Lords in the Light: The Power of the Peers in Stuart England

The history of the English Parliament in the 16th and early 17th centuries is usually presented as an account of an increasingly independent-minded House of Commons and its often fractious relationship with the Crown. This traditional narrative is dominated by a series of well-known events in the Lower House, such as Peter Wentworth’s defence of the right of free speech in 1587 and the Commons’ opposition to a statutory union with Scotland (1604-07). They also include the Lower House’s protests at arbitrary taxation and imprisonment in 1628, culminating in the famous Petition of Right, and the Grand Remonstrance of 1641, which set out the Commons’ grievances against the government of Charles I. In this received narrative the House of Lords has been relegated to a supporting role. The great 19th-century historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner observed that by 1604 the Lords took only a ‘subordinate part’ in Westminster politics. In the mid-20th century the influential John Neale remarked that during the reign of Elizabeth I the Lords were reduced to playing ‘second fiddle to the Commons’.