About the Monarchy and Parliament: Westminster and the struggle for Democracy Walk in London
Westminster has always been at the heart of the governmental system of England and, later, Great Britain, since the Norman Conquest in 1066. Originally the site of the main royal palace in London, a vestige of which survives in Westminster Hall, over the centuries it became the seat of Parliamentary democracy and the area in its immediate vicinity, specifically Whitehall and Parliament Square has seen the development of grand building works housing royal palaces, government departments and the Supreme Court of the judiciary. Westminster Abbey, the other focal point, has also played an important role in the history of government through coronations, royal weddings, funerals and as a necropolis for the kings and queens of England.
The story of government in England has not always been as harmonious as it appears today. A series of conflicts between factions that supported the monarchy and the privileges of Parliament between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries culminated in the Engl
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Westminster has always been at the heart of the governmental system of England and, later, Great Britain, since the Norman Conquest in 1066. Originally the site of the main royal palace in London, a vestige of which survives in Westminster Hall, over the centuries it became the seat of Parliamentary democracy and the area in its immediate vicinity, specifically Whitehall and Parliament Square has seen the development of grand building works housing royal palaces, government departments and the Supreme Court of the judiciary. Westminster Abbey, the other focal point, has also played an important role in the history of government through coronations, royal weddings, funerals and as a necropolis for the kings and queens of England.
The story of government in England has not always been as harmonious as it appears today. A series of conflicts between factions that supported the monarchy and the privileges of Parliament between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries culminated in the English Civil War in 1642 and the death struggle between the King’s divine right to rule and the demands for a more representative form of government. In the centuries that followed, the type of constitutional monarchy, whereby the monarch as head of state retains certain ancient privileges but the real power of government is vested in ministers of the crown on the one hand and members of parliament as the legislature on the other, has come to be recognised globally and has inspired an number of other constitutional experiments.
The walk will take us back to the early years of Parliament as a council of tenants in chief to the King under William the Conqueror and chart its rise to power, culminating the supremacy of the representative House of Commons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will begin in Trafalgar Square under the statue of Charles I, who looks down Whitehall towards Westminster, and explore how this king’s determination to rule by divine right led to civil war and his ultimate overthrow and execution. We will continue down Whitehall, past Horse Guards’ Parade, where the royal bodyguard has traditionally been barracked, towards The Whitehall Banqueting House, part of a seventeenth-century palace complex, the masterpiece of architect Inigo Jones which was intended to exemplify royal power and prestige through the painted decoration of Peter Paul Rubens. We will then examine the architectural vocabulary of many of the ministries of state, particularly the great block that houses the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a vestige of Imperial times when the civil service of the British Empire was administered from here. We will consider the modest frontage of Number 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the Prime Minister. Given to Sir Robert Walpole as First Lord of the Treasury in 1732 by George II, the office mutated into that of Prime Minister and the short terrace of what in fact represents three houses was donated permanently to house successive incumbents.
We will continue on into Parliament Square, flanked on one side by the Houses of Parliament, on the other by the new Supreme Court and on the third by Westminster Abbey itself. We will examine some of the important figures in the history of Parliamentary democracy who are celebrated here: Simon de Montford, the knight who fought Edward I to establish Parliamentary rights; Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Parliamentary faction in the Civil War and de facto ruler of England in the 1650s; Winston Churchill; David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister during the First World War; and Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria’s favourite Minister. We will discuss the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament after the fire that destroyed much of the medieval building in 1834 and the choice of the Gothic style in its reconstruction which led to some of London’s most iconic landmarks. We will visit the surviving ancient buildings that formed the medieval palace: the Jewel Tower, built to house Edward III’s treasury in 1365, and Westminster Hall, one of the largest medieval structures in England, the setting for coronation banquets and important trials. We will discuss the English Parliamentary system, made up of two ‘Houses’, the Commons and the Lords, and how this has changed over the centuries. We will consider the new Supreme Court building and the role of the judiciary in the government of England throughout the ages and, finally, we may visit Westminster Abbey and the royal tombs, once the glory of medieval monarchy, now the setting for coronations where monarchs are anointed through the will of the people in Parliament.
