‘Formed divisions’: politics and party, 1640-8

The clash of parties was a prominent theme in contemporary accounts of parliamentary proceedings in the mid-seventeenth century. Sir Simonds D’Ewes* felt compelled to persist with his parliamentary diary – as he confided to it in mid-1643 – ‘to transmit not only the story but the very secret workings and machinations of each party as well of the two Houses of Parliament, chiefly led and guided by some few Members of either House’. This factional interpretation took hold in the early 1640s: by 1647 and the publication of Clement Walker’s* The Mysterie of the Two Juntos, Presbyterian and Independent, the importance of party as a determinant of parliamentary behaviour had gained wide acceptance. Writing in response to Walker, the civil war poetaster George Wither was ‘certain that there was not one of them [MPs] in the House but professed himself either a Presbyterian or Independent, though some in a more rigid, others in a more moderate, way’.

Historians of Parliament in the 1640s and 1650s have generally followed Walker’s lead, often focusing on the rivalry between parties as a key to unlocking the ‘secret workings’ of the Houses. Recent work on the establishment of the Committee of Both Kingdoms in 1644 and the new-modelling of Parliament’s armies in 1644-5 has employed this approach to particularly profitable effect. Although the two-party structure that Walker anatomized did not survive the revolutionary events at Westminster of 1648-9, it is clear that distinct and organized parliamentary groupings played a major role in shaping politics and government policy during the interregnum.

The Parliaments of the 1640s and 1650s have long been recognized as forcing-houses in the develop-ment of political parties both at Westminster itself and in the country generally. Looking back on the ‘most great and unusual changes and revolutions’ of the 1640s and 1650s, Sir Henry Vane II* foregrounded ‘the disjointing [of] that parliamentary assembly among themselves’ and the subsequent emergence of ‘formed divisions among the people’. Of course, Parliaments before the 1640s had not been immune to partisan politics and factional ‘disjointing’.