page_title: Addled Parliament
section_title: Historiography
hierarchical_section_title: Addled Parliament / Historiography
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Samuel Rawson Gardiner Русский: Сэмюэл Росон Гардинер (1829—1902) — английский историк, редактор и педагог.
context_page_description: The Parliament of 1614 was the second Parliament of England of the reign of James VI and I, which sat between 5 April and 7 June 1614. Lasting only two months and two days, it saw no bills pass and was not even regarded as a Parliament by its contemporaries. However, for its failure it has been known to posterity as the Addled Parliament.
  James had struggled with debt ever since he came to the English throne. The failure of the Blessed Parliament of 1604–1610 to, in its six-year sitting, rescue the king from his mounting debt or allow James to unite his two kingdoms, had left him bitter with the body. The four-year hiatus between Parliaments saw the royal debt and deficit grow further, despite the best efforts of Treasurer Lord Salisbury. The failure of the last and most lucrative financial expedient of this period, a foreign dowry from the marriage of his heir-apparent, finally convinced James to re-call Parliament in early 1614.
  The Parliament got off to a bad start, with poor choices made for the king's representatives in Parliament. Rumours of conspiracies to manage Parliament or pack it with easily controlled members, though not based in fact, spread quickly.
context_section_description: Victorian Whig historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner, in his monumental history of the lead up to the Civil War, took the view that the Parliament of 1614 was primarily concerned with "higher questions" (i.e. those of a constitutional nature) "which, once mooted, can never drop out of sight". To this Parliament, Gardiner wrote, one can "trace the first dawning of the idea that, in order to preserve the rights of the subject intact, it would be necessary to make some change in the relations between the authority of the Crown and the representatives of the people." Gardiner's judgement of the constitutional import of this assembly has met with the sympathy of some later historians. Moir, in his 1958 monograph on the Parliament, held that "the development had begun which led ultimately to parliamentary control of the executive" as early as the exclusion of Parry. Maija Jansson, editor of the 1614 Parliamentary proceedings, wrote in 1988: "[f]ar from being the confused do-nothing assembly of tradition, the English parliament of 1614 addressed thorny constitutional issues and anticipated the concern with procedure and privilege that is evident throughout the sessions of the 1620s."
  This hypothesis regarding the Addled Parliament was criticised by the eminent Parliamentary historian Conrad Russell in his 1991 Stenton lecture—entitled The Addled Parliament of 1614: The Limits of Revision. From Russell's revisionist perspective, the members of Parliament were engaged in a constitutionally conservative battle, aimed at preserving their own rights rather than extending them. The disagreement between Parliament and Crown was not a "battle between rival constitutional ideas" but, as Russell concluded:
  The central disagreement of James's reign was about the true [monetary] cost of government, and James’s central failure was his failure to convince the House of Commons he needed as much as in fact he did. From that single failure, all the constitutional troubles of the reign stemmed.
caption: Victorian historian of James's reign Samuel Rawson Gardiner concluded that the Addled Parliament saw the "first dawning" of certain constitutional ideas in Parliament.
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