Definition
A Convention Parliament is an assembly of the Houses of Lords and Commons convened without the formal summons or assent of the reigning sovereign. Because Parliament ordinarily derives its authority to sit from the Crown's writ of summons, a Convention Parliament is constitutionally anomalous — it assembles by its own authority, justified only by extraordinary necessity, typically when the throne is vacant, disputed, or otherwise incapable of issuing the usual summons.
The term is specific to English and British constitutional history. It does not describe a type of parliament that recurs in ordinary legislative practice but rather a constitutional emergency measure employed at moments of dynastic rupture or political crisis.
Common Confusion
"Convention Parliament" should not be confused with a constitutional convention in the American sense (a deliberative body assembled to draft or amend a constitution), nor with an international convention (a multilateral treaty). The shared root word "convention" — meaning an extraordinary or extra-ordinary assembly, or an agreement — creates surface-level ambiguity that can mislead researchers working across legal systems or across encyclopedia subject areas. A Convention Parliament is specifically and narrowly a British parliamentary phenomenon.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter this term almost exclusively in historical sources dealing with two specific moments: the Restoration of 1660, when the Convention Parliament recalled Charles II to the throne, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, when a second Convention Parliament transferred the Crown to William III and Mary II and passed the Bill of Rights. These events are foundational to English constitutional law, and any research tracing parliamentary sovereignty, the royal prerogative, or the legal basis of the post-1689 constitutional settlement will pass through materials touching on Convention Parliaments.
The critical research trap is the question of legal validity. A Convention Parliament, having assembled without royal summons, occupied uncertain constitutional ground. The 1660 and 1689 bodies resolved this uncertainty by subsequently converting themselves into regular parliaments through royal recognition — but the legitimacy of the acts they passed before that conversion was debated at the time and remains a point of historical legal interest. Researchers reading contemporary sources (pamphlets, legal arguments, early treatises) will encounter vigorous dispute about whether acts of a Convention Parliament carried full statutory force.
For researchers using the Law Mind corpus, the 1689 Convention Parliament is the direct antecedent to major constitutional documents that run through the constitutional law materials. The Bill of Rights 1689, which that body produced, is a recurring reference point in discussions of parliamentary sovereignty and the limits of royal prerogative.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is brief but accurate in its essential claim: a Convention Parliament is justified "ex necessitate rei" — by the necessity of the thing. Bouvier names both canonical instances (the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution) and acknowledges the exceptional character of the institution. The definition is borrowed from Ramsay and Lalor's dictionary, as Bouvier's own notation indicates.
What Bouvier does not address — and what any researcher relying solely on historical dictionary sources will miss — is the subsequent legal controversy over validity. The 1689 Convention Parliament's own members debated whether its acts required retrospective royal confirmation to have legal force; the Convention formally declared itself a Parliament and was later recognized by statute. Bouvier's terse entry presents the institution as a settled historical fact rather than a live constitutional problem, which was the reality at the time of these events.
No American analogue exists, and Bouvier writes from within an American legal tradition that had its own revolutionary break with Crown authority. His treatment of the term is accordingly brief and historical rather than doctrinal.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English and British constitutional law and has no operative meaning in American, Commonwealth, or civil law jurisdictions as a legal category. It appears in American legal materials only in historical or comparative constitutional contexts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia: The Amendment Process — Article V, Conventions, and Ratification. Relevant for comparative background on the concept of an extraordinary constitutional assembly convened outside ordinary legislative procedure, though the American convention mechanism differs fundamentally from the British institution.