Lawyers in the English Parliament. ferent service. Many of them seem to have been as loyal to their constituents as are members of the House of Commons at the present time; and the recorder members seem to have kept up the early custom of addressing their constituents longer than most of the unpaid members of the period prior to the coming of the Stuarts. As long as local members were sent to the House of Commons, the meetings of members and con stituents were general; because the members, in the boroughs at any rate, usually explained what had been done in Parliament when they received their wages from their constituents. When the non-residential member came in, and wages disappeared, these meetings of electors and elected came to an end, and they were not revived until the second dec ade of the nineteenth century — when Can ning reestablished the custom of addressing his constituents at Liverpool on other occa sions than at the elections. Canning was an energetic opponent of Parliamentary re form, but no member who was of the unreformed House of Commons in its closing years had a higher ideal of the relationship which should exist between members and constituents. In his relations with the electors of Liverpool, Canning came nearer to the standard of the early democratic days of the House of Commons than many mem bers who were in the forefront of the move ment for reform. The recorder members seem to have continued the early relationships between electors and elected well on into the sixteenth century. In the old records one frequently meets with a statement like this, taken from the "Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, 1529—30," which has reference to Notting ham — " Mr. Recorder related the acts and manner of the last Parliament, as a burgess of the city, and had hearty thanks therefor." In some places the burgesses went beyond "hearty thanks" to their recorder members, and occasionally gave them a gratuity for their parliamentary services. The ordinary
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pay for a recordership was never large. The office to-day, although much coveted by lawyers, is almost honorary. Whitelock, as recorder of Woodstock, Bewdly, Ludlow, Bishop's Castle and Poole, received a fee of only forty shillings from each place, except that at Ludlow three loads of hay were given him in addition. In a few places the recorders may have been residents of the towns they served in Parliament; but in most places, especially after the beginning of the seventeenth cen tury, they were non-residents, and from that time onwards the lawyer members have al most invariably been carpet-baggers — men who in the unreformed Parliament accepted a service in respect of any borough whose owner or patron would place a seat in the House of Commons at their service. Before Parliament was reformed, and even until the period, later than 1832, at which constitu encies became larger and less corrupt, but more exacting and more critical, lawyers undoubtedly were the soldiers of fortune in English politics. " Everybody," wrote Sir ! George Trevellyan, in describing in his "Life of Fox" the lawyers in Parliament at the period just previous to the American Revolution, " everybody was ready to change sides with the rest of the connection to which he belonged; but the lawyer ratted alone, and at the moment which suited his individ ual interests. The Bedfords hunted in a pack; the Pelhams ran in a couple; but the lawyer pursued his peculiar prey with solitary avidity and with a clamour which went far to spoil the sport of the entire field." As late as 1623, a royal proclamation was issued to the parliamentary electors counselling them " not to choose curious and wrangling lawyers, who may seek repu tation by stirring needless questions." This was the last royal effort to exclude lawyers from the House of Commons. But before 1623, the House had settled down to the inevitable. Long before that it had been
