‘Our Masters the Commons Begin Now to Roar’: Parliament in Scribal Verse, 1621–81*

Abstract

Scribal verse was an important source of news and comment about parliament in 17th-century Britain, especially in the 1620s and 1660s–80s. Unlike other forms of scribal news, poems that circulated in manuscript did not report on parliamentary proceedings as such, but either summarised parliamentary news or provided comment on parliament's actions, nature or wider purpose, and typically presented parliament as a unitary agent that expressed a single voice. Scribal verse overwhelmingly disseminated a view of parliament as an agent of oppositional/‘country’ politics in a polarised, partisan political landscape. In the 1620s, poems represented parliament in conflict with court figures such as Francis Bacon, Viscount St Alban, and George Villiers, duke of Buckingham. Most took an oppositional perspective, praising parliament as a virtuous, corruption-fighting body, while some loyalist/‘court’ poems depicted it as the multitude's dangerous tool. Under Charles II, oppositional poems tended to emphasise that parliament was thwarted from its rightful oppositional role by threatened prorogation and corruption by the court, while loyalist poems discredited parliament with the memory of its revolutionary mid-century predecessors. Evidence about readers, such as the clergyman John Rous in the 1620s and the student Peter Le Neve in the 1670s, indicates that poems were consumed as part of wider bundles of news media. Some poems were themselves embedded within parliamentary culture, being written by members of parliament such as Andrew Marvell and read by others such as Sir William Haward.