Elizabeth's Parliaments

11 Key excerpts on "Elizabeth's Parliaments"

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  The Reign of Elizabeth I

  1558–1603

  • Stephen J. Lee(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 ELIZABETH AND PARLIAMENT BACKGROUND Altogether, Parliament met during twenty-six years of the reign of Elizabeth (1559, 1563–67, 1571, 1572–81, 1584–85, 1586–87, 1589, 1593, 1597–98 and 1601). It dealt with religious issues, especially the settlement of 1559, subsequent demands for modifying the settlement, financial needs for campaigns against Scotland and France, several rebellions, the attainder of Mary Queen of Scots, the increasing crisis involving Spain, and a variety of social issues, including the Poor Law. This was an extensive involvement, even if constitutionally less momentous than it had been during the reign of Henry VIII. Analysis 1 considers the extensive reinterpretations: here it would be no exaggeration to say that former arguments have been stood on their heads. Analysis 2 examines the main changes made to Parliament during the reign, while Analysis 3 deals with the relations between Parliament on the one hand and the Queen and her government on the other. ANALYSIS 1: HOW HAVE THE VIEWS OF HISTORIANS CHANGED ON ELIZABETH’S PARLIAMENTS? Views depend on the perspectives of a particular period: inevitably the ‘new view’ of one period will become the ‘old view’ of the next. Elizabethan Parliaments have seen three clearly identifiable phases of interpretation. The first of these lasted from the nineteenth century until the 1940s, with major reinterpretations following in the 1950s. These, in turn, were widely accepted until the 1980s when they were summarily inverted. The emphasis of nineteenth-century historians such as J. Lingard 1 was very much on the despotism of the Tudors, against which Parliament was relatively helpless (see Source 2.1 below). Parliament was considered to have played little part in the centralisation of government and administration under Henry VIII

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  Tudor and Stuart Britain

  1485-1714

  • Roger Lockyer, Peter Gaunt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It also supervised the entire range of administration, including justice, and took whatever measures were necessary to improve its functioning. While Elizabeth was the Queen, whose will always prevailed in the end, the Council was ‘the Crown’, the formal embodiment of the government of the state that went on all the time with only occasional reference to the sovereign. Parliament Elizabeth summoned 10 parliaments in the course of a reign that lasted nearly 45 years and they took up, in total, a mere three years. There were 13 sessions in all, and the average length of each session was less than 10 weeks. Meetings took place at approximately three-year intervals, which meant that for most of the time Parliament was not in session. Yet, although Parliament was an intermittent assembly, its prestige was high and there was intense competition for seats in the Commons. The Queen was pressed 274 ELIZABETHAN STATE AND FINANCES to create additional parliamentary boroughs, and in the first 30 years of her reign she added 62 members to the Lower House by so doing. The majority of these new members were not, however, townsmen, for more and more boroughs were choosing neighbouring gentlemen or lawyers rather than residents to represent them. In Elizabeth’s first parliament just under a quarter of the burgesses were true townsmen, but by 1601 this figure had dropped to 14 per cent. There is no evidence that Parliament attracted the upwardly mobile, except perhaps for lawyers, whose membership of the Commons increased from 16 to 27 per cent during the course of the reign. Parliamentary seats were not necessarily contested. In the case of elections for knights of the shire, the leading families would often decide between themselves who was to be put forward, while in the boroughs much depended on the patron.

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  Tudor Parliaments,The Crown,Lords and Commons,1485-1603

  • Michael A.R. Graves(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter seven THE ELIZABETHAN PARLIAMENTS: THE ERA OF LORD BURGHLEY, 1571–1597

  Between 1568 and 1572 there occurred the first major political crisis of the reign, provoked by Mary Stuart’s flight to England and followed by the earls’ rebellion in her favour (1569), the papal excommunication of Elizabeth (1570) and the Ridolfi Plot (1571), the first of many conspiracies to dethrone or assassinate her. It ended the decade in which official policy towards the English catholics had been a mixture of insistence on outward conformity and connivance at private catholic religious practice. There was a shift to persecution of the English catholic community and to an ideological cold war with catholic Europe, which gradually and fitfully rose in temperature until the outbreak of hostilities with the catholic superpower, Spain, in the mid-1580s.

  The Parliaments of 1571 and 1572 were responses to the initial crisis which marked a turning point in Elizabethan politics. They were also significant in the history of Tudor Parliaments. In February 1571 William Cecil was ennobled and twice within the next sixteen months he had to stage-manage Parliament’s response to the crisis. Thereafter he was to preside, without ostentation but effectively for all that, during another eight sessions before his death in 1598. He had been a member of the Commons in twelve sessions since 1542 and he had an intimate knowledge of its workings. This was to serve him well when, as Lord Burghley, he managed both houses from the Lords, which now became the operative centre of Parliament.

  It was Burghley who, more than anyone else, guided England through over twenty-five years of ideological war and, finally, of military conflict. He witnessed many changes: the end of the campaign for the queen’s marriage as she grew too old to bear children; the growing catholic threat in Ireland, the Low Countries, and to England itself; the shift from peace to war; and, in the 1590s, the dismantling of the High Elizabethan system under the pressures of war, economic dislocation and a new generation. Parliament always remained one of his political options in time of crisis but never, however, did he lightly recommend calling one. In 1571 Parliament was summoned to strengthen national security after the northern rebellion and bull of excommunication. In the following year it met for one reason only: to advise the queen and consider legislative action against Mary Stuart, whose activities constituted a threat to her life and throne. Speaker Bell identified her as ‘a person in this land whom [many thought] no law could touch’, whereas ‘any person of what state, condition, or nation whatsoever [who] shall commit any felony within this realm they shall die for the same.1

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  Criticising the Ruler in Pre-Modern Societies - Possibilities, Chances and Methods

  Kritik am Herrscher in vormodernen Gesellschaften – Möglichkeiten, Chancen, Methoden

  • Karina Kellermann, Alheydis Plassmann, Christian Schwermann, Karina Kellermann, Alheydis Plassmann, Christian Schwermann(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • V&R Unipress

    (Publisher)

  Seminal: Trevor E. Hartley, Elizabeth’s Parliaments. Queen, Lords and Commons 1559–1601, Man- chester/New York 1992, 11–13. 7 This is based on the understanding of early modern rule as neither static nor absolute, but as dynamic. Seminal: Markus Meumann/Ralf Pröve, Die Faszination des Staates und die his- torische Praxis. Zur Beschreibung von Herrschaftsbeziehungen jenseits teleologischer und dualistischer Begriffsbildungen, in: Iidem (eds.), Herrschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit. Umrisse eines dynamisch-kommunikativen Prozesses (Herrschaft und soziale Systeme in der Frühen Neuzeit 2), Münster 2004, 11–49. For England see e. g.: Michael Braddick/John W alter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society. Order, Hierarchy, and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, New York/Cambridge 2001. Debating, Petitioning, Legislating 269 © 2019, V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783847110880 – ISBN E-Book: 9783847010883 regarded its role within political discourse. 8 Meanwhile, scholarly debates have resolved and integrated the different points of view: Elizabethan parliaments were about political debates on the pressing questions of the time – the succes- sion, religion, Mary Stuart – and on legislation and the integration of the locality within the greater setting of the commonwealth as a whole. 9 Another line of research focuses on contemporary ideas and practices of counsel, arguing that its increasing importance was due to the fact that of the rulers during that period, one was a minor and two were female. 10 While Patrick Collinson and John Guy most famously emphasized the contrasting views on the role of counsel held by Elizabeth on the one hand and her advisors on the other, Susan Doran has recently argued that they were all raised in the same humanistic tradition that put the emphasis on counsel and good rule. 11 Natalie Mears has shown Elizabeth’s preference for private and individual counsel over its in- stitutionalized and more public forms.

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  Tudor and Stuart Britain

  1485-1714

  • Roger Lockyer, Peter Gaunt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The wide range of the Privy Council’s activities stemmed from the fact that it was the heart and centre of Elizabethan government. Making policy – or, rather, advising the Queen on how best to make it – was only one aspect of the Council’s work, and not necessarily the most important. Its main function was to link the centre with the localities, making sure the Queen’s will was transmitted to the furthest corners of her realm. It also supervised the entire range of administration, including justice, and took whatever measures were necessary to improve its functioning. While Elizabeth was the Queen, whose will always prevailed in the end, the Council was ‘the Crown’, the formal embodiment of the government of the state that went on all the time with only occasional reference to the sovereign.

  Parliament

  Elizabeth summoned 10 parliaments in the course of a reign that lasted nearly 45 years and they took up, in total, a mere three years. There were 13 sessions in all, and the average length of each session was less than 10 weeks. Meetings took place at approximately three-year intervals, which meant that for most of the time Parliament was not in session. Yet, although Parliament was an intermittent assembly, its prestige was high and there was intense competition for seats in the Commons. The Queen was pressed to create additional parliamentary boroughs, and in the first 30 years of her reign she added 62 members to the Lower House by so doing. The majority of these new members were not, however, townsmen, for more and more boroughs were choosing neighbouring gentlemen or lawyers rather than residents to represent them. In Elizabeth’s first parliament just under a quarter of the burgesses were true townsmen, but by 1601 this figure had dropped to 14 per cent. There is no evidence that Parliament attracted the upwardly mobile, except perhaps for lawyers, whose membership of the Commons increased from 16 to 27 per cent during the course of the reign.

  Parliamentary seats were not necessarily contested. In the case of elections for knights of the shire, the leading families would often decide between themselves who was to be put forward, while in the boroughs much depended on the patron. Candidates for election had to spend a great deal of money on wooing the electorate, yet, despite all the effort they put in to securing a seat in the Commons, fewer than half the members were regular attenders at debates. One reason for this was that they were more interested in local than national issues, and only turned up when a piece of legislation which they had promoted, or in which they or their constituency had a particular interest, was due to be considered. Conversely, when the House was debating matters that did not directly affect them, they often stayed away. Yet there was no hard and fast line between local and national issues. Members might well discover during the course of informal discussions that the problems facing their constituents were similar to those elsewhere, and that a public rather than a private bill would be the most appropriate remedy. The most famous example of this interconnection is the Statute of Artificers (see Chapter 6

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  Elizabethan Essays

  • Patrick Collinson(Author)
  • 1994(Publication Date)
  • Hambledon Continuum

    (Publisher)

  See also M.A.R. Graves, The Tudor Parliaments: Crown, Lords and Commons, 1485-1603 ( 1985) and N. L. Jones, 'Parliament and the Governance of Elizabethan England: A Review', Albion, 19 (1987), pp. 327-46. 3 60 Elizabethan Essays because it engages head-on with Neale's version of events, this book is inevitably cast as a piece of 'revisionism'. But this is a tired, over-worked term so let us rather call it a work of demythologising, since Elton sets out to expose the myth that these parliaments were altogether dominated, as a careless reading of Neale's two volumes on the subject might suggest, 3 by religion and related issues of great public and political moment, matters agitated by free-ranging and turbulent spirits in a House of Commons which was reaching for liberties which were already halfway to power. Elton's less mythological account of the matter establishes that the essential history of these as of other sixteenth-century parliaments consists of the many useful, mundane bills which were read, debated and committed, and of the minority which as acts succeeded in attaining the statute book. With a fine indifference, Simonds D'Ewes's digest of the Lords'Journal for the 1559 Parliament records that on 27 April the Bill Touching the Reviving of the Act for Killing of Rooks and Crows and the Bill for the Uniformity of Common Prayer were each given a second reading. From the Commons' Journal of the same Parliament we learn that two days earlier nine bills had been sent on their way to the upper House 'of which one was for the preservation of the Spawn of Fish etc. and the other was for the Uniformity of Common Prayer'. The clerk kept a due sense of proportion. 4 However, myths, once exposed, are sometimes capable of rehabilitation through restatement in a modified, less mythological form. Often they contain important truths. Babies do not have to be thrown out with the bathwater.

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  Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572-1588

  • Wallace T. MacCaffrey(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  The reformers did have friends in high places, but their benevolence was pretty much limited to the protection of individual dissenters; they were not prepared to sponsor re- form legislation. Hence the Puritans' parliamentary campaign for reform remained very largely a House of Commons enter- prise promoted by members of their own. THESE ARE DECADES of rapid and far-reaching changes within the parliamentary institution; how are we to characterize them? It would be all too easy to see Elizabethan parliamen- tary history as mere prologue to the constitutional struggles of the next century; for us there are premonitory signs of things to come. But contemporaries had no such range of vi- sion. To them Parliament still seemed what it had been for some generations, a body at once petitionary and consultative. 496 "PARLIAMENT The members came up to Westminster bearing the grievances of their constituents, although cast now as bills rather than as petitions. Some of these were private bills for the particular needs of a locality, but others might very well be incorporated in some larger piece of national legislation. On a whole range of legislation—all those measures which were regulative of the economy or of the social order or remedial to the proce- dures of the common law—they expected governmental initia- tive, but they also expected and received the right to criticize and to amend. But they had also come, since Henry VIII's time, to expect to hear something of the grander issues of state as well. In these matters they thought of themselves either as auditors, or as petitioners respectfully urging on the Queen their worries and their hopes as to her marriage, the succession, or religion. On some questions, such as the treatment of the Queen of Scots, they were prepared with much more specific recommendations.

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  The Irish Parliament in the Middle Ages

  • H. G. Richardson, G. O. Sayles(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  6 PARLIAMENT IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY T HE reign of Edward II and the early years of Edward III wit-nessed profound changes in the English parliament. What hap-pened may be briefly stated in this way. 1 While under Edward I the business of parliament was conducted chiefly by the professional servants of the king, under his successors the baronage became domi-nant in the enlarged council (magnum concilium) which held its sessions in parliament. The conception of peerage took definite shape, with the consequence that the issue of individual writs of summons became restricted and ministers, unless they happened to be spiritual or temporal peers, sank to the position of assistants. Over the same period the commons came to be invariably summoned to parliament and came also to be regarded, in place of the baronage, as the peculiar representatives of the commune or nation at large. In this way a house of lords and a house of commons evolved as the constituents, under the king, of parliament. This evolution was aided by the contempo-raneous, but apparently unconnected, loosening of ties between the convocations of the clergy and parliament. The conditions and cir-cumstances which determined the changes in the English parliament did not obtain in Ireland, but gradually the Irish parliament was assimilated to that of England, though the assimilation was never com-plete during the Middle Ages. The changes in the constitution of the English parliament were accomplished by changes in the character of the business transacted. The great volume of private petitions, which had entailed the preparation of substantial enrollments under Edward I, contracts, and after 1332 separate rolls seem no longer to be made up because the necessity for them had ceased. Much of this source of parliamentary business is ultimately diverted to the courts of equity, though parliament is never without private petitions which, in their more modern form, become private bills.

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  English Parliament in the Middle Ages

  • H. G. Richardson(Author)
  • 1981(Publication Date)
  • Hambledon Continuum

    (Publisher)

  43 Why should we gratuitously suppose that the demise of the Crown marked a change in the character of parliament from a political assembly to (using Stubbs's words) sessions of the council for judicial busi-ness ? 44 The accession of a new king obviously marked a return to regular periodical parliaments, but this does not necessarily imply a change of character. As we have seen, there is evidence to the contrary. We have been an unconscionable time making an end, but since last we wrote of the English parliament many things have been said which invited comment. Let these be our last words. The discus-sion of the nature and characteristics of parliament under Henry III and the first three Edwards threatens to become a vain dispute about the niceties of language. In such disputes we have no interest. Our concern is with historical realities, with what was done and said in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. So long as these are described in sufficient fullness and with sufficient accuracy, it matters little what terms are used, provided the terms are reason-ably unambiguous and fitting to the century to which they are applied. But we confess that, just as we deprecate the selection of evidence to support some preconceived conclusion, so we wince at such phrases as political assembly or representative parlia-ment, which have a meaning at the present day that is not apposite to the reigns of Henry III and the first two Edwards, not even to those few parliaments where politics may be discerned in the clashes between the king and a baronial opposition. In his parliaments the king in council holds his court in the presence of prelates, earls, barons, nobles and others learned in the law. What have politics, what has representation, to do with these parliaments ? « Above, pp. 34-35. ** Constitutional History, ii. 274. NOTES Page 2, n.5 For 1292 read 1293; for 1293 read 1294.

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  The Making of the Modern English State, 1460-1660

  • Philip Edwards(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Both the Yorkist and Tudor periods, he argued, witnessed a decline in the power of Parliament. Before 1460 there is evidence that the Commons were able to withhold their assent to taxation and punish royal councillors by process of impeachment even against the wishes of the king, neither of which was possible in the sixteenth century. Roskell denied that the evidence cited for the growth and greater definition of the Tudor Commons in any way meant that Parliament gained more power in the state. The guarantee of freedom of speech officially granted in 1523) was `largely illusory in practice', he maintained, if one looks at the frequent imprisonment of Elizabethan Members who spoke their minds. Certainly Elizabeth did not believe in true freedom of speech for MPs but made the novel distinction between `matters of commonwealth' such as economic and social issues) which could be discussed spontaneously by the House, and `matters of state' such as religion, foreign policy, her marriage and the succession) which were part of her prerogative and which could be discussed only with her express approval. Roskell saw Parlia-ment remaining an essentially medieval body until 1689, when The Reign of Elizabeth I, 1558±1603 217 annual sessions of Parliament became the norm after the Glori-ous Revolution. 15 Roskell's challenge to the importance of the Tudor period was taken up by G. R. Elton, who tried to validate the modernity of the Tudor Commons by reference to its constitutional develop-ment and the modernising work of Thomas Cromwell. Elton attacked both Neale and Roskell for using the criterion of the growth of conflict as the yardstick to measure the modernity of Parliament. Instead Elton posited the clearer constitutional posi-tion of Parliament as `the body of the whole realm' to indicate its maturity.

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  Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth 1, Vol. 3 1593-1601

  • Terence Hartley(Author)
  • 1995(Publication Date)
  • Leicester University Press

    (Publisher)

  The session was summoned for 27 October and met, therefore, soon after the Spanish landing in Kinsale. Yet, an awareness of the dangers to which the realm and regime had been exposed by 16 years of war was enough in its own right to justify an examination of Elizabeth's reign and achievements. The fact, too, that this was the first 'public' occasion since the death of Philip II made it an obvious time to take stock of the situation, all the more so because his son had seen fit to challenge Elizabeth in 'another parallel' in Ireland, as she put it. It is important therefore to realize that the strong elements of unchanging political language in the set pieces of the parliamentary scene represent at once a continuing and constant theme of the reign as well as a conscious celebration of an achievement whose perdurance was one of its principal achievements. Document i, from the compilation of parliamentary proceedings to be found in Cotton Titus F.i and F.ii, has been included here, though it is in fact a general description of the manner of choosing a Speaker in the House of Commons: it refers to the task of initiating the business falling conventionally to one of the privy councillors in the House, and to the Speaker-elect's traditional and vain attempts to shake off the appointment by mild self-denigration. The process was clearly of enough interest to be recorded in its own right, and Townshend describes it in his journals for 1597 and 1601; and someone has linked this document to Croke's election here. The concluding sentence about an interval between election and presentation to the Queen in order to allow the Speaker to prepare his oration is interesting in view of Croke's use (in Lords i here) of material from an earlier speech of 1598. The Speaker's own disabling speech (Document 2) claimed that his 'playne studdy and learning and profession of the law' left him ill-equipped to deal with the 'greate and weighty affayres of the common wealth'.

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