The Authenticity of the ‘Lords’ Journals' in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

In a brilliant chapter in the ‘Cambridge Modern History’ the late Professor Maitland, dealing with the circumstances of the passage of Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity through the House of Lords, remarks: ‘Unfortunately, at an exciting moment there is a gap, perhaps a significant gap, in the official record, and we cease to know what lords were present in the House.’ This is a summary of a more detailed examination contributed by Maitland to the English Historical Review which reads as follows:—‘It is well known that the Journal of the House of Lords becomes suddenly silent at the most exciting moment of this momentous session. It leaps from Saturday, April 22, to Monday, May 1; in other words, it leaps over the days on which the Supremacy Bill (No. 3) and the Uniformity Bill were receiving the assent of the House of Lords. Is this due to accident or is it due to fraud? The question springs to our lips, for we have every reason to believe that the journal ought to have recorded the fact that not one lord spiritual voted for these bills, and that every prelate who was present voted against them. This fact might indeed be notorious; but notoriety is not evidence, and in the then state of constitutional doctrine the Queen's ministers may have wished to deprive their adversaries of the means of “averring by matter of record” that the first estate of the realm was no party to the religious settlement. With some slight hope that the handwriting might be more eloquent than print, I obtained permission to see the original journal. It made no disclosure. In the first place, the work is so neat and regular that it looks, not like a journal kept day by day, but like a fair text made at the end of the session from notes that had been taken as the session proceeded. In the second place, the practice was to devote one page—or rather one side of a page—to every day, whether there was much or little to record. The session of Saturday, April 22, is described on the back of a page and ends with an adjournment to the next Tuesday; the session of Monday, May 1, is described on the front of the next page. Even if the book were unbound it would, I fear, reveal no more; for, as we apparently have to deal with a clean text made at the end of the session, any inference that we might be disposed to draw from the distribution of quires and sheets would be highly precarious, and “This may or may not have been an accident” would have to be our last word.’