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Some time in late June 1774, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, ambassador of the court of Versailles to that of Sweden, was sitting in his study in Stockholm reading a letter. This commonplace scene, however, marked the apogee of his career to date. The communication on his desk was from the young Louis XVI, who had just ascended the throne following the death of his grandfather Louis XV the previous month. Setting a pattern for all the new king's future correspondence, it was short and to the point: The due d'Aiguillon having resigned from his posts, the good that I hear spoken of you from all sides, as well as your diplomatic skill, has led me to choose you to replace him in the department of foreign affairs. Therefore come as soon as you can: in taking your leave you should present my compliments to the king of Sweden. It will give me great pleasure to see you. Louis. It was a surprising twist of fortune that had brought Vergennes to this pinnacle. Just four years earlier, he had been in virtual disgrace, abruptly recalled after thirteen years as ambassador to Constantinople after a disagreement with the then foreign minister, the due de Choiseul. Now, after an intervening three years of risky but successful diplomacy at Stockholm, he stood in the same position as the minister who had tried to end his career. The circumstances of Vergennes' early disgrace crystallised his political viewpoint at a critical juncture and had repercussions that went well beyond the moment of his rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE COMITÉ AND CREDIT POLICY With the humbling of Ségur and Castries, the comité des finances appeared to have vanquished all opposition. Only four months later, however, it had been swept away in the political and financial crisis of October 1783. This extraordinary reversal of fortune had its origins in the contrôle-général rather than the court. The fall of the comité was not principally the work of the disaffected ministers and the queen's party, although they contributed to it to some extent and benefited from its collapse. The comité fell because of profound disagreements among its members over credit policy. At the centre of these disagreements, yet again, stood those pillars of ministerial despotism, the crown's financial officers. Not only did they administer the royal finances, they also doubled as the crown's chief providers of credit. This situation had major disadvantages. As venal office-holders, the receveurs-généraux and similar functionaries regarded themselves as proprietors rather than employees, and were thus less receptive to central control from above. Most important of all, as wealthy individuals in their own right, they became the chief source of loans for a monarchy that was almost constantly in debt. The extent of the crown's dependence on la finance – and the reason it found it so difficult to reform in this area – was most obvious at the highest level. The greatest part of the crown's day-today debt was relieved by a select group of immensely rich financiers, no more than twelve at any one time, who were known collectively as the faiseurs de service du roi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To those contemporaries who were outside the charmed circle of the well born and personally unacquainted with the governing elite in Church and State, the peers and bishops of the Upper House may have projected a public image of cohesion and homogeneity. The seventy or eighty members were not strangers to one another but familiars, in many cases even intimates. The peers belonged to a legally defined status group, a tiny social elite, within which they became personally associated in their social lives, whilst they were thrown together, in close acquaintanceship, in the business of governing the realm under the prince. The bishops constituted a separate, office-holding elite, engaged in ecclesiastical administration, but they shared with the peers the contemporary ideals of fidelity and obedience to the Crown and service to the commonwealth. The peers in particular were bound together by the social cement of blood and marriage. Nevill(e)s held the earldom of Westmorland and the baronies of Bergavenny and Latimer. Viscount Bindon and William Lord Howard of Effingham were sons of Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk. The ramifications of the Howard clan spread their tentacles through much of the peerage. Thus the third duke's grandchildren married into the FitzAlan, Neville, Berkeley and Scrope families, which in turn established marital links with Lumleys, Greys and Cliffords. Marriages with the children of Henry and Edward Stafford, second and third dukes of Buckingham, forged kinship connections between the Percy, Radcliffe, Hastings, Stafford, Neville and Manners families as well as, of course, with the ubiquitous Howards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of W. Notestein it has become a sine qua non of Tudor parliamentary history that procedures were political weapons in a power-struggle between Crown and Commons. If actual confrontations and crises were relatively few, especially in contrast to the early seventeenth century, conflict was always inherent in a situation in which the monarch was on the defensive and the Lower House was probing and exploring new and enlarged frontiers of independence and authority. Moreover in this political treatment of parliamentary procedure it is not necessary to look beyond the House of Commons. The way in which a compliant upper chamber conducted its affairs is of little moment. However, if the recent admixture of modest revision and more trenchant criticism is a reliable barometer, then the historical climate is changing. There is a dawning realisation that parliament was neither intended to be, nor was it in practice, a political arena and the occasion for a gladiatorial encounter between Crown and Commons. Rather it was, both in purpose and actuality, a market place for the transaction of an infinite variety of legislative business. It was not generally regarded as an opportunity to flex political muscle against the Crown, to indulge in opposition or to engage in blind political conflict. Instead, Tudor parliaments continued to be responsible assemblies characterised by co-operation between the monarch and the governing class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The clerical organisation of the Upper House and the presence of a professional corps of judges and lawyers, on whose advice and assistance the lords spiritual and temporal could call, must be counted amongst the most important assets of the mid-Tudor House of Lords. In these respects it may even have been more adequately equipped than the Commons to fulfil the parliamentary functions of deliberation and legislation. This would not be surprising. The Lords was the historic nucleus of parliament, a fact reflected in its membership and in the very arrangement of the parliament chamber. The judges, king's serjeants-at-law, law officers of the Crown and masters of chancery together occupied the woolsacks in the middle of the chamber and were the official members of the king's continual or permanent council, his legal councillors. The lords spiritual and temporal represented the medieval great council, transformed by the growth of a theory of lay peerage which equated peers with lords of parliament, confined the temporal element of the magnum concilium to nobles, and yet enlarged it to comprehend the entire nobility. The throne was the perpetual reminder that parliament had originated as a royal assembly, an afforced meeting of the king's council. And there were also present, on the wool-sacks, the lord chancellor and his chancery clerks, who had nurtured parliament from its medieval origins. As parliament evolved into separate Houses, the great council ceased to be the nucleus, the essence, of parliament and became instead just one of the two Houses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behind the formal institutional facade of parliament lay the reality of political activity. Although such activity was normally positive and constructive, it could assume a negative, obstructive, even destructive, character. Whatever form it took at a given moment, its end was usually a legislative one – politics and legislation were but two faces of the same process. The enactment or frustration of a bill was not a simple mechanical process, isolated from the mixture of high idealism and self-interest, hostility and alliance, competition and collaboration, which inevitably characterise any assembly of men. In this respect the Lords was probably the more important House. Its lay majority stood at the centre of a web of social connections which included the membership of the Commons. Many of the knights and burgesses were attached to peers by bonds of friendship, kinship, deference and clientage; and frequently their election was guaranteed or assisted by the support of a duke of Norfolk, an earl of Bedford or Pembroke, or other powerful regional magnates. Although political parties did not exist, it would not be fanciful to imagine that sometimes the lords temporal – and the occasional bishop – utilised the services of relatives and clients in the Lower House in order to advance their own measures and obstruct others. It proved also to be a more convenient and safe course of action to resist the Crown by proxy, through the Commons, than to engage in open confrontation in the Lords. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It should be stressed at the outset that this is an institutional rather than a political study. Its particular institutional emphasis is the consequence chiefly of past neglect by historians who have persistently ignored the fact that parliament was a trinity. At best the House of Lords has been treated as a kind of constitutional longstop or a compliant managerial tool wielded by the Crown; at worst it has received a cursory nod of recognition before being consigned to oblivion. However, the comfortable assumption that it could be thus dismissed derived from ignorance, and not from a considered judgement arrived at by a systematic study of its parliamentary performance. More reprehensible, though doubtless a natural consequence of this assumption, is the fact that no attempt has yet been made to answer questions which are of elementary yet fundamental importance: how it carried out its functions, why legal assistants were summoned to the Lords, and what contribution they made to its business. It is surprising that, as the role assigned to it was a subordinate and managerial one, no detailed study was made even of the way in which it performed this supposed service to the Crown. The first responsibility of any pioneering study of the House of Lords is therefore to compensate for this past neglect. Information must be collected, collated and systematically presented about such obvious institutional characteristics as its composition and the rights of membership, the officers of the House, the legal assistants, its procedures and their continuing refinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of the quality of a parliamentary assembly acquires substance and meaning only when it is related to actual performance. The fact that the Lords was blessed with a wide spectrum of talents, abundant experience and the appropriate legislative skills, becomes irrelevant if the members endowed with these particular qualities did not attend regularly and shoulder the main burden of business. Even if they did, a second question interposes itself: did they enjoy freedom of action or did they simply bow to royal directives? The conundrum can be expressed in institutional terms: was the Upper House efficient in practice, and was it something more than a rubber stamp to royal policies and a constitutional support to the Crown's authority? The Lords' attendance record provides a precise record of who turned up and who stayed away. More problematical is the motivation: whether their presence or absence was determined by the political interests of the Crown. Vernon Snow and Helen Miller disagreed about the pre-Edwardian situation, the former arguing that the privy council perfected its managerial techniques in the early forties by manipulating attendance, and the latter denying that, by then, there existed serious managerial problems. Whatever the answer, it sheds no light on the problem whether the Upper House was effectively controlled in the two succeeding reigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial majority of the mid-Tudor House of Lords consisted of a social elite of hereditary peers. It is an obvious truth that an hereditary elite is unlikely to possess exceptional qualities unless there exists the means to recruit new members, thereby maintaining vitality by the infusion of fresh blood, and ensuring adaptability to changing political and social conditions. In practice the Upper House was not afflicted with the deadening political consequences of a closed, self-perpetuating, noble caste. Peers constituted a majority, but they did not enjoy a monopoly of membership. The bishops sat there, not by virtue of high birth, ennoblement or heredity, but by possession of office. Doubtless a bishopric was sometimes the reward for political compliance (as was the case with the appointment of several ex-regulars to Henry VIII's new sees in 1540–2). It was, on some occasions, no more than one of the benefits of Court connections. For others, however, it was a recognition of talent or a reward for services in diplomacy and administration. In any case the peerage itself was not an exclusive, closed order, conscious and sensitive though peers were about status and rank, precedence and lineage. Dreams of an aristocratic caste were not unknown in the sixteenth century, but they were unrealistic and unlikely ever to be realised. The Upper House was never in danger of transmutation into the stronghold of an exclusive noble oligarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Membership of the mid-Tudor Upper House was confined to those who were lords of parliament, either spiritual (the bishops and, until 1540, a number of abbots and priors) or temporal (the peers). They did not, however, constitute two separate orders or estates each of which was required to assent to matters placed before the House. Prelates, regulars and peers were all members of one House of parliament in which the assent of a majority of those present was sufficient. In 1516 this received weighty confirmation when the judges declared that a parliament could be held without the lords spiritual. Their judgement was historically sound. After all, the lords of parliament, spiritual as well as temporal, were in origin no more than barones holding lay baronies in chief of the Crown, and there was a direct association between baronial tenure and summons to parliament However, even as the judges reached their verdict – and certainly by the middle of the sixteenth century – the association of territorial possession and membership of the Lords was being discarded. During the fifteenth century it had become the practice to summon a noble family regularly or not at all, and the distinguishing mark of the Tudor peerage became a personal one: the right of individual summons to the Lords, not a territorial one, the possession of baronial tenure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far the past, and the questions when and why common law and civil law originated, and when and why judges, legislators or scholars dominated the legal scene, have been discussed. It has not been asked which of these approaches was the best – in other words, the discussion has not gone beyond value-free propositions. Many historians believe that this is only as it should be: the historian's task is to describe and, if possible, to explain what happened, not to tell his reader what lessons he should draw from the past. There are, indeed, innumerable books and articles describing the organisation of governments and courts in a multitude of countries and periods, but although they enter into the most minute details, the reader may be sure he will not be told how good that particular government was for the people concerned. That is a philosophical question, a subjective political decision and that is taboo in scholarly historical work. Although it is not difficult to see many good reasons for this attitude, it is a legitimate desire on the part of the layman that the historian, who presumably knows the past best, should also try to answer some questions about the lessons to be drawn from mankind's experiences. It is well known that the Historical School has been reproached by leading jurists with being ‘ultimately barren, because it could not consistently put any aim before men for which they should strive’ and that ‘in effect the historical method comes to the justification of what is, by simply asserting that it is’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]