Often in previous accounts of this Parliament and similar occasions, these absences have been interpreted as the result of government pressure, but that is too crude an interpretation of the transaction. Unity was a prized good in medieval and Tudor England: division was an aberration from the norm, hence the government’s use of voting by division in Parliamentary proceedings as a way to shame people into conformity. Respected county leaders like Throckmorton or Constable, or long-term Crown servants, would not wish to show open defiance to royal policy: absence was a useful middle way between
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