Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England by Paul Cavill Alexandra Gajda

Author:Paul Cavill, Alexandra Gajda [Paul Cavill, Alexandra Gajda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780719099588
Goodreads: 39509646
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2018-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Elizabethan chroniclers and parliament

Ian W. Archer

Chronicles, annalistic in form and eclectic in content, remained the dominant form of historical writing for much of Elizabeth’s reign, only displaced by the new humanist histories from the 1590s onwards. Through the prolific labours of John Stow chronicles were made available in varying formats and at different prices which broadened their audience. Chroniclers recycled material from each other, albeit with significant differences in selection and emphasis which reflected their different agendas. The crowning glory of Elizabethan chronicling was the book we know as Holinshed’s Chronicles, in fact a collaborative venture between people of different confessional persuasions, first printed in 1577 and followed by another revised and much expanded edition in 1587.1 Although notoriously lacking in analytical treatments of institutions (Holinshed was, as we shall see, a notable exception in some respects), chronicles inevitably carried a significant amount of material about parliaments, and their relations with the crown and with the wider political community. It is therefore worth asking what kind of understanding of the institution readers might have gained through their encounter with chronicles.

Elizabethan MPs undoubtedly had a powerful sense of the importance of history.2 Thomas Norton, the archetypal man of business, declared that, through the study of history, a man ‘learneth the state of times past, the doyngs of men, their counsels, their gouernance, and lastly their successes. By beholdyng of those, as in a glasse, he discerneth and iudgeth rightly of thinges present, and foreseeth wisely of thinges to come.’3 His fellow representative for London, the city’s recorder William Fleetwood, echoed Cicero’s praise for the study of history, as a ‘wittnes of tymes. A candle to the truth. The life of memory. The M[aste]r of a man’s life and the Reporter of all Antiquityes.’4 Several members practised as they preached. William Lambarde, an outspoken MP in 1566 on the issue of the succession, was then embarking upon the antiquarian researches which culminated in his Archeion, an account of the law courts, not published until 1635, but circulating widely in manuscript from 1579, and making a strong case for the Anglo-Saxon origins of parliament.5 Like Lambarde, Fleetwood was a member of the circle of antiquarians around Archbishop Parker and a close friend of John Stow; he authored a number of treatises in which his powers of historical investigation were displayed.6 Thomas Norton contributed the preface to the 1569 edition of Richard Grafton’s Chronicles, and was commissioned by Sir Francis Walsingham to prepare notes on key topics in English history during his confinement in 1581; the result was his analysis of the rhythms of history in the ‘v periodes of 500 yeares’, a providentialist account in which periods of stability were punctuated by cataclysms of which one element was succession crises.7 The Society of Antiquaries, established around 1590, but in some respects continuing the agenda set by Parker and his circle, drew in a number of men who served as MPs, several of whom contributed to its papers on the antiquity of parliament.8

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