Proceedings in Parliament 1614 (House of Commons): Memoirs, American Philosophical Society (Vol. 172)

An edition of the extant manuscripts of proceedings in the Lower House of the English parliament of 1614, prefaced by a critical introduction to the texts and a description of source materials. The vol. includes 8 appendixes, one of which is a list of returns that reveals the full membership of the House of Commons in 1614. Until recently historians believed that apart from the official Journal of the House of Commons no complete account of the 1614 assembly survived. Immediately after the close of the session 4 members were imprisoned in the Tower for remarks madeabout the crown, and the Privy Council ordered the papers and notes of others burned. To protect the identity of the author any private diary of the session retained as a personal record had to have been well hidden. The discovery in the Midlands of an anonymous diary subsequently purchased by the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the U. of Kansas altered this picture and makes possible for the first time, close to 400 years after the event, a detailed study of the proceedings in that assembly. Besides the Kansas diary one other small account of debates that year from a manuscript in Trinity College, Cambridge, and several folios of proceedings from Petyt MS, 538/11 in the Inner Temple Library, as well as an unpublished Crown Office list of returns are included in the vol. The manuscript Commons Journal and MS. Add. 48, 101 have been re-edited with the accounts mentioned above, making accessible in one place all of the known accounts of the session. Illus.