In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

47 The House of Commons did not have a permanent meeting place until 1549, when Edward VI granted the knights and burgesses the use of St. Stephen’s Chapel in Westminster. One of the earliest descriptions of the Commons in St. Stephen’s comes to us from John Hooker’s The Order and usage of the keeping of a Parlement in England (1572): the Commons’ chamber, according to Hooker, was “made like a Theater, having foure rowes of seates one aboove an other round about the same. At the higher end in the midle of the lower rowe is a seat made for the Speaker, in which he alwaies sitteth; before it is a table boord, at which sitteth the Clark of the house and there upon [he] layeth his Books, and writeth his recordes” (163). As an MP, Hooker had, of course, seen the Commons’ chamber himself, and the first pictorial representations of the MPs in St. Stephen’s, broadside engravings dating from 1624 (fig. 1) and 1628 (fig. 2), confirm his architectural analogy.1 The engravings, moreover, seem to embrace theatricality as a strategy for representing political representation by staging St. Stephen’s itself: the whole of the chamber and the MPs in intense activity have been thrown open to the viewer’s scrutiny. The Commons we see here, however, is an entirely mythic place, not only because St. Stephen’s was very often nearly empty but also because it was entirely closed to public inspection. Although the MPs figured their new home as a public structure—a place where all matters of public interest could be openly and freely debated and where the people themselves were “deemed personally present” (SR 2:1018), they used St. Stephen’s to secure unprecedented isolation from the public and to maintain secret proceedings.2 1 “An epitome of the whole realme” Absorption and Representation in the Elizabethan and Jacobean House of Commons 48 Hooker’s analogy between a theater and the Commons, then, is remarkably infelicitous . Although St. Stephen’s was constructed like a theater, the House of Commons lacked the definitive feature of theater: it had no room for spectators. The elevated benches were filled entirely with performers, and where the stage and parterre should have been, there was a void.The closest the public ever came to seeing the inside of St. Stephen’s was as an audience to representations of the Commons. The fate of those few members of the public who surreptitiously entered St. Stephen’s during parliamentary sessions tells us volumes about the relationship the MPs sought to create between themselves and the people they represented . Consider, for example, a lurid scene from the House of Commons’ session of November 28, 1584. The day, to be sure, got off to a stirring start: Sir Walter Mildmay, chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir Christopher Hatton, vice-chamberlain of the Household, made long, impressive speeches about the mortal threat that both foreign and domestic enemies posed to Elizabeth and England. In his diary, William Fleetwood, the recorder of London, allows that these speeches made even his very experienced ears tingle: “Befor this tyme I never herd in Parliament the lyke matters uttered. . . . They were magnalia regni” (PPE 2:66). When the MPs rose for their noon recess, they were deeply disturbed to discover an intruder in their midst: One being no Member of this House, being found to have sit here this present day by the space of two hours, during the whole time of the Speeches delivered by Mr. Chancellor and Mr Vicechamberlain, as aforesaid, did upon Examination confess his name to be Richard Robinson, and that he was by occupation a Skinner, and dwelt at the Harts Horns in Gracious-street London , the house of one Mark Fryer a Skinner also his Father-in-law: Whereupon himself having been stripped to his shirt, and his pockets all searched, the Custody and further Examination of him was by this House referred to Mr. Recorder of London, Mr. Topcliffe, Mr. Beale, and another. (D’Ewes 334; cf. PPE 2:66) The MPs were understandably nervous in the fall of 1584: in 1583, several plots against Elizabeth had been thwarted; in July, William of Orange had been assassinated ; relations with Spain had collapsed over the Throckmorton plot; and always there was the terror inspired by Mary, Queen of Scots. But can the MPs really have supposed that Robinson was an assassin? Elizabeth, after all, never set foot in St...

Share