“They told me all would be well once my Lord of Strafford's head was off,” Lady Rivers recalled as the storm clouds of civil war gathered over England. But all was not well. Strafford's execution in May 1641 achieved little more than an increase of the divisions among the members of the Long Parliament. The ensuing summer was one of long nights and short tempers as the Parliamentarians struggled with the repercussions of the army plots, the terms for the Scottish pacification, and the composition of the Grand Remonstrance. Every debate was fraught with tension as those who thought that things had gone too far were challenged by those who thought that they had not yet gone far enough. In London, root and branchers clamored for an ecclesiastical revolution that by its very nature would be a constitutional revolution as well, for the abolition of episcopacy would necessarily change the composition of the House of Lords. In Scotland, leaders of the kirk demanded a union of churches along the controverted lines of Scots presbyterianism. In Whitehall, the king discovered that he was not without allies as the deterioration of the political situation increasingly frightened men of substance. His announcement that he intended to travel to Edinburgh to conclude a treaty with the Scots did little to calm anyone's nerves. Friends feared assassination, foes that sight of the king would rekindle loyalties that the first stage of the crisis had nearly extinguished.
The fifth and sixth volumes of Proceedings of the Opening Session of the Long Parliament bring us intimately into this world of parliamentary politics as the House of Commons continued its daily meetings and debates. They cover a period of two months from 7 June to 9 September 1641, a time centrally focused on the resolution of the Scottish rebellion. Like the previously published four installments—and modeled on the earlier productions of the Yale Center for Parliamentary History—these volumes present transcriptions of surviving parliamentary diaries in a day-to-day account of events in the House of Commons. The editors have constructed an order of business for every session, listing the activities reported either in the Commons Journal or in any of the diaries. This order provides not only official activities but also a list of those who were recorded as speaking in debate. Thus one can follow individuals and subjects through multiple sources and compare or contrast their contributions or developments. Most helpful, the order of business keeps track of earlier emanations of ongoing issues. For example, the debate over “the committee for the bill of St. Andrews Holborne” (5:229) that took place on 19 June is helpfully cross-referenced both to 1 June, when it was first proposed, and then to 17 June, when discussion of dividing the parish had resumed. This cross-referencing serves not only as a temporary index (the final volume including the full index is not yet in press) but also as a place marker for the progress of individual parliamentary decisions.
The crux of the volumes is, of course, the diaries kept by individual members. The most important of these is that of Sir Symonds D’Ewes, the Suffolk antiquarian who kept a diary in the hope of writing a history. While the decision to reprint D’Ewes's diary in earlier volumes of this series was controversial, there can be no issue here, for this period coincides with the famous “gap” in the publication of this seminal source. D’Ewes's is by far the most substantial of the diaries that survive for this period, frequently containing as much material as the other diaries combined. By the middle of August 1641 his is one of only two records to survive, the other being the brief jottings known as Harleian Manuscript 5047. As D’Ewes and John Moore, the author of the other important diary, often collaborated in their journal keeping, exchanging notes and covering for each other's absences, there is a high degree of correlation among the surviving sources.
Despite a lifetime of working on these materials, Maija Jansson has been spare in her introductions and commentary. There is much praise of the Yale Center, much nostalgia for its early supporters—volume 5 is dedicated to Mary Keeler and volume 6 to Kingman Brewster—but little reflection upon the materials, their uses, or their presentation. To take the most obvious example, the editor observes laconically that it is natural that D’Ewes records himself speaking more frequently than do any of the other diarists. In fact, D’Ewes records himself speaking hundreds of times more often than do the other diarists, leading to an obvious question. It is well known that the diarists privileged frequent speakers whose presence in the House was recognized. Had D’Ewes delivered as many speeches as he records himself giving it would naturally follow that he would be a key figure in the records of others. But subsequent speakers rarely, if ever, refer to the interventions he records himself making on critical issues. It is therefore extremely unlikely that D’Ewes delivered most of the speeches he inserts in his text. It would have been valuable to have had some analysis of the reliability of D’Ewes as a diarist, especially given J. S. Morrill's strictures on the use of these materials in general.
Nearly three decades ago G. R. Elton complained so vehemently about the exclusion of the House of Lords from the project that the oversight was rectified by addendum volumes for the Parliaments of 1626 and 1628. Here the decision to exclude the Lords is justified on grounds of cost and expediency, but the effect is exactly the same that Elton bemoaned. It artificially separates a political and constitutional process that was unified in fact and makes it much more difficult to study Parliament as an institution. All legislation in the opening session of the Long Parliament had to pass through both houses, and the day-to-day interaction of the houses is a critical component in understanding even the dynamics of the House of Commons. This shortcoming cannot be rectified by a separate volume, however welcome it will be subsequently to have the Lords materials.
Finally, in light of the possibility of further publication of the debates of the Long Parliament, the issue of format must be raised. Such a marvelous project always leaves churlish scholars wishing for more, especially when more is easily within reach. These and their companions are handsome volumes, meticulously edited and finely produced. They would grace any bookshelf and are reasonably priced for what they contain and represent. One can only applaud the Yale Center and its financial backers for the massive subventions that have allowed them to make available these models of scholarship. But wouldn’t they be of infinitely greater use if they had been published electronically? Having full search features for all of the debates and ultimately being able to integrate the proceedings in the House of Lords would greatly enhance the value of this project and its companions. It is hardly likely that there will be so many individual sales of these volumes that bound books are preferable to CD-ROM, while library access to electronic resources would eliminate the need for multiple copies if these sources were to be used in teaching. One wonders if the Yale Center has preserved the disks from which these volumes have surely been printed and if they are available to scholars for purposes of searching the manuscript. One hopes that the proceedings of the remainder of the Long Parliament will take advantage of these advances in technology.
