Presents the debates in the Lower House in preparation for the impeachment proceedings against George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham and favourite of Charles I. This work is the second book of a four-volume edition of Proceedings in Parliament 1626.

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College, Cambridge, and several folios of proceedings from Petyt MS, 538/11 in the Inner Temple Library, as well as an unpublished Crown Office list of returns are included in the vol.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.

Condemned as 'useless and dangerous', the House of Lords was abolished in the revolution of 1649, shortly after the execution of the King. When it was reinstated, along with the monarchy, as part of the Restoration of 1660, the House entered into one of the most turbulent and dramatic periods in its history. Over the next half century or more, the Lords were the stage on which some of the critical confrontations in English and British constitutional and political history were played out: the battles over the exclusion from the throne of the later James II; the key debates over the 'abdication' of William III; the many struggles over the Act of Union with Scotland. This highly illustrated book presents the first results from the research undertaken by the History of Parliament Trust on the peers and bishops between the Restoration and the accession of George I. It shows them as politicians at Westminster, engaging with the central arguments of the day, but also using Parliament to pursue their own projects; as members of an elite intensely conscious of their status and determined to defend their honour against commoners, Irish peers and each other; as a class apart, always active in devising new schemes - successful and unsuccessful - to increase their wealth and 'interest'; and as local grandees, to whom local society looked for leadership and protection. From the proud Duke of Somerset to the beggarly Lord Mohun, from the devious Earl of Oxford to the disgruntled Lord Lucas, the material here presents an initial impression of the nature of the Restoration House of Lords and the men who formed it, showing them in their best moments, when they vigorously defended the law and the constitution, and in their worst, as they obsessively concerned themselves with honour and precedence and indefatigably pursued private interests. Edited by Ruth Paley and Paul Seaward, with Beverly Adams, Robin Eagles, Stuart Handley and Charles Littleton