‘Too Wild to Succeed’: The Occasional Conformity Bills and the Attempts by the House of Lords to Outlaw the Tack in the Reign of Anne*

Abstract

By the late 17th century it had been largely established as a part of the ‘constitution’ that the house of commons played the leading role in proposing financial legislation and that the house of lords by convention could not amend such bills, but only accept or reject them. From the late 1670s, the practice developed of the Commons ‘tacking’ money or supply bills to other, controversial legislation, to try to ensure that the Lords would pass the whole bill. This underhand proceeding sometimes worked, but at other times the Lords amended the non-monetary parts in such a way as to render the bill unacceptable to the Commons, but such actions sometimes resulted in the loss of financial legislation necessary for the king's government. From the 1690s, the whig-dominated Lords attempted to ‘outlaw’ tory-backed tacking by protesting at its unparliamentary nature. This culminated in a formal declaration by the House in 1702 of the unconstitutionality of tacking. The last major attempt at tacking took place over the Occasional Conformity Bills of 1702–4. The final bill of 1704 essentially failed, however, because of the party strengths in the Lords when the tories were outvoted by the whigs. The Lords, however, continued to condemn tacking until at least 1709.