Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/483

PEERAGE 461 in, of =e?e " m " >; -ast t ^ er ~ this ; it has not prevailed so far as to establish any nobility or any privilege of any kind for all the descendants of the hereditary legislator and hereditary judge. This result was further strengthened by the peculiar nature of the office which became hereditary in the peers of England; it is an office which can be discharged only in concert with others; the very essence of the peerage is the summons to take part in the proceedings of an assembly. In itself nothing is more natural than the growth of nobility out of office ; it is as one of the chief ways in which nobility has come into being. And, to take a position higher than that of mere nobility, men in other lands whose dignity was in its beginning yet more purely official than that of the peers of England, say the dukes and counts of Germany, contrived, not only to make their offices hereditary but to make at least their honorary privileges extend to all their descendants for ever and ever. That is to say, they grew into a nobility a nobility to be sure within a wider nobility in the strictest sense. Why did not the English peerage do the same ? For two reasons, which are in truth different forms of the same reason, different results of the fact that the royal power was so much stronger in England than it was in Germany. One is because the growth of the dukes and counts of Germany belongs to a much earlier state of things than the growth of the English peerage, to a state of things when national unity and the royal authority, though much stronger than they were afterwards, were much less firmly established than they were in England in the age when the hereditary peerage grew up. But partly also, and chiefly, because the dignity and authority of the German duke or count was mainly a local and personal dignity and authority, a dignity and authority which he held in himself and exer cised apart from his fellows, while the dignity and autho rity of the English peer was one which he could hold and exercise only in partnership with his fellows. To the German duke or count his position in the national assembly was the least important part of his powers ; to the English peer it was the essence of his whole position. After the purely official character of the earldoms had died out, the English peer was nothing apart from his brother peers. His greatness was the greatness of the member of a power ful assembly. He might be hereditary legislator and hereditary judge ; but he could not act as either except in concert with all the other hereditary legislators and here ditary judges. The earls and bishops of England, each by himself, might, if the royal authority had been weaker, have grown into princes, like the dukes and bishops of Germany. The earls, after the change in their character, and the other ranks of peerage from their beginning, were shown to be simple subjects by the very nature of their dignity and power. The position of the German duke or count doubtless came from a royal grant ; but it was from a royal grant of some distant age. The position of the English peer rested altogether on a writ from the crown, and that not a writ of past ages, but a writ which, though it could not be refused, needed to be renewed in each successive parliament. In other lands the assembly of the nobles was great and powerful because it was an assembly of great and powerful men ; in England the peer was great and powerful because he was a member of a great and powerful assembly. A parliamentary dignity of this kind, even when it became strictly hereditary, was very different from the quasi princely position of the great nobles of other lands. And, though the peer commonly had a great local position, sometimes an almost princely position, it was not as peer that he held it. Whatever might be his local dignity and local rights, they had nothing to do with his peerage ; they were shared in his degree by the smallest lord of a manor. In short, the hereditary dignity 6 of the peer, hereditary membership of the great council of the nation, was on the one hand so transcendent as to extinguish all other hereditary dignities; on the other hand, as resting on membership of an assembly, it could not well grow into nobility in the strictest sense. The peerage therefore, the office of hereditary legislator and hereditary judge, passed, and such nobility as it conferred passed with it, to one member only of the family at a time. The other members had no share in the office, and therefore had no share in the nobility which it conferred. It was then in this way that the peerage, growing out of the hereditary summons to parliament, hindered the growth of any nobility outside the families of peers and by the same means hindered the growth of any real nobility within their families. To the existence of the peerage then, more than Equality to any other cause, England owes its happy freedom from of a11 the curse of a really privileged class, the happy equality in T j the eye of the law of all men who are not actually peers, p een an equality which reaches so high that the children of the sovereign himself, whatever may be their personal honours and precedence, are, unless they are formally created peers, in the eye of the law commoners like other men. The privileges of the actual peerage have been a small price to pay for such a blessing as this. But we must remember that this happy peculiarity, like all other features in the English constitution, came about by accident, or more truly by the silent working of historical circumstances. As no Silent English lawgiver ever decreed in so many words that there growth should be two Houses of Parliament and not one, three, or e four as no lawgiver ever decreed in so many words that one of these Houses should be elective and the other here ditary or official so no lawgiver ever decreed in so many words that the children of the hereditary lord of parliament should be in no way partaker of his privileges. All these things came of themselves ; we cannot point to any parti cular enactment which established any of them, or to any particular moment when they were established. Like everything else, they grew by usage, not by enactment ; later enactments confirmed them or took them for granted (see Lords Report, i. 47, 483 ; ii. 25). But we can see that the rule which has established but one form of real Constitu- distinction among Englishmen, that which parts the actual tion of peer and the commoner, grew out of the way in which H o US ^ the elements of the parliament finally settled themselves, gradu- The parliamentary line was in the end drawn between the allyfixed. baron and the knight. One is rather surprised that it was drawn at that point. The gap between the earl and the baron, and again the gap between the knight and the citizen, might either of them seem wider than the gap between the baron and the knight. Yet in the end the barons were lifted up to the fellowship of bishops and earls, while the knights were thrust down to the fellowship of citizens and burgesses. This must have done much to hinder the knightly families, families which in any other land would have ranked as noble, from keeping or claiming any strictly hereditary privilege. On the other hand, as we have al ready seen, the nature of that privilege of peerage which the barons were admitted to share hindered the baronial families from claiming any fresh hereditary privilege be yond the hereditary transmission of the peerage itself. Such is a general view of the nature and origin of peerage in England, following at greater length the lines already traced out in the article ENGLAND. This view may now be confirmed by a few of the special facts and The Wit- dates which stand out most conspicuously in that course ena g e - of events which led to the received doctrine of peerage. ^ u ^j n " We assume the House of Lords as the personal continua- j n the tion of the ancient Witenagemot, Mycel Gemot, Magnum House Concilium, by whatever name we choose to call that im- of Lords.