The Nature of Opposition in the House of Lords in the Early Seventeenth Century: A Reevaluation

Abstract

The growth of an opposition party in the House of Commons is a primary reason given for the altered distribution of power within the government of England in the early seventeenth century. While historians are not unaware that opposition also emerged in the Upper Chamber of Parliament, little serious investigation of this phenomena has been undertaken since it has not been viewed as essential to an explanation of the growing constitutional crisis within England. Consequently, the nature and extent of noble dissidence continues to be a subject of vague generalization including no small amount of contradictory assumptions and conclusions. The traditional interpretation may be termed the “personalist” view of opposition in the House of Lords and has been dominant at least since Samuel Rawson Gardiner's massive study of England in the early seventeenth century. This explanation, which still prevails among historians, asserts that opposition was based on little more than personal rivalries and jealousies over power and status among the members of the peerage. Indeed it is argued that monarchs encouraged “government by division” as a major weapon in the maintenance of their own authority. Those who view noble opposition in this manner usually assert that it had no important ideological or philosophical underpinnings, little continuity or organization of the type associated with the rise of opposition in the Commons, and minimal constitutional impact and significance.