1640

1640 marks the opening of the Long Parliament and a key point in the novel’s account of how political and judicial authority came to be combined in the House of Lords. The date anchors a constitutional change within a wider history of overlapping jurisdictions, inherited practices, and uneven protections under English law.

The Long Parliament and the Two Powers

The Long Parliament began in November 1640. The narrative says that, amid revolutionary necessity, it declared that the House of Lords possessed both judicial and legislative power. The distinction mattered: to sit as a court and to sit as a chamber were separate functions, and their union constituted a form of supreme power. The novel sets this parliamentary claim against its account of the Lords’ older authority, described as having included both functions from time immemorial.

The contrast between the Lords’ judicial and legislative settings makes the institutional division visible. As judges, the peers sat in Westminster Hall; as legislators, they assembled in a separate, narrow chamber. A barrier near the chamber’s entrance marked the division between the people and the peerage. The date 1640 therefore belongs to a history in which political authority is expressed not only through declarations of power but also through the courts, chambers, and boundaries that determine who may exercise it.

Legal Authority Beyond Parliament

The account around 1640 places parliamentary power within a less orderly landscape of English jurisdiction. The Tower of London, for example, was treated as outside any county and recognized the authority of its own constable; the Court of Admiralty drew on maritime laws associated with Rhodes and Oleron. Such examples show the novel’s emphasis on overlapping legal inheritances rather than a single, uniform system.

Local administration also carried royal authority into the counties. Most sheriffs received commissions from the Crown, while the sheriff of Westmoreland held office by inheritance and the sheriffs of London and Middlesex were elected by the livery in the common hall. Sheriffs escorted judges on circuit, and their officers apprehended and imprisoned people awaiting trial. These arrangements are not presented as effects of the 1640 declaration; instead, they supply the broader institutional setting against which the relationship between legislative and judicial power is considered.

Procedure, Silence, and Punishment

The novel’s legal history also describes arrests made without explanation. Such silent captures remained in use despite the Habeas Corpus Act and, the narrator says, continued into the time of George II. They signified that questions were being reserved and that matters of state could shape police action. The discussion places this practice within competing legal inheritances and contrasts it with procedures that publicly called for redress.

The account of imprisonment and torture adds another dimension to that history. The narrator states that torture chambers existed in England and that Southwark Jail, like other prisons associated with the time of King John, had such chambers. These passages do not attach the practice to 1640 itself; they widen the chronology around it, showing the coercive powers and punitive spaces that stand alongside the formal division of judicial and legislative authority.

Place in the Novel’s Chronology

The date belongs to the novel’s historical exposition rather than to the immediate chronology of Gwynplaine’s case. That case concerns events in 1690: a parliamentary declaration identifies Gwynplaine as the legitimate heir of Lord Linnæus Clancharlie, and a later confrontation with Hardquanonne tests the evidence behind his identity. In the House of Lords, Gwynplaine speaks from his experience of poverty to an assembly whose members possess wealth and authority. His appeal meets laughter, and the account observes that an audience can escape an orator’s grasp once it turns against him.

Read against these later scenes, 1640 supplies a constitutional frame, not a guarantee that formal power will hear the people. The Lords’ dual authority helps define the institution before which Gwynplaine appears, while his failed effort to make its members attend to suffering exposes the distance between possessing the power to judge and responding to those subject to power.