This volume explores the role of the Speaker and the Lord Chancellor in the Westminster Parliament before the advent of democracy, setting it beside the practice at Dublin and Edinburgh over the same period, and the more recent history of the role at London and Washington.

• First in-depth study since the mid-1960s of how Speakers and the Speakership have operated in Parliament in Britain
• Includes contribution by the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Baroness Boothroyd, describing her own tenure of the Speakership
• Covers practice at Westminster and at Dublin and Edinburgh, and a comparison of Speakers at Westminster and Washington during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• Composed of papers from a conference held at the House of Commons in April 2008

Paul Seaward has held the position of Director of the History of Parliament Trust since 2001. Previously, he was a Clerk in the House of Commons. He has written on politics, history and political thought in the late seventeenth century and on Parliament in the twentieth century. His publications include The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661-1667 (1989); The Restoration, 1660-1688 (1991); The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (1990: edited with Mark Goldie and Tim Harris); and editions of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (2009) and Hobbes’s History of the English Civil War, Behemoth (2009).