(i) TRIALS IN PARLIAMENT
Although, in the medieval period, Parliament met at the King’s behest only on occasion, its meetings were, necessarily, frequent enough to become normal. As the highest court of the realm, Parliament helped the King to fulfil his coronation oath to do justice to his subjects.
During the Merciless Parliament of 1388, when the Lords Appellant (the duke of Gloucester and the earls of Arundel, Warwick, Nottingham and Derby) made themselves collectively responsible for prosecuting, by appeals of high treason, the most important of Richard II’s supporters, including Archbishop Alexander Neville, Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland, Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, and Sir Robert Tresilian, c.j.KB, the lords temporal alone acted, the lords spiritual being disqualified by canon law from assisting in a case possibly leading to capital punishment. In 1397, however, meticulously using against the chief of the Lords Appellant of 1388 (Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick) their own procedure of appeal for high treason, Richard had the trial prosecuted by Lords Appellant of his own choosing, and made the prelates nominate a lay proctor, so that at least their formal agreement might be ensured. Such appeals of treason in Parliament were, at the Commons’ request, abolished in Henry IV’s first Parliament, but it was then that the Lords’ role as judges was amply confirmed, the Commons themselves insisting that ‘les Juggementz du Parlement appertiegnent soulement au Roy et as Seigneurs, et nient as Communes’.
Evidently, the question at issue in 1399 was the guilt of those five of the seven Appellants of 1397 who were still alive (the dukes of Aumâle Surrey, and Exeter, the marquess of Dorset and the earl of Gloucester).
Two whole years and more elapsed before, in 1406, the lords temporal were next engaged in similar judicial proceedings, this time as a result of risings which were indisputably treasonable. For in the meantime, in May 1405, two revolts had occurred in Yorkshire: one near York under Archbishop Scrope and Thomas Mowbray, the Earl Marshal, and another further north led by retainers of the earl of Northumberland. Both were suppressed by the King’s son, John, and the earl of Westmorland, and their actual leaders soon executed, Scrope and Mowbray on the King’s personal orders, without proper trial. Both revolts, in which the insurgents were intended to combine, had been fomented by the earl of Northumberland; and, although he and Lord Bardolf, his ally, had themselves refrained from action in the field, their early retreat to Scotland only confirmed their involvement. As if to compound his guilt, Northumberland had been responsible for other subversive acts: not only had he gone on to burn the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed but, more reprehensively from King Henry’s point of view, he had sent emissaries to Robert III of Scotland and certain French ambassadors there, proposing an offensive alliance against England, besides writing to the duke of Orléans in France about his intention either to restore or avenge Richard II. Since then, moreover, the earl had continued to make common cause with the Welsh rebels. However, with no Parliament meeting in 1405, it was not until 19 June 1406, the last day of the second session of the next Parliament, that the lords temporal came to a decision not just about Northumberland and Bardolf, but also, retrospectively, in relation to Scrope and Mowbray. Yet this was by no means unequivocal, for even now they temporised. They were still only ready to convict Northumberland and Bardolf if, following proclamations in all counties, they failed to surrender themselves by 8 July to answer for their crimes. Furthermore, when asked to pronounce upon the case of Scrope and Mowbray, they merely said that, although it seemed treasonable to them (on the testimony of Prince John, constable of England), they would make their statement after the recess, at the same time requesting the King to order all the lords temporal to be present then, without exception. Even in the third session of the Parliament, which began on 13 Oct., there was yet further delay. Not until 30 Nov., prompted by a request from the Commons, did the lords temporal agree that a fresh proclamation should be made, at the door of the Parliament chamber and in the palace of Westminster, ordering Northumberland and Bardolf to appear on the following day. Then, however, in view of the fact that some of the writs of the previous June, ordering proclamations to be made at large, had not been returned to the Chancery by the deadline set (8 July), and other writs had been altogether ignored, they required another proclamation to be made in the City of London, ordering the two defaulters to appear on 3 Dec.; and even when this had been done, they adjourned the case to the next day. But at long last they made their award, to the effect that the accused, convicted as traitors, should, if and when taken, be ‘drawn, hanged and beheaded’ at the will of the King, and, of course, incur forfeiture of all their lands held in fee simple or enfeoffed to their use, and of all goods and chattels.
In fact, only two major cases of treason disfigured the reign of Henry V: those originating in the lollard rising of January 1414 and the Southampton plot of July 1415, the first easily suppressed, and the second quickly nipped in the bud. Parliament was to be involved in each instance, but only eventually, lending its authority to judicial proceedings which had already taken place elsewhere and simply needed confirmation. The lollard rising had been instigated by Sir John Oldcastle*, Lord Cobham, a peer personally summoned by writ since 1410; but since he was not captured until 1417, Parliament could only then do what was still required. The circumstances of the Southampton plot were different in almost all respects, and this proved an altogether more serious affair. Two peers of importance, Richard, earl of Cambridge (the younger brother of the duke of York), and Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham (hitherto an intimate friend of the King), were directly involved; and a third (more important still, since he had previously been a possible pretender to the throne), Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, was certainly implicated, and not only as the intended beneficiary of the conspiracy. Moreover, when the latter betrayed the plot to the King on 30 July, the other conspirators could be arrested immediately, steps taken forthwith to bring them to justice, and Parliament soon convened to approve of what had been done. Since, with the invasion of Normandy imminent, the conspirators had to be dealt with before the King and his army left England, it was necessary to proceed expeditiously, and yet, as far as possible, satisfy basic legal requirements.
The procedure adopted was to prove, in fact, somewhat complicated, although in the event quite logical.
The lords present and party to the judgement proper included five of the peers who had initially acted as justices of oyer and terminer (the Earl Marshal, the earls of Salisbury, Oxford and Suffolk and Lord Zouche) and 15 others: the dukes of Clarence, Gloucester and York (the latter by proxy), the earls of March, Huntingdon, Arundel and Dorset, and Lords Clifford, Talbot, Harington, Willoughby, Clinton, Mautravers, Bourgchier and Botreaux: 20 all told. However, almost as many parliamentary peers were absent: all but Lord Talbot of the 20 lords temporal who, on 12 Aug. (the day after the army’s departure for France), were summoned by the duke of Bedford, acting as Custos Angliae, to attend the Parliament which, first called for 21 Oct. was prorogued at Michaelmas to 4 Nov. (when the King and the army had still not returned home).
It was again in Henry V’s absence, and once more in a Parliament presided over by Bedford (meeting on 16 Nov. 1417) that the case of Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, was brought to its conclusion. The affair may be said to have begun as early in the reign as June 1413 when, in Convocation, the clergy of the southern province demanded that Oldcastle should be called to answer charges of personal heresy and of supporting lollards. Having first resisted all efforts on the part of the King to get him to retract his opinions, and then to appear before Archbishop Arundel at Leeds castle (Kent) on 9 Sept., Oldcastle was imprisoned in the Tower; and it was from there that he was taken, first to St. Paul’s on 23 Sept., and then two days later to the Blackfriars, for questioning by the archbishop upon matters of faith. On both occasions he demonstrated his total obduracy, doing so on the second in such a contemptuous and insulting manner that Arundel had no option but to excommunicate him and relinquish him to the secular arm, a sentence with which the bishops of London, Winchester and Bangor, acting as assessors, fully concurred. Once returned to the Tower, Oldcastle chose not to avail himself of an agreement between King Henry and the archbishop that he should be allowed 40 days in which to come to his senses. Instead, on 19 Oct., he escaped from custody. And he soon went on to compound his offence against both Church and State by leading the lollard rebellion of January 1414, directly after which, having evaded arrest, he was outlawed in the court of King’s bench for high treason. Remaining at large, he took advantage of the Southampton plot to stage a rising of his own, threatening Lord Abergavenny in his castle at Hanley in Worcestershire, where, however, his force was dispersed. It was not until late November 1417 that he was arrested near Welshpool by servants of Lord Charlton of Powis and transported (wounded) in a litter to the Tower. On learning of his capture, all present at the Parliament (which was now close to dissolution) agreed that it should continue to sit until Oldcastle had been produced for interrogation. Consequently, on 14 Dec., the Commons presented a written petition asking that, in view of Oldcastle’s previous conviction for heresy, his relegation to the secular power and his outlawry in the King’s bench, the lords would instruct Chief Justice Hankford (then present) to submit the ‘record and process’ of the outlawry on the same day. This was done. Even so, when the documents in question had been read and explained in English to the Lords and Commons, and also for Oldcastle’s benefit, the latter persistently refused either to defend himself against the sentence of outlawry or offer any excuses for his conduct. It was therefore awarded by the Lords, with Bedford’s assent, and as at the Commons’ request, that Oldcastle, as ‘Traitour a Dieu et Heretik notorement approve et adjugge ... et come Traitour au Roi et a son Roialme’, should be taken to the Tower, thence drawn through the City to the new gallows in the parish of St. Giles outside Old Temple Bar (the scene of the lollard rising) and there hanged and burnt hanging.
Apart from the trials of the Southampton conspirators and Oldcastle, Parliament’s chief interest in matters of treason under Henry V was retrospective. It looked back to the previous reign, being prompted to do so by petitions presented in Parliament by the heirs of magnates sentenced, in the course of that time of insecurity, to forfeiture for treason of dignities and estates. The first such case occurred in Henry V’s second Parliament, at Leicester in the spring of 1414, when Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury (so designated since his first summons to Parliament in 1409), presented a written petition to the King, calling attention to the circumstances in which his father, Earl John, had met his death in January 1400 and had been condemned for treason in Parliament a year later. It described how, arrested by the townsmen of Cirencester on a promise that he should be brought before the King and, as dictated by Magna Carta, judged by his peers, his father had been executed on the spot without authority or process of law; and how subsequently, in Parliament, he had been judged guilty of treason by only the lords temporal and merely with the King’s assent. Judgement ought, the petition said, to have been given by the King (as ‘Soverein Fuge en toutz cas’) and by all the lords, spiritual as well as temporal, with the Commons, moreover, either requesting the process or assenting to it, since they were entitled, so it was posited, to be party to what should be ordained as law in Parliament.
It was also in the November 1414 Parliament that a petition was presented for Henry Percy, son of Sir Henry Percy (‘Hotspur’) and grandson of Henry, earl of Northumberland. (Others had to act on his behalf because, besides being still under age at this time, he was held against his will in Scotland.) The request was two-fold: that Henry V’s previous restoration to Percy of the title of earl, despite his father’s and grandfather’s rebellions and forfeitures, might be enacted in Parliament; and that the King would now, with the advice of the lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons, give him possession of all his inheritance, not just the entailed estates, but those once held by his father and grandfather in fee simple as well. In view of the King’s readiness to negotiate for Percy’s liberation on the basis of an exchange of Murdoch, earl of Fife (the eldest son of the duke of Albany, the Scottish regent, who had been taken captive by the Percys at the battle of Humbleton Hill in 1402), restoration of the comital title was hardly in question.
The petitioner on this occasion was John Holand, first surviving son and heir of John, earl of Huntingdon, who had been a party to the rebellion of January 1400 and, like the earl of Salisbury’s father, had been executed without trial. He was posthumously condemned as a traitor by the lords temporal in the Parliament of January 1401, and sentenced to forfeiture of the estates he held in fee simple. In view of the rejection, in the Parliament of November 1414, of the petition in which Salisbury had disputed the legality of the procedure by which the judgements of 1401 had been reached, Holand could now do no more than ask for restoration of the comital title, and that when he came of age (29 Mar. 1417) he should be given possession of his hereditary estates, including those forfeited which had been held in fee simple, as well as others under entail. In reply, Henry V granted restitution of the title and, given satisfactory proof of tenure in tail, was prepared to allow possession of the entailed estates in due course. However, the forfeited estates once held in fee simple were, as in Percy’s case, to remain in the King’s hands. As then, the royal response was approved by Parliament as a whole, the lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons assenting to it.
The next such case to arise only did so in the Parliament of May 1421, the last Henry V was to attend in person, the petitioner being once again the earl of Salisbury. (The latter doubtless now believed that his exemplary military service in France had earned him a firmer claim on the King’s generosity.) Now openly accepting Parliament’s rejection in 1414 of the petition in which he had questioned the legal validity of the judgement passed on his father, Salisbury asked that the King should nevertheless, by an act of grace confirmed by authority of Parliament, recognize him as heir to all the estates that would have been his but for his father’s forfeiture: not only the entailed estates to which he was unquestionably entitled, but those held in fee simple as well. Of course, it was the fate of the latter that was really at issue; and although the King granted Salisbury’s petition in most other respects, this particular request was again refused.
(ii) PARLIAMENTARY PETITIONS
(a) Written Petitions
Although of public import, the series of petitions which, in Henry V’s reign, mitigated to some extent earlier judgements for treason belongs to that category of petitions for the presentation of which Parliament provided an ideal opportunity: private petitions for justice from individuals, sometimes described in the Parliament rolls as ‘the petitions of singular persons’ or ‘especial bills of singular persons’.
When, at the beginning of a Parliament, the King undertook to receive petitions, it was not only ‘singular persons’ who were invited to present their ‘especial bills’. He was making possible the ventilation of grievances generally, including ‘grievances done to common people’, and also the submission of proposals for improving government and administration, not least in its legal and judicial aspects.
A tres excellent et tres puissant Prince, et tres gracious Seigneur, nostre Seigneur le Roi, supplient vos povres liges, Communes de vostre Roialme d’Engleterre, Qe plese a vostre Hautesse et Roiale Mageste, en ese et supportation de voz ditz Communes, et en sustenance de voz bones Loyes, graciousment granter les Petitions souz escriptz.
Ibid. 290.
The principal reason for this separate enrolment was that common petitions, as opposed to private petitions, were of greater social relevance and, being liable to result in statutes or ordinances, of more general public interest, rather than because they were ultimately presented by the Commons. But their responsibility was generally recognized, and sometimes given firm official emphasis by being more largely defined. For example, at the opening of the Parliament of January 1390 (the first to be summoned following Richard II’s resumption of personal control of government after the crisis of 1386-9, when doubtless he was anxious to appear genuinely concerned for the welfare of his subjects), the chancellor stated that the King wished to be informed by the Commons how the laws of the land and statutes were actually being observed and his peace kept, about disturbances, maintenance of quarrels, and barratry, and of means of redress and better government, the Commons being obliged, ‘de droit et devant Dieu’, to apply themselves diligently to such matters. Their distinctive role as petitioners was to be given special emphasis, too, in Henry IV’s first Parliament in 1399 when, after they had themselves insisted that responsibility for judgements of Parliament rested with the King and the Lords, Archbishop Arundel, as commanded by the King, admitted that the Commons were essentially ‘petitioners et demandours’. Indeed, earlier in the session, the Commons having asked that Richard II’s last Parliament should be annulled and its acts repealed, they themselves had qualified their request by urging that, if any necessary or profitable statute or ordinance had been passed then, they should now be given opportunity to discuss it, advise, and submit it among their petitions (‘le mettre en lour petitions’), with a view to its being granted afresh.
However, although it naturally fell to the Commons to present common petitions, how these actually originated is not nearly so clear. They certainly did not all evolve through open discussions in the Lower House, and express some collective view corporately agreed upon. Indeed, although this may have been true of many, some were produced quite differently. If a grievance or a request for some concession arose in a particular county or region, the relevant common petition was in all probability drafted there before Parliament ever met, locally elected representatives being required to bring the petition to the notice of the Lower House, so that if possible it might be put forward ‘in the name of the Commons’.
Precisely how, by what formal procedure, the Commons habitually agreed to present their petitions is not known for sure. But whatever the method, it was liable to be manipulated or even circumvented. So much so that, at times, they themselves were compelled to take deliberate counter-measures to prevent its being abused or disregarded. For instance, having encapsuled their requests in an indenture in Edward III’s first Parliament (1327), they stated that, should any other bill be put forward in their name, they would ‘disavow’ it.
The bill in question was ‘exhibited’ to the Commons by Thomas Haxey, a royal clerk of long standing who had been appointed for life in 1387 as keeper of the writs and rolls of the court of common pleas. (In the Parliament now assembled he was also a proctor for the abbot of Selby in the province of York.) His bill requested the Commons to consider, firstly, the very great costs incurred by Richard II as a result of the unprecedentedly large number (‘multitude’) of bishops and ladies who, with their retainers and servants, were enjoying royal hospitality in his household. So far as the bishops were concerned, it recommended that they and their people should live on their estates (‘lour Seigneuries’), which would be for the general good, but especially to the benefit of the King and their own (ecclesiastical) subjects. Secondly, the attention of the Commons was drawn to the imposition on the clergy of the diocese of Canterbury, in the previous year, of a papal tax of 4d. in the pound, so contravening the Crown’s rights; and a remedy was similarly requested. Nowhere else does the roll of this Parliament allude to Haxey’s second point; but the first clearly so excited the Commons’ interest that, presumably after discussion amongst themselves, they brought it to the attention of the Lords, in a joint meeting on Thursday 1 Feb., half-way through the second week of the session. Haxey’s complaint touching the Household was the last of four questions then raised by the Commons, the other three relating, respectively, to breaches of the statute which limited tenure of office by sheriffs and escheators to a year at a time, to infringements of another restricting livery of badges (‘signes’) worn by the retainers of lords to members of their households and menial servants, and lastly to violations of truces by the Scots. It was, however, Haxey’s criticism of the Household which, regarded by King Richard as a seriously offensive infraction of royal liberty, especially aroused his anger against the Commons. Meeting the Lords after dinner on the following day (Friday 2 Feb.), and having listened to the chancellor’s account of events, he instructed them to inform the Commons next day that he greatly deplored so misconceived and presumptuous attempt on their part to interfere in the running of his household and dictate to him as to what personal company he should keep. Since, as he understood it, the Commons had been prompted and advised (‘moez et enformez’) by a bill presented to them, he also ordered the duke of Lancaster, the most senior of the lords temporal, to demand the name of its author from the Speaker (Sir John Bussy). Evidently this was done, and more: not only was the bill itself given up to the Lords along with the name of Thomas Haxey, and then, at the King’s command, delivered by the clerk of the Parliaments to the clerk of the Crown, but the Commons, protesting their innocence of any intention to offend or displease the King, or impugn his prerogatives, humbly begged him to excuse and pardon them. This apology Richard accepted, through the chancellor; and, further to reassure them of his goodwill, he himself declared that he proposed to forego demands for either tenths and fifteenths or a subsidy for his personal use. Haxey’s punishment was still to be decided. On Wednesday 7 Feb., however, he was brought before the King, the lords temporal and the Commons. After his bill had been read over, and he himself, when questioned by the duke of Lancaster (as steward of England), had admitted delivering it to the Commons, he was condemned as a traitor (‘pro proditore’) to death and forfeiture, by advice of all those lords present and with the King’s assent. But the sentence was soon mitigated: that same day, indeed, Archbishop Arundel and all the other prelates, while protesting their belief in the inviolability of the King’s royal estate and regality, requested that Haxey’s life should be spared and he himself entrusted to their custody. Not only were these requests granted and acted upon, but in little more than a fortnight the King ratified Haxey’s estate in two of his benefices, in April confirmed him in four of his prebends and another living, and on 27 May, in letters patent under the great seal, pardoned him his forfeiture.
Although he never recovered the office in the common pleas forfeited by him at this time, Haxey’s actual punishment had apparently been envisaged as little more than a formality. And, indeed, what was meant to be of far greater significance, both at the time and prospectively, was the basis of the proceedings leading to his conviction, as furnished by the lords spiritual and temporal two days before, on 5 Feb. The King had evidently resolved that the question of Haxey’s punishment should directly depend upon Parliament’s recognition of a principle which would effectively safeguard his royal rights and liberties, at whatever expense to normal parliamentary practice. Following a careful scrutiny of Haxey’s bill, the Lords had decided that if an individual, irrespective of his status or condition, should prompt or inspire the Commons (‘Communes Parliamenti’), or anybody else, to remedy or reform anything touching the King’s person, the royal authority (‘Regalitas’) or power (‘Regimen’), he should be accounted a traitor. Haxey’s condemnation, despite the retrospective character of the judgement, automatically followed. That apart, the Commons must have been disconcerted, not to say deeply perturbed, by the Lords’ action. Admittedly, although among the many articles of the Objectus contra regem justifying Richard II’s deposition was one concerning a subject which had figured among the contentious points raised by the Commons in February 1397, namely allegations that the King had contravened the statute restricting the length of tenure of the office of sheriff, Haxey’s bill itself was nowhere mentioned. But neither Haxey nor ‘Haxey’s case’ was to be forgotten by the Commons: among their common petitions in Henry IV’s first Parliament was one which not only asked that all Haxey’s property might be restored, but also requested the annulment of the judgement of the Lords upon which his condemnation for treason had been dependent. That judgement, the Commons now declared, had been erroneous, as well as destructive of their customs (‘en anientesment des Custumes de lez Communes’). After urging that nobody else should he penalized by the Lords’ judgement, the petition itself concluded with a general appeal for justice and the preservation of the liberties of the Commons (‘pur salvation de les Libertes de lez ditz Communes’). With the advice and assent of all the lords spiritual and temporal, Henry IV gave his assent.
It will be recalled that when, after the Commons’ submission of Haxey’s bill in the Parliament of January 1397, Richard II had insisted on being told the name of the author, the duke of Lancaster was ordered to demand a reply from Sir John Bussy, the Speaker. This was doubtless because Bussy, who by virtue of his office was responsible for answering any question on the Commons’ behalf, was naturally the person to approach. It does not necessarily follow that his office, which was principally to represent the Commons in the Upper House, was already invested with such an authority over their own internal operations and procedures as included some measure of practical control over petitions, whether the Commons’ own or the private ones they supported. By 1397, however, the Commons had been electing Speakers to act for the duration of a Parliament for over 20 years, time enough perhaps for the Speaker’s basic function to have undergone extension.
(b) Oral Requests
If it was only in the course of time that the Speaker became closely involved in the Commons’ treatment of private petitions brought to their attention in the hope of support, the very nature of his office ensured that the responsibility for ventilating their own specific grievances (‘gravamina’) and presenting, orally, their requests for appropriate remedies would normally be his. From the start, Speakers were elected to tell the King and Lords what the Commons wanted said. And although the Commons invariably submitted many requests in written petitions or schedules of proposals (often only summarily answered, if accepted, by the words ‘Le Roy le voet’ or, if rejected, by the politely dismissive formula ‘Le Roy s’avisera’), it was only natural that, Parliament being by definition a place of discussion and exchange of information regarding the government of the country generally, much of the Commons’ business with the King and Lords should be conducted orally. This modus operandi is so amply described by entries in the Parliament rolls, as to require only a selection of the relevant evidence. Thus, for example, the impeachments of 1376 and 1386, arising out of ‘the clamour of the Commons’ and resulting in criminal proceedings respectively against high officials of the royal household and the chancellor of England, allowed in each instance for viva voce exchanges between the Commons and the accused. So too did the impeachments of Richard II’s courtiers and judges in 1388, and of his erstwhile enemies in 1397. When, on the fourth day of the Parliament of January 1390, the chancellor, the treasurer, and other lords of the Council (except the keeper of the privy seal) not only offered to resign but openly invited complaints of official misconduct on their part, the Commons, having first successfully requested a day for deliberation and then, on the morrow, been asked by the duke of Lancaster for their views, went to some pains to assert (‘disoient pleinement’) that they could find no cause for complaint. Indeed, in full Parliament, they actually thanked the officials and councillors so that, with the Lords doing the same in warm terms, those who had resigned were reinstated. It was expressly by the mouth of the Speaker (Bussy) that, on the second day of the Parliament of September 1397, following his rehearsal of the chancellor’s opening speech, the Commons requested that the parliamentary commission of 1386 should be repealed as ‘chose fait traiterousement’. Also in this first week of the Parliament, the Commons obtained the King’s leave to impeach Archbishop Arundel of treason, especially for the active part he had taken in the establishment and subsequent operations of the commission.
In the Parliaments of Henry IV’s reign, the Commons continued of course to make oral requests, whether of a distinctly political nature or related to less emotive matters. Indeed, so far as Henry’s relations with his Parliaments were concerned, requests made expressly ‘par bouche’ were often of considerable importance. His first Parliament was inevitably called upon to deal with problems arising from Richard II’s deposition. And the Commons, fully aware of these difficulties, were nothing loth to play a part in bringing them to Parliament’s notice. Directly after it resumed following Henry’s coronation on 13 Oct. 1399, they pointed out to him that his predecessor could not have committed the misdeeds for which he had been deposed without the advice of those who had attended upon his person, and that the worst offenders were named in the records of the Parliament of 1397-8. Consequently, ‘atte the instance and the request of the Commons’ (as Chief Justice Thirning later said), the King ordered the records to be produced and read in Parliament, in the presence of those named: the dukes of Aumâle, Surrey and Exeter, the marquess of Dorset and the earls of Salisbury and Gloucester, all of whom in fact had been responsible for the appeal by which the duke of Gloucester and the earls of Arundel and Warwick had been accused of treason in 1397. Brought to answer for themselves, as the Commons had demanded, each of the six lords, one after the other, affirmed that they had been constrained by fear of death into joining in and prosecuting the appeal, at the same time denying any part in the decision to have the duke of Gloucester murdered at Calais before the Parliament of 1397-8 met, and repudiating responsibility for the later exile and disinheritance of the present King. The judgement of the Lords, to which Henry assented, was that the accused should lose the titles of greater dignity awarded them by King Richard, forfeit the grants he had made them before and after Gloucester’s arrest and, were they ever to attempt to annul Richard’s deposition, stand ‘in peyne of treson’.
Scarcely a Parliament went by in Henry IV’s reign but that, as circumstances required or allowed, the Commons made oral requests before the King and the Lords. These requests or complaints sometimes related to matters of immediate political importance (as in 1399), sometimes to difficulties over procedure, and occasionally to breaches of parliamentary etiquette. At the very outset of the second Lancastrian Parliament (20 Jan.-10 Mar. 1401), the Speaker, Sir Arnold Savage, having made his ‘protestation’ and briefly repeated in substance the declaration of the causes of summons, went on to ask that the Commons should be given sufficient time to deliberate important questions, and not be suddenly pressed to answer them right at the end of the Parliament (a request which received a favourable response). Just four days later, the Commons, again wishing to assert in advance their right to independent discussion, pointed out to the King that, in the course of their deliberations, one of their number, hoping to win his approval and do himself some good (‘pur avancer soy mesmes’), might pass him information about matters not finally agreed amongst themselves, thus arousing his anger, either against them all or perhaps a particular individual. As a result they humbly requested him not to listen to any such premature reports, and he agreed. On the other hand, several apparently important requests made by the Commons expressly ‘par bouche’, on 31 Jan., Henry declined to answer, at least just then, it being his intention that the Commons should include them and others among their ‘communes petitions’, which he would answer as and when advised by the Lords. Later in the session, on 21 Feb., the Commons pointed out (‘monstrerent’) that, contrary to legislation of Edward I, certain royal officials were Welsh-born, and urged him to summon them before him so that any irregularities might be investigated by the Council. Whereupon the King charged his own Council and the prince of Wales’s counsellors to proceed forthwith and, as advised by both Lords and Commons, correct what was amiss. Then, on 26 Feb., with the session still some time to run, the Commons ventured to ask the King to have the business of Parliament enacted and engrossed before the judges left, while the latter still remembered it. Although they were here interfering in a matter which, strictly speaking, was not their business, the King effectively agreed, stating that the clerk of the Parliaments would record ‘la substance du Parlement’ as first advised by the judges and then by himself and the Lords. How necessary the Commons felt some such advice to be, they made clear on the last day of the Parliament (10 Mar.), when, referring to a moderation of the Statute of Provisors passed in 1399, they said that on the previous day they had found the record in the relevant Parliament roll to be at fault, and requested that the Lords, both spiritual and temporal, should examine the matter. However, though Henry assented, albeit protesting that this was not to constitute a precedent, the Lords confirmed the record. At the same time he refused an oral request first made by the Commons on 26 Feb. that, as had until recently been the case, they might be told the answers to their common petitions before they announced their financial grant. The King’s reason for rejection was that it had not in fact been usual for the Commons to receive such information before all the business of Parliament had been completed, the grant of aid included. Not surprisingly, in view of this series of awkward questions put to the King by word of mouth, the Commons, later on this day of the dissolution, begged him to pardon them if by ignorance or negligence they, or any of them, had so offended in word or deed against his ‘estate royal’ as to have incurred his displeasure. This the King then did, ‘et de bone coe[u]r’; and well he might, for in spite of an uneasy session Parliament finally granted him a tenth and fifteenth, leviable in moieties but both within the calendar year.
The Commons were to make similar requests in the next Parliament (30 Sept.-25 Nov. 1402). But this was an altogether quieter session; and it ended so amicably that the King was prompted to invite the members of the two Houses to a dinner on the day after the dissolution. The only oral request of the Commons of institutional interest was one which, on 10 Oct., the chancellor told the Lords had already been made to Henry. This petition, for leave to intercommune with some representatives of the Upper House on parliamentary business, met with royal approval, and 12 lords were actually appointed; but Henry’s concession was framed in such a way as to suggest that the procedure was unwelcome to him. There was in fact ample precedent for it, and every now and then the Commons had nominated those lords who were to confer with some of their own number. On this occasion, however, the King not only insisted that he was complying of his especial grace (not because duty or custom required it), but demanded that this ‘protestation’ should be recorded by the clerk of the Parliaments, and also directly made known to the Commons through the steward of the Household and his own secretary, who, upon their return, did in fact report that the Commons fully acknowledged that the King had the right of it.
That the next Parliament, which sat from 14 Jan. to 20 Mar. 1404, met in an atmosphere of tension, and would most likely prove acrimonious, may be gathered from the Commons’ evident feelings of dissatisfaction at the start. No sooner had their Speaker (Sir Arnold Savage again) been presented and allowed his usual ‘protestation’ than he asked leave to complain of the King’s conduct of affairs (‘la governance mesme nostre Seigneur le Roy’). Indeed, he promptly requested that if any perverse report (‘sinistre information’) reached the King about their deliberations on the subject it would not be regarded as indicative of any ill-will. Nor can relations have been improved by the fact that on a number of occasions (‘as diverses foitz’) the Commons now requested the removal of certain people, including aliens, from the Household. Consequently, after the Lords had expelled four persons (all of them Englishmen) of whom three appeared before Parliament on 9 Feb., the King reluctantly agreed to remove all four, also undertaking to do the same with anyone else who happened to be ‘en hayne ou endignacion de son poeple’. Before a fortnight had passed, the Commons were going over much the same ground, their disapproval now being more emphatically directed against foreigners (especially schismatics) who, they demanded, should not only cease to live in the households of either the King or the queen, but also leave the country. The Lords, charged to give their advice, did so, and on 21 Feb. the chief household officials gave effect to their ordinance, exceptions being made for some members of the queen’s personal entourage.
When Parliament met a second time in the same year, at Coventry on 6 Oct., the Commons’ main concern again related to finance. The important proposal submitted by them on 28 Oct. regarding a resumption into the King’s hands of all royal grants and annuities since 1366 necessarily took shape as a written petition of several articles. Although they put forward a number of oral requests regarding the war in Wales, the rest were largely recommendations designed to benefit all the King’s sons and other members of the royal family (including the King’s cousin, the duke of York, and John and Thomas Beaufort, his half-brothers) and, in the one they made on the last day of Parliament, those knights and esquires who had put themselves at risk in joining Henry on his return from exile in 1399.
Far more uneasy and contentious was the Parliament which, after a long interval, met on 1 Mar. 1406 and, with two prorogations, one short, one long, lasted until 22 Dec. The Commons, evidently following energetic discussions amongst themselves, were once again openly critical of the government’s conduct of affairs. Some of their most important demands for reform were put forward orally. For example, it was in the name of the Commons that, on 23 Mar., the Speaker (Sir John Tiptoft) requested the King that they might have ‘bone Governance habundante’, especially alluding to the need to provide for the protection of ships at sea, the defence of Guyenne, and resistance to the threat from Wales. With regard to the Welsh problem, the Commons urged through the Speaker on 3 Apr. that the prince of Wales, whose authority was now enhanced by a formal definition of his commission in the principality, should fully occupy himself in subjugating the rebels. On the same day, following a reference to ill-intentioned reports (‘sinistre report ... fait par ascuns’) giving the King to understand that the Commons had spoken about him in a disrespectful way likely to incur his anger, the Speaker denied the truth of the reports, and went on to ask that the Commons should be excused and accounted loyal.
Unfortunately, the third and last session of this Parliament (which, called for 13 Oct., only got under way five days later) is not recorded on the Parliament roll in the detail accorded the earlier sessions. However, even as far on as 18 Nov., the Commons, through the Speaker, were demanding that the Lords should be urged to draw the King’s attention to particular causes of ‘male Governance’, the Speaker having, as before, had recourse to his ‘protestation’, at the same time disclaiming any intention on the part of the Commons to derogate from the King’s ‘honourable Estate’, or to excite his displeasure.
When the next Parliament met, at Gloucester abbey on 20 Oct. 1407, it was doubtless intended that, in view of the unprecedented length of its predecessor, it should sit for as short a time as possible, thus perhaps avoiding contention. Much would depend on the Commons’ evaluation of the conduct of the Council during the interval, but more especially on their reaction to the now inevitable demand for further taxation. On the face of it, their election of Thomas Chaucer as Speaker seemed to augur well; for whether or not his dismissal in the previous May from the office of chief butler (held by him since 1402) might be taken to suggest that he was out of favour with the King, he had a close personal relationship with some of the most important councillors. (He was cousin-german to Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, and John Beaufort, earl of Somerset; and, since the beginning of the reign, he had served as steward of the prince of Wales’s estates in Oxfordshire, which was his own county.) Not surprisingly, with the scheme of government formulated in 1406 due to expire at the end of this Parliament, the interrelated questions of conciliar responsibility and financial need came to the fore in the fortnight following Chaucer’s appointment as Speaker on 25 Oct., as is apparent from the record of what happened in the Upper House on 9 Nov., when he began by summarizing events in the previous Parliament for the benefit of the King and Lords. Then, in turn, Archbishop Arundel, the chancellor, reminded the Commons that he himself, solely at the prompting of the Council, had already informed them, first by word of mouth in their own meeting place in the abbey refectory and subsequently in a written statement, of how the taxes had been spent. He continued to explain how he had referred not only to the councillors’ diligence, but also to their having personally entered into bonds for large loans (to the Crown), thus hoping to earn for themselves great goodwill, not to say gratitude. Having been accorded neither, he and the other councillors now wished to be constrained no longer by the oath they had taken in the last Parliament, and so had asked the King to regard them as excused and free of blame. That the Commons in this Parliament were not at this juncture so self-assertive as their recent predecessors is suggested by their failure to question the chancellor’s request, with which the King instantly complied. In fact, since they were apparently ready to let the subject drop, the only other thing the Speaker did that day of direct interest to the government was to protest about royal purveyors; and although seriously meant, this grievance was virtually brushed aside when the steward and the treasurer of the Household (Sir John Stanley and Sir John Tiptoft) replied that punishment for misdemeanours would depend upon legal actions brought privately by plaintiffs against individual purveyors. Only five days later (14 Nov.), however, the Commons were back in the Upper House, the Speaker now complaining that, for want of adequate measures for the safe-keeping of the sea, there had been instances of both loss of seamen’s life and liberty and the capture of valuable cargoes. On this occasion, too, the Commons raised the question of support for the subjugation of Wales. Bewailing the lack of enforcement of previous legislation requiring lords and others with estates in the marches to reside there continually and resist the rebels, the Speaker now demanded that such landowners, minors in royal or seigneurial wardship apart, should be ordered to do so ‘at their peril’, and that the Commons, being under no obligation to sustain the war, should henceforward be altogether discharged.
This state of affairs at once created difficulties that were not to be finally resolved until the last day of the Parliament (2 Dec.), when a written statement obviously prepared in advance—a ‘Schedule of Indemnity'—was read before the whole Parliament. Not only had there been a dispute between the Lords and the Commons (‘certein altercation moeve par entre les Seigneurs et les Communes’), but also trouble between the King and the Lower House, and even between him and the Lords. On 21 Nov. he and the lords spiritual and temporal had discussed together the ‘state of the realm’, the dangers to which the whole nation was exposed from enemies on all sides, and the need for a considerable grant of taxation (‘ascune notable Aide et Subsidie’). The lords, when then asked what financial assistance they thought both adequate and, in view of the poverty of the people, realistic (‘busoignable’), answered one by one that nothing less would suffice than a grant of one-and-a-half tenths and fifteenths, coupled with an extension of the wool subsidy and tunnage and poundage for two years. Whereupon the King ordered the Commons to arrange for deputies to attend the Upper House and report back with his instructions. Accordingly, a dozen Members appeared, only to be told, first, of the question put to the lords and their answer, and then that the King commanded them to return to their fellows and secure their ready compliance with the lords’ proposal. So perturbed (‘grandement destourbez’) were the Commons by their deputation’s report, and so spirited was their verbal protest at the infringement of their liberties, that the King thought it prudent to adopt a conciliatory attitude and retract. As a consequence, the above-mentioned ‘Schedule of Indemnity’ stated that he would continue to respect the freedom of both Houses separately to discuss how best to provide for ‘the estate of the realm’, the Lords doing so in his absence. But regarding taxation, particularly in view of what had occurred on 21 Nov., it was just as important to insist that no grant should be reported to the King, either by the Lords or the Commons, before they were all fully agreed: in other words until a grant had been made by the Commons and the Lords had assented to it, not the other way round. Indeed, lest any doubt should remain as to which of the parties, Lords or Commons, was to be regarded as primarily responsible for any such grant, it was also resolved that, as had been customary, the final announcement of it was to be made by the Speaker (‘par bouche de Purparlour’). Moreover, what had happened this time was not to constitute a precedent, one liable adversely to affect in future the liberty of the ‘Estate’ which the Commons represented; but the King and all other ‘Estates’ too were to be as free as before. When, for additional emphasis, the Speaker requested on the same day that the Commons might leave Parliament enjoying as great a liberty as they had ever had in the past, the King readily agreed, saying that this had always been his intention. All the Speaker now had to do before the dissolution was to ask that adequate measures be taken for defence; that the prince of Wales and his men should be thanked for their efforts in Wales, and those who had deserted him or, like some of the lords of the marches, had otherwise failed to do their duty, should be penalized; that the King’s other three sons should be promoted in rank and suitably provided for; and, finally, to announce the grant of taxation, with specific appropriations for defence. The grant, however, it must be noted, was precisely as first proposed by the Lords; and the King was evidently so grateful that he promised in return not to request, or even accept (the record says), any further grant between Lady Day (25 Mar.) 1408 and Lady Day 1410. What, however, must have given the Commons great cause for satisfaction was that they had managed to make their point regarding the procedure by which Parliament was to grant taxation. They, the Commons, were to make the grant which, once approved by the Lords, their Speaker was to declare, thus effectively leaving them with the last word upon the matter. Incidentally, the King did in fact keep the promise he gave at Gloucester regarding future taxation, at least in the sense that, with Parliament not meeting again before 27 Jan. 1410, it was not until 8 May following that the next grant was actually voted.
This eighth Parliament of Henry IV’s reign which, with a short break for Easter, was to run to two sessions, began at Westminster in circumstances which can only have portended, for both Lords and Commons, another uneasy assembly. The King, as a result of now chronic ill-health, had lost personal control of affairs to such an extent that he had been unable to prevent the recent dismissal of his two chief ministers of state, both of whom were personal friends: firstly, on 11 Dec. 1409, of Sir John Tiptoft, the treasurer of the Exchequer since July 1408, and, secondly, on 21 Dec., of Archbishop Arundel, who had been chancellor from January 1407 (and virtually the King’s vicegerent ever since).
That the Commons fully recognized their own, at least partial responsibility for a virtually sterile first session, is suggested by the unusually elaborate record in the Parliament roll describing how, on the eve of Palm Sunday (16 Mar.), they requested through the Speaker a prorogation for Easter. Having explained that since, at this principal church festival of the year, it was especially incumbent upon them as good Christians to go to confession in their own parish churches, the Speaker asked that they might all return home, at the same time promising, however, that when they came back, and until the end of the Parliament, they would buckle to and ensure the defence of the realm (whereupon the King, trusting in their goodwill and sincerity, gave both them and the Lords leave to depart). In fact, when Parliament re-assembled a fortnight after Easter (7 Apr.), the two Houses, in order to expedite business, promptly entered into joint discussions (‘entrecommunerent’). Yet it was not until 23 Apr. that the Commons presented a series of written petitions which, apart from an interest shown in crime and riotous behaviour especially north of the Trent, were mostly designed to bring about an increase of royal revenue, while at the same time limiting expenditure on the Household as well as on the defence of the realm and of English possessions overseas.
There are other reasons, too, for thinking that this second, final session of the Parliament ended as uneasily as had the first. It can hardly have been of any real importance that a break was made with usual practice, and Parliament dissolved not on the day of the Commons’ grant of taxation, but on the one after (9 May) instead. Obviously, far more significant than this brief postponement was the use made of it, or rather the nature of the business transacted on the extra day by both the Commons and the prince of Wales. Judging from the order in which the Parliament roll records the day’s events, it was at its close that, in the Upper House, the Speaker commended the queen and, likewise in the name of the Commons, paid tribute to Prince Henry (as on previous occasions during the Parliament) as well as his three brothers (Thomas, John and Humphrey), who were considered ripe for honourable promotion.
Although at a great council in March 1411 Lord Scrope had delivered a gloomy statement of the government’s financial position and, by September following, the prince had none the less decided to intervene in the French civil war on the side of the duke of Burgundy against the Orléanists (sending a small English army to France under the earl of Arundel, his fellow councillor), it was not until 3 Nov. that Parliament next assembled. The King himself seems to have been vexed by this pro-Burgundian policy;
There was, of course, still much for the Parliament to do. For example, the Commons needed to discuss ‘un certein article’ which, passed in the previous Parliament, is otherwise only known to have been in ‘restreint’ of the royal prerogative in some way. Whatever its content, the ‘article’ was important enough for the King to have sent the chancellor to draw the Commons’ attention to it; and, with nothing settled by the dissolution (19 Dec.), the Speaker proceeded to ask the King what he meant to do about it. Henry gave the firm reply that, in defence of his royal liberty and authority, the article should be annulled as if the subject had never been raised.
This was an issue which, although bound to have been under consideration in the meantime, may well have been deliberately left undetermined, possibly in order to avoid even formal involvement on the part of Parliament, including perhaps yet another attempt by the Commons to have the councillors sworn in before Parliament on their appointment. In fact, although the Council, its total complement now reduced in number from 12 to nine, remained aristocratic in character, its actual composition underwent considerable changes. Of the nine ordinary members of the Council which had emerged from the Parliament of 1410 only Bishop Langley of Durham, Bishop Bubwith of Bath and Wells, and Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, were re-appointed, now joined by Archbishop Bowet of York, Bishop Clifford of London, and William, Lord Roos. Of the three ex officio members, John Prophet, keeper of the privy seal since 1406, was alone retained, soon to be joined, following the dismissal of Lord Scrope and Sir Thomas Beaufort (both within two days of Parliament’s dissolution), first by Sir John Pelham*, who was appointed treasurer of the Exchequer on 23 Dec., and then, on 5 Jan. 1412, by Archbishop Arundel. For the fifth time since 1386 and the second time under Henry IV the archbishop again became chancellor. None of these councillors was new to the work; indeed, most of them, whether or not ex officio had had considerable previous experience. And they went on to serve for the rest of the reign.
Although Parliament, summoned on 1 Dec. 1412 for 3 Feb. following, did then meet, it was dissolved abruptly as a result of Henry IV’s death on 20 Mar., and the proceedings were nullified. Indeed, in the absence of any Parliament roll, nothing is known of what the Parliament did, or even whether the King took much part, which is unlikely.
It is hardly surprising that since Parliament had so recently been in session for more than six weeks, and a great concourse of peers and others had attended Henry’s coronation in the meantime, this first Parliament of the new reign should have lasted for less than four weeks, ending as it did on 9 June, when the Commons, the Lords assenting, made a modest grant. Otherwise, the session gave little cause for satisfaction. Indeed, the Parliament roll itself reveals that the Commons had not only soon found themselves at odds with the King, but then, in the upshot, had also run into difficulties among themselves, or at least with their first elected Speaker. As will be recalled, an important point of occasional difference between them and Henry IV had been over the form of the Speaker’s protestation (so much so that in 1411 Speaker Chaucer was eventually compelled to ask for time in which to explain it in writing). The imbroglio which now in 1413 arose likewise turned upon the use to which the protestation might be put, not simply by the Speaker in his own interest, but by the Commons too in theirs.
By this time, the Speaker’s protestation, along with his request to the King for its acceptance, had long been a normal proceeding. It is not inconceivable that when, in the 14th century prior to 1376, the Commons had sent a deputation to the Upper House with a foreman to present its case, he might have used a protestation similar in content to the one which, after 1376, soon became customary. Of course, early in the Good Parliament of that year, in the person of Sir Peter de la Mare, the Commons first, to all appearances, elected a Speaker from among their number to serve for the duration of the Parliament. The political tension then generated by the Commons’ impeachments, especially those of high officials of the royal household, was so dangerous to de la Mare himself that he required the protection afforded by a protestation designed to relieve him of personal responsibility for what he might have to say in the Upper House on behalf of the Commons, ‘in discharge of their conscience’.
When, on 22 May, at the beginning of the second week of the Parliament, William Stourton, the Speaker, repeated for the Commons a petition for ‘good governance’ similar to those which, he said, Henry IV had often granted but had neglected to fulfil, he went on to explain, possibly at length, the need for more adequate measures of defence in all frontier regions at home and overseas, as well as drawing attention to the prevalence of riots in different parts of England, notably one at the abbey of Cirencester (a royal foundation). Henry V replied that, on the advice of the Lords, he would remedy the Commons’ grievances as soon as he was able, but not until after the Speaker, having consulted his fellow Members, had submitted them again in detail (‘especialment’) and in writing.
As in the first Parliament of the reign, so in the second (which met at Leicester on 30 Apr. 1414), the Commons evidently again ran into difficulties in their relations with the King. They were greatly concerned with a matter of such procedural importance that, potentially at least, it threatened to be of major constitutional significance: the question of official amendments to those written petitions and oral requests from the Lower House, which, if granted by the King, would be converted into statutes. Although the roll is silent on this point, after the last Parliament most of the statutes resulting from common petitions (including the one laying it down that, at shire and borough elections to Parliament, both electors and those elected should be resident) had finally been so drafted as to have made changes of some material significance.
(iii) PARLIAMENTARY ADVICE UPON AFFAIRS OF STATE, ESPECIALLY FOREIGN POLICY
As will have been appreciated, the ‘common petitions’ which invariably emerged in the course of every Parliament, and for the formulation or adoption and presentation of which the Commons bore a special responsibility, drew attention to ‘the sores of the realm’, grievances which it behoved the government to examine. Whether or not the King, as advised by ‘the great council of Parliament’, accepted the remedies proposed in the petitions, with a view in many instances to their conversion into statutes, the petitions themselves provided a useful source of information, potentially enabling the royal administration to be carried on in a more just and competent fashion, both locally and at the centre. Many common petitions, being based upon an intimate knowledge and understanding of provincial conditions possessed by MPs, were a form of advice. But it was not only upon such matters that the government needed a constant supply of information and guidance. There were other matters of a more directly political nature on which it required the advice of Parliament; and Parliament, having obliged in this respect, would need to provide the means for giving effect to what was eventually decided.
For guidance upon major affairs of state, it had usually been considered imperative that the King should rely upon the great lords of the realm, especially when assembled in Parliament. And this remained the case once peers summoned individually to attend had been joined by the elected Commons, and Parliament became, in due course, a bi-cameral institution. The Lords’ superiority resulted, in part, from certain general factors. In an age when the conduct of government in Church and State, in England as in Christendom as a whole, rested on an acceptance of the hierarchical principle, and relations between members of the different orders and ranks of society were based on a willing recognition on the part of social inferiors of a duty to defer to those above them, such attitudes were bound to affect the workings of all institutions, Parliament included. Moreover, by reason of their landed possessions, and the wealth and influence these provided, the parliamentary peerage, prelates and titular nobility alike, commanded great personal respect, not least when they met together formally as two of the three ‘estates of Parliament’. Admittedly, there were (as previously noted) many occasions when the attendance of the magnates in Parliament was far from full, and some when it was so deplorably sparse as to leave the government quite openly dissatisfied. Yet, as a general rule, such delinquency was largely compensated for by the assiduous attention to duty of those of the highest social standing (bishops and temporal peers of the rank of earl and above), and of persons enjoying the greatest political influence (peers who, whether ex officio or not, always made up a majority on the royal council and sometimes monopolized its membership), whose combined presence invested sessions of Parliament with all due solemnity and seriousness of purpose. Some of these lords were the King’s own kinsmen, and others his trusted friends. And, after the foundation of the Order of the Garter by Edward III in 1348, several of the lords temporal were always distinguished by the peculiarly personal allegiance which, as knights appointed to the Order, they owed to the King as its sovereign, whether he himself or a predecessor had promoted their election. (Seven lay peers were KGs in 1399, 16 in 1413 and 15 in 1422.)
Although final decisions touching the defence of the realm and of the Crown’s possessions and rights abroad, being unquestionably within the scope of the royal prerogative, were normally taken by the King, it was only politically prudent for him to seek the advice of those upon whom he would mainly have to rely for service in war, namely, the magnates. As tenants-in-chief, they had once habitually rendered this service (or paid scutage or fines instead) as a condition of maintaining safe possession of their fiefs and, legally, they remained always liable to perform it on the same basis. And when, from Edward I’s reign onwards, royal armies engaged on foreign campaigns came, at first occasionally, eventually all but exclusively, to be recruited on the basis of military contracts voluntarily entered into by individuals undertaking to serve for specified periods with stipulated numbers of knights, esquires, men-at-arms and archers, all payable at daily rates fixed according to rank and function, it was the lay magnates who mainly supplied the retinues required. Indeed, so many of the lords temporal regularly responded to the call to arms in time of war that the number of those available to be summoned to Parliament was severely reduced. The lords spiritual, admittedly, no longer provided their former military quotas, but they too continued to show a personal interest in the wars, helping to finance them by substantial loans to the Crown and serving as agents of royal diplomacy. Understandably, therefore, advice from Parliament on questions of foreign policy was chiefly sought and obtained from the House of Lords, where particular attention would doubtless be paid to those present who sat on the Council. But what of the Commons’ interest in such matters?
Many of the knights of the shires would already have been, or expect soon to become, involved in foreign expeditions either as members of aristocratic retinues or in pursuance of military contracts of their own, and all were supposed to be ‘belted knights’. Indeed, sometimes they were even specifically required by the writs of summons to have followed the profession of arms and done service in the field. There were always some parliamentary burgesses, too, especially from the coastal towns, who as shipowners and merchants had experience of war, in the transportation of armies and conveyance of military supplies and, occasionally, at close hand in sea battles (most notably at Sluys in 1340 and in the mouth of the Seine in 1416). Moreover, concerning taxation for defence and war overseas, the consent of the Commons had become, even during Edward III’s reign, a factor of crucial importance. So, when the King and his councillors considered it imperative that Parliament should openly agree with a policy they themselves were predisposed to adopt, the Commons as well as the Lords were almost inevitably allowed opportunity to express their opinions. This had become by no means unusual under Edward III, especially when the supremely important question arose as to whether there should be war with France over the King’s rights, or when, during wartime, there was the possibility of a peace.
It was first in the Parliament of October 1382 that two new military projects simultaneously came up for discussion: on the one hand, a proposal that would enable the duke of Lancaster to lead an army via Portugal to enforce his claim (jure uxoris) to the throne of Castile, France’s greatest ally, and, on the other, a proposal for an expedition to be led as a ‘crusade’ by Bishop Despenser of Norwich into the county of Flanders, which was a fief of the French kingdom itself. Since a choice would clearly have to be made between the two schemes, the Lords firmly supported Lancaster’s, whereas the Commons, while not openly declaring against it, so obviously preferred the bishop’s as to present a written ‘common petition’ setting out their reasons in detail. (They argued that a campaign in Flanders would be assisted by those Flemish communes which, being in rebellion against Count Louis de Mâle, had already offered to accept Richard II as their sovereign; that it might well distract the French from attacks on Gascony; and that the cost of transporting forces to the scene of action would be lower.) Evidently, despite recourse, at the Commons’ request early in the session, to consultation with a committee of ten peers (among whom they named both Lancaster and Despenser), the two Houses failed to reach agreement. Judging from the official response to the common petition, that the Council should proceed to treat with Despenser, it looks as though the Commons’ view had prevailed. But in the end Parliament sanctioned a third alternative, namely an expedition to France led by Richard II himself, for which it granted a fifteenth in aid.
So far as the war with France was concerned, the problem of defence had now become uppermost, not least because of deteriorating relations with Scotland. Early in 1384 the official end of the long Anglo-Scottish truce, first concluded in 1369 but since then periodically extended, had been marked by Scottish cross-border attacks and an English counter-invasion under the duke of Lancaster. Although the truce had now been renewed, it was still possible that Robert II of Scotland, who previously had held aloof from the Anglo-French conflict, would soon invoke the promise the French had made him in August 1383 to provide both military and financial help in the event of war with England. But the French still remained the chief source of danger: should hostile action take the form of an invasion of England, their forces were bound to operate from bases in Flanders where Philip, duke of Burgundy, who was in control of the government of his young nephew, Charles VI of France, had recently succeeded as count (on the death of his father-in-law, Louis de Mâle, on 30 Jan. 1384), and enjoyed secure possession of the whole of the province, except for Ghent.
When the next Parliament met, in October 1386, a French invasion from Flanders again seemed dangerously imminent. Despite this, both Houses were now mainly preoccupied by a serious rift with the King following the Commons’ impeachment of his chancellor, the earl of Suffolk, by the latter’s trial, and by the establishment of the parliamentary commission entrusted with the exercise of royal authority for the following year. And, just like the Wonderful Parliament of 1386, the Merciless Parliament of 1388 was chiefly involved in matters of domestic importance, most notably the ‘Court revolution’ consequent upon the trial and condemnation for treason of the King’s foremost friends and supporters. Naturally enough, once Richard II assumed personal control of government, in 1389, the course of foreign policy became ever more firmly determined by prerogatival action. The Commons’ response to his aim of reaching an accommodation with France (which was to culminate in the royal marriage alliance of 1396 and a 30 years’ truce) was largely that of Parliament as a whole; and only very rarely were they either consulted separately or themselves moved to intervene. In the Parliament of November 1391 they went so far as to urge that John of Gaunt, who had been granted the duchy of Guyenne in March 1390, should attend the negotiations for a peace or extension of truce with France, to which both he and the King agreed.
One important condition of the alliance between Richard II and Charles VI was that it should lead to a compromise solution of the general problem posed by the papal schism, which had now persisted without any previous hope of secure settlement for nearly 20 years (since 1378). When the two kings met outside Calais in October 1396 for the handing over of Richard’s child-bride, it had been agreed that a joint Anglo-French embassy should proceed first to interview Benedict XIII at Avignon and then Boniface IX at Rome, its common object being to secure the resignation of both Popes on pain of renunciation. Charles and Richard had then also approved an additional scheme, which, although connected with their plans for the schism, was far more likely to promote Charles VI’s long-held idea of establishing a strong French presence in Italy than benefit English interests there.
Although Henry IV, for all but the end of his reign, was treated by the French as a usurper and regicide, and England and France were again enemies, the dangers from civil war and rebellion affecting the internal security of both kingdoms were so serious as virtually to rule out a resumption of open war between them, at least on any appreciable scale. And when, in the autumn of 1411 and then in the summer of 1412, English forces again invaded France, it was in order to take advantage of internal French dissension, first on one side (the Burgundian party supported by Henry, prince of Wales) and then on the other (the Orléanist, alias Armagnac, party supported by Henry IV and his second son, Thomas, duke of Clarence). Meanwhile, so far as were concerned the major outstanding questions at issue (the now traditional claim to the throne of France, still overshadowed by the old problem of the English tenure of Guyenne), the situation had been largely one of stalemate. Furthermore, if the King needed fuller advice than his council felt able to give, whether regarding France or Scotland, Brittany, Flanders, the Empire or the Hanseatic League or the problem of the papal schism, he tended to seek it of Parliament as a whole, seldom specifically of the Commons. At least, so it appears from the rolls of his Parliaments, which are somewhat less informative in this respect than those for the reigns of Edward III and Richard II, and which, indeed, were to remain so under Henry V. Yet, the odd occasion does arise in the official records of Parliament when the Commons’ interest in external relationships again emerges. Admittedly, in Henry IV’s first Parliament, in 1399, the lords spiritual and temporal alone were asked by Archbishop Arundel (on 23 Oct.) to agree that Henry of Monmouth, the royal heir apparent, should assume the title of duke of Aquitaine. Furthermore, when, nearly three weeks later, the earl of Northumberland denied that he and the earl of Westmorland (constable and marshal of England, respectively) had incited the King to make war against the Scots, as some alleged, and Henry then assumed personal responsibility for the intended invasion of Scotland, announcing his decision to take direct command, their audience was restricted to the lords temporal. Having been each asked by Northumberland on the King’s behalf for advice, it was, in fact, only the lay peers who consented to the war, which they unanimously blamed upon the Scots.
In the next Parliament, which met on 20 Jan. 1401, the Commons, who then closely involved themselves in a whole range of important questions, still found time to consider a particular problem which, although of relatively minor significance in the context of Anglo-French relations, was evidently of considerable immediate interest. Having already heard that certain English nobles and others had been challenged to personal combat by Frenchmen, and believing that France was likely to prefer war to peace, on 25 Jan. the Commons asked the King, in view of the eminence of the Englishmen concerned, the risk of losing their services in a war and the costs involved, to consult all the peers, but first to forbid the challenges from being taken up.
In his opening address to this assembly of 1402, the chancellor had also been concerned not only to emphasize the King’s need of financial aid, but to ask that he be fully informed by both Lords and Commons of their advice regarding the rebellion in Wales, the state of Ireland, the defence of Guyenne and the march of Calais, but, first and foremost, ‘les Guerres d’Escoce’. It was no doubt to ensure a more effective discussion of the whole of this agenda that, on 10 Oct., the Commons asked through the chancellor for the appointment of a committee of peers to intercommune with them. Although the King at first sent the steward of the Household (Lord Saye) and his secretary (John Prophet) to demand that the Commons recognize his right to refuse such a concession, he did, in fact, agree once they had done so. Of all those questions at issue, the Scottish war seems to have particularly interested the Commons, especially in view of recent success in that quarter. When they next came into the Upper House on 16 Oct., and had congratulated the King upon his invasion of Scotland, as well as commending his own and the prince of Wales’s repeated efforts to suppress the Welsh rebellion, and praising the work of Thomas of Lancaster in Ireland, they turned more specifically to the crushing defeat inflicted on the Scots at the battle of Humbleton Hill on 14 Sept. previous. Their request that the earl of Northumberland, the commander of the victorious English army, should be accorded all honour and gratitude for his services once he arrived at the Parliament was doubtless put into effect on 20 Oct., when he and other lords who had fought in the battle brought before King, Lords and Commons in the white hall of Westminster palace a number of their Scottish and French captives. Chief among the prisoners recorded as present was Murdoch Stuart, heir to the duke of Albany and nephew of King Robert III.
Although at the beginning of the Parliament of January 1404 both Lords and Commons were asked for advice regarding defence, not only against rebels in Wales and Ireland, but also against the French, it is not recorded that either House specifically responded.
Before the end of Henry IV’s reign there was a quickening of interest in external affairs, certainly in the situation in France, and also in the movement to reunite Christendom by means of General Councils. But although both Lords and Commons were undoubtedly affected by the political consequences of this revival, their concern did not result in any long or detailed explanations in the rolls of the Parliaments of the time (the Parliaments of 1407, 1410, and 1411). It was not, indeed, until Henry V had decided to recover his inheritance overseas and, in the Parliament of November 1414, allowed the fact to be announced by his chancellor (Bishop Beaufort), that the latter went on to demand ‘sage Conseil et loial’ as well as substantial monetary support (‘copious subside daniers’).
So, apart from more official reports of further military success (as in the Parliament of November 1417), urgent appeals for continued financial support, and references to the grants of taxation which resulted, the rolls of Parliament now provide little information about the interest shown by the two Houses in external affairs. Admittedly, the roll of the Parliament of October 1416 contains the full text of the treaty of Canterbury of 15 Aug. previous: an offensive and defensive alliance which Henry V had personally arranged with the Emperor Sigismund, and which he now caused to be revealed and explained to Parliament, in order to secure its approval. Of course, this was obviously no more than a formality: the treaty, to which ‘all the Estates Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons of the realm assembled’ consented, was by then a fait accompli; and ratification by Parliament, as also by the Imperial electors in Germany, had indeed been written into its terms. However, the production of the treaty in Parliament could only be of great propaganda value. All of which, mutatis mutandis, may be said again of the submission, to the Parliament of May 1421, of the terms of the year-old treaty of Troyes, the treaty which had not only provided for Henry’s marriage to Charles VI’s daughter, Katherine, but also made the King and his successors Charles’s heirs, and himself his Regent.
However, that treaty of Troyes had, in the meantime, already affected parliamentary business, in the Parliament of December 1420. It was then laid down, evidently early in the session, that if Henry were to return to England during the Parliament, Parliament, although originally summoned by writs issued under the teste of his lieutenant, should not be dissolved; and that if in future the King were to require a Parliament to meet in accordance with writs similarly issued, and then soon came home, Parliament should neither be summoned afresh nor, had it actually assembled, be dissolved. This ordinance was passed ‘by authority of Parliament’, meaning that it must have been agreed by both Lords and Commons.
It might appear from the above presentation of evidence about Parliament’s interest in foreign policy that the Commons rarely intervened in any really significant fashion. Indeed, whenever, as occasionally happened, their advice was officially demanded, they tended to decline to offer it, at least in a straightforward manner. Admittedly, at a time of general perplexity, the Commons might act independently, even decisively (as over Despenser’s crusade to Flanders in 1382-3); but when, as was usually the case, they found the Lords ready to approve the policy projected by the King and his councillors, they themselves were content to fall into line and accept it. Their general reluctance to offer independent advice may well have been due to a suspicion that they might be inveigled into assuming financial responsibility for any policy with which they were too closely associated. Of course, if the policy gave rise to campaigns overseas, or was simply a matter of providing for special measures of defence, the need for extraordinary taxation was bound to be so urgent as inevitably to involve the Commons. Then, at least, their interest would be close, expressing itself in the grants they made, to which, moreover, might well be annexed conditions in the form of appropriations of the tax revenues to specific purposes.
(iv) PARLIAMENTARY TAXATION
Although all post-Conquest kings of England held great lordships, were possessed of other extensive estates, and also derived considerable income from the feudal ‘casualties’ (reliefs, wardships and escheats), the fee farms paid by royal boroughs, and rents of various kinds, the idea that they could ‘live of their own’, however much their subjects might urge them to do so, was in practice only ever a dream. They were in constant need of financial aid involving extraordinary taxation. Although the King in time of real necessity was fully entitled to it, and his subjects were under a moral obligation to provide it, such aid ought none the less to be ‘gracious’ aid, that is granted by consent. General taxes on personal property (as distinct from strictly feudal aids levied on the knights’ fees of the King’s vassals), date from the reign of Henry II, when they were first levied to finance crusades; but such was their value in terms of revenue that, under Henry’s successors, Richard I, John and Henry III, they became so increasingly unexceptional that by Edward I’s reign they were the normal means of raising the huge sums urgently required by the King in time of war (the gravity of any such crisis, Edward was convinced, being his own right and duty to judge). Consequently, although John, in the Great Charter of 1215, had acknowledged the right of prelates, earls and greater barons to consent to extraordinary taxation (aids and scutages), and this concession continued to be observed in practice during Henry III’s reign, Edward I was the first king to realize how important it was to strengthen the framework of consent, not haphazardly but on a regular basis. Fully aware that the tax on moveables necessarily fell upon all and sundry, by no means only on the lords who had been used to granting it, and also persuaded by his legal advisors of the practical validity of the Romano-canonistic doctrine that what affected all should be approved by all (‘quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur’), Edward eventually formed the habit of seeking the consent of Parliaments enlarged, inter alios, by elected representatives of the local communities of shires, cities and boroughs. And by 1340, with the cessation of tallage levied on the King’s demesnes, parliamentary taxation had become the only form of direct taxation.
The writs of summons prescribed that the Commons should attend Parliament with full power (‘plena potestas’) to act for their respective communities in doing, and consenting to, whatever might be ordained there by common counsel.
The Hundred Years’ War, upon which Edward III embarked in 1337, and which may be said to have lasted until the loss of Bordeaux in 1453, inevitably involved the Crown in expenditure on a scale that could only be met by parliamentary taxation. In fact, there were no more than two relatively short spells in that period (1360-9 when England and France were at peace, and 1422-7 when Parliament evidently took the view that the conquered regions of France ought to finance the war), when ordinary direct taxation continuously remained ungranted. Otherwise, royal requests for extraordinary aid were fairly routine; and, provided that a reasonable case for assistance was made out, Parliament could usually be relied upon to furnish enough to meet the request at least in part, if not in full.
Direct taxation, as levied on the laity since the reign of John, had normally taken the form of grants of a general subsidy raised in counties and towns on the basis of an agreed proportion of the assessed value of an individual’s moveable property (goods and chattels). The rate had been constantly variable (as low as a fortieth in 1232 and as high as an eighth in 1297) until, in 1334, it finally took the form of tenths levied on parliamentary boroughs and fifteenths levied on the communities of the counties (a distinction in the rating of the local parliamentary constituencies having become increasingly common since 1307). In 1334 it was also evidently decided that the local contributions to the tenth and fifteenth should henceforward be fixed quotas (amounting all told to about £38,000 per subsidy). However, since this arrangement took no account of economic and demographic change, it resulted in anomalies and was liable to be quite inequitable in its long-term effects. Doubtless partly for this reason, and perhaps in the hope of a more satisfactory financial yield, Parliament had recourse, albeit only occasionally, to other modes of direct taxation. In 1371, after ‘plusours voies de Eide’ had been discussed between Lords and Commons, a levy of £50,000 on parishes (except in Cheshire) was agreed.
In contrast, indirect taxation, notably the subsidy levied on exported wool and also tunnage and poundage, was eventually granted in ways which made it continuously leviable once Parliament’s exclusive right to consent was admitted by the Crown. So far as the wool subsidy was concerned, this was not until 1362. Indeed, who, or what body, should grant this lucrative subsidy had long been a vexed question. In Edward I’s reign, and since then, partly on account of the sheer weight of the levy (rarely less than 40s. per sack, in addition to the ‘ancient custom’ of 6s.8d. per sack accorded by Parliament in 1275), it had been royal policy to demand consent, whenever possible, only from the wool merchants, who actually paid the tax. For 20 years after 1336 Edward III took this policy so far as to convene, on a more or less regular basis, large assemblies of merchants, who were sometimes elected locally or sometimes individually summoned by royal writs, and of whom some, at least, were happy to grant the subsidy in return for special, monopoly privileges in the export trade. Such benefits apart, wool merchants in general had usually been able to recoup their payments of the tax by reducing the price at which they bought their wool, and increasing the price at which they sold it abroad. In England, therefore, it was effectively the producers of wool who were penalized: they lived in all parts of the country and were of every class, and, as such, were represented in Parliament by the Commons, who, of course, remained fully alive to the economic realities of the situation. Even so, at least in the 1340s, the Commons, when themselves asked to make the grant, tended to vacillate: occasionally they demanded the cessation of the tax (long stigmatized as the ‘maletolte’); now and then, however, they assented to it, until in 1351 they themselves voted it for two years, and then in 1354 for as many as six.
Apart from these exceptional allocations to Richard II and Henry V, for nearly a century after 1362 exaction of the wool subsidy habitually depended on renewal by special grants. So, too, from 1372 onwards, did the levy of the subsidiary mercantile tax of tunnage and poundage. The grants of both subsidies were now mostly timed to produce a continuous yield of revenue from each; but they continued to be special at least in the sense that they were invariably intended to cover a closely defined period (most frequently in terms of Exchequer years running from Michaelmas to Michaelmas). This restriction itself gave an added dimension to Parliament’s control of taxation in general: the fact that every grant of this financially essential revenue was made afresh for a limited period enabled Parliament not only to alter the different, disproportionate rates at which native and foreign merchants were to pay their dues, but also to revise the appropriation of the subsidy revenues for specific purposes. It was inevitable, too, that changing circumstances would affect the duration of grants, and these sometimes varied quite considerably, especially in the case of the wool subsidy which, as the far more important of the two imposts levied on external trade, was particularly susceptible to commercial fluctuations, as well as to internal political shifts.
Whereas from 1362 until the end of Edward III’s reign, the wool subsidy was regularly granted for either two or three years, the unstable governmental and financial situation in the first half of Richard II’s reign gave rise to considerable uncertainty. Admittedly, the Gloucester Parliament of 1378 provided for the renewal of the subsidy when the grant made by the Good Parliament of 1376 (at rates of 43s.4d. and 53s.4d. per sack payable by denizens and aliens respectively) had still a year to run. But Richard’s first grant was then only for a single year, ending at Michaelmas 1380; and although, in part compensation, the Gloucester Parliament had agreed that a general surcharge of 6s.8d. per sack should apply as from Easter 1380, the next Parliament, which met in April 1379, annulled this additional duty and merely confirmed the existing grant. The Parliament of January 1380 renewed the subsidy, again in advance, but only up to Martinmas 1381; and its successor, which met at Northampton in November 1380, countenanced an extension of no more than six weeks, until Christmas 1381. Consequently, when the first Parliament after the Peasants’ Revolt assembled on 3 Nov. 1381, the grant, even as extended, had all but run out. Despite the special demand put to the Commons in the first session that they should continue the subsidy for long enough to pay the Calais garrison, at least, their general dissatisfaction with the government at the time led them to object that the King’s normal, uninterrupted enjoyment of the subsidy was no basis for any facile claim to receive it ‘as of right and custom’. Moreover, although they did agree to a renewal, this fresh grant was to exclude the week after Christmas and then cover only the month ending 2 Feb. 1382. Even so, the second session ended more promisingly on 25 Feb. with a renewal of the subsidy, in the first instance for four months (until 24 June), but then for all of the following four years.
Not surprisingly, the period of unremitting political tension from 1386 to 1389 produced no greater certainty as to what might happen to the wool subsidy from year to year. In the Wonderful Parliament of 1386 Lords and Commons again anticipated the expiry of their last previous grant, but on this occasion they extended it from 1 Aug. 1387 only to Christmas following. Since no fresh grant was then possible before the Merciless Parliament met, it was not until 20 Mar. 1388 (when Parliament was prorogued) that the subsidy was renewed until 17 May (Whitsuntide), and as late as 2 June (two days before the dissolution) that a further renewal was sanctioned, albeit for barely another year (until midsummer 1389). The Cambridge Parliament of September 1388 evidently extended the subsidy until 1 Mar. 1390, when the next grant occurred, but this was only until Christmas of the same year. Not until the Parliament of November 1390 did the wool subsidy begin again to be renewed on a more regular basis, without interruptions, and for longer periods which, incidentally, allowed for fewer Parliaments, as well as smoothing the way for the grant of the subsidy for Richard II’s lifetime in January 1398. On the day of its dissolution the November 1390 Parliament renewed the subsidy for three years up to 3 Nov. 1393. (Although this concession was at first made absolutely conditional upon the Council’s removal of the wool staple from Calais by 9 Jan. 1391, and its permanent location in English ports thereafter, in the next Parliament of November 1391 all these provisos were abrogated, and the grant was confirmed outright.) The next subsidy, the need for it anticipated by the Parliament of January 1393, was again for three years, following immediately after the previous one. Although, since no Parliament met in 1396, this particular grant had expired before the Parliament of January 1397 could renew it, the new extension was for no less than five years, appropriately backdated to 30 Nov. 1396. However liberal such an award may have been it was superseded, at Shrewsbury on 31 Jan. 1398, by one of outstanding generosity, being voted for the rest of the King’s life, a grant which, Parliament insisted, was without precedent and should not create one. The grant ceased, of course, at Richard’s deposition at Michaelmas 1399.
Considering the constant upsets and strains of Henry IV’s reign, when the King and Parliament were often at odds, not least over questions of financial support, it is indeed remarkable that grants of the wool subsidy were now made to produce an almost perfect continuity. Certainly, the reign did not ever witness any such deliberate interruption by the Commons of this fundamental source of supply as had twice occurred under Richard II. Indeed, only two grants—the first for three years, made on 15 Oct. 1399 (by Henry’s first Parliament) and the second, for a similar period, voted on 25 Nov. 1402 (by his third)—unavoidably had to be back-dated to the previous Michaelmas. Otherwise, the renewals of the subsidy were all made well in advance; and if the later grants of the reign were for shorter periods, they still proved perfectly adequate. The Coventry Parliament of October 1404 renewed the subsidy for two years (ending at Michaelmas 1407); the long Parliament of 1406 did so for only one (Michaelmas 1407-8); the Gloucester Parliament of 1407 for two again (Michaelmas 1408-10); and that of 1410 for another two years (Michaelmas 1410-12). Then, as matters fell out, the short renewal up to Michaelmas 1413, voted in 1411, outlasted the reign.
The exaction of tunnage and poundage, those subsidiary mercantile taxes levied respectively on wine and general merchandise (including cloth), had remained rather haphazard for some time following their introduction in 1347 as part of a series of emergency measures for the protection of shipping in home waters against enemy action and piracy. As was then the case with the wool subsidy, there was uncertainty as to who might sanction the levy: in 1347 the taxes were imposed by the King’s Council; in February 1350 they were granted for a year by ‘the merchants of the realm’ and in September following, after their suspension in June, Edward III himself re-imposed them, again for a year. The Commons had objected more than once, on the ground that their assent had not been obtained, and in February 1351 they even asked for the imposts to be abolished. Predictably, under the circumstances, King Edward refused, and they were in fact levied until Michaelmas 1351, thenceforward to be discontinued until, in October 1359, the magnates ‘with the consent of the merchants’ granted poundage (at 6d. in the pound), and, in January 1360, the Council independently authorized the collection of tunnage (at 2 s. per tun). With the conclusion of the peace between England and France at Calais in October following, these two subsidiary taxes on external trade, unlike the wool subsidy, understandably fell into abeyance.
Although, in order that direct and indirect taxation should be granted ‘by authority of Parliament’, all such grants, finally encapsuled in indentures, had to be approved by both Lords and Commons, the Commons’ exercise of a right not simply to consent to taxation in all its forms, but to assume prime responsibility in the decision-making process, had become virtually automatic by the end of the 14th century. In the second half of the century, preliminary discussions about grants between delegates of both Houses were quite common, and clearly proved mutually beneficial; but it was invariably the Commons who requested the appointment of these ‘inter-communing’ committees, and who, in the 1370s, 1380s and 1400s (when they were carefully recorded in the Parliament rolls), frequently nominated the individual lords who took part.
When the King asked Parliament to grant him financial aid, whether by direct or indirect taxation, his request was the most important feature of the ‘charge’ laid upon both Lords and Commons at the opening ceremony. Each House was then required to consider, independently, the reasons offered in justification of his demand. Since the Upper House was attended at least frequently by the King himself, and constantly by such great officials and other members of the Council as were peers, all of them fully conversant with government policy and well able to sway opinions and win support, a favourable reaction could usually be expected. A similar response from the Commons, even if royal ministers came along to explain official policy, and whether or not the Commons intercommuned with the Lords, might be more difficult to achieve. For although the moral obligation to aid the King in his necessity and for the common good of the realm, to which Parliament as a whole was subject, bore upon the Lower House with no less compelling force than upon the Lords, the Commons were not answerable to the King alone, but also, in a different sense, to the local communities which they represented, and upon which fell most of the burden of taxation, a fact they themselves realized only too well. All the same, because they usually appreciated the reasons for the King’s request for extraordinary aid, the Commons were on the whole willing to make him a grant. Since the Parliament rolls hardly ever quantify the amount requested, it is, however, mostly impossible to say whether, when a grant was made, it came up to royal expectations. Nor when, as sometimes, no grant of a general subsidy was forthcoming, can one always be sure that none had been asked for. (The only authentic references to the Commons being expressly excused such a grant relate to the Parliament of January 1397, during which Richard II himself announced that he was not asking for a tenth and fifteenth on this occasion, and to the opening of Henry V’s second Parliament when, on 30 Apr. 1414, the chancellor stated that the King, in the hope of making the Commons more amenable to his demands in future, proposed not to ask them for a tenth and fifteenth.)
Naturally enough, the Commons were bound eventually to aspire to regulate the way in which their grants were to be applied. That is, to concern themselves with the expenditure of the proceeds of taxation, especially when, as in time of war, this reached enormous proportions. Significantly, it was in 1340, when Edward III’s finances were already in a parlous state, that the Commons first used the device of appropriation of supply, and imposed conditions as an integral part of their grant.
This was a time when, especially, the Commons’ appropriations came to be more closely defined. For example, when the Parliament of January 1380 granted a whole tenth and fifteenth (as a gift) and a further half of the same subsidy (as a prest until the next Parliament), it was on the understanding that the money would be exclusively applied to finance an expedition to Brittany, commanded, like the previous one of 1378, by Thomas of Woodstock, Richard II’s youngest uncle. In the next Parliament, which met at Northampton in the following November and granted the infamous triple poll tax, the Commons, having first petitioned that this tallage should be used to ‘refresh’ the leaders of the expedition and honour the military covenants between the King and Earl Thomas, ended by appropriating their grant principally to that purpose.
Since the roll of the Cambridge Parliament of September 1388 has not survived, whatever conditions were attached to the grant of the whole tenth and fifteenth then made are not known; and only when a similar tax was next voted, in the Parliament of November 1391, does further information on appropriations become available. When this Parliament provided a half tenth and fifteenth payable on 21 Apr. 1392 and a whole subsidy to be collected on 24 June following, the Commons earmarked the half subsidy to bear the costs of an already projected conference between Richard II and Charles VI of France for the negotiation of a truce or final peace. However, in the event of an outbreak of war, the proceeds of that particular tax were to be held in reserve by the treasurer of the Exchequer, ready to be used, along with the whole tenth and fifteenth, to finance a military expedition to either France or Scotland, provided that it was led by Richard himself. Indeed, it was solely to pay for such an expedition that the larger subsidy was appropriated, and if it did not materialize the money was to remain uncollected. Neither of the two separate grants was to be employed in any way other than in accordance with these conditions; and if the treasurer, having been charged by the King to observe them, failed to do so, then the Commons might justifiably impeach him in the next Parliament.
The appropriation of the subsidy of 1395 was to be the last of Richard II’s reign made applicable to a grant of direct taxation. For although, in the next Parliament of January 1397 (which met after Anglo-French relations had been quite transformed by the 30 years’ truce of 9 Mar. 1396 and Richard’s marriage to Isabella de Valois three days later), the King was evidently still expecting a joint Franco-English military expedition into northern Italy, and hoping for a grant to finance it, the Commons objected so firmly that he voluntarily withdrew all claim to a tenth and fifteenth, and none, of course, was voted.
Although, under Henry IV, the Commons’ appropriations of supply were again to be a regular feature of their grants, this was not the case at first, largely for want of a proper opportunity. The Parliament of October 1399 had no option but to renew the wool subsidy (Richard II’s grant for life having automatically ended with his deposition), but it voted no direct taxation. This omission was to be repaired by the Parliament of January 1401, which granted a whole tenth and fifteenth (payable in two instalments leviable within the year), although the revenues were not appropriated to any specific purpose. Such a course would, indeed, have been rather pointless. For, as Sir William Thirning, c.j.c.p., had made clear when opening Parliament, most if not all of a grant was bound to be used up in attempts to cope with the heavy debts run up by the King’s expedition to Scotland and his efforts to suppress Glendower’s rebellion in Wales, all in the past six months. When, however, in the Parliament of September 1402 the Commons once more renewed the wool subsidy for another three years and again voted a whole tenth and fifteenth (leviable in three instalments, but all within a twelve-month), they were evidently less preoccupied with past royal indebtedness than with future expenditure; and their grants, made in consideration of Scottish hostility (despite the Percys’ recent triumph at Humbleton Hill), the spread of rebellion in Wales and also the situation in Ireland, at Calais and in Guyenne, were expressly appropriated to defence, ‘especially defence of the realm of England’.
When the next Parliament met, on 1 Mar. 1406, the dangers to which England was exposed were still serious, since although the Yorkshire risings of the spring of 1405 had been ruthlessly suppressed, the rebels in Wales were still aggressively active, and, so too, overseas, were the French. But another chronic problem, which now appeared particularly acute, was how best to protect English shipping against piracy and privateering in both the English Channel and the North Sea. Native merchants, mariners and shipowners were so dissatisfied with existing arrangements that some of them undertook to assume collective responsibility for the safeguarding of the seas, provided that they could agree terms with the King and his Council.
To these various allowances were added certain other, administrative provisions. To help guarantee regular payment from their basic source of income, the contractors were given the right to nominate one of the two customs officers at the ports of collection, and were also promised warrants under the great and privy seals ordering officials generally to do what was necessary to implement the ordinance. Moreover, having asked for the appointment of royal commissioners empowered to try and punish anyone who contravened the ordinance, and that those who were party to the scheme should not be harassed for offences committed against the King’s foreign friends and allies by other English merchants, the contractors were formally authorized to nominate two persons, one for the south, one for the north, with the same judicial functions as admirals, to try such malefactors.
The remarkable length of the 1406 Parliament, which ran to three sessions of progressively longer duration, almost certainly reflects not only the volume of multifarious business, but also the King’s determination not to dissolve Parliament before it had made him a grant of direct taxation. In fact, it was not until 21 Dec., when many Members of the Commons would already have abandoned any hope of reaching home for Christmas, that they actually conceded a tenth and fifteenth leviable in mid February 1407, coupled with a renewal of the wool subsidy and tunnage and poundage, although only for a single year dating from the expiry of the current grant (an effective extension to Michaelmas 1408).
However well-intentioned these conditions may have been, the appropriation of £6,000 for the King’s use must have hindered the Council from winding up the finances of the merchants’ scheme for safeguarding the seas, which had come to a premature end on 29 Nov. 1406. In fact, so little progress had been made by the time the next Parliament met (at Gloucester in October 1407) that one of the more important tasks still facing the Council, and now also the Lords in general, was to provide for the reimbursement of the two admirals who in 1406 had been directly responsible for the conduct and financing of operations at sea. Not even then, however, was it possible to do all that was needed. Although the King, as advised by the Council and other lords, now agreed that the treasurer of the Exchequer should pay Richard Clitheroe I*, former admiral for the south and west, £2,668, appropriated as a first charge on the revenues raised on all shipments of wool made after Christmas, a discretionary power had again to be given by Parliament to the Council to treat with Nicholas Blackburn, late admiral for the north, and also with the merchant-contractors and customs officials.
This met in January 1410 and, after a break for Easter, sat until early in May, by which time the prince of Wales and his friends had secured firm control of the Council; and it was mainly in support of their ministry that grants of direct and indirect taxation were made. Both were similar to those voted in 1407: one-and-a-half tenths and fifteenths were again to be levied in three instalments, albeit now at yearly intervals up to Martinmas 1412; and the grant of indirect taxation provided, as before, for an extension of the wool subsidy and tunnage and poundage for another two years. A condition attached to the grant of direct taxation stipulated that collection of the three moieties should not start before Michaelmas of the year in question, and that the commissions sent out to collectors should expressly mention this. Similarly incorporated in the grant, but of far greater importance, was the Commons’ special appropriation to the King’s own use of 20,000 marks from all the revenues deriving from these grants, as and when they became available.
Another, very different appropriation was also made in this Parliament of 1410, however. It first took shape as a provisional agreement by the King and Lords that, when the wool subsidy was renewed, three parts of it should be earmarked for the protection of the town and castle of Calais, the ‘new tower’ of Rysbank and other castles and places in the marches of Calais, as well as for the payment of debts incurred in their defence, for as long as the grant of the subsidy should last. Once the Commons had actually extended the subsidy for two years (to Michaelmas 1412), these proposals were re-cast in more formal terms and greater detail: the captain and the garrison of the town of Calais were to be paid their wages and gratuities, together with all previous arrears, as from 16 Mar. 1410 until Michaelmas 1412; the captains and garrisons of the castle of Calais and other castles in the march were to receive their wages and gratuities alone as from 23 Mar. 1410; and if these various assignments proved insufficient, alternative provision was to be made on the Council’s recommendation. This particular appropriation clearly reflects the dominance exerted over the Parliament of 1410 by the prince of Wales and his party, for he himself was chief of all those intended to benefit, having been appointed on 18 Mar. (three days after the adjournment for Easter) as captain of the town of Calais for 12 years.
Throughout Henry V’s reign, appropriations of either direct or indirect taxation were only ever made in the most general terms: ‘for defence’. Moreover, when, in November 1415, Parliament granted him the mercantile subsidies for life, these were earmarked for a similar purpose, as he saw fit.
Conditions attaching to grants of direct taxation were now remarkably few. However, in view of the fact that the date of payment of the second of the two tenths and fifteenths voted by the Parliament of November 1414 was brought forward seven weeks to 13 Dec. 1415 by the Parliament of the previous month (reacting to the news of the King’s glorious victory at Agincourt), and that the date of payment of the single tenth and fifteenth granted by this same assembly was advanced by even five months to the beginning of June 1416 by the then recent Parliament of March-May, the next two Parliaments each made their respective grants conditional upon the dates of payment not being ‘abbreviated’, ‘accelerated’ or changed in any other way.
When, at the opening of a Parliament, the King’s request for financial aid was put to the whole assembly, attention was usually drawn to specific governmental needs, and, provided these were considered justifiable, a grant of taxation, whether direct or indirect, or of both kinds, normally followed. But if Parliament was to exercise real control over taxation, more than just the Commons’ consent, and the assent of the Lords, was logically required. Hence the Commons’ appropriations of supply. However, they were also prone to view with suspicion the tendency of the Exchequer, which was constantly embarrassed by its want of ready money, to dispose of income from parliamentary taxation in whatever manner best suited its own administrative convenience, intermingling such revenues indiscriminately with other receipts. (Of course, the Exchequer acted in this way only with the agreement of the King or his council; and they naturally strove to maintain as much freedom of financial manoeuvre as possible long after the introduction of the practice of appropriation.) And so, at the end of Edward III’s reign, when direct taxation threatened to become continuous and increasingly heavy, the Commons realized that they would have to take more extreme steps towards ensuring their effective control of the money supply. It was in Edward’s last Parliament that they were first moved to request the adoption of a device whereby the government would be obliged to adhere more strictly to the terms of their appropriations, namely, the appointment of special ‘treasurers for wars’. On that occasion, however, having asked the King to appoint two earls and two barons of his own choosing who should undertake on oath to spend all available taxes on the war with France, they then abandoned the idea because of the cost of paying these ‘gardeins et tresoriers’.
When it became Lord Scrope’s turn, only now as chancellor, to open the Parliament of January 1380, his plea for a grant was even more urgent than before; and he again promised that a full statement of the yield from the wool subsidy and the graduated poll tax granted in the Parliament of 1379, and of the way in which these revenues had been spent, would be produced by the Council on demand. Although Parliament responded with a grant of one-and-a-half tenths and fifteenths, all payable before 23 Apr., the Commons successfully requested that the proceeds, together with any forthcoming clerical tenths and all arrears of recent parliamentary grants (including the poll taxes of 1377 and 1379), should be exclusively used to finance the expedition which Thomas of Woodstock was to take to Brittany; and in order to clinch that appropriation, they went on to ask for what would have been a revival of their earlier scheme for control of receipt and expenditure. This supplementary request, as recorded on the Parliament roll, was for the appointment by royal commission of ‘une suffisante persone’ who, to prevent income from taxes being confused (‘medlez’) with other royal revenues, should be responsible for their custody and administration, and make payments only in accordance with warrants under the great seal or the privy seal (in other words, as authorized by the Council).
Even though the Commons’ appropriations of parliamentary revenues were now traditional, the Council evidently sometimes found them irksome, especially when, as during the early years of Richard II’s reign, they were backed up by the appointment, at the request of the Lower House, of watch-dogs over receipt and expenditure. The Commons, however, not only understandably continued with appropriations, but soon had recourse again to the device of special custodians of income from taxation. In fact, they did so as early as the Parliament of May 1382, although on this occasion they proposed, and obtained, a less comprehensive arrangement than before. Treasurers as such were not now to be commissioned to control expenditure on war and defence in general (as had been the case in 1377-9), but ‘receivers and custodians’, whose sole function would be to provide for the safe-keeping of the sea. Moreover, once Parliament had decided to assign the proceeds of the wool subsidy to defence (including the maintenance of towns and fortresses overseas) under the direct control of the Council, it was also agreed that the cost of patrolling coastal waters should be separately financed by the whole subsidy of tunnage and poundage. Already ‘les mariners del West’ had offered to provide a naval squadron until Michaelmas 1384; and when, on 22 May 1382, the last day of the Parliament, a long overdue renewal of tunnage and poundage was voted with effect from the 21st, it was decided to extend the grant until the seamen’s period of voluntary service came to an end. To complement the appropriation, the Commons asked that Sir John Philipot (again sitting for London) should be made responsible for the collection of the subsidy and the engagement of ships and crews along the coast east of Southampton and northwards to the Tweed, and that John Polymond (MP for Southampton) and Thomas Beaupyne* (who was representing Bristol) should jointly be responsible at Southampton and westwards. Within a month of the dissolution, these merchants, now described as ‘principal receivers’, were formally appointed by royal letters patent, Hugh Fastolf* of Great Yarmouth being associated with Philipot. In addition, Polymond and Beaupyne were given permission to raise loans, and also, although not until 1 July, to farm out the collection of the subsidy in their region.
Even so, in the Parliament of 1385, the Commons, at least, remained wedded to the idea of limiting the Council’s basic control of the use of parliamentary revenues. For when direct taxation was then voted in the shape of one-and-a-half tenths and fifteenths, leviable in the first half of the following year, and appropriated to financing Gaunt’s proposed expedition to Spain, the safe-custody of the sea and the defence of the Scottish border, as well as to the support of the rebellion of the city of Ghent, one of the Commons’ conditions was that two peers should be appointed as ‘treasurers for wars’, assisted by ‘deputies’ who were not to sanction any payments without their special warrant. In the event, however, Parliament finally decided that William Gunthorpe (a baron of the Exchequer) and John Hadley* and Nicholas Exton (aldermen of London then representing the City) should be appointed as ‘receivers’, able to pay out money on the receipt of royal warrants (presumably conciliar in origin); and that the two peers (Bishop Brantingham of Exeter and John, Lord Cobham) should act simply as ‘overseers’, with power of assent. Apparently, the government had refused to accept the Commons’ proposal as it stood, and doubtless the Lords had agreed. Indeed, the collectors of the subsidy chosen on 6 Dec. (the last day of the Parliament) were instructed to account primarily at the Exchequer; and when, on 30 Jan. 1386, the overseers and receivers were formally appointed, their patents made clear that expenditure was to be made solely ‘by the advice of the Council’, with payments warranted by appropriate writs of privy seal. Moreover, although the overseers were to do no more than their title implied, the two remaining receivers (Gunthorpe no longer being involved) were to account for all their receipts at the lower Exchequer, as well as answering there on a regular weekly basis for every payment made.
By the second half of Richard II’s reign, the Commons had lost their earlier confidence in the appointment of special treasurers as a means of controlling the expenditure of grants, and only once during that period did they again have recourse to such a device. This was at the dissolution of the Parliament of January 1390, when they agreed to renew both the wool subsidy and tunnage and poundage from 1 Mar. (the previous day) until the following Christmas, on condition that the proceeds should be spent on defence in the event of war; and that, to this end, a ‘treasurer’ and a ‘controller’ should be appointed in the present Parliament, both to be personally answerable to the next. Although the Parliament roll records no nominations on the part of the Commons, their basic demand was unquestionably taken up. For early in 1391 William Fulbourne (a royal clerk) and the Londoner, John Hadley (not then an MP), who had acted as treasurers, and John Waltham, bishop of Salisbury, and John, Lord Cobham, who had been controllers, were all exonerated, the Exchequer having certified that they had fulfilled all their obligations.
Considering how highly critical, not to say mistrustful, the Commons so frequently were of the way in which government under Henry IV was conducted, and yet how anxious the King so often was to placate them, it is surprising that, when grants of taxation stipulated appropriation to specific purposes, the Commons did not regularly revert to previous practice and (as they had so constantly done in the early, difficult years of Richard II’s reign) request the appointment of special treasurers. This, in fact, happened only twice while Henry occupied the throne, and, moreover, in successive Parliaments meeting in the course of a single year, namely those of January and October 1404. Reading between the lines of the formal record of events in the first of these two Parliaments, it looks as if the King himself, doubtless hoping that the Commons in this greatly troubled assembly might more readily be induced to make him a grant of a general subsidy, virtually offered to give a favourable reception to any request they might make for the nomination of special treasurers.
By this date, not only had another Parliament been held, at Coventry in the autumn of 1404, but the Commons, although still dissatisfied with the state of affairs, had made what was to prove the largest grant of direct taxation of the reign: two tenths and fifteenths (the first whole subsidy payable at Christmas, one moiety of the second at midsummer 1405 and the other at Martinmas following), while, for good measure, the mercantile subsidies, not then due to expire until Michaelmas 1405, were renewed for a further two years. The lords temporal, too, on behalf of themselves and noble ladies (‘Dames’) of the realm, had granted a twentieth on income from land similar to that voted by the previous Parliament, but now leviable only on estates worth 500 marks a year and above. Not surprisingly, given the extent of their own generosity, the Commons attached stringent conditions to the parliamentary grant as a whole, the most important being the appointment of Thomas Neville, Lord Furnival, and Sir John Pelham (Member for Sussex) as ‘treasurers for wars’. They also laid down that these two special treasurers, entirely disregarding the demands of individuals for payment for previous military service (even if supported by warrants of privy seal, signet or Exchequer tallies), and indeed any other royal debts incurred before the Parliament, should use all the tax revenues now made available exclusively to finance future measures for defence. Failure to do this might, it was stated, make the treasurers personally open to charges of treason; but to strengthen their hands, they themselves were to be authorized to appoint the collectors and controllers of the wool subsidy and tunnage and poundage.
It will be recalled that in the first of the three sessions of the next Parliament, which met at Westminster on 1 Mar. 1406 and was not finally dissolved until 22 Dec. following, provision for the safe-keeping of the seas stood high on the agenda; and that consideration was accordingly given to a scheme promoted by the merchants which, on 19 June, at the end of the second session, was finally adopted, a quarter of the wool subsidy and all tunnage and poundage being then allocated to finance it.
No further recourse to the device of special treasurers for wars was to be had in the remaining Parliaments of Henry IV’s reign, nor in any of Henry V’s (when, in any case, the appropriation of parliamentary taxation virtually fell into abeyance). Indeed, such a step was taken only once more during the entire 15th century, that is in the third session of the Parliament of November 1449, held at Leicester in the following spring. Four commoners, including a representative for Buckinghamshire, were then appointed as ‘Tresorers and Receyvours’ of a graduated tax on all income from land (by whatever tenure it was held) and from fees and wages, the proceeds being earmarked for the payment of such captains and soldiers as the King’s government would decide, the special treasurers to be accountable at the Exchequer.