The Speaker
The most senior of the Commons’ officers was its Speaker. Seated in a raised chair under the royal coat of arms at the east end of St. Stephen’s Chapel, the Speaker presided over the House’s daily business. Unlike the House’s other two chief officers, the clerk and the serjeant-at-arms, the Speaker was chosen from among the Members of the Commons, and for that reason his office automatically ended when Parliament was dissolved.
Although the Speaker was an elected official, his appointment was too important to be left to chance, as it was through him that the Crown expected to control the Commons’ agenda.
Little attempt was made to conceal the fact that the Speaker was a Crown appointee. In her Golden Speech of 1601, Elizabeth openly referred to Speaker Croke as the man ‘whom we did constitute the mouth of the lower House’.
The king was guided in his choice of Speaker by his chief ministers. In December 1625 Heneage Finch acknowledged that he was bound to Buckingham for his appointment, ‘as I am much otherwise’.
Though legal expertise seems to have been considered essential, previous parliamentary experience was merely preferred. The majority of Speakers between 1559 and 1629 had sat in two or more parliaments before their appointment, and a few were real veterans, like Sir Christopher Wray (1571) and Sir Edward Phelips (1604), who had sat in six and five respectively. Nevertheless, relatively inexperienced men sometimes occupied the Speaker’s chair. Ranulphe Crewe’s only parliamentary service before he occupied the Speakership in 1614 was as a borough Member in the short-lived Parliament of 1597-8 more than sixteen years earlier. His successor, Richardson, had no previous parliamentary experience at all, nor did Sir John Puckering, Speaker in 1584. The appointment of novices or men with limited Commons experience suggests that the Crown sometimes had difficulty in finding a suitable candidate. In 1614 the Crown almost abandoned the search for a lawyer and nearly bestowed the chair on Sir Thomas Lowe, a merchant with considerable parliamentary experience.
A Speaker was not normally expected to seek re-election to the Commons after his term of office had ended. This convention developed after the Speakership of Sir Thomas Gargrave in 1559, and was observed by all of Gargrave’s pre-Civil War successors except Sir John Puckering and Sir Thomas Crewe, both of whom served two consecutive terms as Speaker, and Sir Edward Coke, who resumed his Commons’ career during the 1620s despite having occupied the chair in 1593. Ahead of the 1628 session Ranulphe Crewe was urged to return to the Commons, presumably in imitation of Coke. In the event he decided against doing so, not out of consideration for convention but because, once in the House, he would be called upon to embarrass the government by explaining the circumstances behind his recent removal as lord chief justice.
Following his formal election, the Speaker, accompanied by his fellow Members, attended the king, before whom he would once again plead insufficiency. Once his objections had been brushed aside, the Speaker delivered a fulsome oration in praise of the king. This customarily ended in a series of four requests, concerning privilege from arrest for Members, their servants and goods; freedom of speech ‘tempered with duty’; access to the king by the Speaker ‘when the business of the House shall require it’; and permission for the House to punish its own Members.
At the start of each day’s business, the Speaker read aloud a prayer. Unlike the clerk’s prayer which preceded it, the Speaker’s prayer was special as it was ‘fitly conceived for that time and purpose’.
As well as presiding over debate, the Speaker also established the order of business, deciding which bills should be read first. However, his scope for determining the agenda was circumscribed, even in respect of legislation. While the Speaker normally decided which bills were to be handled he could not refuse if the House demanded that a particular measure be read.
The Speaker was meant to remain aloof during bill debates,
The Speaker was not explicitly prohibited from drafting or introducing legislation himself, but the impartiality expected of him meant that he normally did neither. The exception, naturally, was Phelips, who in May 1604 brought in a bill desired by James regarding hunting with guns, which he himself had almost certainly drafted.
One of the responsibilities of the Speaker was to appoint tellers whenever the House divided.
During a division the Speaker was expected to remain impartial. However, in May 1610 Sir Henry Montagu argued that in the event of a tie the Speaker, being a Member himself and therefore sitting in a ‘double capacity’, might cast a deciding vote. Two months later, in a thinly attended House, Phelips took Montagu at his word.
Just as custom prevented the Speaker from drafting legislation, so too it normally stopped him from serving on committees. However, on 2 April 1604 ‘it was thought fit that Mr. Speaker should attend the committee for penning the reasons in Sir Francis Goodwin’s case’, and on 23 May 1604 Phelips was the first Member appointed to the committee for the bill to prevent unlawful hunting, a measure which, as we have seen, he had almost certainly drafted himself. During the 1606 session, Phelips was appointed to a committee connected with the bill for the better execution of the laws regarding purveyance (30 January 1606), and was required to attend the final meeting of the committee for the bill against popish recusants (26 May 1606).
The Speaker could do little without the permission of his colleagues. At the beginning of each Parliament, it was the House that conferred upon him the authority to issue warrants to the clerk of the Crown requiring writs for by-elections.
During debate a Speaker who wished to retain the goodwill of the House would gauge its mood and be guided by it. He would therefore not put the question until the House ‘conceive it timely’, as Hakewill observed, nor would he frame the question himself. A wise Speaker would instead announce ‘what he conceives the question ought to be, and in what words he intendeth to make it’, and if his colleagues ‘dislike that which is propounded’ he was to await their further direction. Once the wording was agreed, the Speaker would emphasize the will of the House by saying that ‘by your favour, I will put the question’.
The Speaker’s freedom of action was limited because Members regarded him as their mouthpiece rather than their leader. Through him the Commons expressed its collective will, replying to messages sent by the Lords, communicating its thanks to the king, pronouncing punishment on those found guilty of contempt towards the House, or presenting the king with the subsidy bill.
Though the Commons always accepted without serious protest the Crown’s choice of Speaker, its Members considered him primarily their servant rather than the king’s. The latter, as the real author of the Speaker’s appointment, naturally saw matters differently and expected the Speaker to report to him or his ministers regularly, both for information and instruction. During the heated purveyance debates of February and March 1606, Phelips kept Salisbury closely informed of developments, and in one letter promised not to vary ‘from the matter whereunto I shall be prescribed’. He did not altogether forget that he was the House’s servant, as he tried to persuade James and Salisbury to moderate their anger towards the Commons over the purveyance bill, whose author, John Hare, he portrayed as an ‘inconsiderate firebrand’ with limited support in the House.
As well as communicating by letter, the Speaker often waited on the king in person, usually at the beginning of the day, when he would confer and receive instructions. These early morning meetings often delayed the start of business. On the morning of 5 April 1604, for example, Members were kept waiting from eight o’clock until ten while Phelips discussed with James the Commons’ refusal to confer with the judges over the Buckinghamshire election.
After the Speaker had consulted the king, he would notify the House of the royal wishes. However, since they regarded the Speaker as primarily their mouthpiece rather than the king’s, many Members felt uneasy that he was required to act as a royal spokesman. Their disquiet increased in May 1610, when they discovered that a message ordering them not to consider the king’s right to levy impositions actually originated with the Council. Sir Herbert Croft declared that it had ‘grown into too much custom that the Speaker should bring any message from the king, but when he was sent by the House’, while Sir Edward Montagu announced that the lords of the Council were neither ‘mediators nor messengers’. The crisis lasted eight days, and was only resolved when James tacitly signalled that he would permit impositions to be debated after all.
The Speaker was not expected to manage business for the king single-handed, but looked for guidance and support to the privy councillors in the House, who seated themselves near the chair. When Phelips was pressed to know whether the message requiring the House to abandon its plan to debate impositions was from James ‘or from some great person’, for instance, he turned to the government ministers present before replying that he had received it ‘from the body of the Council’.
The knowledge that successive Speakers saw themselves primarily as royal officials rather than the servants of the House had the effect of eroding their authority. Treated with contempt by their parliamentary colleagues, their already limited powers increasingly became severely circumscribed. In February 1610, for instance, an attempt was made to prevent the Speaker from deciding the result of a debate without putting a distinct question first. Although the motion was not then adopted, an order to this effect was passed in April 1614.
Although the committee of the whole House significantly reduced his power, the Speaker was not left entirely impotent. Bills could still not be read unless the Speaker was in the chair, nor could messages be delivered to the House. Furthermore committees, even those composed of all Members, had to report their deliberations to the House before any action could be taken on their resolutions. Consequently, the Speaker often resumed the chair immediately after a sitting of the grand committee. Should the Speaker not wish to attend the committee, or if he were required to be absent, he would sometimes be ordered to return after the committee had concluded its business. On 28 May 1621, for example, the House ordered Richardson ‘to be here at four’ when the grand committee was expected to have finished. On 6 July 1625, too, the House instructed ‘Mr. Speaker to be here at eight’ the next morning after a sitting of the grand committee.
The Speaker’s residual power meant that the king and his ministers continued to hold a trump card up their sleeves. By delaying the arrival of the Speaker, or causing him to be absent, the king could severely disrupt the business of the House. On the final day of the 1628 session, Charles played this card to great effect when he detained the Speaker at Whitehall for two hours, thereby preventing the Commons from passing a Remonstrance complaining that Tunnage and Poundage was being levied without parliamentary authority.
Before 1790 no Speaker enjoyed the use of an official residence,
Despite lacking a permanent fixed residence, the Speaker was expected to provide hospitality to his fellow Members, even during an adjournment. When Sir Thomas Crompton suggested that the Speaker should be ‘enjoined to keep a table during this recess as he doth while the House sitteth’, Richardson replied that ‘he wondereth that any gentleman should move to have him ordered to keep it’, as anyone was welcome to come to his table at any time.
The Speaker was supposed to suspend his legal practice while in office, even when the House stood adjourned.
As well as his official salary and the retainer paid by London, the Speaker was entitled to payment for every private bill brought before him. Prior to1587 a fee of £3 was normal, but thereafter the rate increased to £5.
Rewarding the Speaker after a bill was enacted or awaiting the Royal Assent seems to have been commonplace. When the Coopers’ Company learned that its bill had successfully passed through both Houses in 1597, it gave the Speaker four bottles of claret and a runlet of sack at a cost of 29s. 9d.
The Speaker was assisted by the clerk of the Commons, who often wrote letters for him and looked up precedents.
The clerk of the Commons and his servants
Described as the ‘usefullest man of the House’ by Sir James Bagg in 1628,
Three men occupied the clerkship between 1603 and 1629. Following the death of the long-serving Elizabethan clerk, Fulke Onslow, the office was bestowed upon Ralph Ewens, a servant of the master of the Posts, Sir John Stanhope. A Yorkshireman who had represented Beverley in the 1601 Parliament, Ewens was educated at Gray’s Inn, where he became an ancient in February 1604. From August 1603 he was also auditor to Anne of Denmark.
In his patent of appointment the clerk of the Commons was designated the under-clerk of the parliaments to distinguish him from the clerk of the Lords, whose formal title was clerk of the parliaments.
Although the clerk was a royal appointee, he did not, unlike the Speaker, report to the king or his ministers. He might, of course, be prevailed upon to supply the government with copies of particular documents, but even so tact was needed to avoid creating the impression that he was at the government’s beck and call. In August 1610 Ewens sent Lord Treasurer Salisbury a copy of the draft Great Contract after the latter sent him a request, which came not from Salisbury directly but from one of the joint keepers of the Tower records.
Political considerations undoubtedly influenced the choice of clerk, but the appointments of Ewens and Wright suggest that it was also considered important that the successful candidate should have a sound knowledge of law. Certainly he needed a good grounding in French, and probably also in Latin: in April 1610 Ewens was required to translate a statute of 1353 from law French into English, while in 1621 Wright was ordered to read aloud a record of 1399 in French.
Although the duties of the clerk were not formally set down, they formed the subject of a tract written in about 1611 by the veteran Member and procedural expert William Hakewill. Part of a wider treatise on the workings of the Commons, this document was never published in full and the original manuscript now appears to be lost.
Despite the lack of a handbook, it is possible to reconstruct the duties of the clerk from a number of sources. The clerk sat bareheaded below the Speaker at a table ‘upon which he writeth and layeth his books’.
One of the chief duties of the clerk was to record the progress of each bill and the names of committee members as they were appointed. This was no easy task, as the assembled throng shouted out the names of Members to be appointed, so that, as Hakewill observed, the clerk wrote down only ‘such whose names (in that confusion) he can distinctly hear’.
Less easy to understand are gaps in the legislative record. In 1606 Ewens failed to note down either the first or second readings of the Muscovy Company bill, although he recorded the naming of additional members to the committee and the fact that the bill was eventually ordered to sleep.
The clerk was not meant to record speeches in case the king used his notes to punish Members who had spoken out of turn. However, neither Ewens nor Wright before 1624 heeded this restriction. Indeed, Wright took down more speeches in 1621 than anyone else, though the accuracy and completeness of his reporting often compares unfavourably with many of the diarists.
On the face of it, the intervention of the committee for privileges appeared to meet the needs of the House very satisfactorily. In the final version of the Journal the anonymity of each speaker was preserved while in the earlier draft the House got a formal record of its debates. However, there was an obvious flaw in this process: the king or his ministers might insist on seeing the Journal before a fair copy could be produced. This consideration should have led the House to check the clerk’s notes with great regularity, yet astonishingly it was not until 1610 that the privileges committee was ordered to examine Ewens’ notebooks, which had been kept since 1604.
The Commons’ failure to keep a more watchful eye on the note-taking habits of its clerk had serious consequences in 1621, when Wright’s habit of recording not only the content of speeches but also their authors provided the government with valuable ammunition against troublesome Members. Immediately following the dissolution, before Wright could produce a fair copy of his Journal, William Mallory was told by a member of the Privy Council who interrogated him ‘that if I had been as careful to look to the clerk as I was to the Speaker many things had not been known that now comes [sic] to light’.
Wright was not entirely to blame for exposing Members to such censure. Unlike Ewens he had never been a Member of the House himself, and before 1621 the only Parliament in which he had served as clerk had been the short-lived assembly of 1614. Greater fault lay with the small committee for surveying the Journal which had been appointed soon after the Parliament commenced. Consisting of some of the most seasoned Parliament-men,
Not all Members were keen to ensure that the clerk refrained from recording speeches. During the 1628 debates on the subject, Wright’s friend Sir Nathaniel Rich argued that the House needed a formal record of its debates for future reference. It is not difficult to see why, especially at a time when fundamental differences arose between the king and the Commons over property rights and the liberties of the subject. However, since he was well aware of the need to safeguard Members from arrest and preserve their right to free speech, Rich proposed the creation of a second Journal devoted exclusively to debates in which reported speeches would remain anonymous. According to the diarist John Newdigate, this suggestion was well received, but no other source bears out this claim and there is no evidence that a parallel Journal was ever started.
Before 1610 the clerk never recorded committee proceedings. However, in April 1604 the committee appointed to examine the sheriff of Buckinghamshire handed Ewens a note of its deliberations for inclusion in the Journal,
The Journal and the book on grand committees were not, of course, the only records compiled by the clerk. In 1621 Wright kept a ‘book of orders’ consisting of extracts from the Journal, and a similar volume may also have been compiled in 1610.
As well as keeping the formal record of the House and compiling works of reference, the clerk occasionally performed secretarial duties for the Speaker. Thus in May 1607 a warrant to arrest one John Smyth for serving a subpoena on Philip Gawdy was ‘framed by the clerk’, while in March 1621 Sir George More announced that the responsibility for writing letters to justices of assize for staying trials of Members of the Commons ‘belongeth to the clerk’.
Of course, the clerk was first and foremost an officer of the House rather than of the Speaker, and his duties accordingly reflected that fact. When the Commons received the original Instrument of the Union from the Lords on 20 November 1606 it fell to Ewens to make a copy for the House.
The clerk was the keeper of the Commons’ records as well as its clerical officer. Naturally he kept the Journal and any other books he created himself, such as those relating to orders, precedents and grand committees. However, he also took custody of any evidence supplied to the House. For example, on 17 May 1628 it was ordered that various patents and warrants relating to the petition of the Goldsmiths’ Company were to be handed to him.
The clerk performed several other important functions in addition to his clerical and archival duties. One of the most important was to look up precedents from the books in his keeping. These he communicated to the Speaker in a whisper rather than by public speech. He performed the same service for the chairman of the committee of the whole House, for on 1 June 1610 Ewens sat alongside Richard Martin ‘to explain and make known the orders’.
Prayers and bill readings were usually the only occasions on which the clerk was required to address the House. However, he sometimes read out other documents, such as the list of nine grievances delivered in by Nicholas Fuller in May 1606.
An important duty of the clerk was to provide books and stationery for himself and his servants. Like the clerk of the parliaments he was supplied by the king’s printer, and certainly before 1610 he was reimbursed in full. Thus on 26 November 1605 Ewens was paid £21 14s. 2d. ‘for books, parchment, paper and other necessaries employed and expended for the use and service of the said House upon a bill of particulars made by His Majesty’s printer and himself’.
At the beginning of each Parliament the clerk recorded the names of those Members who swore the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy prior to taking their seats. When, in February 1621, a question arose over whether all Members had actually taken the oaths, Sir Warwick Hele proposed that Wright ‘may produce the names of those which he hath that were sworn’.
It may also have fallen to the clerk to fix notices and committee lists to the door of the chamber; certainly, documents were displayed in this way in 1614, 1621 and 1624.
The increase in fees for copies may not have been simple profiteering but a response to uncertain remuneration from other sources. The clerk was entitled to an annual salary from the Crown of £10, but in practice his pay was often seriously in arrears. Shortly before the opening of the 1604 session Ewens received £5 from the Exchequer, but he received nothing more until August 1610, when he was paid £40 ‘for his sundry pains and charges since the beginning of this Parliament’.
As well as his official salary, the clerk was entitled to a fee of 6s. 8d. for every licence of absence granted by the House. However, as most Members seem to have absented themselves without ever receiving a formal licence, the value of this perquisite is doubtful. Only one licence was issued in 1614, and only two and three in 1624 and 1625 respectively. The 32 issued in the 1605/6 session, worth a total of £10 13s. 4d., were exceptional, as were the 33 granted in 1626.
It seems likely that, like the serjeant-at-arms, the clerk levied a fee from each Member at the beginning of every Parliament, probably as they were sworn in. Certainly in April 1614 Sir Richard Paulet recorded paying 2s. 6d. ‘to the clerk of the Parliament [sic] and his man’.
Bills yielded fees for the clerk in more ways than one. In 1606 the Cordwainers, who had opposed a measure hostile to its interests in the previous session, gave him 16s. 4d. ‘to give notice of any bill that should pass this Parliament concerning the Company and for other charges spent about the same’. In 1621 the Grocers paid Wright 22s. ‘in regard he should give this Company notice of the Apothecaries’ proceedings’. As a trained lawyer, Wright seems to have been particularly adept at picking up fees from lobbyists keen to exploit his legal qualifications. When the Tylers and Bricklayers preferred legislation in 1621, they gave him 22s. ‘for his opinion upon our bill’. The Grocers gave him an equivalent sum that same year ‘for his advice’ regarding their petition to the House.
A hidden financial benefit enjoyed by the clerk was that the Commons made a contribution to the cost of his staff. In July 1607, for example, Members ordered that Ewens’ four servants should be paid 20s. each out of their collection. Lobbyists, too, sometimes rewarded the clerk’s men separately. According to the Elizabethan commentators, the authors of private legislation were expected to pay 10s. per bill for this purpose, over and above the 40s. due to the clerk himself. The detailed accounts kept by many of the London livery companies, however, indicate that when this money was paid at all, smaller amounts were generally forthcoming. In 1614, for example, the Bakers paid just 5s. to ‘the under-clerks of the Parliament House’ in connection with their bill.
Each of the clerk’s servants probably had a particular set of duties to perform. Valentine Sayre, for instance, carried Ewens’ bags.
Whenever the deputy clerk replaced his master, he created a vacancy himself. Whenever this occurred it seems likely that it was normal for one of the junior clerks to step into his shoes, but when Wright’s inexperienced son took over from his father in February 1621 the House debated whether some of the lawyer-Members should take turns to sit alongside him. It was certainly not unknown for a Member to assume clerical duties in the House, for in 1587 William Onslow, sitting for Penryn, had deputized for the clerk during his illness, and twice in 1604 Sir Thomas Lake read royal messages to the House because Ewens could not decipher James’s handwriting.
It is unclear whether the clerk was provided with a work room. Under Elizabeth he certainly occupied an office within the Palace of Westminster. Located in the south-west corner of St. Stephen’s Chapel, it is first mentioned in the Works’ accounts for the late 1560s, and the records of the Coopers’ Company suggest that it may still have existed in 1593.
The serjeant-at-arms and his servants
Like the clerk, the serjeant-at-arms was appointed by the king rather than the Commons and held office for life. By the terms of his patent, he was required to ‘attend upon His Majesty’s person when there is no Parliament, and at the time of every Parliament to attend upon the Speaker of the House of Commons’. Because he served both the king and the Commons, the serjeant received, in effect, two salaries.
Unlike the Speaker, who sometimes found it difficult to serve two masters, the serjeant rarely found the two sides of his office to be in conflict. Nevertheless, in November 1610, when the House sought to establish on whose authority thirty of its Members had privately conferred with the king, the serjeant was obliged to explain that it was he who had notified the Members involved to attend the meeting after receiving a list of their names from the chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Julius Caesar.
Between 1590 and his death in mid-March 1610 the office of serjeant was filled by Roger Wood, a prosperous man judging by his will, who received a grant of arms in 1606 and leased property in the London parishes of St. Sepulchre and St. Andrew’s, Holborn. His successor, Edward Grimston, claimed to be ‘old and far stricken in years’ in 1628, and held the post until his death in 1640.
It was the serjeant’s responsibility to carry the silver mace, the main symbol of royal authority in the Commons, which normally rested on the clerk’s table below the Speaker’s chair.
Inside the Palace of Westminster, one of the serjeant’s main duties was to control access to the Commons, which was gained by passing through two sets of doors. Serjeant Wood assigned several of his servants at a time to act as doorkeepers, as did his predecessor, Ralph Bowyer. Indeed, no less than three of Wood’s men performed this duty in 1606.
Only the officers and Members of the House were normally permitted inside the chamber, although access to the lobby was less restricted. Perhaps to prevent strangers from entering, the serjeant compiled (or was provided with) a book of Members’ names and their constituencies at the start of each Parliament. This book, which duplicated the register created at around the same time by the clerk of the Crown, may also have enabled the serjeant to levy fees from each Member. On the first day of the Parliament each knight of the shire paid him 4s., each burgess gave him 2s. and both paid a further 3s. 8d. to the doorkeeper. In return, Members had their names entered in the serjeant’s book.
As well as controlling access to the Commons, the serjeant and his staff were meant to keep the entry clear. The inner door dividing the Commons from the lobby was often left open to allow Members to come and go freely, but this also meant that Members, as well as occasional intruders, tended to congregate at the doorway and chatter, disrupting proceedings and making it difficult to pass in and out easily.
As the Commons’ doorkeeper, the serjeant was well placed to fine latecomers, though he was instructed to do so only once, in June 1628.
Although termed ‘our usher’ by Edward Nicholas in 1621,
It was unusual for the serjeant to place a close guard on those he was sent to fetch, although in March 1604 Wood was instructed to bring up one man in such a way that he should ‘speak with none in the meantime but in the serjeant’s hearing’.
No-one except the serjeant was permitted to bring prisoners into the House, not even his servants. Indeed, when it was suggested that the sheriff of Shropshire be brought to the bar in May 1604 it was decided to await the return of Serjeant Wood, who was on another errand, as ‘no delinquent is to be brought in but by the serjeant with his mace’.
Many of those arrested by the serjeant were subsequently gaoled by the House, and were escorted by him to prison. In February 1621, for example, Grimston was instructed to conduct the monopolist Sir Francis Michell to the Tower ‘on foot through London streets’.
One of the serjeant’s most important duties was to run messages. On 2 June 1607 Wood was dispatched to the Court of Wards ‘to entreat the committee [for the Hostile Laws bill] to come into the House’, and on 25 June 1628 Grimston was ‘sent to all the committees, to let them know that, by order of the House, they are dissolved for the present’.
As well as carrying messages for the House, the serjeant notified the Speaker whenever messengers arrived from the Lords. Sometimes he brought messages to the Commons himself. In 1604 the imprisoned Member Roger Brereton ‘delivereth a petition to the serjeant’, who in turn handed it to the Member for Preston, William Holt.
As well as serving as the Commons’ macebearer, usher, messenger, gaoler, purveyor and cleaner, the serjeant performed a range of miscellaneous duties, such as collecting from Members granted leave of absence their contribution to the House’s collection for the poor. At the end of the 1614 Parliament money undistributed from the previous session was placed in his hands.
It was not only the House which benefited from the services of the serjeant. Through him lobbyists could gain the Speaker’s attention, particularly during the late Elizabethan period, when the clerk of the Commons was frequently ill and served by deputy. In 1589, for instance, the serjeant was paid 20s. by the Curriers’ Company of London for helping ‘to procure our reading’, and it gave him the same sum again in 1593. During the 1576 session the Speaker was informed that the serjeant was well acquainted with the London Cordwainers’ Company, as ‘they be his clients’.
As noted earlier, the serjeant collected two salaries, one for his Commons’ duties and the other for attending the king. Each was worth 12d. per day, producing a combined annual income of £36 10s., though payment seems to have been irregular. In addition, at the end of each Parliament the serjeant was permitted to keep various items of furniture provided for the Commons. In 1628, for example, he claimed ‘one joined table with drawing boxes’. The remove to Oxford in August 1625 evidently prevented Grimston from exercising this customary right, as he was given 20s. in cash in lieu of two tables.
Although the serjeant was well remunerated, the sums he received from the king formed only a fraction of his income. One of his most important sources of additional income was the money paid to him by every Member at the beginning of every Parliament, this being (as previously mentioned) 4s. from every knight of the shire and 2s. from every burgess. As the number of burgesses rose (from 378 in 1604 to 403 in 1629), the value of this levy increased, from £55 16s. to £58 6s. In addition to this fee, the serjeant, like the clerk, received a share of the proceeds of the Members’ collection, which was normally distributed at the end of each session. The sums involved varied significantly from one session to another. In 1601 the serjeant received £30, whereas in 1606 he was given just £12, though a further £6 was paid to his servants. In 1624 he was granted £10 ‘by precedent’, and additional sums were paid to his men.
The serjeant further supplemented his income with fees from lobbyists. Like the Speaker and the clerk, he was entitled to payment for each private bill laid before the House. His schedule of fees was set out in detail in the early 1640s by the then serjeant John Hunt for the benefit of his Irish counterpart. According to Hunt, who claimed that his rates were the same as those ‘taken and recovered by my predecessors’, the serjeant was entitled to receive 20s. for a private bill unless the party involved compounded at a lower rate. If the bill concerned more than one person or a corporation, the amount due was normally 40s. For every 20s. paid to the serjeant, a further 5s. was owed to his servants. Contrary to the assertion of the Elizabethan commentator John Hooker, fees were due whether or not a bill was enacted, although in the case of bills of naturalization the serjeant was entitled to receive an additional 10s. from the party concerned if the measure became law.
Despite this elaborate tariff, in practice the fees charged by the serjeant were flexible, as Hunt himself indicated and as an inspection of the records of the London livery companies reveals. Sometimes they were on the light side, as in 1593, when the Coopers’ Company gave just 10s. to the serjeant and only 12d. for his man. On other occasions the fees paid corresponded with Hunt’s scale, as in 1604, when the Coopers paid 20s. to the serjeant and 5s. to his servant. More generous payment was not unknown, for in 1604 the Brewers gave Serjeant Wood 40s. in connection with their bill, twice as much as the Coopers, although they paid nothing at all to his servants.
Fees from bill promoters were not the serjeant’s only source of income from lobbyists. Those who wished to block legislation or keep an eye on bills that might prove hostile to their interests were just as likely to pay him fees. In 1604, for example, the Vintners’ Company, alert to the number of alehouse bills before the Commons that year, paid Wood 20s. for providing them with copies of two such measures, plus an additional 40s. Most likely the Company asked him to send them word if any of the alehouse bills appeared to cross their interests, but whatever the reason for this second payment it was repeated in the following session.
There were two further sources of income available to the serjeant. The first arose from the fees payable by those summoned by the Commons. In May 1610 a Commons committee specified that the serjeant could charge absentee Members
20s. for their summons, plus 12d. for every mile travelled in coming and going to fetch them.
Distinctions of rank did not colour the second source of income available to the serjeant, this being the cost of incarcerating his prisoners. Each prisoner was charged 20s. per day over and above the 16s. he was forced to pay for his appearance at the bar of the House. Some of this money was obviously needed to feed, house and guard the prisoner, and part may also have gone to the clerk of the Commons, but a substantial amount must have been pure profit, as a passage in the infamous ‘Fart’ poem of 1607 implies. Here a Member proposes committing the offending wind to the custody of Wood: ‘No so quoth the Serjeant bent low on his knees, / Farts will break prison but never pay fees’.
The clerk of the Crown in Chancery and other custodians of royal records
During the sixteenth century the clerk of the Crown in Chancery was regarded as an officer of the Lords rather than the Commons. In the upper House he sat on the lowermost woolsack facing the throne and occasionally stood in for the clerk of the parliaments. John Hooker, the Elizabethan expert on parliamentary procedure, regarded him as the deputy to the clerk of the parliaments, but it seems likely that there was in fact no formal relationship between the two men, and that the services provided by Thomas Powle, clerk of the Crown 1546-1601, for Anthony Mason, clerk of the parliaments 1574-97, were of a temporary and personal nature.
In the early seventeenth century the clerk of the Crown continued to serve the Lords, helping to convey messages and bills to the Commons.
Although considered a servant of the Lords, the clerk was also expected to wait upon the Commons. In 1601 the lower House asserted that he was ‘our immediate officer’ after Lord Keeper Egerton insisted that warrants authorizing by-elections be sent directly to him by the Speaker. Following this disagreement, the solicitor general announced that henceforward the clerk of the Crown would be regarded as the servant of both Houses, and so ‘be attendant between the two doors of the upper House and the lower House’.
The main duties of the clerk of the Crown in respect of the Commons concerned the election indentures returned to Chancery. As has been explained in Chapter 4, the returning officers for each constituency were required, after every election, to deliver their indentures to the clerk, who exacted a fee for filing them.
As the custodian of the election indentures, the clerk of the Crown was often called into the Commons at the beginning of a Parliament, when disputed returns were considered. On 23 March 1604, for instance, the then clerk, Sir George Coppyn, came before the House with ‘all the writs of summons, indentures and returns made of the knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire for this Parliament’. After these were read out by the clerk of the Commons, Coppyn, standing at the bar, was ‘commanded to retire to the door’.
Not all business relating to disputed returns was dealt with in the chamber, and consequently the clerk of the Crown had often to appear before the privileges committee.
Before the 1620s the clerk of the Crown was chiefly employed by the Commons in matters relating to its own elections, but thereafter he or his deputy was often required to produce for inspection other documents in his care. In March and April 1628, for instance, he was ordered to produce the instructions issued to the commissioners for the Forced Loan, as well as the commission documents themselves, and on 7 June he was told to attend the grand committee that afternoon ‘with the commission, or warrant, or copy of it, concerning excises or impositions’.
The clerk of the Crown in Chancery was not the only royal official to hold records of interest to the Commons. One of the most important royal repositories was the Tower of London, which housed the medieval rolls of Parliament.
As the Tower clerks were not officers of the Commons they naturally exacted a fee for their searches, and also for any copies that they provided. In April 1606 the House reluctantly agreed to meet these charges out of the Members’ collection, but it was careful to describe the money so paid as ‘a benevolence and not fees’.
The Tower clerks were not alone in being paid to carry out searches among the records. In 1624 £5 was given to Mr. Humphrey of the Rolls Chapel, where many of the records of Chancery were lodged, and an equivalent sum was given to John Bradshaw, one of the deputy chamberlains of the Exchequer. Bradshaw was a particularly attentive searcher, as Simonds D’Ewes later recalled, and £2 was assigned to him in 1628 out of the Members’ collection ‘if so much can be gotten’.
Keepers
The keepers of the Westminster law courts or their servants, though not technically officers of the House, customarily received payment at the end of each session from the Commons, which frequently commandeered their rooms. In 1607 the House ordered £2 to be paid ‘to the usher’s man of the Court of Wards’ and £1 10s. ‘to the Usher’s man of the Exchequer’. In 1624 the attendants of the courts of Wards, Exchequer and Star Chamber were each paid £5, and in 1628 the Commons bestowed £2 upon the usher of the duchy out of the Members’ collection.
The responsibility for policing the landing outside the Commons and the stairs leading down into Westminster Hall normally lay with the serjeant. However, in 1581, after a disturbance involving several pages and other servants, the Commons attempted to fix this duty upon the warden of the Fleet, who held the keepership of the Palace of Westminster by inheritance.
Between 1609 and 1622 at least, some or all of the old Palace of Westminster was in the care of an under-keeper named Owen Jones. It is not known who appointed him, and the accounts kept by the Office of Works describe him in various ways. In 1610/11 he appears as the ‘under-housekeeper of the lower Parliament House’, and was paid 3s. 6d. for ‘making clean the House and opening the doors to the workmen’, whereas in 1613/14 he is styled ‘underkeeper of the Parliament Houses’. Two later accounts, compiled when Parliament was not sitting, refer to him as ‘under-keeper of Westminster Hall’.