May 2023 saw the publication of the History of Parliament House of Commons 1640-1660 volumes. This research has uncovered that many of the political identities, behaviours and structures that constitute a recognisable party-political system first came together during this time. Dr David Scott, editor of the House of Lords 1640-1660 section, explains...
On trial for his life in 1662, the former parliamentarian statesman Sir Henry Vane referred to the ‘most great and unusual Changes and Revolutions’ of the mid-seventeenth century (The Tryal of Sir Henry Vane (1662), 40). For him, the profoundest of these unusual changes was ‘the disjoynting [of] that Parliamentary Assembly among themselves’ and the subsequent emergence of ‘formed divisions among the people’. The most serious of these formed divisions was that between the parliamentarians and royalists. But Vane also had in mind a different kind of disjointing and division – the formation of opposing political parties within Parliament itself.
The clash of contending political groups at Westminster was a prominent theme in accounts of parliamentary proceedings during the 1640s. The MP Sir Simonds D’Ewes felt compelled to persist with his parliamentary diary in 1643 ‘to transmitt not onlie the storie but the verie secrett workings and machinations of each partie … chiefelie ledd and guided by some few members of either Howse’ (BL, Harley ms 165, f. 93). But although the language of party was widespread in the 1640s, historians have generally traced the emergence of parties properly-speaking to the struggle from the late 1670s between the Whigs and Tories. Were Vane and D’Ewes wrong therefore to think and write in terms of parties? Not according to the History of Parliament’s recently published House of Commons 1640-1660 volumes, which reveal that the first age of party was indeed the civil-war period. It was evidently during the 1640s that many of the political identities, behaviours and structures that constituted a recognisable party-political system first came together in Parliament.
Simonds D’Ewes. Available here.
The emergence late in 1642 of rival factions within Parliament with contrasting programmes for national settlement had never been seen before at Westminster and was a watershed moment in English history. It coincided with and contributed to the sharp rise in contested votes in the Commons, known as divisions, that occurred from November 1642. There was a pronounced spike in the frequency of these divisions in the debates on Parliament’s peace proposals to the king during the winter of 1642-3 – and this upward trend was never reversed. Conflict between organised parliamentary factions, or parties as we might properly call them, that competed for power and political resources, and not simply to carry a particular debate, was decisive in accelerating the disintegration of the Commons’ consensual traditions and their replacement by the majoritarian tactics of party-based politics. In the life or death struggle to decide Parliament’s and the nation’s fate, winning mattered as much at Westminster as it did on the battlefield. The priority for leading politicians – the men who could expect to lose their heads if they bungled the war – was building and sustaining voting majorities. That process demanded management and organisation – in short, it both required and produced parties.
The parties at Westminster assumed their most stable and coherent form in 1645 and the rivalry between the Independents and the Presbyterians. The leadership of each party comprised small groups of politicians known as ‘the grandees’. These were the politicians in both Houses with a programme as to how and on what terms to restore Charles as king and who expected to dominate his court and counsels once they had done so. By no means all MPs were consistent followers of either set of grandees; not a few of them shifted their ground as their views and political circumstances changed. Even so, historians have probably over-estimated the number of true neutrals in the Commons.
Given their ambitious plans for settling Charles’s war-torn kingdoms and the considerable risks involved in failing to achieve them, the grandees had to resort to a variety of arts and instruments in an effort to steer the public and the generality of their less resolute or partisan colleagues. Now for the first time, Parliament-men began to use the press for propaganda purposes in a systematic fashion. In 1643, for example, a long-running propaganda war broke out between the parties in which the parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Britanicus was one of numerous weapons used by both sides to blacken their opponents and bolster public support for their own terms for settlement.
Managing business in the often divided and troubled Commons of the 1640s also required an unprecedented degree of planning and coordination, and on a scale and with a sophistication that was unrivalled before the 1670s. The dark arts of party-political manipulation worked best when they were least visible, so in an effort to cover their tracks in the Commons the grandees recruited in-House enforcers and influencers to help manage business on the floor of the chamber. By the mid-1640s a variety of informal party agents seem to have operated in the Commons, each with their own specialised role: there were ‘teazers’ and ‘sticklers’ to prompt and steer debate, ‘Beagles’ to nose out controversy, ‘dividers’ – either tellers or division-managers – and ‘vote-drivers’ to marshal the party faithful during crucial divisions. Evidence suggestive of whipping by both parties can be detected in Commons’ divisions from the mid-1640s.
The party system that emerged at Westminster during the 1640s did not survive Charles I’s execution in 1649 and the establishment of a republican regime. Yet this narrowing of the political horizon could not hide the fact that something new had occurred in the practice of politics. Most significantly, perhaps, parties had become not merely political means but to some extent ends in themselves. Their existence had been tied not to the attainment of specific rewards or policies but to the maintenance of a particular way of government and to imposing and then sustaining a permanent shift in constitutional relations between Parliament and the crown and between England and the other Stuart kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland. The Independents and Presbyterians had been more than parties therefore, they had been governments-in-waiting; their rivalry had been that between competing organisations for the very future of England and its status within the British Isles.
The partisan politics born of the civil war would outlive all the purges from office and all the loyalty tests that Parliament introduced from the mid-1640s in an attempt to kill it. The clash of organised parties at Westminster ended in 1649, but the networks they had helped to create across the country survived and exacerbated the politicisation of local affairs in the aftermath of civil war. Pioneered at Westminster under the pressure of military events, the politics of majoritarian decision-making also spread to the provinces and gradually became standard practice in parliamentary elections and municipal government. A society that would long continue to define political disagreement as against the natural order was now awash with dissident groups. Political associations that had emerged from the civil war would harden again in the 1670s and 1680s. Once again, Parliament became the principal battleground in a struggle between organised parties that managed elections, mobilised public opinion, and contended for control of royal government. This time, however, unlike in the 1640s, the rage of party at Westminster would grip the entire nation – and it would never let go.
DS
Further reading:
William J. Bulman, The Rise of Majority Rule in Early Modern Britain and its Empire (CUP, 2021),
Paul D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns 1650-1730 (CUP, 1998)
Stephen K. Roberts (ed.), The House of Commons 1640-1660 (Boydell, 2023), volume 1
The History of Parliament 
Excellent overview! One of lessons that stayed with me from Mark Kishlansky’s Rise of the New Model Army was that the Civil War period marked the demise of the old ideal and practice of consensus on the Houses of Parliament.