Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Note on the text
- 1 Introduction
- PART 1 FROM ABOLITION TO RESTORATION
- PART 2 MEMBERS AND THE BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
- 3 Membership, attendance and privileges
- 4 Legislation
- 5 Justice
- PART 3 KING, LORDS AND COMMONS
- PART 4 RELIGION
- PART 5 POLITICS
- Appendix 1 Temporal members of the House of Lords
- Appendix 2 The bishops, 1661–1681
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
3 - Membership, attendance and privileges
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Note on the text
- 1 Introduction
- PART 1 FROM ABOLITION TO RESTORATION
- PART 2 MEMBERS AND THE BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
- 3 Membership, attendance and privileges
- 4 Legislation
- 5 Justice
- PART 3 KING, LORDS AND COMMONS
- PART 4 RELIGION
- PART 5 POLITICS
- Appendix 1 Temporal members of the House of Lords
- Appendix 2 The bishops, 1661–1681
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
Summary
In contrast with the House of Commons the restored House of Lords was small and intimate. Total membership in November 1661 was 132, which was less than a third of the size of the Commons. This figure showed little variation until the Second Test Act (1678) excluded all but two of the nineteen Catholics, leaving 147 peers. For the 1,549 sittings of the reign average attendance was 74, about half of those eligible to attend. This figure was substantially surpassed when controversial business came before the House, and sometimes as many as a hundred lords packed into the chamber. When Danby's Test Bill was before the House in the spring session of 1675 average attendance was ninety, and for fourteen of the forty-nine sittings over a hundred lords were recorded as present.
Membership was constantly changing, though less dramatically than either in the House of Commons or as it had done earlier in the century. As a consequence of the first two Stuart monarchs' peerage creations the nobility had more than doubled in size, from 59 peers in 1603 to 142 in 1649. Between 1660 and 1685 membership increased slightly from 145 to 153. This was because the rate of peerage extinctions (there were forty-five during these twenty-five years) was running at its highest level for any similar period in the seventeenth century. Charles II actually created more peers than his grandfather and father, a total of sixty-four between 1649 and 1685.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The House of Lords in the Reign of Charles II , pp. 29 - 49Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996