Few constituencies in the early seventeenth century had any difficulty in finding men ready and willing to stand for election. On the contrary, from time to time many places were inundated with hopeful candidates. At Reading in February 1628 there were eight applicants for two seats, while at Sandwich in December 1620 there were nine, among them Sir Roger Nevinson, who dropped out before the election. At Nottingham in January 1624 there were no less than ten ‘suitors for the burgess’s places’.
Many men clearly relished their time in Parliament, and repeatedly stood for re-election. For instance, Robert Berry of Ludlow represented his native borough in nine consecutive parliaments between 1581 and 1614, while William Cage of Ipswich and Thomas Bowyer of Leythorne in Sussex sat in all eight of the parliaments that met between 1614 and November 1640. Those who failed to find a seat on one occasion often tried again. In 1626 Sir Robert Poyntz, his status recently enhanced by a knighthood of the Bath, secured the junior knighthood of the shire for Gloucestershire after two previously unsuccessful attempts. Two years later, in 1628, Henry Darley was finally rewarded for his persistence with a place at Scarborough, having in the previous two general elections tried without success to secure election at Aldborough. However, it was unusual for those who had failed twice in a row to put themselves forward a third time if they had never sat before. Gilbert Boun at Nottingham, James Ellis at Leicester, William Gardiner at Steyning and Samuel Short at Rye are just some of those who gave up after trying to win a seat at two successive elections. Those who sat in the Commons once were often eager to repeat the experience, but though some individuals had little difficulty in gaining re-election – Sir James Whitelocke, for instance, had the offer of three seats in 1614 – others found the feat hard to accomplish. In 1625 a young Sir Edward Dering entered the Commons for the first time, but despite repeated attempts he proved unable to sit again until November 1640. Sir Henry Goodyer was returned for West Looe in 1604, but when he tried to secure re-election in 1614, and again in 1620, his efforts came to nothing.
On the face of it, the fierce competition for seats and the dogged persistence of many of those who had been defeated is surprising, as service in the Commons was not an entirely attractive prospect. In the first place, there was the cost of getting elected to consider. Many boroughs levied a fee from outsiders for the freedom of the borough, without which a man was legally not entitled to stand. Often this fee was waived or returned to the candidate if he agreed to serve without wages, but such generosity of spirit was by no means universal: at Leicester in 1604 Sir Henry Beaumont and Sir William Skipwith were obliged to part with £6 apiece.
It was not just the cost of getting elected to consider. For those who discharged their duties conscientiously the hours were disagreeably long, particularly from about 1610, as the Commons increasingly sat all day rather than just the mornings.
Service in the Commons ate not only into a man’s time but also his purse, adding to the costs he may already have incurred in getting himself elected. For those with a landed income the expense was not necessarily insupportable, but for men like Joseph Field, who needed to earn a living, service at Westminster might easily result in a reduced income for the duration of the Parliament. During the opening Parliament of James’s reign, which lasted seven years, several Members received one-off payments from their boroughs to help offset their losses. At Boston in April 1607, the barrister Anthony Irby was compensated for ‘the neglect of his own affairs’ occasioned by his ‘attendance at the Parliament’ with a payment of £13 6s. 8d., and in April 1608 John Prowse, a cloth merchant by trade, was awarded £20 by the corporation of Exeter for attending ‘the Parliament House a great long time about the city’s business to his great labour and hindrance’.
By law all Members were entitled to receive a salary from their constituents, but the last time an English county is known to have paid parliamentary wages was in 1601.
Even in a Parliament that lasted only two or three months, the costs involved in paying one’s way soon mounted up. In 1626 Thomas Scott of Canterbury complained that his service in the 1624 Parliament, which lasted around fifteen weeks, had left him £100 out of pocket ‘and gained me much ill and little thanks,’ for which reason he ‘no more desired to be a Parliament citizen than to be a constable or churchwarden’.
Even for those with substantial means, the cost of serving at Westminster was daunting. Sir Dudley North, who began his long parliamentary career in 1628 and whose father the 3rd Lord North was hardly a pauper, described parliamentary service in 1669 as ‘excessive chargeable, and of no profit as to my particular’.
Some Members undoubtedly limited their expenses by lodging with friends or relatives while in London. Others, like the Suffolk gentleman Sir Robert Brooke and the Sussex-based Edward Alford, owned townhouses of their own. However, many Members were forced to hire houses or take lodgings. A combination of frequent litigation and long service in Parliament caused Sir John Leveson of Halling, in north Kent, to lease a house in Blackfriars, at a cost of over £100 a year, during the early years of James’s reign.
On top of the cost of their board and lodging, many Members had to foot the bill for transporting their personal possessions to and from London, in 1626 the corporation of Bristol allowed both of its representatives 26s. for carriage of their trunks. At the end of the 1628 session the servant of the Warwickshire Member John Newdigate laid out 9s. 9d. ‘for carriage of my master his things from London at the breaking up of the Parliament’.
The financial burdens of membership did not fall on everyone equally, of course. Wealthy boroughs like London, Exeter, York and Bristol continued to pay their representatives wages, and Members often sold their services to lobbyists anxious for advice on the drafting and presentation of legislation. In the 1604 session the London lawyer Nicholas Fuller made at least £6 from various London companies for his advice and skills as a draftsman.
Most Members probably found themselves out of pocket after serving in Parliament. The drain on a man’s purse, however, was by no means the only disincentive to membership. In February 1604, in the aftermath of a major plague outbreak, Edward Reynolds thought the risk of infection in London ‘in so great a concourse of people as is like to be at this time’ was likely to be so great that ‘a man shall be scarce safe from danger even in the Parliament’.
Some individuals were not able to stand even had they wanted to do so. Though his father and son took turns at representing Wallingford, Sir Barentyne Molyns of Clapcot in Berkshire never put himself up for election, for in his youth he had been severely wounded while on campaign in France and was almost blind. Those who did wish to stand were sometimes prevented from doing so by urgent personal business. ‘My occasions’, explained Sir John Scudamore to Sir Robert Cotton in January 1626, ‘do so press me in the country that, sore against my will, I shall not be of this Parliament’.
If some individuals chose not to sit for good reasons, or were prevented from doing so, there were many prominent men who might easily have stood but who conspicuously failed to do so. Whereas the master of the London Drapers’ Company and governor of the East India Company, Sir Maurice Abbot, found time to sit in Parliament four times during the 1620s, the governor of the Levant Company, Sir Hugh Hammersley, never graced the Commons’ chamber even once. Another notable avoider of parliamentary service was the north Welsh gentleman Sir William Thomas of Pwhelli. On being invited to stand for Caernarvonshire in 1625, Thomas told Sir John Wynn that ‘I am not as yet ready for the Parliament’.
Just as there were some men who clearly recoiled at the prospect of sitting in the Commons, others left lengthy intervals between periods of service. Take Sir John Heigham of Barrow, in Suffolk, for instance. As a young man, Heigham entered Parliament for the first time in 1563 for Sudbury while still training for the legal profession. Following this brief stint in the Commons, he did not sit again until 1584, when he transferred to Ipswich. In 1586-7 he was promoted to a county seat, but thereafter he did not serve in Parliament again until 1604, when he resumed his representation of Suffolk. Another individual whose parliamentary career contains several notable gaps was Sir Richard Edgcumbe of Mount Edgcumbe, in Cornwall. Edgcumbe first entered Parliament in 1586 when he was in his early twenties. He subsequently served in the next two parliaments, but was conspicuous by his absence from those of 1597, 1601 and 1604-10. His interest in sitting at Westminster was rekindled in 1614, when he re-entered the chamber after an interval lasting 21 years, and he sat again in 1624 and 1628, but he missed the parliaments of 1621, 1625 and 1626. Sporadic service of this kind is difficult to interpret, but the intervals in the parliamentary careers of both Heigham and Edgcumbe look like conscious decisions rather than enforced absences.
Some of those who left gaps in their parliamentary career may have been obliged to do so, of course, either for want of a patron or perhaps because some seats were held in rotation and it was not yet their turn. Sir John Eliot sat in every Parliament between 1614 and 1628 apart from that of 1621, in which year he seems to have lost out at St. Germans, the seat closest to his home, to Sir Richard Buller. Sir Henry Spelman served in the parliaments of 1593 and 1597-8, but did not return to Westminster again until 1625. His lengthy absence from Westminster may not have been from choice, for in 1614 at least he applied for a seat at King’s Lynn, only to be rebuffed.
The holding of certain sorts of office, too, could generate enforced intervals in a man’s parliamentary service. Those who were sheriffs were in theory barred from sitting, a consideration that Charles I turned to his advantage in the autumn of 1625, when he pricked as sheriffs several of the leading troublemakers from the previous Parliament, among them Sir Thomas Wentworth, in order to prevent them from serving in 1626. Mayors and town bailiffs, being returning officers, were also barred, as were those in royal service across the Irish Sea if their presence in Ireland was needed.
Many men with experience of serving in the Commons came to the conclusion that it was possible to have too much of a good thing. On being asked whether he would like to represent Dover in the 1621 Parliament, William Leonard replied that he did not ‘greatly desire’ to do so, having already sat once before – in 1597-8. For the Somerset gentleman John Poulett, two stints in the Commons were about as much as he could stomach. Pressed to serve a third time in 1624, he desired his friends ‘to excuse him and free him from that place at this time for that he hath already served twice ... and there are many more gentlemen of worth in the country worthy of the place’. In December 1625 Sir William Spencer declined to stand for re-election as, having served in the previous four parliaments, ‘I have had labour and travail enough in that kind’.
Meetings that lasted many years had a particular tendency to induce an aversion to further membership. In the aftermath of the first Jacobean Parliament, which lasted seven years, many former Members declined to throw their hats into the ring again, among them Sir Francis Barrington and Thomas Spencer of Yarnton, in Oxfordshire.
It was not only that some men grew tired of parliamentary service, or rationed the number of times they sat; the failure of successive parliaments gave many Commons veterans cause to think twice about standing again. Halfway through the 1626 Parliament, Sir Richard Skeffington reproached his kinsman Sir Edward Dering, who had sat the previous year, for not warning him to avoid election, describing service in the Commons as a place ‘to please none, to displease all and bear all his own charges’.
Why did so many men wish to take part in the business of Parliament when many others found the prospect so unappealing? One of the most attractive features of sitting in Parliament must have been the prestige that membership bestowed. By the early seventeenth century it was a commonplace to liken the Commons to the senate of ancient Rome.
Although membership of such an august institution provided a powerful incentive for election, there were other, equally important factors that lured men to Westminster. As Cedric Ward has observed, those below the rank of peer often saw the knighthood of the shire as ‘the most coveted prize county society had to offer’.
In addition, those in the upper echelons of county society often regarded it as both their duty and right to sit. Take, for instance, Sir Henry Wallop of Farleigh Wallop. By 1625 Wallop was the richest man in Hampshire, and between 1597 and 1640 he sat in every Parliament except that of 1604-10, from which he was necessarily excluded as sheriff. In Caernarvonshire after 1610, the Wynns of Gwydir, conscious of being the dominant family in the county, felt honour-bound to ensure that the knighthood of the shire was held by a member of their own family. ‘It standeth upon your ... reputation’ was how William Wynn put the matter to his father Sir John Wynn in November 1620. For a family of county standing to fail to secure a seat that it regarded almost as its birthright was thus a dreadful humiliation. Following the defeat of the Wynn interest at the Caernarvonshire election in December 1620, Sir John Wynn described the defeat as ‘the greatest public disgrace that ever I had in my time’.
Some county leaders clearly regarded Commons membership as a badge of rank, and were determined to sit even if, once at Westminster, they contributed next to nothing to the House’s proceedings. Between 1604 and 1626 Sir John Cutts of Swavesey represented Cambridgeshire in every Parliament that met during that period, and in 1624 he fought two bitterly contested elections rather than forgo the chance of sitting. Yet before the spring of 1640, when he represented his county for the last time, he seems never to have uttered a single word in debate. It was a similar story in respect of James Price of Mynachdy, who monopolized the knighthood for Radnorshire between 1593 and 1621 and, so far as is known, never got round to delivering his maiden speech. Many county families became so used to membership of the Commons that they clearly created an expectation of belonging to the House that passed from one generation to the next. The Finch family of Eastwell in Kent enjoyed continuous representation in the ten parliaments that met between 1593 and 1628, and the Montagu family of Boughton produced at least one Member per Parliament between 1593 and 1625. The most successful parliamentary dynasty of the early modern period, however, was the Knollys family of Rotherfield Greys, in Oxfordshire, one of whose members sat in every one of the nineteen parliaments that met between 1559 and November 1640.
Those at the top of county society were not alone in feeling under an obligation to sit. Unless they were Scots, in which case they were barred from standing, members of the Privy Council not capable of serving in the Lords were normally expected by the king to find seats, as were various other royal officials, such as the solicitor general. Sir Thomas Chaloner, who had last sat in Parliament in 1586, would not, perhaps, have re-entered the Commons in 1604 had he not recently been appointed governor of Prince Henry’s Household.
Many boroughs expected their recorder or town clerk to stand for election as a matter of course. At Wallingford there was even a by-law by the early seventeenth century requiring the recorder to serve in Parliament.
Before the 1620s, a recorder with a legal or prescriptive claim to a seat would normally expect his consent to be sought if the borough wished to choose another in his stead. At Wallingford in 1614, for instance, the corporation asked its recorder, Edward Clarke, to surrender his right before proceeding to choose Sir George Simeon in his place.
For many men, election to Parliament afforded the opportunity to serve the interests of their local community or county. As John Griffith put it in a letter to Sir William Maurice in November 1620, ‘every true lover of his country should endeavour to do service’ once he was at Westminster.
The opportunity to debate matters of national significance was by no means the only attraction to those whose horizons were not limited to their own localities. During the early seventeenth century relations between the king and the House of Commons became increasingly strained, as one disagreement after another flared up over matters of profound constitutional importance. These momentous clashes, over such matters as the Union, the right of the Crown to levy taxes without recourse to parliaments, and arbitrary imprisonment, meant that the Commons became a stage for dramatic events. Many of those who sought a place in the Commons during these years may have done so out of a desire to witness these explosive scenes. The high levels of attendance of the chamber at the height of the impeachment debates of 1626 are certainly striking.
Many who put themselves forward for election may have done so out of a concern that, unless they stood now, their chance might soon vanish. During the 1610s a well-founded fear developed that parliaments were headed for extinction, an anxiety that persisted despite the proliferation of parliaments between 1621 and 1629. Those who might otherwise have put off parliamentary service to some future date, safe in the knowledge that another Parliament was just around the corner, were obliged to seize the moment before it was gone for good.
During the sixteenth century one of the prime motives for wanting to sit was personal ambition. For those eager to pursue a career in the service of the Crown, there were few better ways for a man to draw attention to his abilities than service in the Commons.
It was not unusual for lawyers who made trouble in Parliament to find that their path to advancement was blocked, for without the king’s support an experienced barrister could not attain the rank of serjeant. In the aftermath of the Addled Parliament, Thomas Crewe was unable to obtain the coif, ‘though he had many friends’. He remained out of favour as late as 1618, when James warned the City that Crewe was the one man in the kingdom whose candidacy for the recordership of London he absolutely forbade.
Far from providing ambitious young men with a springboard from which to launch their careers, the Commons under the early Stuarts gave those of ability denied office by the king an alternative outlet for their talents. Once his chances of advancement had evaporated in 1604, Sandys used Parliament to provide him with a substitute career, becoming, in effect, the Commons’ troublemaker-in-chief during the first half of James’s reign. Something similar also happened in respect of Sir Edward Coke. Following his readmission to the Privy Council in 1617, Coke, a former chief justice of Common Pleas and King’s Bench, had high hopes of ministerial advancement, particularly after forging a marriage alliance between his daughter and the brother of the king’s new favourite, the marquess of Buckingham. On the fall of lord treasurer Suffolk in 1618, he worked hard to sort out the king’s finances in the hope of being offered the treasurer’s staff himself. However, in December 1619 the treasurership was sold over his head to Sir Henry Montagu, whereupon Coke, instead of retiring gracefully, proceeded to exact his revenge. Despite the convention that former Speakers should not seek re-election, Coke returned to the House of Commons after an interval of twenty-six years and at the grand old age of sixty-nine. There, despite having been found his seat by Prince Charles’s council, he set about distancing himself from the Privy Council of which he was still formally a member, to the astonishment of many of his parliamentary colleagues. Over the next few years, Coke spearheaded the opposition in the Commons to the Spanish Match, the duke of Buckingham and arbitrary imprisonment, and in so doing he carved out a place for himself on the national stage that had been denied him by the king, though at the cost of his seat on the Council.
To some extent those whom the king regarded as troublesome in Parliament may have secretly hoped that by making a nuisance of themselves a job would have to be found for them to buy their silence. Sandys at least never seems to have given up entirely on the idea that he might be the recipient of royal office, for in 1614 he re-entered Parliament as a client of the royal favourite, the earl of Somerset, and in 1624 he was one of the undertakers who acted on behalf of the duke of Buckingham. However, James was never able to forgive Sandys for the central role he had played in wrecking his cherished plan to unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland. When the Virginia Company was about to choose a new treasurer in 1620, James reportedly sent a message to the Company telling them that they might ‘choose the Devil if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys’.
Sir Edward Coke stands out as having sought membership of the Commons from a sense of frustration at being denied ministerial responsibilities. However, lack of office may have provided many less prominent individuals with a reason for wanting to enter the Commons. Though raised a Protestant, Sir Thomas Littleton of Frankley in Worcestershire was denied local office by the Crown throughout the 1620s in view of his family’s Catholic sympathies. In what looks like anxiety to affirm his local importance, Littleton had himself returned as knight of the shire to no less than four successive parliaments between 1621 and 1626. Interestingly, he played almost no recorded part in any of the parliaments of which he was a Member, and one – that of 1625 – he failed to attend, preferring instead to travel abroad. To Littleton, it would seem, the prestige that went with membership of the Commons mattered more than the business of the House.
Littleton’s lack of office was striking because his father was long since dead. However, perhaps the largest group of office-less Members of the Commons was comprised of eldest sons whose fathers were still alive. In general, eldest sons could normally expect to assume their fathers’ local offices only when the latter was infirm or had died. However, many had to wait long into adulthood before taking their father’s place on the bench or other local commissions. In the interim, quite a few sought election to Parliament. The case of Henry Darley, eldest son and heir of Sir Richard Darley of Buttercrambe in Yorkshire, provides a neat illustration. By 1625 Henry, despite being almost thirty and having been married for more than five years, held no local office. That same year Sir Richard, in an attempt to give his son some social standing, wrote to the bailiffs of Scarborough requesting a seat on Henry’s behalf. Unfortunately for Henry, this approach was rebuffed, as was a second overture in 1626, and it was not until 1628, by which time he had gained a foothold in local government, that Henry Darley finally entered Parliament. A similar story perhaps lay behind the entry into Parliament of Sir Alexander Denton, whose father was only about twenty-two when he was born in 1596. Aside from a captaincy in the local militia, Denton held no local office until 1629, by which time he was about thirty-three. In May 1624 the enfranchisement of Wendover enabled him to secure election to the Commons on the interest of his wife’s family, and in the following year his father, Sir Thomas Denton, stood aside to allow his son to occupy his own former seat at Buckingham. Sir Thomas obligingly did the same in 1626, since in that year he was returned as a knight of the shire, but in 1628 he once again needed the Buckingham seat, leaving Sir Alexander to go without. Absence of office must also go a long way towards explaining the presence in all the parliaments of the 1620s of Sir Thomas Wenman of Thame Park, Oxfordshire, and of that of Edward Pitt, the twenty-six year-old son and heir of William Pitt of Hartley Waspell, in Hampshire. In January 1624 Edward encouraged his son to ‘become a Parliament man’, and wrote to both the mayor of Wareham and his kinsman Richard Swayne of Blandford Forum for assistance.
As the Darley and Pitt cases show, many young men were drawn to sit at Westminster under the guidance of their fathers. One of the widely acknowledged benefits of membership of the Commons was the education that it afforded a young man. Those who entered the House for the first time could expect to learn about the legislative process at first hand, to sharpen, if they so wished, their debating skills and to inform themselves about political affairs. Not for nothing did John Chamberlain dub the Commons in 1614 ‘the great schoolhouse of Christendom’.
Under such pressure, more than one young man entered the Commons as part of his formal education. Thomas Chaloner, the future governor of Prince Henry’s Household, sat for the first time in 1586 while in his mid twenties after graduating from Oxford and spending a year as a volunteer in the Low Countries. Robert Knollys, the twenty-four year old eldest son of Sir Francis Knollys of Abbey House, Reading, was elected in 1614 after passing through university and the Inns of Court. Like Chaloner, Knollys had first done a spot of soldiering in the Low Countries. In March 1610 Sir John Harington, the eighteen-year old eldest son of the 1st Lord Harington, completed an impressive education (which included an extensive tour of Europe) by entering the Commons. Sons who entered the Commons as a way of rounding off their education were often following in the footsteps of their fathers. In 1625 the twenty-three year old Edward Mainwaring was returned to Parliament for Newcastle-under-Lyme while still completing his studies at the Middle Temple, which was precisely what his father had done in 1601. However, those who entered the Commons as part of their education were not always emulating their fathers. In 1628 the twenty-seven year old John Stonhouse came in for Abingdon after completing a tour of the Continent even though his father, Sir William Stonhouse of Radley, in Berkshire, had never once sat at Westminster. Whether John’s entry to Parliament was simply intended to further his education, or whether it also represented an attempt by Sir William to elevate the social importance of his family – he purchased a baronetcy that very same year – is impossible to say.
Not every young man was thrilled at the prospect of being required by his family to enter the Commons, particularly if it meant curtailing his studies. Although he would have preferred to remain a scholar at Cambridge, the eighteen year-old Mildmay Fane, eldest son of the Commons veteran Sir Francis Fane, was ordered by his parents in November 1620 ‘to assume the adult senatorial robe’ by entering Parliament for Peterborough.
Sometimes whole groups of men were drawn to Westminster in defence of their own interests. Ahead of the 1614 Parliament, rumours of an impending petition to the Commons against the newly instituted order of baronets seem to have persuaded at least two of the recently made baronets, Sir Miles Sandys of Wilburton in Cambridgeshire and Sir Harbottle Grimston of Bradfield in Essex, to seek election for the first time. Born in 1563, Sandys was old enough to have stood for election prior to that date had he so wished, while Grimston’s surviving papers include copies both of the proposed petition to the king against the order of baronets and the ‘Motives to induce … the Commons House … to petition His Majesty’ for abolition, which was read in the Commons on 23 May.
More than one man found himself in the Commons because he was required to keep a seat warm for someone else during their absence. In 1624 Sir John Ferrers, unable to bestow a seat at Tamworth on Sir Thomas Puckering as he had done previously since Puckering was now sheriff of Warwickshire, turned to his lawyer, John Wightwick, instead. Once freed of the shrievalty, however, Puckering resumed his representation of Tamworth. It was a similar story at Marlborough in 1626: Edward Kirton, a servant of the Seymour family, was put into the seat which might otherwise have gone to Sir Francis Seymour who, then being sheriff of Wiltshire, was disabled from serving. There was nothing dishonourable in keeping a seat warm for another. Indeed, following the elevation of Sir Thomas Wentworth to a peerage, Sir Henry Savile of Methley offered in December 1628 to supply the place of knight of shire of Yorkshire that Wentworth had vacated ‘until your lordship’s nephew and my young cousin Sir William [Savile of Thornhill] be more capable thereof’.
Not a few men entered Parliament in order to defeat their creditors. One of the advantages of Commons membership was the legal protection that it conferred, for in order to prevent business from being interrupted Members were guaranteed immunity from arrest. Just how many men were driven to seek election primarily to escape their creditors is never likely to be known, but in 1614 around eleven Members may have done so. They included such notable figures as Sir William Cavendish, who was expressly accused by Sir Baptist Hicks of getting himself elected for Derbyshire in order to free himself from debtors’ prison, and both knights for Lancashire, Sir Cuthbert Halsall and Sir Thomas Gerrard, 1st bt.
Some men may have been prompted to seek election by the prospect of a stay of at least several weeks in the capital. ‘I am one that loves to see fashions, and desires to know wonders’, Thomas Bulkeley once told Sir John Wynn, ‘therefore, if I be elected, I will not refuse it’.
Membership of the Commons, especially among veteran Parliament-men, was also an opportunity to renew old acquaintances. Sir Henry Savile of Methley, who had last sat in 1614, told Sir Thomas Wentworth in December 1628 that he wished to resume his former membership out of ‘a desire to see my honourable friends in the south, from whom I have been long absent and may well be forgotten if I return not thither in some reasonable time’.
For the wealthiest Members, Parliament was also a time to preen in public. Basil Dixwell, a bachelor with an income reportedly of £2,500 a year, was noted ‘to be the bravest man in the House of Commons’ in 1626 on account of his ‘quotidian new suits of apparel’.
The reasons that induced men to stand for election were thus many and varied. Some stood for Parliament because they wanted to, while others did so because they felt they ought to. For some, the Commons was where they might help to shape the law and influence government policy, while to others it primarily represented a refuge from clamouring creditors or an opportunity to savour the delights of the capital. Those who entered the chamber were almost as varied in their backgrounds and occupations as their motives, and it to this subject to which we shall turn shortly. However, before doing so, the mechanics of parliamentary elections – how they were conducted and regulated – must first be considered.