The House of Commons

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 2 March 1935, Page 12

The House of Commons

Ti HERE is a story that John Burns once overheard a party of American visitors on the terrace of the House of Commons speaking disparagingly of the Thames. It was, it appeared, the smallest thing they had seen in the way of rivers. “River!’ 7 roared the indignant old Londoner. “That’s not a river. That’s liquid history.” He might have spoken with equal emphasis and enthusiasm about the proceedings inside tre Palace of Westminster, says a writer in tre Daily Telegraph. The building itself is undoubtedly antiquated and inconvenient, and looks, as Mr Wells has said, as if a late Gothic Cathedral had had an illegitimate child by a Flemish Town Hall. Within its walls the amenities compare unfavourably with those of more modern Parliament Houses. The procedure is sometimes clumsy and often dilatory. But there is scarcely a rule or a custom which has not its origin far back in Parliamentary history or which does not commemorate the establishment of some first-class constitutional principle. Take, for example, the traditional discourtesy to Black Rod, the- King’s Messenger, in whose face the doors of the House of Commons are slammed when he comes to summon the members to attend at the Bar of the Upper House. In this way the Commons are asserting their independence of the Crown. For no Sovereign has entered the Lower Chamber since Charles I came to arrest the Five Members, and so even the Crown’s representative is admitted as a matter of grace and not as of right. Or there is the Mace, the presence of which on the table indicates that the House is in session. This device has been in use as far back as there is any record, and the present Mace, which dates from the Restoration, is the immediate successor to that which was removed by the order of Cromwell. Or the Sergeant-at-Arms, an officer who ever since the Middle Ages has been lent by the Crown to the Commons to assist in the preservation of order. It was in the reign of Elizabeth that the procedure of the House of Commons began to assume its modern form. Our Parliamentary methods of transacting business date, for the most part, from the 16th and Ith centuries. A knight of the shire of the time of Charles I, returning to-day', baffled as he. might be by the subject-matter of debate, would still find the forms and customs tolerably familiar. Even the bearing of honourable members would be similar. For he would notice that they still bow low to Mr Speaker on reaching or departing - from their places, a habit that goes back to Elizabethan Parliaments. Tradition has it that it arose in this way. In St. Stephen’s Chapel, where the Commons met right up to the fire which destroyed the Houses of Parliament in 1834, the Speaker’s chair was originally in front of the altar. It was to the altar, therefore, and not to the chair or its occupant, that the bows were originally directed. However this may be, we find the House of Commons in 1581 ordering that members should “depart and go forth in comely and civil sort, for the reverence of the House,” and directing members when they left the chamber to make “a low courtesy” to the Speaker “like as they do at their coming into the House.”

Of even greater antiquity is the custom which is still observed at the beginning of every Parliamentary session. After the Commons have heard the King’s Speech in the House of Lords and have returned to their own quarters, the Clerk calls out “Outlawries Bill.” The Bill, which is expressed to be “For the more effectual preventing of Clandestine Outlawries,” is then read the first time. But since first reading is a purely formal stage, and a measure heed not appear in draft until the second reading is moved, the terms of the Outlawries Bill never actually see the light of day. The constitutional significance, however, is profound and deserves particularly to be emphasised in these latter days, when the sole function of Parliament appears to be to register the decrees of an omnipotent executive. For the House is asserting its right to discuss whatsoever business it chooses, which is why it deals with the law of outlawry before turning, its attention to the sessional agenda set out in the Speech from the Throne. The origin of this practice could scarcely have been earlier than Tudor times, for it was not until the reign of Henry VIII that the Com-

Some Quaint Observations

mons began to embody their demands in Bills instead of petitions to the Crown (thus ensuring that the relief actually granted should coincide with that intended). The usage seems to have existed as early as 1558, the year of Elizabeth’s accession. A chronicler who wrote in 1653 described in detail the reading of a Bill by the House to assert its independence. ! “The Speaker being placed in the chair,” the account runs, “Seymoui’, Esq., clerk of the aforesaid House of Commons, who sat uncovered at the upper end of the House, just before the Speaker, stood up and read a Bill . . . . being entitled ‘the Bill touching the felling of wood and timber trees in forests and chases,’ which done, kissing his hand, he delivered the said Bill to the Speaker . . . which hath been the constant use and custom ever since, and also divers years before, that after the presentment and allowance of the Speaker, one Bill be once read after his return from the Upper House in the House of Commons.” It is not only the ceremonies but even the actual working rules of the House that date from the three decades immediately preceding the Civil War. That forty should be a quorum was determined in the first Parliament of Charles I, and it still frequently happens on a Friday or Wednesday afternoon that the House is counted out, there being less than forty members present. In the same year it was laid down that unless a man were present at prayers his place could not be kept, a provision that even now ensures a large attendance of members at the commencement of the day’s business.

The importance of the latter rule is due to the fact that in no Parliament since the Middle Ages, either in the old building or the new, has there been sufficient seating accommodation for the whole body of members. M.’sP. are. compelled to reserve their seats by attendance at prayers and their place at prayers by an early visit to the House, when they deposit a ticket on the seat they propose to occupy.. Even this latter custom appears to be over a century old, for we find Cobbett in 1932 complaining that 658 members were crammed into a space that allowed them no more than half a foot square, and that he himself had to go to the House at 7 o’clock in the morning to stick a bit of paper, with his name on it, on a bench. But perhaps the most striking example of historical continuity is to be found in the jealous care with which Parliament has always safeguarded the approaches to the Palace of Westminster. In 1332 boys were forbidden by Royal Proclamation from playing at games or knocking off the hats of passers-by anywhere in the immediate neighbourhood. For nearly seven centuries there have been sessional orders to prevent obstruction in the streets near by. It is by virtue of such an order that the traffic is still held up for the convenience of M.’sP. passing from Parliament Street to Palace Yard. Moreover there is a statute of Charles II whirh prohibits the bringing of a petition to Parliament by a deputation numbering more than ten. It has not always been possible, however, to give effect to these precautions, and more than once in times of high political excitement the London mob has demonstrated outside the very walls of Parliament. When in 1711 the famous dispute arose between the House of Commons and the City of London over the publication of debates, and the House proposed to send the Lord Mayor to the Tower, the indignant citizens besieged the Legislature for several days. When the Prime Minister, Lord North, appeared, his coach was destroyed, his hat torn to pieces, and he himself severely manhandled before he could be rescued by a political opponent. His persecutors endeavoured to make amends by explaining that they had mistaken him for Charles Fox, then a Junior Lord of the Admiralty. The error was rectified shortly afterwards when Fox himself arrived, for he was promptly “rolled in the kennel” and pelted with stones, oranges, and mud, being “bruised to a pulp” by the time he succeeded in reaching the building. It must always be a matter of regret that no record remains of the speech in which next day he described his treatment to the House. As one of his biographers has pointed out, the combination of such eloquence and such a theme is rare indeed.