Space and Time
Ever since the reign of Edward VI the Commons had met in St. Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster. The accommodation was somewhat cramped for an assembly which not infrequently numbered over 350 and could rise to over 450. According to one newsletter-writer, the debate of 27 Jan. 1702 on the Maldon election had been attended by the greatest number ‘that was ever known’ in the House since the Revolution, some 434 Members in all, ‘there being one more than at the abdication’ (the division on 5 Feb. 1689 on the transfer of the Crown, when in fact 439 Members had been present).
The chamber itself measured 57 feet 6 inches long by 32 feet 10 inches wide.
How far it is appropriate in this period to talk of ‘front-’ and ‘back-’ benchers, or of ‘government’ and ‘opposition’ sides of the House, is unclear. The convention that the front bench immediately to the Speaker’s right was occupied by important officers of state (evolving in due course into the ‘Treasury bench’) seems to have operated in the early eighteenth century. Otherwise, we know very little. Although one historian has stated confidently that ‘long before 1714 it was becoming customary for opposition Members to sit on the Speaker’s left’,
Daylight entered the chamber through three high round-arched windows in the east wall, behind the Chair, and eight rectangular sash-windows in the side walls, two above and two below the gallery on either side, which had been put in by Wren’s instructions in 1692 following the demolition of the clerestory, and the removal of the original Gothic windows. There was also a central chandelier, and individual sconces mounted on the pillars which supported the north and south galleries.
Beyond the chamber itself, and the lobby, the Commons made use of a number of other rooms in the palace. There was a ‘withdrawing room’ for the Speaker, to which in 1692 Wren added ‘a little closet and a flight of stairs’, accessible through a passage running behind the east wall and popularly known as ‘Solomon’s Porch’. The ‘Speaker’s chamber’, situated above the cloister and reached by a staircase from the north-west corner of the lobby, comprised two rooms, each about 20 feet square, in which, from 1693 onwards, committees (other than committees of the whole House or those, like privileges and elections, which met in the chamber itself) held at least their first meeting. They could also meet, as before, in the ‘smoking room’ above the lobby, which in due course became known as the ‘old committee-room’. The Clerk of the House had the use of an inner room in the Court of Wards, and in the 1692 rebuilding acquired ‘a particular closet’ opening off the north-east corner of the lobby. The estimates also mentioned the provision of ‘a room adjoining to the ante-room for the clerks’, and various ‘conveniences’ for the clerks, housekeeper and doorkeeper. A ‘bog house’ was situated behind the south wall of the lobby.
The daily timetable of the House was subject to considerable variation. Nominally each day’s business began at 9 a.m., the time to which the House was usually (though not invariably) adjourned. One guide to the actual times of sitting may be the orders given at the opening of a session to the constables of Middlesex and Westminster, to keep the streets from Temple Bar to Westminster clear of obstructions, for Members making their way to and from the Parliament. In 1667 the hours were 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., ‘the usual time of the meeting and rising of this House’; but in 1710 they became 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., and in 1717 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Clerical and Administrative OrganizationSee below, Appendix 7. Unless otherwise stated, this section is based on O.C. Williams, Clerical Organization of H. of Commons, ch. 3 and app. 2.
In this period the clerical and administrative staff of the Commons comprised a principal clerk (the Clerk of the House), together with a Clerk Assistant, and four under-clerks (or ‘Clerks without doors’); and a Sergeant at Arms (properly described as the Sergeant to the Speaker), under whom were a housekeeper, two doorkeepers (one for the House itself and one for the lobby), four general messengers (with unspecified ‘assistants’
The Clerk of the House and the Sergeant were both appointed by the Crown, the latter by the Lord Chamberlain’s warrant,
Most of the clerks’ income derived from fees. The Clerk of the House received a mere £10 p.a. in salary; 10s. a week during parliamentary sessions for supplying the monarch with copies of the Votes; an end-of-session gratuity of £50 (which lapsed during Queen Anne’s reign); and occasional gifts from the ‘royal bounty’, usually in the form of grants of land (in freehold or lease). Fees, however, brought him £300-£400 p.a. The Clerk Assistant earned less in fees, only some £20 out of annual income of £120 in 1713, and this after his salary had been raised (to £100 p.a.) in 1701. Both the Clerk of the House and the Clerk Assistant maintained a private legal practice out of term, and complained of any extension of the duration of sessions, which would limit their time for private work. Culverwell Needler, Clerk Assistant until 1710, held a second office under the Crown, as solicitor to the commissioners for licensing hawkers and pedlars. The Clerks without doors, whose salaries were also raised in 1701, to £50 p.a., received on average £90 a year extra in fees, with the senior clerk, or ‘clerk of engrossment’, enjoying the particular privilege of taking 10s. on every private bill introduced into the House. They too looked to outside employment to augment their earnings, and offered assistance to parliamentary lobbyists in return for monetary inducements. Fees were also an important element in the remuneration of what might be termed the ‘household’ staff of the Commons, under the Sergeant at Arms. The Sergeant himself enjoyed a salary of £50 p.a.; the Housekeeper £10 per session, later increased to £30;
By 1713, however, the yield of fees had fallen sharply, across the board, because of a reduction in the number of private bills being introduced into the House (the consequence of the passage of the General Naturalization Act of 1709, and changes to standing orders). In response, all the officers joined in a petition to the Queen, requesting an ex gratia payment to compensate them for losses already sustained, and an increase in salaries. What the Treasury granted was a single payment, to the Clerk Assistant, Clerks without doors, housekeeper and messengers ‘for their pains and attendance relating to the Act ... for a General Naturalization, and for the losses sustained by them during the said Act’.
Throughout this period the Clerk of the House was Paul Jodrell (d.c.1728), a Chancery solicitor and member of Lincoln’s Inn, who had succeeded to the office in 1683 under the terms of a reversionary grant. It is to Jodrell that historians have ascribed responsibility for the reorganization of the Clerk’s office, and the appointment of the Clerk Assistant and Clerks without doors. He also created the post of under-clerk responsible for the Journals, which was held by Zachary Hamlyn in 1709. The first Clerk Assistant, appointed in 1689, had been Samuel Gwillym, but he had resigned that year and been replaced by Culverwell Needler (1656-1712), the son of a clergyman ejected in 1662, and himself a lawyer trained at Clifford’s Inn and the Inner Temple. Needler retired in 1710, ‘disabled by palsy’, and was followed by Edward Stables (d.1731), like Jodrell a member of Lincoln’s Inn, who was to succeed as Clerk of the House in 1726. The four Clerks without doors who had been appointed in 1689 all remained in office throughout this period: John Hookes (b. ?1662), the senior clerk, George Cole (d.?1720), James Courthope (d.1720), and Hicks Burrough (d.1733).
The Speakership
In 1690 the day of the apolitical Speaker was still far off. Every occupant of the Chair in this period was a prominent political figure, and two in particular, Paul Foley I (1695-8) and Robert Harley (1701-5) could be described as party leaders. Sir John Trevor (1690-5) had been Speaker since 1685 and master of the rolls. Sir Thomas Littleton, 3rd Bt. (1698-1700) was a front-bench Whig who served the Junto ministry of 1694-1700 in the Treasury commission, and the treasurership of the Navy; as was John Smith I (1705-8), who had not only held a post in the Treasury but had also been chancellor of the Exchequer, for all the Tory protests at the time of his election to the Chair that he was ‘a man of very small abilities’. Although Smith’s successor Sir Richard Onslow, 3rd Bt. (1708-10), had also been in office in the 1690s, he had subsequently refashioned his political reputation as a ‘patriot’—earning the nickname ‘stiff Dick’ for his rigorous devotion to principle—and had been one of the foremost Country Whigs in the parliamentary campaigns of 1705-8. Finally, there were the two Tories, William Bromley II (1710-13), who had come to prominence during the debates over occasional conformity in 1702-4 as a spokesman for the ‘High Church’ interest, and who was so valuable to the Tory administration that after his term as Speaker he was elevated in 1713 to a Secretaryship of State; and (Sir) Thomas Hanmer II (4th Bt.) (1714), the incorruptible ‘Hanoverian’ Tory who had helped defeat the French commercial treaty in June 1713, and for his efforts on behalf of the Protestant succession was to be offered a Cabinet position by George I.
For politicians of this calibre, election to the Chair did not constitute a retirement from the maelstrom of party politics; far from it. As Speaker, Littleton continued to enjoy his place on the ‘Treasury bench’; Smith gave direction to the ‘Lord Treasurer’s Whigs’ in the Commons; Bromley shepherded Tory back-benchers on behalf of the administration; while Hanmer directed his own `squadron’ of followers in the Commons in defence of the interests of the house of Hanover. The most remarkable example was Robert Harley, who in the Parliament of February 1701, and again after 1702, combined the Speakership with management of the Court interest in the lower House, even retaining the office for a session after his appointment to a Cabinet post as Secretary of State (despite muttered protests from some back-benchers). His predecessors Trevor and Littleton had also held important places in government while occupying the Commons Chair, which in Littleton’s case did raise objections among ‘Country’ Members to his election, answered only indirectly in debate in the House by testimonials to the ‘candour and probity’ he had shown in his trusteeship of public money. Foley and Hanmer each ostentatiously refused offers from the court, Foley even declining the Speaker’s traditional place on the Privy Council, but neither ceased active engagement in politics while occupying the Chair. Foley continued as a member of the commission of public accounts, described by some historians as ‘the front bench of the Country opposition’;
Despite the ‘toil and difficulties’ arising from tenure of the Speakership,
King William took a personal interest in the Commons’ choice. In March 1695, after Trevor had been expelled for corruption, the unsuccessful nomination of Sir Thomas Littleton was managed on behalf of the Court Whig by Comptroller Wharton (Hon. Thomas) in such a way as to imply a direct recommendation from the throne, Wharton having proposed Littleton immediately after he had delivered to the House the King’s message commanding the election of a Speaker. The tactic backfired, and Foley was chosen. In December 1701 the King’s pleasure was made known more directly, even if not in the House itself: a meeting of Whig Members prior to the opening of the session was told that William favoured Littleton against the outgoing Speaker, Harley. Once more, however, the House preferred their own choice and Harley kept his place. In between, William’s interventions had been more successful, largely because he was working with the grain of the majority party in the House. In November 1695 and again in January 1701 he persuaded the Court Whig Littleton to stay away from the House on the day of election in order to clear the path, first for Foley, whom the King was obliged to accept as Speaker faute de mieux, and second for Harley, whom he expected to act the part of a Court ‘undertaker’ in the 1701 Parliament. There was, nevertheless, some back-bench resentment at what was perceived as royal infringement of the privileges of Parliament: in 1701 some Whigs called attention to rumours that Sir Thomas Littleton ‘was spoken to absent himself’, and forced the question to a division.
Queen Anne, by contrast, did not involve herself in any Speakership contest, though it was usually clear to Members which candidate her ministers supported: Harley in 1702, Smith in 1705, Onslow in 1708, and Bromley in 1710 were all nominated by office-holders, or by leading members of the Court party. The fact that Smith’s candidacy had actually been announced, albeit informally, by Lord Treasurer Godolphin (Sidney†) to a meeting of placemen in the summer of 1705, gave rise to comment in the House, although it did not prevent Smith’s election.
The attractions of the office were not primarily financial. Apart from the equipage grant of £1,000 made on his election, and small allowances for entertainment and administrative expenses (wine and stationery), the Speaker’s official income was made up from a daily payment of £5 from the Exchequer (amounting therefore to £1,825 a year) and fees for the passage of bills (probably in the region of £400-£600 p.a.).
What Harley’s massive private archive also shows to good effect is the amount of patronage available to the Speaker, which went some way towards offsetting inadequacies in financial remuneration: the right to appoint clerks and chaplains, as well as the printer of the Votes; and the power to facilitate or frustrate business before the House, the presentation and examination of petitions, the management of legislation, or the hearing of election cases; and not least, to judge by the number of letters received on the subject, to protect chronic absentees from censure when the roll of the Membership of the House was called.
Once a Speaker had been elected, there were all kinds of ways in which he could use the position to benefit his friends and his party; or so contemporaries assumed. Accusations of partiality were common. Trevor was a particular target, partly because expulsion tainted his reputation so profoundly that he was easily credited in retrospect with any kind of corruption; partly because his squint made him an obvious target for humour, being used to explain his having called more speakers from Court than opposition. Occasionally he had even been subject to open accusations of partiality, as on 23 Feb. 1693, when he rephrased a motion to go into ways and means the following day in terms that the Country opposition did not like, and found himself ‘checked very severely’ for acting ‘contrary to the duty of the Chair’.
Other Speakers, although generally more trusted, were also accused of bending the rules in favour of their own side. Paul Foley, bowed down as he was by the weight of his own rectitude, interfered with the official record of the debate of 31 Jan. 1696 on the proposed council of trade, so that the defeated motion would not be reported in full in the Votes, in case its anti-Jacobite language exposed to criticism those of his Tory allies who had voted it down. In the Fenwick case, Foley ‘did his part’ in the protection of his friend the Duke of Shrewsbury and other ministers; and in January 1697 he antagonized some Country Whigs, by stepping in to prevent a tack of the landed qualification bill to the capitation bill. Secretary James Vernon I* reported that Foley ‘did very good service today against the tacking clause ... under pretence of speaking to order [he] answered all their precedents, and declared the like never was in Parliament’. The charge levelled at Sir Thomas Littleton was that his frequent bouts of illness were a contrivance in order to secure adjournments favourable to ministers. In February 1700, for instance, as the opposition mounted attacks against Lord Chancellor Somers (Sir John*) and Charles Montagu*, the adjournment of the House for two days on the 19th, after the Speaker had been once more laid low by a ‘fit of the stone’, afforded government a valuable breathing-space. Both Smith and Bromley fell foul of the Scots, Smith attempting to prevent a division in December 1707 on a Court amendment to a resolution on the Scottish commission of the peace, until the question ‘was seconded with such a shout that it was not in the Speaker’s power to delay it’, and Bromley being accused by George Lockhart* of more systematic obstruction of Scottish business and even of showing ‘an unwillingness’ to call Scottish Members. Not even Hanmer escaped, though the occasion on which he was supposed to have acted partially, in giving his casting vote against the tobacco drawback bill, to the anger of the ministry, was in fact an example of strict adherence to the rules of the House.
Of course, there was nothing to prevent a Speaker showing his party colours in committee, when someone else was in the Chair, and few were shy of expressing themselves in this arena, the possible exceptions being Littleton and Onslow, although the absence of parliamentary diaries for the years of Onslow’s Speakership makes the point difficult to demonstrate in his case. Certainly Harley and Foley were frequent contributors to committee debates, especially in supply and ways and means, as were Smith and Bromley, while Hanmer made several major speeches on the issues of the peace and the succession in committees of the whole.
Every Speaker in this period could claim some qualification for the Chair as an experienced parliamentarian, beyond a prominence in party politics. Trevor had already been Speaker in the Parliaments of 1685 and 1689; Littleton had served as chairman of the committees of supply and ways and means; Bromley in the chair of the committee of privileges; while Foley, Harley, Smith, Onslow, and Hanmer had all chaired major committees (select committees, on such subjects as the loyal Address, and committees of the whole). None was regarded as a surprise choice, and Littleton, Bromley, and Onslow had been already been considered as candidates in previous Speakership elections (Littleton in 1695, Onslow in February 1701, Bromley in 1705). Foley’s re-election in 1695, though undoubtedly unwelcome to the Court interest, was explained by one minister as a rational assessment of the respective qualities of the two main candidates, Foley’s experience of the House, dating back to the first Exclusion Parliament, being thought to outweigh Littleton’s, which had begun in the 1689 Convention.
In spite of their qualifications and experience, however, not every Speaker could look back on his tenure of the office with pleasure and satisfaction. Harley was probably the most successful. A master of procedure and precedent, ruling without contradiction (even occasionally exploiting his reputation for parliamentary learning to bamboozle the Members with spurious medieval precedents), and enjoying such confidence from the Members that when he fell ill in April 1701 the House adjourned from day to day rather than sit without him. Comparatively little is known of Onslow’s tenure of the office, but his nephew Arthur, the doyen of all 18th-century Speakers, later remarked that it was ‘a post that of all others the most suited his [Sir Richard] genius and which he sustained with great reputation’, and certainly one very favourable contemporary report was delivered by George Lockhart*, who contrasted the unsympathetic treatment the Scottish Members had received from Bromley with the way in which they had been ‘so very civilly, nay kindly, used’ by his predecessor.
Others were not so fortunate. Once again Trevor appears as the most unhappy, repeatedly losing face in the House as experienced Members corrected him in lapses from propriety. In 1690 he called a voice vote in favour of one side, then changed his mind as several Members of the opposite party entered the House, only to be reprimanded by that self-appointed parliamentary sage (and former Speaker) Sir Edward Seymour.
Committees
A number of different types of committee had evolved by 1690, differentiated both by form and function.
Committees of the whole were held during daily business, and were indistinguishable from the plenary sessions of the House, except that the Speaker was replaced by a chairman elected before the House went into committee. Sittings of the committee began with the Speaker leaving the Chair (giving way to a temporary chairman whom the House itself had elected), and ended when he resumed his authority. Supply legislation was almost always entrusted to committees of the whole. The standing committees of supply and ways and means, which decided, respectively, on the sums to be raised and the methods by which this should be done, and the 2nd-reading committees on supply bills, all took this form. Other items of legislation which the House deemed to be of particular importance, or which had proved particularly contentious, were also passed to committees of the whole: the bill of 1713, for example, to give effect to the 8th and 9th articles of the treaty of commerce with France. But committees of the whole were not restricted to legislation. They were entrusted with consideration of a variety of major issues: in 1692, for example, the conduct of the war at sea (in a committee ‘on the state of the nation’), in 1699 the price of gold, in 1702 the ‘rights and privileges of the House’ (in relation to the controversy over the impeachments of the previous year), and in 1705 the proceedings of the Scottish Parliament on the question of union. In these examples, committees of the whole were giving Members’ opinions rather than clarifying facts. As defined by a later 18th-century authority on procedure, the difference between a select committee and a committee of the whole was that the former ‘cannot report an opinion on any matter unless they are authorized to do it, and the latter never reports anything else but opinion, for they never state evidence nor facts but resolutions only’.
‘Grand’ committees were also open to every Member, but met when the House itself was not sitting, often in the morning, and were not obliged to convene within the chamber itself, though for reasons of space most did so. The ‘usual orders’ at the beginning of each session appointed each of the four traditional ‘grand committees’, for religion, grievances, trade, and the courts of justice, to meet weekly, but the evidence of the Journals suggests little serious activity. The only report received from any of these ‘grand committees’ during the period was delivered in March 1708, from the committee for the courts of justice, in response to a petition from a Welsh Tory, Richard Bulkeley*, 4th Lord Bulkeley [I], against the behaviour of the Whig judge, John Hooke, on circuit at Beaumaris.
There were other committees which, though not ‘grand committees’ by designation, were in practice much the same, namely those select committees after whose appointment the House added the following order, ‘and all that come are to have voices’. The best known is the committee for privileges and elections, which met in the chamber after the adjournment of the House, and was often as well (if not better) attended than the previous sitting of the House. In fact the committee for privileges was only one instance among many in which this ‘open access’ policy was followed: committees on such matters as the qualification of Members, the relief of the poor, Anglo-Irish trade and the disposal of Irish forfeitures; and bills of a similar general interest, on vagrancy, the jury system, tithes, the coinage, the payment of servants’ wages, and the repair of the highways.
Last, there were select committees, whose composition was deliberately restricted by the House to a certain number of named individuals. Most committee-business was undertaken in this way. Select committees were appointed to investigate claims made in petitions, to inquire into matters which had been brought to the attention of the House in order to report the facts, to receive proposals which might lead to legislation (on such subjects as the reform of the coinage, the disposal of forfeited estates, or more generally on the revival of ‘expiring laws’), to supervise ballots, prepare addresses and representations, undertake conferences with the upper House, and manage the proceedings on impeachments. They also played a highly significant role in legislation. The preparation and presentation of bills, including supply bills, was usually undertaken by a small select committee (though this was not always the case, for occasionally the duty might be entrusted to a single Member), and the majority of bills were sent after their second reading to a select committee rather than a committee of the whole House.
The research for this section of the History has discovered little direct evidence of the methods by which committee-members were selected, though it seems reasonable to assume that the informal procedure which obtained later in the century was already established, with Members calling out nominations to the Speaker. (Secret committees, elected by ballot, did not feature in this period; nor did sub-committees). An important letter of December 1705, from the Cumbrian James Lowther*, a former Member, relating to the Parton harbour bill, appears to show that, at least on bills of a specifically local nature, additions to the committee could be made subsequently, at the discretion of the Clerk.
in the naming of a committee in the House, if too many be named, and the work to be done require a smaller number, as to draw a bill etc., in that case the expedient is to order that the first five or seven of those named shall make a committee; and if any person be proposed to be added, and a contest or debate arise, it must be decided by a question, whether A.B. shall be added to the committee. But it being an odious thing to put a negative upon any Member, in such case it is ever endeavoured to avoid such a question and the Member is usually agreed to be added.
SP 9/22, f. 26.
Although there were no other rules governing nominations, certain conventions seem to have been observed. The Member named first was customarily the proposer of the motion on which the committee was grounded, and subsequently (though not inevitably) took the chair of the committee, as demonstrated by his having reported back to the House. Hence the superficially eccentric choice of Sir John Bolles, 4th Bt., the mentally unstable Lincolnshire Tory, as the first Member of the 2nd-reading committee on the bill of settlement in March 1701, a decision that Whigs interpreted as a calculated insult to the Hanoverian family, was in fact no more than a proper adherence to procedure, since Bolles had been the first to name the Electress Sophia as successor, in the debate.
Unfortunately, the evidence of the Journals on the composition of committees is not wholly reliable. Manuscript committee lists surviving in the private papers of individual Members occasionally differ from the Journals (as in the case of the 2nd-reading committee on the corporations bill of 31 Oct. 1691, for which the papers of William Brockman* contain a more extensive list than the printed version).
Select committees varied greatly in size. Drafting committees were usually quite small, and examples comprising no more than two or three Members were not uncommon. The average was probably five. Nevertheless the preparation of bills might be undertaken by a very large committee, presumably where the proposed legislation attracted widespread enthusiasm or concern: the press regulation bill of 1695 had a drafting committee of as many as 31 Members. Committees on petitions, and to receive proposals, might also involve relatively large numbers. Those entrusted with preparing addresses nearly always did: the most important, the committee to prepare the loyal Address, had an average of 45 Members during the reign of Queen Anne, reaching its highest point of 68 in November 1705.
DivisionsUnless otherwise stated, this section is based upon the accounts given in Thomas, 242-63, 278-81; The Commons 1715-54, i. 2; and Brit. Parlty. Lists 1660-1800 eds Ditchfield, Hayton and Jones, 101-4.
When the Speaker put a question to the House it was first decided by ‘collective voice’, that is to say the Speaker would declare the result on the basis of the relative volume of noise produced by the Ayes and Noes. He might do so decisively, as in ‘the Ayes have it’, or more cautiously, ‘I think the Ayes have it’. Whichever form was used, any Member could then force a division by disputing his decision, with the words, ‘the contrary voice has the question’. ‘The old rule, and practice too’, wrote John Hatsell (Clerk of the House 1768-1820), ‘ were that the House should be divided only when the Speaker’s determination upon the voice was wrong, or doubtful.’
We did not trouble ourselves ... to say much, for we had done our numbers, and so did the Whigs, for after all their violent speeches, they did not divide upon the question, but ’twas carried nem. con., which when I wondered at, a Member told me he saw it would be so because he saw none of (Sir) Thomas Hanmer [II]’s* squadron speak against it, and the Whigs would not divide to show how weak they were. A moderate Whig told me ’twas never designed to have a division, but only to show the Queen she was not well served, and as she had made the peace, would do nothing to disturb her.
Wentworth Pprs. 379.
Occasionally, if Members were aware of possibilities for electoral propaganda, an unnecessary division might be forced in order to expose the minority. One such division had been contrived at the end of the highly-charged debate of 5 Feb. 1689, on the Lords’ amendments to the resolution on the vacancy of the throne. It was
thought by some that many of those who were hearty for the vote joined with others in the noes on purpose to sift them, as afterwards it did appear. For Mr Powle [Henry*] the Speaker stood up and desired them that were against standing by their vote, and for complying with the Lords in their amendments of it, to withdraw out of the House; whereupon 151 withdrew and 282 stayed, though it is believed had they known that there had been 131 on the other side more than theirs they had not half so many gone out as they did, they being heartily vexed that they had so unwittingly exposed themselves to the observation of others ...
Dr Williams’s Lib. Morrice ms Q, p. 459, quoted in Bull. IHR, lii. 38.
A list compiled of the minority in this division was then used as the basis for the ‘black list’ of supposed Jacobites circulated before the general election of 1690.
Once requested, a division had to proceed, unless the House was unanimous in agreeing to waive it. In 1702, the Tories were only saved from a repetition of their embarrassment over the vacancy of the throne by the quick thinking of one of their number, who intervened to prevent a vote in the debate on the proceedings on the impeachments on a question whose phrasing had dangerous implications. Various colleagues had insisted
that the previous question should be first put, but [Par]ker, who has more sense and temper than the whole party, made angry faces at those that insisted on it [?and] so they found their error; for had they divided the House upon the previous question it would have [?been] a worse list for them than the black list, viz. that they had been against the rights and liberties of the commons of England. Seymour [Sir Edward, 4th Bt.*] was very uneasy with himself for opposing this question, and looked out of humo[ur] and confessed at dinner that he was mistaken in speaking against it.
Cocks Diary, 223.
Clearly, if no one had been quick enough, or the Speaker had been a Whig and not Robert Harley*, the question would have been put, and no amount of grimacing would have sufficed to lift the Tories off the hook on which they had impaled themselves.
The procedure in a division in the House (divisions in committee were conducted slightly differently) was for one side to ‘go out’ into the lobby, while the others remained seated. The principle applied by the Speaker to decide which side should leave and which remain was that those who were ‘for the preservation of the orders of the House’ should stay in, and those ‘introducing any new material or any alteration’ should go out. This principle was not always easy to apply, but over the years precedents accrued so that, for example, on a motion to adjourn, ‘if this question is put before four o’clock the Ayes go forth, because four o’clock is ... the regular hour at which the House may adjourn; but if it is after four o’clock the Noes go forth’.
In order to ensure that all Members present at the time the question was put should cast a vote, as they were obliged to do, and that no one should be able to participate in the division who had not been in the House,
Evidently the rule that doors should be closed was not always enforced. In a division on the impeachments in 1701 it was strongly suspected that the Whig general Lord Cutts (John*) had not been sharp enough to ‘absent himself’ from the House before the question was put, but had been able to make his escape subsequently, an accusation he heatedly denied.
The procedure for divisions in committee of the whole House ran along similar lines: the chairman of the committee (in lieu of the Speaker) first gave his judgment on a voice vote, then, if this was challenged, the committee divided. Members did not go out of the chamber, however. Instead they separated within the House itself, one side on the right of the Chair, the other on the left, and were counted bench by bench on each side in turn. Passing to the left of the Chair was the equivalent of leaving the chamber in a division in the House, and the same determining principle applied, except that the supporters of any declaratory resolution proposed in committee went to the right, ‘presumably because it was the purpose of committees to formulate such opinions’.
Certain other features were common to divisions in the House itself and in committee. If a decision affected a Member personally he would be expected to withdraw before the question was put. The fact that Hon. John Granville ‘stayed in [the House] and voted for himself’ in the election of a chairman of the committee of supply in March 1702 was regarded by Sir Richard Cocks, 2nd Bt.*, as ‘pretty extraordinary’.
The rule ... is not, in many cases, sufficiently observed. It was always attended to in questions relative to the seat of the Member ... and has been strictly observed in cases of very great moment: but in matters of lesser importance, yet where the private interest of the Member has been essentially concerned, it has been entirely neglected.
Not even Sir Rowland Gwynne*, who was shameless enough to have spoken from the floor in the committee of privileges in 1690 in his own behalf on the New Radnor Boroughs election, could bring himself to vote as well, and when the petition against him was reported he was not present to add to the single vote cast in his favour.
In the unusual event of the numbers in a division being equal, the Speaker (or chairman of the committee) would give a casting vote. There was no formal rule of the House as to how this privilege should be exercised, judgment being left to the Speaker’s discretion, though the House expected to be told ‘the reasons which induce him to it’.
Journals until the session of 1714, but were being stated to the House as early as 1702.
Ballotting was used in the House to elect the Members of parliamentary commissions, each Member making out a list of his own choice and handing this to the Clerk of the House or Clerk Assistant as they made they way along the benches. Party managers circularized their followers with the details of a pre-arranged slate of favoured candidates, but there would be no official list of candidates and Members were not obliged to restrict their choice unless the relevant legislation had included specifications about the composition of the commission; that it must, or must not, include sitting Members, for example. The final list of nominations for trustees under the Irish Forfeitures Resumption Act of 1700 ran to the extraordinary total of 133 names (for 13 available places), no less than 44 of whom received a single vote, and 84 less than 10 votes.
The 1707-8 session witnessed an abortive attempt, on the part of Country Whig activists, to introduce a system of ballotting to decide divisions in the House over election cases. The committee appointed to consider what methods might be taken to improve (and to speed up) the adjudication of election petitions recommended on 18 Feb. 1708 that for the future all decisions should be determined by ballot. A further resolution of the committee was adopted three days later, prescribing the use of a ‘ballotting box’ and balls, and the involvement of the Clerk and Clerk Assistant, supervised by one representative from each side of the question. Each Member voting was to ‘take a ball in his bare hand, and hold it up between his finger and thumb, before he put it into the box’. On 26 Feb. these arrangements came into operation for the first time, in the trial of the petition for Ashburton. The cumbersome nature of the system immediately became apparent:
the ballotting was prepared according to the orders of the House for that purpose; and Sir Godfrey Copley [2nd Bt.]* and Mr [Anthony] Henley* were appointed by the Speaker to attend the box: and the Clerk, and the Clerk Assistant, went with the box, and balls, and the said two Members with them, round the several benches of the House; and the Members sitting in their places took the balls and put them into the box: after which the box was carried to the clerks’ table; and, after counting the balls at the table by the clerks, in the presence of the two said Members (who stood one at each end of the table), the two Members went to the bar, and came up to the table (as usual, on other occasions of reporting), and reported to the Speaker, that the Yeas were 189, and the Noes 148.
The whole exercise took over an hour to complete, and to make matters worse, the rules of the ballot stated that ‘nobody must move in that time, whatever the occasion may be’, which made it an endurance test for the Members. Because ballotting in this manner was such a slow and laborious business, and perhaps also because party managers ‘disliked this move towards impartiality’, it was effectively abandoned. No further election petition was heard that session, and in the following November an attempt to reintroduce the system was defeated (though by no more than nine votes). It was revived again in December 1710, in a House of Commons full of young and politically inexperienced ‘Country’ Tories but was defeated once more, this time by the crushing majority of 247 votes to 39.
Procedural Changes 1690-1715
The greater frequency of parliamentary sessions after 1688, and the greater volume of business transacted in the Commons, resulted in a significant number of changes in procedure during this period, some recorded officially, in the form of new standing orders, others adopted informally through the establishment of precedents.
In a few cases these changes arose directly from constitutional developments embodied in statute: alterations to the oaths of allegiance and supremacy in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent imposition on all Members in 1702 of a compulsory oath of Abjuration; the exclusion of office-holders under the various Place Acts, culminating in the Regency Act of 1706, which obliged anyone taking office during the sitting of a Parliament to resign his seat, with the opportunity of re-election; and the new arrangements consequent upon the Union with Scotland.
The Parliaments of 1690-1715 also saw the adoption of 32 new standing orders by the House, seven of which (all arising from the adoption in 1708 of a system of balloting to decide the outcome of election petitions) were subsequently vacated or rescinded.
Most of the new precedents recorded in this period
General observations on the behaviour of Members tended to assert a recent decline in parliamentary manners. Sir Richard Cocks described the House as ‘a bear garden’. ‘There is such a noise’, he wrote, ‘one can scarce hear or mind what is said’; in particular, at committee sittings on elections ‘some of the Members come in drunk, some sleep and some [are] tumultuous’.
Sir Edward Seymour, after an harangue complaining of the disorders of the House, and speaking to order, gave it down for a rule and for orders that there ought not to be more than one uncovered in the House at one time, and said that gentlemen were come to such a beauishness in their perrukes that they were afraid to put on their hats for fear of disturbing their periwigs, and that that beau had not his hat on this fortnight, pointing to somebody; this made him cover his head and the House laugh. Just after came in Mr Vice-Chamberlain Bertie [Hon. Peregrine II], and he knew nothing of what had passed, and he sat without his hat, and they called to order and he did not know what had passed, but at last he was told and was forced to make an impression upon his fine periwig by putting on his hat. That was no sooner over but he cried to order, because some[one else’s hat] was off; and after these fooleries were over we went upon the adjourned report …
Ibid. 261-2.
‘Strangers’See in general Thomas, ch. 8. I am grateful to Dr Christopher Kyle and Dr Jason Peacey for making available to me their unpublished work on this subject.
The Palace of Westminster was a busy and often teeming place, open to all kinds of people: those with business to transact in either House of Parliament, or in the courts and offices; those in attendance, servants, footmen, and chairmen; and the merely curious. On one occasion Swift recorded that he had gone ‘to see the Parliament meet, but only saw a great crowd’.
It was a different matter with the House itself. In theory ‘strangers’ were not permitted. In April 1690 the Sergeant was ordered to ‘attend the House from time to time’ and ‘take into his custody any stranger or strangers that he shall see, or be informed of to be, in the House or gallery, while the House, or any committee of the whole House, is sitting’. The same form of words was repeated at the beginning of the 1705/6 session, and turned into a standing order, accompanied by a injunction to the Sergeant to ensure that the back door to the Speaker’s chamber was locked. In 1711 the further addition was made ‘that no Member of this House do presume to bring any stranger or strangers into the House or the gallery of, while the House is sitting’.
The phrasing of these orders may have implied a blanket exclusion, but in fact ‘strangers’ were only removed on particular occasions: at every division, whether in the full House or in committee, according to rule; at times when the House made a specific reinforcing order, as happened in January 1694 and again in January 1710;
The usual places for ‘strangers’ to perch were in the galleries, especially perhaps the gallery at the west end of the House, opposite the Chair, and on the benches underneath, between the door to the chamber and the bar of the House, the seats ‘below the bar’, which in due course became the recognized accommodation for visiting members of the House of Lords.
had the good luck, without any assistance, to place himself so well at the door of the House of Lords, that when the usher of the Black Rod came with (Sir) Thomas Hanmer [II] * to the door, he clapped in before all the Members at Sir Thomas’s back, and with him to the bar of the Lords, and stood behind him while he made his speech to the Lord Chancellor.
East Anglian, n.s. v. 145.
No example of confusion, however, could surpass the bizarre scene in 1694, when, during the reception of ex-Secretary of State Nottingham’s report concerning intelligence on the Brest fleet, ‘a Frenchman got privately into the House of Commons and sat down some time before he was discovered’ (and arrested).
Particular problems arose from the practice of holding meetings of the committee of privileges in the evenings in the Commons chamber. Not only did large numbers of Members attend, in an obscurely lit room, but so did counsel and witnesses. The possibilities of ‘strangers’ slipping in unnoticed were multiplied considerably. Peter Wentworth for one, attended regularly, and the fact that Narcissus Luttrell’s* digest of news, compiled mainly from newsletters (the ‘Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs’) includes so many details of divisions in the committee suggests that the newsletter writers on whom he relied had had access either to the committee itself or to reliable witnesses, who may not always have been MPs. By 1699 infiltration into the chamber during sessions of the committee had become so worrying that a complaint was made to the House
that there have of late been such great numbers of strangers at the committee of privileges and elections, that the Members of the House have not been able to come into the House, and take their seats therein; and that ... there hath been such crowding in the passage, by witnesses and others, that the witnesses cannot have free passage into, and out of, the committee.
As a result it was ordered
that the Sergeant-at-arms ... do give order to the doorkeepers and messengers ... constantly to attend the committee or privileges and elections, and other committees sitting in the House; and take care that no persons do crowd, or sit, upon the seats of the House, either below, or above in the gallery, where the Members ought to sit ...
CJ, xii. 425, quoted in Williams, Clerical Organization of H. of Commons, 215-16.
The order was repeated two years later, and in 1705 merged in the comprehensive standing order to the Sergeant to clear strangers.
Parliamentary Printing and the Provision of Information
All Acts of Parliament and speeches from the throne were printed by the King’s or Queen’s printer (who was paid from Treasury funds).
Your Speaker exacting the exorbitant rate of £10 per diem for the Votes, and giving the printer encouragement to raise it upon the people, by selling them at 4d. per sheet, is an illegal and arbitrary exaction, dishonourable to the House, and burdensome to the people.
The House ordered the printing of other materials on a less regular basis, the work again undertaken commercially. Those clergymen appointed to preach sermons before the Members were routinely requested to publish their text, as much out of politeness, one suspects, as in testimony to the power of their words. More substantially, a new order, beginning in November 1705, which achieved the status of a ‘usual order’ when reissued in 1706, 1708 and 1709, required that all private bills be available before their first reading in printed form, the cost to be borne by the beneficiaries.
But this in itself was not the first example of the House seeking to appeal to ‘the people’ by publishing official accounts of its proceedings. As early as 1696 the Country opposition had insisted on the inclusion in the Votes of details of the division on the resolution condemning those who had advised the King to veto the Elections Bill, and in May 1698 they went further, in securing the publication in extenso of the report of the committee of inquiry into the petition brought by the Royal Lustring Company in defence of its monopoly, an affair which Country Members wished to exploit in order to embarrass Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Montagu*.
While Members in general, and Tories in particular, were becoming habituated to the idea of occasionally authorizing the publication of details of politically-sensitive proceedings, far beyond the skeleton accounts provided in the Votes (and, at the same time, of deliberately enhancing phraseology of their resolutions and addresses with a view to their popular impact through the medium of the Votes), the House remained implacably hostile to the idea of unauthorized publication. An order of 1690 (subsequently reissued as a ‘usual order’ in 1694, 1695, 1697 and 1704) expressly forbade publication ‘without the particular order of the House’, after a debate in which reference had been made to ‘newsletters and other written papers’. Despite this prohibition, journalists and pamphleteers continued to publish from time to time even quite lengthy accounts of Commons proceedings, as in the Collection of Debates and Proceedings in 1694 and 1695 upon the Inquiry into the Late Briberies and Corrupt Practices (1695), or the History of the Trial of Dr Sacheverell in 1710. Individual speeches appeared as printed broadsides, often to appease the vanity of their authors.
Evidence from the private papers of the Members themselves indicates that the bills, petitions, submissions from government offices and other materials laid before the House circulated in manuscript. Robert Harley’s personal archive, in particular, contains a vast array of such materials, items from which were then used as scrap paper on which Harley made notes of the arguments deployed in debates, or prepared his own contributions. Where handwritten, these documents were almost always been transcribed in a clerk’s hand. In many cases their origin is unknown, although petitioners (especially in election cases) were presumably responsible for preparing and distributing copies of their own cases; and indeed a substantial proportion were printed, usually on single sheets. Early drafts of public bills would circulate among Members of the select committee responsible for introducing the bill, and sometimes more widely, among interested parties whose advice was being sought.
Parliamentary Commissions
The recurrent parliamentary commissions of this period were far from being a constitutional innovation.
The first and most important of these commissions was the commission of public accounts, set up in 1690 and enjoying a more-or-less continuous existence, with some interruptions and very brief intervals, until 1697.
In its early years the accounts commission played a powerful part in the campaign of the Country party to bring the actions of government under scrutiny. But in due course Courtiers were able to infiltrate its ranks. Four supporters of the Junto Whig ministry were successful in the 1694 ballot, the M.P.s Sir Edward Abney, Sir Thomas Pope Blount, 1st Bt., and Charles Hutchinson, as well as Sir James Houblon; and although there was some small improvement in the position of the Country party in the following year, with the election of Hon. Henry Boyle* in place of a Court Whig, and an almost complete recovery in 1696, when only one adherent of the Junto was chosen, the commission’s teeth were no longer as sharp as they had been.
Although leave was given in March 1699 for a bill which would have resurrected the defunct commission, nothing emerged from the drafting committee,
It may be coincidental that in February 1700 the Commons returned to the idea of establishing a commission of public accounts, but this time with a limited remit and including no current MPs. The Act ‘appointing commissioners to take, examine and determine the debts due to the army, Navy and transport service’ (11 Gul. III, c. 8) named five commissioners (previously selected by ballot), none of whom were sitting in Parliament, though William Farrer had served for Bedford prior to 1698 and would be elected again in November 1701, after the expiry of the commission, which was originally established for one year, and not renewed.
The following year saw an attempt to revive the first accounts commission, in the plenitude of its power, and, as originally intended, as an instrument for the scrutiny of all governmental expenditure. A bill to set up a commission of public accounts was introduced into the Commons in April 1701, and passed all its stages in the Lower House before becoming bogged down by a dispute between the two Houses, and falling a victim to the prorogation.
When the Country Tories eventually regained a majority in the House of Commons, after the general election of 1710, one of their highest priorities was the re-establishment of a commission of public accounts.
And indeed all seven vacancies were filled by current Members. The Act was renewed, for two years, in March 1712 (by the statute 10 Anne, c. 11), and lapsed on 25 Mar. 1713. An attempt was made to revive it in the 1713 Parliament, but on that occasion, after passing through the Lower House, the bill foundered in the Lords.
Tory back-benchers in the 1710 Parliament also sought to revive the scheme to resume crown grants made since the Revolution by means of a parliamentary commission, extending their ambitions from Ireland to include a resumption of grants made in England and Wales. Bills were put forward for this purpose in 1711 and 1712, both rejected in the Lords.
The commissions were all ‘offices of profit’, which is why they were specifically exempted from place legislation in Anne’s reign, although Country politicians like Robert Harley*, who was very keen to accept his seat on the commission of accounts in 1690, took pains to differentiate between this kind of public service and being recruited into the service of the Crown. It was a distinction which the majority of Members endorsed: their commissioners were not the same as placemen, since they depended for their appointment on statutory provision and a secret ballot of their parliamentary colleagues, and they were responsible, not to monarch and ministers, but to Parliament. However, commissioners were always paid, and sometimes rather well: the commissioners of public accounts in 1690-7, 1702-4 and 1711-13 received £500 p.a. each;
The provision of subordinate staff, in greater or lesser numbers, naturally offered opportunities for patronage. Harley’s extensive correspondence contains not only applications for jobs in the service of the first public accounts commission, to which he himself belonged, but later requests for his recommendation to, or ‘interest’ with, members of other commissions. It was to preserve their political integrity from the temptations offered by solicitations of this kind that the accounts commissioners of 1690 decided to fill the seven most important places on their staff by ballot.