Preface

As the 50th Clerk of the House of Commons, I write this under the gaze of two portraits of distinguished predecessors. At one end of my office is Nich­olas Hardinge, painted by Allan Ramsay.

Into this enclosed and rather private compound of Westminster, known in Washington as “parliamentarians”, Peter Aschenbrenner turned up about a year ago, seeking enlightenment on the manuscript sources used by Hat­sell.

To a casual inquirer the field of parliamentary procedure may seem an arid one, full of arcane terms, dusty precedents and quibbles. That may explain why it took so many years before Jefferson’s Parliamentary Pocket­Book was published in the United States. Even Peter Aschenbrenner sug­gests that procedure is enervating and regrets that it has never attracted minds of equal talent to John Hatsell. That is best left to others to judge. But the answer to the charge of tedium can be found throughout this book, and possibly in future books studying parliamentary procedure over the centuries from different perspectives. Boring it is not: tales of the procedural framework exposed by accounts of the passage of canal Bills or the creation of the Sinking Fund demonstrate that. And as I write in May 2017, the way in which the House of Commons dealt more than two centuries ago with the need to make a Treaty to end the American War of Independence, and the Senate dealt with key treaties in 1801, have evident echoes in contemporary UK parliamentary politics.

There has been serious historical examination of the process by which the clubbable chaos of eighteenth-century House procedures and practices was transformed into the disciplined chaos of the late nineteenth century. Ministers emerged as something grander and more powerful in the House than other Members, expected to manage the legislative process as well as answer questions and lead the House.

Parliamentary procedure is part of the necessary armature of politics in a parliamentary democracy. The world of Hatsell is also that of William Pitt and George Washington, of Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham, and of the struggles between Great Britain and the American colonies, and then the Revolution in France. In the United Kingdom, in the absence of a codified constitution, an understanding of parliamentary practice and procedure is an important part of understanding the practice of politics. And so it must

Preface xi be in the United States. Nor does parliamentary procedure stay still. Dis­covering its origins is often a necessary precondition for understanding its present state and trying to shape it for the future.

Hatsell was drawing on several centuries of parliamentary debate and record-keeping, assisted by the printed Journal and the Index. He was not the first or last Clerk to try and draw rules of general application out of a mass of precedents, and to select those which to his judgement as a practi­tioner seemed soundest.

But for Jefferson it was different. The new nation required a new set of rules for its Congress. It is curious that Jefferson was already obsessed with parliamentary procedure from a young age, having learned at the feet of his legal mentor George Wythe, at the Virginia House of Burgesses in the 1760s. It is notorious that the occasion for compiling the Manual arose only because he found himself, for better or worse, presiding over the Senate as a result of having lost the 1796 Presidential election to John Adams and thus having to serve as Vice President. If Jefferson had won in 1796 we can be confident that Adams would have shown no more interest in parliamentary procedure than he had in his first two terms as Vice President. Thank good­ness Adams won in 1796.

Presiding over the Senate was no picnic. Jefferson’s predecessor as Presi­dent of the Senate, John Adams, exercised a casting vote 31 times. Although smaller than a modern local council, the United States Senate at the end of the eighteenth century was full of highly articulate and politically educated members, with more than sufficient lawyers. Many had experience in state legislatures. To a Westminster observer it is unexpected how little if any reference was made in Congress to the dozen existing sets of rules in each of the States, most of whom had two Chambers, each with their own rules; or to the rules of the Continental Congress. Jefferson relied instead on Hatsell and Scobell and other conveyors of English practices and procedures. There is no suggestion that he had any knowledge of or interest in the Scottish Par­liament, defunct for almost a century, or the Irish Parliament whose demise coincided with Jefferson’s Manual. Perhaps less surprising is the absence of interest in the Caribbean legislatures, many of them dating back to the sev­enteenth century, but which seem to have left little or no procedural trace, or in the Canadian legislatures - Nova Scotia dating from 1758 and Lower and Upper Canada from 1791.

Jefferson evidently knew and valued Hatsell’s work, as he did that of Hat­sell’s predecessors, notably William Hakewill. Jefferson bought the three volumes of Hatsell’s Precedents in Paris in 1785. Some time seems to have elapsed before he studied them, but he then more than made up for lost time. He thoroughly gutted Hatsell and rarely contradicted him. There is no sign, sadly, that Hatsell knew of Jefferson’s interest or his Manual. I imagine Hat­sell would have disapproved of Jefferson’s Francophile politics and general radicalism. I doubt if Thomas Erskine May knew of Jefferson’s Manual either.

John Hatsell has no memorial. He died in November 1820 at Marden Park in Surrey and is buried in the Temple Church in London, having been the senior bencher of the Middle Temple. He does not seem to have been an especially memorable man. Peter Aschenbrenner relates how he met Vol­taire, a meeting naturally memorable to Hatsell but not to Voltaire. His letters remain unpublished. Having had occasion to look things up in his volumes of Precedents over some years, he strikes me as having had a kindly but sceptical outlook, not unusual among Clerks of the House. His cheer­ful resignation to the loss of the American colonies, and his attribution to divine providence that the King had found to serve as his Ministers the one set of incompetents who could have brought about that state of affairs, suggests a sardonic sense of humour, as does the famous tale about Speaker Onslow’s response when asked about the consequences of naming a Mem­ber. With the passage of time it is in truth no longer possible to separate Hatsell’s character from Speaker Onslow’s.

I should add a third party at this feast of the parliamentary mind: I refer to Jeremy Bentham’s Essay on Political Tactics, a sprawling book, of which only a fragment appeared in 1791. Bentham’s goal, to affect the parliamen­tary developments in the early years of the French Revolution, was realized, but his efforts did have a real influence on Spanish constitutions and those in Latin America.

There has been an unimaginably rich legacy of the late eighteenth century. Since 1800 a family of Imperial and now Commonwealth legislatures has spread around the globe, imitating Westminster and improving on it. The American experience has been different, of course, not least as a result of the underlying constitutional differences, and it too has been imitated in countries with strict separation of powers between Executive and Legis­lature. Over the past 15 years there has been some valuable reconnection between Congress and Parliament. In the 1960s two British Clerks, Sir Ken­neth Bradshaw and David Pring, published editions of a useful compara­tive study, Parliament and Congress. In the 1980s, in the early days of our departmental select committees, there were several expeditions from West­minster to Washington to discover the secrets of what made committees in

Preface xiii Washington so powerful. Then in recent years personal and professional friendship between Sir William McKay, the Clerk of the House of Com­mons, and Charlie Johnson, the Parliamentarian of the United States House of Representatives, led to a recognition of a shared and neglected common heritage. This came to fruition in their 2010 volume Parliament and Con­gress: Representation and Scrutiny in the Twenty-First Century. This wel­come book is another brick in that edifice.

David Natzler Clerk of the House of Commons Palace of Westminster May, 2017