The Aristocracy and Leadership of Parliament in the English Civil Wars

Abstract

The recent publication of two major political biographies concerned with supporters of the Long Parliament invites a fresh look at the dynamics of parliamentary action during the 1640s. Of the two works, Professor Vernon F. Snow's life of Essex1 seems to me to be the most innovative. Snow amplifies the themes of political motivation which he earlier presented in this Journal2 as he unfolds the full political career of the third earl of Essex. In doing so, he establishes a firm base for criticism of the mainstream of whig historiography which since 1832 has dominated the treatment of the Long Parliament. The first point which Snow makes concerns the noble descent of the third earl of Essex. As the only legitimate son of the great military hero and ambitious statesman of Elizabeth's last years, the third earl had a great reputation to maintain and one of the great patronage empires in England to build upon. For those clients were also in part the legacy of the second earl's stepfather Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. The author then relates the familiar story of how this great inheritance was dragged through the mire of humiliation by the criminal machinations of Frances Howard and the upstart earl of Somerset under the complacent eye of James I. Essex inevitably became an antagonist of the court and took the most effective institutional route to make that opposition felt: parliament. This placed him in alliance with George Abbott, archbishop of Canterbury; the earls of Pembroke, Southampton, Bedford, Warwick, and Oxford; and Lords Say and Sele, Grey of Warke, and Spencer. Snow shows how these peers led the resistance to the king's government in the last parliaments of James I and the first parliaments of Charles I. It is in discussing the opposition in these assemblies that Snow helps us understand the nature of early Stuart parliaments and therefore the Long Parliament itself. Instead of these parliaments witnessing the achievement of initiative by the House of Commons, the author reveals that initiative was squarely with the peers. The institutional devices perfected by the House of Commons during these years, which weigh so heavily in the writings of the Notestein school, were also developed in the House of Lords. This simultaneous development of tactical weapons left the