Membership

When writs summoning a Parliament to meet in April 1640 were drawn up in the court of chancery, they were sent to 259 constituencies in England and Wales, and required the election of 493 Members. These were the same numbers that had been summoned to the most recent Parliament which had been dissolved eleven years earlier. In the period 1604-29 the Commons had expanded, initially at the behest of James I, who had added eleven Members from four boroughs and the two universities, and subsequently on the initiative of the Commons itself. By the early 1620s James had become opposed to further expansion, an opinion shared by some Members themselves, who cited limitations of physical space at the Palace of Westminster as a reason to curb any further growth in numbers. Nevertheless, during the Parliaments of the 1620s the Commons increased its membership by pursuing a policy of restoring the franchise to boroughs which were considered to have lost representation during the medieval period. The most senior judges and government law officers failed to find grounds for quashing the Commons’ appeal to history.

In the three-week sitting of the first Parliament of 1640 there was no time for the question of enfranchisement or re-enfranchisement of more boroughs to be considered. The committee of privileges had its work cut out in addressing the irregularities of the recent elections; and a bill against electoral abuses presented in the Commons, had it come to fruition, would not have touched on the possibility of future new constituencies. When the next Parliament met in November, however, the pattern of expanding numbers in the Commons incrementally was quickly resumed. Between November 1640 and February 1641 seven boroughs that once claimed representation in Parliament were re-enfranchised: Malton, Northallerton, Cockermouth, Seaford, Ashburton, Honiton and Okehampton. Although the evidence is fragmentary and largely circumstantial, there is no doubt that at Westminster the initiative for these re-creations of parliamentary boroughs lay with the reforming element in the Commons and their allies in the House of Lords.