This chapter describes the long, revolutionary period in which majoritarian patterns of decision-making predominated and matured but were never clearly institutionalized. The House of Commons regularly faced status-related crises that perpetuated majoritarian practices during this period, but these practices were never routinized to the point where they became devoid of profound status implications. If the ultimate question of the English Revolution is the question of why Parliament failed to protect its institutional prerogatives, this chapter provides an answer. Consensual decision-making utterly collapsed amid the disintegration of Parliament’s authority under revolutionary conditions in the later 1640s. The explosion of majoritarian dynamics undermined Parliament’s legitimacy and made its composition subject to the dictates of the army and Oliver Cromwell from the late 1640s to the end of the Interregnum. Majoritarian patterns of decision-making continued up to the Restoration, not necessarily because majority voting had become institutionalized, but because so many questions before the Commons had profound constitutional and status implications in a period of fundamental instability.

This chapter describes and explains the fitful emergence of majoritarian political tactics in late 1641 and 1642 and the crucial turn toward consistently majoritarian decision-making between December 1642 and April 1643. It demonstrates how the House of Commons was unable to maintain its consensual decision-making practices once its members found themselves struggling over how to approach the early stages of the Civil War and their first peace negotiations with Charles I. Under these conditions of structural dislocation, members’ use of majoritarian tactics proliferated. Members who employed these tactics at the time clearly considered them to be emergency measures that enabled them to engage in effective status interaction under extremely trying circumstances. Neither these tactics nor majoritarian decision-making itself had yet become institutionalized. The 1641 controversy over protestations to the printing of the Grand Remonstrance vividly exposed the strains under which the Commons was struggling to continue to function. But the winter of 1642–3 was the clear turning point: consensual decision-making suddenly collapsed amid the emergence of war and peace groupings in Parliament and an array of other remarkable developments in English political culture between 1641 and 1643.

This chapter describes and explains the early weakening of consensual decision-making in the Commons between the opening of the Short Parliament and December 1642. The political conflicts of these years were not able, in themselves, to topple the consensual tradition prevailing in Parliament, but some of them further revealed the conditions under which consensual decisions become increasingly infeasible. Divisions that did occur often involved ideological conflict, but ideological conflict was insufficient for causing majoritarian decisions. Instead, divisions in the House were overwhelmingly related to perceived threats to the honor, privilege, existence, or authority of the House of Commons, the Parliament as whole, or its members in particular. Conflicts over what course of action best conduced to maintaining the status of the House were what consistently led to divisions.