Queen Anne addressing the House of Lords.
The House of Lords is the upper chamber of the Parliament of Great Britain. It is made up of Great Britain's titled aristocracy, both hereditary and appointed, as well as the kingdom's 24 bishops and 2 archbishops. Abbots were also members of the House of Lords until Henry VIII abolished England's monasteries in the 1530s. Like the House of Commons, the House of Lords meets in the Palace of Westminster.
The House of Lords is an outgrowth of the Great Council of the Norman Kings of England, a meeting of major landowners and senior clergy that served to advise the monarch. The Great Council underwent a major change in the mid-thirteenth century when Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, seized control of the government by defeating in battle and capturing King Henry III and his son the future King Edward I. Montfort sought to legitimize his control by calling together a Great Council that included minor landowners, the Knights of the Shires and the burgesses of the towns. Although Montfort was soon defeated in battle and killed by Edward, the future king retained the innovation of including minor landowners in his Parliaments. Starting in 1341, during the reign of Edward III, the knights and burgesses began meeting separately from the nobles and churchmen, in doing so dividing Parliament into the two houses of Lords and Commons. Edward's attempts to evade Parliamentary control led to the rule that no law could be made or tax levied without the consent of both houses.
The House of Lords continued to be the more powerful of the two houses due to the power exercised by the individual hereditary nobles until the seventeenth century. During the English Civil War, after the execution of Charles I the Commons abolished the House of Lords. When Charles II was restored to the throne, the House of Lords was reinstated. Parliamentary supremacy was established after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when James II was deposed by Parliament in favor of his daughter Mary II and her husband William III. The power of the Commons grew in the eighteenth century as the office of Prime Minister developed as the head of both the majority party in the Commons and the Treasury.
Following the suppression of the North American Rebellion in 1778 Lord North articulated what would become the Brotherhood Policy in a speech to the Lords on 12 November. During the debate on the Britannic Design in the Lords in 1780 the initial plan to group the thirteen colonies into three confederations was altered for fear that the proposed Northern Confederation of New England colonies would be likely to rebel again. The proposed Central Confederation of the middle colonies was combined with the New England colonies, since they were considered to be more Loyalist.