1597

S. Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, 136-7.Much had changed in the interval following the 1593 Parliament. Four successive bad harvests had plunged England into a crisis of dearth and spiralling inflation; by August 1597 the price of flour had tripled. Rebellion broke out in Ireland in 1594 led by Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, whose resistance to the English settlement of Ulster resulted in a bitter war that Elizabeth could ill afford at the same time as maintaining defences against Spain on several fronts at home and abroad. Supply was as always the ostensible reason for summoning Parliament, but there was an equally urgent need for social and economic legislation to address the ills of the commonwealth and try to mitigate the impact of heavier taxation. Serjeant-at-law Christopher Yelverton, MP for Northampton, was appointed Speaker. The only surviving private journal of this Parliament was kept by one of the youngest Members, Hayward Townshend, a law student elected to represent Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire despite being technically underage. His diary reflects his inexperience of parliamentary procedure, but also permits us insights lacking from the official record such as the presence of a ‘rebellioues corner in the right hand of the Howse’.Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, ed. T.E. Hartley, iii. 238.

Although only three privy councillors found seats in the Commons – the smallest contingent in any Elizabethan Parliament – their efforts were supplemented by Francis Bacon, who opened the first full day of business, 5 Nov., with a motion concerning tillage, enclosure and depopulation. He presented two bills for the maintenance of husbandry which, as he explained, were grounded upon former statutes such as the Tillage Act of 1563 that had been quietly repealed in 1593 being then deemed ‘not much needfull’. Dire consequences of legalizing enclosures had since been highlighted by agrarian unrest and violence that broke out in Oxfordshire in 1596. Now Bacon argued that although ‘it maie be thought ... verie predudiciall to lordes that have inclosed great groundes ... and converted them to sheepe pastures’ tough measures enforcing the re-conversion of pasture to arable were essential ‘considering the increase of people and the benefitt of the common wealth’.Procs. iii. 130, 230-1. Some objected that it was simply not possible to keep certain types of land under the plough, and therefore unreasonable to tear down all enclosures; Henry Jackman sensibly pointed out that dearth had been caused by rain which no number of laws could prevent. After heated debates and numerous conferences with the Lords two completely redrafted husbandry bills were enacted, with a proviso for the exemption of Shropshire, the ‘dayrie howse to the whole realme’.Procs. iii. 215-24, 234-5; S. D’Ewes, Journals of all the Parliaments during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, 551 A further Act to restrain malting, intended to preserve grain, was passed. However, other ‘commonwealth’ bills that failed include two measures concerning the corn trade, to prohibit exports and regulate abuses such as forestalling and engrossing, and sumptuary legislation to restrict ‘excesses in apparel’.

Also on 5 Nov. Henry Finch drew the House’s attention to the ‘miserable estate’ of the poor and increase of vagrancy. Numerous solutions were proposed; at one point the committee appointed to consider this problem was faced with eleven bills ranging from a traditional measure for levying sums to relieve the poor, to schemes for the erection of workhouses and setting the poor on work, and various punishments for ‘rogues and sturdy beggars’. These were eventually reduced, after great labours in committee and in conference with the Lords, into four separate Acts. An expiring statute for the relief of maimed soldiers and mariners was also renewed.

Elizabeth had always deemed such ‘matters of commonwealth’ fit for the Commons to address but one grievance, monopolies, constituted a grey area since it simultaneously concerned the royal prerogative. On 7 Nov. Francis Moore moved ‘touching sundry enormities growing by patents of priviledge and ... the abuses of them’, and was seconded the following day by Robert Wingfield and Nathaniel Bacon. Unfortunately the responses of the queen’s principal secretary Sir Robert Cecil and the solicitor-general Thomas Fleming went unrecorded, though they presumably opposed the motion of Sir Francis Hastings to appoint an investigating committee.D’Ewes, 554. This was eventually achieved despite stalling tactics by Cecil, whose brother Sir Thomas Cecil subsequently proposed to draft a petition to Elizabeth which was delivered by the Speaker at the close of the session. Concerning another prerogative matter religious debates were pre-empted rather than prohibited in this Parliament for on 14 Nov. the Commons received word that Elizabeth would permit a committee including such notable religious radicals as Anthony Cope to gather evidence of ecclesiastical grievances.

The motion for supply was introduced on 15 Nov., when the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Fortescue, Cecil and Bacon each set out the expenses of waging war against Spain both at home and in France on behalf of the Protestant Hugenots, plus the ‘bleeding ulcer of Ireland’.Procs. iii. 211-4, 232. Three subsidies and six fifteenths and tenths were duly approved with much less friction than the same sum had elicited in 1593. After the Christmas adjournment there was heated debate over a measure promoted by Lowestoft against Great Yarmouth’s charter concerning fishing tolls. This failed but a bill sponsored by the London Fishmongers’ Company succeeded in repealing Yarmouth’s prejudicial 1581 Act ‘for the increase of mariners and maintenance of navigation’.Procs. iii. 238, 239-40.At the dissolution on 9 Feb. Elizabeth responded to the Commons’ petition against monopolies with a promise that ‘they shall all be examined to abide the tryall and true touchstone of the lawe’.Procs. iii. 197-207, 242. A total of 28 public and 15 private measures received the royal assent.

For further information on this Parliament, see the Appendix to the 1558-1603 Introductory Survey.