Page:Dod's Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage etc. of Great Britain and Ireland.djvu/39

PRECEDENCE Precedence is not regulated by mere conven- tional arrangements ; it is no fluctuating practice of fashionable life, no result of volimtary com- pacts in society, no usurpation of one class over others ; but, on the contrary, is " part and parcel of the law of England " ; subsisting under the authority of acts of parliament, solemn decisions in courts of justice, or public instruments pro- ceeding from the Crown. The earliest statute on the subject of precedence is the 31st of Henry Vni. cap. 10, which, although passed chiefly for the purpose of fixing the official precedence of .certain state fmictionaries and of the Lords in parliament, has been accepted as an authority for placing these persons on all occasions, whether specially named in the act or not. The next public documents relating to this subject are the decrees of James I. issued in 1612 and 1616: then the 1st of William and Mary, cap 21 ; the 10th of Anne, cap 8 ; the 5th of Anne, cap 8 ; the .39th of George III. cap. 67 ; with many other acts determining individual precedence, besides royal ordinances, decrees, warrants, letters patent, and statutes of knightly Orders. At all periods of our history, but especially dviring the last 200 years, the aristocratic spirit of British society has presented a well-defined and ascertained character. From this source have sprxmg a variety of arrangements connected with court ceremonial as well as with the inter- course of private society, which are mingled with, but in some respects quite distinct from the duties, privileges, and powers of those who are engaged in the public service. For example, though each rank in the peerage commands, according to a certain graduated scale, the respect of society, while it gratifies the ambition of its possessor and his family, yet no one member of the House of Lords possesses in his pohtical or judicial capacity any greater amount of power than his brethren ; the vote of a duke reckons for no more than the vote of a viscount or baron. It is to be observed, that primogeniture and seniority are amongst the leading principles of our system of precedence. Priority of birth, and dates of patents and commissions, determine the precedence which individuals of the same rank take amongst each other, and thus the station and degree of each are ascertained by means which rarely admit of controversy or doubt. In Great Britain all rank and honours are either hereditary, official, or personal. The order of baronets, the five ranks of the peerage, and the sovereignty of the realm, constitute the hereditary distinctions in society. The discharge of pubhc duties, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, impart official dignity, while a seat in the Privy Council or in the House of Commons, the honour of Imight- hood, patents of precedence at the Bar, etc., confer distinctions which, being neither hereditary nor official, may fairly be comprehended under the third of the above-named classes. In seeking to arrive at clear and satisfactory views of a subject like this, we are naturally induced to venture upon some attempts to trace these honorary distinctions to their respective origins, and to examine their remote as well as their recent history ; but yet even these aids do not secure all the information that is necessary to satisfy the demands of a liberal curiosity. There are no authentic soiuces from which any very material information can be derived with respect to the manners and customs of our remote ancestors, as regards rank, place, and precedence. In a primitive condition of society, the supreme ruler, the priesthood, and the people are the natiu-al divisions into which a nation would, ae it were, classify itself. Any inquiry into the usages of the Saxons, still less into those of the ancient British, would supply but little assist- ance towards rendering more interesting or useful the account here proposed to be given of the various orders of society in this country. It is well known that the Norman invaders and their . descendants assiuned in England all those exclusive privileges by which they made them- selves everything, and the serfs, who cultivated the soil, no better than slaves. Although the legal institutions, the language, and the lineage of the Saxons, in process of time, recovered their infiuence, andultimately prevailed, yet it is to our Norman conquerors, and to their usages, we must look for the germ of that which constitutes our ceremonial and titular code — the principle upon which our ranks and dignities have been fonned and arranged, as well as the power by which they are conferred. Still it is only the germ of that system that modern English society may be said to have derived from the rude soldiers of fortune who followed in the train of William, Duke of Normandy. With the consent of their leader, they constituted themselves the nobles of the land ; and though the titles of duke and earl might be traced to an age antecedent to the extinction of the Saxon dynasties, yet a long period elapsed after the Conquest before any other degrees of nobility than those of baron and of knight were established in England. The latter was, as it still continues to be, a personal distinction ; the former, a result of territorial possessions. It was the tenure of certain lands which in those days imparted to a man the dignity of a baron. Many knights possessed what were termed " knights' fees," and if they held such lands they were bound to perform " knights' service " ; but the existence or continuance of knighthood did not in any respect depend upon territorial possessions. It is here perhaps not unworthy of observation that inasmuch as the Crown has not exten- sively exercised the power of giving precedence to new knights or newly made barons, over men already in the enjoyment of those dignities, yet the monarch gradually called into existence new orders of nobility ; and though he did not much alter the positions of individual nobles amongst each other in their respective ranks, yet he assumed the power of placing one entire order above another. Thus the whole peerage at one time consisted chiefly of barons ; and now barons form its lowest rank ; for each successively created order was placed not after, but before those who may be considered to liave constituted the original nobility of the land. In like manner the ancient and general fraternity of knights bachelor has been moved downwards in the scale of precedence, to make way for the knights of the several Orders and for the baronets. In the subjoined tables of precedence the reader will find that, wherever necessary, an ex- planatory notice has been given under each head, to account for the arrangement adopted, to show the relation which that particular rank may bear towards others, to describe changes, anomalies, and exceptions, or to supply any additional information which the case may seem to require. GENERAL TABLE. 1. The Sovereign. — It is hardly necessary to remind the reader, that as the monarch is the highest personage in the realm, no one takes 15