House of Commons of England

• 1. Introduction

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  The House of Commons of England spent more than three centuries evolving from a body of near-powerless representatives into a chamber capable of beheading a king. It began as an afterthought, a gathering of knights and town burgesses summoned mainly to approve taxes. It ended, in 1707, as the foundation upon which the Parliament of Great Britain was built. How did a room full of men who once feared their towns would be stripped of representation ever come to stage the only military coup in English history? What drove them from subservience to sovereignty? And what does the arc of that journey reveal about the relationship between money, war, and political power?

• 2. A Council Learns to Bargain

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  Simon de Montfort summoned the first Parliament to include representatives of the major towns in 1265, during the Second Barons’ War, using it to consolidate his position after his victory at the Battle of Lewes. It was a tactical move, not a democratic gesture. But the practice proved popular enough that Edward I made it permanent when he called the Model Parliament of 1295. From that point, each county sent two knights of the shire and each borough sent two burgesses.

  The burgesses began almost entirely without power. Monarchs could enfranchise or disfranchise boroughs at pleasure, which meant any display of independence could cost a town its place in Parliament. Knights of the shire stood on firmer ground, though they too ranked below the nobles and clergy who dominated what was still a single-chamber assembly. The whole body existed primarily to approve taxes the Crown proposed. Its leverage came from one recurring dynamic: before voting on taxation, the council often demanded that the people’s grievances be addressed first. That habit of linking money to redress was the original engine of legislative power.

• 3. The Speaker and the Purge

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  In 1341, during the reign of Edward III, the Commons met separately from the nobility and clergy for the first time. Knights and burgesses sat together in what became the Lower Chamber; clergy and nobles formed what became the House of Lords. The split created the two-house structure that would persist for centuries.

  The Good Parliament of 1376 sharpened what the Commons could do. Facing heavy taxes and frustration with royal mismanagement of military affairs, the Commons appointed Peter de la Mare to carry their complaints to the Lords, to demand an accounting of royal expenditures, and to impeach several of the King’s ministers. Mare was imprisoned for his boldness. But the value of having a single voice for the Commons was clear enough that the office eventually became known as the Speaker of the House of Commons. Mare was released after Edward III died, and in 1377 he became the second speaker of the body he had helped define.

  Under Richard II, the Commons pressed further, insisting they could control not just taxation but public expenditures. The gains were real, though the Lords and the Crown still dwarfed the Commons in authority. The civil wars of the late fifteenth century then shifted the balance in an unexpected direction: they devastated the great noble families, which reduced the Lords’ power but also restored the absolute supremacy of the Crown.

• 4. Tudor Dominance, Stuart Collision

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  Henry VII grew fiscally independent of Parliament, and under the House of Tudor the monarch’s dominance deepened. Henry VIII pushed the relationship further in a different direction. After Cardinal Wolsey failed to secure a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Henry convened the Reformation Parliament, which sat from 1529 to 1536 and passed laws touching every aspect of national life, with particular force on religious matters that had previously been the church’s exclusive domain. Parliament acted at the King’s direction, guided by his leading minister Thomas Cromwell, but in doing so it was acquiring the legal competence and responsibility for the full range of matters affecting the realm.

  When James I took the English throne in 1603 as the first Stuart monarch, the question of how the Crown would fund itself returned as the central point of tension. James I and his son Charles I both provoked conflicts with the Commons over taxation, religion, and the extent of royal powers. The differences with Charles I proved irreconcilable. They ended in the English Civil War, which the parliamentary forces won.

• 5. Coup, Execution, Restoration

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  In December 1648, the New Model Army - which was supposed to answer to Parliament - turned on its masters. Pride’s Purge, as it became known, was the only military coup in English history. The army removed members it found unacceptable, leaving a small remnant that critics called the Rump Parliament: a body made up only of MPs the army had approved, some of them soldiers themselves. The surviving unicameral assembly proceeded to abolish the House of Lords.

  Charles I was beheaded. In 1653, when figures within the Rump Parliament began to conflict with the army’s leadership, Oliver Cromwell dissolved it. The Commons had, in the span of a few years, participated in the execution of a king and then been itself swept aside.

  The monarchy and the House of Lords were both restored in 1660, alongside the Commons. But the Crown that returned held less power than the one that had fallen. That erosion continued in 1688 when James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution, and in 1689 when the Bill of Rights was enacted, placing formal constraints on royal authority that had not existed before.

• 6. Calais, Tournai, and the Edges of Empire

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  Not every constituency in the House of Commons was in England or Wales. Two European cities held borough seats while they were English possessions. Calais was represented between 1372 and 1558, across nearly two centuries of English control. Tournai, which now sits in Belgium, held a seat between 1513 and 1519 during a shorter period of English rule. Both cities were originally annexed from the Kingdom of France and eventually ceded back to it. Their presence in the Commons is a reminder that the House was never purely an island institution; the edges of English territorial ambition found their way into the chamber.

  The House of Commons of England came to an end in 1707, when the Act of Union passed in both the English and Scottish parliaments, replacing it with the House of Commons of Great Britain. That body was itself later replaced, in 1801, when the union of Great Britain and Ireland created the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. Tournai’s brief six-year membership, representing a city on the European continent, sits at an odd angle to a constitutional story that would eventually lead to Westminster becoming the model for representative assemblies across the world.