Abstract
It is at present particularly difficult to give an account of the role and history of Parliament in the reign of the first Elizabeth. The last three generations have seen two well entrenched interpretations shattered, one after the other, and we are still in the process of putting the new insights together.1 Until about sixty years ago it was generally held that in the sixteenth century Parliament played very little part in a system of government which centred on an exceptionally strong, even autocratic, monarchy. Parliaments were thought of as ‘subservient’; the Tudor period supposedly formed an interruption in what was regarded as the normal and proper development of England — the subjugation of the Crown to the representative assembly. As recently as 1964, this medievalists’ view, which treated the Tudor age as a retreat from the position achieved under the Lancastrians, could be defended against the newer theories of Parliament’s novel political importance in the sixteenth century.2
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Bibliography
The history of the Elizabethan Parliament is most fully rehearsed in the work of J. E. Neale: The Elizabethan House of Commons (1949); Elizabeth I and her Parliaments. 2 vols (1953, 1957); ‘The Commons’ Privilege of Free Speech in Parliament’, Tudor Studies... Presented to A. F. Pollard. ed. R. W. Seton-Watson (1924) pp. 231–57.
For much of his interpretation he relied on W. Notestein, ‘The Winning of the Initiative by the House of Commons’, Proceedings of the British Academy. XI (1924) 125–75.
Of late it has come to be recognised that these venerable works pretty thoroughly misinterpret what happened and leave important parts of the story untold, though the editorial contributions to Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I. I: 1559–1581. ed. T. E. Hartley (Leicester, 1981), still rely on Neale. Though the new approach has not so far produced a treatment as comprehensive as Neale’s and able simply to replace him, enough has appeared to document the need to start again. On records and procedure, Sheila Lambert has cleared up many of the errors found in the old view: ‘The Clerks and Records of the House of Commons, 1600–1640’, BIHR. XLII (1970) 215–31
and ‘Procedure in the House of Commons in the Early Stuart Period’, EHR. XCV (1980) 753–81. M. A. R. Graves, The House of Lords in the Parliaments of Edward VI and Mary I: An Institutional Study (Cambridge, 1981 ) at last, though not quite for the period in question, brings out the importance of the Upper House. Particular points of revision have been made by N. L. Jones, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion. Royal Historical Society Studies in History XXXII (1982); M. A. R. Graves, ‘Thomas Norton the Parliament Man: An Elizabethan MP’, HJ, XXIII (1980) 17–35
G. R. Elton, ‘Arthur Hall, Lord Burghley, and the Antiquity of Parliament’, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (Cambridge, 1983) III, 254–73.
On the records of Parliament and their meaning see G. R. Elton, ‘The Sessional Printing of Statutes, 1484–1547’, ibid., pp. 92–109, and ‘The Rolls of Parliament, 1449–1547’, ibid., pp. 110–42, both of which document the transformational role of the reign of Henry VIII. Provisional attempts to provide a new interpretation for the Elizabethan Parliament are found in three papers by G. R. Elton: ‘Tudor Government — the Points of Contact: I. Parliament’, ibid., pp. 3–21; ‘Parliament in the Sixteenth Century: Functions and Fortunes’, ibid., pp. 156–82; and ‘The English Parliament in the Sixteenth Century: Estates and Statutes’, in Parliament and Community. ed. A. Cosgrove and J. I. McGuire (Dublin, 1983) pp. 69–95. Since one of the apparent strong points of the Neale thesis lay in its supposed fit to pre and post-Elizabethan parliamentary history, attention is drawn to recent revisions in those surrounding periods: J. Loach, ‘Conservatism and Consent in Parliament, 1547–59’, in The Mid-Tudor Polity c. 1540–1560. ed. J. Loach and R. Tittler (1980) pp. 9–28; C. Russell, ‘Parliament History in Perspective, 1604—1629’, History. LXI (1976) 1–22
and Parliament and English Politics, 1621–1629. (Oxford, 1979); R. C. Munden, ‘James I and “the Growth of Mutual Distrust”: King, Commons and Reform, 1603–1604’, in Faction and Parliament. ed. K. Sharpe (Oxford, 1978) pp. 43–72.
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© 1984 G. R. Elton
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Elton, G.R. (1984). Parliament. In: Haigh, C. (eds) The Reign of Elizabeth I. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17704-2_4
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