Speeches, like legislation and petitions, were the stuff of parliaments. Indeed the very word Parliament, deriving as it does from the French verb ‘parler’, announced that England’s representative assembly was first and foremost a forum for debate. However, since there was no equivalent of Hansard in the early seventeenth century, our knowledge of what was said there is necessarily imperfect. We are the prisoners of sources which vary both in their quality and completeness. It seems highly likely, as Conrad Russell observed, that ‘even on the best-reported days’ no more ‘than a quarter of the words spoken in the Commons are preserved’.
What has come down to us are the official Journal, numerous diary accounts and copies of individual speeches produced for distribution. Each of these types of sources, though valuable, is fraught with hidden dangers. In the Journal speeches and debates were generally recorded only in outline, if at all, as it was the prime function of the clerk to record the resolutions of the House and the progress of bills, not the content of individual speeches. Indeed, from 1624 the clerk was urged to avoid creating a formal record of debate in case the king or his ministers used the words recorded in the Journal as grounds for punishing individual Members.
Since we can never be absolutely sure what was said, John Morrill has proposed that the words imputed to Members should be paraphrased rather than quoted.
The obligation to speak
Writing in 1571, John Hooker, the author of a celebrated treatise on parliamentary procedure, declared that every Member of the Commons should be ‘of such audacity as both can and will boldly utter and speak his mind according to his duty, and as occasion shall serve, for no man ought to be silent or dumb in that House, but according to his talent he must and ought to speak in the furtherance of the king and commonwealth’.
A Member whose expertise qualified him to speak was naturally expected to do so. After hearing William Noye allude to events described in some fifteenth century manuscripts, Robert Bowyer, the keeper of the records in the Tower, declared in March 1606 that ‘I am in some sort tied by special duty to declare somewhat touching the last gentleman’s speech’.
As an elected official, a Member was also naturally expected to speak on behalf of his constituents. ‘We must lay down the respects of our own persons’, declared William Hakewill in December 1601, ‘and put on others and their affections … for they speak by us’.
Despite the general obligation to speak, the House sometimes fell quiet, its Members uncertain how to proceed or too angry to continue. On the morning of 5 December 1621, for instance, having received the king’s message ordering it to desist from further discussion of the prince’s marriage, the Commons fell into ‘a long silence’ before anyone dared to speak.
Just as Members were not normally expected to remain silent, neither were they expected to discourage others from speaking. In February 1629 the chancellor of the duchy, Sir Humphrey May, rounded on Sir John Eliot for finding fault with Secretary of State Sir John Coke at every turn: ‘If you be too quick to except against the ministers of His Majesty that serve His Majesty and this House, it will discourage and stop our mouths, whose service you daily command’.
Although Members were obliged to speak whenever possible, some were terrified at the prospect of having to address the House. In December 1601 Zachariah Lok, who represented Southwark, was so overcome with nerves that he shook ‘for very fear’, and, after standing for some time, had to sit down.
Those capable of addressing the Commons often affected reluctance to do so. ‘It hath always been a burden to me to speak in this House’, announced John Pym in 1621, ‘and much against my disposition’. In 1606 Robert Bowyer declared that ‘it is not my desire to hear myself speak’, a claim that was repeated almost verbatim, if less truthfully, by Sir James Perrot in 1621.
It was generally agreed that Members should speak according to the dictates of their conscience, even if what they had to say was unpopular. ‘I have learned it for a rule in this House’, declared one Member in 1601, that ‘it is better to venture credit than conscience’.
Although Members were expected to speak according to their conscience and on behalf of those whom they represented, many also acted as spokesmen for the Court, for private lobby groups or aristocratic patrons. Before the early seventeenth century speaking in more than one capacity – or as Solicitor General Heath put it in 1625, ‘as a private man and the servant of His Majesty’ on the one hand and ‘as a public man for the public good’ on the other – was uncontroversial.
A Member paid to speak on behalf of a particular interest group theoretically committed no offence. Indeed, it was common for individuals to be paid to act as spokesmen by lobby groups in respect of bills. In 1604, for instance, Sir Henry Montagu, the recorder of London, was given £5 by the Brewers’ Company for ‘his fee, and for drawing our bill into the Parliament House’.
Although Members were normally expected to contribute to debate, the time available was not endless. ‘If every man should speak at large and of several matters’, declared William Hakewill during the debates on the Petition of Right, ‘I fear our pains would prove fruitless’.
Over the course of a session the proportion of Members who spoke was never very high, as Notestein observed.
From time to time a Member whose personal interests were closely related to the matter under debate might be barred temporarily from sitting, or at least expected to withdraw of his own volition. In June 1604 James Kirton moved that Edward Seymour, Member for Devon and a party to the bill for settling the lands of the late Protector Somerset, who had been executed half a century earlier, should leave the chamber during the debate, ‘which was conceived to be agreeable with former order and precedent in like cases, and so was ordered’. More often than not, however, the Commons was reluctant to instruct interested parties to leave. Three days after Seymour was ordered out, a similar motion directed at any Member who was an accountant or a receiver was resisted, even though the House was then about to debate the 1601 Act making such officers personally liable for the debts of their office. In April 1606 Sir Edward Hoby gallantly offered to withdraw when the Commons turned its attention to the grievances connected with his wool patent, ‘but the House willed him to stay, having lately given that favour to Sir Roger Aston’. When, eventually, Hoby left the chamber it was at his own wish and ‘contrary to expectation’.
Wherever possible the House drew its definition of interested parties narrowly. Following the order barring Seymour from debate, a motion to extend this instruction to all the servants of the earl of Hertford in the Commons was refused on the grounds that they were ‘no parties themselves’. In March 1624 Barnaby Gooch, the master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and one of the Members for Cambridge University, was permitted to remain in the chamber during the second reading debate on a bill introduced by his own college, despite opposition from Sir Walter Earle, after Sir Humphrey May declared that the order barring interested parties extended only to those whose private estates rather than professional interests were involved. As May correctly pointed out, the Commons had previously allowed the chief officers of the Merchant Adventurers’ Company with seats in the Commons to remain ‘when their charter and the misdemeanours that have been committed by that company have been here questioned’.
Rules of debate
On the floor of the House Members spoke standing, as this made it easier for them to be heard and identified. When Sir Christopher Pigott tried to address the House from his seat in February 1607 he was urged, ‘for order sake’, to stand up.
Those who addressed the House were required to remove their hats; only in committee were they sometimes allowed to remain remained covered.
During a debate in the House Members were generally entitled to speak only once or else, as the Elizabethan commentator Sir Thomas Smith observed, ‘one or two with altercation would spend all the time’.
From at least 1601 some Members began to argue that they should be permitted more than one intervention whenever a debate resulted in the discussion of several different matters.
Members who tried to speak more than once were liable to be reprimanded. During the debate on the alehouse patent in April 1621, for instance, Sir Francis Seymour attempted to speak again only to be interrupted by the Speaker, while in March 1626 Clement Coke was ‘cried down’ for trying to take a second bite of the cherry.
The frequency with which the Commons ignored its own rules to allow Members to speak more than once perhaps reflected the impact on its proceedings of the committee of the whole House. It had long been a rule that, in committee, Members were entitled to speak as often as they liked, because the purpose of a committee was to mull over the details whereas speeches in the House were merely intended ‘to persuade the general point’.
The chief disadvantage of grand committees, however, was that one or two Members might simply dominate proceedings to the exclusion of everyone else. Consequently, until the 1620s, when grand committees were often used to bypass the Speaker, there was no guarantee that matters of importance would be debated in committee. Indeed it was perhaps because the advantages of doing so were not yet clear that on 1 May 1610 the Commons debated whether to consider the Great Contract in committee or in the House.
Although a Member was usually only permitted to speak once per debate in the House, he was entitled to hold forth for as long as he liked once he had the floor providing that he stuck to the point.
Long speeches, however, made for long debates. By 1601 four-hour debates had become commonplace,
Despite Salisbury’s complaint, many Members were acutely aware that long speeches were broadly undesirable as they consumed valuable time.
Members were entitled to use notes or other reference material when delivering a speech.
Not everyone approved of written aids, for once notes were permitted Members might soon begin reading from prepared texts, reducing debate to a series of set-piece, disconnected speeches. In February 1607 William Brocke witheringly remarked of his fellow lawyer Sir Robert Hitcham that he had delivered a speech ‘of great reading, for he read almost two leaves’.
The disapproval directed at those who read from a text in part reflected a dislike of planned speeches. Quite apart from anything else, it was difficult for other Members to respond adequately to a well-planned speech, particularly if it was long and complex. After listening to James Morice in February 1593, James Dalton declared that ‘it is hard upon a sudden for me to answer a long, premeditated speech’, a view echoed by Robert Cecil.
Although some clearly disliked planned speeches, it was unrealistic to expect Members not to sketch out their arguments in advance. While some were certainly ‘dexterous at short and quick returns’, as one contemporary commentator put it,
Just how many Members planned their speeches in advance can never be known. However, by the late 1620s it was not uncommon for Members to make available to their friends their speeches in manuscript form so that these could be copied and considered at leisure,
During debate Members were expected to stick to the point, avoid superfluous motions and not to change the subject before the matter under discussion had been dealt with. Any man who broke this rule was liable to be halted by the Speaker.
The Speaker was not entitled to interrupt a man for raising a subject that he did not wish to hear. In June 1607 Speaker Phelips, doubtless mindful of the king’s views, interrupted Nicholas Fuller in the midst of an attack on High Commission, an action that was ‘contrary, as some conceived, to order’.
Private conversation was not permitted, for as Speaker Coke observed in 1593, ‘only public speeches are to be used’ in the Commons. In March 1624 Edward Alford moved to have Martin Bond summoned to the bar ‘for whispering his partner Bateman in the ear’ when Bateman was called upon to deliver an account of the money in the East India Company ships then in the Thames.
Efforts to stamp out heckling met with only limited success. In March 1604 Edward Hext, outraged at having been hissed at two days earlier, called for Members to listen with more reverence in future, a motion that was ‘generally liked’ and ‘well approved’. Three months later, however, Sir Lewis Lewknor also suffered the indignity of being hissed down, whereupon the House threatened to call any further offenders to the bar and charge them with ‘breach of order and contempt to the House’.
Just as Members were not supposed to heckle one another, neither were they entitled to use ‘reviling or nipping words’. On the contrary, they were generally expected to address each other through the chair and to avoid referring to one another by name. A Member who wished to mention the previous speaker often alluded to ‘the gentleman that spoke last’, while the Speaker was often referred to respectfully as ‘sir’. In this way it was hoped that heated exchanges would be prevented. However, as Sir Thomas Smith observed in the 1560s, Members were inclined to ‘make their reasons as violent and as vehement the one against the other as they may’.
Those who engaged in personal abuse were seldom reprimanded, but from time to time the House decided that a Member had gone too far. In March 1606 Solicitor General Doddridge was called to the bar after bitterly questioning the loyalty of William Noye for opposing a grant of subsidy.
The requirement that Members refrain from making personal attacks was not the only limitation placed on their freedom of speech. In 1625 Sir Edward Coke declared that ‘many men’, including himself, ‘will speak in Parliament that which they dare not speak otherwise’, but as Hakewill observed, anyone rash enough to ‘break forth into intemperate and indiscreet speeches either against the king or against the government in general, or against persons in great place or office in state’ was liable to be interrupted, called to the bar as a delinquent and sent to the Tower.
The convention that Members should not attack the monarch was so ingrained that it is perhaps remarkable that it should ever have been called into question. Nevertheless, in May 1614 both Sir Edwin Sandys (despite his later remarks) and Thomas Wentworth of Henley came perilously close to accusing James of being a tyrant.
On the face of it, Sandys later regretted his rash outburst. In February 1621, soon after the Commons was officially warned ‘not to turn liberty of speech into licence or break the reverence due to a sovereign’, he proposed that the Commons draw up a bill to guarantee the Commons the right of free speech and ‘to punish the extravagant speeches of this House’. What Sandys had in mind is unclear, but given that he proposed that the measure should also include a clause ‘against misinformation of His Majesty, of any man’s speech, either in Parliament or after’, it would seem that he was just as concerned to protect individual Members from the king as to prevent violent speeches from being made in the Commons.
Just as those who criticized the king were liable to be punished, so too were any who defamed the Commons. When, during the purveyance debates of April 1604, a furious Griffith Payne – a purveyor himself – accused the House of seeking to ‘dishonour the king, disgrace the Council’ and ‘discredit the opinion of the judges’, he was summoned to the bar, charged with contempt and (on the pretext that he was a mayor and thus incapable of sitting) suspended from membership.
Only the monarch was permitted to restrict the range of subjects that the Commons could debate. Consequently, when Convocation protested in June 1604 that the House had no right to discuss religion it was ignored.
Members were in theory barred from debating any matter relating to the royal prerogative without the monarch’s express permission. Insofar as this prohibition affected the king alone, the stricture was uncontroversial. Treason, for instance, was out of bounds because, as the solicitor general observed in 1604, it was a crime directed solely against the person of the king.
Although there were rules governing the language that Members should use and the subjects they could discuss, there were none to regulate gestures. Members might be required to refer to one another by name, but they were not explicitly forbidden from waving their hands around or pointing at each other. In December 1601 the godly Sir Francis Hastings jabbed his finger at John Bond while accusing him of being ‘far from religion’ for opposing the Sabbath bill.
Pointing was often highly intimidating. During the subsidy debate of 5 August 1625 the courtiers in the House grew ‘fearful’ for themselves and anxious for their friends, ‘whom they saw aimed and pointed at’.
From time to time Members were reminded that what was said in the chamber was meant to remain secret. In 1589, for instance, they were admonished ‘that speeches used in this House should not be made table talk nor in notes in writing to any not Members of this House’.
It is perhaps not surprising that many Members were willing to share with others the news of what was happening in Parliament. After all, as elected representatives they were duty bound to keep their constituents informed. However, while few may have seen anything amiss in disclosing the contents of Commons’ debates to all and sundry, many took a different view regarding the relaying of reports to the king. As we have seen, Members enjoyed – within certain prescribed limits – the right of free speech, but if the king learned in detail what they were saying they might be unwilling, for fear of punishment, to express their views openly. Once it had reached a decision the House had a duty to notify the king via the Speaker, but in the meantime it did not expect that the king should be kept abreast of debates, particularly as there was no telling how accurate the reports reaching him might be. The day after James castigated Members for delivering long, empty speeches on the Union, Sir Robert Drury complained to Salisbury that Members’ meanings had been ‘wrested by the carriers, contrary to all honest construction’.
The idea that the king should not wish to be kept informed in detail of debates in the Commons was, of course, entirely unrealistic. James in particular was eager to know what was being said in the Commons, and since many in the House were the holders of high office or occupied positions at Court they were well placed to divulge to him what they knew. Their colleagues were perfectly well aware of this fact, and whenever the House was berated by the king for words uttered in the chamber suspicion naturally fell on them. In May 1604, for example, ‘out of a fear that the king was much misinformed’, every Member who had access to the king was urged to ‘purge himself’ of the charge of telling tales, ‘either to His Majesty or any privy councillor’. Ten years later, after James wrote to the Commons demanding to know by what right the House had decided to go into recess, John Hoskins declared that ‘it appeared by the king’s letter that the orders of Parliament were not observed, that any should go and acquaint the king what was in debate here’, whereupon Secretary Winwood announced ‘that he thought himself was particularly aimed at’.
Giving a speech
When addressing the House, a Member was expected, as Hakewill observed, ‘to speak with a loud voice’, and to ‘turn his face so as he may be best heard and seen’. Anyone who spoke ‘with a low and soft voice’ was invariably ‘called upon to speak out’.
When a Member addressed the House it was helpful if his voice made a pleasing sound. Sir Robert Phelips, perhaps the most widely admired speaker of his age was, according to Eliot, blessed with ‘a voice and pronunciation of much sweetness’ and ‘an affected cadence and delivery’. Others were not so fortunate: poor Hugh Beeston suffered from a stammer,
Those who addressed the House were expected to eschew rhetorical devices, which, as Sir Simon Weston remarked in 1626, ‘take up time and are to no purpose’.
Like many in the early seventeenth century, James regarded oratory as a form of populism, and like many of those around him he often employed the word ‘orator’ as a pejorative. In December 1621 he complained to the Commons of ‘some tribunitial orators amongst you’ and of the ‘ejaculations of some foul-mouthed orators in your House’.
Although Members were expected to avoid florid and over-elaborate speeches, it was nevertheless hoped that they would seek to sharpen and enliven their speeches. Those in particular who had been trained from an early age to employ rhetoric in their speeches both at school and university were naturally inclined to believe that rhetoric was essential for clarity.
It was not, of course, necessary to be trained in the art of public speaking to perform well in debate. In March 1606 Walter Gawen, a man of no known education and with no experience of public office, opposed compounding for purveyance ‘with good conceits, himself being a plain man’. Gawen, who sat for Heytesbury, was painfully aware of his lack of education, and on getting up to speak again three weeks later he remarked that ‘I am sure the wise men of this House marvel that I speak at this time’, although of all those who spoke during the debate on the bill to relieve poor prisoners, he was the only one whose contribution the diarist Robert Bowyer chose to record.
If the lack of an education was not necessarily a handicap, a good schooling was no guarantee of oratorical ability either. Indeed, some of the most vocal lawyer-Members were not highly regarded as speakers by their colleagues. The Cambridge educated Gray’s Inn barrister Nicholas Fuller, who failed to appreciate the oratorical skills of Sir Francis Bacon, was lampooned by some of his colleagues in about 1607 as being ‘fuller of devotion than eloquence’. The future attorney-general William Noye was dismissed as ‘no great orator’ by James Howell, who like Noye served in the 1628-9 assembly.
Nonetheless, many of the best speakers in the House – such as Bacon, Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir Edward Coke, Sir John Eliot, Sir Dudley Digges and Sir Robert Phelips (whom Sir John Oglander remembered as ‘the best orator I ever heard’)
Those who captivated the House tended to garnish their speeches with epithets, maxims and witty stories. Sir Humphrey May was considered worth listening to because ‘he was never without store’ of apophthegms.
Those whose speeches were well received were customarily applauded with expressions of ‘well moved’.
Although those who spoke might hope to impress their listeners with their erudition, elegance and wit, they naturally also expected to persuade. No matter how clever or humorous its content, a speech that failed to shape opinion or change minds ultimately failed in its objective. In May 1610 Sir Francis Bacon sought to convince the Commons to set aside the wording of a message to the king suggested by Sir Robert Harley, but his ‘reasons and persuasion (though delivered by an excellent speaker and with all advantage that wit, words or eloquence could add to them)’ are said to have ‘moved the House no whit’.
Many Members undoubtedly entered the chamber impervious to the arguments of their opponents, but some, particularly those least well informed about the issues under discussion, appear to have approached debate with an open mind. During the 1606 debates on the legality of impositions, Sir John Savile, whose lack of anything more than a rudimentary legal training inclined him to listen carefully to the lawyer-Members, declared that he had been ‘almost transported to the other opinion’ by Bacon, but on hearing the counter-arguments he had ‘further considered the matter’.
Those who cared to listen to their colleagues sometimes had their minds changed. ‘I was for the perfect Union’, announced Sir Robert Wingfield in May 1607, ‘but he that spake last except three yesterday hath seduced me’.
It was not unusual for a Member who wished to address the Commons to consult some of his friends who were fellow Members before doing so, ‘especially such men as are gracious with the House’, in order that they might second him.