Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- Parliamentary sessions, 1547–8
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The composition of the House
- 3 The quality of the House
- 4 Attendance and activity, absenteeism and management
- 5 Cohesion and division
- 6 The Lords' inheritance: clerks and assistants to the House
- 7 The rules of business: procedure
- 8 The legislative record of the mid-Tudor Lords
- Abbreviations
- Appendix A Composition
- Appendix B Roll of the ‘actual’ members of the House of Lords, 1547–58
- Appendix C Attendance
- Appendix D Legislation
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
5 - Cohesion and division
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- Parliamentary sessions, 1547–8
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The composition of the House
- 3 The quality of the House
- 4 Attendance and activity, absenteeism and management
- 5 Cohesion and division
- 6 The Lords' inheritance: clerks and assistants to the House
- 7 The rules of business: procedure
- 8 The legislative record of the mid-Tudor Lords
- Abbreviations
- Appendix A Composition
- Appendix B Roll of the ‘actual’ members of the House of Lords, 1547–58
- Appendix C Attendance
- Appendix D Legislation
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
To those contemporaries who were outside the charmed circle of the well born and personally unacquainted with the governing elite in Church and State, the peers and bishops of the Upper House may have projected a public image of cohesion and homogeneity. The seventy or eighty members were not strangers to one another but familiars, in many cases even intimates. The peers belonged to a legally defined status group, a tiny social elite, within which they became personally associated in their social lives, whilst they were thrown together, in close acquaintanceship, in the business of governing the realm under the prince. The bishops constituted a separate, office-holding elite, engaged in ecclesiastical administration, but they shared with the peers the contemporary ideals of fidelity and obedience to the Crown and service to the commonwealth.
The peers in particular were bound together by the social cement of blood and marriage. Nevill(e)s held the earldom of Westmorland and the baronies of Bergavenny and Latimer. Viscount Bindon and William Lord Howard of Effingham were sons of Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk. The ramifications of the Howard clan spread their tentacles through much of the peerage. Thus the third duke's grandchildren married into the FitzAlan, Neville, Berkeley and Scrope families, which in turn established marital links with Lumleys, Greys and Cliffords. Marriages with the children of Henry and Edward Stafford, second and third dukes of Buckingham, forged kinship connections between the Percy, Radcliffe, Hastings, Stafford, Neville and Manners families as well as, of course, with the ubiquitous Howards.
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- The House of Lords in the Parliaments of Edward VI and Mary IAn Institutional Study, pp. 95 - 119Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981