Recording a revolution: the clerk of the parliaments and the journals of the house of lords, 1640–9

Abstract This article examines the creation of the journals of the house of lords during the 1640s. Making extensive use of notes kept by the clerk of the parliaments and his assistants, it argues that the journals are not objective factual records, but documents intended to project an image of the Lords as driven by consensus and tradition. In reality, the Lords were fractious and riven by faction. An investigation of the journals also has important implications for understandings of early modern record-keeping and the nascent information state, showing a deep-rooted desire in seventeenth-century England to conceal and destroy information alongside the recently explored wish to collect and use it.