-8This magisterial study deserves a place with Gardner and Spedding. It is one of those rare works in which historians who came of age during the reign of Elizabeth II can hold up a masterpiece to match the scholarship of the great Victorians. The physical heft of these six volumes reflects an uncommon depth and breadth of research: a sustained intellectual effort measured in thousands of pages, 1,782 individual biographies, hundreds of topical essays, and innumerable shrewd, well-grounded judgments.'From 1604 to 1629', Paul Langford writes, 'the House of Commons was at the centre of English politics as never before, the forum for vigorous and increasingly bitter debates over finance, religion, foreign affairs and court corruption. . . . Despite, or because of, this catalogue of rows and recriminations, the Parliaments of the early seventeenth century proved remarkably fertile in procedural and institutional developments'.1 Few other eras have been fought over so continually or picked through so thoroughly, and yet the importance of these twenty-five years continues to demand attention. These were the years in which Wallace Notestein found that the House of Commons won the political initiative - in which, Conrad Russell suggested, Charles I displayed a personal devotion to government through Parliament - in which Jack Hexter saw a crucial chapter in the evolution of political liberty - and whose manuscript remains were put into print by the industry of Elizabeth Read Foster and Maija Jansson.Around the time that this study was undertaken, Theodore Rabb warned his fellows not to look back at the era of Samuel Rawson Gardiner and Wallace Notestein:No historian of the period should again repeat the simplifications that marked the Gardiner/Notestein interpretation. The relentless unfolding of a grand plan; the clear-cut constitutional and ideological divisions; the coherence of both 'opposition' and 'court'; and the exclusive concentration on events at Westminster - and even there only in the House of Commons - no longer command support.2And yet, Rabb had to acknowledge, historians' continuing assessment of the early Stuart terrain continued to emphasize the same features:Notestein may have changed Gardiner's balance - now it was the gentry who were ambitious, and the king who held the high ground - but the centrality of parliament to English politics [has been] resoundingly confirmed. The major issues - financial exactions, foreign policy, ministerial conduct, religion and political procedures - have also survived, as have some of the chronological milestones and principal dramatis personae: the 'Apology', the Union, the 'Great Contract', Impositions, Monopolies, Impeachment, Arminianism, the Petition of Right, and Cecil, Bacon, Cranfield, Coke, Buckingham, Sandys, Eliot, the lawyers, Phelips, Digges, and the rest.3Such landmarks dominate the landscape even after the passage of a further thirty years. They remain too serviceable to be paid no heed. The great contribution of this work is the detail in which they have been examined. From one angle, this study provides the context of the councils and debates that mark the birth of political self-awareness and self-assertion in the Commons. From another perspective, this is a closely-focused survey of the crowded chambers through which ran the timeless, powerful currents of patronage, kinship, provincial loyalty, and personal rivalry.In the first volume, in fourteen masterful essays, editor Andrew Thrush ably introduces the work and presents the conclusions that the research presented here supports. The title of Thrush's initial essay, 'The Nature, Functions and Remit of the House of Commons', takes up a challenge almost as daunting as a lecture on 'Merrie England'. …