// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did recruiter election say? I'm hiring votes.
 | This article includes a list of general references but lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (January 2014) |
Recruiter elections were held during the seventeenth century to fill vacant seats in the House of Commons in England. The words 'recruit' and 'recruiter' meant nothing more than filling a vacancy, so the contemporary phrase' recruiter member of parliament meant a member of the House of Commons who had been elected through a by-election.
During the English Civil War and Interregnum, no national or general elections were held in England for fourteen years, from the 1640 elections to the Long Parliament, until the 1654 elections to the First Protectorate Parliament. From 1645, the many vacant seats that arose in the Long and Rump Parliaments, by death and arbitrary expulsion (initially of many Royalist members, and later of many Leveller and Puritan members in Pride's military coup d'état) were filled by by-elections, or so-called 'recruiter elections'.
It seems clear that there was some stage management of the recruiter elections;[1] indeed, it has been suggested that the recruiter elections during the Civil War led to the change in character of elections from an Elizabethan model based on clientship and personality, to the beginning of a system managed by party politics.[2][3][4]
References
[edit]- ↑ David Underdown, "Party Management in the Recruiter Elections, 1645–1648", The English Historical Review, Vol.83, No.327 (April 1968), 235–264.
- ↑ Lawrence Stone, "The electoral influence of the second Earl of Salisbury, 1614–68", The English Historical Review, Vol.71, No.280 (July 1956), 384–400.
- ↑ J. R. Jones, The first Whigs (London, 1961).
- ↑ D. Brunton & D. H. Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament (London, 1954).