Introduction

Parliament’s leaders ‘have gotten the power in their hands and swallow all matters of moment in Derby House and other private committees of their faction’, observed the civil war’s most astute news-writer, Marchamont Nedham, in 1648. Sitting in the Commons chamber six years earlier, the parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes had made precisely the same complaint and in very similar language. This corruption of parliamentary virtue – as Nedham, D’Ewes and many others saw it – had begun within days of the Long Parliament assembling in 1640 and would revolutionize English government and politics. It was only by adapting and co-opting Parliament’s committee system that Westminster’s new statesmen were able to wrest control of the executive from the crown and defeat the king in the civil war. In turn, parliamentary committees nurtured what Nedham called ‘this monster of the STATE’ in the mid-1640s and were instrumental in its further evolution in 1648-9.

The committee system provided the Commons with the flexibility and delegative capacity needed to cope with the huge expansion in parliamentary business following the collapse of royal government late in 1640. The development of bicameral executive committees (for which, see chapter VII) also enabled Parliament’s leaders, the so-called ‘grandees’, to exercise a degree of control in terms of policy-making and patronage out of all proportion to their number or their following in the two Houses. The grandees and their ‘confident ministers’ came to dominate the more important committees, certainly during the 1640s, and were able to tighten their grip on the levers of parliamentary power accordingly.

The Short and Long Parliaments inherited a set of precedents and procedures regarding committees that had not changed fundamentally since Tudor times. Innovations in the format and modus operandi of committees during the period 1604-29 had largely been confined to the development of committees of the whole House and of standing committees. These new committee types, along with a growth in the average size of ad hoc committees, had been introduced primarily to improve efficiency and to overcome the perennial problem of absenteeism (from the House itself as well as its committees).