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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Foreword
- Foreword
- Contents
- Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introductory Survey
- Appendix 1 Dates of Parliaments and sessions, 1640-60
- Appendix 2 By-elections
- Appendix 3 Speakers of the House of Commons
- Appendix 4 Principal Judicial and State Officeholders
- Appendix 5 Officials of the House of Commons or of Parliament
- Appendix 6 Chairmen of Standing Committees
- Appendix 7 Failed Parliamentary Candidates
- Appendix 8 The ‘Straffordians’ of April 1641
- Appendix 9 Members who fled to the New Model army in 1647
- Appendix 10 Members excluded at Pride’s Purge, December 1648
- Appendix 11 Dissenters to the 5 December 1648 Vote to continue negotiations with the King
- Appendix 12 Members excluded in 1654 and 1656
- Appendix 13 The ‘Kinglings’ of 1657
- Appendix 14 Members of the Other House, 1658-9
- Appendix 15 Members who served City of London Apprenticeships
- Appendix 16 Members who served Apprenticeships outside London
- Appendix 17 Legal Practitioners
- Appendix 18 Members with Commercial Interests
- Appendix 19 Military and Naval Members
- Appendix 20 Officers of the Royal or Protectoral Households
- Appendix 21 Attendance at and Reporting from the Committee of Both Kingdoms
- Appendix 22 Attendance at the Derby House Committee
- Appendix 23 Recruitment and Attendance, Naval Committees
- Appendix 24 Activity at the Committee for Revenue
- List of Manuscript Sources Used
- Abbreviated Titles and Other Abbreviations used in the Footnotes
- Index to the Introductory Survey
- Committees
VII - Parliamentary Government: Executive Committees
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 May 2023
- Frontmatter
- Foreword
- Foreword
- Contents
- Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introductory Survey
- Appendix 1 Dates of Parliaments and sessions, 1640-60
- Appendix 2 By-elections
- Appendix 3 Speakers of the House of Commons
- Appendix 4 Principal Judicial and State Officeholders
- Appendix 5 Officials of the House of Commons or of Parliament
- Appendix 6 Chairmen of Standing Committees
- Appendix 7 Failed Parliamentary Candidates
- Appendix 8 The ‘Straffordians’ of April 1641
- Appendix 9 Members who fled to the New Model army in 1647
- Appendix 10 Members excluded at Pride’s Purge, December 1648
- Appendix 11 Dissenters to the 5 December 1648 Vote to continue negotiations with the King
- Appendix 12 Members excluded in 1654 and 1656
- Appendix 13 The ‘Kinglings’ of 1657
- Appendix 14 Members of the Other House, 1658-9
- Appendix 15 Members who served City of London Apprenticeships
- Appendix 16 Members who served Apprenticeships outside London
- Appendix 17 Legal Practitioners
- Appendix 18 Members with Commercial Interests
- Appendix 19 Military and Naval Members
- Appendix 20 Officers of the Royal or Protectoral Households
- Appendix 21 Attendance at and Reporting from the Committee of Both Kingdoms
- Appendix 22 Attendance at the Derby House Committee
- Appendix 23 Recruitment and Attendance, Naval Committees
- Appendix 24 Activity at the Committee for Revenue
- List of Manuscript Sources Used
- Abbreviated Titles and Other Abbreviations used in the Footnotes
- Index to the Introductory Survey
- Committees
Summary
Emergence and development
The ‘rise of the fiscal state’ during the second half of the seventeenth century – a development that transformed English (and subsequently British) government and society – was rooted in the Long Parliament’s creation of a system of executive committees to fund and fight the civil war. Here was a new kind of parliamentary agency, with licence to break free of the constraints that applied to select and grand committees. Given sweeping powers that allowed them to operate outside the common law, executive committees were able to imprison individuals at will, remove disaffected clergymen, sequester and dispose of private property, pay and provision armies and the navy, direct military operations on land and sea, administer crown revenues and estates, oversee affairs in Ireland, gather intelligence from abroad, and to create new colonies across the Atlantic. The executive committees of the Long Parliament enabled the two Houses to supplant the crown as the most powerful governmental institution in the British Isles and, almost as controversially, to tax and spend on a scale that Charles I could barely have conceived of. MPs themselves would come to regard their committees as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘coercive’ and derogatory to the ‘honour of Parliament and the ease and right of the people’. But by the time they tried to curb their over-mighty creations it was too late – executive committees had become an indispensible part of the burgeoning parliamentary state.
Between the meeting of the Long Parliament in November 1640 and the king’s departure from London early in 1642, the English privy council and most other instruments of royal government withered or fell into abeyance. In their place, the Westminster junto was compelled to create a new executive if it were to maintain the political and (by the spring of 1642) military initiative against the king and to manage the two Houses in the face of a substantial bloc of Parliament-men that was anxious to halt the slide towards civil war, if necessary by making major concessions. Effective government would require a huge growth in Parliament’s military and financial capabilities.
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- Information
- The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640-1660 [Volume I]Introductory Survey and Committees, pp. 186 - 213Publisher: Boydell & BrewerFirst published in: 2023