The History of Parliament

Together with other MPs who were interested in the subject, he wrote a memorial to the Prime Minister urging him to appoint a committee to prepare a complete record of the personnel of every parliament since 1264.

The memorial noted that the Official Return was incomplete and inaccurate, and contained no information beyond a list of names; it attempted to head off Treasury objections to the cost, by pointing to the fact that pledges of voluntary assistance had been obtained.

[4] The result of the pressure was that Baldwin announced in December (by which time 512 MPs were on board) that the Government agreed to appoint a Select Committee to report on materials available to write such a history.

[5] The committee so formed in March 1929 included academics as well as politicians, and it soon became riven by ferocious differences about the nature of the project with Wedgwood's romanticism alienating most of the historians.

[2][6] The interim report of the Committee, covering 1264 to 1832, was published in September 1932 in the run-up to the centenary of the Reform Act and gave a guide to the information available.

Wedgwood then undertook fundraising and worked with a small group of assistants, completing in 1936 and 1938 two volumes entitled The History of Parliament 1439–1509.

At the end of the war, strenuous lobbying by L. B. Namier who had been a member of the 1930s committee succeeded in getting agreement by the Treasury to provide funding for the History of Parliament Trust.

[8] The historian David Cannadine, in the History of Parliament Trust's 2006 annual lecture on 21 November 2006, noted that while Wedgwood and Namier are predominantly responsible for the foundation of the History, they were quite contrasting characters (Wedgwood a gregarious and high-spirited English aristocrat of advanced Liberal views, Namier a Polish Jew who was joyless and a strong Tory).

Despite working together on the Committee on House of Commons Personnel and Politics, they had quite different inspirations to take up the subject of parliamentary history.

For a decade, Namier himself worked nine hours a day at the Institute of Historical Research to write biographies of eighteenth-century Members of Parliament, with three paid assistants and other volunteers.

Although Namier died in 1960, the first volumes of the History to be published in April 1964 carried his name along with that of his colleague John Brooke and covered the years 1754–1790.

[13] The History of Parliament Online website is a project of the Institute of Historical Research at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

A. J. P. Taylor was the most quoted critic, writing in The Observer that the books were not a history but undigested raw material for one, and that many of the MPs profiled were of no importance in their own day.

[16] In 2002 The History of the Irish Parliament 1692–1800 was published in six volumes by the Ulster Historical Foundation, after several decades of intermittent work with occasional public funding.