The ‘Parliaments, Politics and People’ seminar has returned for the new academic year. To start things off, the History of Parliament’s own Dr Patrick Little, Senior Research Fellow in the Commons 1640-60 section, reports back on his paper ‘‘The dressing of a cucumber’: the Scottish Union Bill of 1656-7’…
The constitutional relationship between England and Scotland was as topical in the mid-seventeenth century as it is today. The Cromwellian conquest of Scotland in 1651-2 was followed by various attempts to unite the two nations, with a union ordinance being passed by the protectoral council in April 1654. It is usually assumed that the bill debated in the second protectorate parliament in the winter of 1656-7 was merely a rubber-stamping exercise, upgrading the existing ordinance into an act, but a careful examination of the sources – including Burton’s diary and the Clarke Papers and, crucially a sheet of…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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