Parliament of England

Parliament of England is at once a constitutional institution and a measure of the distance between power and the people it governs. The novel traces its development through conflict between the Crown, the peers, and the Commons, then brings that history into the present through formal parliamentary ritual and Gwynplaine’s attempt to make the poor audible. Its chambers can debate and judge, but their authority does not guarantee that those beneath them will be heard.

Historical Formation and the Growth of Parliament

The narrator presents Parliament as emerging from older assemblies and repeated struggles over who may limit royal power. The Saxon assembly known as the wittenagemote is offered as a precedent; after the Conquest, the Normans used the term parliamentum. In the narrator’s account, popular participation was gradually narrowed: a change in the wording of royal summonses marks the Commons’ diminished role, from being called to offer counsel to being called to consent.

The barons’ conflict with King John culminated, in this history, in Magna Carta in 1215. The narrator links that settlement to the later House of Lords and treats it as one stage in a longer contest rather than a final resolution. In 1248, the Provisions of Oxford further constrained the king: twenty-four barons deliberated on his authority and brought a knight from each county into the dispute. The account identifies this widening of participation as a beginning of the Commons. Later, citizens and burgesses joined the arrangement, while the peers retained authority over the validity of elections until the time of Elizabeth.

The two chambers developed unequal roles and distinct procedures. The peers claimed supremacy, and the narrator describes their ability to reprimand Commons members who spoke against the upper chamber, with imprisonment in the Tower of London among the possible consequences. The Commons and peers also differed in how they voted: members of the Commons gave a collective answer, whereas peers were called individually, beginning with the most junior. The Commons accused; the peers judged. These arrangements make Parliament not a single voice but a hierarchy of voices, with the upper chamber exercising powers unavailable to the lower.

Peerage Power and the People

The novel’s historical commentary repeatedly asks readers to distinguish the people’s work from the sovereign’s credit. People fight and pay, the narrator argues, while glory and generosity are attributed to the Crown. That critique shapes the account of Queen Anne’s popularity: the queen is said to have been admired for presiding over national achievement, even though the account assigns the costs and exertions to England and its people. In 1705, England had a fleet of 150 warships and forces deployed in Catalonia, Portugal, and Flanders; it also voted a patriotic loan of thirty-four million francs in annuities. The contrast underscores how public resources and public action can sustain royal prestige without giving the people equivalent authority.

The peers’ authority is connected directly to wealth. The narrator invokes the Domesday Book as a record of landholding and describes the peerage as possessing England through its estates. A story about a father of six being hanged for poaching rabbits on a great lord’s land makes that hierarchy concrete: the law protects property, yet the value assigned to a lord’s game can eclipse the life of a poor subject. Elsewhere, the narrator notes that the peers could say no to the king and had even taken part in the execution of Charles I, while the people had no equivalent power. The point is not that the Crown alone commands Parliament, but that political power is distributed among elites in ways that exclude the mass of the population.

Legislative and Judicial Authority

Parliament’s functions are not confined to legislation. The novel distinguishes sitting as a chamber from sitting as a court, treating their combination as a form of supreme power. The Long Parliament, which began in November 1640, asserted that the House of Lords possessed judicial as well as legislative authority. The account places this claim within a wider legal landscape: the House of Lords could sit as a court when summoned by the Crown, while the Court of King’s Bench and the Court of Chancery occupied adjoining spaces in Westminster Hall. The distinction between justice and mercy belongs to those courts, but the peers’ dual role joins judgment to lawmaking.

The treatment of arrest and local authority gives this institutional picture a further edge. The narrator describes unexplained, silent arrests as a customary practice that continued despite the Habeas Corpus Act, and connects such captures with questions of state necessity and secrecy. County sheriffs, commissioned by the Crown with certain exceptions, were responsible for protecting judges on circuit; their officers apprehended and held accused people for trial. The novel also describes torture chambers in English prisons, including Southwark Jail. These passages do not make Parliament the direct agent of every abuse, but they place its claims to legal authority alongside coercive practices carried out under England’s overlapping jurisdictions.

Ritual, Bills, and Royal Assent

Parliamentary procedure appears through ceremony as well as constitutional description. At a royal sanction, five bills that had passed the Commons and been agreed to by the Lords awaited the Crown’s approval. One would charge the country a million pounds for improvements to Queen Anne’s residence at Hampton Court. The detail places a specific public expense inside the ceremonial process and recalls the novel’s broader concern with who pays for royal privilege.

The voting procedure is rendered with particular formality when the Lords consider an annual increase of £100,000 for the Prince, the queen’s consort. After several days of debate, the Lord Chancellor orders the vote to begin with the junior baron. Each peer is called by name, rises, and records a position as content or non-content, with the opportunity to explain the vote. A large book containing the peerage list supplies the order of participation. The scene gives the upper chamber a visible, regulated process, but the subject under consideration—the provision for royalty—also makes clear whose interests the chamber is being asked to decide.

Gwynplaine’s Address and the Limits of Hearing

The sharpest test of Parliament’s public function comes when Gwynplaine addresses the Lords. He arrives as a man raised among the poor and recalls entering society as an abandoned child. His account associates law with a gibbet, riches with a woman dead from cold and hunger, and the future with a child left to die. He tells the Lords that their height and privilege have placed them outside the experience of the people beneath them, and presents his own history as a reason he must speak on their behalf.

The address briefly changes Gwynplaine’s sense of his new status: what had seemed an elevation becomes, in his understanding, a duty. But emotion overwhelms him, and his involuntary laughter—produced by the fixed expression that marks his face—turns the assembly’s attention from his appeal to his appearance. The Lords laugh, applaud, and insult him. He tries to resume control of the room and asks them to hear his plea, warning that their authority carries responsibility. The episode exposes a division between formal access and meaningful attention: Parliament allows the speech, but the assembled peers convert the speaker’s suffering into entertainment. In this contrast between procedure and response, the institution becomes a stage on which the poor can appear without necessarily being heard.