This article explores the atmosphere and behaviour of the house of commons during the 17th century, and endeavours to recover evidence about noise and gesture, decorum and disorder. Such evidence is rarely recorded and is difficult to interpret, but it is, nevertheless, possible to demonstrate that the House was often much less orderly and polite than contemporaries would have liked to admit, and than historians have often suggested. This evidence is largely absent from the official Commons' journals as well as from most private diaries, but it is occasionally recorded in contemporary news reports, and more obviously in the diary of Thomas Burton, and it highlights the numerous occasions on which proceedings fell into silence or descended into noisy uproar, as well as the occasions when interventions were made with gestures rather than words. At times, this aural and visual culture involved humour and harmless fun, but at others, it reveals personal tensions and political animosities that might otherwise not be apparent from recorded speeches. By drawing attention to such evidence and teasing out its meaning, this piece argues that historians have too often succumbed to the tendency to accentuate consensus and downplay conflict in 17th-century parliaments.

Although we know a certain amount about how governments tried to plan parliamentary sessions in the 17th century, about the managers to whom they entrusted the task, and about the existence of factions and parties within the house of commons, very little is known about the exact operation of such groups – how they tried to secure the result they wanted through working together to manipulate their fellow members and the practice and procedure of the House. A sophisticated level of organisation by the junto in the early 1640s is implied in two polemical sources, and this article investigates whether more can be discovered about organisation and tactics on the floor of the House through a detailed examination of the way divisions were taken across the period. A database of tellers covering four periods within the years 1604–87 has been constructed in order to examine the role, in particular to see whether individuals specialised as tellers. The result shows that a few specific members were extremely active as tellers, although further work would be required to establish whether their activity as tellers can be distinguished from overall activity.

During the occupancy of the office of clerk assistant in the house of lords by John Walker sr (1664–82) and his son John Walker jr (1682–1715) jottings appeared in the margins of the manuscript minutes (the preliminary stage of the Lords’ journal compiled each day on which the House sat). These jottings are concerned with the work that the clerks assistant performed as part of their ‘official’ duties, such as those concerned with the registering of proxy votes. But there are other jottings which indicate that the clerks were performing jobs for the individual members of the Lords, helping them in their own private affairs as well as helping the peers and bishops perform as lords of parliament. This article looks at the working of this system for the years 1670–80, its origins and why it ceased.

The revolution of 1688–9 has been studied from a variety of angles, but few historians have paid much attention to the sheer depth of William of Orange's acquaintance with a broad swathe of British society. Many of the choices the prince made during the invasion and in the years leading up to it were influenced by his contacts in Britain. He knew the court well and had made some efforts to influence the timings of parliaments and the direction of policy under his uncles, Charles II and James II. The shape of the regime that emerged after his successful overthrow of James II was also informed by his knowledge of a number of senior British politicians and this is reflected in a list compiled by one of his followers, Gilbert Burnet, in the course of the revolution. This article seeks to cast new light on the preparations that lay behind the invasion and the reasons for the appointments that were made in the new administration of William and Mary.

This study of 18th-century estate acts draws upon the range of manuscript and printed materials relating to 428 estate bills to determine the nature of these measures, the backgrounds and motivations of their sponsors and their impact both upon the properties of individual promoters and on the broader economy. Estate acts enabled small proprietors, gentry and grandees (including a number of women) to free themselves from restrictions imposed by settlements and made it possible for them to sell, lease, exchange, partition, mortgage, alter earlier acts, or make other amendments to existing settlements. Many authorities have stressed the degree to which this legislation promoted economic growth, but the principal finding of this study is that, in the largest number of cases, they were utilised to alleviate indebtedness incurred primarily as a result of personal extravagance and secondarily because of overly generous provision for widows and younger children. While attesting to the positive economic contributions of landowners who tapped mineral resources and promoted urban development, the largest number of bills illuminate the costs of sustaining their self-indulgent and unproductive expenditure.

The year 1935 was an ominous year for European peace. Hitler's Germany began to rearm; Mussolini's Italy provoked a major diplomatic crisis by invading Abyssinia. Against this background it seemed extraordinary that Edward Russell, 26th Baron de Clifford, had to be tried for manslaughter by his peers in the house of lords. Such trials of peers had once been perceived as powerful theatrical examples of the place of the aristocracy in British society. By 1935, de Clifford's trial, the last ever of a peer in the house of lords, was an anachronism and his ultimate acquittal seemed like an outdated piece of class justice. Behind the scenes of an apparent farce in which justice was to be administered by men garbed in pantomime robes, there was, however, a serious issue about interpreting the law of manslaughter, which sparked a concerted, but clandestine, attempt by the then director of public prosecutions to undermine the credibility of the lord chief justice.

When the project for a collaborative, publicly-funded History of Parliament was relaunched in 1951, with the support of a substantial grant-in-aid from the treasury, academic direction was entrusted to an ‘editorial board’ of professional historians, the most influential of whom were Sir John Neale and Sir Lewis Namier. Both were committed to the technique of collective biography, but had radically-different views of the structure and scope of the History. For Neale, the research would provide quantitative answers to specific historical questions, arising from his essentially whiggish view of constitutional development. Namier held to a ‘sociological’ method, studying the lives of MPs as a means of recreating the world of the governing classes. In practice, Namier set no limits to his inquiry: historical questions would be determined by the evidence. Faced with these conflicting approaches the ‘editorial board’ failed to define the purpose of the History. In practice, because Namier's section made more progress, his view of the History triumphed over Neale's. But as deadlines drew near the treasury began to exert pressure. Conservative ministers (especially Harold Macmillan) and civil servants, were sharply critical of the apparently open-ended nature of the History, and the trustees, who bore ultimate responsibility for the project, were anxious to bring volumes to publication. In consequence, Namier's original ambition was curtailed and, after his death in 1960, his own section was completed by his assistant, John Brooke, in a more restricted format.

The duties of the clerk of the crown in chancery in the middle ages are illustrated by the templates recorded in a series of precedent books preserved in the National Archives, Kew, dating from the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The material concerned includes among various types of parliamentary writs, and documents relating to the adjournment and prorogation of parliament, an otherwise unknown list of summonses to the parliament of 1489.

The docquets of letters patent are brief chancery documents authorising grants to be made under the great seal. They are, therefore, state papers, but an extensive collection dating from the long lord keepership (1625–40) of Sir Thomas Coventry (1578–1640) remained among Coventry's personal papers at Croome d'Abitot, Worcestershire. Most of the docquets were taken to Birmingham Central Library in 1938, and these form the basis of A Calendar of the Docquets of Lord Keeper Coventry, 1625–1640, ed. J. Broadway, R. Cust and S.K. Roberts (List and Index Society Special Series, 34–7, 4 vols, Kew, 2004). Some docquets were left behind at Croome, however, and in recent years these have been moved to the Worcestershire Record Office. The additional docquets calendared here are from the Worcestershire Record Office deposit and record the entrances and exits to and from the commissions of the peace. They are to be consulted alongside the comparable material presented in A Calendar of the Docquets, and provide useful additional evidence of how the crown adjusted or tuned the commissions of the peace in the counties during the reign of Charles I to 1640.

Voting in the house of lords until 1867 was allowed by proxy if a peer or bishop was absent. Proxy deeds which enabled the absent peers and bishops to nominate their proxies had to be registered in a proxy book in the care of the clerk assistant. Until recently there was no record of a proxy book for 1661–2, it having been wrongly bound with proceedings for 1625–6. This note looks at the layout of this newly-found proxy book, and compares it with earlier and later books. The note ends with an analysis of the proxies recorded in the book and their importance for the political history of the period.

The discovery in the manuscript papers of Charles, Lord Bruce, of three lists enumerating the voters in important divisions in the house of lords in the early 18th century – on the ‘Church in Danger’ (1705), the Septennial Bill and the Bill to Resume the Forfeited Estates of ‘Traitors’ after the Jacobite Rebellion (1716) – help to illuminate the state of party allegiances and affiliations in these periods, for which no other division lists are extant. This note provides the voting results from these division lists in tabular form, accompanied by indications of the current state of our knowledge of party affiliations for each of the individuals listed. However, the origin and accuracy of each of these lists are not clear-cut and this note also details the discrepancies and anomalies in each list.