‘I remember a story of Mr. Onslow’

W.S. Howell established himself as a leading scholar in the field of Aris­totelian logic as matured in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.³⁹ In his Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, Howell explained the eighteenth century’s preferred employment of de omni.

Taking completeness, consistency and proximity as heuristics available to investigators of parliamentary procedure at the close of the eighteenth century, I tested Members/Speaker to determine if Hatsell employed com­plete, consistent and proximate as disposable dimensions or heuristics. As to completeness, the House of Commons tasked searches through the journals to a committee specially appointed for this purpose. In 21 of 35 instances, Hatsell concluded that the journals did not furnish a serviceable answer to the question posed.⁴¹ Such an outcome may be referred to as the null case.

As to consistency, Hatsell lost no time in disputing ‘the opinion of Sir Edward Coke, as to the law, and which seems to be adopted by Mr. Jus­tice Blackstone, in his Commentaries’. Hatsell placed his assessment at

‘This John Milton deserves hanging’ 41 the opening of Members/Speaker.

When a question is complicated, that is, consists of two or more prop­ositions, it has been often said, that it is the ‘right’ of any one Member to have it divided, that he may give his opinion upon each proposition separately. This was a very favourite topic with Mr. Grenville, and often repeated by him.⁴³

Grenville did not recognize the evident inconsistency and resulting confu­sion competing procedural choices inflicted on members of the House. ‘May any proposition on the floor be sliced into three propositions or five?’ There was no heuristic to reliably guide the Speaker in these situ­ations, Hatsell observed. The ‘only mode of separating it, is by moving amendments to it; and these must be decided by the House, upon a ques- tion’.⁴⁴ The ‘doctrine of any one member having a right to insist’, Hatsell concluded, ‘would introduce universal confusion, for who is to decide, whether a question is complicated or not?’⁴⁵ Inconsistency was, on this and other occasions, treated as a species of indeterminacy in sampled data.

As to missteps in handling levels of abstraction, norms governing insult and invective between members illustrate the rule-writing challenge. If the member (who was the target of the offensive remarks) directed that the Clerk take down the offensive words, was the Clerk ‘justified in obey­ing any other order or directions but what are signified to him by the Speaker’?⁴⁶ Hatsell traced two possibilities: If the Speaker found

the objection to be a trivial one, and thinks that there is no founda­tion for their being thought disorderly, he will prudently delay giving any such directions, in order not necessarily to interrupt the proceed­ings of the House.⁴⁷

‘If however’, Hatsell continued, ‘the call to take down the words is pretty general, the Speaker will certainly order the Clerk to take them down’.⁴⁸ No matter how earnest or outraged the victim’s response, the Speaker and only the Speaker was in command of those who served at Clerk’s Table. Otherwise, Hatsell argued, the Clerk would be called on to serve multiple masters.

to frame a procedure that - in advance of a ‘Member offending’ - would reliably guide the Speaker to fulfil his duty to restore order in the chamber.

When members lose their composure, Hatsell remarked, ‘the House of Commons exhibits a scene of indecency and disorder, not very becoming their character as gentlemen’.⁴⁹ On occasion the Clerk might be obliged to refuse to obey the House. Hatsell underlined this point via italics. ‘That on the 2d of March, in the year 1628, the Clerk refused to read the remon­strance offered by Sir J. Eliot though commanded by the House’.⁵⁰ Given the combative instincts of the participants in this collaborative art, Hatsell made lively matter of the risks taken by members for whom verbal combat was second nature.

I remember a story of Mr. Onslow, which those, who ridiculed his strict observance of forms, were fond of telling; That, as he often, upon a Member’s not attending to him, but persisting in any disorder, threat­ened to name him, ‘Sir, Sir, I must name you:’ On being asked, what would be the consequence of putting that threat into execution, and naming a Member, he answered, ‘The Lord in Heaven knows!’ - from whence they collected, that it was nothing but a threatening expression of his own, that would have no consequence at all.⁵¹

From this anecdote, one might conclude that procedural rules were con­nected, if to anything at all, to some preference for irrationality. If one pro­cedure is as good as the other, for example, push-back by Commons against encroachment initiated by the House of Lords or the King would be facili­tated. The House need not cudgel its brains to come up with a best practice and declare that behaviour, as formulated, into a Standing Order. There was decidedly a tension here between Hatsell’s rules - untethered to reason - and rules that William Hakewill, member of Parliament and historian, had in mind when he observed: ‘The privileges of this House are the flowers of the Crown, and we shall never sit here again if they are not maintained’.⁵²

Some measure of relief may be found here: if the assembly’s need for a new procedure arose only one time in a hundred - when solutions were sought but not found - a Speaker’s ‘The Lord in Heaven knows’ moment would be a rare event.