PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY

Part 2: The Braye Manuscripts from the House of Lords Record Office

REVIEW ESSAY BY PROFESSOR JEREMY BLACK,

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

The House of Lords is today heading for extinction in its current form.  The notion of a hereditary peerage appears anachronistic in Tony Blair’s Britain.  However, even before that successive restrictions have greatly limited the constitutional and political role of the House of Lords.  A microfilm collection centred on its current activities would be of limited interest.

Such is not the case with the Braye Manuscripts, because the Lords were at the centre of the political world in the seventeenth century.  However, their subsequent decline has ensured that they have rarely received sufficient attention.  As a result, the appearance of the Braye Collection in microfilm is greatly welcome and Adam Matthew Publications is to be congratulated on its appearance.  This is indeed the second part of their Parliamentary History series.  The first part, devoted to the manuscript minutes, committee books and voting records of the Lords from 1620 to 1714 has already appeared (36 reels).

The appearance of the Braye microfilm is particularly welcome because the collection has not been in the public domain for long.  The papers, accumulated by John Brown, Clerk of the Parliaments 1638-91, are the most important collection of seventeenth-century parliamentary records to have passed into private hands.  After Browne’s death, the papers were moved to Stanford Hall, the home of the Cave family, which eventually succeeded to the Barony of Braye.  Many of the papers were listed by Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte in the 10th Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission which was published in 1887.

In 1947 the 6th Lord Braye began to sell the manuscripts, a process which continued until 1987.  Over a period of forty years, the House of Lords Record Office managed to purchase the bulk of the manuscripts and to obtain photographs of most of those which passed into other hands.  In the course of acquiring the manuscripts, the Record Office issued a number of lists of the purchases and photographic copies.

The purchase in 1987 of, what would appear to be, the remainder of the Braye Manuscripts of Parliamentary interest, encouraged the publication of a consolidated handlist of the manuscripts:  H.S. Cobb’s A Handlist of the Braye Manuscripts in the House of Lords Record Office (House of Lords Record Office Occasional Publications, No.4. HMSO. 1993).  The opportunity was taken to revise and amplify certain of the entries, with references to published texts, if any, and to provide an introduction describing the methods of record-keeping of John Browne and his predecessors and the archival history of the manuscripts.  This most useful descriptive listing is used for the guide provided with the microfilms.

The Adam Matthew Collection includes all the 105 volumes described in the Cobb Handlist.  The project encompasses all the Braye papers held in the Osborn collection at the Beinecke Library at Yale.

The material includes early diaries, draft journals, lists of Private Acts, petitions and state papers.  Manuscripts of particular significance include:  House of Commons Diaries, 1593-1601; Scribbled Books of Proceedings, 1609-10; Draft Journals of the House of Lords, 1620-8, 1660-90; and Scribbled Books of their Proceedings, 1640-2.  In more detail, this further includes, for example, the proceedings against Strafford and Laud in 1641-4, including Strafford’s autograph petition and a contemporary manuscript version of his trial and the original record of Laud’s trials; the Resolutions concerning Ship Money in 1640-1; and material on the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis.

The organization of the material is good and I would recommend it for all institutions teaching postgraduate courses on the period.

Professor Jeremy Black,

Department of History

University of Exeter.