History of Parliament Online

In the Middle Ages, Parliament was not formally concerned with matters of religious organisation or doctrine, which were all outside its jurisdiction. The Church was always concerned in Parliament, however. In the Middle Ages, the key offices of state were usually held by clergymen. The greatest ecclesiastical dignitaries were summoned to Parliament because they were regarded as great landholders and political figures who were, like the barons, ‘tenants-in-chief’ of the king. In time, though, the number of churchmen who were routinely summoned to the House of Lords narrowed to the bishops and a list of abbots and priors. Other senior clergy and representatives of ordinary cathedral and parish clergy were summoned as well for a time between 1295 and 1340. But from the 1330s the ‘lower clergy’ largely withdrew from Parliament, and would meet in their own assembly, Convocation. They came to regard what Parliament did as entirely separate from Church affairs.

Despite the separation of matters of Church and State during the Middle Ages, Parliament was naturally interested in the affairs of the Church and from time to time protested against the actions of the Church and its institutions. From the sixteenth century, however, the state’s involvement in both the organisation and doctrine of the Church grew very rapidly. The reason was Henry VIII’s quarrel with the papacy over his marriage to Anne Boleyn, combined with the growth of the Protestant movement. The Reformation Parliament of 1529-36 swept away the power of the Pope. It made the king Supreme Head of the Church of England in 1534. It followed by dissolving the principal monasteries and beginning to determine the doctrine of the Church. At the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I Parliament passed an Act of Supremacy making the Queen Supreme Governor of the Church, and an Act of Uniformity enforcing the use of the Book of Common Prayer. (For more information, see 'The Elizabethan Settlement')

For the next two to three centuries, the doctrine and organisation of the Church of England and the danger from the papacy and its allies were central concerns for English and British politics. Fears of Catholic attempts to reconvert England led to a series of statutes in the reign of Elizabeth I against the activity of Catholic priests. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 confirmed many people’s worries about the terrorist plans of Catholic extremists.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century ‘puritans’ used Parliament to pursue campaigns to make the Church more Protestant; in the reign of Charles I they attacked what they regarded as a tendency to restore Catholic practices and ideas. These conflicts were among those which resulted in the Civil War of 1642-6. Even before the War, in 1641, the bishops were voted out of Parliament. Following its victory, Parliament abolished the Church of England entirely. Although politicians struggled to replace it with a different formal Church, attempts to do so encountered opposition from politicians who supported the many more informal religious groupings, including Quakers and Baptists, which rose to fill the vacuum.

The Church of England was re-established at the Restoration, although its organisation and doctrine, and the right of the new religious groups to worship freely outside it continued to be political battlegrounds. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 was regarded by many of the ‘Presbyterian’ successors to the puritans as unacceptable. Those who did not accept the doctrine of the Church – ‘dissenters’ or ‘nonconformists’ – were prevented from openly worshipping in a series of Acts of Parliament: they were even prevented from holding public office under the 1673 Test Act. Although there were a number of attempts to make the Church’s practices more broadly acceptable and introduce toleration for those outside the Church, these failed, partly because of suspicions that they were designed to let Catholics practise their religion more freely. Only after the 1689 Revolution was it politically possible to allow toleration. (For more information, see 'Religion and Politics, 1660-1690')

After the Revolution, many whigs wanted further reforms to broaden the Church; tories thought it was broad enough already, and regularly protested that the Church was in danger, especially from the practice of ‘occasional conformity’ – to get round the requirements of the Test Act. (For more information, see 'Religion and Politics, 1690-1715') Concern about the Church was an important factor in the arguments over the union with Scotland in 1707. The whig government ceased to call the assembly of the clergy, Convocation, after 1717, because it had provided a platform for tory clergy.  But over the course of the eighteenth century the debate about the Church of England moderated in its tone, to the extent that the restrictions on the civil rights of nonconformists were removed in 1828 and after half a century of bitter argument Catholics were at last emancipated in the following year 1829.

Religion never ceased to be an important parliamentary issue, even in the nineteenth century, although argument was now much more about the position and privileges of the Church within the state than about its doctrine or the specifics of its organisation. The church and its bishops were targeted by the more radical elements of the whig and liberal parties. With state-funded education, arguments developed about the role of the Church in organising education. But as Parliament became more concerned with other legislation, it became much less interested in the minutiae of Church affairs. The creation of a new assembly for the Church in 1919, accompanied by a special procedure for passing legislation relating to the Church, the Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act, 1919, transferred most discussion of ecclesiastical affairs outside Parliament.