The concept of the public man was set forth in Stephen Marshall's great eulogy for John Pym in 1643, and the following year in Milton's Areopagitica. When John Felton assassinated the hated Duke of Buckingham in 1628, he was acclaimed as a public benefactor. To be a “Parliament man” was, in the parlance of the seventeenth century, a compliment to long-serving members versed in the traditions of the institution and serving the general welfare.
Modern historians, notably Richard Cust, have revived this concept in its early modern English context. They have also been interested in defining the public spaces in which the kingdom's business was transacted, and, more broadly, the “public sphere” that constituted the physical, institutional, and ideological arenas of political action per se. Their investigations have been concrete rather than symbolic. They have been concerned to describe the actual circumstances of public action, including such performative acts as laughter, shouting, stamping, hawking, and silence. They have also sought to reconstruct communication networks that linked institutional actors to interested private and corporate parties.
Chris R. Kyle's Theater of State extends this analysis to the Houses of Parliament, with particular focus on the turbulent sessions of the 1620s. The public sphere was a dynamic, not a given, and, as numerous studies of Renaissance monarchy have shown, rulers were continually engaged in both seeking to construct and monopolize it. The former meant conspicuous display, and the latter control—by ritualization, by propaganda, by censorship—of a carefully orchestrated set of events.
Other countries had legislative assemblies, but by the seventeenth century, England's Parliament was virtually alone among the monarchical states of Europe in claiming a coordinate function in the state that required institutional autonomy. This claim was circumscribed by the fact that the summoning, adjourning, and dissolving of parliaments was at the discretion of the monarch (although in 1621 the House of Commons sought to adjourn itself, and in 1629 to briefly delay a dissolution). There was also much dispute about the limits and provenance of “free speech” in Parliament, that is, speech not subject to the command and control of the sovereign. The very insistence on the right of such speech, obviously, bespoke a sphere independent of direct royal authority.
Free speech and other like privileges of Parliament were, broadly, constitutional issues. As Kyle points out, however, actual parliamentary speech was subject to myriad distractions and responses, and members of Parliament were not slow to register their disapproval of the long winded, the impertinent, and the time serving. At the same time, an increasing number of parliamentary diarists strove to record the particulars (rather than merely, as with official clerks, the results) of debate, disseminating them in the form of newsletters and separates to the countryside. The increasing amount of paper generated by, for, and about the two Houses, was as Kyle argues, a measure of the importance of their business and the intense public curiosity about it. Nor was this a one-way communication, as lobbyists bombarded Parliament with petitions on a scale never before seen, or at any rate recorded. These included not only petitions for business but for justice, particularly after the House of Lords took up active judicature in the 1620s.
All of this would seem to betoken a lively and flourishing institution, and so for the most part Kyle describes it. But it was also an embattled and arguably a dysfunctional one. The Crown's chief interest in it was the granting of taxes; these were grudgingly given, and from the royal perspective, inadequate. On the other hand, public business—new laws and the redress of grievances—was increasingly encumbered by procedural and constitutional debate, or buried in an overburdened committee system. The impeachment of public officers, revived in 1621, added to the estrangement of Crown and Parliament, and it too encroached on the dispatch of business. Parliaments that broke up in dispute with the Crown, as most did from 1610 on, resulted in no new laws at all. A legislature that failed to legislate was a dying body, as R. W. K. Hinton argued in a 1957 article that proved influential on a generation of parliamentary historians.
The cycle has turned again, and the picture of Parliament that emerges from Kyle's study is one of a robust institution taking on new functions and responsibilities, and despite (or because of) conflict with the Crown, deeply engaged with a public that eagerly followed its affairs. What is lacking, however, both in this and other works on the discursive practices of the nation's assembly, is a fresh sense of the great issues that had brought the political system to crisis by the late 1620s, and would plunge it into civil war a decade and a half later. It is a little like discussing the scenery and costumes of Hamlet without getting at the script. It is time again for the play.
