Elizabethan Parliaments 1559-1601 by Michael A.R. Graves Roger Lockyer

Author:Michael A.R. Graves, Roger Lockyer [Michael A.R. Graves, Roger Lockyer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Renaissance, Modern, 16th Century
ISBN: 9781317887355
Google: 0d6sAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-01-14T16:01:36+00:00

Part Three: Assessment

8 Conclusion

In his study of The Evolution of Parliament, published in 1920, A.F. Pollard identified the consolidation of the House of Commons as the most important development in the parliamentary history of the sixteenth century. It acquired a corporate consciousness, superseded the Lords, and became the focus of parliamentary activity. His pupil and successor, Sir John Neale, elaborated upon this theme, detected a growing, Commons-based opposition to royal authority and postulated the thesis that the origins of the English Civil War were to be found in the Elizabethan parliaments. Thus there was created a coherent, consistent and well-rounded picture of a rising Parliament and, within it, a politically maturing House of Commons which was becoming more disposed and able to criticise, oppose and challenge the Crown. This thesis had a seductive quality because it was consistent with events during the forty years after Elizabeth’s death – or at least with the views of early Stuart historians who wrote at the same time as Pollard and Neale. In contrast, the well-established interpretation which they overthrew was certainly not in harmony with either pre- or post-Tudor developments. It can be summarised briefly. The long-term rise of Parliament was interrupted when fifteenth-century Lancastrian constitutionalism gave way to the strong ‘New Monarchy’ of the Yorkists and Henry VII. Sixteenth-century government was characterised by submissive parliaments and autocratic Tudor rulers. In 1603 this lengthy aberration ended and Parliament resumed its upward progress which culminated in the neutralisation of the monarchy, the political castration of the Lords, adult suffrage and the Commons’ supremacy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The new interpretation fitted neatly into this scheme. Moreover, its adherents were conscious of the need to see the Tudor parliaments in the context of what came before, and especially of what happened afterwards. So Neale searched for the origins of seventeenth-century conflict, whilst Wallace Notestein, an American historian working in the same field, was one of the few (then or since) to produce a parliamentary study which did not stop or start in 1603 [73]. There are elements of truth in their thesis of a rising Parliament and they should not be dismissed lightly. The sovereignty of King-in-Parliament and the supremacy of statute were products of the sixteenth century, whilst the monopolies uproar in 1601 demonstrated how a united House of Commons could extract concessions from a Tudor monarch. Nevertheless, their political interpretation has come under serious attack from revisionist historians during the past fifteen years and it is not difficult to see why. Pollard, Neale, Notestein and others fell into the trap of trying to explain seventeenth-century upheavals, instead of studying Tudor parliaments in their own right and not as a mere prologue. They imposed upon their material a preconception, which in turn determined their treatment of parliaments in political terms. Their own historical training reinforced this approach. Pollard’s apprenticeship was as a contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography, and thereafter his best pieces were the biographical studies of great men (see pp. 20–1).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.