Parliament

The English legislative body known as Parliament evolved from Saxon traditions that required a king to rule with the advice of his nobility, the great men of the realm.

The body that sat in Westminster during the reigns of the Henry VIII and Elizabeth I traced its lineage to the system of EEudalism as it developed in England. Lords granted freedmen land in trade for service. Lords, in turn, were responsible to tenants. Feudalism created a social system of fealty to regional monarchs and their courts that was supported by the advice tenants could provide about local political and social conditions.

Gatherings of tenants occurred on a semiregular basis and became assemblies in which all members of society were, in theory, represented. Such gatherings offered the opportunity to advise the monarch. From that body a few special advisers became members of the monarch’s council, emerging as the Privy Council by the time of the Tudors. These men did the day-to-day work of the government, along with the monarch, and became part of the executive operations of government. Parliament remained responsible for legislation.

As early as 1242, clerics, earls, and barons who were called to a parliamentum advised the king. By 1258 Parliament was to meet three times a year. Knights of the shires were desirable allies for clerics, earls, and barons by 1264, and they came to be called the House of Commons. By the early 16th century towns as well as shires were demanding representation. In 1530, 236 representatives in commons represented 117 English boroughs. The figure nearly doubled during the reign of Elizabeth I. By the turn of the 17th century Parliament had two distinct houses within its legislative body, one closely associated with subjects and one closely associated with the king.

Further reading: Christopher Hollis, Parliament and Its Sovereignty (London: Hollis & Carter, 1973); Kenneth Mackenzie, The English Parliament (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959); Edward Miller, The Origins of Parliament, General Series Number 44 (London: Historical Association of London, 1960); J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).

—David P Dewar

Parmenius, Stephen (1555?-1583) writer, settler The first Hungarian to see the Western Hemisphere, Stephen Parmenius was an intimate of various Elizabethan explorers and promoters of colonization who intended to write a great epic about the European exploration of North America but managed to leave behind only two poems and a short prose piece before his death at sea leaving Canadian waters in 1583.

Born in Buda when that Hungarian city was under the control of the Turks, Parmenius was an intelligent young man who left his homeland in 1589 to travel to western Europe, where he quickly came into contact with a number of men who had an interest in overseas exploration. Raised in a Calvinist family, Parmenius presumably intended to return to Hungary once he had completed his tour of various Protestant churches in Germany and perhaps beyond. He studied at Heidelberg and then quite possibly traveled to other well-known destinations for young men seeking a broad humanist education. If so, he would have traveled to Rome, Florence, Venice, and the Netherlands. Whether he made this predictable trip is unknown, but Parmenius did arrive in Oxford in 1581, one of the centers of learning in the Western world and a city renowned for its concentration of individuals with an interest in matters of state policy in Elizabethan England.

Soon after his arrival in Oxford, Parmenius met Richard Hakluyt the Younger, the avid promoter of the English colonization of the Americas, and eventually he came to the attention of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who in the early 1580s was busy preparing for a venture to establish a colony in North America in modern-day Newfoundland. The two men shared common interests, especially their fascination with America. Parmenius subsequently spent his time writing a poem celebrating the exploration of North America. Eventually, Gilbert offered Parmenius a chance to live out his life’s dream: He enticed him to join the English mission to Newfoundland in 1583, an invitation the young Hungarian did not refuse. After a successful crossing the Delight, the ship Parmenius sailed on, ran aground in August of that year, and he was lost at sea along with most of those onboard. Soon after Gilbert himself perished when his small vessel, the Squirrel, also sank on his return to England.

Parmenius’s loss mattered deeply to Elizabethans who cared about the potential colonization of the Americas, especially to Hakluyt. Parmenius’s written pieces survive as testament both to his interest in Atlantic exploration and to the literary abilities of a young man whose death was one of many when Europeans sailed in unfamiliar—and thus to them dangerous—American seaways.

Further reading: David B. Quinn, “Stephen Parmenius Budaeus: A Hungarian Pioneer in North America,” in Quinn, ed., Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500-1625 (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), 225-238; David B. Quinn and Neil M. Cheshire, eds., The New Found Land of Stephen Parmenius: The life and writings of a Hungarian Poet, drowned on a voyage from Newfoundland, 1583 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).