The Palace of Westminster was the location of some of the most dramatic events in the English Civil Wars. Dr Stephen Roberts, editor for the House of Commons 1640-1660, discusses the layout of the House of Commons Chamber and its role in these events.

The great timeless moments of parliamentary history in the 1640s and 50s – Charles I’s failed attempt to arrest the Five Members in 1642, Oliver Cromwell’s brutal expulsion of the Members in 1653 – took place in a Commons chamber smaller as a working space than its modern counterpart.

Unlike the modern palace of Westminster, laid out symmetrically by Barry and Pugin in Victoria’s reign exclusively for parliamentary use, the palace before the fire of 1834 was a warren of wood and stone, where before 1640 in a period of intermittent parliaments, the main activity was the work of the principal law courts. A further difference was that the Commons chamber, now completely surrounded by courtyards and buildings, was in that period orientated east-west. At the east end, a great window overlooked the Thames, lighting the chamber with the morning sun. Below the window stood the Speaker’s chair, raised on a dais, and in front of that, a cloth-covered table provided a work station for the clerk and the assistant clerk. On both sides of the central rectangular space, the floor of the House, were 5 rows of benches where Members sat, with some seating at the sides of the Speaker’s chair. At the opposite end of the chamber from the chair was the bar of the House, not a place of refreshment but a wooden gate symbolically barring access, which could be removed to allow Members to come and go. (In the modern chamber, the bar of the House is represented by a white line.)   

Though the botched invasion of the chamber by the king and his retinue and the appearance of soldiers intent on purging or clearing the House are the images that have retained their colour down the ages, drama on a smaller scale was never far removed from the working day in the Commons. Individual members quickly learned to use the layout of the chamber to good effect. Sir Simonds D’Ewes considered himself an authority on parliamentary procedure, and to be fair, so (usually) did his fellow-Members. He habitually sat at the side of the Speaker’s chair, so he was well-placed to proffer welcome or unwelcome advice to William Lenthall, Speaker throughout D’Ewes’s time as an MP. John Pym, the master of the dramatic gesture for calculated political effect, positioned himself near the bar of the House, a commanding location, to announce the latest outrage perpetrated by the king’s supporters. Another demonstration of Pym’s dominance of the House was his readiness to call for the chamber door to be closed, heightening the tension in the chamber before a dramatic news announcement.

Generally, Members sat in accustomed places, as we might expect, though there seems not to have been a ‘front bench’ of government ministers, nor even any clear political divide between one phalanx of members and their opposite numbers on the other side of the floor. In parliaments of the 1620s, the gallery at the western end of the chamber became the resort of an ‘awkward squad’ of Members liable to cause trouble for the Speaker, and in the 1640s the gallery became the haunt of Sir Arthur Hesilrige, a sour and combative politician throughout his time in Parliament. From the chamber, access to the gallery was from a winding steep staircase, in appearance resembling a step-ladder. It was the epicentre of the panic that swept the Palace of Westminster on 19 May 1641, when the (presumably stout) Member for St Germans, John Moyle, broke some laths at the south end of it as he stooped to retrieve a dropped paper. The noise was like ‘the fall of some part of a scaffold’, and evidently put already jumpy Members in mind of Gunpowder Plot.

In other respects, the layout and customs of the chamber served to underscore the distinction between Members and non-members, in an age when the palace was crowded with both professionals and the public, with minimal security. The door and the bar, policed by the serjeant-at-arms, were physical aids to maintaining this distinction, as was the sizeable lobby beyond the door at the western end of the chamber. This ‘big room’, as it was described before 1640, was the place where the public and their representatives could mix, and where petitions were presented: where, in other words, ‘lobbying’ took place. The lobby was where women peace protesters assembled in August 1643, only to be ejected and then attacked outside by horsemen acting in the name of Parliament, with at least one fatality. Seated Members, and the Speaker, could get jittery in times of agitation on the streets outside, and the area immediately at the threshold and beyond it was sometimes ordered to be cleared. Less traumatically, the lobby was the only room for the procedure by which Members would leave the chamber to be counted in divisions.   

A door in the west end of the gallery led to a room known as the committee chamber, which served as an ante-room to the main chamber. It was a useful space put into service variously as a venue for small committees to perform urgent tasks, a place for private conversations by Members, and a general common room. The fireplace there was used to burn a libel on the House in January 1643, and when Members ran in panic after John Moyle’s accidental damage of the gallery woodwork, it was in the committee chamber that some of them re-grouped to calm down. When the Long Parliament got into its stride, the room was set aside for the use of Speaker’s ease and refreshment after his marathon sessions in the chair.    

In the cockpit that constituted the Commons, every aspect of its topography could be deployed for political purposes. The east-west orientation of the chamber, with only one window, made for short days of natural illumination. The decision on whether to bring in candles, which must have been large sconces, was subject to voting by Members, and was not at the discretion of the servants of the House. Votes on whether to bring in candles were thus really votes on whether to curtail or prolong proceedings for the day, which on each occasion gave opposing factions in the House an opportunity for tactical political behaviour. In the contests large and small that made up parliamentary proceedings, we need to bear in mind that the physical space and artefacts of the Houses were not a neutral environment.

SR 

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Find more blogs from our Commons in the Civil Wars series here.