{"title":"Parliament and the principle of elective succession in Elizabethan England","authors":"P. Kewes","doi":"10.7228/manchester/9780719099588.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719099588.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"The question of precisely how far parliament should be involved in settling the succession to the crown constitutes a neglected strand of the Elizabethan succession debate. Patrick Collinson and his successors have examined in detail the attempts undertaken by committed Protestants from the 1560s through to the 1580s to secure legislation debarring Mary, queen of Scots. However, this chapter demonstrates that a necessary corollary of the campaign for exclusion was the argument that parliament, even one summoned after Elizabeth’s death without statutory warrant, could determine the identity of her rightful successor or even choose the next ruler. Theoretical justifications of this scenario, however, were seldom disinterested, and were typically designed with a practical purpose and a specific person in mind. It may be a mistake to treat them as expressions of abstract political thought. Drawing on new archival evidence, this chapter reveals that he intended beneficiary of the boldest such scheme propounded in 1586, when the Scottish queen was still alive, was her infant son James. It concludes by reflecting on the memory and polemical uses of Elizabethan parliaments in late Stuart England.","PeriodicalId":207891,"journal":{"name":"Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England","volume":"529 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132381636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Elizabethan chroniclers and parliament","authors":"I. Archer","doi":"10.7228/MANCHESTER/9780719099588.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7228/MANCHESTER/9780719099588.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Chronicles remained the dominant form of historical writing throughout the sixteenth century, and contained much material about the relationship of parliament and the crown and the wider political community. But how coherent a view of parliament could be derived from the chronicles? That is the question addressed by this essay, primarily through Holinshed, but with reference to the other chronicles on which his account was built. Holinshed included some key texts on parliament, including William Harrison’s reworking of Sir Thomas Smith’s account in De republica Anglorum (1583), significantly enhancing parliament’s role on the succession and church reform, and John Hooker’s Order and Usage (1572), inserted into the Irish section. But Holinshed famously left his chronicles open to variant readings. There was little interest in parliament’s institutional development, or commonwealth legislation, but much more interest in parliament as the bringer of hated taxes, and in the politics of parliaments, particularly relating to monarchical succession. It is argued that readers might take away various understandings from the chronicles, but that in any case the chronicles tended to focus less on institutional structures than on the moral qualities of the country’s leaders who operated them.","PeriodicalId":207891,"journal":{"name":"Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129279820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘That memorable parliament’","authors":"J. Peacey","doi":"10.7765/9781526115904.00015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526115904.00015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":207891,"journal":{"name":"Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122797288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Polydore Vergil and the first English parliament","authors":"P. Cavill","doi":"10.7228/manchester/9780719099588.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719099588.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"In the text of his Anglica historia of 1513, the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil did something unprecedented: he dated England’s first parliament to the year 1116 and hence to the reign of Henry I. While debate continues about the evolution of parliament, modern authorities agree that the assembly held in that year is unremarkable. As none of Vergil’s chronicle sources identified this meeting as significant, scholars have been unable to account for his reasoning. This article seeks to explain why Vergil singled out that particular assembly. It argues that the origin of parliament was an uncontroversial subject when Vergil composed his history. Over the course of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century, writers and scholars supported and contested Vergil’s dating, but debates about the parliament’s origins cannot be associated with any particular ideological outlook.","PeriodicalId":207891,"journal":{"name":"Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England","volume":"437 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125786907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dedication","authors":"","doi":"10.7765/9781526115904.00002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526115904.00002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":207891,"journal":{"name":"Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128638810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Institutional memory and contemporary history in the House of Commons, 1547–1640","authors":"P. Seaward","doi":"10.7765/9781526115904.00016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526115904.00016","url":null,"abstract":"Parliament in the course of a century after 1547 became almost certainly the best-recorded institution in Britain. This essay considers the nature of institutional memory in the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century House of Commons. It concerns firstly the nature and quality of institutional memory, and how, while it relied considerably on non-inscribed memory, it changed with the growth of the written record. It discusses the importance of precedent to parliamentarians, and how precedents were identified and selectively used. But more broadly it considers how written records, both of a formal and official nature and a private and unofficial kind, were developed over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to generate a narrative about parliament that helps to consolidate its landmark status. As a result, parliament came to be recognised and revered as the key institution in the relationship between the state and the individual.","PeriodicalId":207891,"journal":{"name":"Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130869202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}