‘The Present Mode of Decision is defective for want of Solemnities’

At the opening of the Fourteenth Parliament (29 November 1774), petition­ers challenged election outcomes. Parliament had previously attempted to legislate a comprehensive solution to the procedural difficulties facing the House of Commons when petitions and cross-petitions challenged election results.

THE PRESENT Mode of Decision upon Petitions, complaining of undue Elections or Returns of Members to serve in Parliament, fre­quently obstructs publick Business; occasion much Expence, Trouble and Delay to the Parties; is defective for want of those Sanctions and Solemnities which are established by Law in other Trials.⁵³

It would be rather ‘unsolemn’ for a committee to judge petitions without a full hearing on the merits. The applicable statutory timelines arguably clashed with the deadlines dictated by Commons’ Sessional Orders that the House had recently approved. In short order Commons settled on an inter­pretation of its Sessional Orders. This work-around permitted the House of Commons to treat the current round of petitions challenging elections as if they were timely filed. The solution crafted in December 1774 was inelegant but effective.

In the course of the debate on the procedural difficulty before the House, Francis Cornwall observed that the ‘Journals of parliament do not furnish an instance of a petition being rejected, complaining of an undue election, without being sent to a committee’ (6 December 1774).

[The] question being put, That the said petition be referred to the com­mittee of privileges and elections; and that they do examine the mat­ter thereof; and report the same, with their opinion thereupon, to the House; the House divided [and] it passed in the negative.⁵⁴

An assembly may encounter a procedural issue-of-the-day and find itself struggling with incomplete or inconsistent choices which make difficult work of forward progress. Likewise, the choices may appear too detailed or too general. Events recorded in December 1774 indicate that members of the House of Commons had acquired the technical facility to manage these situations. Members were required to match the very tangible dimensions of the problem it faced with the most proximate available and feasible solu­tion it could imagine. In the course of formulating its preferred settlement - dealing with election contests - the House of Commons did not stumble over an incorrect citation to historical evidence.

Devising a workable solution could readily be cut loose from historical enterprise. Individual members could risk getting past parliamentary experi­ence wrong while, acting collectively, members could decently manage the risk of entering upon their corporate future present with their procedural affairs in good order.

The preceding passage (and Cobbett’s footnote in the Parliamentary His­tory) reveal an assembly at work visualising the probability space presented by multiple choices. Each choice is logically possible. Ranking will take place after competing solutions are brought forward for examination. This vetting may well include solutions that are incorrectly grounded in Commons’ his­tory. The exploitation of history mattered to the mediate task of identifying possible procedural pathways, even if a member’s recollection failed at the task of serving as a reliable witness.

One might suppose that the scientific method demanded meticulous vet­ting of sampled data. Along these lines, some preliminary screening would enhance the likelihood that the sample reliably serve the investigator’s purposes. Employment of screening procedures would seem to be, on this account, an important forward step in maturing the scientific method. How­ever, Hatsell demonstrated that the encounter with the null case was itself an opening for progress in the matter of procedure writing. Cases of conflicting past precedents or cases too general or specific to be useful were also treated as if they were instances of the null case. The infrequency of such unreliable encounters was irrelevant. Hatsell’s historical enterprise was not the captive of past generations. In Hatsell’s experience the past was likely to have served as an untidy housekeeper of its describables.

Hatsell viewed anecdotes, taking like with like, as raw material to support the prescriptions he presented to readers in his Observations and to make the prescriptions more memorable. This enhanced the value of his work as a finding aid, even if Precedents of Proceedings was - as an artefact of print culture - too ponderous for a member to reference on an urgent basis, that is, in the chamber itself. The key to understanding John Hatsell lies in his understanding that one can’t manage the past without getting fully vested in managing prescriptions. History exists to be venerated, one may surmise, only by those who don’t use it for a living.