Yesteryear in Parliament

 

As we come to the end of the Parliamentary session it is time to look back at what was achieved, at the pointers to new ways of doing things, of a change of personnel at the top in government, at who did well and who didn’t, at where we go from here ….. no, dear reader I am not talking about the current situation at Westminster - too boring - but rather the assessment one can make about Westminster on this day 650 years ago in 1376 as the Good Parliament came to an end.

Parliament had commenced on April 28th and this had been the longest session to date. In the course of the meeting the Commons had for the first time elected a permanent Speaker in Sir Peter de la Mare, rather than having one MP speaking to the Crown and Lords on a one-off basis, they had raised many instances of what they saw as corruption and inefficiency in government, had invented a new procedure in impeachmentto bring those responsible to trial whereby the Commons corporately brought charges against suspects who were tried before the Lords, and when convicted, stripped of office, they had voiced their fears about the succession to the throne, and now they were going home without voting any taxation.

If in the popular imagination and memory this was the Good Parliament its successor early the following year whereby the government tried to undo some of its actions and got a vote of taxation was remembered as the Bad Parliament. Sir Peter, as first Speaker, for his pains also became the first holder of the office to be imprisoned. 

Nonetheless the Good Parliament had broken new ground, with the Commons showing real independence,  establishing a greater sense of corporate identity through the Speakership, and in the impeachment procedure had found a means of bringing ministers to book.

 

King Edward III

Image: luminarium.org

The background to this was that King Edward III was failing, and indeed died a year later, his eldest son the Prince of Wales was in failing health and was to die during the Parliament on June 8th, and was not a king/in-waiting, and his and heir, Richard was not yet ten.

The tomb effigy of King Edward III in Westminster Abbey

Image: akg-images/ Erich Lessing

The opposition to the demands of the Commons was led by the king’s next surviving son, John Duke of Lancaster. This made him unpopular and led to unfounded rumours that he sought the throne for himself.

John, Duke of Lancaster

Image: Wikipedia from a portrait belonging to his direct descendant the Duke of Beaufort

Impeachment was probably used as a corporate charge to protect individual MPs from legislation which protected nobles from such charges by one person. 

In the 1388 and 1397 Parliamentary moves against firstly King Richard II’s ministers and secondly against his opponents a different process of appeal was used.

As a legal mechanism impeachment re-emerged in 1450, and then not again until 1640, had a fair amount of use under the Restoration and in the eighteenth century. It was last used in 1806, when Lord Dundas was acquitted by the Lords. An attempt to use it against Palmerston in 1848 did not get sufficient votes in the Commons. Some experts doubt if it still is part of the living legal tradition, but in 2019 there was talk by some of seeking to impeach Boris Johnson over his bungled prorogation of Parliament. That would have been fun, the Queen’s evil councillor brought to account at the bar of the Lords. Alas it was not to be.

The development of the concept of Parliamentary responsibility made it otiose here, but in Congressional systems in the Americas, such as the US and Brazil with systems based on the separation of powers it had retained its vitality as a potential check on those in power.

Our sources for these events are the formal records of the Parliament Rolls with their official recording l of new legislation and the other records of the Crown in the Chancery rolls. 

Chronicles give some details as reported back to their compilers for this and meetings well into the fifteenth century. 

Not until 1461 do we have a fragment of the Lords Journal of proceedings m, though this was presumably not an innovation and those for the Commons do not survive until 1547. 

What make our understanding of the Good Parliament so much better is the lengthy account of what went on in the debates in the Commons preserved in the Anonimalle Chronicle of the abbey of St Mary at York which includes a detailed account written by someone who was there in the Commons. There is a note at The First Political Pamphlet? The Unsolved Case of the Anonymous Account of the Good Parliament of 1376 about who or what that source may have been. 

The ruins of  St Mary’s Abbey York

Image: TripAdvisor

The complete text of the account of the events in the Good Parliament can be read in Translation of the Anonimalle Chronicle

The Commons had no permanent home until 1547 when they were given St Stephen’s Chapel where they sat until the fire of 1834.

In1376 they were assigned the great Chapter House of Westminster Abbey whilst the Lords met in the adjoining royal palace - as indeed they still do.

The Chapter House of Westminster Abbey

The original tiled floor is covered to prevent damage

Image: Wikimedia

The knights of the shires, two for each, irrespective of size - think of the US Senate - sat on the benches around the wall. The wall against which they sat was just about to be decorated with a cycle of paintings of the Apocalypse and Last Judgment that took from 1375 until 1404 to complete, and still survives substantially intact today.

The members for the cities and towns had to sit on the wonderful heraldic tiled floor which still survives, which indicates a definite hierarchy. No green leather benches.

There is a well-illustrated account of the Chapter Housr and its architecture and art at The Chapter House Westminster Abbey, and Pyx Chamber

When an MP wished to address the Commons they spoke from the central lectern used by the monks for their Benedictine devotions and governance. Had the Commons stayed in the Chapter House that might have remained the English practice as in other European and American assemblies. In England the descive change came in 1547 when the government assigned the Chapel of St Stephen in the Palace of Westminster to the Commons. The Speaker sat where the altar had been, the MPs occupying the choir stalls, facing each other. How much this led to what has been a basic English and British model of a two party system, His Majesty’s Government and His Majesty’s Opposition facing one another two swords length apart is not entirely clear, but the physical reality of where they met and the natural tendency to seek out and sit with allies shaped future political patterns.