ABSTRACT
Parliament in the seventeenth century represented almost exclusively the propertied classes. The House of Lords was composed of the biggest landowners, together with Bishops. Under James I and Charles I the peerage was diluted by the barefaced sale of titles; but this increased rather than reduced the wealth of the Upper House, though it diminished respect for it. We know so much less about the House of Lords than about the Commons in these decades that it is easy to underestimate its significance: contemporaries still regarded it as the more important of the two houses. But the House of Commons also
represented the wealth of the country. A county seat was an eagerly coveted social distinction, and the ninety county members were invariably drawn from the leading landed families below the rank of peer. The county electoral franchise, restricted to men having freehold land worth forty shillings a year, excluded smaller freeholders, copyholders, cottagers, leaseholders, and paupers, who probably formed eighty to ninety per cent of the rural population; and many lesser forty-shilling freeholders, voting by show of hands in open court, Richard Baxter said, ‘ordinarily choose such as their landlords do desire them to choose’. In towns the franchise was more varied: it might be vested in the corporation, in holders of certain properties, in all the freemen, in all ratepayers, or, in one or two cities like Westminster, in all male inhabitants. But in most towns the propertied minority had the decisive voice. By the seventeenth century even a borough seat in the Commons conferred social prestige; more towns were represented by gentlemen than by their own inhabitants. Since gentlemen also represented all the counties. Parliament represented a unified class. The divisions which marked the beginning of the Civil War were not between gentlemen and townsfolk but within the ruling class. Disputed elections were usually not concerned with political issues, but with rivalries for power between local families, though these rivalries might acquire a political flavour as one family attached itself to a court favourite and its rival therefore adopted an opposing standpoint.
