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This article uses the digital humanities approach to analyse the first English Parliament (1604–10) of James I in an entirely new way. Utilizing the most comprehensive data on the parliament – the Journal of the House of Commons– and, through computer programming and database manipulation, integrating it with what is known of individual Members of Parliament (MPs), it explores the reactions of parliament-men en masse and by a number of demographic categories to some of the most important issues of James’s early reign: finance, religion, prerogative against privilege, the grievances of impositions, purveyance and wardship, and the Anglo-Scottish Union. In doing so, it shines new light on some of the biggest questions asked by historiography: who were the parliament-men of the first Jacobean Parliament, did they act in predictable ways, and can any of them be considered to represent some form – religious, ‘country’ or cultural – of ‘opposition’? Not only does it suggest some startling conclusions, reopening old debates with new insights, but it also provides another approach to our understanding of the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century, and to the history of parliaments as a whole.
