Elizabethan Parliaments 1559-1601

Michael A.R. Graves, Roger Lockyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317887355
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

Michael Graves provides a clear summary of conflicting interpretations of Elizabethan parliaments and presents a new perspective, striking a balance between business and politics.

Part One: Background

1 Pre-Tudor Parliaments

When Henry Tudor became King of England in 1485 representative assemblies existed in France, the various Spanish kingdoms, the Holy Roman Empire, the Low Countries, Sicily and Poland, indeed in most European countries. They varied in age – some being older than the English parliaments – in authority and in the frequency of their meetings. However, they had one common characteristic. Their structure reflected the formal division of society into three estates of clergy, nobility and the rest. In practice, parliamentary power, especially the power to resist the monarch’s financial demands, was usually confined to the first two estates, whilst, in some cases, representation of the third estate had become restricted to the towns. Nevertheless, most continental assemblies consisted of competing social orders which sat apart and deliberated separately. English parliaments, however, evolved in a quite different way. They had begun as meetings of the King and his professional counsel with his great council of spiritual and temporal magnates, in order to treat of important matters of government. As such, they embodied a basic medieval principle of government by consent of the community and they expressed a sense of unity and consensus. Sometimes, therefore, parliaments included shire (county) and borough (town) representatives, whose prime function was to grant taxes in response to royal requests. Thus far, Parliament was a unicameral institution in which the various social orders sat together. Although, in the early days, the knights of the shire (the county members) and the burgesses (the borough representatives) often went home once they had assented to new taxes, early English parliaments did not follow the continental model and sit as separate estates.

Then, in Edward III’s reign, parliamentary developments destroyed any resemblance to other European assemblies, even if the concept of a society organised into estates lingered on in the minds of many men. Representatives of the lower clergy disappeared from Parliament and instead attended the Convocations (assemblies) of the Church. The knights and burgesses too began to sit apart from the bishops and abbots (the lords spiritual) and the nobles (lords temporal). However, the process of fragmentation stopped there. The lords spiritual and temporal did not divide into separate parliamentary estates. Instead, they, together with the King’s professional counsel – his judges, attorney, solicitor and his Serjeants (eminent lawyers) - continued to sit in the original Parliament House. It was not until well into the sixteenth century that they became known as the House of Lords. Nevertheless, long before Henry VII’s reign Parliament had developed into a bicameral institution. Structurally, it bore little similarity to the continental concept of estates, even though it was common to refer to the lords spiritual and temporal and the commons as three estates.

This development was accompanied and followed by changes, not only in Parliament as an entity, but also in its component parts. Before the accession of the first Tudor in 1485 there had probably developed known procedures for the transaction of business, even if they were, as yet, flexibly applied. Surviving documentary fragments from the mid-fifteenth century show that clerks, in the Upper House at least, were keeping records of proceedings. The functions of parliaments, too, were altering and, at the same time, becoming more clearly defined. Consultation between the King and the wealthier, more powerful and influential subjects and communities in the realm continued to be crucial to good governance. And the parliament time was the most convenient occasion for the exchange of views. However, parliaments had shed their earlier curial (judicial) character. Despite continued references to ‘the High Court of Parliament’, they had become, first and foremost, taxing and legislative assemblies. Henry VII’s parliaments did not simply declare what the law was, as a judge or law court might do; they enacted new laws on a wide range of subjects.

At the same time the Nether House of knights and burgesses had advanced in stature and authority. It alone could initiate the imposition of taxes on the laity. Furthermore, whereas the Commons had originally sought redress of grievances by petitions, which were then considered by the King, his legal counsel and great council, that too had altered. By the 1460s statute was enacted by the advice and assent of the bishops, abbots and peers, at the request of the Commons and ‘by authority of Parliament’. In Henry VII’s reign the Commons proceeded by bill – the first step towards an Act of Parliament – and its right to assent to new laws was recognised. So the Lower House (or House of Commons) had become constitutionally co-equal with the Upper. However, these were not early steps in some kind of rise to political supremacy. They were the simple consequences of a change whereby single-chamber parliaments became bicameral.

There was, in any case, considerable continuity with the medieval past. Parliaments remained royal occasions. They were summoned as and when the King wished, in order to furnish him with the necessary laws and supplementary revenue which would ensure good governance. He managed them in order to obtain what he wanted and he ended them as soon as they had performed their tasks to his satisfaction. Furthermore, the King remained outside and apart from parliaments. The correct way to describe the relationship is ‘King and Parliament’, a phrase which emphasises their separateness. Within parliaments, too, the changes should not be exaggerated. The Upper House, as the assembly of the social elite and the King’s natural counsellors, enjoyed superior political status and wielded a formidable social influence. The presence of many of the nobles’ kin, clients and servants in the Commons bolstered its authority in its dealings with a socially inferior house. Moreover, it inherited a much older parliamentary experience. By 1485 the Upper House had long enjoyed the bureaucratic services of a Chancery clerk, styled the Clerk of the Parliaments. It also benefited from the legal and legislative expertise of the King’s professional counsel, who sat on woolsacks in the centre of the chamber, ready to advise and assist in the drafting of laws whenever they were called upon to do so.

Finally, it should be emphasised that the competence of parliaments (that is, the area of their legitimate activity) continued to be limited. Although the borderline was sometimes blurred, it was generally accepted that they could not encroach upon the spiritual authority of the Church or papacy, nor could they embark on a massive invasion of property rights. That had not altered by 1485. If there was change, then it was, in the short term, to the detriment of parliaments. The strong kingship of the pre-Tudor Yorkists, Edward IV and Richard III (1461–85), the Crown’s restored financial solvency, and the Commons’ grudging attitude to taxation reduced the royal necessity or desire for frequent assemblies. Nevertheless, their future was assured. Although parliaments were royal occasions, by 1485 they were also undoubtedly meetings of an institution. Parliament had its own procedures, clerical organisation, defined powers and corporate identity, and it was a recognised part of the machinery of government [43 p. 144].

2 Pre-Reformation Parliaments, 1485–1529

Henry VII

The Lancastrian Henry VII continued the tradition of strong Yorkist kingship. His first, urgent priority was to secure the Tudor dynasty. This could be achieved only by political stabilisation, good governance, the elimination, neutralisation or recruitment of surviving Yorkists and the Crown’s financial solvency. At first, parliaments were essential to the implementation of his policies and so they met frequently: in 1485, 1487, 1489, and 1491–92. Thereafter, as Henry’s policies bore fruit, he needed them less. Only three met in the last eighteen years of his reign. None lasted more than eleven weeks and they averaged only eight to nine weeks apiece. There is nothing surprising in this. Parliaments were not a regular part of government. Short and infrequent sessions did not give rise to discontent. Quite the reverse. A Parliament usually meant a tax – never a popular prospect. The Commons was a niggardly provider. It hedged in its grants with often humiliating qualifications. In 1504 it stoutly resisted Henry’s attempt to secure parliamentary approval for the levy of customary feudal aids. In any case, members of both houses could not have relished the prospect of winter travel, together with the costs and discomfort of London lodgings. Therefore Henry must have touched a responsive chord when he declared, in 1504, that ‘for the ease of his subjects, without great, necessary, and urgent causes’, he would not call another Parliament for a long time. By then his need of them had diminished. Few major laws were required. Furthermore, he preferred a thorough exploitation of hereditary revenues (together with an inexpensive, isolationist foreign policy), rather than parliamentary taxes, in order to achieve solvency and a reserve of treasure.

Henry VIII

In 1509, however, Henry VII died and political circumstances changed dramatically. Henry VIII was the self-confident heir of his father’s marriage-union of Lancaster and York. He was imbued with the ideals of chivalry and military prowess, inherited from the court of the Dukes of Burgundy, who had also ruled the Low Countries. His foreign policy was expansive, imperialistic and expensive. Military intervention in Europe cost money, and this simple fact meant a parliamentary resurgence. There were six sessions between 1510 and 1515. Furthermore, Henry relished cheap popularity. Therefore in 1510 he allowed Parliament (and especially the Commons) to voice governing-class discontent with his father’s rigorous financial practices. Statutes, designed to prevent a recurrence, were enacted, whilst Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, Henry VII’s most conspicuous financial agents, were sacrificed.

Thomas Wolsey’s rise to primacy under the King put an end to the brief parliamentary flurry of 1510–15. His autocratic distaste for parliaments was strengthened by Parliament’s anti-clerical temper and especially by the Hunne case. Richard Hunne was a London merchant who refused to pay fees to the clergy for spiritual services. He was arrested on heresy charges and later found dead, in suspicious circumstances, in the Bishop of London’s prison. The result was an anti-clerical outburst in the 1515 Parliament, during which the King, peers and Commons united against the isolated bishops and abbots in the Lords. Wolsey, who became Archbishop of York and cardinal, was concerned to protect clerical privilege. It is no wonder that only one more Parliament was summoned before his fall in 1529. When it met, in 1523, the government’s request for war revenue received rough treatment from the Commons – an experience which confirmed his low opinion of parliaments.

Perhaps Henry too was disenchanted. Despite the life-grant of tunnage and poundage in 1510, frequent votes of fifteenths and tenths (a tax on moveables) and the innovation of a subsidy (income tax) in 1513, the actual yield was slow to come in and invariably considerably less than the estimated return. Exemptions and evasions, payment by instalments, administrative slowness, inefficiency and some dishonesty all played a part. In response to the request for a parliamentary tax in 1523 there was prolonged and heated debate in the Commons. It was not surprising. The Lower House, which alone initiated lay taxation at the King’s request, was naturally sensitive about matters of the purse. Furthermore, the request was made as royal commissioners were still collecting a forced loan, which yielded the unprecedented sum of over £250,000 [39 p. 119]. Yet money was normally the primary purpose of parliaments, and after 1523 their future must have looked bleak. However, their extinction was not even a remote possibility. Political circumstances seldom remain static for long. Six years later a diplomatic humiliation and Wolsey’s failure to secure the annulment of the King’s first marriage led to the minister’s fall. Henry, always the political realist and opportunist, turned back to Parliament.

Institutional Developments

Far from being moribund, pre-Reformation parliaments showed signs of healthy institutional growth. The Clerk of the Parliaments gradually detached himself from Chancery, their traditional activating force and record repository. From 1497 he retained possession of the original Acts of Parliament, instead of transferring them to Chancery, and in 1515 he expanded the Lords’ journal to include a daily attendance record. An embryonic Parliament Office emerged. At the same time the classic legislative process of three readings was taking shape. It evolved as the most practical contemporary way to make law. In the absence of printed copies of bills for members, the first reading was the literal recitation of the text of a proposed law. It was the only way to inform them of its contents. The second reading allowed debate on the bill’s substance and an opportunity to propose amendments, which were usually incorporated by a committee. It was then engrossed (written on parchment). The third reading was concerned only with textual precision. As yet the process abounded with irregularities and imprecision. However, the movement towards the rigid procedural uniformity of Stuart parliaments was already under way in both houses, with the Lords probably taking the lead.

Known and consistent procedures were necessary because the early Tudor parliaments were such active legislative assemblies. Although their role as a point of contact and communication between Crown and governing class was important, their raison d’être was legislation. The King could secure new laws only with the assent of parliaments. Although the notion lingered on that they declared what the law was rather than made it, in practice early Tudor assemblies enacted an impressive volume of new laws. Many were public (concerning the whole country). They vested the Tudor dynasty with legality, strengthened royal government, voted taxes (which were cast in statutory form), imposed social controls and even tackled the delicate subject of benefit of clergy (which enabled not only those in holy orders but all who were literate to escape punishment by the King’s courts for their first offence). There were legal reforms, confirmations of traitors’ attainders and the restitution of their heirs, measures to protect landowners’ property rights and manufacturers’ markets, regulation of industrial standards and statutes penal (which punished offences, usually of an economic nature, with a fine or forfeiture). Other Acts were private. They were usually beneficial measures, affecting individuals, families, localities and particular economic interests. No corner of the realm and, with the possible exception of the general property rights of the governing class, no secular aspect of human affairs was exempt from the attentions of statute.

Parliaments were also becoming better equipped to transact legislative business. The Commons, which by the very nature of the political and social order had a less intimate connection with the King, needed guaranteed privileges in order to fulfil its responsibilities. The medieval Speaker had regularly requested personal access to the King, pardon if he misreported the sense of the House, and freedom from arrest for debts or other civil suits for Commons’ members. The House strengthened its privileges during the pre-Reformation parliaments. Strode’s case (1513) formally protected its members and its actions from the law courts. An Act of 1515 gave the House a measure of control over its members, when it empowered the Speaker to authorise their absence. Finally, in 1523, Sir Thomas More made the first known Speaker’s request that members should be allowed to speak freely, without licence, on matters placed before them. These were not signs of the maturation or rise of the Commons, but a formalisation of basic privileges without which it could not function properly.

The Parliamentary Trinity

Last, but certainly not least, were the changing relations between King, Lords and Commons. These were the continuation of developments which ante-dated the Tudors. The Nether House finally achieved parity with the Upper. The judges’ decision of 1489 made it clear that its assent was necessary to transform a bill into an Act. Another judicial ruling in 1516 effectively killed any lingering beliefs about Parliament as a gathering of estates. The judges declared that the bishops and abbots did not have to be present when a bill passed the Lords. In other words, they were simply members of one house in which decisions were taken by a majority vote, not a separate estate in a three-tiered assembly of estates. Finally, the King ceased to stand above and outside Parliament. By 1529, as the language of statutes attests, he had become an integral part of the institution. In a gradual, undramatic development, King and Parliament had been transmuted into one entity, the King-in-Parliament. If its competence remained limited, the critical decade of the 1530s was to demolish those limits and make it the sovereign authority in England and Wales.

3 The Parliaments of the Reformation, 1529–58

The Parliaments of Henry VIII

The catalyst of the dramatic change in the authority of parliaments during the 1530s was the so-called ‘Divorce question’ or, to be precise, the annulment of Henry VIII’s first marriage. His motives were mixed: his infatuation (or love) for Anne Boleyn and the political necessity of discarding his ageing consort, Catherine of Aragon, in favour of a younger woman with child-bearing potential. In other words, the ruler’s duty to sire an undisputed male heir and so guarantee a peaceful succession merged with the man’s passion for a woman. The politics of 1529–36, during which the Reformation Parliament met seven times, were tortuous and complex and do not need to be unravelled here. It is enough to say that Henry secured his objectives through Parliament, which was the forum of an anti-clerical and largely anti-papal governing class. Between 1529 and 1532 it dutifully assisted him in his unsuccessful attempts to coerce Pope Clement VII, who alone could annul his marriage. Then, when Anne Boleyn’s pregnancy in 1533 made a solution urgent, it passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals. This Act established its competence to deal in matters of spiritual law and enabled Henry to secure the annulment, marry Anne, and guarantee the legitimacy of their offspring. In 1533–34 Parliament proceeded to enact the statutory rejection of papal supremacy and the declaration of a national Catholic Church with the King as its supreme head.

The Reformation Parliament had served Henry well. It had resolved his matrimonial problems (for the time being). It had also effected a jurisdictional revolution in the Church and church-state relations, of which he was the chief beneficiary. However, Henry’s resort to it was not a stroke of political genius. The Crown was powerless without the support of the governing class, which ...