King Henry I, for most of his reign, exercised unrivaled authority over the English church. Following the Concordat of London in 1107 which formally ended his bitter dispute with Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, Henry reestablished effective control over the ecclesiastical affairs of England. During the remaining twenty-eight years of his rule, he assiduously cultivated and generally sustained friendly relations with the papacy while maintaining royal control over the internal matters of the English church.

There is, however, a dramatic exception to this picture of royal primacy. In 1125, the papal legate, Cardinal John of Crema, made a spectacular tour of England. During his six-months stay, John exercised greater authority than any other papal legate sent to England during the reign of Henry I. As Austin Lane Poole observes, of the nine legates dispatched between 1100 and 1135, “one only—John of Crema in 1125—was permitted to preside over a church synod or to exercise any legatine authority.” To underscore the unprecedented nature of this visit, neither of Henry's predecessors, William the Conqueror and William Rufus, had allowed a foreign legate to exert such power within England.

This paper will examine the events leading up to the legatine mission of 1125 and attempt to explain why Henry sanctioned this rare exhibition of papal authority within his kingdom.

“Resolved by the majority that the Bill of Attainder against the Earl of Strafford should pass as a law.” Thus, on May 7, 1641, the House of Lords enacted that Thomas, Earl of Strafford, should “undergo the pains and forfeitures of high treason by law.”

The passage of the Bill of Attainder against Strafford has subsequently engendered one of the perennial controversies of English political and legal history. On one side of the issue, it is claimed that the answer of the judges and the decision of the Lords were warranted by generally-accepted doctrines of law and constitutional theory. The other side claims that the charges against Strafford had no basis in statute or common law, that the abandonment of the impeachment proves the weakness of the case against the accused, and that in going by way of the Bill, the Commons “slaughtered a man they could not convict.”

Resolution of the controversy over Strafford's case has been hampered by a lack of historical data because at the restoration Charles II ordered all proceedings of the trial to be stricken from the Journals of the House of Lords. The Journal Manuscripts were rendered almost totally unreadable and, as a result, the official record of the trial has been missing for over three hundred years. Until recently, Rushworth has been the main source for histories of the Strafford trial. However, the usefulness of Rushworth has been marred by many lapses and errors, the most significant being that he was absent for several days at the climax of the trial. Consequently, the conclusion of the trial, the proceedings of which would help to resolve the legal controversy, has been reconstructed from fragmentary sources.

On January 4, 1642, Charles I's ill-starred attempt to reassert his authority over Parliament led to the unsuccessful attempt to arrest five of the leading members of the parliamentary opposition on charges of high treason. Three of the men, John Pym, John Hampden, and Denzil Holles, were prominent members of the opposition party, well known to their contemporaries and posterity. The remaining two members, Sir Arthur Hesilrige and William Strode, were less well known to their contemporaries and by and large forgotten by later generations. The Earl of Clarendon quite easily dismissed them as minor figures when he came to write his great history.

Thus were Hesilrige and Strode consigned to the dustbin of history. In Hesilrige's case such treatment did not accord with all the facts as recorded by Clarendon, nor apparently did it coincide with the opinion Charles I held of Hesilrige. The Earl, by his own account of events, leaves little doubt that Hesilrige was capable of doing great mischief although he always preferred to see the knight as the instrument of other men's designs. As for the King, who was fighting to save his ancestral throne, Hesilrige must have appeared as the bitterest of enemies, and it was with good reason that Charles included Hesilrige among the five members.

Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the origins of political parties in England during the reign of King Charles II. Yet the fact that a prominent courtier and member of the king's own family, Prince Rupert, was also a leader of the opposition or “country” party has frequently been overlooked by historians. J. R. Jones, for example, in The First Whigs, fails to mention the prince, and even Rupert's biographer, Eliot Warburton, has dismissed the last decade in his subject's life by saying that, after 1673, the ailing prince was too ill to play a role in English government.

But Prince Rupert was, in fact, very active politically in the two decades following the Restoration. He sat in the House of Lords as duke of Cumberland and served on parliamentary committees. He had a seat on the Privy Council and was a member of all four of its standing committees. Rupert was often selected to serve the crown: as special emissary to his friend, Emperor Leopold I, in 1661 with the task of preventing an Anglo-imperial rupture over the marriage of King Charles to a Portuguese princess; as England's representative in negotiations with Denmark in 1669 and Brandenburg in 1670; as joint admiral of the fleet during the second Anglo-Dutch War, and de facto commander of the fleet during the third conflict with the United Provinces. Although the prince became openly critical of the royal government as early as 1667 and, by 1673, had allied with Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury, to form an opposition group, the future country or Whig party, he also retained many ties with the court.

The most recent biography of Lord Durham begins with a comparison between the affection felt by the people of his county for Squire Lambton, and the lack of attention paid by the nation to the co-author of the first Reform Act and the author of the Durham Report. A neo-Grecian temple, built by the Freemasons of county Durham, overlooking his seat at Chester-Le-Street is visible for miles, and provides a stark contrast to the London town house at 13 Cleveland Row, which lacks even the familiar blue plaque to serve as a reminder that Radical Jack once lived there. The illustration is apt. Traditional deference paid by a county to a “friend of the people” who made his mark in the larger world accounts perhaps for the existence of the temple; less easily explained is his failure to earn that respect usually accorded a public figure of his significance, and it is curious, at first glance, that a man of his abilities and achievements should be regarded as an outcast by his own government. Yet the fact remains that for most of the 1830's, Durham was regarded as little more than a nuisance by his colleagues, who, following the passage of the Reform Bill, entrusted him to no position of authority in England.