Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 2.djvu/21

BASSET (of Drayton) 5 which, however, was resumed by Henry IV. She d. 8 Nov. 1402, and with that dignity, fell into abeyance in 1646; and, notwithstanding that the Abeyance of the Barony of Ferrers of Chartley was terminated in Dec. 1677 in favour of Sir Robert Shirley, the youngest coheir (from whom Mr. Townshend derived his right to that dignity), no act is stated to have taken place relative to the Barony of Bourchier; nor does it appear that the abeyance of that dignity has ever been terminated, unless the fact of George Townshend Lord Ferrers of Chartley, who was then the youngest coheir of that Barony, having on that occasion been styled under the Great Seal ' Baron Bourchier,' be considered to have vested that dignity in him and the heirs of his body. " Secondly, Lovaine. — This dignity seems never to have been a Parliamentary Barony, in the modern acceptation of that term, as only one Writ of Summons was ever issued to the ancestor from whom the dignity was pretended to have been derived; and, moreover, it is very doubtful if that Writ was a Summons to a regular Parliament. It is thus manifest that no Barony of Lovaine could, according to modern decisions of the House of Lords, then have been held to be in existence; and even if such did exist, the Earl of Leicester was only a coheir of the dignity. " Thirdly, Basset of Drayton. — This title, though frequently assumed by the family of Shirley, and consequently by its representative the Earl of Leicester, was never, it is believed, vested in them. Their claim to it was, as is fully related above, in virtue of their descent from Isabel Basset, the ihter of Ralph the last Lord Basset of Drayton, but a rational doubt can scarcely be entertained that the said Isabel was illegitimate^ and hence that any pretensions derived from her must be totally groundless. " An instrument has thus been allowed to issue under the great Seal, in which three Baronies are recognised to be vested in an individual, to neither [j/t] of which he was legally entitled; and, what is no less extraordinary, one of the said dignities has never existed since the reign of Edward I, and another was at that moment entirely vested in other persons! " The precise effect of these dignities having been thus attributed to the Earl of Leicester, is a point of some difficulty, so much so, that the Editor [Courthope] will not presume to pronounce a decisive opinion; he does not, however, consider that a misnomer in the preamble of a patent creating a certain dignity can have the effect either of adding to or diminishing the dignity directly intended to be created: Lovaine had never existed as a descendible dignity, and could not be recognized, and if it could even be argued that it was created by this patent, there are no words of inheritance, and consequently would endure only to the grantee for life. An early instance of the same description occurs in the creation of the Earl of Kent, in 1465, where in his description he is styled Lord of Hastings, Waisford, and Ruthyn; according to the decision of the House of Lords in 1 840, the Earl of Kent was not even a coheir of the Barony of Hastings, and even in 1640, when the 'possessio fratris' was more relied upon, the opinion of the judges was unanimous against the claim of Mr. Lon- gueville to the Barony of Hastings, although deduced through the individual in whose person the Barony had been thus indirectly recognized." G.E.C. This subject has been further and more fully discussed by J. H. Round in his Studies in Peerage and Family History, pp. 440-449, and, subsequently, in his " Notes on the Lord Great Chamberlain Case" {The Jncestor^l^io. 4, pp. 8-18), where he has collected numerous instances of the wrongful assumption of peerage styles and of their occasional recognition by the Crown in error. His chief object was to prove that the Committee for Privileges were mistaken in the Mowbray and Segrave case (1877), in