The speech on the address in the late eighteenth‐century house of commons

Abstract

The Speech on the Address of Thanks for the King's Speech, the so‐called “Speech from the Throne,” was not strictly a genre, perhaps, or even a subgenre of parliamentary usage in the eighteenth century. It had few givens in form or substance, but it served to maintain formal submission of the Parliament to the Crown, and to preserve the idiom, at least, of the Parliament, and especially the House of Commons, as the loyal servant of the Crown in promoting the welfare of the Kingdom. Like other rules and traditions of the House of Commons, the ritual of the Speech from the Throne, the Address of Thanks, and the debate on the Address can be seen as helping to stabilize the Government at a time when the revolutionary fervor of French republicanism seemed to threaten traditional British constitutional democracy.