History of Parliament Online SEARCH RESEARCH EXPLORE GALLERY SCHOOLS ABOUT Explore Politics PERIODS Medieval Tudors Stuarts Hanoverians Modern THEMES Politics Economy Religion Diplomacy & War Society Home Explore > Themes > Politics Politics Articles in Politics Related articles Medieval Tudors Stuarts Hanoverians Modern Politics and Parliament If national politics is defined as the working out of forms of conflict between different people and interests, then Parliament has long been the paramount forum for that process in Britain. Deriving from the royal court in the Middle Ages, Parliament was increasingly the arena in which disputes between the English king and his opponents were played out. Of course, Parliament could not always contain those disputes or prevent them from spilling over into various forms of legal or physical conflict, but like other medieval institutions it developed as a surprisingly effective venue for the mediation of potentially explosive quarrels.Through time, it became not so much the king or queen who was, to varying degrees, at odds with the MPs and peers gathered in Parliament, but the government, the ministers who ran the country on his or her behalf, that was so at odds. This separation of the monarch from the political arena, for all that for many centuries it was no more than a polite fiction, allowed a key alteration in the way politics operated. For it permitted politicians to question and to criticise the actions of the executive, without falling foul of charges of disloyalty or sedition. The privilege, or at least the practice, of being able to speak freely in Parliament without fear of reprisals was what came to be seen as one of the principal guarantees of political liberty within a monarchical system of government. It assisted in the evolution of political parties and eventually led to an apparently paradoxical development in the form of what is now called Her Majesty’s ‘loyal’ opposition. Over the 600 years from the thirteenth century onwards, the substance of politics – the issues debated and the scope of government action – changed out of all recognition, particularly after Parliament became a permanent institution in the late seventeenth century. With the Reform Acts of the nineteenth century, the political mêlée in the House of Commons and the House of Lords became characterized less as that of a closed circle of aristocrats and of their related landed, mercantile and imperial interests. Instead, the pressure of the political struggle from outside Parliament moved Britain slowly (if not fully) in the direction of the democratic ideal, in which all individuals would be deemed to have an equal say, regardless of gender, class or ethnic origin. Parliament can be dated from 1265, the first time that the knights of the shires (or counties) and burgesses of various boroughs (or towns) had been summoned, alongside the peers and bishops, to attend upon the king. From then on this was the usual pattern, with Parliaments meeting often, though sometimes for a very short period of time and frequently with nothing of any great significance being settled. In the medieval period, one of the main reasons for calling a Parliament was for the king to be able to impose direct taxation, a means of raising money to fight wars. As was commonly the case later on, the ability of the Commons to resist calls for increased taxation gave it the bargaining power to expand its own sphere of influence. The Commons was in a weak position as regards most medieval monarchs, but Parliament did consolidate its legitimacy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The practice of petitioning the king for the redress of particular, perhaps quite minor, grievances, with his reply forming the basis of a new law, evolved into a system under which the Commons asserted and maintained a role in agreeing legislation. For the first time, in 1376 the Commons is known to have appointed its own Speaker (Sir Thomas Hungerford, who filled this role in the January 1377 Parliament). He acted as its spokesman in addressing the monarch and (probably later on) to chair its own sittings. For all that the Speaker was frequently the king’s man, the office he held would come to be seen as one which secured the independence of the lower House. In a similar way, it was in this period that the doctrine of free speech in Parliament came to be raised, notably in the case of the former Bristol MP Thomas Young, who petitioned the Commons to complain about having been summarily imprisoned in the Tower in 1451. The notion of parliamentary privilege did not always protect Members from royal vengeance, as the execution of at least six of the MPs who sat during Elizabeth I’s reign indicates; they included William Parry, whose downfall was caused by an indiscreet Commons speech. It was during the Tudor period that the separation of royal managers on one side and of an ‘opposition’ on the other became slightly more solidified. Henry VIII’s chief minister in the 1530s, Thomas Cromwell, sat in and helped manage the Commons, as did Elizabeth’s favourites, the father and son figures William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) and Robert Cecil (later Lord Salisbury). It was also during the sixteenth century that the first known reference occurs to the opposition side of the House: ‘they in the rebellious corner in the right hand of the House’, on the left-hand side of the chamber looking from the Speaker’s chair. The union of England and Wales, which was implemented by Acts passed in 1536 and 1543, led to new Welsh constituencies being represented at Westminster. In 1512 two MPs were returned for Tournai on the continent, and between 1536 and 1555 the Commons even contained Members representing Calais. James I (James VI of Scotland) enfranchised numerous English boroughs, so accentuating the already disproportionate representation of the southern counties of England compared to the North. Scotland had its own Parliament until 1707, as did Ireland until 1800, but MPs elected from seats in those countries also joined the Commons and brought with them distinctive local issues and concerns. The fact that Members attended as the elected representatives of specific places meant that, as with the corporation boroughs which paid their MPs to attend Parliament in order to promote their mercantile interests, politics was often as much about regional and personal affairs as it was about great matters of state. In the early seventeenth century opposition grew in the face of the perceived tyrannical tendencies of the Stuart kings, especially during the period of ‘personal rule’ exercised by Charles I, 1629-40. One of the leading opposition figures was Thomas Wentworth who, however, went over to the king’s side, was created earl of Strafford and soon became a marked man in the eyes of Parliament. He was impeached by the Commons in front of the House of Lords and was executed in 1641. One of his main opponents was John Pym, who was among the ‘five Members’ to evade arrest when Charles I entered the Commons with an armed guard in 1642. Following the victory of the Parliamentarians in the English civil war, 1642-6, the monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished and a number of different types of constitution were experimented with. One of the oddest was the 1653 Parliament, known as the Nominated Assembly or Barebones Parliament, the failure of which led to the inauguration of the protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. At the restoration in 1660, Charles II returned to England as king, the House of Lords was revived and Parliament remained at the centre of national politics, with its position if anything strengthened by the preceding decades of instability. Parties emerged for the first time during the exclusion crisis in the late 1670s, when the group which became known as the Whigs sought to have James, the duke of York, who was a known Roman Catholic, excluded from succeeding to the throne on the death of his elder brother Charles II, who had no sons. The Tories, who took York’s side in the conflict, were thereafter seen to be supporters of strong, potentially arbitrary, royal government, as against the Whigs, who trumpeted the virtues of Parliament as an essential restraint on the power of the executive. These parties, whose principles also had significant a religious dimension, bore little relation to their apparent successors, but the survival of party labels down to the Conservative and Liberal parties of the nineteenth century gave an apparent sense of continuity to modern political history. A period of political stability followed the abdication of James II (as York had become) and the constitutional settlement of the Bill of Rights of 1689. Under this statute, William and Mary acceded to the throne, subject to certain limitations on their powers, which came to be seen as guarantees of English liberty. Parliament, which from then on was to meet every year, became a permanent feature of public life, and it made itself indispensable by producing the funds necessary to finance the long French wars at the turn of the eighteenth century. From the time of the succession of the first Hanoverian king, George I, in 1714 Parliament became increasingly specialized in its activities. Techniques in the dark arts of parliamentary management were honed during the era of Sir Robert Walpole’s premiership, with the Country party opposition complaining that his control of parliamentary patronage, and the government’s electoral interest in ‘treasury boroughs’ like Harwich and Queenborough, gave the ministry too great an influence in the House of Commons. The eighteenth century saw the evolution of the roles of the government Leader in each House and a parallel development in the organisation and control of parliamentary committees. By the early nineteenth century the position of ‘whipper-in’ (or whip) was emerging as the means of mustering party supporters for crucial votes. William Holmes was one of the earliest and most effective of such operators. Another major change that arose from the mid-eighteenth century onwards was the increasing availability of public access to parliamentary debates via the spread of newspaper reports and through the issuing of collections of such publications, the precursors of what became known as Hansard. Not only did this increase public interest in events in Parliament, but it enabled external political campaigns to focus their attention on securing their demands in the Commons, for instance through co-ordinated petitioning campaigns. The growth of an informed public opinion and of extra-parliamentary pressure groups, for instance the Birmingham Political Union, were important factors in the eventual passage of the first Reform Act in 1832. In the post-1832 period, Britain’s party system slowly came to fruition. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the heyday of Gladstone and Disraeli, the effective withdrawal of Queen Victoria from active interference in government, the consolidation of the two-party system and the extension of legislative regulation into many aspects of everyday life, produced a recognisably modern pattern of politics. The early twentieth century witnessed the rise of the Labour party, the introduction of mass democracy and huge economic and social changes, all of which were to transform British politics in the years to come. Author: Stephen Farrell Politics The Order of the Royal Oak The order of the Royal Oak (or knight of the Royal Oak) was a new order of knighthood planned during the early part of Charles II’s reign as a reward to royalist supporters, but it was never actually instituted. Knowledge of the proposal derives from a list of 675 gentry who were to be members or... read more The Hanover Club The Hanover Club was a society of prominent and active Whigs dedicated in particular to championing support for the Hanoverian succession, and for the Whig cause generally, both in Parliament and the constituencies. The club had come into existence by the spring of 1712, though there is evidence... read more County Members and Country Politicians There was a high degree of overlap between the country gentlemen, the county Members and the ‘Country’ politicians, but these terms were not identical. In the mid-eighteenth century a good example was Sir George Savile (1726-84), who owned estates in Nottinghamshire and in Yorkshire. read more © Crown copyright and The History of Parliament Trust 1964-2020 Terms & Conditions Privacy & Cookies FAQs Abbreviations Contact Us