The Parliamentary Proceedings of 1624

The 1624 Parliament remains one of the most puzzling and controversial of all the early Stuart Parliaments. The most harmonious of all the early Stuart assemblies, it fits rather awkwardly into the accepted scholarly framework, which views the period between 1604 and 1629 as one of steady and marked deterioration in relations between the king and the Commons. Its burst of legislative activity has helped to inspire important recent research, moving political history into new realms, exploring the connections between Parliament and the public in Stuart England ? for example on the relationship between parliamentary politics and petitioners and the publication and circulation of news.

Moving forward our understanding of this Parliament, however, has been hampered by the lack of a good edition of its proceedings. For all of the other Parliaments of the early seventeenth century, the scattered evidence has been brought together and edited by the Yale Center for Parliamentary History, a project which dates back to the 1920s and one of the great historians of the pre-Revolution English Parliament, Wallace Notestein. The proceedings of the 1624 Parliament, uniquely, remained unpublished when the Yale Center was closed in 2007, leaving a gaping hole in the material readily available and accessible for this critical year in the history of Parliament.

The History of Parliament Trust agreed to become the repository of the 1624 material collected by the Yale Center, and a ?97,000 grant from the Leverhulme will now enable it to employ research staff to complete the project, under the supervision of the team which has recently published The House of Commons, 1604-29, and is now working on the House of Lords over the same time. The 1624 proceedings will be published online as well as in print, and, with the biographies we have already published and other online resources, will begin to offer the prospect of a connected set of resources which will enable scholars to dig more deeply and more easily than ever before into the vexed politics of the early Stuarts.

The project will begin at the beginning of January 2012. Philip Baker has been appointed to review the material collected by the Yale Center, and prepare the edition using the methods and principles established by the Yale Center under the immediate supervision of Andrew Thrush and the staff of the 1603-1660 House of Lords project. We are planning to use the ReScript tool, under development at the Institute of Historical Research, as a Virtual Research and Editing environment for the project.