The Earl of Northampton, Merchant Grievances and the Addled Parliament of 1614

Abstract

S. R. Gardiner, the doyen of English historians, wrote of the earl of Northampton's oration, delivered at a conference between the two houses of parliament in 1607, that it was ‘a speech which hardly any other man in England would have allowed himself to utter. In him was combined the superciliousness of a courtier with the haughtiness of a member of the old nobility. He treated the Commons as if they were the dust beneath his feet.’1 Furthermore, Northampton was accused by some contemporaries and most later historians of engineering the abrupt dissolution of the Addled Parliament in 1614, an abortive two-month session that was the last for seven years. For both, Northampton epitomized the authoritarian and anti-parliamentary views which came to dominate the early Stuart court.