A detailed account of the parliamentary and political debates on the 1788-9 Regency Crisis. From the library of Lloyd Kenyon - Lord Chief Justice during the Crisis, and containing substantial manuscript material in his hand.
This volume collects various records of the parliamentary and political proceedings underpinning the Crisis. Division results are published, as are transcripts of the debates in the House of Lords, reports from George III’s physicians, correspondence between Pitt and the Prince of Wales, and addresses from the parliaments of Britain and Ireland.
During the Regency Crisis, systems of royal succession overlapped with issues of party politics. George III had suffered a severe episode of mental instability in the summer of 1788, and would spend the remainder of the year entirely incapacitated. In Parliament, the opposing Whig and Tory parties debated the constitutional foundation for a regency under the Prince of Wales (later George IV). Rather unexpectedly, the Whigs (under Fox) argued that the Prince enjoyed a sovereign right to a fully-empowered regency; the Tories (under Pitt) argued that, with no statutory basis to that effect, any right to determine the nature and limits of a prospective regency lay with Parliament alone. The outcome of the Crisis would thus have substantial political ramifications, as victory for the Prince and the Whigs would have swiftly led to the ejection of Pitt’s Tory ministry.
Given Fox’s most unWhiggish position on the Crisis, the Whigs lost the support of their traditional parliamentary supporters, and Pitt was able to frame a Regency Bill which provided a statutory foundation for a politically-limited regency (Neil Herman, Henry Grattan, the Regency Crisis and the emergence of a Whig party in Ireland, 1788-89 (2001) pp. 479-481). The recovery of the King in February 1789, however, would render the proposed bill superfluous, and it never came into effect.
By collecting and publishing the parliamentary records of the Crisis, this volume reflects the wider movement among newsmen and publishers towards a more comprehensive public reporting of political and parliamentary business in the late Eighteenth Century (Dror Wahrman, Virtual Representation: Parliamentary Reporting and Languages of Class in the 1790s (1992), pp. 86-87). It is thus similar to, though more focussed and comprehensive than, Debrett’s well-known Parliamentary Register.
Many of the records collected and published in this volume are, indeed, drawn from highly disparate sources, and it thus forms an invaluable resource for examining the political struggles and processes underpinning this critical period of eighteenth-century British history.
This copy contains on the title page the signature of Lloyd Kenyon, first Baron Kenyon (1732-1802) - a prominent British lawyer, judge and civil servant who served by turns as Attorney General, Master of the Rolls, and Lord Chief Justice within the various governments of George III (ODNB). It contains both manuscript annotations and a separate leaf of manuscript notes in Kenyon’s hand.
Although a newly-elevated member of the House of Lords, and Lord Chief Justice during the Crisis, Kenyon seems to have avoided directly engaging with it, beyond broadly supporting Pitt’s project for a limited regency. His only recorded contribution was a poorly-received speech on the 23rd of January 1789, in which he implied that government ministers could assume the authority to issue pardons and reprieves without the direct involvement of the monarch (John Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices of England, from the Norman Conquest till the Death of Lord Tenterden. Vol. 4 (1874), pp.84-85). This speech is recorded on pages 356-357 of the present volume, although Kenyon did not, interestingly, annotate the episode.
In light of Kenyon’s apparent unwillingness to engage substantially with the crisis, his purchase and use of this volume is highly interesting. Between pp. 552 and 553 of the present copy, a separate leaf of manuscript notes, apparently in Kenyon’s hand, is preserved. These notes appear primarily to summarise key episodes in the Crisis from November 1788 to January 1789: the entry for December the 10th records that “Committee appointed to search for Precedents - (Claim of right advanced)”. Consequently, these notes, and Kenyon’s other manuscript annotations, appear to be primarily descriptive - although they undeniably merit closer scholarly attention, not least for the insight that they might potentially offer to the actions and priorities of the judiciary during this critical period of eighteenth-century political history.
