Speakers and the Speakership: Presiding Officers and the Management of Business from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-first Century / Edition 1

by Paul Seaward

Overview

This volume explores the role of the Speaker and the Lord Chancellor in the Westminster Parliament before the advent of democracy, setting it beside the practice at Dublin and Edinburgh over the same period, and the more recent history of the role at London and Washington.

• First in-depth study since the mid-1960s of how Speakers and the Speakership have operated in Parliament in Britain
• Includes contribution by the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Baroness Boothroyd, describing her own tenure of the Speakership
• Covers practice at Westminster and at Dublin and Edinburgh, and a comparison of Speakers at Westminster and Washington during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• Composed of papers from a conference held at the House of Commons in April 2008

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781444332896
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	02/08/2010
Series:	Parliamentary History Book Series , #4
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.32(d)

About the Author

Paul Seaward has held the position of Director of the History of Parliament Trust since 2001. Previously, he was a Clerk in the House of Commons. He has written on politics, history and political thought in the late seventeenth century and on Parliament in the twentieth century. His publications include The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661-1667 (1989); The Restoration, 1660-1688 (1991); The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (1990: edited with Mark Goldie and Tim Harris); and editions of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (2009) and Hobbes’s History of the English Civil War, Behemoth (2009).

Table of Contents

List of Contributors iv

Introduction Paul Seaward 1

Speakers at War in the Late 14th and 15th Centuries Anne Curry 8

The Tudor Speakers 1485-1601: Choosing, Status, Work Alasdair Hawkyard 22

Chancellors, Presidents and Speakers: Presiding Officers in the Scottish Parliament before the Restoration Alan R. MacDonald 49

Speakers in the 17th-Century Irish Parliament Coleman A. Dennehy 62

The Reputation and Authority of the Speaker and the Speakership of the House of Commons, 1640-60 Stephen K. Roberts 75

The Speaker in the Age of Party, 1672-1715 Paul Seaward 90

The Speakership of the House of Lords, 1660-1832 Ruth Paley 102

Thurlow, Eldon and Lyndhurst and the Management of the House of Lords Richard W. Davis 118

'Nothing Could Exceed the Badness of His Character Even in This Bad Age' Sir William McKay 129

The Role of the Speaker in the 20th Century The Rt Hon Baroness Boothroyd 136

Index 145

Editorial Reviews

Both of these books contribute much to our under-standing of the history and current practice of the Speakership, and to the way in which well-documented parliamentary questions in the UK as well as across Europe can provide a ready source of scholarly investigation..”  (Political Studies Review, 7 August 2013)

From the Publisher