We may think that Parliament can be a little fractious these days, but we are pale shadows of our Tudor forebears. In 1586 Job Throckmorton, the MP for Warwick, launched a ferocious attack on the Catholic Mary Stewart, calling her “the daughter of sedition, the mother of rebellion, the nurse of impiety the handmaid of iniquity”. She was “such a creature whom no Christian eye can behold with patience, whose villainy hath stained the earth and infected the air, the breath of whose malice towards the Church of God and the Lord’s anointed, our dread sovereign, hath in a loathsome kind of savour fumed up to the heavens.” Putting an end to Mary, he said, would be “one of the fairest riddances that ever the Church of God had”.