Method

These volumes of the History of Parliament contain biographies of 1,803 Members who sat in the House of Commons between the opening of Charles I’s fourth Parliament in April 1640 and the dissolution of the restored Long Parliament in March 1660. After the abolition of the House of Lords by a parliamentary act of March 1649, the Commons sat under various dispensations as a unicameral Parliament. A second chamber, the Other House of the Cromwellian protectorate, was brought into being by the Humble Petition and Advice of 1657. Of those who were summoned to it and attended, all but two had been Members of the Commons or of the unicameral Parliament at some point from April 1640, so their biographies appear in these volumes by virtue of that service. Biographies of the remaining two individuals are included in an appendix in volume IX; a second appendix contains another two individuals whose cases are anomalous but judged worthy of inclusion.

There are also 329 articles providing accounts of the constituencies. Most of these are the constituencies familiar to readers of the History’s volumes covering 1604-29, but there are also constituencies brought into being during the novel constitutional changes between 1649 and 1660. Each article provides details of the electoral fortunes of the place, together with the political, social and economic background and where appropriate the basis of the constituency’s creation. Each constituency article is a self-contained unit of writing, though each can be read in conjunction with the biographies of Members who represented the place in the House. A unique anomaly in this period is the Parliament of 1653, which was an assembly whose Members were summoned by the invitation of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, not by the usual electoral process. When this body assembled, it declared itself a Parliament, and has been treated as such in these volumes. As Members were summoned to represent constituencies, their appointments have been listed in constituency articles as if they had been elected in the usual way.

The Introductory Survey draws mainly on the biographies and constituencies to identify some but by no means all of the major points to emerge from the biographies and constituency articles.