Debrett's Peerage

“ Sir William did not smile at this speech. "There's a lot of nonsense talk about buying peerages," he said. "I've been saying to mother, only just now, that I doubt whether there has ever been a single instance of a man putting down so much money and getting a peerage for it, or even a baronetcy. Or, if things were ever [Pg 226] done in that way, they're certainly not now. As far as I'm concerned, I'd just as soon have done what I'm going to do in the Commons as in the Lords. For many things I would much rather have been in the Commons. ”

“ But even where peers do bear territorial or local titles, as, for example, the Duke of Norfolk, Marquis of Northampton or Earl of Derby, it is not usual in society to so speak of them except in the case of a dukedom; all noblemen, whether actually so, or only by courtesy, being styled simply Lord So-and-so.
It now and then happens that some distinguished man, who for some reason is not disposed to accept a peerage himself, will yet permit such honour to be conferred on his wife. ”

“ I have not a doubt, dear Longcluse. But you are urging a point that really has no weight with us people in England. We have taken off our hats to the gentlemen in casques and tabards, and feudal glories are at a discount everywhere but in Debrett, where they are taken with allowance. Your ideas upon these matters are more Austrian than ours. We expect, perhaps, a little more from the man, but certainly less from his ancestors than our forefathers did. ”

“ I view my deportment throughout this ordeal, in retrospect, with a considerable degree of satisfaction. I have spared no pains to realise my conception of the part. The essential thing about a successful peerage, I take it, is that it should be invested, for ordinary eyes, with a glamour of unreality. A Baron should be perceptibly romantic. A Viscount, if he respects his station should quite envelope himself in the mists of the improbable. As for an Earl, he should live frankly in fairyland. ”

“ With regard to Jacobite peerages, ‘Experience has shown that in the absence of a Resolution and Judgment of the House of Lords, it is a dangerous thing to say, without qualification, who represents a Peerage. The Duchess of Sutherland is Countess of Cromartie, as the Earl of Errol is Baron Kilmarnock, not in the Peerage of Scotland, but that of the United Kingdom, in virtue of a recent creation. ”

“ A man made himself prominent and formidable in Parliament, but that was a small part of the necessary qualifications for office. The Sovereign then exercised a control, not indeed absolute, but efficacious and material, on the selection of ministers. The great posts were mainly given to peers; while a peerage is now as regards office in the nature of an impediment, if not a disqualification. In those days an industrious duke, or even one like Grafton who was not industrious, could have almost what he chose. ”

“ The aristocracy, which is the most flourishing in Europe, is constantly recruited from the ranks of the people. He who has parts, pluck, and perseverance, will get riches, and, if he covets it, the bubble reputation. There is, indeed, one exclusive profession. Unless a man has a father according to Debrett, or unless he is an inheritor of wealth, he has no chance of promotion in the army. But every other calling is open to all comers. We have merchant princes who were once errand-boys; self-taught children, of the direst poverty, have won high renown in literature, art, and science ”

“ My dear Lord Derby,—The Queen wishes me to answer your kind letter of yesterday.
Her letter to you and to Mr Walpole of this morning will have apprised you that she sanctions the Guard of Honour [page 396] having been placed at Walmer, and the Duke's body having been taken possession of formally on the part of the Crown.
It would be a great pity if Lord Fitzroy were to be obliged to decline the Peerage on account of poverty; at the same time it may be difficult to relieve him from the payment of fees by a public grant. ”

“ Is the British Peerage to grow brighter with high moral qualities, than with hereditary honours, and to be cherished by an enlightened spirit of public virtue as a standard of all that is honourable, and as a pattern of what is most excellent in the ideal of the true Christian gentleman? Or must the sad reverse be true, and must this House be the scene of the last act in the eventful history of England? Shall a factitious nobility be crowded into these chief seats of the realm; men devoid of ennobling antecedents, and not less so of honour and of worth? ”

“ This doctrine is now exploded and cannot be regarded as applying to any case except that of the Crown (Baronies of Fitzwalter, 1660, and De Ros, 1666; Collins's Claims, 168, 261) . Every peerage descends according to the limitations prescribed in its patent of creation or its charter, and where these are non-existent (as in the case of baronies by writ) to heirs-general. (See Abeyance)
In dealing with English dignities it is essential to realize the difference between a mere title of honour and a peerage. ”

“ Can't you hit upon something, Balfour? Can you devise nothing respecting the Chief Baron?”
“He 'll take nothing but what you won't give him; I hear he insists on the peerage.”
“I'd give it, I declare,—I 'd give it to-morrow. As I told the Premier t' other day, Providence always takes care that these law lords have rarely successors. They are life peerages and no more; besides, what does it matter a man more or less in 'the Lords'? The peer without hereditary rank and fortune is like the officer who has been raised from the ranks,—he does not dine at mess oftener than he can help it.” ”

“ Supporters were an adjunct of the peerage, and peers were not subject to the Visitations. With his freedom from arrest, his high social position, and his many other privileges of peerage, a peer was "too big" a person formerly to accept the dictatorial armorial control which the Crown enforced upon lesser people. Short of treason, a peer in any part of Great Britain for most practical purposes of social life was above the ordinary law. ”

“ The Queen acknowledges Lord Derby's letter of yesterday, and returns him these three letters. She much regrets that he cannot reckon on the support and assistance in the Government, which he is about to form, of such able men. The Queen authorises Lord Derby to offer the office of Lord Chancellor with a Peerage to Mr Pemberton Leigh ”

“ What, then, is the signification to the people of Britain whether the person called the pretender be legitimate, or no? The son of King James, or the son of a cinder-woman? The case is settled by the queen, by the legislative authority, and we cannot go back from it; and those who go about as emissaries to persuade the commons of Great Britain of the pretender having a right, go about at the same time traitorously to tell the queen's good subjects that her majesty is not our rightful queen, but an usurper. ”

“ The right to vote certainly needs better proof than that now accepted. For many years the House of Lords maintained that the Crown could not confer a new peerage of Great Britain on a Scottish peer, the ground being that the Scottish peerage was only entitled to the sixteen representative peers given it by the Act of Union, but eventually in 1782 in the case of the duke of Hamilton this contention was given up. ”

“ By suggesting that the common people of Great Britain are more inclined to the pretender than they were formerly, they think they bring them really to be so, and encourage all the endeavours of those who labour indefatigably all over the nation to have it so. ”

“ It is this peculiar official quality of an English peerage which saved England from the curse of a privileged noble caste such as that which so long barred all progress in France and Germany. As a result there are hundreds of families in the United Kingdom who, commoners there, would yet, from their purity of blood, position and influence, be accounted noble in any continental country. ”

“ No, gentlemen; a minister who could venture to treat such influence with indifference would not be a Constitutional minister, but an arrogant idiot.
Gentlemen, the influence of the Crown is not confined merely to political affairs. England is a domestic country. Here the home is revered and the hearth is sacred. The nation is represented by a family — the Royal Family; and if that family is educated with a sense of responsibility and a sentiment of public duty, it is difficult to exaggerate the salutary influence they may exercise over a nation. ”

“ The English peer is not like the continental noble the member of a caste, but the holder for life of an office clothed with high and exceptional legislative and judicial attributes entirely dependent on his office and exercisable only in conjunction with his fellow peers in parliament assembled. Such privileges as he possesses are due primarily to his office rather than to his blood. His children are commoners, who though accorded courtesy titles by the usage of society have no legal privileges not shared with the humblest of British subjects. ”

“ On the third Day the Queen made a great Banquet for the King and those who had justed, and after the Banquet she gave the Chief Prize to the King, the second to the Earl of Essex, the third to the Earl of Devonshire, and the Fourth to the Marquess of Dorset. Then the Heralds cried aloud, My Lords, For your noble Feats in Arms, God send you the Love of the Ladies whom you most admire.'
The next year the Earl of Devonshire died, and was succeeded by his son, Henry, who for a time was high in the favour of his royal cousin. ”

“ The elder Despenser, then nearly sixty years of age, had grown grey in the service of Edward I. A baron of competent estate, he inherited from his father, the justiciar who fell at Evesham, an hereditary bias towards the constitutional tradition, but he looked to the monarch or to the popular estates, rather than to the baronage, as the best embodiment of his ideals. Ambitious and not over-scrupulous, he saw more advantage to himself in playing the game of the king than in joining a swarm of quarrelsome opposition lords. ”

“ Landor.—The peerage is the park-paling of despotism, arranged to keep in creatures tame and wild for luxury and diversion, and to keep out the people. Kings are to peerages what poles are to rope-dancers, enabling then to play their tricks with greater confidence and security above the heads of the people. The wisest and the most independent of the English Parliaments declared the thing useless. [79] Peers are usually persons of pride without dignity, of lofty pretensions with low propensities. ”

“ Lord John Russell presents his humble duty to your Majesty, and has the honour to submit to your Majesty a letter from the Earl of Coventry requesting an Audience.
It is usual for the Sovereign to receive any Peer who may be desirous of an Audience, without any other person being present. But if the Peer who is thus admitted to the honour of an Audience should enter upon political topics, it has been the custom for your Majesty's predecessors merely to hear what is offered, and not to give any opinion, or to enter into any discussion or conversation upon such topics. ”

“ The ministers of the crown, and in particular, Mr. Baldwin, the Prime Minister, have always treated me with full consideration. There has never been any constitutional difference between me and them, and between me and Parliament. Bred in the constitutional tradition by my father, I should never have allowed any such issue to arise.
Ever since I was Prince of Wales, and later on when I occupied the throne, I have been treated with the greatest kindness by all classes of the people wherever I have lived or journeyed throughout the empire. ”

“ King William, say they, promised in his declaration to have it referred to the decision of the English parliament, but when he obtained the crown he never did anything that way more than encourage the people to spread the delusion by scurrilous pamphlets to amuse the poor commons; have them take a thing for granted which could have no other thing made of it ”

“ As they really appear by an impartial deduction from them both, without the least bias either to one side or other; that so the people of Britain may settle and compose their thoughts a little in this great, and at present popular, debate; and may neither be terrified nor affrighted with mischiefs, which have no reason nor foundation in them, and which give no ground for their apprehensions; and, on the other hand, may not promise to themselves greater things from the pretender, if he should come hither, than he will be able to perform for them. ”

“ For the next five years the Despensers ruled England. Unlike the ordainers, they took pains to get the Commons on their side, and a parliament held at York in 1322 revoked the ordinances because they trenched upon the rights of the crown, and were drawn up by the barons only. From this time no statute was technically valid unless the Commons had agreed to it. This marks the most important step forward in Edward II.’s reign. But the rule of the Despensers soon fell away from this wise beginning. They thought only of heaping up wealth for themselves, and soon stirred up universal indignation. ”

“ In this dilemma he appealed to the people by the old trick of an effective speech, interlarded with those clap-traps which he knew so well how to employ. He caused a platform to be erected at the door of Westminster Hall, and appeared upon it, supported by his son Edward, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Earl of Warwick. Like the schoolmaster who never administered a flogging without saying it hurt him a great deal more than the boy, the king told the people that it was more grievous to him to exact taxes from his dear people than it could be to them to bear the burden. ”