The History of Parliament

Of all the bizarre voting qualifications in operation before 1832 – from potwallopers to burgage holders – one of the most striking was the freedom-by-marriage franchise. Philip Salmon explains how this system worked and even survived br...

One of the highlights of the 1997 general election was the contest in Tatton. The Conservative Neil Hamilton, then under a cloud of corruption allegations, was challenged by the independent former war correspondent Martin Bell, in his famous white suit. Our oral history project now includes interviews with both candidates, allowing

Who created the modern game of lawn tennis? As Dr Naomi Lloyd-Jones discusses, one possibly surprising 19th-century pioneer could have been Sir William Hart Dyke, a champion sportsman best known as Disraeli’s chief whip, who claimed to have pla...

Producing biographies on late-medieval MPs comes with its unique set of challenges, notably the lack surviving records indicative of their character. Dr Simon Payling of our 

In 1736 an almost united bench of bishops in the House of Lords scuppered legislation to relieve Quakers from prosecution for their refusal to pay tithes. In his first post for the Georgian Lords, Dr Ben Rogers considers how this controversy reignited disputes between the government, the Church of England, and religious dissenters, and led to an irretrievable breach betwe...