‘The inner history of parliament is still so fragmentary'

Born to the legal profession, John Hatsell (1733-1820) glided into a career serving the House of Commons in the Palace of Westminster. After obtain­ing his appointment as Clerk of the House (1768), in name and emoluments Hatsell remained Clerk until the end of his life.

Hatsell followed his father, likewise a Middle Templar, into a career at the bar in 1750. Hatsell served in his first post as Clerk Assistant (from 1760 to 1768). Hatsell credited this opportunity to Jeremiah Dyson, Clerk of the House of Commons 1748-62.³ Hatsell named Dyson as the dedi­catee of Cases of Privileges (1776) the first book-length work that Hatsell published. Hatsell was able to maintain the esteem of men who did not hold his diverse friendships against him. Hatsell attracted the confidence of leading politicians, Williams has observed, ‘by his sympathetic understand­ing, though he was no sycophant of those in power'.⁴ Hatsell dedicated the three volumes following Cases of Privileges as follows: Frederick Cornwall was the dedicatee of Members/Speaker. He named Frederick Montagu as the dedicatee of his Lords/Supply. Hatsell named Henry Addington as the dedicatee of Conference/Impeachment.⁵ Hatsell gathered these four works under the series title Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons.

Two of Hatsell's patrons deserve special note: Arthur Onslow retired as Speaker after Hatsell had served a year as Clerk Assistant. Charles Abbott served the House as Speaker (1802-17). Later ennobled as Baron Colches­ter, Abbott retired the year before the last edition of Hatsell's Precedents of Proceedings went to press in 1818. John Rickman, a colleague serving the House, revised Hatsell's indexing for the final edition.

Arthur Onslow brought both wisdom and patience in abundance to his service as Speaker. Rendering the longest service to the House in British history, Onslow acquired a reputation for personal integrity. Also a Middle Templar, he was in the habit of offering counsel to Hatsell, advice which the latter faithfully recorded in his works. There is more than a hint of Boswell’s appreciation of all things Johnsonian in Hatsell’s relationship to his Mr. ‘O’, Hatsell’s affectionate name for the Speaker. Mr. ‘O’ figured in 40 anecdotes Hatsell spread over the pages of Members/Speaker. Hat­sell’s conversations with Speaker Onslow complemented Hatsell’s personal stream-of-consciousness stylings on matters that stimulated his imagination. The manner in which Hatsell brought humane attention to the work of politicians in the House was unique for its time. His prose did not, however, trade on his daily encounters with the most powerful men in Great Britain.

Appointed by Courtenay Ilbert - at that time Clerk of the House of Commons - to serve in the Clerk’s Office (1909), O.C. Williams was the first to bring twentieth-century curiosity to bear on the details of Hatsell’s pro­fessional and personal life. I have relied on Williams’s Clerical Organization of the House of Commons, 1651-1880 (1954) for his balanced judgment in this regard, as the endnotes will reveal. Williams regretted that Hatsell’s let­ters might remain ‘in oblivion’.⁶ Williams remitted serious biography to future scholars: the ‘inner history of parliament...

Hatsell’s first thesis indulged his fascination with the null case. This thesis was always in danger of being underestimated, as it appeared to be little more than an excuse for piling up anecdotes or vignettes, the page sprinkled with citations to available print resources. On Hatsell’s account, the way for­ward to a needed procedural solution commenced when experience failed. Analytic tools must be available to determine that the assembly’s encounter with its past returned less-than-useful or problematic results. If the past turned out to be a reliable guide to the future, Hatsell’s interest dropped off. He took care to say so: in these situations he explicitly regarded himself as a ‘Compiler’ of ‘cases’.⁸

Hatsell’s second thesis articulated code-writers’ options when they encoun­tered a blank page and considered their options. In creating an inventory of prescriptions, the assembly might vision itself solving a procedural difficulty in the near future. ‘Do what you can today to speed matters along when tomorrow’s problems require solution’. This may be taken as the working motto of legislative assemblies in the study interval. In a metaphor of Jer­emy Bentham’s, inventories of procedures supplied legislative ‘manufactur­ers’ with tools ready-to-use.⁹ The product was still to be fabricated but the tools were at hand. Hatsell put this thesis into practice when he published his 1774 Standing Orders. This was Hatsell’s first attempt to package Stand­ing Orders declared by the House of Commons into a mini-code for sale as a stand-alone artefact.

It should be noted that the link between merit code-writing and proce­dural code-writing may be located in the technical facility acquired by mem­bers of the House of Commons in the 1760s and 1770s.

Hatsell’s second thesis set benchmarks for members who fashioned inven­tories of prescriptions. Take the process by which an assembly examined its past practices for the purpose of agreeing on those deserving treatment as best practices. This effort afforded members of the assembly a useful point of reference by which to judge progress along the procedural pathway involved. How complete, for example, was the assembly’s proposed treat­ment of the subject matter at hand? Was the assembly considering matters at the right level of abstraction? That is, not too detailed and not too general. What mattered was self-conscious insight, translated through the corporate will to declare best practices suitable for the assembly’s encounter with the future present.