Halls of Power: Changing Political and Administrative Culture at the Palace of Westminster in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

During the sixteenth century, the medieval Palace of Westminster went from being the most-used royal palace, where the king lived and worked alongside his administration, to becoming solely the home of the law-courts, Parliament, and the offices of state. At the same time, the numbers of individuals who came to the palace seeking governance or to take part in the business of the law-courts increased over the course of the century. While Westminster had earlier been a public venue for governance and royal display, the increasing absence of the English monarch from the palace created alternative uses. Political culture came to focus on Westminster as entirely separate from the court. This article explores how these changing uses created new forms of political and administrative culture. It examines how the administrative offices, particularly the Exchequer, were remade to accommodate changing financial demands and the increasing contact between individuals and the Crown. It argues that the repurposing of the Palace of Westminster created a distinctly different set of relationships between the Crown and the public. This gave the institutions that called the palace home the space to develop as bodies that drew their legitimacy from their representation of the community of the realm as a whole.