The Business of the House

Introduction

After the Glorious Revolution Parliament not only met more often than before, but generally stayed in session for longer periods. Not a year passed without a Parliament, a striking contrast with the previous decade, in which there had been no Parliamentary sittings between 1681 and 1685, and none again between 1685 and 1689. Moreover, these annual sessions rarely ended within three months, and occasionally lasted as long as six or seven. The average number of working days per session in the period from 1689 to 1715 was 112 (111 for 1690-1715), as compared to 61 for 1660-85 (57 for 1660-89).Excluding days on which the House met simply to be adjourned or prorogued. There was also a greater consistency after 1689 in terms of the length of sessions, the shortest being 74 and 78 (in 1689-90 and 1690-1 respectively) and the longest 168 (in 1697-8), while in the period 1660-85 there was a much greater range; some very short sessions (36 in 1664, 27 in 1675, 20 in 1665, and only 6 days in 1673), and others with over 100 working days. Thus an even better indication of the increased frequency of sittings, allowing for the irregular pattern of elections and prorogations under Charles II and James II, would be to compare the total number of days spent on parliamentary business in the years before and after the Revolution: 1,663 between 1660 and 1685 (1,776 in 1660-89), and 3,034 between the Convention of 1689 and the Hanoverian Succession (2,790 in 1690-1715). With a few exceptions, sessions after 1690 began in October or November and continued until the spring, even as late as May, and twice ran on into July, by which time the heat and stench of the capital would have become intolerable. The detailed schedule was follows:

The Parliament of 1690

March-May 1690	52 working days
October 1690-March 1691	78 working days
October 1691-February 1692	99 working days
November 1692-March 1693	103 working days
November 1693-April 1694	136 working days
November 1694-May 1695	136 working days

The Parliament of 1695

November 1695-April 1696	128 working days
October 1696-April 1697	44 working days
December 1697-July 1698	168 working days

The Parliament of 1698

December 1698-May 1699	112 working days
November 1699-April 1700	100 working days

The First Parliament of 1701

February-June 1701

102 working days

The Parliament of 1701-2

December 1701-May 1702

119 working days

The Parliament of 1702

October 1702-February 1703	95 working days
November 1703- April 1704	97 working days
October 1704- March 1705	103 working days

The Parliament of 1705

October 1705- March 1706	107 working days
December 1706- April 1707	104 working days

The Parliament of 1707 (first Parliament of Great Britain)

October 1707-April 1708

112 working days

The Parliament of 1708

November 1708-April 1709	115 working days
November 1709-April 1710	104 working days

The Parliament of 1710

November 1710-June 1711	148 working days
December 1711-June 1712	141 working days
April-July 1713	81 working days

The Parliament of 1713

February-July 1714

106 working days

 

More time spent in session naturally meant doing more business, a high proportion of which consisted of legislation. Any idea that the House was essentially a debating chamber, and that ‘legislation was … an exceptional not an ordinary function of Parliament’ has long been dispelled.J. Brooke, intro. to Gen. Index to Reps. from Cttees. of H. of Commons 1715-1801 (21973), quoted in Failed Legislation, 1660-1800 ed. Hoppit (1997), p. 35. See also Parlty. Hist. xiii. 312. Bills came in different forms, originated in different ways, and covered a huge variety of different subjects. Many began with petitions, from individuals, institutions or ad hoc groups, which required some formal investigation or consideration before legislative action was initiated. By itself this process would have involved Members in endlessly diverse discussions, but of course there was much more to Parliament than simply the making of law. As participants in ‘the great inquest of the nation’ Members undertook inquiries into matters of public interest, in particular the works of government, sometimes in ostentatious pursuit of ‘grievances’; they were prepared to advise the monarch on the prosecution of war or the negotiation of peace, and even on one occasion addressed the widowed Queen Anne to consider remarriage, recalling the ambition of the Elizabethan age; and they spent a great deal of time in scrutinizing their own Membership, especially in the adjudication of disputed elections. Although there were days when nothing of great importance seemed to be decided, or as the parliamentary diarist Sir Richard Cocks wrote, there was ‘nothing worth mentioning’,E.g. Cocks Diary, 288. the Journals would still record a crowded programme, so crowded indeed as to far exceed the orders of the day, which set out a basic framework rather than a detailed agenda, so that ‘in the main business was proceeded upon in a … spontaneous manner’.K. M. Ellis, ‘Practice and Procedure of H. of Commons 1660-1714’ (Univ. of Wales Ph.D. thesis, 1993), p. 40. In essence, then, business, of one kind or another, was the life of the House, and it is to be hoped that the biographies printed below will reflect that fact.

 

Legislation

Legislation was of course one of the principal functions of Parliament, perhaps its prime function, as several self-consciously ‘revisionist’ historians of early modern Parliaments have argued, albeit for a rather earlier period than this.Particularly the late Professor G.R. Elton, in relation to Parliament in the Tudor period: see e.g. Hist. Jnl. xxii. 255-78; M.A.R. Graves, Elizabethan Parlts. 1559-1601 (1996), p. 66. Cf. P.D.G. Thomas, H. of Commons in 18th Cent. 45; Failed Legislation ed. Hoppit, 1-2. Certainly in the years from 1690 to 1715 a great deal of Members’ time, in the House itself and in committee, was spent in preparing, discussing, and amending bills.

Legislation could take its rise in either House, but had to be passed by both Commons and Lords.For what follows, see Thomas, ch. 3. Supply bills always began in the Lower House, while most private estate bills originated in the Upper. For the most part, those bills which started life in the Commons took their origin from the initiative of individual Members, or as a result of a petition or petitions from interested parties. It was a standing order that private bills had to originate with petitions, usually from individuals. All such petitions would be scrutinized by a committee to decide whether it was necessary and desirable to proceed on the case by means of a bill. Sometimes (though not invariably) similar scrutiny by committee would follow a straightforward motion for a public bill (which had arisen without an initiating or supporting petition). If agreeable, the House would then order the preparation of the bill, entrusting the task either to a single Member or to a committee (defined in the biographical entries in this History as a ‘drafting committee’). In some cases the Journals record simply an order for a bill, presumably indicating acceptance of the original motion without scrutiny, in which case the Member responsible for the motion would subsequently present the bill. The exceptions to this procedure were bills that arose from the deliberations of a ‘grand committee’; from a committee of inquiry on a particularly important or controversial issue such as the great recoinage in 1696; or from the committees of supply and ways and means.

Once agreed, and drafted, a bill would be presented to the House, usually by the Member who had made the original motion, or who had been ordered by the House to prepare the bill. In the case of a ‘drafting committee’ this function would fall to the chairman, and in the case of supply bills the introduction would be made, more often than not, by the chairman of ways and means. The 1st reading, in most cases a mere formality, would then take place. The 2nd reading was the next critical point, and ‘the customary stage for the main debate on the principle of a bill’.Thomas, 49. Assuming that Members accepted the need for a bill, the central issue was whether a select committee should be appointed to consider the detailed provisions, or whether the measure should be sent instead to a committee of the whole, which would take more time but would allow all Members to give an opinion. It was a rule of the House that private bills were always dealt with in a select committee.

In committee the bill would be considered clause by clause, and amendments proposed. (The committee could not recommend outright rejection of the bill.) The report would then be made to the House, presumably by the Member who had taken the chair of the committee (often the person responsible for introducing the bill in the first place) though the evidence of committees of the whole, where the chairman’s name, as distinct from that of the reporter, would be recorded in the Journals, indicates that this was not always the case. Amendments agreed in committee would be considered by the House, which could make new amendments at this stage. The bill would then be copied out in full, including any amendments, a procedure known as engrossment. Subsequently it would be read a third time, the stage at which the House decided whether or not it should pass. If successful, it would be carried to the other House. A bill originating in the Commons would usually be carried up by the Member who had introduced the bill and chaired the 2nd-reading committee (though again, this did not always happen).

In the other House the same process would begin again: 1st and 2nd reading, committal, report (though not engrossment, since this had already been done), and 3rd reading. The second House could amend the bill further in committee, and if it did so the bill would be returned for the amendments to be considered. If the two Houses did not agree, the differences between them would have to be settled by a conference or conferences.

Finally, a bill which had successfully negotiated its passage through both Houses would be laid before the monarch. With the Royal Assent, it became law. Between 1660 and 1689 the monarch’s power to veto unacceptable bills had been used six times. King William used it on as many as five occasions between 1692 and 1696: in 1692, supposedly on the highest legal advice, against the bill ‘for ascertaining the commissions and salaries of the judges’, which would have enshrined in statute his own voluntary practice of making appointments to the bench ‘during good behaviour’ rather than at pleasure; twice in 1693, against the royal mines bill and the triennial bill; in 1694 against a place bill; and in 1696 against a measure which would have imposed a landed qualification on MPs.Ellis, ‘Practice and procedure of H. of Commons’, ch. 2; H. Horwitz, Parl. and Pols. Wm. III, 75-76, 114, 127, 177. To begin with, William’s exercise of this prerogative passed without much comment, but the veto of the triennial bill caused an outcry among Country Members, and in the following year supporters of the place bill secured the consent of the House to a formal representation to the King expressing ‘great grief’ at the loss of the bill. Tories and their Country Whig allies tried to repeat the protest in 1696, in response to the veto of the landed qualification bill, only for their motion for an address to suffer a heavy defeat. Nevertheless, William did not resort to the veto again, despite the provocations offered to him in 1699-1700 over disbandment and the resumption of the Irish forfeitures. Presumably the Country opposition was at this point too strong for him to risk confrontation. Queen Anne vetoed only one bill, the Scottish militia bill in March 1708, though her ministers evidently threatened Scottish Tories in 1714 with a veto of their pet project for the resumption of ecclesiastical revenues in Scotland, the so-called ‘bishops’ rents’.D. Szechi, Jacobitism and Tory Pols. 158. See The Politics of the House. The refusal of the Scottish militia bill was in fact the last occasion on which this particular royal prerogative was to be employed.

In absolute terms the volume of legislative activity in Parliament can be shown to have increased very considerably in the two decades after the Glorious Revolution. However, this seems to have been a function of the greater frequency and greater length of parliamentary sessions, rather than an intensification of interest in legislation to the detriment of other kinds of parliamentary business. Indeed, it may well be that at certain times within this period, and particularly in the latter stages, there was actually a decline in the numbers of bills attempted, as the Commons’ interest became absorbed by other matters: inquiries into corruption, the discussion of foreign policy, or the preparation of partisan addresses to the Crown. In order to make some assessment of the frequency of legislative initiatives, and their fluctuating success rate, we have, for the purposes of this History, adopted the definition of a legislative ‘failure’ used by Julian Hoppit in his study of Failed Legislation during the late 17th and 18th centuries, based on a research projected undertaken jointly with Joanna Innes and John Styles, and published in 1998.Failed Legislation ed. Hoppit, 2. As Dr Hoppit has pointed out, any attempt to list ‘failed bills’ instead of the wider category of `failed legislative initiatives’, in other words bills ‘which can be proven physically to have existed’, is fraught with difficulties. The random nature of the surviving evidence makes it impossible to compile a definitive list of bills which were drafted and were intended for presentation to the House but which are not mentioned specifically in the Journals. Instead, he and his collaborators opted to define as a legislative ‘failure’ any ‘attempt to initiate legislation’ recorded in the Journals which did not pass into law. Thus their listing

includes resolutions, orders, petitions and reports whose reports whose object appears to have been legislation. It includes, at one extreme, failures which got no further than a petition or a motion for leave to bring in a bill, and, at the other extreme, those ... bills which sailed successfully through both Houses only to founder upon a royal veto.

Statistics kindly supplied by Dr Hoppit, supplemented by separate calculations for this History, based on the Journals and published Statutes of the Realm, show a truly dramatic rise after 1690, both in the number of ‘legislative initiatives’ begun and Acts passed, especially in comparison to the two preceding decades, in which parliamentary sessions were on the whole far shorter and occurring less regular. On the other hand, the number of legislative initiatives per session does not appear to have been very much higher after 1690 than it had been in the 1660s, and if we calculate the number of ‘legislative initiatives’ undertaken for each working day in a session (by dividing the total number of initiatives by the total number of working days) the figure remains remarkably steady across the period 1660-1715, with, if anything, a slight fall in frequency after 1690, which became more pronounced in the final two Parliaments of Queen Anne. The Members of Charles II’s ‘Cavalier’ Parliament had been quite as busy with legislation as their counterparts after the Revolution, though they had been significantly less successful in seeing their efforts through to a satisfactory conclusion. In fact, the clearest trend visible in this long perspective is a steady improvement in the success rate for legislation, overall a doubling in percentages between 1660 and 1714 (though the number of Acts passed per session did drop slightly in the 1710 Parliament). The reasons are obscure, though explanations of differing degrees of plausibility may be suggested: the simple fact that sessions were extending in length, or rather returning after 1690 to the levels of the 1660s, and thus affording more time for the completion of the parliamentary process; increasing efficiency in the legislative machinery, produced by a tightening up of administrative procedures, an improvement in the clerical support available, and the Members themselves acquiring more experience; and possibly also a greater degree of managerial control over the parliamentary process.Ibid. 5.

	Working days	Ave per sess.Rounded up to the nearest whole number.	Legislative initiatives	Ave per sess.	Acts passed	Ave per sess.	% successRounded up to nearest decimal point.
1660-69	841	93	1068	119	334	37	31.1
1670-80	598	60	764	76	197	20	26.3
1680-90	356	71	401	80	106	21	26.2
1690-1700	1256	114	1516	138	671	61	44.2
1701-10	1058	106	1258	126	740	74	58.7
1710-15	476	119	418	105	252	63	60.2

	Working days	Legislative initiatives	Ave per working dayIbid.
1660-69	841	1068	1.3
1670-80	598	764	1.3
1680-90	356	401	1.1
1690-1700	1256	1516	1.2
1701-10	1058	1258	1.2
1710-15	476	418	0.88

 

Looking more closely at the period 1690-1715, it is possible to discern peaks and troughs in both the frequency of legislative attempts and their rate of success. The number of initiatives per working day, perhaps the truest guide to the intensity of legislative activity in the Commons, was at its highest during the very first session of the 1690 Parliament. A sharp decline over the succeeding five sessions, becoming particularly precipitous in 1693-5 (probably as a consequence of the Commons’ preoccupation at that time with inquiries into maladministration and parliamentary corruption), was followed by recovery in 1695-6 (encouraged by the crisis over public funds and the recoinage, which necessitated a flurry of bills) and a relatively steady performance until 1708, when the number of legislative initiatives began to drop steadily once more. The success rate for legislation shows a more regular pattern, of exponential growth from 1690 onwards, with occasional lapses, often coinciding with periods of especially weak ministerial management or strong opposition, as in the sessions of 1693-4, 1699-1700, and 1707-8.

Session	Working days	Legislative initiatives	per working dayIbid.	Acts passed	% successIbid.
1690	52	91	1.75	28	30.8
1690-1	78	118	1.51	41	34.8
1691-2	99	142	1.43	57	40.1
1692-3	103	134	1.30	59	44.0
1693-4	136	119	0.88	47	39.5
1694-5	136	113	0.83	50	44.2
1695-6	128	158	1.23	81	51.3
1696-7	144	129	0.90	65	50.4
1697-8	168	222	1.32	107	48.2
1698-9	112	146	1.30	74	50.7
1699-1700	100	144	1.44	62	43.1
1701	102	111	1.08	49	44.1
1701-2	119	175	1.47	112	64.0
1702-3	95	104	1.09	57	54.8
1703-4	97	107	1.10	72	67.3
1704-5	103	126	1.22	80	63.5
1705-6	107	141	1.32	94	66.7
1706-7	104	137	1.32	82	59.9
1707-8	112	145	1.29	75	51.7
1708-9	115	117	1.02	70	59.8
1709-10	104	95	0.91	49	51.6
1710-11	148	122	0.82	74	60.7
1711-12	141	121	0.86	85	70.2
1713	81	77	0.95	45	58.4
1714	106	98	0.92	48	49.0
Average	112Rounded up to nearest whole number.	128	1.14	67	53.3

 

The very high figures for bills attempted between 1692 and 1708, which reached an extraordinary peak of 222 in the long-drawn-out session of 1697-8, can be ascribed in part to a rapid increase in the number of private bills introduced into Parliament after the Revolution. As a rule private bills originated in the Lords, but all successful private bills would come down to the Commons eventually, and although the Lower House tried to give priority to public legislation over private much of its time was still taken up in this way. Private bills were not always defined by their subject matter. Technically they were measures which had been introduced at the behest of particular individuals or groups of individuals, who were responsible for paying fees to the clerks and other officers of the House.O.C. Williams, Clerical Organization of H. of Commons (1954), pp. 299-304. Avoidance of fees was an obvious inducement to change the nature of a bill from private to public wherever possible, so that some items of local legislation (for example, those concerning roads or harbours, private charities, the building and endowment of churches) or measures benefiting particular interest groups (chartered trading companies, say, or distinct groups of merchants or manufacturers) might be found under the category of private or public bills, depending on circumstances.

Probably the most important reasons for the expansion of private bill legislation in the later 17th century, certainly as reflected in the number and substance of private Acts passed, were the mounting problem of indebtedness among landed families, itself the effect of economic instability and the burdens of war taxation, and the widespread adoption of the practice of ‘strict’ settlement of estates, which could only be altered or broken by statute. Whereas the period 1660-85 saw the passage of 77 private Acts permitting sales of entailed or settled property for the satisfaction of creditors (at an average of 3.08 per year), there were as many as 262 between 1689 and 1714 (at an average of 10.48).J. Habbakuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System: Eng. Landownership 1650-1950 (1994), pp. 505-6. From the late 1690s onwards there was also an upsurge in the number of private naturalization Acts, even though the intended beneficiaries often combined their efforts in multiple bills, in order to facilitate progress through Parliament and reduce fees, until the operation of the General Naturalization Act of 1709-12 rendered individual bills unnecessary. Then, as an unintended consequence of the resumption of forfeited estates in Ireland in 1700 Parliament began to receive a large number of private bills to confirm individual claims to Irish estates, or to declare specific exemptions from the general Act. By February 1702 so many petitions had been delivered into the Commons that the House resolved to admit no more until those which had already been accepted should have been ‘disposed of’.Cocks Diary, 200-1, 214-15. Nor did the winding up in 1703 of the parliamentary trust established by the Resumption Act signal the end of private legislation on this subject. As late as February 1708 a standing order was issued to restrict the numbers of private bills ‘relating to estates in Ireland’, by insisting on a term’s notice.CJ, xv. 530.

Some idea of the precise impact of these various factors can be derived from a chronological analysis of the proportion of private to public bills reaching the statute book during the period 1690-1715. Particularly noticeable is the spectacular rise after 1697 and the peace of Ryswick, a development which is almost certainly to be explained by the increase in private Naturalization Acts, especially those benefiting Huguenot and other émigré Protestant soldiers; and further peaks in 1701-2 and 1703-6, largely in consequence of the resumption of Irish forfeitures. Finally, the long-term decline after 1706 may well indicate a delayed impact of the introduction of several standing orders in 1699-1701, expressly designed to reduce the stream of private bills by slowing down the procedure.Failed Legislation ed. Hoppit, 16; B. Kemp, Votes and Standing Orders of H. of Commons (H.C. Lib. Document 8), pp. 40-42.

session	working days	total acts	public	private	% privateRounded up to nearest decimal point.
1690	52	28	10	18	64.3
1690-1	78	41	15	26	63.4
1691-2	99	57	15	42	73.7
1692-3	103	59	25	34	57.6
1693-4	136	47	25	22	46.8
1694-5	136	50	20	30	60.0
1695-6	128	81	40	41	50.6
1696-7	144	65	37	28	43.0
1697-8	168	107	45	62	58.0
1698-9	112	74	15	59	78.0
1699-1700	100	62	24	38	61.3
1701	102	49	13	36	73.5
1701-2	119	112	32	80	71.4
1702-3	95	57	24	33	57.9
1703-4	97	72	21	51	70.8
1704-5	103	80	19	61	76.3
1705-6	107	94	26	68	72.3
1706-7	104	82	34	48	58.5
1707-8	112	75	45	30	40.0
1708-9	115	70	34	36	51.4
1709-10	104	49	25	24	49.0
1710-11	148	74	34	40	54.1
1711-12	141	85	44	41	48.2
1713	81	45	19	24	53.3
1714	106	48	33	25	52.1

 

Public bills covered a remarkably broad range of subjects: the granting and administration of taxes, matters concerning the security of the realm; constitutional and legal reform; changes to the machinery of government; religious and ecclesiastical questions, both great and small, from the general treatment of Catholics and Protestant Nonconformists to the uniting and division of parishes; the regulation of commerce and manufacture, the development of transport facilities—roads, bridges, canals, facilities for shipping—and other aspects of economic infrastructure.

Much of this general legislation was designed to answer the consequences of the profound changes which were transforming the economy and society of late 17th- and early 18th-century England. The commercial and financial ‘revolutions’ brought new problems in the organization of overseas trade and the mechanisms of public credit, and there followed a succession of bills to establish merchant companies, restrict the importation of foreign luxuries, regulate the market in stocks, and improve the law in relation to the collection of debt, the declaration of bankruptcy, and the pursuit of small claims. The great continental wars fought by William III and the Duke of Marlborough (John Churchill†) required new legislation to facilitate the recruitment, payment and supply of armies and navies. In turn the demands made by such large-scale warfare on national resources, in terms of finance and manpower, brought a significant increase in social tensions and at least the apprehension, if not the reality, of public disorder. In response there were new laws on vagrancy; new initiatives to cope with widespread poverty in town and country; a ‘moral panic’ issuing in laws against such perceived social vices as swearing, the profanation of the Sabbath, gaming, duelling, and even (in 1698-9) adultery. Most important, perhaps, was the plethora of new criminal statutes (many of them shaped by the distinctive experience of London magistrates), involving the extension of capital punishment to many hitherto non-capital offences, the so-called ’bloody code’.

Pressure for public bills with a local or particular purpose came from interest groups whose lobbying techniques were increasing in sophistication, involving not only petitioning and the distribution of manuscript or printed briefs, but the employment of legal agents and solicitors, and the engaging of individual MPs to promote their cause in the House.On parliamentary lobbying in this period, see in general J. Brewer, Sinews of Power (1989), pp. 231-49; and P. Langford, Public Life and Propertied Englishman (1991), pp. 176-86. Historians have unearthed evidence of organized lobbying on behalf of borough corporations, London and provincial trading companies, ad hoc associations of manufacturers and merchants, religious groups like the Quakers (whose ‘Committee for Sufferings’ directed its parliamentary campaigns in 1701 and 1702Soc. Friends Lib. Meeting for Sufferings, mins. xv. 209, 318, 320, 337-8. Cf. Parlty. Hist. xvi. 277-88.) and groups of country gentlemen, townsmen and other local inhabitants, like ‘the people of Birmingham’ who joined to promote the Birmingham church bill of 1707.Warws. RO, Walton Hall mss CR1368/iii/17, William Ld. Digby* to Sir John Mordaunt, 5th Bt.*, 12 Feb. 1706-7. Sometimes bright ideas and pet projects came from the fertile imagination of individual ‘projectors’ like John Cary, William Paterson and the virtuoso of the art, Thomas Neale* , who might be promoting economic and social reform for its own sake, or (especially in Neale’s case) hoping to make money for themselves from Parliament’s adoption of their schemes.Stilling the Grumbling Hive ed. Davison, Hitchcock, Keirn and Shoemaker (1992), pp. 6-7. Some bills involved mass petitioning, organized by large and well co-ordinated groups: the various representatives of the leather industry, in relation to the reduction of the Leather Duty in 1697-9; and the woollen manufacturers, in the west country, East Anglia and Yorkshire, in their attacks on competition from Irish or East Indian imports.Brewer, 242; Irish Econ. and Soc. Hist. vii. 22-44. Counter-petitioning might also play a part in frustrating or amending legislation, as seems to have happened twice in 1709, when the bill to regulate the African trade was held up by the many enemies (English and Scottish) of the Royal African Company’s monopoly, and a measure for the relief of insolvent debtors ran into powerful opposition from commercial and financial interests in the City of London.Failed Legislation ed. Hoppit, 19-20. An even more notorious case occurred in 1713, with the widespread and well co-ordinated mercantile lobby against the French Commercial Treaty in 1713.Trade, Govt. and Econ. in Pre-Industrial Eng. ed. Coleman and John (1976), pp. 187-211; Parlty. Hist. i. 47-77.

It was of course an important part of Parliament’s role in this respect to arbitrate between competing vested interests. Particular examples here would be the negotiations which took place over bills to improve facilities for communications and transport—concerning the navigation of rivers, the construction of roads, bridges, or canals, which were often the cause of disputes between local landowners and those who hoped to benefit from improvements—or measures to regulate trade and industry, which might set domestic manufacturers against importers and retailers— weavers against factors in the reorganization of the Blackwell Hall cloth market,E.Lipson, Econ. Hist. of Eng. (1956), ii. 25-31; Cocks Diary, 33. weavers against East Indian merchants in the several attempts to limit the importation of foreign cloth. Such conflicts were sometimes resolved outside Parliament, and before the introduction of a bill, as was the case with the renewal of the Great Yarmouth Haven Act in 1698, which had at first encountered stiff opposition from the rural hinterland of the town, pamphleteers calling themselves the ‘country gentlemen’ of Norfolk denouncing the statutory backing which the measure provided for the imposition of harbour duties. Once the Great Yarmouth aldermen had consulted representatives from Norwich and the county of Norfolk, and agreed to continue a financial contribution towards river navigation, the opposition faded away and even the previously hostile county Members joined in supporting the renewal bill.P.L. Gauci, Pols. and Soc. in Gt. Yarmouth 1660-1722, pp. 203-4. But disputes were not always resolved amicably, and in 1704-5 attacks by inland residents (some as far afield as Bedfordshire) on the powers of the corporations of Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn to raise local customs on imported coal, resulted in a bill for ‘the free importation and vending of coals’ (which failed).Gauci, 218-20.

The coal duties bill was an example of a local grievance giving rise to legislation of general application. One of the ways in which Parliament sought to resolve disputes of this nature was by making any such statutes ‘local and particular’ in their effects,Langford, 186. but specificity was not always attainable, nor indeed desirable. Initiatives like the corporations for the poor, begun in London, Bristol and other towns, which had originally been designed to provide local solutions to local problems, could easily form the basis of a broader policy.S.M. Macfarlane, ‘Studies in Poverty and Poor Relief in London at End of 17th Cent.’ (Oxf. Univ. D. Phil. thesis, 1983); T.V. Hitchcock, ‘Eng. Workhouse: A Study in Institutional Poor Relief in Selected Cos. 1696-1750’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1985). Other examples of subjects in which local Acts provided a template for general social legislation included the reform of the law, the administration of prisons, and the perennial problem of vagrancy.See Parlty. Hist. xvii. 23-47. Petitions from the localities on particular issues might also highlight questions with a wider political relevance and be exploited to create the opportunity for the introduction of general bills, as in 1706, for example, when a petition from the gentry and clergy of south Lancashire protesting against the ‘evil practices’ of local papists, was used as pretext for ordering a new popery bill.Parlty. Hist. xvi. 172.

Union with Scotland naturally widened the scope of legislation even further. The terms of the Union itself were not comprehensive, and experience soon indicated areas in which legislative adjustment was required, over the militia, for example, or the commission of the peace, or the continuance of the Scottish Privy Council.P.W.J. Riley, Eng. Ministers and Scotland, 92-100. Moreover, new issues naturally arose which were peculiar to Scotland, especially in relation to the church settlement, whose boundaries Episcopalian and Tory interests north of the border were keen to redraw; while local manufacturing and trading interests in Scotland were as prompt as their English counterparts to raise questions with their parliamentary representatives which could only properly be answered by appropriate legislation. Indeed, the Scottish tradition of ‘attorneyship’ in parliamentary representation encouraged burghs in particular to press on their Members a legislative agenda, of which the most successful example would be the linen bills of 1711-12, introduced by George Yeaman* on behalf of his constituents in Dundee and Perth, at their insistence and with their advice.

Many general public bills can therefore be viewed as responses to grievances pressed or demands made by forces in society at large, in the form of local or vested interests; and, as we shall see, most were prepared and piloted through Parliament by back-bench Members. But not all. It is a commonplace to argue that in the 17th and early 18th centuries the interest shown by the ministers of the Crown in the passage of legislation was seriously limited in intensity and scope, at least in comparison with what came after, but the reality behind this assumption is hard to prove, since ‘government legislation’ in this period is not easy to identify. Not every bill that enjoyed sponsorship or even approval by government would be put forward by officials. Some at least were presented, chaired or reported (or all three) by sympathetic back-benchers. It is true that ministries of every political hue focused principally on security questions, necessary and practical administrative reforms, the management of the armed forces, and fiscal measures, either bills to raise money or to deal with the coinage and the public credit. But broader economic and social issues, especially in relation to trade and industry, or to the maintenance of public order, may also have come within their field of interest.

Supply legislation had originally been the first and only concern of government. However, despite the unprecedented levels of taxation imposed during the wars of 1689-97 and 1702-13, supply bills formed only a very small proportion of the total volume of legislation processed in any session during this period, and furthermore the proportion decreased significantly after 1698. Two developments may be noticed: an overall drop in the number of supply bills introduced after 1698 (though the pattern is not by any means regular), and a similar rise in the success rate. The two were presumably interrelated. They may well reflect an improvement in the efficiency of the legislative system in respect of parliamentary supply, and a greater degree of managerial control exercised by administration. In the early 1690s the ‘Country’ opposition led by Paul Foley I*, Robert Harley* , and others had offered an alternative to the Court’s programme for supply, advancing rival schemes of their own, which meant, in effect, competition between two teams of financial managers, a ‘Treasury bench’ in possession and an opposition in waiting, each with its own sheaf of supply bills to place before the Commons. A second important factor may have been the eventual emergence of a settled structure for wartime taxation, and, after the successful establishment in the mid-1690s of a system of deficit financing, and with public credit anchored to the Bank of England and the New East India Company, the abandonment of adventurous fiscal experimentation. This made it possible for the practice to emerge in Anne’s reign of simply renewing existing taxation through consolidated supply bills. The Nine Years War was very much a time of trial and error, of desperate expedients to stave off national bankruptcy. The more settled state of public credit during the War of the Spanish Succession was reflected in fewer supply bills presented to the House, and fewer legislative failures.

Session	Total legislative initiatives	supply bills	supply Acts
1690	91	10	3
1690-1	118	10	6
1691-2	142	11	4
1692-3	134	5	4
1693-4	119	13	7
1694-5	113	10	7
1695-6	158	11	7
1696-7	129	11	8
1697-8	222	19	14
1698-9	146	9	4
1699-1700	144	4	3
1701	111	5	4
1701-2	175	6	4
1702-3	104	9	7
1703-4	107	10	6
1704-5	126	6	5
1705-6	141	5	4
1706-7	137	6	5
1707-8	145	9	7
1708-9	117	5	4
1709-10	95	6	6
1710-11	122	9	9
1711-12	121	4	4
1713	77	5	3
1714	98	7	5

 

‘The Grand Inquest’

One of the traditional functions of Parliament was to act as ‘the “grand inquest of the nation”, remedying individual grievances and keeping a jealous eye on the government of the country, both on matters of general policy and on details of administration’.Thomas, 14. For what follows, see ibid. ch. 2. Members still took this duty very seriously. In the early years of King William’s reign zealous politicians on the Country side of the House were to be found insisting that at the beginning of a session the Commons ought to postpone all other discussions, even proceedings on supply, until grievances had been dealt with. As Sir Thomas Clarges* argued in November 1692, ‘it hath been always the method of Parliaments to go upon redressing of grievances before they went upon supplies’.Luttrell Diary, 217. Comments of this kind soon came to be regarded as old-fashioned, and disappear from the surviving parliamentary record as Members settled into a routine of voting supply as a matter of course. None the less, throughout this period the grievances of the subject, both great and small, remained high on the parliamentary agenda.

Grievances could be brought before the House in several different ways. Individual Members might raise issues off their own bat, either by means of a motion in the House itself or in various committees whose remit was of a general nature. The most appropriate would have been the four ‘grand committees’, for ‘grievances’, ‘religion’, ‘trade’, and ‘courts of justice’, which had been created for the very purpose, which met very infrequently in this period, if at all. An alternative was to exploit any possibilities contained in the speech from the throne, and from time to time the ‘committee on the King’s [or Queen’s] speech’ might go beyond the preparation of the loyal Address to pursue subjects to which the monarch had drawn attention. There was also a more recent invention, the ‘committee on the state of the nation’ (sometimes called the ‘committee on the state of the kingdom’), born in the Convention Parliament of 1689, which has been defined by one historian as ‘an ad hoc institution periodically created by the initiative of opposition Members on the pretext that government policy had produced exceptional discontent or disaster’.Thomas, 269.

The ‘committee on the state of the nation’ was a device used repeatedly by the Country party in King William’s reign, with differing degrees of success: in 1691-2, chiefly as a means of investigating failures in the war at sea; in January 1694, as a vehicle for criticism of those ministers who had advised the King to withhold the Royal Assent from the place bill; in November and December 1696, in another abortive attempt to identify naval incompetence; in February 1700, as a platform for the campaign against what was seen as corruption in the granting away of forfeited estates; and in the 1701 Parliament, to rake over the events surrounding the signing of the Partition Treaties, and to launch the impeachments of the four Whig lords.CJ, x. 545, 549-50; xi. 70-71, 172, 175, 572, 576, 617; xiii. 184, 415, 435-6, 450, 465.

In the long run the House seems to have been unwilling to develop the idea of a general committee of this sort, which might act as a conduit for a variety of grievances and complaints, as for example the committee of November 1695 to March 1696, under the chairmanship of the Tory Hon. John Granville*, moved from the question of the coinage, to trade in general, then the East Indian trade, the alleged interloping of the Company of Scotland, and finally the activities of the Royal African Company.CJ, xi. 340, 344, 356-8, 365, 375, 422, 439, 457-8, 498. It recognized instead the value of narrowing the focus of such committees, though retaining their constitutional or organizational form, that is to say as committees of the whole House. As early as May 1690 a committee of the whole House was established to consider ‘ways and means of preserving the peace and safety of the kingdom in the absence of the King’ abroad.CJ, x. 413. The format was revived in December 1697, in the committee considering the number of ships necessary ‘for summer and winter guard’; and there followed similar committees in June 1698 (to consider the ramifications of the East India trade), February 1699 (the price of gold), November 1699 (trade), February 1700 (the King’s revenue), April 1701 (trade), and February 1702 (the ‘rights and privileges’ of the House of Commons, in practice a justification of the position of the Lower House in the controversy over the impeachments).CJ, xii. 10, 13, 297, 511, 513; xiii. 7, 160, 223, 245. 477, 479-81, 735, 767. Under Queen Anne investigative committees of the whole House were established in every session, though until the Tory victory at the general election of 1710 most were used to clear the ground for legislation. Thus in the first Parliament of Great Britain, in the winter of 1707-8, committees of the whole were appointed to consider improvements in the methods of recruiting, the difficulties in convoying merchant shipping, the necessity for imposing duties on imported cloth, the African trade, and the fisheries.CJ, xv. 399, 472, 493, 599. Only in 1712 did these general committees recover their critical edge, with the establishment of inquiries into the circumstances of the conclusion of the Barrier Treaty, and of the relative contributions to the war effort made by Britain and her allies.CJ, xvii. 49, 55, 69, 76, 92, 94. Two years later there was even a recurrence of the term ‘committee on the state of the nation’, but with a relatively close definition provided by the addition of the phrase ‘with regard to the Protestant Succession’.CJ, xvii. 557, 573.

For individuals and interest groups outside Parliament, the most obvious method of raising grievances was by petition, provided that a sympathetic Member could be found to present their petition to the House. With the ‘grand committees’ virtually defunct, and the investigative committees of the whole House progressively narrower in scope, petitioning assumed an even greater importance. So great was the traffic that sometimes the channel became choked. In 1700 one of the Members for Liverpool, William Clayton, reported having done his duty by his constituents in successfully presenting a petition from the town, but at the same time warned against over-optimism on the part of the petitioners. This was the 46th petition received by the House in the course of the session, and there was only a remote chance that it would be heard.Norris Pprs. (Chetham Soc. ix), 57. Cf. Ellis, ‘Practice and Procedure of H. of Commons’, 43-44.

The subject-matter of petitions varied widely. Some were concerned with local issues or even personal or family difficulties. Others had a broader relevance. Sometimes the House would be bombarded with petitions in an orchestrated agitation, usually on some economic question, combining industrialists or traders from different parts of the country who shared similar concerns: woollen manufacturers, for example, or those involved in the leather trades, who successfully campaigned in 1697-9 against the proposal to introduce a leather duty.Brewer, 232-3. A rather different example, in which the motive was clearly party-political, was the petitioning campaign in 1710-11, protesting at the cost to local parishes of providing subsistence for the Palatine refugees, which was intended to prompt a general inquiry into the circumstances of the invitation to the Palatines and the organizational and financial arrangements made by the previous Whig ministry to cope with the influx. At other times a single petition might succeed in stirring up debate on an issue of general interest, as was the case with the petition from London merchants at the outset of the 1693-4 session over their losses at sea in the previous summer (in particular from the capture and destruction of much of the Smyrna convoySee The Politics of the House.), which gave rise to a large-scale investigation into ‘naval mismanagements’ and a witch-hunt after the admirals and officials responsible.

Once grievances had been brought to the attention of the House, whether by motion or petition, there were several ways in which they might be pursued. The matter could be heard in the House itself, as was the case in 1693, for example, in the debates on ‘the state of the kingdom of Ireland’, in effect a full-scale inquiry into the multiple allegations of corruption, criminality, and neglect of the Protestant interest levelled at Lord Lieutenant Sidney (Henry†) and lesser luminaries in the Dublin administration, and again in the 1696-7 session, in the search for a scapegoat for the navy’s failure the previous year to intercept the vulnerable French fleet in its voyage from Toulon to Brest. The vast majority of petitions were heard in committee, and usually (though not invariably) select committees rather than committees of the whole. This was certain to be the procedure if the petitioners had expressed their intention to seek redress by means of legislation, in which case the investigating committee would report on the advisability and feasibility of a bill. On rare occasions petitioners would be heard by counsel at the bar of the House. A number of related petitions on identical or similar issues might give rise to a different kind of select committee, cited in the biographies in this History as a ‘committee of inquiry’ (though this term was not a contemporary usage). Such bodies had a purpose not unlike the more narrowly focused investigative committees of the whole House, namely to investigate a subject in a general way rather than simply to report on the truth of the allegations made in a petition. Thus the consolidated committee appointed to hear the petitions on the Palatine refugees in 1710-11 was in due course transformed into a committee of inquiry on the whole question of the ‘invitation’. Such ‘committees of inquiry’ appeared with remarkable frequency in this period. Between the beginning of the 1690 Parliament and the end of the 1713 Parliament some 297 committees were established to deal with individual petitions, many of them as no more than a formal preliminary to the introduction of a bill, but there were almost as many ‘committees of inquiry’, 247 in all, and in ten of the 25 sessions more committees of inquiry were appointed than committees on individual petitions. Moreover, these figures relate only to select committees. Adding in those committees of the whole which were required to consider either ‘the state of the nation’ in general, or some more particular question, gives 36 more ‘committees of inquiry’, making 283 in all.

From time to time the House also set up quite separate parliamentary commissions, for matters requiring more sustained examination (of documents or witnesses) than was possible even by a select committee. The most important were the commissions of public accounts, active between 1690 and 1697, 1700-5 and 1711-14, and the commissions of 1699-1703 dealing with forfeited estates in Ireland. In many cases membership of commissions was made incompatible with the retention of a seat in the House, since the administrative demands made on a commissioner would seriously interfere with the duties of a parliamentary representative. Exceptions were the commissions of accounts, which were regarded as too important to be entrusted to non-Members. Commissions, like parliamentary committees, reported to the House, and sometimes their findings were printed. But in all cases the end result of the Commons’ inquiries depended on the nature of the discoveries made, and the determination of Members to act upon it, by means of legislation (increasingly after 1702 the preferred option), condemnatory resolutions, representations and addresses to the crown, and in extreme cases impeachment.For the number of impeachments (successful and unsuccessful) in this period, see below.

Members therefore spent a great deal of their time in the House in the work of ‘inquest’, scrutinizing the conduct of government and inquiring into matters of significant public interest. The range of subject-matter was as extensive as that covered by the legislation, but certain broad general areas may be distinguished: matters of grave concern to the security of the state, including the discovery (or pretended discovery) of intelligence relating to conspiracies or possible invasion, instances of public disorder and the publication of works calculated to inflame the passions of the populace or to undermine the establishment in church and state; abuses in public administration, from the highest offices on the land to the comparatively lowly, usually brought to light by particular complaints and allegations of corruption and incompetence, though sometimes arising naturally from public contemplation of military failure or from simple party-political animosity; the related question of discrepancies in public accounts (which will be dealt with separately in this analysis); infractions of constitutional propriety, including abuses of the electoral system; and last (though not least in terms of quantity or frequency) economic or social problems requiring some form of remedial action from Parliament or government.

On several occasions during the Nine Years’ War the House was alerted to reports of enemy intelligence, and a committee was appointed in 1691 to inquire into papers captured by Sir Ralph Delaval* on board a French ship.CJ, x. 556-7. Among a rogues’ gallery of informers and agents provocateurs the most egregious was probably William Fuller, who was examined by a committee in February 1692 to no avail, and who ten years later wrote to the Speaker asking that ‘eight Members might be sent to him and that he would discover great matters’, a boast that proved equally empty when, as Sir Richard Cocks reported, ‘Mr Fuller was brought before us … [and] made a very pretty shamming discourse and we censured him by a vote’, the exasperated Anthony Burnaby ‘moving to ‘have leave to bring in a bill to have Fuller whipped in every county town in England’.CJ, x. 682-3; Cocks Diary, 186-7, 201-2; The Whole Life and Unaccountable Actions of William Fuller … (1703). The committees established in 1690 and 1700 respectively, to inquire into the ‘listing and assembling of papists and other disaffected persons’, and to review the operation of the laws against Roman Catholics, also derived from an anxiety about a domestic ‘fifth column’.CJ, x. 414; xiii. 183. Members’ concern with matters of public order came to a peak in February 1701, when the House asked a committee to review the laws regarding the ‘spreading of false news’; again in the following summer in the wake of the Kentish Petition and the Legion Memorial, when there was concern at ‘the endeavours of several ill-disposed persons to raise tumults and sedition’; and much later, in 1711, when the House re-examined the statutes dealing with riotous behaviour.CJ, xiii. 338, 540; xvii. 14; Cocks Diary, 127-8. But it was more frequently expressed in successive parliamentary investigations into libellous, inflammatory and even potentially treasonable pamphlets, from the inquiry into the activities of the Jacobite agitator Richard Stafford in April 1690 to the debate in 1714 on the expulsion of Richard Steele* from the House for reflecting on the loyalty and integrity of the Queen’s ministers.CJ, x. 364-5; xvii. 513-14. In some cases there was an obvious party-political edge, though the grounds of investigation varied, from impugning the honour of government to questioning the very principles of the Revolution settlement, in such different cases as the Tories’ denunciation in January 1693 of Charles Blount’s King William and Queen Mary Conquerors and Bishop Burnet’s Pastoral Letter, both of which were alleged to ‘undermine all … laws and liberties’; the attack mounted by the Junto Whig ministry in October 1696 on the nonjuror Samuel Grascome for his pamphlet on the recoinage; Tory resentment in the winter of 1701-2 at the tide of ‘libellous and scandalous papers’ arising from the impeachments controversy; and in 1703 the pursuit by High Tories of the Whig journalist John Tutchin for remarks on occasional conformity in his Observator.Luttrell Diary, 376; N. and Q. n.s. xxv. 529-32; CJ, xi. 572; xiii. 699; xiv. 248; J.A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 67; Yearbk. Eng. Studs. iii. 124-40. Equally, Members were capable of feverish indignation in defence of orthodox Christianity against sceptics and freethinkers, as witness the inquiries in 1693 into the publication of A Dialogue, by Way of Question and Answer, Concerning the Deity; and in 1704 into Second Thoughts Concerning the Human Soul; and the various proceedings taken against John (‘Translation’) Asgill* for publishing his eccentric views on matters teleological.CJ, xi. 27; xiv. 373; xv. 440.

More obviously in the nature of public ‘grievances’ were the manifold complaints of abuses of power generated by the post-Revolution administration, by neglect of duty, corruption, or a combination of both. These ranged from major investigations into incompetence in the conduct of the war, especially at sea, and large-scale fraud and embezzlement in high office, down to relatively trivial breaches of form or discipline by minor and local dignitaries; from the crimes and misdemeanours of the lord chancellor or the first lord of the Admiralty to the maltreatment of prisoners in the Marshalsea or the improprieties of the royal brewmaster. Few sessions in the period were entirely free from complaints or inquiries of this kind, but the frequency of their occurrence was by no means consistent, depending, inter alia, on the vigour of Country sentiment among back-benchers and the relative strength or weakness of the Court party. Almost from first to last William’s reign saw a stream of parliamentary inquiries into maladministration and corruption. In the winter of 1690-1 there were committees of inquiry into abuses in the collection of the aulnage duty, the Marshalsea court.CJ, x. 434, 459. In the next session Members embarked on a full-scale investigation into the conduct of the war at sea, followed in 1693 by the inquiry into the ‘state of … Ireland’, and a year later by the attempted impeachment of two leading members of the Irish administration.See The Politics of the House. The last session of the 1690 Parliament, in 1694-5, saw the pursuit of venal regimental agents widening into an exposure of parliamentary corruption which resulted in the expulsion of Speaker Trevor*, and the attempted impeachment of the Duke of Leeds. Even when the Junto administration was at its most formidable and most secure in the House of Commons, following the passage of the Association in 1696 and the attainder of Sir John Fenwick†, ministers faced a barrage of muck-raking inquiries: in the session of 1696-7 a committee on ‘the state of the nation’ probed naval mismanagements, and select committees interrogated the officers of the Mint and of the Exchequer, delved into the circumstances surrounding the recoinage, and pursued allegations of abuses in prisons; while in 1697-8 it was the turn of the post office and, more important, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Montagu*, whom the opposition sought to implicate in scandals over Exchequer bills and the clandestine importation of French silks.CJ, xi. 580, 585, 589, 662, 704; xii. 248. In the next Parliament the ‘Country’ opposition was fully into its stride: in the first session, in 1698-9, it feasted on evidence of mismanagement and peculation at all levels in naval and Admiralty administration, and, for dessert, returned to the issue of debtors’ prisons; then in 1699-1700 came the attack on the issue of crown grants, and the resumption of forfeited estates in Ireland, and a rehearsal of grievances over the remodelling of the commission of the peace and interference with borough charters.CJ, xii. 368; xiii. 8; J.A. Johnston, ‘Parlt. and the Navy 1688-1714’ (Sheffield Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), pp. 351, 387-92. Nor was the pressure on the outgoing Junto ministry relaxed with the reconstruction of the ministry in 1700 to admit the Tory leaders. Indeed, the 1701 Parliament could be said to have witnessed an over-indulgence in grievances, some of them of major significance, notably the inquiries into the Partition Treaties, the circulation of Exchequer bills and the affair of Captain Kidd, others frankly trivial: irregularities in hospital revenues, the suspected misconduct of the admiralty solicitor, and the destruction of wood in Enfield Chase, which was a means to strike at the ranger, the Whig Lord Stamford.CJ, xiii. 344, 354, 416, 444, 533; Cocks Diary, 148-50.

After 1701, however, the pace dropped considerably The Parliament of 1701-2 could find nothing more startling to complain of than abuses in the royal brewery, and indeed there were no further inquiries into corruption until the Tories returned to power after the 1710 election (unless we count the committees of 1707 investigating the activities of scavengers in the London suburbs, and the possibilities of frauds in the operation of the system of drawbacks introduced after the Anglo-Scottish Union, and the scrutiny of land tax arrears in 1709).CJ, xiii. 767; xv. 211, 311-12; xvi. 111. But with the Tory revival the doings of government (more specifically the abuses of power alleged to have been perpetrated by the Whig administrations of 1705-10) came once more under scrutiny. A battery of committees examined charges of malversation in the commission of victualling, false musters and irregularities in garrisons and military hospitals, the invitation to the Palatines, the affair of the Bewdley charter (see under BEWDLEY), and not least, the direction and administration of the war effort, culminating in the ‘representation’ of 1712 which denounced inequalities in the contributions made by Britain and her continental allies.CJ, xvi. 448-9, 456-7, 481-2.

Less overtly partisan were inquiries that related to constitutional questions. With the exception of the committee of 1702 concerning the ‘rights and privileges’ of the Commons, the purpose of which was to justify the Lower House in the impeachments controversy, these were issues of public rather than party interest: the physical structure of the House of Commons itself, its safety and inadequate ventilation, the fees and salaries paid to the officers of the House, the privileges claimed by Members, and the rules in passing private bills. The health and purity of the electoral system was also a matter of recurrent concern, especially before 1702. Members established committees of inquiry to consider punishments in cases of false and double returns (1691), the prevention of corruption at elections (1695), measures to discourage frivolous petitions and false returns (1695), the elections in the Cinque Ports (1699), and electoral malpractice (by the New East India Company director Samuel Shepheard I*) in certain specific constituencies (1701).CJ, x. 583; xi. 202, 355; xii. 390; xiii. 367. Moreover, in its attempts to restrain the licence of the press the Commons occasionally acted from constitutional motives, or at least employed constitutional pretexts, in defence of its own rights and privileges, and those of its Members, as was the case in 1694 over the publication of a speech allegedly delivered in the chamber, in 1709, over a pamphlet by a Nonconformist minister pressing the repeal of the sacramental Test, and in 1712 over an issue of the Daily Courant, all of which in their different ways ‘reflected upon’ proceedings in the House;CJ, xi. 113; xvi. 57; xvii. 175. and most clearly perhaps in 1698, over the pretensions for the legislative independence of the Dublin parliament advanced in William Molyneux’s celebrated tract, The Case of Ireland … Stated.CJ, xii. 281; J.G. Simms, William Molyneux of Dublin ed. Kelly (1982), ch. 8.

Lastly, there were other, more widespread forms of grievance which did not involve protests against the abuse of power by officials or the corruption of the political process by factions or unscrupulous individuals, but raised issues of more general policy, relating to the regulation and improvement of the economy or the solution of social problems. The House was particularly occupied with the investigation of questions of trade and manufacture, often emanating from petitions, even single petitions, the intention of which was that grievances be addressed by means of legislation. Merchants, of various kinds and in various ports, clothiers, tinners, tobacco pipe-makers, distillers, barber-surgeons, fishermen, stock-holders in the public funds, owners of Caribbean plantations, and even innkeepers who had not been paid for quartering troops, all petitioned the House with their own particular grievances; and some were taken up in more general committees of inquiry. In 1694 the Commons established a committee to consider the general ‘decay of trade’, while at other times there were specific investigations into the African trade (1690, 1695), the Greenland trade (1702), the Newfoundland trade (1706), the spread of piracy in East and West Indies (1707), (1694), commerce with Ireland (1697), and above all the welfare of the woollen industry, which was made the subject of inquiries in 1696, 1698, 1701, and 1702. The strain put on the English economy by the demands of funding a continental war resulted in a number of different committees, established between 1692 and the great recoinage in 1696, whose concern was to stem the outflow of bullion and the consequent shortages of coin, while the unpleasant side-effects of the ‘financial revolution’ of the 1690s were reflected in committees to investigate the ‘ill practices of brokers and stock-jobbers’ (1697), the legislation relating to London brokers (1711), commercial fraud (1705), and the ‘abuses arising from the Act to prevent frauds by bankrupts’ (1707). Wider social concerns were also apparent. The poor were naturally ubiquitous, being the subject of separate committees in 1696, 1697, 1698, 1699, and 1714, while the House also set up committees of inquiry into, among other things, the prevalence of highway robbery (1694, 1695), the excessive fees charged in law courts (1692, 1693), the repair of streets and highways (1709, 1714), the measures used in the retailing of beer (1700), the regulation of Hackney coaches (1700, 1709), legislation relating to servants (1708), and, most optimistically, ‘ways of suppressing riotous living and debauchery’ (1691).

Parliamentary scrutiny of government expenditure was conducted prospectively, through the examination of estimates, and retrospectively, through the examination of accounts. Both these processes were important component parts of the campaign of the Country party in the 1690 Parliament to establish a check upon the executive. Historians have paid considerable attention to the inspection of accounts, by select committees and specially constituted commissions, but relatively little to the question of estimates.Cal. Treas. Bks. intro. to xi-xvii, pp. clxxi-clxxv, clxxx-xlxxxi; EHR, xci. 33-51. The importance of parliamentary examination of estimates is underlined in an unpublished paper by E.Rowlands, ‘Robert Harley: Estimates and Accts. and Establishment of Pattern of Parlty. Behaviour, 1690-5’. I am grateful to Mr Rowlands for making a copy of his paper available to the History. However, it was in establishing their right to review estimates before granting a supply that the Commons made a significant constitutional gain in this period.

In the autumn of 1690 the Court had presented estimates and accounts to the House, , as a voluntary concession. Such was the complexity of the paperwork involved, and so minuscule the detail, that Members felt it necessary to appoint a select committee. But the interest of opposition politicians soon came to focus on accounts, which offered them not merely a means of controlling expenditure but of finding evidence of ministerial incompetence, or worse, and they duly resurrected the notion of a separate commission of accounts, such as had operated in the reign of Charles II, and for which an abortive bill had previously been introduced in the first session of the 1690 Parliament.

This survey has already recounted the history of the accounts commission established by statute in December 1690, its continuance, by subsequent Acts, until 1697, revival in a slightly different form in 1700-5 (restricted to the auditing of military and naval accounts), and again, for the last time, in 1711-14.See The Organization of the House. We have seen how the early hopes of back-bench Members began to dim as the first set of commissioners were seen to be working to a factional agenda (and from 1695 onwards were infiltrated by placemen). When the idea was raised once more, in 1700, its muck-raking intentions were flagrantly acknowledged. At the same time the Commons did not abandon the idea of scrutinizing accounts by other means. After the demise of the first accounts commission in 1697 there was an unsuccessful attempt to revert to a general committee for ‘estimates and accounts’,CJ, xii. 9. and even during the lifetime of the various commissions the House appointed a succession of select committees to take and report on particular classes of accounts: in 1692 the papers of the commissioners for transports; in 1696 the accounts of the East India Company and the Bank of England, and the deficiencies of public funds; in 1697 the accounts of the victuallers of the Navy; in 1701 the contracts for circulating Exchequer bills, and the accounts of payments to half-pay officers, as well as a general account of revenues, taxes and borrowings since 1699.CJ, x. 701; xii. 509, 616. 665; xiii. 354, 476-7, 500. Gradually, these committees became more and more specific, and less and less significant politically: in the Parliament of 1701-2, for example, there was only one such select committee appointed, to receive the accounts of Morgan Whitley, formerly receiver of taxes for Cheshire and North Wales, while in the session of 1709-10 the Commons brought its full attention to bear on the demands that had been made on the ‘Equivalent’ granted under the terms of the Anglo-Scottish Union.CJ, xiii. 819; xvi. 371. In this as in many other respects, the Tory landslide at the 1710 election inaugurated a phase in which the House again expended considerable energy on the pursuit of ministerial wrongdoing. So the first session of the new Parliament saw select committees entrusted with the task of stating the public debts of the Navy and of other public offices for which no provision had been made, the arrears of parliamentary taxation, and the accounts of the auditors of the imprest; and in 1711-12 another committee sought in vain to discover the whereabouts of the £35,000,000 of public money which allegedly remained unaccounted for.CJ, 451, 455-6; xvii. 114. It was probably an admission of the failure of these specific select committees as well as the disappointments engendered by the ineffectual commissioners of accounts that at the very end of the period in March 1714 the House turned once more to the idea of a joint select committee to consider both ‘estimates and accounts’, but this initiative, like its predecessors, came to nothing.CJ, xvii. 500.

By contrast, the examination of estimates became an accepted feature of parliamentary procedure. The first general estimates committee, in the session of 1690-1, was succeeded the following year by separate committees for naval expenditure, for the Irish military establishment, and for the cost of maintaining the army in England, Scotland and the West Indies.CJ, x. 452, 549, 562, 567. Thereafter estimates were presented instead to the committee of supply, where they duly became a staple of debates. Apart from the two attempts in 1697 and 1714 to re-establish a consolidated committee for estimates and accounts, the one select committee to be appointed for the express purpose of scrutinizing estimates was that of April 1713, to consider proposed expenditure on the Navy.CJ, xvii. 305.

 

From this analysis of different types of parliamentary inquiry, whether by committees of the whole House, select committees and commissions, a pattern emerges. While the House never entirely relaxed its commitment to the investigation of grievances, the direction and emphasis of its inquiries shifted. The concerns of the ‘Country party’ in the early 1690s to subject government to what Robert Harley* termed ‘check, inspection, control [and] supervision’,Quoted in Brewer, 158. by means of the auditing of accounts and estimates, and close inquiry into complaints of official wrongdoing, seems to have given way by 1695 to a more overtly party-political campaign on the part of the Tories to hound their enemies from office by exposing corruption. Despite the ministerial reconstruction of 1700, which brought some Tories to power, the Parliament of 1701 saw this campaign intensify, culminating in the impeachments of Lords Halifax, Orford, Portland, and Somers. In Anne’s reign, however, there was a palpable slackening in the Commons’ zeal. Under the Godolphin-Marlborough administration, and more particularly when the Whig Junto were back in power between 1705 and 1710, committees of inquiry became much more low-key, and their subject-matter much more specific. Rather than bringing ministers to book, they were often used to prepare the way for legislation on economic and social issues. The Tory Parliaments of 1710-14 recovered something of their party’s old enthusiasm for witch-hunts, though with publicity now their principal objective, and with less success than their predecessors had enjoyed a decade before.

These conclusions may to some extent be supported statistically by a comparative analysis of the numbers of committees established in each session to investigate petitions and to make inquiries and report to the House. These totals may easily mislead in some respects. On the one hand the role of inquiry committees may be understated, since it is necessary to include committees of the whole House, some of which took on the character of standing committees and dealt with a succession of different topics in the same session. On the other, the figures for ‘petition committees’ will be unrepresentative in a quite different way, for many petitions were presented simply with a view to securing permission for bills, and were thus part of the process of legislation rather than inquiry. However, the overall pattern is suggestive, showing a much greater incidence of these committees, especially committees of inquiry, in the first half of the period. Generally, the appointment of large numbers of committees (expressed perhaps most clearly in relation to the number of ‘working days’ in each session) coincides with phases of peculiar ferocity in Country politics, in 1690-2 and 1697-1701, the exception being the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Scottish Union in 1707, when, not surprisingly perhaps, petitions on economic issues, and on questions of administrative reorganization, multiplied. What is also apparent from this table is the overall decline in the numbers of committees appointed after 1701, which may be explained by reference to improved techniques of management and the gradual extension of ministerial influence over the business of the House.

session	working days	petition committees	inquiry committees	total	per working dayRounded up to nearest decimal point.
1690	52	4	9	13	0.25
1690-1	78	5	6	11	0.14
1691-2	99	13	16	29	0.29
1692-3	103	9	10	19	0.18
1693-4	136	14	11	25	0.18
1694-5	136	12	17	29	0.21
1695-6	128	13	12	25	0.20
1696-7	144	16	17	33	0.23
1697-8	168	30	17	47	0.30
1698-9	112	15	12	27	0.24
1699-1700	100	22	12	40	0.40
1701	102	15	24	39	0.38
1701-2	119	9	15	24	0.20
1702-3	95	3	4	7	0.07
1703-4	97	2	10	12	0.12
1704-5	103	12	6	18	0.17
1705-6	107	8	2	10	0.09
1706-7	104	18	9	27	0.26
1707-8	112	20	13	33	0.29
1708-9	115	10	8	18	0.16
1709-10	104	7	8	15	0.14
1710-11	148	11	13	24	0.16
1711-12	141	11	13	24	0.17
1713	81	11	4	15	0.19
1714	106	7	7	14	0.13

 

Regulation of Membership

The cherished right to decide who would and would not be admitted to sit in their own House was fiercely defended by the Members. At the beginning of this period the struggle to repel outside interference seemed to have been won, and the Commons itself recognized as the final arbiter of its own returns. The outcome of Goodwin v. Fortescue (1604) had demolished the claim of the clerk of the Crown to be able to refuse a return. More recently, the sole right of the Commons to judge elections had been confirmed in the final decision in Barnardiston v. Soame (a lawsuit which had arisen from the Suffolk by-election of 1672). In 1689 the Lords upheld an appeal against a decision of King’s Bench which had originally granted Barnardiston damages against a county sheriff for making what was alleged to be an improper return, and in doing so had entrenched upon the rights of the House. But the issue arose again (and as it turned out for the last time) in 1704 with an appeal to the Upper House in the notorious case of Ashby v. White.For what follows, see Party and Management in Parl. ed. C. Jones, 88-106. This had begun with an action brought at the Buckinghamshire assizes by an Aylesbury cobbler against the borough constables, the returning officers, for denying him his vote at the general election of January 1701, which resulted in the award of damages of £5. But at stake was control of the borough, and thus each side was supported by powerful patrons, the cobbler Ashby by the Whig Lord Wharton (Hon. Thomas*), White and his fellow constables by Wharton’s Tory rival, Sir John Pakington, 4th Bt.* White’s appeal to Queen’s Bench in 1703 was maintained (by the opinion of three judges to one) on the grounds that the determination of the right of elections lay with the House of Commons alone, and that ‘no such action did by law lie against the defendants’. Wharton then sought to exploit the Whig majority in the Lords to further his supporters’ cause, and in January 1704 the Upper House, hearing Ashby’s appeal, reversed the decision of the judges. A vote, they maintained, was a species of property, and any voter denied the right to make use of his property at an election must have remedy at law. The Commons could not of course shrink from this challenge, and duly set about maintaining its privileges. A bitter dispute between the two Houses, conducted in Parliament, in the law courts, and in the public prints, raged throughout this and the following session, and resulted in the imprisonment of Wharton’s legal counsel (including several well-known Whig M.P.s) by the Commons for breach of privilege. With the dissolution, however, the case fell. It was not revived in the new Parliament, nor was any subsequent attempt made to reverse electoral decisions in the law courts, so that to all intents and purposes the Commons could consider their rights maintained. Nor did the arrival of the Scottish Members in 1707 make any difference. Even though controverted elections to the Scottish parliament had been appealed to the court of session, which had pronounced upon the qualifications of individual voters, disputes over elections for Scottish constituencies to the united Parliament were now proceeded upon by parliamentary petition, and heard solely at Westminster.

The right of judging disputed elections was not only resolutely guarded but frequently exercised, most obviously in individual cases arising from election petitions and double returns (which could affect either one or both seats in a double-Member constituency). The alternatives available to the House were to declare a Member or Members duly elected, in which case the successful candidates would resume or take up their seats, or to declare the election void, in which case a new writ would be issued. From time to time the misbehaviour of candidates, their agents, or the returning officer would attain such distinction as to encourage Members to order punishment, in the form of detention in the custody of the Sergeant until such time as the miscreants were required to attend the House and, with proper humility, beg pardon for their offence. Where a double return had been received, the House would have to decide first on the merits of the return, and second on the merits of the election; that is to say in effect declare first whether a valid return had been made, and, if so, which of the candidates had been duly elected. Usually, disputed elections were referred to the committee of privileges, though some exceptional cases would be heard at the bar of the House. The partiality shown in the committee was such as to render its deliberations notorious: ‘the most corrupt court in Christendom’ was one verdict.That of Sir Richard Cocks: Cocks Diary, 225. Among other reforms (including an abortive scheme to replace the customary procedure on divisions in election cases with a secret ballot), the Parliament of 1708 began by referring all petitions to a hearing at the bar. But so slow and ponderous did this method prove (even when balloting was dropped) that in the second session Members happily reverted to committee hearings as the generally preferred option. The number of cases presented to the House could indeed be intimidating. In the Parliament of February 1701, for example, 57 election petitions were received, of which the House was only able to decide upon 15, partly because of the complex and controversial nature of certain notorious cases, such as those of Bramber, Great Grimsby, Malmesbury, and Totnes. The following Parliament, of 1701-2, saw petitions presented on 47 elections, of which 9 received a decision, while in the 1702 Parliament, which of course went on for much longer, there were only 38 petitions, but 26 judgments. The arrival of the Scots meant still more petitions. In the first Parliament to which the Scottish constituencies returned Members there were as many as 84 petitions. Some of this increase should be put down to the failure of the experiment of by-passing the committee, since a number of these petitions were in fact resubmissions in the 1709-10 session after a first attempt had failed to receive a hearing. Only 31 of the 84 petitions presented in this session resulted in a judgment. But in the 1710 Parliament the overall figure was again high, standing at 87 petitions, of which 42 were judged by the House, a reflection perhaps of the enthusiasm of defeated Tory candidates to take their case to a Parliament which they had every reason to believe would be sympathetic. The expectation of partisanship was another inducement for petitioners to try the time and patience of Members, and indeed there were occasions on which the House became so exasperated with what it regarded as `frivolous’ petitions, that it would pass a vote to this effect and occasionally send for the petitioner in custody. This happened three times in one session, in 1695-6, over elections for Cricklade, Kingston-upon-Hull, and Totnes, and on seven other occasions during the period (concerning petitions for Abingdon, Colchester, Haslemere, Ipswich, Malmesbury, Shrewsbury, and Westminster).

The House provided by means of legislation for the general disqualification of certain types of Member. All those returned were obliged to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy (under the Act of 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 8), and after 1701 the abjuration (under 13 & 14 Gul. III, c. 6, amended by 1 Anne, sess. 2, c. 21), requirements which presumably deterred many from standing for Parliament in the first place but resulted in the exclusion of only one elected Member, the Quaker convert John Archdale. The Union of 1707 brought about the immediate disqualification of three Members with Scottish peerage titles—Lords Dysart (Lionel Tollemache), Fairfax (Thomas), and Newhaven (Hon. William Cheyne). Eldest sons of Scottish peers were also disqualified from sitting; four were returned at the 1708 election and subsequently excluded ineligible—Lords Haddo (William Gordon), Johnston (James), and Strathnaver (William Sutherland), and the Master of Sinclair (John St. Clair). The last-named was doubly ineligible, since at the time of his election he was under sentence of death from a court martial. A series of legislative provisions also disqualified various categories of placemen. A clause in the Salt Duty and Excise Act of 1694 (5 Gul. & Mar. c. 7) prevented any Member from taking up, after his election, a post in the management or collection of any new branch of the revenue; provisions in the Land Tax Acts of 1700 and 1701 (11 Gul. III, c. 2, 12 & 13 Gul. III, c. 10) excluded excise and customs officials respectively; and finally the 1706 Regency Act (4 & 5 Anne, c. 20, a modification of the sweeping ‘place clause’ in the Act of Settlement, which was itself adjusted after the Anglo-Scottish Union, by 6 Anne, c. 41) excluded a further batch of commissioners and pensioners as well as making it compulsory for all Members who took office during the session to resign their seats and submit themselves to re-election.B. Kemp, King and Commons (1957),pp. 53-63; Bull IHR. xxxix. 447-68; Parls. Estates and Rep. v. 103-8. The delayed invocation of the ‘place clause’ of the Salt Duty Act resulted in the expulsion from the House in 1699 of a quintet of minor office-holders: Samuel Atkinson, Henry Cornish, Sir Henry Furnese, James Isaacson, and Richard Woollaston. Two years later, after the first general election of 1701, Furnese was sacrificed again, along with his fellow Whig financier, Gilbert Heathcote. Similarly the effects of the Regency Act were not felt immediately, but with the uniting of the English and Scottish Parliaments in 1707 six Members were disqualified on the grounds that the offices they held were incompatible with a seat in what was technically a new Parliament: John Brewer, Paul Burrard, Fleetwood Dormer, Anthony Duncombe, Philip Herbert, and Nicholas Pollexfen. The navy commissioner Anthony Hammond suffered a similar fate in 1708. Prior to 1715 a total of 86 Members fell foul of the clause which required that Members taking office seek re-election immediately, but only 11 of these lost their seats (some without even caring to present themselves to the electorate).Cf. Bull. IHR, li. 206-8.

Finally, in 1712, the Landed Qualification Act (9 Anne, c. 5) imposed a property-owning qualification for both county and borough Members. This was a pet project of Country enthusiasts, who had twice been thwarted in attempts to get such a bill on the statute book, in 1696 and 1697, in the former case running into a royal veto.Horwitz, 168, 177, 187, 189. The 1712 Act was, however, a Pyrrhic victory. Henceforth a county Member had to have an annual landed income of at least £600, from freehold or copyhold, while a borough Member needed half that amount. But the bill did not apply to the Scottish constituencies, or the English universities, exempted the eldest sons of peers and heirs presumptive to landed property of the requisite value, and, worse still, from the country gentleman’s viewpoint, made no distinction between urban and rural property. Thus the impact on the general election of 1713 was disappointing. Evasion, or downright flouting, of the Act saw the re-election of carpet-bagging London financiers, and other obviously unqualified candidates, such as the ‘pettifogging attorney’ and theatre-manager William Collier at Truro, while on the other side the casualties among the more timid or law-abiding candidates included Country stalwarts like the Tory Thomas Legh II* at Newton.G. Holmes, Pols. in Age of Anne, 178-82.

Other Members fell foul of the House for more particular reasons, and were expelled. John Asgill and Richard Steele each suffered on account of their writings, Asgill on a charge of blasphemy for publishing his eccentric views on death and salvation, Steele for a political offence. The remainder were convicted of corruption: Speaker Sir John Trevor and John Hungerford for receiving bribes to promote the London Orphans bill in 1695; John Knight I and Charles Duncombe in the Exchequer bills scandal in 1697-8; Samuel Shepheard I for bribing voters in several constituencies in the first general election of 1701; Richard Jones, Earl of Ranelagh, in 1703, in recognition of his multiple sins as paymaster-general; Thomas Ridge, the Portsmouth brewer, as a victim of the October Club’s witch-hunt against malversation in the victualling; and Adam de Cardonnel and Robert Walpole II in the wake of Marlborough’s disgrace in 1712, because of irregularities in army contracts. Walpole, perhaps typically, was the only expelled Member to put himself up for re-election immediately, but his return at the by-election for the compliant borough of King’s Lynn, an exercise that was part self-justification, part political stunt, was rejected by the House, which declared him incapable of sitting, at least in that particular Parliament, so that he was obliged to wait until the general election of 1713 to resume his seat.

As well as excluding the undesirable, the House was also concerned to compel attendance from those Members who were qualified to sit. At least in the first half of this period there seems to have been a serious concern to ensure a proper level of attendance. Names would be called over when numbers had become embarrassingly thin, or when some controversial or important business was imminent, as in December 1692 when the commissioners of accounts were about to report, November 1696 when the attainder bill against Sir John Fenwick† reached its 3rd reading, and June 1701 before an important debate on the impeachment proceedings against the Whig ministers.CJ, x. 570; xi. 592; xiii. 637. Cf. Ellis, ‘Practice and Procedure of H. of Commons’, 158. Between October 1690 and January 1700 there were as many as 15 calls, often resulting in the exposure of a multitude of absentees (other than those excused by illness or some other acceptable reason), who were then subjected to the indignity of an official summons in custody and detention by the Sergeant until they were permitted to explain themselves or beg the pardon of the House.CJ, x. 440, 545, 767; xi. 17, 93, 127, 179, 234, 381, 573; xii. 10, 192, 386; xiii. 47, 98. In this way a dozen of the worst defaulters were exposed in 1691 and as many as 16 in 1696. At the same time there were frequent repetitions of the general order that no Member was to go out of town without the express leave of the House.CJ, x. 394, 492, 589, 699, 745; xi. 17; xii. 192, 387; xiii. 228, 268, 588, 637. Obviously those who were carried abroad by diplomatic or military duties, or even by the urgent demands of commerce needed special consideration, but even then the House offered no automatic dispensation. In 1692, at the height of the continental campaigns of the Nine Years’ War, the question of prolonged absence abroad was referred to a committee to look for precedents.CJ, x. 699. The same response was given to William Johnson when, in February 1700, he embarked on a trading voyage to the East Indies and China while still undecided as to which of the two parliamentary seats he had contested at the general election he would eventually represent. Johnson had been returned for his father’s pocket borough of Aldeburgh, but had also been a candidate in the more problematic constituency of Orford, where a petition was pending. Since he would be clearly not be able to make his choice in person, he signified his preference to the Speaker by letter, and after judgment was given in his favour in the Orford case the letter was read out. However, the House, dissatisfied with what appeared to some to be presumption, resolved again to look for precedents. So stern was the response to chronic absenteeism that individual Members who might be affected went to great lengths to avoid exposure. The papers of Speaker Harley include numerous letters from anxious absentees, asking the favour of advance information of any call, a precautionary grant of leave of absence, or to be assisted by Harley in the House with words of explanation or excuse.

The determination of the House to enforce attendance seemed to wane after 1702, however. True, the general order reminding Members of the need to obtain prior leave before going out of town was repeated occasionally,CJ, xv. 142; xvii. 205, 356. and in January 1710, at the height of the furore surrounding the impeachment of Dr Sacheverell, the House resolved that all who absented themselves without leave were in effect betraying the trust of their electors.CJ, xvi. 277. But calls became less frequent, and took on a more conventional nature. In due course it became almost a formality to call over the Membership about half-way through the session, usually in January or February, until 1712, when the practice ceased entirely;CJ, xiv. 230, 407; xv. 104, 235, 496; xvi. 88, 266; xvii. 114. and in any case after the 1704-5 session (in which only two delinquent Members were named and sent for) the defaulters were no longer singled out and subjected to public humiliation in atonement. It was as if the House had collectively appreciated the fact that more regular and longer sessions made the levels of attendance expected in early Stuart Parliaments unrealistic.

Further support for this interpretation may be provided by the decline in the number of licences of absence granted by the Commons after 1700. Of course it would be equally possible to interpret the evidence in a quite different way, as indicating generally higher attendances, but, if taken together with the diminishing interest in punishing defaulters, it would seem more easily explicable in terms of a more complacent attitude on the part of Members towards absenteeism. The detailed figures are as follows:

Session	No. of grants of leave	Working days	No. of grants per working day
1690	15	52	0.29
1690-1	11	78	0.14
1691-2	74	99	0.75
1692-3	73	103	0.71
1693-4	167	136	1.23
1694-5	114	136	0.84
1695-6	109	128	0.85
1696-7	165	144	1.15
1697-8	193	168	1.15
1698-9	90	112	0.80
1699-1700	44	100	0.44
1701	47	102	0.46
1701-2	15	119	0.13
1702-3	22	95	0.23
1703-4	23	97	0.24
1704-5	31	103	0.30
1705-6	48	107	0.45
1706-7	12	104	0.12
1707-8	30	112	0.27
1708-9	21	115	0.18
1709-10	60	104	0.58
1710-11	77	148	0.52
1711-12	78	141	0.55
1713	0	81	0
1714	20	106	0.20

 

The critical phase here would seem to be from 1699 to 1709, though if we divide the period as a whole into two the resulting statistics show a startling, if inevitably crude, comparison: 1,117 licences of absence granted between the beginning of the Parliament of 1690 and the end of the Parliament of 1701-2; and only 445 from the beginning of Queen Anne’s first Parliament in October 1702 to the prorogation of her last, in August 1714.

 

Counselling the Crown

The waging of war and the making of peace were the most important issues facing government, and Members of Parliament naturally expected to be able to discuss them. Since Parliament provided the extraordinary subsidies necessary for warfare Members had traditionally assumed the right to counsel the Crown on the way in which this money was to be spent, ‘to discuss and approve a policy for which they supplied the money’.Faction and Parl.: Essays on Early Stuart Hist. ed. Sharpe (1978), p. 95. Thus, despite James I’s protestations in 1621, Parliament had long since established its right to debate foreign policy, and the momentous decisions taken by King William and Queen Anne, and their ministers, were subject to scrutiny and comment, expressed in the Lower House in resolutions and addresses.

Often the end result of the Commons’ deliberations would be a simple expression of support for the Crown. On 27 Oct. 1691, for example, the House resolved upon an address which, having congratulated King William on ‘the success of his Majesty’s army in the reducing of Ireland’, reassured him of Members’ wholehearted commitment to the maintenance of ‘a vigorous war against France’.CJ, x. 540. Queen Anne was thanked effusively on 2 May 1702 for communicating her intention to declare war on France; was repeatedly assured of support in continuing military efforts against Louis XIV, on the continent and in Spain; and eventually, by the Tory majority in 1712, was congratulated on her efforts for peace.CJ, xiii. 870; xvii. 28, 259. But Members did not always simply applaud royal policy. The Parliament of 1701 witnessed hard-fought debates over foreign affairs. Although in February the House voted to address the King with a reassurance of support for his diplomatic endeavours, there was considerable contention over the wording, with each party seeking to impose its own priorities—the peace or the liberties of Europe.Horwitz, 281-2, 289-91. Previously William had been obliged to endure stinging criticism of his continental campaigns, in respect of their expense, and their inept foreign commanders, which occasionally resulted in parliamentary intrusion into the details of policy. In November 1692, in a committee whose specific remit was to draft advice on the conduct of the war, Members resolved to warn the King and Queen against the employment as general officers of any other than ‘natives of their Majesties’ dominions’.Luttrell Diary, 251-8. Queen Anne was subjected to similarly presumptuous ‘advice’: in 1703 that she ‘insist … with the States-General’ of the United Provinces that a stop be put to all ‘correspondence, trade and commerce’ with France and Spain, as ‘absolutely necessary for the carrying on the war’; in February 1710 that the Duke of Marlborough be sent without delay into the Low Countries to take charge of affairs, ‘where his presence is absolutely necessary’; in June 1713 that she appoint commissioners to renegotiate the treaty of commerce with the French; and a week later that she actively pursue with the Duke of Lorraine the question of the expulsion of the Pretender from the Duke’s dominions.CJ, xiv. 102; xvi. 314; xvii. 436, 449.

Other issues also prompted Members to make a formal public statement of their opinions. It was common practice, and generally unexceptionable, for the House to requests that provision be made for deserving individuals, especially clergymen who had preached to the House on fast or commemoration days. This extended in January 1707 to a pledge to honour any appropriate financial provision the Queen might make for the Duke of Marlborough, ‘for the support of his honours and dignities in his posterity’.CJ, xv. 220. Conversely, there were occasional expressions of disapproval of particular individuals: foreign general officers in 1692; the Earl of Portland, against whose grant of the manors of Bromfield, Denbigh and Yale in north Wales the House remonstrated in 1696; Portland again, and the rest of the impeached lords in 1701, whom the King was asked ‘to remove … from your council and presence forever’; and, on a much less exalted level, the naval commander William Kerr in 1708, for having, while on the West India station, extorted ‘exorbitant sums of money from the merchants for convoys’.CJ, xi. 390-1; xii. 497; xv. 546-7; Cocks Diary, 94. The response of the House in 1699, in refusing William’s personal request for a reprieve from disbandment for his Dutch guards, which brought to a head the struggle over the standing army, could probably also be placed in this category.CJ, xii. 601-2; Horwitz, 255. As well as the standard addresses of condolence on the death of a monarch or consort, congratulation on the accession of a new sovereign, and support in the face of a seditious conspiracy or threatened invasion, Members were also willing to protest against corruption in government, or any infringement of their liberties, as for example in King William’s use of the royal veto to kill popular measures. such as the place bill of 1694 or the elections (landed qualification) bill of 1696.See The Politics of the House. Finally, there were a handful of issues, of a non-political, or at least a non-controversial nature, over which the Commons as a whole felt strongly enough to press its views on the Crown: the importance of taking some measures to preserve the coinage of the realm; the necessity for a rigorous prosecution of the laws against ‘profaneness and immorality’, or against ‘papists and other disaffected persons’; the desirability of some amelioration of the condition of the poorer clergy of the Established Church.CJ, xi. 343; xii. 102, 517; xiii. 8; xiv. 329; xv. 177; xvi. 343, 570.

The one instance in which Members may have overstepped the mark was in January 1709, in an episode reminiscent of the Elizabethan era. Fearful lest in the aftermath of the death of Prince George the Tory opposition should mischievously revive the ‘Hanover motion’ of 1705 and call for an invitation to the heir presumptive to come and reside in England, Whigs moved an address to the Queen requesting her not to ‘suffer her just grief … to prevail’, but to ‘have such indulgence to the hearty desires of her subjects as to entertain thoughts of a second marriage’.CJ, xvi. 69. This proposition was known to be deeply repugnant to Anne herself, still in mourning for her beloved consort, and might well have been construed as wilful impudence. One Tory observer regarded it as a bad joke:

The persons that move it help out the jest. Mr [Edward] Watson ... was the first, little Lord Lumley [Henry] was the second, Ashe Windham the third, a young spark not less comical than either of the other two … The House came into it very unanimously, but I have heard gentlemen of both parties laughed at it, some Tories pretend to say the Whigs have so[me] deep design in it.Wentworth Pprs. 75; Marlborough-Godolphin Corresp. ed. Snyder, 1217; E. Gregg, Q. Anne, 285.

A year later there was the prospect of an even more insulting act of lèse-majesté, when, at the behest of the Duchess of Marlborough’s protégé Arthur Maynwaring*, the Whig Junto took up the notion of a Commons petition to the Queen to dismiss Abigail Masham from her household. Not every Whig approved, Lord Coningsby (Thomas*) writing that ‘it was impossible for any man of sense, honour, or honesty to come into an address to remove a dresser from the Queen … only to gratify my Lady Marlborough’s passions’.Quoted in Gregg, 303. This perceived reluctance gave Anne her chance. She ‘gave orders to tell all her friends in the House of Commons, that is to say all that had any dependants, that any such address would be very disagreeable to her’, and herself embarked on a round of personal interviews with members of both Houses, whom, ‘with tears in her eyes’, she implored to oppose the motion.Gregg, 303; F. Harris, A Passion for Govt. 164-6. See also Hamilton Diary ed. Roberts, 6. The success of this extraordinary campaign, and the abandonment of the proposed petition, perhaps indicates the limits of parliamentary presumption in this period, although the fact that the Queen was driven to such desperate measures to preserve her own dignity might equally well be adduced in support of the conclusion that by this time no aspect of monarchy was immune to observation and criticism in the Commons.

 

The Members at Work

The Journals provide a basic record of parliamentary activity, in terms of motions made and bills presented, tellerships undertaken, messages delivered (including the transmission of engrossed bills to the Lords), claims of privilege entered, and, most important, various aspects of committee service: the naming of select committees, the occupancy of the chair in committees of the whole House, and reports from select committees. But a great deal is also omitted, and any attempt to plot the direction and intensity of Members’ involvement in the business of the House will be hampered by the inadequacy of the evidence. Only the report of a select committee is printed, together with the name of the reporter. There are no records of attendance or proceedings at committees, no figures or tellers given for divisions in committees of the whole or in the ‘grand committees’.See The Organization of the House. Furthermore, the evidence that does appear in the Journals is not always easy to interpret. For example, historians have tended to assume that a report from a select committee was always made by the chairman, but this has not been proved. Nor can any hard-and-fast conclusions be drawn from nominations to select committees, by far the most common source of information on individual Members that the Journals contain. For one thing, the committee lists themselves are not necessarily comprehensive;Ibid. for another, they can only signify that a Member was appointed to a committee, not that he ever attended or spoke. The Liverpudlian attorney Jasper Maudit, MP for his native town in the 1695 Parliament, may be an example of a `sleeping’ committee-member: nominated to a vast number of select committees during his three years in the House but never chosen to make a report. By the rules of the House appointment to a select committee ought to have meant that at least the Member concerned had expressed himself in favour of (or had not expressed himself against) the motion from which the committee derived (that is to say to give a 2nd reading to a bill, or to take cognizance of a petition). But on its own account it can mean little more to the historian, other than perhaps as an indication of attendance in the House at the time of appointment, though this itself is by no means certain, and there are examples of names being added to the committee, either by the Speaker or the clerks in private, after the original decision of the House.Ibid. Thus for present purposes lists of select committees have not been used as an index of activity, however useful they might be to indicate attendance at the House or the disposition of individuals towards particular items of legislation.

The gaps in the Journals can be supplied, at least in part, by unofficial sources, division-lists, parliamentary diaries, and reports of debates, but these do not occur with sufficient consistency throughout the period to permit sustained analysis.For what follows, see Sources. Division-lists, by their very nature, tended to be generated by controversy, and therefore are at best a poor guide to attendance patterns. As for parliamentary debates, the best reported sessions are those of 1691-2 and 1692-3, when the occasional coverage supplied by Anchitell Grey’s* published Debates is supplemented by the more methodical and apparently comprehensive compilations of Narcissus Luttrell*. For the years after 1693 parliamentary reports are sporadic, comprising scattered ‘separates’ (notes on particular debates), brief diaries of single sessions or, more rarely, printed contemporary accounts, all of which will naturally concentrate on the politically more important debates and thus give a distorted picture. The only continuous parliamentary diary to have survived for the period after 1693 is that of Sir Richard Cocks, 2nd Bt.*, but this document gives a full account only of the Parliaments of 1701 and 1701-2, and even then Cocks recorded only the more important and interesting speeches. Moreover, Luttrell’s diary, although by far the most extensive, still omits proceedings in select or ‘grand’ committees.It is also tempting to presume, from Luttrell’s stenographic style, that his version of debates is accurate, but it should be remembered that there are few sources against which he can be checked.

Despite the difficulties of the evidence, two historians, T.K. Moore and Henry Horwitz, have attempted an analysis of the parliamentary activity of Members during this period, focussing on the sessions covered in Luttrell’s diary, between 1691 and 1693, and comparing this evidence with the record in the Journals. Moore and Horwitz examined four important areas of parliamentary activity: speaking in debates, telling in divisions, and appointments to two classes of select committee, 2nd-reading committees on public bills and ‘committees of investigation’ (or, as defined in this History, ‘committees of inquiry’). Their aim was to identify Members who were particularly active in the business of the House.Jnl. Mod. Hist. xliii. 205-27. Anticipating criticism of their concentration on particular areas of parliamentary activity, they observed that their cohort of ‘workers’ included many Members recorded in the Journals as taking upon themselves other duties and responsibilities: introducing bills for example, or carrying messages between the Houses. It is not necessary to repeat their detailed statistical findings here, but a brief recapitulation of the more important sets of figures may be helpful. For each of the two sessions studied Moore and Horwitz counted the Members who appeared in Luttrell’s diary and other sources as contributing to debates in the House; together with those recorded in the Journals as having told in divisions, or been named to 2nd-reading committees and inquiry committees. Using their own criteria, relating to numbers of speeches, tellerships or committee-appointments, Moore and Horwitz then identified the more active, the real parliamentary ‘workers’, from the broader cohort. The totals are as follows (and it should be borne in mind that the total Membership of the House at any one time would have been a little over 500):

	1691-2 session	1692-3 session
Speakers in debate	149	148
Tellers in the House	70	88
Appointed to 2nd-reading committees on public bills	312	285
Appointed to inquiry committees	208	195
‘Workers’	131	163

 

The numbers involved, especially in committee-appointments, are actually quite impressive. The same still holds true of the totals for ‘workers’, whatever reservations may be entertained about the way in which these have been calculated (that is to say with the arbitrary exclusion of many who were a long way from deserving to be called drones). Well over a fifth of the total Membership in each session may by this calculation be described as ‘active’ Members.

Moore and Horwitz went on to draw further conclusions from their statistics, relating to the different activities in which Members participated. They were able to show substantial groupings among their ‘workers’ who paid more attention to debates than committees, and vice versa. By applying sets of variables, they also pointed to the greater involvement of lawyers and senior office-holders, especially among the ‘debaters’, and emphasized (relative) inexperience as the most obvious characteristic of many who were first and foremost ‘committee-men’.

This research is subject to certain criticisms: over-reliance on Luttrell’s diary as a source of speeches; the arbitrary nature of the statistical criteria employed to distinguish the particularly active from the rest; the exclusion from consideration of private bills; and most important, perhaps, the assumption that appointment to 2nd-reading committees is indeed indicative of a degree of activity as opposed to merely a consistency in attendance. However, it represents the first systematic definition of parliamentary activity, and compares very favourably with other, more generalized and impressionistic approaches.See, for example, the comments in The Commons 1660-90, i. p. xiii. Moreover, the differentiation of active Members into ‘debaters’ and ‘committee-men’ receives support in many of the biographical entries in this History. While it would be wrong to exaggerate the contrast, there are certainly Members who would fall into one or the other type: those who were predominantly ‘debaters’, like ‘Jack’ (John Grobham) Howe, the veteran Sir Edward Seymour, 4th Bt., or the Junto henchman (Sir) Joseph Jekyll, who were to the forefront on great parliamentary occasions but were not often to be found in committees; and back-benchersThe use of this anachronism can only be justified by the absence of a suitable alternative. like the Norfolk lawyer Waller Bacon, the Kentish squire and auditor of the excise, Sir Basill Dixwell, 2nd Bt., or the Member for Derby, John Harpur, who worked hard for their constituents without making any mark in debates on the great issues of the day.

The limitations of the sources prevent any extension of the work of Moore and Horwitz across the period as a whole; nor, in any case, given the remit of this History, would it be appropriate to embark upon a major statistical exercise the results of which would of necessity be speculative. Such conclusions as may legitimately be drawn from the materials available are inevitably restricted in scope. We cannot, for example, say very much in general about levels of attendance in the House. The Journals and surviving division lists offer little more than the conclusion that numbers attending proceedings within the chamber were on occasion very high, and at other times very low. Grants of leave of absence, or the exposure of truants at calls of the HouseFor which see above. are evidence only of chronic absenteeism, not of the short-term absence, or irregular presence, of those Members who were in or near London but distracted from their parliamentary duty.

The one area of parliamentary activity represented by entries in the Journals in which the evidence may be analysed with some precision is the process of legislation; and here it is not the appointment of committees on which attention would most profitably focus, least of all perhaps 2nd-reading committees, but the presenting and reporting of bills, which were the responsibility of individual Members. Presenters and reporters may be regarded as ‘workers’ par excellence. Limitations of time and resources have meant that analysis of this evidence for the whole period 1690-1715 has been impracticable. Instead, separate Parliaments have been sampled. The Parliaments chosen are those of 1690, 1698, 1702, 1708 and 1710, in order to achieve a satisfactory spread, both chronologically and in terms of the prevailing political circumstances. Thus they include Parliaments in which the Court party was dominant, and those in which Court control was weak; Parliaments with large numbers of experienced Members, and those admitting a flood of the inexperienced. No distinction has been made between public and private bills. The resulting figures, expressed as totals for each Parliament rather than for each separate session, show a surprisingly large number of Members taking the prime responsibility for bills, usually about a fifth of the total Membership, and as much as a quarter in the 1702 Parliament. It should also be noted that incomplete identifications of namesakes in the Journals, which may refer, for example to ‘Mr Bertie’, ‘Mr Foley’ or ‘Mr Montagu’, mean that these totals are almost certainly understated. Low figures for the Parliament of 1708 may reflect the greater managerial control exercised by the Junto ministry, but are of course also more directly a function of lower rates of legislation (particularly private bill legislation),See above. and appear even more clearly in percentage terms because of the expansion in Membership following the Anglo-Scottish Union. In the 1708 Parliament only two Scottish Members presented bills (William Morison and Sir David Ramsay, 4th Bt.) and two reported (Hon. Sir David Dalrymple, 1st Bt., and Ramsay again), but this bashfulness was soon conquered, and in the next Parliament at least five and possibly six Scottish Members presented bills (George Baillie, John Carnegie, George Lockhart, Hon. James Murray, George Yeaman, and a ‘Mr Smith’, possibly Thomas Smith II, MP for Glasgow Burghs) and four, possibly five, reported ( Baillie, Carnegie, Lockhart, Yeaman, and ‘Mr Smith’). The figures for presenters and reporters separately are as follows:

Parliament	MPs presenting bills	% of total Membership	MPs reporting bills	% of total Membership
1690 (5 sessions)	96	15.5	110	17.8
1698 (2 sessions)	98	18.2	84	15.6
1702 (3 sessions)	111	20.1	105	19.1
1708 (2 sessions)	69	11.6	61	10.2
1710 (3 sessions)	86	14.7	98	18.2

 

Consolidating the two sets of figures, however, clarifies the overall position:

Parliament	MPs presenting & reporting bills	% of total Membership
1690 (5 sessions)	140	22.7
1698 (2 sessions)	123	22.9
1702 (3 sessions)	142	25.8
1708 (2 sessions)	81	13.6
1710 (3 sessions)	116	19.8

 

Within the cohort of Members whose ‘activity’ in legislative matters may be demonstrated in this way it is also possible to identify a sub-set, of those who may perhaps be termed the ‘hyper-active’, defined for this purpose (and arbitrarily, of course) as those who presented or reported at least five bills during the course of a Parliament:

Parliament	MPs presenting at least 5 bills	MPs reporting at least 5 bills	MPs presenting or reporting at least 5 bills
1690 (5 sess)	18	25	40
1698 (2 sess)	6	7	18
1702 (3 sess)	14	11	30
1708 (2 sess)	3	5	13
1710 (3 sess)	9	10	29

 

These ‘hyper-active’ legislators came in many shapes and sizes. There were of course the professional politicians, either senior officials like Sir George Treby (attorney-general 1689-9), Sir John Somers ( his counterpart as solicitor-general in the same period, then successor as attorney- in 1692-3), Sir Thomas Trevor (successively solicitor- and attorney-general 1692-1701) and Sir Thomas Littleton (lord of the Treasury 1696-9); prominent Country party men like Sir Thomas Clarges, John Granville, Simon Harcourt I, Robert Harley and ‘Jack’ Howe in the 1690s, and Sir Richard Onslow, 3rd Bt., in the 1702 Parliament; and other Members who might be described as standing in the second rank as spokesmen for their parties in the Commons—William Bromley II (a second-rank figure in 1702, if more distinguished subsequently), John Comyns, John Conyers, Gilbert Dolben, and John Hungerford for the Tories, Edward Clarke I, Hon. Spencer Compton, William Cowper, William Farrer, and Lord William Powlett for the Whigs. Many of these politicians were also practising barristers (besides Somers, Treby and Trevor, this category also included Compton, Comyns, Conyers, Cowper, Dolben, Farrer, Harcourt, and Hungerford). Naturally enough, the advantages of a legal training to the legislator meant that lawyers in general were well represented; men like the recorder of Leicester, Lawrence Carter II, the Welsh judge Sir William Wogan, the Irish barrister Francis Annesley, and, perhaps the best example of the type, the Leicestershire squire and sometime bencher of the Inner Temple, Samuel Bracebridge. In a few cases ‘hyper-activity’ in legislation coincided with a bulging portfolio of personal economic interests, which would help account for the substantial contribution to legislative transactions made by such men as Sir Robert Davers, 2nd Bt., who combined the roles of bluff Suffolk gentleman and West Indian planter; his fellow East Anglian Richard Ferrier, who was also a participant in the Atlantic trade; the Massachusetts mining projector, Sir Mathew Dudley, 2nd Bt.; and the Cumbrian coal-owner James Lowther.For Lowther in particular, see Parlty Hist. i. 79-97. One might also look to explanations based on character. A personality which might be described (from different viewpoints) as busybodying or public-spirited may well have found in legislation its most appropriate parliamentary outlet. This would certainly apply to the parliamentary diarist Sir Richard Cocks,Cocks Diary, intro. pp. xv-xxxiii.. and possibly to other back-benchers appear unexpectedly among the most active legislators: the Earl of Ailesbury’s man-of-business Thomas Christie, Henry Goldwell of Bury St. Edmunds, the York alderman Robert Waller, and, most surprisingly perhaps, Locke’s long-time host, the otherwise ineffectual Essex squire Sir Francis Masham, 3rd Bt.

Often these ‘active’ Members would have particular legislative interests, amounting to specialisms. For professional politicians, especially those holding high legal office, or places in the Treasury and customs and excise commissions, supply bills would be an obvious preoccupation. On the back benches we can find experts in private bill legislation, including some of the more unexpected figures like Christie, Masham, or Waller; those devoted to questions of commerce and manufacture, like Davers, Dudley, Ferrier, and the London merchant Sir Matthew Andrews; social reformers driven by an evangelical or moral purpose, among whom we may include not only Cocks but the crusading Southwark j.p. Anthony Bowyer, described by his panegyrist as ‘a pattern for the modern magistrate’; and even those whose interests lay chiefly in the promotion of local issues, like the conscientious Tory Member for Chester, Peter Shakerley, or Derby’s representative, John Harpur, who busied himself promoting the Derwent navigation and estate bills on behalf of neighbours in the east midlands.

Evidence to confirm the substantial part played by back-bench MPs in the framing and passage of legislation, and for a degree of specialization in subject-area, emerges from the work of those historians who have studied the legislative process more generally. Some commentators have argued that ministers took relatively little interest in legislative questions, aside from fiscal measures, granting supply or reforming the administration of the revenue, and bills necessary for the security of the realm, the smoother operation of government offices, or to enact constitutional changes like the Anglo-Scottish Union. By contrast, the regulation and encouragement of trade and industry, and the solution of social problems, seem to have been left very much to enthusiastic individuals or pressure-groups. Trans. R. Hist. Soc. (ser. 5), xl. 75-81. It is worth restating the argument against drawing this distinction too sharply or hastily. Commercial questions might well have had fiscal implications, just as social problems drew in issues of public order; and certainly representatives of Court and opposition can be found arguing on opposite sides in debates on these and other such matters, far removed, it would seem, from the immediate concerns of governing. Parlty. Hist. xiii. 317-18. None the less, it is difficult to find much direct ministerial input into the preparation and management of social and economic legislation, while the work of back-benchers in this regard has been amply demonstrated. The investigations of John Beattie, for example, have revealed that criminal legislation in this period was largely inspired by ‘a group of several dozen Members’ for whom fear of a rising tide of crime was a hobby-horse, in some cases because of a religious concern with the dereliction of public morals, in others from the effect of personal experience on the magistrates’ bench, mainly in the capital.Stilling the Grumbling Hive ed. Davison, Hitchcock, Keirn and Shoemaker, 56-7, 59. A similar preoccupation with ‘moral reform’, arising from evangelical zeal, has also been alleged to lie behind a succession of bills intended to improve ‘manners’, by criminalizing such ‘vices’ as profane swearing, gambling, duelling, and even adultery; and to remedy the evils of poverty and vagrancy by the establishment of workhouses.A.G. Craig, ‘Movement for Reformation of Manners, 1690-1715’ (Edinburgh Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1980); Past and Present, no. 128, pp. 48-91; Trans. R. Hist. Soc. (ser. 6), iii. 151-70; T. Claydon, William III and Godly Revolution (1996), ch. 5. More predictably, an examination of the history of legislation to protect textile manufacturers from foreign competition has uncovered the existence of another caucus of interested Members, this time motivated by local concerns, and drawn mainly from woollen-producing districts: after comparing appointments to more than 50 2nd-reading and inquiry committees in the period 1689-1714, T.W. Keirn found ‘a clearly identifiable group of 25-30 “cloth MPs” nominated to virtually all pertinent committees’.Stilling the Grumbling Hive ed. Davison, Hitchcock, Keirn and Shoemaker, 13-14.

Back-benchers were not always well equipped for the tasks they took upon themselves, or that circumstances had thrust upon them. The preparation of legislation required a particular expertise, and a knowledge of the subject-matter, in some cases detailed local knowledge. A few Members did their own drafting, but they may well have been exceptional, and even they did not act entirely alone. Sir William Williams, 1st Bt., chairman of the drafting committee on the elections bill of 1695-6, felt able, as a former Speaker, to draw up the bill himself. Nevertheless, he circulated his proposals among friends and political sympathizers, and incorporated some of their ideas.NLW, Canon Trefor Owen mss 184-5, 187, 192-7, 200-9, papers relating to elections bill. Similarly, the Junto ‘under-strapper’ Edward Clarke I, who personally drafted numerous bills and clauses on behalf of government in the 1690s (when he was closely involved, inter alia, with the recoinage project),E.g. Som. RO, Sanford mss DD/SF 3078, 3842. See Parlty Hist. vii. 228-40, esp. pp. 229-30. also paid attention to outside advice. Still more striking was the example of Speaker Robert Harley, one of whose greatest assets in the Chair was his mastery of parliamentary lore, but who had recourse to advisers (some of them self-appointed) for ideas and forms of legislation.Add. 70216, John Chamberlayne to Harley, 15 Aug. 1712, 6 Apr. 1713; 70252, Ambrose Philipps to same, 27 May 1695. Less experienced or confident parliamentary figures found assistance essential. Lord Digby (William*) urged Sir John Mordaunt, 5th Bt.*, in 1707 to employ ‘a skilled lawyer’ to draw up the Birmingham church bill, which all the Warwickshire Members were keen to secure by the end of the session.Warws. RO, Mordaunt of Walton Hall mss CR1368/iii/17, Digby to Mordaunt, 12 Feb. 1706/7. With private or local legislation it was possible that the beneficiaries, whether individuals or interest-groups, would be responsible themselves (sometimes with disastrous results, as the Quakers discovered in 1702 when supplying Sir Richard Cocks with alternative versions of their affirmation bill and thus affording him the opportunity to introduce the wrong one by mistakeCocks Diary, 266-7, 283-4.). Then it would be inevitable that a specialist parliamentary draftsman would be employed. The Yorkshire MP Cyril Arthington*, who guided the broadcloth bill through the Commons in 1709, admitted that he had little to do with the actual preparation of the measure; instead, the bill had been drawn up by clothiers themselves with the assistance of a parliamentary solicitor.Stilling the Grumbling Hive ed. Davison, Hitchcock, Keirn and Shoemaker, 14-15.

More frequent and longer Parliaments after 1689 turned legislation into a growth industry and paved the way for the rise of the profession of the parliamentary solicitor, who came to blend the skills of the draftsman with the techniques of the lobbyist, and served as an adjunct and an adviser to the sponsor of a bill. A well-documented example is supplied from the archives of the Gold and Silver Wire Drawers’ Company, in London, who in 1698 employed a John Barrett to help them obtain a clause in the lace importation bill, to ban imports of gold and silver thread. Barrett charged the company £33 for his various labours in ‘drafting a new version of the bill, meeting … the two MPs who had agreed to sponsor it, organizing a petition in its favour, drawing up a breviat of the bill, soliciting MPs to attend select committee meetings … and attending the House of Lords for four days to help the bill’s passage’.Brewer, 239-40; and see in general S. Lambert, Bills and Acts (1971). Ex-Members were particularly useful in soliciting and opposing bills, given their knowledge of the ways of Westminster, their connexions within the House and their ready access to the Chamber and its precincts. A splendid example, in this case of activity in opposition to a bill, is provided by the vigorous efforts made by James Lowther in the winter of 1705-6, when temporarily out of the House, against the Parton harbour bill, which was being promoted by another Cumbrian MP, Thomas Lamplugh, and which Lowther’s family perceived as a serious threat to their economic interests in Whitehaven.J.V. Beckett, Coal and Tobacco, 158-61. Lowther, unconfined by other responsibilities, was able to give his full attention to thwarting the bill. He reported his successes in a series of letters to his father, one of which, dated 6 December 1705, is so revealing of the processes of legislation and of the sophisticated techniques of lobbying which could be employed by a man of Lowther’s standing, that it is worth quoting in extenso.Cumbria RO (Carlisle), Lonsdale mss, D/Lons/W2/2/8, Lowther to Sir John Lowther, 6 Dec. 1705. I am indebted to Richard Harrison for bringing this very important letter to my attention.

Last post I sent you and Mr Gilp[in] Mr Lamp[lugh]’s petition, which he presented himself on Monday morning in a thin House. He hopes to get a bill ordered as a thing of course. I was waiting in the gallery and, seeing him standing up to offer somewhat, I immediately gave notice to R[ichard] Lowther, Sir Henry [Dutton] Colt and Sir W[illia]m Coryton, whom I could see at the upper end of the House, and were some of those I had apprised of the matter, and they opposed the petition, and if it had been a full House it would have gone near to have been rejected. However, though it is seldom known but they give leave to bring in a private bill upon offering the petition, the House referred this to a committee and I took care to have a great many of my friends named. As soon as the House was up, Mr Lamp[lugh] got five or six of his friends to go into the Speaker’s chamber, and they were about appointing a short day to hear the petition, but I got two or three of my friends and with them I argued against the irregularity of it, for that they could not sit till two hours after the House was up, at which time they met again but then there was not above six of the committee, so that I would not allow that they had any authority to sit or make any order, and they adjourned till Wednesday morning. On Tuesday morning I added to the committee about 16 of my particular friends, and attended about the House all day and engaged about 25 sure friends to come to the committee yesterday morning. I went out betimes and sent to a great many of their lodgings to desire them to come before 10 o’clock. I was at the Speaker’s chamber a little after nine and found Mr Lamp[lugh] there the first. Then came in two or three of my friends. Then I waited at the bottom of the stairs, and, as my friends came, I kept seven or eight of them out of sight till Col. [Thomas] Stanwix and two more of Mr Lamp[lugh’s] friends appeared and several others of mine. I gave Mr JodrellPaul Jodrell, the clerk of the House. notice that the bill would come to nothing, so he makes Mr Lamp[lugh] pay for everything as it goes on. There being then about nine of my friends and only four of Mr Lamp[lugh]’s, I made the clerk call over the committee and brought up the rest of my friends. Then, we being about 17 to their four, I got a particular friend of mine put into the chair, Mr Serj[eant] Birch [John II], who is my tenant in the Temple. Mr Lamp[lugh] would have given us but till Monday sennight for you to be heard against the petition. I desired three weeks, which was thought very reasonable considering the distance and your indisposition, and so it was ordered by the committee to the 26th instant, before which time the House will be adjourned till after the holidays, and this was opposed by none but Mr Lamp[lugh] and his three friends … Mr Lamp[lugh] could not get above four of his friends to attend the committee, and, if there had been occasion, I could have got above four score. I don’t doubt but either to make him glad to withdraw the petition, or to carry on the committee myself to get a vote against his petition and in favour of yours, and that the bill desired is unreasonable, injurious to you and prejudicial to the public.

The one area of legislation in which government ministers were always heavily involved, usually to the exclusion of outsiders, was supply. At the outset of the 1690 Parliament the drafting of money bills was entrusted to the principal law officers of the crown, the attorney- and solicitor-general, Treby and Somers, with the assistance of the chairman of supply and ways and means, Richard Hampden I, who also happened to be a Treasury lord and chancellor of the Exchequer. Preparation of some bills was handed over to small drafting committees, in other cases to individuals. However, one aspect of the Country party’s campaign to challenge ministerial control over fiscal policy (manifested elsewhere in the close scrutiny of estimates and accounts) was an attempt to dislodge Court nominees from these vital positions, or at least to intrude their own men. Thus the session of 1690-1 saw the extension across the whole range of supply legislation of the principle of appointing a drafting committee rather than an individual, with the Country Tories Sir Thomas Clarges and Sir William Wogan nominated alongside a detachment of Whig placemen. More Country spokesmen appeared in drafting committees during the following two sessions, and on one occasion in the session of 1692-3, over the proposed bill to continue the duties on East India stock, the two ministerialists, Somers (now chairman of ways and means) and the new solicitor-general, Sir Thomas Trevor, found themselves outnumbered by Clarges, Paul Foley I and Sir Christopher Musgrave, 4th Bt. The turning point seems to have occurred in the following session, with a temporary return to the system of appointing individuals to prepare a significant proportion of the bills, most of which were left to Trevor, and the consequent exclusion of Country activists. Thereafter the ministry retained tight control over the drafting procedure, and preserved a monopoly of membership on all drafting committees, with the exception of the session of 1696-7, when a minority of opposition Members was added to the government’s team in a quite extraordinarily large committee given responsibility for various supply bills. But this seems to have been an experiment forced on the Court by acute financial and political difficulties,Horwitz, 180-5. and was not repeated.

Gradually a system developed and solidified. Several developments may be noted. The practice of entrusting the preparation of money bills to a single person was phased out—the last such order was made in April 1702—and instead there was an increasing, eventually exclusive, reliance on small drafting committees, comprising no more than five or six Members, and usually only two or three. Second, one may detect the emergence of a ‘Treasury bench’, providing the personnel for these committees, a concept which moreover was not peculiar to individual ministries. This included not merely the senior law officers (the attorney- and solicitor-general, and after 1710, the prime serjeant Sir Thomas Powys) but the chancellor of the Exchequer, Treasury lords (if the office was in commission), commissioners of customs and excise, paymasters, and other suitably qualified placemen. Other Members might be added from time to time: merchants and those with similarly appropriate expertise for particular bills, sometimes even local men if the tax proposed had implications for a regional or industrial interest (the bill of 1708 to secure the rock salt duties would be one example); political appointees, such as the brother and cousin of Lord Treasurer Oxford (Robert Harley*) from 1711 onwards, who were there to safeguard their master’s interests; and in the very peculiar circumstances of the winter of 1707-8 two Scots, Sir John Erskine, 3rd Bt., and John Montgomerie I, presumably as balancing compliments to the rival ‘Court’ factions headed by the Squadrone and the Duke of Queensberry. Also increasing in importance was the figure of the (effectively permanent) secretary to the Treasury, William Lowndes*, who began to be appointed to drafting committees in 1696-7, and by Anne’s reign was a fixture on almost every committee, where he seems to have held a watching brief. In the same way Lowndes began to take personal responsibility for the presentation and reporting of some money bills in the 1696-7 session, though his role here was not to steer through the Commons important or controversial enabling measures, so much as to take charge of the more technical items of fiscal legislation, amending previous acts, and regulating the administration and collection of duty. The major responsibility for seeing through supply bills fell instead to the chairman of supply and ways and means, whose rise in importance may be said to constitute the fourth pillar in this new ‘system’. The ‘money chair’, as one its occupants called it,William Cowper: see Cam. Misc. xxix, 392. was an important position in the early 1690s, and at that time always held in conjunction with a major office in government. Richard Hampden I, chairman in the first session of the 1690 Parliament, was a Treasury lord; his successor Somers was solicitor- and attorney-general. Then came Sir Thomas Littleton, 2nd Bt., clerk of the Ordnance and a Treasury commissioner. The break happened with the election of the young Whig lawyer William Cowper in 1699. Thereafter the chairmanship became in effect a separate position in its own right, a development that should perhaps more properly be associated with the long tenure of the Tory John Conyers, from 1699 to 1708, and again from 1710 to 1714. Neither Conyers nor the Whig William Farrer, chairman from 1708 to 1710, were in receipt of official income, but to all intents and purposes they acted as auxiliary members of the ‘Treasury bench’ (in Conyers’ case this would only have applied after 1701) serving on most if not all drafting committees on supply and undertaking the lion’s share of work in pushing the resulting bills through the Commons.

 

Lords and Commons

By the later 17th century the Commons may have come to hold the power of the purse, but the authority and influence of the Upper House were far from negligible. Indeed, as Geoffrey Holmes has commented, in the eyes of contemporaries ‘the House of Lords seemed to be gaining in importance’ in this period, and some historians have come to regard the reign of Anne as a ‘golden age’ for the Lords. Party chieftains and Cabinet ministers were to be found there rather than in the Commons, and ‘with such a wealth of talent to enrich its debates, the … Lords was unquestionably supreme as a political forum’.Holmes, ch. 12, esp. pp. 382-3. For what follows, see in general Ellis, ‘Practice and Procedure of H. of Commons’, ch. 9. Moreover, an in-built Whig ascendancy, at least after 1700, made the Upper House the natural focus of resistance to any rampaging Tory majority in the Commons: in 1701, for example, when Members of the Lower House sought to impeach the leading figures in the previous Junto ministry; between 1702 and 1705, in the prolonged struggle over occasional conformity; and again after the Tory landslide at the general election of 1710, when for a time (until Robert Harley’s* political management constructed a workable majority for the Court) the Lords appeared to ‘prevail over the Queen’s management with us, and the strongest House of Commons that ever met’.Lord Poulett, in Add. 22222, f. 188-9, quoted in Britain in the 1st Age of Party ed. C. Jones, 85. Thus the customary amour propre of the Lords, and their pique at any perceived instances of inflated constitutional pretensions on the part of the Commons, could be exacerbated by party-political animosities.

There were numerous opportunities for the two Houses to quarrel. The most frequent cause of dissension was the slow or interrupted progress of legislation. During this period the Commons sent as many as 37 messages to ‘remind’ the Lords of engrossed bills on which no action seemed to have been taken following their dispatch to the Upper House. The list includes significant and controversial measures which were being quite deliberately stifled—the treason trials bill in 1691-2, for example, or the place bill in 1694— but also a number of routine items of legislation which the Lords may have had good grounds for reconsidering, or indeed may simply have forgotten in the press of other business. What is also apparent from the tabulation of these messages is an uneven chronological distribution: peaks between 1690 and 1694, and 1696-9, when the House of Lords was being used by the Court as a long stop to guard against unwelcome legislation coming through from the Commons, followed by four sessions without a single message, from 1699 to 1703, and a generally low incidence of messages thereafter, with the exception of the two sessions of 1704-5 and 1707-8.

Session	Working days	Number of bills over which messages sent	Subject of bills
1690	52	0
1690-1	78	2	attainting rebels; supply (low wines)
1691-2	99	5	lessen interest rates; relief of creditors; transfer aulnage duty collection to customs; treason trials; vest forfeited estates in their Majesties
1692-3	103	4	better discovery of judgments in Westminster; clandestine mortgages; elections (prevent false and double returns); transfer aulnage duty collection to customs
1693-4	136	2	place; prevent delays at quarter sessions
1694-5	136	1	against Sir Thomas Cooke*
1695-6	128	0
1696-7	144	4	abuses in prisons; encourage bringing in of plate to the Mint; relief of creditors; sheriffs’ accounts
1697-8	168	4	housebreaking; Russian trade; sheriffs’ accounts; suspend patent for copper coinage
1698-9	112	3	Blackwell Hall; hinder papists disinheriting Protestant heirs; quiet subject against pretences of concealment
1699-1700	100	0
1701	102	0
1701-2	119	0
1702-3	95	0
1703-4	97	1	supply (tonnage and poundage)
1704-5	103	4	appoint commissioners for Union; j.p. qualification; poor relief; supply (low wines)
1705-6	107	1	sheriffs’ accounts
1706-7	104	1	vagrancy
1707-8	112	3	end embargo on white cloth exports; prevent mischiefs from fire; protect trade
1708-9	115	1	encourage manufacturers
1709-10	104	1	gaming
1710-11	148	1	j.p. qualification
1711-12	141	1	sheriffs’ accounts
1713	81	0
1714	106	0

 

A similar pattern is visible if we look at instances in which the two Houses conferred over particular bills, in order to reconcile their differing opinions. Conferences, the normal method of resolving disputes between Lords and Commons, were conducted by representatives of the two Houses, in the Painted Chamber. The Commons would appoint a committee to prepare its case, which would then become the committee to manage the conference. In the case of legislation a conference would usually be called if one House amended to an unacceptable extent a bill produced by the other. Thus in December 1691 the Commons rejected the Lords’ amendments to the bill imposing new oaths of allegiance and supremacy in Ireland, and a series of conferences resulted. In all some 53 bills were made the subject of conferences. These ranged from such important measures as the mutiny and treason trials bills in the session of 1691-2, and the first occasional conformity bill in 1702-3, to items of purely local or sectional interest, and even one or two private bills. Again a chronological pattern emerges, with a relatively high frequency of conferences on bills between 1690 and 1699 (leaving aside the 1692-3 session, in which no such conferences took place), a sharp fall thereafter and generally lower figures for the remainder of the period, though with a dramatic exception in the winter of 1705-6.

Session	Working days	Number of bills over which Houses conferred	Subject of bills
1690	52	0
1690-1	78	3	employment of foreign seamen; mutiny; Earl of Salisbury estate
1691-2	99	5	Irish oaths; mutiny; public accounts; small tithes; treason trials
1692-3	103	0
1693-4	136	4	mutiny; place small tithes; Lord Stawell estate
1694-5	136	3	continue expiring laws; imprisonment of Sir Thomas Cooke*; treason trials
1695-6	128	3	coinage; Greenland trade; prohibit trade with France
1696-7	144	3	coinage; prevent buying and selling of offices; restrain wearing of silks and calicoes
1697-8	168	6	against correspondence with King James; Alverstock waterworks; Colchester workhouse; continue imprisonment of Counter et al.; explain Poor Relief Act; pains and penalties against Charles Duncombe*
1698-9	112	6	Billingsgate market; Blackwell Hall; corn exportation; Legg et al. naturalization; supply (paper); prevent distilling from corn
1699-1700	100	1	Irish forfeitures resumption
1701	102	0
1701-2	119	0
1702-3	95	1	occasional conformity
1703-4	97	0
1704-5	103	3	militia, Pechells et al. naturalization; prevent correspondence with enemies
1705-6	107	5	advancement of justice; allow import of cargo of French wine; militia; regency; Earl of Conway estate
1706-7	104	1	continue Vagrancy Act
1707-8	112	3	amend Highway Repair Act; enforce Act to finish St. Paul’s Cathedral; secure American trade
1708-9	115	0
1709-10	104	3	copyright; explain Eddystone Lighthouse Act; Edward Southwell* estate
1710-11	148	3	Dunstable-Hockley highway; game; preservation of pine trees in America
1711-12	141	0
1713	81	0
1714	106	0

 

Naturally, some disputes over individual items of legislation were more violent and protracted than others. The project in 1699-1700 to resume the Irish forfeitures, and the successive occasional conformity bills of 1702-4 would be obvious examples. In the session of 1691-2 the controversial treason trials bill gave rise to eight separate conferences within the space of a month, while during the same session there were five conferences on the public accounts bill. Each House was alert to any possible infringement of constitutional proprieties. The Commons were ready to object in February 1700 when the Lords sent down a bill to appoint commissioners to treat for a union with Scotland which was accompanied by a message declaring the bill to be ‘of great consequence’. This was interpreted as an illegitimate attempt to bring at least moral pressure to bear. A committee was set up to search for precedents, and duly found a bundle of them, all from the Parliament of 1621-4 (doubtless to the chagrin of some back-benchers, who were spoiling for a fight in defence of the liberties and privileges of the House).CJ, xiii. 236, 267; Cocks Diary, 58.

The Commons’ exclusive control over fiscal legislation was a perennial source of friction. On three occasions the Lords were accused of improperly interfering with money bills: once very obviously, in the case of the land tax bill of 1693; twice more doubtfully (in that the bills concerned were not strictly supply bills), over the recoinage bill of 1696, and a year later the bill to restrain the wearing of silks and calicoes imported from the East Indies.Ellis, ‘Practice and Procedure of H. of Commons’, 311-12. On the other side, the Commons, or rather opposition Members in the Commons, several times abused their privilege in a calculated fashion, by the device of ‘tacking’ otherwise unacceptable items of legislation to money bills, knowing that the Lords would not be able to remove the obnoxious clauses by amendment, and that the ministry would on the whole prefer a tacked bill, however unpleasant, to the loss of a subsidy. In 1692, following the Lords’ obstruction of the bill to renew the commission of accounts, the Commons ‘tacked’ this measure to the poll tax bill, and thus pushed it through; a year later the Country party succeeded in adding to the land tax bill an extraneous clause obliging the Admiralty to make specific dispositions of naval resources for the protection of trade; in 1699 the disbandment bill was yoked to supply in a manner many in the Upper House found offensive; and the Irish forfeitures resumption was accomplished entirely by the expedient of tacking—the clauses establishing a commission of inquiry inserted into the land tax bill of 1699, the enabling legislation for the resumption itself yoked to the land tax bill of 1700.Horwitz, 73-75, 126-7, 255-6, 266-8. The tack of the resumption bill itself produced the strongest reaction. Several Whig peers entered their protest that

the tacking of so many and different matters to a money bill is not only contrary to all the rules and methods of Parliament, but highly dangerous, both to the undoubted prerogative of the Crown, and right of this House.

These arguments were taken up by the Lords’ managers at subsequent conferences, necessitated by the unprecedented decision of the Upper House to undo the tack and excise the offending clauses from the bill. Inevitably such boldness provoked a constitutional crisis. After a prolonged tussle the Commons finally triumphed when the King was persuaded at the last minute to concede the issue of resumption and Court peers were ordered to desist from opposing the bill. Even then the vital division in the Lords was tied, and had to be decided on a casting vote from the Chair.LJ, xv. 569, 575; A.S. Turberville, H. of Lds. in Reign of Wm. III (1913), pp. 200-209; Horwitz, 266-9.

In fact, this was to be the last successful example of the use of the weapon of ‘tacking’, unless we count the inclusion in the autumn of 1702 in the bill to make provision for Prince George of a clause exempting him from the penalties imposed upon foreigners in the Act of Settlement, a provision which had not been adopted by Members of the Commons in the spirit of earlier ‘tacking’ devices, even though the Junto Lord Sunderland (Charles, Lord Spencer*) professed to regard it as a ‘tack’ and condemned it accordingly as ‘unparliamentary’.A.S. Turberville, H. of Lds. in 18th Cent. (1927), p. 41; LJ, xvi. 247. High Church Tories threatened a tack in December 1702, by inserting their beloved occasional conformity bill into a money bill, but were deterred by a pre-emptive strike on the part of the Whigs in the Upper House, who successfully moved a resolution which denounced tacking itself as ‘unparliamentary and tending to the destruction of the constitution of this government’.LJ, xvii. 185; Ellis, ‘Practice and Procedure of H. of Commons’, 311-12. Two years later the Tories tried again, in the most notorious case of ‘tacking’ in the period—an incident generally referred as ‘the Tack’ tout court—but the defeat of their motion to combine the occasional conformity and land tax bills, on 28 November 1704, not only put a temporary closure on their hopes of an Occasional Conformity Act, but also to the whole practice of tacking, which was only revived in 1712, and then half-heartedly, as the ministry saw off with some ease the efforts of the October Club to attach its land grants resumption bill to the lottery bill. Indeed, one historian has argued that the supporters of this manoeuvre may not have regarded the conjunction of these two measures as a ‘tack’ at all in the proper sense, since both were in some sense supply bills.Szechi, 112-13.

Of course, the collapse of ‘good correspondence’ between the two Houses was not solely the consequence of contentious legislation. Commons and Lords might disagree on expressions of public policy. In 1701, for example, each House took a different view of the priorities and objectives of foreign policy, and this would have been the case again in 1711-12 had it not been for the timely creation of a dozen new peers, which forced the ministry’s peace policy through the Upper House. Then there were questions of privilege, when each House accused the other of going beyond the bounds of its authority or jurisdiction. The most serious incidents arose from complaints by the Commons against encroachments by the Lords. In the session of 1702-3, and again in the following winter, Whigs in the Lords moved quickly to try and protect Lords Halifax (Charles Montagu*) and Orford (Edward Russell*) from censure by the Commons commission of accounts, setting up committees of inquiry of their own, and exculpating the two ministers in advance of the accounts commissioners’ report. This was deeply resented by Tories in the Commons, who argued in both instances that the Lords were acting without authority, and had prejudged the issue of the commissioners’ investigations.Turberville, H. of Lds. in 18th Cent. 42-45. In a rather different example in 1704 the Lords took up the investigation of a doubtful case rather too promptly for the Commons’ liking. In the hope of making trouble for the Tory Secretary of State Nottingham (Daniel Finch†), the Junto began inquiries into the so-called ‘Scotch Plot’, but ran into protests from the Commons (orchestrated by High Church supporters of Nottingham) that they had acted precipitately and without authority, particularly in the matter of imprisoning suspects. Each House presented its arguments to the Crown, by representations and addresses, accusing the other of abusing the royal prerogative and indulging in ‘unparliamentary’ conduct.Ibid. 46-50. In the same session the Lords were charged with exceeding their powers in hearing an appeal from Lord Wharton (Thomas*) in the case of Wharton v. Bathurst (see under THEODORE BATHURST) before judgment had been given in a lower court, and thus assuming an original jurisdiction.Ibid. 62-64; Ellis, ‘Practice and Procedure of H. of Commons’, 311-12. The bitterest dispute of all, the case of Ashby v. White, arose over a controverted parliamentary election, for Aylesbury in 1701, again involving Wharton.See above. When the Lords gave judgment, in January 1704, effectively overturning the Commons’ decision on the election, MPs erupted in indignation. The High Tory Sir Edward Seymour, 4th Bt.*, declared that, with this decision, ‘an axe is laid to the root’ of the constitution. The Lords, he claimed, ‘have a dislike of this House of Commons, and endeavour to get rid of them’. The controversy raged for two sessions, until the dissolution of 1705 put an end to it. The Lords appealed to public opinion by publishing their proceedings, and pamphleteers buzzed on both sides. In the end, the issue was technically unresolved, but the Lords did not try again to interfere in election matters.

Finally there were disputes over the treatment of individuals, those whom one House wished to pursue and punish, and the other to protect. In this period it was always the Lower House which initiated proceedings, the Upper House which delayed and frustrated. The impeachment of the Duke of Leeds in April 1695 was quietly allowed to expire in the Lords;CJ, xi. 327, 330. and three years later the bill of pains and penalties against Charles Duncombe* was rejected. But the impeachment in 1701 of Lords Halifax, Orford, Portland, and Somers (Sir John*) proved the most controversial. The Commons were adamant that they had been denied justice, and the Tory back-bencher Sir Humphrey Mackworth published a Vindication of the Rights of the Commons of England (1701), which was duly answered on behalf of the Lords, sparking off a ‘paper war’ in pamphlet, broadsheet and newspaper.Turberville, H. of Lds. in Reign of Wm. III, 210-24; Horwitz, 287-92. The four other impeachment cases in this period either failed to pass the Commons or resulted in a satisfactory judgment, and although the weak sentence passed on Dr Sacheverell in 1710 did not please the Whig majority in the Lower House, discretion proved the better part and the hotheads allowed themselves to be dissuaded from making an issue of their disappointment.The proposed impeachment of the Irish lords justices Lords Bellomont (Richard Coote*) and Coningsby (Thomas*) was rejected by the Commons in January 1694 (CJ, xi. 73); a vote in January 1696 to impeach the directors of the Company of Scotland likewise came to nought (CJ, xi. 407); but the impeachment of Jean Goudet and others in the 1697-8 session for smuggling French silks into England, undertaken at the behest of the Royal Lustring Company, did result in a conviction and the imposition of swingeing fines (CJ, xii. 241, 287, 342).

Emphasis on disputes over legislation brings out the tension between Commons and Lords in the early years of William’s reign, but a broader view points to a much more serious crisis developing in the later 1690s and running through to at least 1705 (which may also help to explain the unusually high incidence of messages and conferences over bills in 1704-6).See Turberville, H. of Lds. in Reign of Wm. III, ch. 9. Relations took a turn for the worse with the dispute over the punishment of Duncombe in 1698, deteriorated further owing to the Lords’ resentment of, and resistance to, the tack of the Irish forfeitures resumption bill in 1700, and reached a nadir in 1701 over the impeachments. For the first time the two Houses gave a public airing to their grievances against one another, and made their quarrels an issue at the general election of December 1701. It is in this context that we should view the criticisms made by Members of the Commons in King William’s two last Parliaments of the conduct of individual peers: Lords Sandwich and Peterborough for interfering in Commons’ elections; Lord Haversham (Sir John Thompson*) for his contemptuous demeanour and insulting remarks at conferences between the two Houses. The contests over privilege and authority that marked the 1702 Parliament—the attacks on Halifax and Orford, the protests against the judgment in Wharton v. Bathurst, the conflict over the Tack, the Aylesbury case—may be interpreted as a long coda to the political crisis of 1700-02. Undoubtedly the main reason for the persistence of hostilities was the political balance in the two Houses: a predominantly Tory House of Commons confronting a predominantly Whig House of Lords. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a similar series of disputes might have erupted in the 1710 Parliament had it not been for Harley’s skill and lack of scruple as a political manager, as by fair means and foul in 1711-12 he restored the Court’s majority in the Lords. For the animosity between the two Houses did not go entirely cold after 1705. The potential for conflict remained, as the furious debates over the Peerage Bill in 1719 were to bear witness.