The Nature of a Parliament in Early Stuart England

Abstract

‘I am forced a little to begin in general of the parliament and to call to your memories (though I know you know it already) what a parliament is.’1 A historian starting out on an apparently elementary task of this sort must share James I’s misgivings, yet the things we know already, like the things we can do in our sleep, are ones on which we sometimes need refreshing. Inhabitants of the modern English-speaking world, to whom parliaments are as familiar as the air they breathe, have grown up with a number of what James Mill would have called ‘indissoluble associations’ with the word ‘parliament’. Some of these associations, when applied to the world before the English Civil War or even before 1689, are necessarily false, yet, because they are among the images that the word ‘parliament’ creates in our minds before we have even begun to think, they are very hard to discard. In fact, like James I, I want to call in question some of the things I am sure we know already, because a number of the things we ‘know’ about parliament are not known historically. Unless we can dismiss these associations from our minds, we risk committing the same anachronism as was committed by Sir Edward Coke, examining parliaments in the time of ‘Ina, King of the West Saxons’.2