The History of Parliament Projects

The Wedgwood Archive

Among the History’s papers is the material collected by its founder, Col. Josiah Wedgwood MP, towards the project during the late 1920s and 1930s.  It includes the remarkable questionnaires which were eventually sent in the period 1936-38 to living Members and former Members who had been in the House between 1885 and 1918.  Wedgwood himself explained their purpose within the context of the project as a whole in the preamble to the questionnaires:

‘It has been suggested that it would be desirable for living Members or ex-Members of Parliament to assist in the compilation of their own biographies.  Below are questions which ought to be dealt with.  It would be useful to have answers to these from our predecessors and contemporaries; they will inform and guide our contemporaries in this and other lands.  No biographer, only the man himself, can answer these questions.’

A large number of the questionnaires were filled in, or responded to in other ways, by Members and their relatives, and on the basis of them, Wedgwood wrote many short biographies, which were sent for correction to their subjects.  The project was never completed, largely because of the war, and Wedgwood’s death in 1943.  The papers, however, have been kept by the History, and now Priscilla Baines, the former Librarian of the House of Commons, is working with us on conserving and listing them, and devising a strategy for their publication.

British History Online

The History is a partner, with the Institute of Historical Research and its various research centres – the Victoria County History and the Centre for Metropolitan History – in a project, called British History Online, to create a digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles.  British History Online now includes important parliamentary and political sources: the Journals of the House of Commons to 1699, and of the House of Lords to 1717; parliamentary diaries and journals relating to the Elizabethan, Cromwellian and Restoration periods; and some of the standard collections of parliamentary debates for the eighteenth century.
British History online

Religion and Rebellion: the Carte papers at the Bodleian Library

A partnership between the Bodleian Library and the History of Parliament has resulted in the creation of a digital version of the nineteenth-century calendar of the Carte papers in the Library.  The Carte papers in the Bodleian Library comprise vast collections of original papers from various sources which Thomas Carte amassed in preparation for the publication of his biography of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, in 1735-6. There are 276 large volumes, comprising Ormond, Fitzwilliam, Chichester, Sandwich, Wharton, Huntingdon and Nairn papers largely relating to the history of Britain and Ireland in the period 1560-1715. Funding was secured from the Heritage Lottery Fund to keyboard all the calendar entries for the period 1660-87. This is unlocking the untapped riches of the Carte collection by producing an electronic version of the calendar available to all over the internet. This period includes a great deal of important material for the study of Restoration Ireland, but also includes two further collections of papers acquired by Carte: the papers of Edward Montagu (1625-72), 1st Earl of Sandwich, admiral and envoy to Spain; and some of the papers of Philip Wharton (1613-96) 4th Baron Wharton, and his son Thomas Wharton (1648-1716), 1st Marquess of Wharton.
The calendar can be accessed by clicking here.