Search

In his secret paper, ‘A Brief Discourse Concerning the Nature and Reason of Intelligence’, written during the course of the reign of William III, Sir Samuel Morland, who had served the regimes of both Oliver Cromwell and Charles II in the secret dealings of government, attempted to capture the rationale and philosophy behind the Restoration regime's intelligence system. The foundation of the philosophy which Morland outlined was clarity itself. His view was that all mankind possessed a fallen nature and thus was unable to be held to anything in political life if his vital interests, his survival and need for power, were threatened, Morland's political man was ‘governed wholly by politick maxims’ and while this was most visible in the relations between nation-states such tendencies were equally visible in the relationship between government and people. In such relationships the sanctions laid down by religion had little effect, for men merely paid lip service to keeping the ‘most sacred promise[s] & solemn agreements’, which were as ‘easily broke[n] as Sampson's cords’. In such a philosophy nothing could be ruled out that gave an advantage to ‘political man’. As the ruler mistrusted his neighbour in international politics so he should also mistrust his own people. Given this situation it was beholden upon the ruler to discover and assess the ‘tempers of his own subjects’ as well as ‘the first ferments of all factions; in order to manage the ‘lopping men of so many different parties & the Heroes of the populace’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the reign of Charles II the world of espionage and conspiracy continued to be as perplexing for the government as in the first half. The ‘problem’ of Catholicism also began to loom, to explode in the Popish Plot of 1678. There were a number of men employed as spies by the regime in this period and while it is not possible to trace all of their careers here, lengthy case studies are given of two of the most notable and complex individuals who enlisted as covert soldiers in the regime's espionage wars: Thomas Blood and John Scott. Sir Joseph Williamson, who came to know Thomas Blood quite well, noted on the day after Blood's attempt on the Crown Jewels that it was ‘one of the strangest any story can tell’. There is no doubt that Thomas Blood was the nonpareil of the seventeenth-century spy, rebel and adventurer. There is no-one quite like Blood in the Restoration regime's service, or for that matter out of it. He was distinctive in many ways, but most of all his is the only fully rounded figure of a spy in the period we can uncover. The others involved in the Restoration regime's intelligence system remain at heart shadowy figures. With Blood, however, we have a man whose thoughts we can actually penetrate through his own personal writings. Yet in spite of this there are great mysteries both concerning the man and his career. Notorious in his day, he was also adept in covering his tracks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the espionage world of Restoration politics the infantry were those men, and even the occasional woman, who were members of what Clarendon had once called the ‘ignominious tribe’ – the spies. Any intelligence system in the period, whatever its other sources of information, was ultimately dependent upon men and women actually going out to gather information on the ground. It was such people who would perform the dangerous tasks which otherwise could not be carried out. It was the spy who would take the ‘ruffian's wage’, to mix with the ‘hired slaves, bravos and common stabbers, Nose-slitters [and] alley-lurking villains’. They became a necessary, but often double-edged asset to the political and diplomatic life of any regime. They were essential because the late-seventeenth-century world was both physically and mentally a large place for its occupants, and factors of time and distance played a significant part in seventeenth-century government as well as in international politics. Instantaneous communication, other than face to face, was impossible. It took days, sometimes weeks, to communicate by letter, even if one allowed for human or natural intervention. Furthermore in places otherwise out of reach, or in places where no government officer could go openly, it was necessary to have ‘eyes’ to do so. This, as well as the need to counter subversive activity, and to prevent the interference of foreign government in domestic affairs, made the trade of the spy essential if not respectable and in such a world, especially one prone to violence, war and conflict, the trade of the spy could also thrive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the extant material from the Celys’ papers in 1480 concerns the routine business of buying and selling wool and fell. The widespread ‘death’ in 1479 had perhaps interfered with trade that year, and although Richard Cely senior had braved infection and bought 27 sarplers of wool in the Cotswolds in April 1479, he kept them in store in England until they were finally shipped to Calais on 23 March 1480. Part of the consignment, which old Richard had described as carefully classed or ‘good packing’, was quickly sold, but when George attended the Antwerp mart in June he received bitter complaints from the buyer, who said that a large proportion of the wool was wrongly designated. By that time Richard had shipped 17 sarplers of new stock, which George endeavoured to keep back until he had sold more of the defective shipment. This was still unsold by November, however, and the wool in the remaining 20 sarplers had to be reclassed and repacked, at the same time as 11 more sarplers had reached Calais with the autumn fleet. For both Cely brothers 1480 was a year of travel. George had a full round of seasonal marts to visit. Richard was assigned to the buying and packing of wool in the Cotswolds in the earlier part of the year, and then accompanied Sir John Weston's party on a number of official occasions, including an embassy to France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sometime around the mid-fifteenth century the three Cely boys, Robert, Richard and George, were born to an established wool-merchant, Richard Cely senior, and his wife Agnes. The elder Richard was a worshipful citizen of London, proud to be designated ‘merchant of the Fellowship of the Staple at Calais’. He was, it seems, in a minority among the larger exporters of raw wool, in that the wool trade constituted his main business interest. Many of the leading staplers of the period were also merchant adventurers, importing and exporting a variety of other goods in addition to their trade at the Calais wool staple, the only authorized point at which good quality English wool might be sold abroad. But although Richard was not one of the richest or most influential men in City politics, by the time that the Cely papers begin, about 1473, he was a man of substance, with a town-house in a desirable area of London, an estate in Essex, and other land in Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire, and was enjoying the seniority in his Company which past office-holding and long continuance conferred. There can be little doubt that merchants (that is, men engaged in wholesale trade) thought of themselves as forming a distinct class in society, however shifting the outer edges of the stratum, however realistic might be their hopes of marrying daughters into a higher class and of making their sons into landed gentlemen, well-beneficed clergy, or rich and influential lawyers, and however close the threat of the sickness, unlucky venture or political reversal which could overturn a man's fortunes and send him and his children into penury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1558, Jean d'Estouteville, sieur de Villebon and governor of Picardy, wrote to the duke of Guise that ‘il n'y a gouvernement en France où il y ait plus d'affaires qu'il a icy’. The importance of the lieutenant-général du roi in Picardy stemmed in part from the regular army stationed there and its massive augmentation in time of war. It has been suggested that this period of war tended to limit the scope of governors' powers in the interest of the crown. These powers will be examined in chapter 3, but there must be some doubt on the matter, since war arguably enhanced the political and administrative competence of governors as well as of other military officials. The lengthy tenure of the post in Picardy by princes of the house of Bourbon contributed to this augmentation but also complicated it. The post of governor was a ‘charge’ revocable at royal will, but this power was seldom invoked. However, the first half of the sixteenth century saw the rapid development of the post of deputy governor, appointed at first in times of emergency but later on a permanent basis. It has perhaps too easily been assumed that the deputy governors quickly eclipsed the real power of governors, often great princes preoccupied with court politics. This is not so clear from an examination of the affairs of Picardy, which reveal a continuing central role for the governors and a complex relationship with their deputies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What was the area over which the provincial governors exercised their authority? Godard, in 1949, put the case aptly when he said that ‘au cours des guerres, le mot Picardie avait pris un sense militaire, mais restait extrèmement imprécis’. It was indeed military necessity which shaped the province and, in the first half of the sixteenth century, there were still enclaves and exemptions which rendered a clear geographical definition of the province difficult. By 1560, however, custom was beginning to introduce a greater degree of clarity. In the reign of Louis XI, the governor's powers covered at first only that part of the Somme region which owed allegiance to the king of France – the ‘marches de Picardie’ – but the reconquests of the 1470s naturally led to an extension of that authority. In addition, new territory seems to have fallen within the governor's sphere with the acquisition of the county of Boulogne and large parts of Artois. Even though Charles VIII formally abandoned his claims to Artois in 1493, certain enclaves remained under French jurisdiction (the most important of which was Thérouanne) and for this reason the governors were still in 1560 entitled ‘lieutenant-général du roi en Picardie et Artois’. The exact status of Boulogne might seem ambivalent. Later in the ancien régime, the county had a governor of its own but, throughout the sixteenth century, the sénéchal and governor there were always subordinated to the governor of Picardy, though until 1494 these were the same in the person of the marshal d'Esquerdes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attached piecemeal to the French royal domain in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Picardy might seem on the maps to be a region close to the centre of royal power in the later middle ages. Such an impression, however, is deceptive. Though it formed no single province or appanage, the centrifugal tendencies of its nobles and the independent urban traditions of an area that had been at the centre of the early mediaeval communal movements were enough to ensure that the grip of the crown had been periodically weakened during the fourteenth-century struggles with the Plantagenets, fatally so in the fifteenth. Such interests were realigned during the late fourteenth-century ‘régime of the dukes’ around the Valois dukes of Burgundy. For much of the fifteenth century, the region was controlled by the English or Burgundians, formally so after the Treaty of Arras in 1435 conceded the Somme towns to Philip the Good, on condition that the crown might redeem them at some future date; Boulogne and Ponthieu were ceded without condition to the male line of the Burgundian dukes. Burgundy was the dominant power in northern France from the 1420s to 1477 and became in consequence deeply embedded in the clientage networks of the local nobility. Artois, with its intimate connections with Flanders, was a natural adjunct of the Burgundian state; Picardy, which in a sense stood at the crossroads between the Ile-de-France and the Low Countries, was more equivocal in its loyalties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The towns of Picardy were confronted in a markedly direct way by the demands of the state and its military administration in the sixteenth century. The high levels of direct royal taxation which prevailed later in the reign of Louis XI were relaxed under his successors, but began to rise again in the semipermanent war conditions after 1521, though not steeply until the 1550s. In the course of this, the balance of taxation shifted from direct to indirect, and the exemptions of the towns were gradually abridged by new sorts of taxes and special loans. Picardy, though it had no estates to protect its interests, was relatively lightly burdened by direct taxes as a result first, of the need to conciliate interests, and then to offset the effects of war. The newer urban levies of the 1540s and 1550s, however, contributed to debts which aggravated the economic effects of war in the form of demands for military supplies. To explain the complex nature of these developments, it will be useful to examine the framework within which they were shaped. The administrative structures Though there has been much debate about the extent to which administrative frontiers in early modern France were clearly defined, there is no doubt about the massive complexity of the layers of administration which existed by the middle of the sixteenth century. Above all, this is the case in financial districts, which were bedevilled by arcane procedures and bewildering enclaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general peace treaty was signed and proclaimed at Le Cateau on 3 April 1559. The day before, Sansac, the governor of Picardy, announced the news to Amiens and on 7 April a great service in the cathedral was followed by a general procession. On 5 April the king had issued from Coucy a manifesto against the robberies and exactions of his soldiers, committed to his ‘trèsgrand regret’, in terms that echoed the denunciations of military abuses throughout the wars. The demobilisation of forces was not markedly different from that following earlier treaties: reductions in garrisons took place only in stages and work on fortifications was slowed down over the course of 1559. In April 1559, there could have been little to indicate that this was any more than another pause in the seemingly endless dynastic wars. Two factors in reality turned the treaty of 1559 into something different: first, the financial exhaustion which had pushed both sides to the conference table remained a determinant; secondly, the far-reaching political upheavals in France stemming from the sudden death of Henri II froze the international compromise. That monarch had made known as soon as the treaty was sealed his desire to deal conclusively with heresy, but similar plans had been envisaged in 1544–5 and had come to nothing. The preparation of an antiheresy campaign was more dangerous, of course, in the context of 1559 and gave rise to extreme reactions, but it was the king's death that released a naked struggle for power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 3 April 1559, the long intermittent war which had begun in 1521 was finally terminated by the treaty signed at Le Cateau-en-Cambrésis. The significance of this peace has long been understood, somewhat simplistically, as a sort of ‘hinge’ between the Habsburg–Valois Wars and the epoch of the Wars of Religion. The details of the negotiations are well known, though the classic work of de Ruble largely ignores the problems of implementation insofar as they concern the north. On the surface, of course, there was no reason to suppose that the treaty would be any more durable than its predecessors; it had been the exhaustion of the great monarchies that had motivated a substantial effort at settlement and the continuation of that exhaustion, coupled with the descent of France into civil war after 1562, froze the agreements that were reached in 1559. It is also easy to forget that the political imperatives behind war dictated that fighting should be accompanied by frequent, even longlasting, negotiations for the conditions which would be conducive to ‘une bonne paix’, or stable settlement. What this meant for both sides, of course, was distinctly divergent, but both sides faced similar problems: how to achieve a stable relationship. This in turn meant agreement on the conflicting territorial and jurisdictional claims of the Valois and Habsburg monarchies, including Navarre, Savoy-Piedmont, French claims in Italy and, of course, the frontier between France and the Low Countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Picardy was the frontier province par excellence in sixteenth-century France and had come into being as a gouvernement essentially for purposes of defence. As a result, it suffered more systematic military operations than any other region of France in this period. Provence was invaded in 1523 and 1536 but was not a route amenable for invading armies; nor were the passes through the Alps into Dauphiné. Charles V's thrust into France via Saint-Dizier in 1544 was a dangerous but isolated campaign that illustrated the limitations of the war of movement in this period. Champagne was certainly a fortified frontier to the east but did not experience the intensity of operations or the scale on which Picardy was dominated by the actions of French and enemy forces. Picardy was the most obvious route of invasion into France and consequently its most fortified area. It was a region, therefore, in which, during the forty years between 1520 and 1560, the impact of war on the peasantry and townsmen made normal life at times virtually impossible. Yet it was possible to survive. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the extent of the impact of war on the countryside in the different stages of the Habsburg–Valois conflict and to trace the increasing ferocity of destruction over the decades. An attempt will then be made to explain how it was possible to survive and live with the problems brought by continuous military operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Habsburg–Valois Wars outside Italy have failed to attract the attention of modern historians, in contrast to the formidable analysis brought to bear on the Religious Wars of the later sixteenth century or the Thirty Years War. It may be surmised that this results from the suspicion that conflicts generated essentially by dynastic rivalry are more trivial than those with some kind of ideological or economic impulse behind them. The Habsburg–Valois conflict, much of it inconclusive, might easily have attracted Veronica Wedgwood's verdict on the Thirty Years War as ‘the supreme example of meaningless conflict’. Yet it would be difficult to imagine the genesis of modern warfare without the lessons taught in tactics and fortification during the first half of the sixteenth century; nor would the instruments of Absolute Monarchy have been so substantially developed. For some regions of western Europe, this was the most devastating experience for centuries. Picardy was, during the first half of the sixteenth century, the most consistently fought-over region of France, and its history in that period is inseparable from war. After the generation of uneasy peace that followed the definitive restoration of royal government in the later fifteenth century, the forty-seven years from 1521 to 1559 saw twenty-eight years of war, all of which involved fighting of some kind and fifteen of which witnessed the mounting of major campaigns. The king appeared in person at the head of his armies in 1521, 1524, 1537, 1543, 1549, 1553, 1554 and 1558. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That the public ethos and code of honour of the nobility remained predominant in early modern French society is now hardly open to challenge, though the implications for regional and national power structures are still being worked out. The nobility was a vast social order accommodating enormous differences of wealth, property, ability and interest; only a small proportion played a leading political role, though military activity continued to provide a function and some income for many more. The relationships which bound together this heterogeneous social group were partly expressed in terms of kinship, partly of the much-discussed notion of clientèle or patronage. Kristen Neuschel, in her study of Condé's circle in Picardy during the 1560s and her subsequent analysis of noble culture based on it, has argued, rightly, against simplistic notions of patronage. Individuals certainly inherited ties of loyalty to great magnates like the Bourbons or Guises, but such ties were not unconditional and, in a province like Picardy with many small fiefs held directly of the crown, feudal ties could be complex and contradictory. Neuschel, however, in viewing the nobility, like Arlette Jouanna, from the perspective of the intensely chaotic period of the Wars of Religion, has tended to exaggerate its independence and self-sufficiency as well as its own sense of an autonomous legitimacy outside the scope of the crown and of public power. The interdependence of the crown and the French nobility remained indissoluble until the end of the ancien régime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1470, the dominant power in the region of Picardy was the Burgundian state, which then seemed to be at its zenith. By the time that Henry II of France made peace with the Habsburgs in 1559, Picardy was a clearly organised province of France, the fidelissima Picardiae natio whose loyalty had been reinforced by generations of war. A loosely defined and undifferentiated region had become one of the great gouvernements of the French kingdom and had taken its place as the French frontier with the Empire and the kingdom's first line of defence. The process by which this was achieved was not straightforward and was accompanied by generations of warfare and political adjustment, which are the themes of this study. The history of Picardy, though a rich territory for the historian of the earlier middle ages, has been largely neglected in the early modern period. American historians have begun to explore, notably, the religious history of the area and the clientage connections of the nobility during the wars of religion, but the emergence of the province during the decisive period from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries is, apart from the pioneering work of Augustin Thierry and Edouard Maugis, an historiographical blank. Some differences of perspective and emphasis from other regional studies may result from the nature of the sources characteristic of the century before 1560. Many of the great pays d' états have been studied through the sources left behind by their estates or their parlements in their battles with the crown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Probably sometime in 1528 Pole and Starkey returned to England. Starkey reacted enthusiastically, seeing ‘thys occasyon’ as his chance to begin a career in service to the commonwealth. Now that he and Pole had finished their education in Padua, the two of them would put their skills to practical use. Starkey's ambitions took on solid form in the elaborate reform programme offered in his Dialogue, which he composed in the main between 1529 and 1532. Pole's prospects encouraged Starkey to hope that he could gain office himself on Pole's coat-tails. They would have pulled strongly because of Pole's successful mission to the Parisian theologians in 1529–30, combined with the general lack of obvious direction from the centre in England. Starkey already had most of the pieces of his design for secular government in place when he began to write the Dialogue, but it seems likely that he gained some new ideas about ecclesiastical power while with Pole in Paris. The vibrant conciliarist tradition descending from Jean Gerson probably helped to foster Starkey's emphasis on cardinals and council. Debates in the theological faculty may have inspired some other aspects of the Dialogue as well. Pole's diplomatic assignment also brought Starkey into close contact with Englishmen interested in conciliarism and aware of the direction of policy at home. Conflicting testimony and lack of much direct evidence continue to obscure Starkey's movements in the late 1520s, but now they affect our knowledge of Pole's actions, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The staplers and their customers in the low countries both accounted in terms of pounds, shillings and pence (librae, solidi and denarii), the centuries-old system accommodating two schemes, one based on the unit of a dozen (twelve pence in the shilling), and the other on the unit of twenty (shillings to the pound). The duodecimal unit fitted neatly into its own ‘hundred’ of six-score, used for certain commodities in Britain, but not into the ‘small tale’ hundred of five-score, by which other goods were commonly sold, for example fells at Calais or cloth when priced by the hundred ells. The great advantage of the duodecimal unit was that, unlike the score or the hundred of five-score, it was readily divisible by three. Some of this advantage of a duodecimal shilling was lost in England, because its constituent unit, the penny, was divisible in practice only into a half (the halfpenny, in Latin obolus, abbreviated ob.), and a quarter (the farthing, Latin quadrans). The difficulties caused by this were demonstrated in Chapter 6, when calculations of the custom and subsidy due on fells were examined. In the low countries, on the other hand, the penny was subdivided conveniently into 24 mites, or three units of account named in Flemish the engelsc or ingelsche and in French esterlin, ‘sterling’. The awkwardness of the twenty-shilling pound was mitigated by the existence of another ancient unit, the mark, which expressed two-thirds of a pound, whether weight or money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The part played by fells – the wool-bearing skins – in the wool trade as a whole has been somewhat under-estimated by students. This neglect no doubt reflects the fact that fells formed a relatively small proportion of the total English wool export. But, equally, contemporary documents reveal little about fells by comparison with the amount of information available on fleece-wool. For example, there is no schedule of prices to be put beside those which survive for wool. It has recently been implied that the sale of fells at Calais was concentrated in the hands of a few ‘specialists’, while the great majority of staplers dealt almost exclusively in fleece-wool. It is true that, as far as the few surviving particular port books go to show, some men had a decided preference for fleece-wool, while a very much smaller number concentrated their trade on fells. Among the latter were several members of the Skinners’ Company, notably (in 1488) Roger Grantoft, John Pelet and John Pasmer, a merchant adventurer who had joined the Staple company three years earlier. Thomas Granger, George Cely's host, belongs in this category. But the vast majority of established staplers, like the Celys and later the Johnsons, habitually sold both kinds of ware, and even Granger and William Maryon occasionally added a few sacks of fleece-wool to their consignments of fells. An individual's shipments could vary widely from one shipping to another, and the proportions of fleece-wool and fell shipped to Calais also varied considerably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Robert Cely was really the eldest of the family, he did nothing to sustain the dignity and responsibilities of that position, and in time his brothers found themselves acting as nursemaids for Robert. Possibly he suffered from ill-health, certainly he compounded his troubles by weakness of character and a reluctance to accept advice. Robert seems to have been a full member of the Staple Fellowship by 1474 or 5, when Thomas Kesten sold six sarplers of wool for him. He was married – young, perhaps, by the usual standards of merchants of the time – by July 1474, when his father sent him a scolding letter: I understand nothing of receiving of wool, of no good rules of the Place [the staple headquarters], neither in a sale nor in other wise, for the which ye be slow in writing …. And say to George Cely I had no word from him of your coming to Calais, and your wife think ye should have writ to her. Ye forget yourself, what is for to do. Sloth is a great thing, and doth little good [betimes], there as good business doth ease. Since George was also at Calais for much of his time, he and Robert saw a good deal of each other, and in George's memoranda of this date, ‘my brother’ may refer to Robert and not, as it does later, to Richard. George noted that on 24 July 1474 he borrowed 9s from Robert, and he paid for a pair of spurs which Robert had bought from the stapler Ralph Lemington. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those starting out in the wool-merchant's business, and many small or part-time staplers like William Maryon and John Cely, might deal almost exclusively in fells, that is the wool-bearing skins of slaughtered sheep. But about 72 percent of old Richard's trade was in shorn fleece-wool, and when Richard and George inherited his business they increased this proportion to some 81 percent. One essential in the training of a stapler, whether he dealt in fells or fleece-wool, was the ability to judge the quality of a fleece and to distinguish wools from different areas of England. The original author of one section in that compendium of earnest advice, the ‘Discourse of Weights and Merchandise’, had observed caustically: If a man buy Yorkshire wool [as] Burford wool or Leominster wool, he should know what he bought ere it were all uttered [i.e. ‘his customers would let him know about it before it was all off his hands’]. Therefore there is an old proverb: ‘he is no wise merchant that buy the cat in the sack’, that is to say, he that buyeth a ring and seeith it not, he trusteth another better than himself, which is against all manner wisdom. This obvious counsel was not always heeded. A case heard at Bruges in 1449 concerned the sale of six bales of English wool called Jorcxwouts wulle (wool from the Yorkshire wolds). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The affectionate relationship between the brothers Richard and George gives human warmth and colour to the family correspondence in its early years. Since George was the unsystematic hoarder who preserved these letters, his own side of the correspondence is poorly represented. So while the flavour of Richard's personality comes over directly from his letters to an intimate friend and brother, in the letters we see George chiefly through the eyes of his family and acquaintances, and he makes an appearance in his own right more often in his accounts and memoranda. That Richard was the elder of the two is clear from his position as his father's chief executor and from the inheritance pattern of his parents' properties. It could not be guessed from the brothers’ own correspondence, which was carried on in terms of complete equality. They also shared equally in the partnership which they began in 1476, and carried on until George's death in June 1489. But most of the extant letters from Richard to George were written between 1476 and 1482, because after the death of their father both brothers lived for most of the time in London or close to each other in Essex, and the correspondence then comes from William Cely, managing the Calais end of the business. The handwriting of the brothers is a good indication of the differences in their temperaments and personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE EARLY JOURNALS OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS The early history of the Lords' Journals has been discussed several times. First came A. F. Pollard who in a well-known article debated what he called the ‘authenticity’ of the Journals and concluded that those beginning in 1510 started then as the clerk's private notebook and gradually underwent an ‘evolution’ or development towards a more formal record. He drew attention to the inadequate editing which produced the printed Journals and from his analysis conjectured various consequences for the history of the House, and indeed of the Parliament as a whole, especially that it was clearly still in a very unfinished state in the reign of Henry VIII. Pollard's article initiated the serious study of these materials, but it was not altogether satisfactory. Its age will readily excuse not only some odd attitudinizing about authenticity and evolution but, more obviously, the fact that he could not take account of manuscripts since discovered; it is more serious that he tied himself up in certain misconceptions about the purposes and history of the manuscripts available to him. Nor is it at all clear whether he himself really made the careful study of the manuscript Journals and later copies which he succeeded in suggesting lay behind his paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

GENERAL Far and away the largest number of bills put into the Parliament concerned themselves with the common weal for which, in the Queen's view, it was the proper function of members of either House to propose action of one kind and another. In principle, nothing that touched the inhabitants of the realm in their daily lives stood outside the reforming, restricting or promoting powers of the Parliament, and in practice this principle was pretty consistently obeyed. The range of topics touched upon is remarkable, even if a majority of bills failed to get through, and some things thought of might amaze; indeed, the range is too wide to be fully recited here without burdening attention well beyond what it should be asked to bear. Acts did not often result from the more extravagant moves, few of which look likely to have been initiated by the government, but that does not diminish the interest of some initiatives. One bill that did pass in 1563 completed the sixteenth-century code against gypsies which had been officially begun in 1531 and elaborated in 1554. These alien ‘vagabonds’ caused fear and hatred, and typically enough each act got more savage. That of Henry VIII had attacked them for thieving and proposed to expel them, while the next one made it felony to be a wandering Egyptian. The act of 1563 worried about the Englishmen who dressed as gypsies in order to pursue a life of crime and added them to the tally, providing only that any native-born person found in such company could not be expelled from the realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our evidence rarely permits a complete understanding of how bills came to be proposed and promoted, but often suffices to tell important things about the initiative behind legislation. When we know the text of a bill we can rely on the probability that a full enacting clause means private promotion while a short clause implies government origin. However, most bills, and especially those that failed, are but titles to us. Older views which tended to solve the problem by assuming that in the sixteenth century public acts of Parliament originated with the government have long ceased to convince. We no longer suppose with A. F. Pollard that before Elizabeth's reign bills for the common good were always devised by the Council, or with Wallace Notestein that only in the reign of James I ‘the House of Commons’ wrested the legislative initiative from the Crown. Even so, the various ways in which bills came to be put forward and pursued are still not sufficiently appreciated. Yet if, for instance, policy is to be evaluated by means of acts of Parliament it obviously becomes very necessary to gain a clear understanding of the minds and the people behind them: a judgment touching what was done depends on at least some knowledge of who did what. It also seems to have been generally assumed that every Parliament's output stood by itself; insofar as bills have been studied this has been done within the compass of individual sessions. This, however, will not serve. Acts often resulted from efforts renewed in Parliament after Parliament; failed bills quite frequently reappeared in later sessions, sometimes making it to the statute book after several endeavours. Nor have we yet fully grasped how widely spread the interest in promoting legislation could be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘ The most high and absolute power of the realm of England is in the Parliament.’ This famous phrase of Sir Thomas Smith's summarizes a concept but falls well short of explicating it. Historians, following a tradition established by the whig victory of the seventeenth century and impressed by the fact that the meetings of representative assemblies inevitably bring together varied and often rival interests, have habitually concentrated on a political function; to them Parliament has been primarily the embodiment of that ‘politic’ principle which, as Fortescue explained in the fifteenth century, distinguished the otherwise ‘regal’ monarchy of England from the purely royal despotism that he, rather uncertainly, discerned in France. Thus its history has usually been written around the occasional clashes between the Crown and other politically influential elements, clashes which were exceptional rather than normal. It is not denied that meetings of the Parliament could offer an arena for political dispute, but the essence and permanent function of the institution did not lie in that fact. It is now nearly a hundred years since F. W. Maitland taught us an essential truth when he explained that from its beginnings the Parliament formed an aspect of the king's government, a meeting in which the monarch and his Council, calling to them the members of the realm, sat to resolve the problems of Crown and common weal. Even in the sixteenth century everyone agreed that Parliament formed the apex of the king's courts: here the errors of the other courts could be amended and its own errors were remediable by itself alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]