This may be too broad of a question but can anyone explain Parliament in the mid 16th century. How many members were there, how were they chosen, did they have any real conflicts with the reigning monarch, was there a real leader in Parliament or did that come in the Georgian age?
Henry VIII broke away from Rome and founded the Church of England, plus a couple of messy divorces and the usual diplomatic stuff. There’d be plenty of political conflicts.
The problem was too that for a long time, the distribution of members was not regularly adjusted. Even as late as 1800’s there were “rotten boroughs” where the member of parliament allocated a millennia or so ago now served a few constituents, so anyone who provided enough money to those “voters” could buy their way into parliament. Old Salem, if you’ve ever seen it, is simply a circular ruin with the outline of a cathedral, abandoned back around 1300 when most of the people moved to Salisbury… yet it apparently sent a member to parliament based on its ancient population base. Meanwhile, bustling new industrial towns in the early 1800’s had minimal or no representation. Plus, IIRC, landowning was a criteria for voting; so the members tended to represent the wealthier lower (middle) class.
IANAHistorian, don’t know much about that period, but a lot of the current government titles appear to have evolved from the roles of the King’s inner circle (“privy council”). Some were the King’s hires or clergy, some were nobles (House of Lords) and some no doubt from the leaders of the House of Commons. By the early 1600’s, James (I of England and VI of Scotland) was already butting heads with parliament over taxes. A tax was not legal unless parliament approved it; so presumably in the better times earlier there had been some quid-pro-quo horse trading, threatening, and bribing for the King (or Queen) to get what they wanted. We tend to think of the monarchs of olden times as absolute dictators (much like the dictators of today) but in either case, it is in fact a balancing game - ignore and threaten too much, and your enemies list will gain enough critical mass to do you in. IIRC, the monarch in England also had a concern not to let any of his immediate subordinates get too powerful, so having the commoners on his side was occasionally beneficial.
I’m not terribly well versed on the Tudor parliaments, but from what I have read, it was largely a vehicle for the Tudors to dress their policies in popular legitimacy. It wasn’t a complete cipher, and could push back, but mostly parliamentarians adhered to the desires of their monarch.
One of the reasons for this was that Parliament was gradually evolving from an event into an actual institution. Following the Wars of the Roses the county was relieved to have stable government and peace for a spell, and many potential political adversaries had been eliminated in that war and later, driven out or suppressed by the Reformation.
Nationalism was in a very infant stage and my understanding is that manny commoners found being an MP and inconvenience and a hassle, given the travel complications, and many Parliaments back then met for at most a few weeks before packing up again. And these meetings happened at most once a year.
So Parliament was meeting too infrequently to really build up a distinctive institutional identity and set of desires different from the monarch.
This would change, however. First, the victory for Henry VII in the Wars of the Roses put much of the old aristocracy thoroughly under the King’s control, making baronial revolts much, much more difficult to pull off in future. That meant that Lords would gradually see Parliament as an ideal means of resisting an overbearing King without exposing themselves too much to the King’s wrath. And with the Reformation, the monarchy became dependent upon the legitimacy that Parliament could bestow to enact their religious changes and unite a country divided by religious differences. This meant more frequent parliaments and a revival of interest in the institution.
So while Henry VIII could get away with almost anything in his parliaments, Elizabeth enjoyed widespread support in her own parliaments but occasionally had to rebuff it (for example, over her getting married), and James I was so furious with the Commons interfering in foreign policy he tore pages out of the House Journal. So by the time Charles I was King, Parliament became a pain in the arse.
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As for leaders in Parliament, not really. Speakers of the Commons were meant to be the King’s creatures and ensure the King’s business was prioritised, although famously Thomas Moore told Cardinal Wolsey to fuck off once over taxation.
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Parliament were pretty compliant during all those political upheavals, and pretty much rubber stamped whatever was put in front of them.
They only got bolshie earlier in his reign when he came to them asking for huge piles of money for his unsuccessful French campaigns.
It’s all very gradual. James VI and I met resistance he couldn’t overcome in both English and Scottish parliaments to his plan to unite them. By Charles I’s time, Parliament’s resistance to him can be seen as conservative - they insisted they were upholding established Parliamentary practices and principles from Elizabeth’s time (just as the Civil Wars erupted from Scottish resistance to his radical plans to Anglicanise the liturgy of the Scottish church).
Shouldn’t that rather be a pain in the neck?
It’s called Old Sarum.
This was a big enough problem still centuries later that when the American colonies broke free, they wrote it into the Constitution (Article I Section 2) – a requirement for a decennial census & reapportionment of representation.
Had the UK done so on a regular basis, it’s possible they wouldn’t have lost all their colonies. Certainly would have nullified one of our Revolutionary slogans “No Taxation without Representation!”