King Pym and his ‘Happy,Scrappy Jester’

The Reign of King Pym took mid 17th‐century studies in a new direction when it was published in 1941. Anglo‐American collaboration in the field in the 1920s and 1930s had been rooted in making available in print to a scholarly readership one of the private diaries of the Long Parliament. J.H. Hexter's book, produced at a time when Anglo‐American collaboration was temporarily on hold under pressure of global war, changed the direction of academic discourse by its format (monograph), content (a detailed study of a brief period in a unique parliament) and tone (brash and unrestrained by the idiom of the academy). The book scoped out the power of John Pym, but also its limitations, and introduced to scholarly debate a categorisation of political groupings in 1642–3 that held sway for 40 years. The first direct attacks on Hexter's work, beginning in the 1980s, were weakened by overstatement. In the forthcoming History of Parliament volumes, Pym's signal importance is reasserted, but Hexter's concept of the ‘middle group’ is found to be untenable.     

Kingship and good lordship in practice in late medieval England: Henry VII,the earl of Oxford and the case of John Hale, 1487

This article opens up a neglected source-base for the study of late medieval England: royal writs under the privy seal to the chief justice of the King’s Bench ordering a halt to legal proceedings. These writs gave the king a greater degree of flexibility than simply pardoning someone, including allowing him the option of reopening cases. This article demonstrates the value of this neglected instrument of royal power by placing one example in a broader context. The case study focuses on a writ sent by Henry VII to his chief justice halting the case against John Hale, a yeoman, who was in the contingent of John de Vere, earl of Oxford, in the lead up to the Battle of Stoke. It illuminates the nature of kingship and good lordship in late medieval England, showing how the two ideas could interact for the benefit of king, lord and servant.     

The Scottish Union Bill of 1656–7

The Scottish Union Bill introduced to the second Protectorate Parliament in October 1656 was based on the union ordinance of 1654, but it was then subjected to wide‐ranging amendments over the next few months. These amendments made many concessions to the Scots, including recognizing their separate legal system and the rights of the burghs, and allowing an expansion of free trade. This article explores the implications of these changes to the constitutional relationship between the two nations, and identifies the changes with a programme of reform championed by the Scottish council, led by Lord Broghill. The fate of the Union Bill thus became linked to the wider reform movement that saw the replacement of the Instrument of Government with the more moderate, civilian constitution known as the Humble Petition and Advice in the spring of 1657.     

Spiritual-Material Noninterventionism: Reformed Influences on Bodin's Political Theology

ABSTRACT

Jean Bodin's political philosophy drew on a key Reformed principle: the necessary separation between the spiritual and material realms. This principle, as Bodin understood it, required that the sovereign avoid interference with his subjects’ property. As such, the separation of the spiritual and material served Bodin's voluntarism, permitting man, who occupied a middle state between the spiritual and material, to impose his will on the world, but also made man (and particularly woman) vulnerable to abusing this state through witchcraft. Tracing this principle through Bodin's thought demonstrates another connection between the sovereign and the witch.     

Parties in Parliament in the 18th Century: The Demolition of Robert Walcott and its Consequences*

The failure of Robert Walcott's attempted ‘Namierisation’ of Queen Anne's house of commons in the 1950s is now an accepted historiographical fact. Scholars working on late Stuart politics inevitably dismiss Walcott's work as misguided and misleading, and instead take as a given the existence of a two‐party structure as delineated by the standard authority on the subject, Geoffrey Holmes. This article returns to the controversy over ‘party’ in the 1960s, which reached a climax in 1967 with the publication of Holmes's magnum opus and J.H. Plumb's Ford Lectures. The purpose is not to revisit the debate, which was decided conclusively at the time, but to explore the context in which Walcott and his critics were writing; more specifically the connection between Walcott's work and the approach to 18th‐century political history pioneered by Sir Lewis Namier. Using private correspondence between the principals, it argues that Walcott did not properly follow Namier's methods, and was identified as a Namierite largely because Namier was unwilling, for personal reasons, to disown him. In the long run, this reluctance proved damaging, accelerating the decline in Namier's reputation in the 1960s and the shift towards different forms of political history.     

Radicals,Tories or Monomaniacs? The Birmingham Currency Reformers in the House of Commons, 1832–67*

Benjamin Disraeli described Thomas Attwood as a ‘provincial banker labouring under a financial monomania’. The leader of the Birmingham Political Union, Attwood's Warwickshire accent and support for a paper currency were widely derided at Westminster. However, the themes of Attwood's brief parliamentary career were shared by the other men who represented Birmingham in the early‐ and mid‐Victorian period. None of these MPs were good party men, and this article illuminates the nature of party labels in the period. Furthermore, it adds a new dimension to the historical understanding of debates on monetary policy and shows how local political identities and traditions interacted with broader party identities. With the exception of Richard Spooner, who was a strong tory on religious and political matters, the currency men are best described as popular radicals, who consistently championed radical political reform and were among the few parliamentary supporters of the ‘People's Charter’. They opposed the new poor law and endorsed factory regulation, a progressive income tax, and religious liberty. Although hostile to the corn laws they believed that free trade without currency reform would depress prices, wages and employment. George Frederick Muntz's death in 1857 and his replacement by John Bright marked a watershed and the end of the influence of the ‘Birmingham school’. Bright appropriated Birmingham's radical tradition as he used the town as a base for his campaign for parliamentary reform. He emphasized Birmingham's contribution to the passing of the 1832 Reform Act but ignored the currency reformers' views on other matters, which had often been at loggerheads with the ‘Manchester school’ and economic liberalism.     

Drafting the Nineteen Propositions,January–July 1642*

This article analyses the drafting of the document eventually printed as the Nineteen Propositions. Section two addresses certain issues regarding the methods and concepts employed in the subsequent analysis, focusing on consensus‐building, constitutional leanings and the drafting of parliamentary declarations in early 1642. Section three examines the origins of the Nineteen Propositions in the draft Declaration of Ways and Means (January 1642) (hereafter cited as the Ways). Section four traces the emergence of the Declaration Concerning Grievances and Remedies (hereafter cited as the Grievances) from the Ways (January–February). Section five examines the junta's efforts to overcome the Lords' prevarication over passing the Grievances (February–May). Section six examines the emergence of the initial draft of the Nineteen Propositions from the Grievances (24–7 May). Section seven analyses the 28 May draft, while section eight explores the amendment of that draft (31 May and 1 June). Section nine examines parliament's abortive attempts to revise the Nineteen Propositions in light of His Majesty's Answer to the XIX Propositions (21 June–2 July). It is concluded that, contrary to the received view, the text of the Nineteen Propositions began to emerge in January rather than May 1642, and that the junta in the Commons rather than the Lords drove this process. The three appendices identify, respectively, the constitutional leanings of the relevant parliamentarians, the parts of the text of the Ways that were repeated in the Grievances, and dates on which the various parts of the final text of the Nineteen Propositions were written.     

Sir Henry Cavendish (1732–1804), Parliamentarian in Two Countries

Sir Henry Cavendish, who sat in the Irish parliament from 1766 to 1768 and from 1776 to 1800, and in the Westminster parliament from 1768 to 1774, was a parliamentarian par excellence. His chief claim to fame is as a parliamentary diarist, in both houses of commons, noting down in shorthand some five million words. But this article is on Cavendish as a politician. He was a prolific speaker in both parliaments. But finding himself only a second‐rate debater, he cultivated two fields of expertise: finance, and, above all, parliamentary procedure. Here his knowledge soon became unequalled, and virtually unchallenged by the last two decades of the Irish parliament, where he became notorious as a master of obstruction. His political career was erratic, often in opposition, increasingly in government, a permanent officeholder by the end.     

Ventilating the Commons,Heating the Lords, 1701–1834

In 1833, the Commons chamber was described as a ‘noxious vapour‐bath’, while the Lords deemed the insufferable heat and toxic smoke in its House as injurious to health. This situation was not new, as for more than a century both Houses had been battling with officialdom and technology to improve their working conditions. In their continuing quest for effective heating and ventilation they had drawn in many respected men of science and commerce as well as entrepreneurs and showmen of varying abilities, to little avail. Many machines were tried, Desaguliers's ventilating wheel alone achieving modest success. A notable institution arising from all these experiments was the ventilator in the Commons’ roof, enabling ladies, barred from the chamber, to witness debates, albeit in considerable discomfort. After the 1834 fire, parliamentarians renewed their ventilating mission in their temporary chambers, before projecting their cumulative experience and opinions onto the far larger canvas of the new Victorian Palace of Westminster.     

Land Reform in the Time of Neoliberalism: A Many‐Splendored Thing

Abstract: Over the past 20 years, land reform – defined here as the redistribution of land from large to small properties – has emerged as an important political issue in the Global South. Actors with widely differing ideological perspectives have claimed land reform as central to their political, social and economic platforms. In this paper, I compare reforms championed under the neoliberal auspices of the World Bank (the so‐called Market Led Agrarian Reforms) with those supported by popular grassroots actors such as the Movement of Landless Workers (the MST) in Brazil. I argue that although these two approaches to land reform are often considered antithetical to one another, they share a common theoretical foundation. Both are rooted in a labor theory of property that attributes the fruits of one's labor to the laborer. Where the two differ is in their interpretation of the “original sin” through which land and labor came to be misaligned: neoliberal actors see the state as the key source of land‐related inefficiency while popular grassroots actors identify the market as the key source. I analyze case material from northeastern Brazil and suggest that the institutionalization of the labor theory of property (across civil society, state and market in the region) has generated insecurities for new land reform beneficiaries who must protect their property rights with visible evidence of their productivity.