These prints came into my possession about 6 years ago complete with a House of Commons Booklet
Click on an image for a larger picture and a full description

Above, is a series of large prints from the original paintings which hang in St. Stephens Hall, in the Palace of Westminster. London 

Below, is the exact transcript from the accompanying booklet as published by Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd
 by the authority of the Speaker of the House of Commons

THE BUILDING OF BRITAIN

Introduction

THOSE who to-day find themselves in St. Stephen’s Hall may be informed, and quite truly, that they are standing in a chamber which is only about a century old it was in fact built after the fire which destroyed the old houses of Parliament in 1834. But the hail is something more than its mere walls; it is a historic place of much greater antiquity. It stands upon the old crypt, and exactly fills the site and follows the outlines of the ancient St. Stephen’s Chapel₁ which had been partially burnt in the reign of Edward the First, restored under Edward the Third, and used in later times as the regular meeting-place of the House of Commons for nearly three hundred years (1547-1834). Care has been taken to preserve these old associations: large brass studs, let into the floor near the east end of the hail, mark the places occupied by the table and the Speaker’s chair during those three centuries, and an inscription on the wall towards the west end shows the position of the Bar of the old House, by which the Lobby was marked off from the Chamber itself.

In this hall, then, we are standing upon the exact spot where many of the great struggles of our Parliamentary history took place where words were spoken and decisions taken which have ever since affected the course of our national life. Here, for example, Hampden, Pym, and Eliot fought for Constitutional Government ; Burke pleaded for an understanding of the American Colonies.  Pitt and Fox, Whitbread and Sheridan, contended across the table on questions of war and peace ; and here the long contest of the Reform Bill was carried through. In the first volume of his great play, The Dynasts, Mr. Thomas Hardy has drawn a vivid picture of a debate in this hall we see it as the old House of Commons, its arrange­ment, its decoration, its candelabra, and its close-packed benches; we hear the sound of “those slashing old sentences” in which politicians disputed about the means for saving their country from the militarism of a foreign autocrat. The place is consecrated to history and the historic imagination.

The hail was rebuilt, as we now see it, by Sir Charles Barry, and it was part of his design that the eight large panels below the windows should be filled with paintings. But the difficulties in the way were many, and for eighty years the plan has remained incomplete. For so historic a chamber it was felt that the only worthy scheme of decoration would be one which should fulfill certain conditions. First, the paintings must represent striking aspects of the national life ; secondly, they must form a series and not a mere collection of isolated scenes; and thirdly, to ensure unity and so heighten the impression to be effected, they must be the work either of a single artist or of a team working together in the closest understanding and fellowship.

There have been few periods in the history of British painting when such an exacting enterprise could have been undertaken with any likelihood of success. If at last it has been satisfactorily carried through, it can only be because a new age has unexpectedly and almost unconsciously produced a new flowering of decorative art in this country. The eight painters have been found, and found capable of working together with a harmony which comes near to the miracu­lous: without apparent effort, without any cramping of individual genius, every one of them has bent to the common aim his creative power and his technical skill. This co-operation has been made easier by the guidance and tact of Sir D. Y. Cameron, who has achieved with unerring judgment the feat of allotting the eight chosen subjects to the eight painters, and of keeping them all in touch with one another during the progress of their work.

The choice of the subjects was made by the present writer, in consultation with Lord Peel (the First Commissioner of Works), Lord Crawford (the Chairman of the Fine Arts Commission), and the Speaker—the initiator and sympathetic director of the whole scheme. The final list was only settled after long and careful deliberation, and after Sir D. Y. Cameron and the painters had contributed their views. It would evidently have been impossible to represent in eight pictures the varied and multitudinous scenes of a thousand years of national history. Moreover, it was felt that the later part of this long record was no very happy subject for the art of to day —it was undesirable to revive smouldering embers of the party conflicts and personal feelings of the last two hundred years. It followed that only such scenes could be chosen as would be of the highest and most far-reaching significance, and that the period they were to cover must be the eight centuries which begin with King Alfred and end with Queen Anne.

The series then, as it outlined itself, is concerned with a single subject—the Building of Britain—and the eight pictures give striking examples of this process. They show how certain main needs have been met by the different forces of the national constitution. First comes the necessity of naval defence, and of the corresponding power of transporting expeditions oversea: King Alfred’s famous long-ships and Richard Coeur de Lion’s Crusade rightly begin the story of an island people. Then- comes the day of the Barons—the great lords who protest on behalf of themselves and all freemen against illegality and oppression. The fourth picture commemorates the long struggle of the English people for liberty of religious faith, achieved only after a hundred years and more of heroic endurance. In the fifth we see the first far-reaching success of the House of Commons in another vital obstinacy—the denial of the right to spend the people’s money without the consent of the people’s representatives. The sixth presents, as in a splendid dream, the shrewd and romantic daring of the Elizabethan age, eager to find an Eldorado for itself, and found­ing instead a New World for a new nation. Next comes the true and typical story of a great Englishman’s dealing with an Indian Emperor, the head of an ancient civilization destined to mingle with ours under a constitution unexampled elsewhere. Finally, we reach the Union between our own two nations at home: a union often attempted, once half achieved, and at last completed in an hour most fortunate for the greatness and prosperity of both.