Addressing the representatives of the Lords at a conference between both Houses in December 1601, Sir Robert Cecil declared that ‘we be all members of one body, and as we cannot be without your lordships, so you cannot be without us’. Ennoblement under James did nothing to alter Cecil in this opinion. During the midst of the debates over the Great Contract, he reminded the Commons that ‘though we be divided in place, yet we [are] all but one lawmaker’. Indeed, ‘if we confer not, we shall spend many days in vain’, as nothing could be accomplished without cooperation.
Although conferences were a vital part of the parliamentary process, there were no rules to determine when one House ought to consult the other. Some Members of the Commons were understandably wary of Cecil’s argument that the two Houses formed a single court and therefore ought to confer because they feared jeopardizing the lower House’s independent authority. When it was suggested in February 1621 that the Commons should seek the aid of the Lords in petitioning James for the right to free speech on the grounds that both Houses formed a single court, Sir Edward Coke opposed the motion, ‘for then they [the Lords] should have to do in examining returns’.
In many instances it was simply a matter of choice whether one House decided to confer with the other. However, if the Commons intended to petition the king on the subjects’ liberties or property rights, common sense dictated that the Lords should also be approached. As Sir Edwin Sandys remarked during the impositions debates of 1614, if the peers agreed to throw their weight behind the Commons, ‘we shall have their strength’.
Types of meetings
Speaking during the war debate of March 1624, Sir Edwin Sandys declared that there were two sorts of meetings with the Lords – ‘conferences and audience’.
Although audiences enabled the Commons to keep its conference committees under tight control, they also had the effect of slowing down business to a snail’s pace. During the negotiations over the Union and the Great Contract, the Commons’ refusal to allow its representatives to engage in debate until they had reported back the Lords’ position frequently maddened the Lords beyond belief. As Lord Treasurer Salisbury observed in 1610, the whole point of conferring was to hasten the dispatch of business.
Not everyone in the Commons approved of the House’s unwillingness to grant its representatives permission to engage in debate at conferences. In March 1607, following a conference at which the Commons sulkily declined to debate with the Lords after the latter declined to allow the legal status of those Scots born before James’ accession to be handled separately from the status of those born after 1603, Dudley Carleton declared that business ‘hath been much hindered by the strict commission which went from this House’. His opinion was shared by Christopher Brooke, who wished ‘to leave it to the discretion of the committees whether they will reply or not’. However, his motion was ‘received with a general and universal mislike’.
On one notable occasion the Commons, though it refused to give its conference representatives carte blanche, succeeded in reconciling the need for caution with the need for haste. Midway through talks with the Lords in May 1628, the Commons’ representatives broke off to report back to the House and then, ‘after some small stay’, returned to continue the conference.
Meetings between the Commons and the Lords, whether they were mere audiences or free conferences, were not normally held in the presence of the monarch. In May 1604 James attended one such meeting by prior arrangement in order to address the peers and Members present, but James was then still unfamiliar with English parliamentary procedure, and may have assumed that his presence would be welcome. Indeed, only the previous month the Commons had invited him to preside over a meeting between its representatives and the judges.
Although the king was not expected to attend conferences between both Houses, meetings between himself and Members of the Commons were fairly frequent and might be requested by either party. Though sometimes described as ‘conferences’,
When in London, the king generally received Commons’ deputations, many of which were sizeable, in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. At around one hundred and twenty feet long and fifty-three feet wide, this building was ideal for such large gatherings.
Although the new Banqueting House was ready by the spring of 1621 – it was used to receive the knights of the Garter on 23 April – James seems to have been reluctant to allow it to be employed for parliamentary purposes. On 20 April he addressed the two Houses in ‘the Hall at Whitehall’.
Although the king’s chief minister might hold private talks with individual Members of the lower House,
The Commons never took up this startling offer, perhaps because many of its Members suspected that James would use such meetings to put pressure on those who attended them. James, however, remained convinced that there was a place for more intimate gatherings than was customary, as did Lord Treasurer Salisbury, who in July 1610 convened a private meeting between himself and leading Members of the Commons at Hyde Park.
James’s hope that a direct meeting with the unofficial leaders of the Commons would help pave the way to a vote of subsidies was thereby dashed. Moreover, news of the meeting quickly spread among the rest of the House, many of whom were furious. To those who had not been invited it looked as though James was trying to strike a deal with the House’s leaders behind their backs. Tempers ran so high that William Hakewill thought it necessary to oppose any idea of calling the offenders to the bar or sending them to the Tower, while James was obliged to send a message to the House denying that it had been his intention to persuade the thirty Members – dubbed by contemporaries ‘the thirty doges’ – to act as his spokesmen.
The resentment engendered by this episode, coupled with the furore at the beginning of the next Parliament over the rumours of a secret undertaking, should have led James to the conclusion that meeting leading Members of the Commons privately was an experiment that could not safely be repeated. However, James, who held his own powers of persuasion in high regard,
In seeking to find a way to deal directly with the Commons’ leadership at moments of crisis, James was attempting to overcome the convention that barred the Commons from conferring with all but the Lords. This was not James’s only attempt to challenge settled practice in respect of conferences, however, for during the opening session of the first Jacobean Parliament, while still a relative newcomer to England and its Parliament, he twice insisted that the Commons confer with bodies other than the Lords.
The Commons received the first of these irregular instructions on 29 March 1604, one week into its dispute with Chancery over the Buckinghamshire election return. The king, convinced that the Commons was not legally entitled to resolve disputed elections, gave the House ‘special charge’ to ‘admit of conference with the judges’, in the hope that once Members heard the legal arguments for themselves they would withdraw their support for Sir Francis Goodwin.
On learning of the Commons’ defiance James was furious, and three days later he ‘desired and commanded, as an absolute king, that there might be a conference between the House and the judges’ in the presence of the Privy Council. At this fresh instruction the Commons was stunned into silence. There was now no alternative but to comply, not least because the Commons was hoping that James would look favourably on its arguments in the Goodwin case, which were now ready for presentation. The only concession that the House managed to extract was that James would attend the conference in person ‘to hear, moderate and judge’.
Although forced to climb down over the judges, the Commons proved less compliant a few weeks later, when James, having heard that Members wished to treat of matters of religion, required the lower House to confer with Convocation, the representative assembly of the English church. During the ensuing debate, held on 16 April, it was pointed out ‘that there was no precedent of any conference with a Convocation’ and that ‘clerks of the Convocation were not their peers’.
James had now reversed the position he had adopted less than two weeks earlier, when he had commanded the Commons, ‘as an absolute king’, to confer with the judges. This alteration is so striking that it demands an explanation. In early April the Commons had been left with little choice but to accede to James’s demands, because gaining the king’s support in the struggle with Chancery over the right to adjudge election returns was essential. By 18 April, however, it was James rather than the Commons who now found himself in a position of weakness: having conceded the Commons’ claims in the Buckinghamshire election dispute, he was anxious to press on with the Union, and to avoid doing anything that would cause the Commons to oppose the intended merger of the two kingdoms. A further factor in James’s decision to retreat was that a middle course lay open to him, for as early as 16 April the lower House had declared that, while it would refuse to meet the representatives of Convocation, it would be willing to confer with the bishops ‘as lords of Parliament’. This assurance, which was seized upon by James on 18 April, was somewhat misleading, as it soon became apparent that the Commons was not prepared to enter into discussions with a Lords’ committee composed wholly, or even mainly, of bishops.
Several conferences between the Commons and the bishops (albeit in the company of lay peers) ensued, and in mid May James bestowed upon these gatherings the royal mark of approval by having them take place in the Council chamber at Whitehall. However on 4 June Convocation, alarmed that the Commons ‘should deal in any matters of religion’, informed the Commons through Bishop Bancroft that unless these negotiations with the bishops ceased it would appeal to James, ‘who had given them authority to deal only in these matters’.
Despite this setback, some Members hoped that the experiment of conferring with the bishops would be revived. During a debate on the deprivation of godly ministers in March 1606, Sir William Strode, seconded by John Hoskins, proposed ‘that a conference may be desired of the Lords the bishops to understand if they be justly or unjustly put out’. This motion was taken so seriously that it was put to the question, but it evidently failed to find favour.
Requesting a conference with the Lords
Whenever the Commons wished to confer with the Lords messengers were dispatched to the upper House. Those chosen were often Members of some stature rather than mere novices.
At the start of the seventeenth century neither House had refused to confer with the other within living memory. In 1593, it was true, the Commons, enjoying the sole right to grant supply, had initially declined to debate the subsidy with the Lords on the grounds that to do so would be ‘a derogation of the liberties of this House’, but after reflection and under pressure it had relented.
Although the Commons continued to meet the Lords on request for the rest of James’s reign, on one notable occasion the same courtesy was not extended to the Commons by the Lords. This was in May 1614, when the Commons asked to meet the peers to discuss impositions. A majority in the Lords, however, judged that impositions were a matter for the royal prerogative, and that the king’s right to levy them was not open for discussion. On 24 May, after a debate lasting two days, the Lords resolved not to confer.
Although the Lords proved anxious not to rebuff the Commons again, they inadvertently caused offence once more in December 1621. On announcing that they had decided to reject the monopolies bill, which had originated in the lower House, the peers offered to discuss a replacement measure, as they professed to ‘like well the scope and end’ of the original bill. The Commons, however, was offended that the Lords had rejected an important piece of legislation without consulting the House first. ‘They have ... cast it away without conference with us’ complained Sir Edward Coke, and it would ‘hardly stand with the precedents of this House for us to confer with their lordships ... on a new bill for the same purpose’. He accused the peers of showing ‘disrespect’ to the Commons, whose Members had shown ‘all due respect to them’. Sir Nathaniel Rich agreed, and like Coke he recommended that the Commons should reject the Lords’ offer. However a majority in the House, perhaps mindful of earlier events, was unwilling to go that far, and accordingly the Lords were told that the Commons would consider what answer to give them ‘in convenient time’.
Following these events neither House rebuffed the other until the final stages of the Petition of Right. On 23 May 1628 the Lords proposed that a select committee composed of specially chosen Members of both Houses should hammer out the remaining sources of disagreement over the Petition. The Commons baulked at this suggestion, which was condemned by Sir Edward Coke as being ‘as dangerous a thing as ever came in Parliament’. Were the House to delegate the power to iron out the remaining difficulties to a handful of its Members, he warned, it ran the risk of agreeing, through its representatives, to ‘new propositions and declarations’ that might serve to weaken or even nullify the effect of the Petition. Either the Lords should accept the Petition as it stood, he added, or they should declare themselves dissatisfied, in which case the Petition would be made to ‘sleep’.
Conference committees
Whenever the Commons conferred with the Lords it appointed a committee for the purpose. The size of this committee varied from one meeting to another and was determined, indirectly, by the Lords. This was because, as the clerk of the Commons noted in 1604, it was ‘an ancient rule of the House’ that the size of the House’s deputation was ‘always double that of the Lords’.
So far as is known, conference committees were appointed in precisely the same way as bill committees: that is to say, Members called out the names of those whom they wished to be included, and these were then recorded in the Journal. However, on 4 May 1604 the Commons adopted a more rigorous approach to the appointment of the 20-strong ‘select’ committee instructed to confer with the Lords about drafting a bill regarding the commissioners of the Union. The name of each prospective member of the committee was read aloud, presumably by the clerk, ‘and a several question [was] made upon his name’.
In theory only the members of the conference committee were entitled to attend the conference, but in practice those who had not been named to the committee also expected to come along, in the same way that they did to bill committees to which they were not formally appointed. This perhaps explains why in 1621 the novice Member Charles Howard, trying to make sense of Commons’ procedure, noted that ‘it is always the order of the House that there be at the least twice as many (and as many more as will) of the Lower when they go to the Lords’.
Shortly after the opening of the 1604 session, the Commons resolved to enforce the rule that only committee members should attend conferences after complaint was made ‘that sundry other of both Houses, besides the committee themselves, were present’.
Each conference committee was led by at least one spokesman. Normally the House appointed the spokesmen, but sometimes this task devolved upon the committee charged with planning the conference. The number of spokesmen varied depending on the extent and complexity of the business in hand. It was not unusual for two or three Members to be deputed, but ahead of the Union conference of 28 April 1604 no less than twenty-six Members were assigned speaking roles.
Members chosen as spokesmen were not normally permitted to decline the honour. When Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Henry Montagu tried to excuse themselves in December 1606, their appointments were, ‘notwithstanding, ordered to stand’, although two other Members were instructed ‘to join them in the same charge’.
Venues
While either House could request a conference with the other, only the Lords were entitled to choose the venue. The Lords offered to waive this right just once, in February 1606, by way of soothing the injured feelings of the Commons, as they had criticized the behaviour of John Hare at a conference twelve days earlier. However the Commons, prompted by Humphrey Winch, deferred to the peers as usual.
Meetings normally took place in the Painted Chamber, situated within the Palace of Westminster.
During the 1580s and 1590s the Council Chamber in Whitehall Palace was also occasionally pressed into service.
The second occasion on which the Council Chamber was used in 1604 was in early May, when it hosted two meetings to consider complaints against purveyance.
Although the two were probably unconnected, the relatively heavy use of the Council Chamber in 1604 coincided with growing dissatisfaction in the Commons over the suitability of the Painted Chamber as the customary conference venue. On 28 April 1604 the Commons condemned the Painted Chamber as ‘too strait and not convenient’, and requested that ‘some other’ room be found instead.
Pressure of numbers on the Painted Chamber increased rather than decreased thereafter. The reason was not primarily the growth of the Commons’ membership – from 478 in 1604 to 493 in 1629 – but the emergence of the committee of the whole House, and the corresponding practice whereby grand committees of Both Houses met. The numbers involved in such gatherings – as many as six hundred Parliament-men and legal assistants all told – was immense, and the overcrowding was often made worse by interlopers who, taking advantage of the press of people, often managed to worm their way in.
In demanding that ‘some other’ room be provided, the Commons may have been casting envious eyes on either the Great Hall or on the Banqueting House which, as has already been noted, was commonly used by the king to receive deputations from one or both Houses. It was certainly to the Great Hall that on 24 February 1624 the Lords turned when, out of the blue, they dropped the Painted Chamber as the venue for that afternoon’s conference between the entire membership of both Houses on the grounds that it was ‘too strait’ for the purpose. The Great Hall, explained the Lords, was ‘better accommodated’ for the ‘ease and hearing’ of the Commons than the Painted Chamber,
Tension only resurfaced at Oxford in August 1625, when relations between the two Houses deteriorated as a result of the handling of the war with Spain and the role played by Buckingham. When the Lords requested that a conference be held in the room dubbed ‘the Painted Chamber’ for the purposes of the Parliament (namely the south wing of the Picture Gallery, situated on the top floor of Bodleian Old Schools quadrangle), the Commons criticized the venue on the grounds that the place chosen was ‘too weak to bear so great a multitude’. Emboldened by Sir Nathaniel Rich, who revived Fuller’s claim that in medieval times the Lords had not automatically determined conference locations but had ‘come down into this House to acquaint us with business’, the House declared that it had arranged for St. Mary’s, the university church, to be used instead. This was a direct challenge to the authority of the upper House, but the Lords, anxious not to jeopardize the king’s chances of obtaining additional subsidies, agreed to change the location. Nevertheless, they denied that the original venue was dangerous and preserved their right to choose by selecting Christ Church Hall rather than St. Mary’s church.
For Members of the Commons, the suitability of the Painted Chamber at Westminster would undoubtedly have been improved had seating been provided or permission been given to keep their hats on. Instead, they were expected to stand bareheaded throughout conferences in deference to their social superiors, the peers, who sat at a table wearing their hats. The only Members entitled to sit at conferences were those assigned to act as reporters, as they needed to take notes. At Oxford in August 1625 ‘a little form was left at the upper end of the table’ for them.
Under Elizabeth the discomfort of standing bareheaded at conferences had never become an issue, probably because conferences tended to be held only infrequently. The 1601 Parliament, for instance, which lasted three months, witnessed only six meetings between the Lords and the Commons, although five of these gatherings were held within the space of a week.
Meetings not only increased in frequency; they also became far longer. In the past, it had been customary to iron out most of the problems contained in a bill before the House conferred with the Lords, but now, complained Edward Alford in March 1607, ‘the whole body of the business’ is ‘discoursed and debated at conferences, which maketh the attendance long’.
Discontent first surfaced in April 1604, when the Commons not only complained that the Painted Chamber was too narrow but that it was a place ‘full of dis-ease’. Two years later, in May 1606, Fuller grumbled that ‘we stand long’.
After 1607 most Members gave up complaining, at least publicly. Ill feeling nevertheless remained. When the Commons’ spokesmen were criticized by their colleagues in March 1621 for failing to identify at a recent conference those responsible for recommending to the king the granting of various patents, Sir Robert Phelips declared that the omission might have been the result of forgetfulness ‘or want of ease in standing’. Eight months later Sir Francis Barrington, in his early sixties, ‘moveth for some course to be taken for avoiding crowding at the meeting, whereby much disease and hurt’, after learning that the lord keeper had been instructed to deliver a message from the king to both Houses in the Painted Chamber.
The widespread pain and discomfort experienced at conferences might easily have led to problems with attendance, but in fact the Commons never encountered the difficulties that constantly plagued its bill committees. On the contrary, the enthusiasm with which Members trooped off to conferences was often equalled only by their eagerness to ensure a good vantage point ahead of their colleagues, as those who made a dash for the Painted Chamber in March 1624 after the Lords requested an immediate meeting demonstrates.
Timing and planning
Just as the Lords always determined the venue, so they invariably chose the time of meeting. This was the case even if it was the Commons that requested the conference.
The Commons did not always react well to being asked for an immediate conference. In April 1606 the Lords suggested meeting either straight away or that afternoon to discuss ecclesiastical matters, whereupon Sir Robert Wingfield protested that the peers’ request was intended to ‘surprise us of a sudden’.
Some of the most thorough planning of the period occurred ahead of the anticipated conference on impositions in May 1614. During the interval between 5 May, when it was decided to seek a meeting with the Lords, and 21 May, when the request was actually sent, the Commons’ planning committee was immensely busy. Indeed, a week elapsed before it made its preliminary report, and at least one further meeting of the committee was deemed necessary in order to allocate parts, ‘that so nothing may be omitted’. In addition, the records in the Tower were searched, the customs books in the Exchequer were inspected, and letters were dispatched to Sir Robert Cotton and two other private individuals regarding documents in their hands.
Not all conferences were as well planned as this though, and some were barely planned at all. In June 1607 Thomas Wentworth, Member for Oxford, confessed that at a conference on the Hostile Laws bill the Commons had ‘met with the Lords unprovided to answer them’.
Poor conference planning seems to have plagued the 1621 Parliament. On 7 March an anxious Sir Robert Phelips proposed to defer the following day’s conference on the patentees on the grounds that they would ‘not be ready’, but his concerns were brushed aside by Sir Edward Coke, who argued that the House already had sufficient grounds on which to proceed against the principal patentee Sir Giles Mompesson, and that it was unnecessary to seek out more. However, the next day’s conference was such a fiasco that on 9 March Edward Alford, declaring that he had warned his colleagues before of ‘haste’, said that he had never seen a Parliament ‘so out of order’. Two months later Sir Edwin Sandys condemned the preparations for the opening conference on the scandalous remarks uttered by the Catholic barrister Edward Floyd as ‘a mere confusion’, for at the appointed hour of meeting ‘no man’ knew ‘what he was to speak’.
There was a limit to how far any conference could be planned, of course, because to a considerable degree the Commons was reliant upon the verbal dexterity and learning of its spokesmen to accomplish its ends. Once the House had agreed the points that were to be made and the roles to be played by each speaker, there was nothing for it but to rely upon the judgment of its spokesmen to know when and how best to intervene during the subsequent debate. Indeed, the House frequently made this point crystal clear to those entrusted with managing conferences on its behalf. Thus the spokesmen appointed to speak in March 1607 on the status of the Scots naturalized by France were instructed ‘to speak interchangeably, as there shall be occasion, to maintain any former doubt or opinion delivered by the committee’, while in April 1628 the spokesmen for the conference on the liberties of the subject were given ‘power to speak, as occasion [shall arise], to make good what [had] formerly [been] propounded there’.
Conference procedure
Before the mid 1620s at least, Members of the Commons were meant to turn up at conferences ahead of the peers, who were required, by their standing orders, to arrive in a body rather than singly so as not to detract from the ‘gravity’ of their House.
In theory the spokesmen of whichever House had initiated a conference were expected to speak first, although it was customary that whenever the Lords were the initiating party a spokesman from the Commons should announce that the representatives of the lower House were ‘ready to hear their lordships’ pleasure’.
From time to time the representatives of one of the two Houses would ask their counterparts to be allowed to consult together privately. The Lords would put their heads together at the table or withdraw into a corner, but for Commons’ deputations, being at least double the size of the peers’, it was permissible (at least before the emergence of conferences involving the grand committees of both Houses) to leave the Painted Chamber briefly. Midway through one meeting in December 1601, for instance, the Commons’ conference committee ‘went forth into another room, and there conferred what speech or answer to make’.
Spokesmen for the Commons were supposed to be given room by their colleagues to discharge their duty. In the cramped conditions of the Painted Chamber this was, of course, easier said than done, but in May 1628 the House threatened to take the names of anyone who ‘shall hinder it’.
Although conferences were generally courteous affairs, it was not unknown for the peers to rebuke the Commons’ representatives. In June 1607 the earl of Northampton upbraided the Commons after the lower House requested that both Houses jointly petition the king in support of those merchants who complained of mistreatment in Spain. The Commons, he declared, was ‘not fit to handle matters of state’, and to petition the king on this matter would be tantamount to saying that James ‘did so sleep in the sobs of his people that it were needful to wake him by a Parliament’.
Ahead of a conference that it requested, the lower House sometimes sent the Lords an outline of the points that it wished to discuss. In February 1621, for example, the Lords were sent five headings which the Commons proposed as the basis for a joint petition from both Houses. However, these were sent only after the Lords had agreed to confer rather than with the messengers who requested the meeting, as one Member had suggested.
Reporting back to the House
Following a conference it was expected that a member of the conference committee should provide the House with a detailed verbal report of proceedings, which would then be summarized by the clerk and entered into the Journal. It seems likely that it was normal practice for reporters to stand by the clerk’s chair while delivering their reports. Certainly Sir Francis Bacon did so on 27 April 1604, when he reported a conference with the Lords on the Union.
It was not permissible to refuse to serve as a reporter. On being called upon to report a conference on the Union in February 1607, Attorney-General Hobart ‘laboured to excuse himself by a great cold he had taken’, whereupon the House, dissatisfied, made him deliver his report anyway. One month later William Holt requested that two other men perform his duty as a reporter, but having been seen to take notes diligently at the conference he too was not allowed to shirk his responsibility.
In general a day or two elapsed between a conference taking place and the report being made so as to allow time for the report to be compiled. This was particularly needful where the debate to be reported was complex or the conference had been of long duration. On 16 February 1610, the day after Salisbury spent two hours laying before the Commons the state of the royal finances, those entrusted with the task of reporting were granted permission to defer making the report until the following morning, as the lord treasurer’s speech ‘was of that length and stood of so many parts’ that they could not compile the report any faster.
Under Elizabeth, and during the opening two sessions of the first Jacobean Parliament, it was the practice to appoint only one reporter per conference. However, as meetings became longer and more complex, the burden of reporting frequently became too great for one man to shoulder alone. Crisis point was reached on 28 February 1607, when Sir Francis Bacon, reporting a conference on the Union two days earlier, ran out of time, his report being ‘very long, consisting of many divisions and particulars and interlaced with much variety of argument and answer on both parts’. Bacon finished delivering his report two days later, whereupon not surprisingly he ‘prayeth the House that at other times they would use some other, and not oppress him with their favours’.
During the 1604 session the burden of reporting was not only fixed upon a single Member, but also the same individual – Sir Francis Bacon – was repeatedly chosen for this task. Over the course of the session Bacon reported no less than fourteen conferences with the Lords (two of them in one day) plus a meeting with the king;
After Bacon’s displacement no other Member assumed the unofficial mantle of prime reporter until Sir Edward Coke resumed his Commons’ career in 1621. Like Bacon, Coke was an exceptionally talented speaker, and during the opening weeks of the session he earned praise from his colleagues for the leadership he displayed, both in the Commons’ chamber and at conferences. However by 1621 he was nearly seventy and no longer at the height of his powers. In November John Chamberlain related hearing that Coke had reported one particular conference with the Lords only ‘indifferently well’, it having been ‘a hard task for so old a memory’.
Conference reporters were often selected from among the most outspoken and influential Members of the Commons, men who, by virtue of their sheer personality, played a leading role in the management of business. The task of directing the Commons was immensely complex, and it is to this subject that our attention now turns.