As in other sections of the History one footnote only (if necessary) has been attached to each paragraph of the text, and many standard sources are not cited at all. What follows is a guide to works frequently used, not a complete bibliography.

Elections. The primary source for elections is the collection of indentures in C219/49-71, the majority of which have survived in excellent condition. From them was printed in 1878 by order of the House of Commons, the Return of Members of Parliament: part 1, Parliaments of England, 1213-1702. The compilers recorded only the dates of elections, the constituencies and the names of the Members returned, with such few additional details of addresses, offices or kindred as the indentures showed. Their labours have been carefully checked against the originals, and it has been found that only a few dates were misread or perhaps misprinted. It was not, however, their practice for this period to notice separate indentures for two-Member constituencies; nor was it part of their brief to record the names of voters or to describe the electorate. An inspection of the original documents has in general filled these lacunae, and supplied much else of value. For example, it is clear that in some of the smaller constituencies all the electors present were expected to sign or make their marks, while it was the admirable practice in Haverfordwest for the town clerk to list them, with their occupations, on the return. For defunct boroughs like Bere Alston the portreeve’s signature on the indenture may be the only means of identifying the returning officer, whom the patron evidently selected in this period with the utmost care. It has to be accepted that the words used to describe the body of the electors—‘burgesses’, ‘commonalty’, ‘inhabitants’ or the like—are frequently ambiguous. Nevertheless contemporary practice in the hearing of disputed elections by the Commons was to quote them as authoritative, and in fact some variants, as in the case of Huntingdon, are not empty of meaning. More dubious are the epithets applied to the elections. ‘Unanimously’ or ‘to the number of 2,000 or more’ (as in one Bristol election) are presumably meant to be taken literally; but such phrases as ‘with one assent and consent’ or ‘being the major part’ are often meaningless common form, though even then their absence may be significant.

Only for the Restoration Convention has there been a sizeable loss of indentures, and here deficiencies have been supplied from a crown office list, and from newspapers, which are cited by the second date on the by-line, representing the date of publication. Broadsheets giving the names and constituencies of Members are known for every general election of the period, and were reproduced (for 1660) in The Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England (cited as Old Parl. Hist.) and for the later Parliaments by W. Cobbett in Parliamentary History of England. Revised editions were sometimes issued in the course of a Parliament, and seem to have provided Cobbett with the results of several by-elections in 1685; but this broadsheet has not been found either in the British Library or the Bodleian.

Genealogy and Education. For Members who were or became peers it may be assumed that the standard genealogical works have been consulted: A. Collins, Peerage of England ed. Brydges (1812); Sir Bernard Burke, Genealogical History of the Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited and Extinct Peerages of the British Empire (1883 ed.); G. E. Cokayne, V. Gibbs and continuators, Complete Peerage (1910-59). For baronets the corresponding works are: Kimber and Johnson, Baronetage of England (1771); Burke, Extinct and Dormant Baronetcies of England (1838); Cokayne, Complete Baronetage (1900-6). The educational record is derived from the published registers of those schools, universities and inns of court which the Member is stated to have attended, supplemented by E. Peacock, Leyden Students (Index Soc. xiii) and H. E. Brown, ‘Inglesi e Scozzesi all’ Università di Padova, 1618-1765’ in Monographie Storiche sullo Studio di Padova (Venice, 1922). Admissions to the Inner Temple after 1660 have been supplied from a typescript list in the Inner Temple library.

National Office. For Privy Councillors and great officers of state J. Haydn, Book of Dignities (1894 ed.) has been used. During the Commonwealth their functions were fulfilled respectively by the Councillors of State (whose dates of office have been obtained from the relevant volumes of CSP Dom.) and by commissioners. For the latter we have relied on C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum. E. Foss, Judges of England, proceeds unruffled by changes of regime, including impartially the law officers of the crown, masters of the rolls, serjeants-at-law, and King’s Counsel, and their republican equivalents. The contents of T. D. Hardy, Catalogue of Lord Chancellors, Keepers of the Great Seal, Masters of the Rolls, and Principal Officers of the High Court of Chancery (1843) are as useful as its title is cumbersome, since it gives the succession of masters in Chancery, the Six Clerks, registrars, examiners, and clerks of the petty bag. For the Treasury, the secretariats of state, the boards of trade and plantations, the Admiralty and the navy board J. C. Sainty and J. M. Collinge have compiled similar complete lists in the series Office-Holdiers in Modern Britain. All these volumes begin at the Restoration; but for Admiralty commissioners there is a list from 1619 by G. F. Jones and J. J. Sutherland Shaw in IHR Bull. xiv. 13-19. Mr Sainty’s comprehensive lists of Exchequer officials were unfortunately not available when we went to press. Diplomatic personnel may be found in L. Bittner and L. Gross, Repertorium des diplomatischen Vertreter aller Länden. Both central and local appointments are covered by Sir Robert Somerville, Office-Holders. Most of these offices and many others, including the obscure Household posts, are given in a valuable though unofficial source, E. Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia, which deservedly went through 22 editions between 1669 and 1708, and consequently enables appointments to be dated to within two or three years. N. Carlisle, Inquiry into the Place and Quality of the Gentlemen of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Chamber (1829) uses another unwieldy title, but gives the dates from the Restoration when the gentlemen ushers were sworn in, though he omits the gentlemen extraordinary to be found in LC3/2, and can be supplemented from a clerk of the cheque’s book in the Duke of Beaufort’s manuscripts at Badminton. We have to thank Mr Sainty for drawing our attention to LC3/2 and also to LS13/231, which fills a gap in the Chamberlayne series by listing all the inhabitants of Whitehall in 1689. W. R. Chaplin, Corporation of Trinity House, gives dates for all the elder brethren elected to this distinguished body since its revival in 1660.

Military and Naval Office. C. H. Firth and G. Davies, Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army is thorough and illuminating, but the temporary commissions issued between the Restoration and disbandment were seldom noticed except for commanding officers. For those below the rank of colonel we have relied almost entirely on the newspapers. From 1661 there is C. Dalton, English Army Lists and Commission Registers, which unfortunately does not index those entries indicating termination of service. For naval commissions students of the period are primarily indebted to Pepys, whose alphabetical list of all commissioned officers serving between the Restoration ‘and the withdrawing of King James the Second’ was printed by J. R. Tanner in Naval Manuscripts in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge (Navy Records Society, xxvi), 309-434. J. Charnock, Biographia Navalis (1794-6) has also been consulted.

Local Office. For Members of royalist background the first local office may often be as commissioner of array. Commissions for most counties will be found in the Northamptonshire Record Office (Finch-Hatton mss 133). Most other appointments made at Oxford during the Civil War have been taken from W. H. Black, Docquets of Letters Patent. From Firth and Rait have been derived the parliamentary and Commonwealth appointments, including the commissioners for assessment, a designation that has been retained for the Restoration period although not strictly appropriate to some of the direct taxation then levied (see C. D. Chandaman, English Public Revenue, 140 et. seqq.). During the period this was the only local appointment made directly by the House of Commons, with the names entered in the supply bills, and, as might be expected, Members and former Members figure prominently. Unsuspected local interests have often been revealed, and a name’s disappearance from the lists constitutes strong presumptive evidence of death, bankruptcy, or removal from the county. Names were laboriously extracted from the Statutes of the Realm and indexed by student assistants. The recusancy commissions for 1675 were printed in Cal. Treas. Bks. For justices of the peace up to 1688 there was little need to supplement the sources given by T. G. Barnes and A. Hassell Smith in IHR Bull. xxxii. 234-42. The libri pacis from 1634 to 1685 and the patent rolls for 15 Charles I (C66/2858) and 17 Charles II (C66/3074) were searched, together with the commissions in county record offices. All entries in the crown office docquet books from 1640 were extracted; a copy of the result has been deposited in the Round Room of the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. PC2/71 contains recommendations for alterations in December 1686, and there is good reason to suppose that most of them were carried into effect in the next few months (L. K. J. Glassey, Politics and the Appointment of Justices of the Peace, 70-71). Similarly, the recommendations printed in G. F. Duckett, Penal Laws and Test Act (1882-3), are assumed to have been accepted unless there is evidence to the contrary. No further comprehensive lists have been found until 1701-2 (National Library of Wales 17071E; Harl. 7512), although it is known that those justices who refused the Association in 1696 were removed from the bench. C181/7 contains commissions of the peace for certain boroughs and liberties, and commissions of oyer and terminer for the circuits from 1660 to 1673; only the date of first appointment is given in the biography. Sources for militia officers are cited in the footnotes, except All Souls, Oxford mss 233, which was tabled in Parliament in November 1680. Names from the earlier lists of the lieutenancy were not calendared or indexed in CSP Dom. The first is contained in SP29/11/142-201, dated about August 1660, but has to be used with care, since it would seem that most of the lists are recommendations rather than appointments. It has been assumed that only the names marked with a dot or a tick were accepted by the crown. Two further lists follow in 1661 (SP29/42/62-71) and 1662 (SP29/60/66); neither is complete, but every county except Cornwall appears on one or the other. The next comprehensive list was drawn up in March 1670 (SP44/35A/4- 8), and again there are counties omitted. Names from later lists appear in the indexes to CSP Dom.; only notices of individual appointments and renewals are cited in the footnotes. Other alterations are conjecturally attributed to a change of lord lieutenant, such as occurred in Hampshire and Norfolk in 1676. The All Souls manuscript includes the lieutenancy; it subsequently passed into government hands, and the brief comments against some of the names and the deletions probably represent cause and effect of the purge of 1681. Duckett has again been followed, as with the justices, for the removals and appointments of 1688. For the shrievalty we have used PRO Lists and Indexes, ix. and for the clerks of the peace (not a numerous body in the Commons) Sir Edgar Stephens, The Clerks of the Counties. J. R. Woodhead, The Rulers of London, 1660-89 provides dates for all the aldermen and common councilmen of the period and in many cases genealogical data and details of company offices. We are grateful to Sonia Anderson and Henry Horwitz for much help with merchants, especially those who belonged to the East India and Levant Companies. For the assistants in the Royal Adventurers into Africa we have used T70/75, and for the members (but not the licencees) of the Society of Mines Royal and the Mineral and Battery Works the unpaginated order-books on deposit in the British Library (Loan 16).

Narrative. Most of the biographies ultimately rest on an identification by Leonard Naylor, and an outline provided by him, though his initials appear only where he also wrote a first draft. There are few direct citations of the Dictionary of National Biography, except for factual details not available elsewhere. In our own particular field, detailed examination of parliamentary activity, we have found few predecessors. Those we are aware of include the accounts of Sir Thomas Fanshawe I by H. C. Fanshawe in a note to the Memoirs of Anne, Lady Fanshawe (1907), 299-301; of Winston Churchill by A. L. Rowse in The Early Churchills (1956); and of Bullen Reymes by Helen A. Kaufman in Conscientious Cavalier (1962). These three writers undertook the laborious task of combing the Journal of the House of Commons for the numerous references to their subjects. Recently, Henry Roseveare has done the same for an article on Sir George Downing. It is the object of these present volumes to leave no important personal activity in the Commons unnoticed in the biographies, though when Members of the same name sit contemporaneously, certainty of attribution cannot be achieved. Close on a thousand entries were recorded for some Members, and to prevent overloading the footnotes it was decided to eliminate most references to CJ except for individual activities—tellerships, reports, and the like. It has been assumed that, given the strict adherence to the sessional treatment, the reader will be able to find the committee appointments without too much difficulty, and will be prepared to forego a page reference for other matters if the full date appears in the text.

Debates have attracted more attention, and substantial additions can be offered to A Bibliography of Parliamentary Debates of Great Britain compiled by J. A. Woods and others (House of Commons Library Documents No. 2), which was confined to sources then in print. All references are duly given in footnotes, but a few comments may assist the reader. We are deeply obliged to Caroline Robbins for a copy of her transcript of the diary of the Restoration Convention which she has shown to be the work of Seymour Bowman (N. and Q. cxcvi. 56-59). Unfortunately it was already mutilated before it was used as the basis for the Old Parl. Hist. and has suffered further severe loss since. But it remains incomparably the best account for this Parliament. William Banks I kept a diary from 7 May to 18 July (Lancs. RO, DDBa), but it adds little or nothing to the Journals. Sir Edward Dering tried out his prentice hand at reporting between 25 Apr. and 15 Aug., with many intervals. The result was printed by M. F. Bond in The Diaries and Papers of Sir Edward Dering, but it cannot be compared with the work of his maturity.

The opening sessions of the Cavalier Parliament are conspicuously badly reported, and there is reason to be grateful even for such summary accounts as are contained in the letters of William Chetwynd and Henry North. Helen Kaufman kindly supplied some further extracts from Bullen Reymes’s diary (8 May-6 June, 20 Nov.-10 Dec. 1661, 7 Jan.-4 Feb. 1662), but that versatile character does not seem to have found Parliament stimulating, though he worked hard in committee. Caroline Robbins in ‘The Repeal of the Triennial Act in 1664’ (Huntington Lib. Quarterly, xii. 121-40) has skilfully reconstructed from a variety of sources one of the more important debates during the administration of Clarendon. The supply debate of 25 Nov. 1665 was reported by Thomas Clifford in a letter to William Coventry (Add. 32094, ff. 24-27). Caroline Robbins has edited the Diary of John Milward, beginning in the next session on 17 Sept. 1666 and continuing to 8 May 1668. This covers the first major political crisis of the reign, the fall of Clarendon, which apparently stimulated Anchitell Grey to commence a very different sort of account. Both were Derbyshire men, Milward sitting for the county and Grey for the borough; Milward, a loyal churchman but no courtier, assesses and comments freely, while Grey contents himself with the speeches, and his bias—which would later be called Whiggish—appears only in his principles of selecting and summarizing. His persistence and assiduity are unequalled. Proceedings in the House of Commons touching the Impeachment of Edward, Earl of Clarendon (cited as Clarendon Impeachment) was published in 1700, probably from the shorthand notes of the dissenter, William Love. Andrew Marvell’s public letters to his constituency are too cautious to be revealing. His few surviving private letters, on the other hand, reveal a great deal, especially of the writer’s personality. Grey’s coverage of the next few years is patchy; as D. T. Witcombe has suggested (Charles II and the Cavalier House of Commons, 99) he was probably one of the 80 Members who withdrew from the House on 18 Feb. 1670 in protest at the passing of the government motion for supply. Fortunately he was supplemented in the next session by Dering, who returned to the Commons in junior ministerial office and proved himself one of the best of the parliamentary diarists. His work resembles Milward’s rather than Grey’s, but with a cooler head and better information. His diary from 15 Nov. 1670 to 3 Nov. 1673 was edited by B. D. Henning (Yale Historical Publications, xvi) and from 13 Apr. to 5 June 1675 by M. F. Bond, as above. Accounts of the 1677 debates from 21 Feb. to 25 May were prepared for Danby, probably by one of his mercenaries, Thomas Neale, and remain in manuscript in the British Library (Add. 28091; Egerton 3345). The other court reporter of the period, Daniel Finch, provided a livelier as well as a more reliable account, on the Milward-Dering pattern. His notes, covering 15 Feb.-23 May 1677, and 29 Jan.-9 Feb., 2 May-1 June and 4 Nov.-31 Dec. 1678, are in the Leicestershire Record Office, and have been cited by date. Some of the most informative accounts of the closing sessions of the Cavalier Parliament and of its two successors will be found in the correspondence of the two ‘viceroys’, Ormonde in Ireland and Lauderdale in Scotland. The letters of Sir Robert Southwell in HMC Ormonde are particularly illuminating, but some of the debates on Scotland are also well-reported in The Lauderdale Papers. The writers are all in the court interest, but this top secret correspondence is certainly not intended to deceive. Grey continues for the Exclusion Parliaments, but unfortunately he is so engrossed in high politics that he tells us nothing of their one positive achievement, the passing of the habeas corpus bill. Some scrappy notes in the Finch papers and the hardly more substantial accounts intended to help Danby prepare his defence (Add. 28064) add little to our information. By the end of the second Exclusion Parliament Henry Somerset, Marquess of Worcester, whose position in Wales was as powerful, and as vulnerable, as those of Ormonde and Lauderdale elsewhere, was also anxious for reports from the Commons. What he received (printed in HMC 12th Rep. IX, 98-115) covered the debates from 18 Dec. 1680 to 8 Jan. 1681, not omitting a variety of disagreeable reflections on himself. On the other side of the House Grey had a rival in the second and third Exclusion Parliaments. The anonymous author (who was probably, in every sense, close to Speaker Williams) clearly contemplated publication from the start, and worked his notes up carefully to that end, though it was not until 1689 that An Exact Collection of the Debates of the House of Commons ... was able to appear. The speakers, denoted only by their initials, are given ample space, and we can recapture something of their accents and personalities, and of the atmosphere of the Commons at a period of intense political excitement.

After this the reporting of James II’s Parliament comes as an anti-climax. Grey lost his seat, and no diaries have been discovered for the first session. The accounts of Thomas Bruce (court Tory), Sir John Bramston (country Tory), and Sir John Reresby (trimmer) have been much used, but they give less detail of the business of the House than Roger North, who enjoyed, like Dering before him, the advantages of a junior post in the ministry. For the second session, from 9 to 20 Nov. 1685, several diaries are known, all clearly based on a common original, in which the anonymous reporter took over from his Whig predecessor the practice of identifying the speakers only by their initials. Unfortunately Grey’s Georgian editors, when they decided to fill the gap in his record to the best of their ability, often went astray in expanding the names, and the false attributions have gained widespread currency. Reasons for preferring the Evelyn manuscript at Christ Church, Oxford, or the Lowther manuscript in the Cumberland Record Office are explained in the relevant biographies. Grey regained his seat and his position as principal diarist in the Convention. But for the crucial debate of 28 Jan. 1689 there are two superior accounts; one was produced by John Somers and printed by Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke in Miscellaneous State Papers (1778), ii. 401-25, the other was discovered by Lois G. Schwoerer and appeared in IHR Bull. xlix. 242-63, where it was tentatively ascribed to Sir Henry Hobart. The nonconformist Roger Morrice clearly had access to better information in this Parliament than in its predecessors; but there is no Tory diary, and indeed no diary at all from 2 July to the end of the first session.

All the known party lists for the period have been noticed in A Register of Parliamentary Lists, 1660-1761 edited by David Hayton and Clyve Jones. The use made of them in the biographies is generally self-explanatory; it will be clear, for example, that those who figure on the Wharton lists of 1660 and 1661 are very far from constituting a ‘Presbyterian party’. For convenience the list of 1673/4 from the Paston papers in the British Library (Add. 27448, f. 125) has been called the ‘Paston list’; it was probably drawn up by Sir Robert Paston, who was given a peerage on 19 Aug. 1673, for the use of his successor as government whip in the Commons.

Many of these and other sources are cited in the footnotes in abbreviated but it is hoped unambiguous form. The unselfish labours of our predecessors in making so much available in print are perhaps already sufficiently well-known to students of the period. The following list, in order of publication and with the editors’ names prefixed, also shows the form of the most frequent citations:

Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion is cited from the edition by W. D. Macray (1878), and his Life from the edition of 1827. For Burnet’s History after 1885 we have had to use the old edition by M. J. Routh (1833). Helen C. Foxcroft produced an indispensable Supplement (1902) from the suppressed passages. For Pepys Diary we have relied on the new transcription edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews; references are to date. References to the Evelyn Diary are to the edition of E. S. de Beer (1955). The Bulstrode Papers were published from the Morrison collection in 1897, unfortunately without an index. A similar deficiency has now been supplied for Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, published in 1857; our citations are by Luttrell’s name alone. Other important documents were printed by Christie in his Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury (1871) and by Helen Foxcroft in her Life and Letters of Sir George Savile, Bt., 1st Marquess of Halifax (1898). No citations are given to the list of intended knights of the Royal Oak, with the value of their estates, given in J. Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners ... (1833), i. 688-94. Membership of the Green Ribbon Club has been ascertained from the sources mentioned by J. R. Jones in his article in the Durham University Journal (n.s.) xviii. 17-20. The answers to the three questions on the repeal of the Test Act and the Penal Laws, and the electoral reports of James II’s agents are taken from Duckett, who is cited in the constituency articles only.

We are grateful to the authorities of Dr Williams’s Library for giving us unstinted access to Roger Morrice’s Entering Books. Among family muniments the Thynne and Coventry papers belonging to the Marquess of Bath at Longleat come first in size and importance. The Duke of Beaufort’s papers at Badminton are fewer, but contain some interesting letters on the exclusion elections not printed in the HMC 12th Report. Two particularly large and important deposits, the Fleming manuscripts from Rydal and the Mexborough manuscripts, were consulted in the Westmorland Record Office and the Sheepscar Public Library, Leeds, respectively. The Verney papers were read on microfilm at the British Library. Many wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury were read at Somerset House before their transfer to the PRO. The PCC references, which were used for the calendars in the Index Library, have been retained.

Unless an article forms the principal source for a biography, in which case it is cited in full with author’s name and title in the first footnote, only the name of the periodical, with volume and pages, is given.

Theses and Dissertations. Those by Mary Wittmayer Helms, ‘The Convention Parliament of 1660’ (Bryn Mawr Ph.D. 1963) and Alan Simpson, ‘The Convention Parliament 1668-9’ (Oxford D.Phil. 1939), have been of outstanding value throughout the preparation of this work. Among others used are the following:

The historiography of this period has attracted the best minds in the field, from the philosophical subtlety of Clarendon and the psychological acumen of Burnet to the massive learning of Macaulay. But re-interpretation is a periodic necessity, and one major work of this kind is K. G. Feiling, History of the Tory Party, 1640-1714. Three other books that must be mentioned appeared while the writing of these volumes was in progress: J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (1967), J. R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution (1972), and J. R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England (1972). The influence of such works cannot be measured by counting footnotes and citations; they affect habits of thought and direction of inquiry, sometimes for several generations. We count ourselves fortunate to have had such guidance.

Ref Volumes: 1660-1690

Author: John. P. Ferris

End Notes