ABSTRACT
In his study of The Evolution of Parliament, published in 1920, A.F. Pollard identified the consolidation of the House of Commons as the most important development in the parliamentary history of the sixteenth century. It acquired a corporate consciousness, superseded the Lords, and became the focus of parliamentary activity. His pupil and successor, Sir John Neale, elaborated upon this theme, detected a growing, Commons-based opposition to royal authority and postulated the thesis that the origins of the English Civil War were to be found in the Elizabethan parliaments. Thus there was created a coherent, consistent and well-rounded picture of a rising Parliament and, within it, a politically maturing House of Commons which was becoming more disposed and able to criticise, oppose and challenge the Crown. This thesis had a seductive quality because it was consistent with events during the forty years after Elizabeth's death – or at least with the views of early Stuart historians who wrote at the same time as Pollard and Neale. In contrast, the well-established interpretation which they overthrew was certainly not in harmony with either pre-or post-Tudor developments. It can be summarised briefly. The long-term rise of Parliament was interrupted when fifteenth-century Lancastrian constitutionalism gave way to the strong ‘New Monarchy’ of the Yorkists and Henry VII. Sixteenth-century government was characterised by submissive parliaments and autocratic Tudor rulers. In 1603 this lengthy aberration ended and Parliament resumed its upward progress which culminated in the neutralisation of the monarchy, the political castration of the Lords, adult suffrage and the Commons’ supremacy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
