House of Commons

The House of Commons is the lower chamber of England’s Parliament in the novel’s account of English political history and parliamentary custom. Its emergence marks the gradual broadening of a royal and aristocratic assembly to include representatives of counties, cities, and boroughs. Yet the Commons’ place beside the House of Lords is sharply unequal: it can accuse, vote, and participate in legislation, but the narrative emphasizes how narrowly its authority has been defined and how visibly its members are made to defer to the peers.

Origins and development

The novel traces the ancestry of Parliament to the Saxon Wittenagemote and describes the Commons as a body that took shape over time rather than appearing fully formed. After the Norman Conquest, the assembly was called Parliament; in the narrative’s account, the people were gradually pushed out of it. The Crown’s summons to the Commons changed in meaning: representatives who had once been called to deliberate were eventually called chiefly to consent. The text distills that restricted role into a blunt political judgment: saying yes is their liberty.

The development of the Commons is linked to conflict between the Crown and the barons. In 1215, the barons compelled King John to accept Magna Carta, an event the account associates with the creation of the House of Lords. The struggle continued. In 1248, the Provisions of Oxford limited the king’s powers and brought a knight from each county into the political contest. The narrative identifies this widening of participation as the dawn of the Commons. The Lords later added two citizens from each city and two burgesses from each borough, extending representation beyond the baronial class without erasing the hierarchy between the chambers.

That growth did not end aristocratic control. Until the time of Elizabeth, the peers judged the validity of elections to the Commons. The account notes that this arrangement did not prevent rotten boroughs, a reminder that formal representation could coexist with distorted or unequal practice. The Commons thus appears as a historical gain whose development remained constrained by the very institution from which it emerged.

Powers and parliamentary functions

The Commons and the House of Lords have distinct roles in the novel’s description of Parliament. The chambers differ in voting: peers state their decisions one by one, while members of the Commons vote together with an Aye or No. The text also describes a division of legal and political functions: the Commons accuses, and the peers judge. The Commons is therefore not simply another name for Parliament as a whole, nor does it possess the same authority as the upper chamber.

The narrator gives this imbalance a broader constitutional meaning through Ursus’s attack on aristocratic power. He argues that the peers can refuse the king, while the people cannot, and represents the Commons’ limited freedom to consent as a symptom of exclusion from sovereignty. In this polemic, the peers’ power rests not only on inherited rank but on wealth and control of land, with the Doomsday Book invoked as a record of aristocratic possession. Ursus even presents the execution of Charles I as an encroachment on the peers’ privilege and condemns Oliver Cromwell in the same deliberately inflammatory argument. These are the terms of the novel’s critique, which makes the Commons a measure of how far popular participation has—and has not—advanced.

Ceremony and visible hierarchy

The novel makes the Commons’ subordinate position visible during a royal sitting. The Usher of the Black Rod announces the faithful Commons, and the members enter behind their Speaker. They stand at the bar with uncovered heads, in ordinary dress, mostly black and carrying swords. The peers, by contrast, are seated and wear their hats. The arrangement turns parliamentary rank into a physical tableau: the Commons waits below and before the Lords, who occupy the chamber as its established authority.

The Speaker is John Smith, an esquire and member for Andover. His black satin robe, embroidered with gold, and his smaller wig distinguish his office, but do not erase the contrast between his chamber and the Lords. During the sitting, formal assent is conveyed through a brief exchange between royal officials. When the sitting ends, the Speaker descends from his stool with a deep bow, the Commons bow to the ground, and the members depart while the upper chamber returns to its business. Ceremony here is not incidental decoration; it stages the difference in standing between the two halves of Parliament.

Place in the novel’s political argument

The account of the Commons belongs to a wider history of aristocratic government. The peers’ jealousy of the Crown is presented as a check on royal initiative, while their power over the Commons and their control of parliamentary procedure expose the limits of that check: resistance by one privileged order does not necessarily give political power to the people. The Commons’ long development—from county knights to citizens and burgesses—registers an expansion of participation, but its constrained right to consent and its deference in the chamber keep that expansion incomplete.

This institutional contrast gains force elsewhere in the novel when Gwynplaine addresses the House of Lords. His attempt to speak about the poor and the society that has shaped his life is interrupted by uncontrollable laughter, which the peers turn into an occasion for their own amusement. The episode takes place in the upper chamber, not the Commons, but it sharpens the political significance of the two-house structure: the people’s representative voice remains vulnerable to the customs and power of the aristocratic assembly. The Commons stands in the narrative both for a real widening of political representation and for the distance still separating representation from effective authority.