Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/480

458 these productions the following have been preserved and edited by Mr Dyce: The Chronicle History of Edward I. (published in 1593); The Battle of Alcazar (1594); The Old Wives Tale (1595); David and Bethsabe (1599); Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (1599). These plays, which are very different in kind, testify to Peele's versatility and adroitness, but do not entitle him to much consideration either as a poet or as a dramatist. Quickness of wit and fancy and a certain neatness of versification are their highest qualities. As Peele lived through the transition from the first tentative essays to the full maturity of the great Elizabethan drama, his works have an historical interest as showing what an ingenious man of culture could do with the common stock of theatrical characters, situations, and imagery. His comedies are often pretty, but his tragedies are inflated and preposterous.

  T was remarked in the article (vol. xvii. pp. 529, 530) that the existence of the peerage, as that word is understood in the three British kingdoms, is something altogether peculiar to those kingdoms, and that it has actually hindered them from possessing a nobility of the Continental type. Before we try to trace out the history of the British peerage, it will be well to show more fully than was done in that article in what the institution consists, and in what it differs from those institutions in other countries which are most like it. And to this end we must define what we understand by the word peerage in the British sense. In its historical use it takes in all the members or possible members of the House of Lords and no other persons. But modern usage and modern decisions seem to limit the use of the name on one side, and to extend it on another. There is no kind of doubt that, according to the earliest precedents precedents reaching up to the earliest official use of the word peer the spiritual lords are equally peers with the temporal. But it has been held, at least from the 17th century, that the spiritual lords, though lords of parliament equally with the temporal lords, are not, like them, peers. Again, in earlier times no peers were heard of except members of the House of Lords, but membership of that House, even as a temporal lord, was not necessarily hereditary. But a decision of the present reign has ruled that a life-peerage is possible, but that the holder of such a peerage has no right to a seat as a lord of parliament. And an Act of the present reign of later date has actually called into being a class of lords who, it would seem, may possibly be either lords of parliament without being peers, or peers without being lords of parliament. These doctrines, some of which trample all the facts of history under foot, but which must be supposed to declare the modern law, establish the possibility of peers who are not lords of parliament, as well as of lords of parliament who are not peers. The question whether all lords of parliament were peers has been debated for several centuries; that all peers were in esse or in posse lords of parliament, that the right to a seat in parliament was the essence of peerage round which all other rights have grown, was surely never doubted till the year 1856.

Still these later doctrines, though founded on altogether wrong historical grounds, give us a definition of peerage which is intelligible and convenient. Setting aside the possible peers who are not lords of parliament, the two decisions between them rule that the parliamentary peer age is confined to the temporal lords, and that, except in the case of the very modern official lords, their peerage is necessarily hereditary. This definition is convenient in practice, because it is the hereditary temporal peerage whose growth and constitution is of that unique kind which distinguishes it from all other bodies which bear the same name or which present any likeness to it in other ways. It will save trouble in this inquiry if we use the word peerage in what with the possible exception of the last-created official lords seems now to be its legal sense, as meaning the hereditary temporal peerage only.

In this sense then the peerage of England continued after the union between England and Scotland in the peerage of Great Britain, and after the union between Great Britain and Ireland in the peerage of the United Kingdom—is a body of men possessing privileges which are not merely personal but hereditary, privileges which descend in all cases according to some rule of hereditary succession, but which pass only to one member of a family at a time. In this the peerage differs from nobility strictly so called, in which the hereditary privileges, whatever they may consist in, pass on to all the descendants of the person first created or otherwise acknowledged as noble. The essential and distinguishing privilege of the peer, as defined above, is that he is an hereditary lord of parliament, that he has, by virtue of his birth, a right to a summons from the crown to attend personally in every parliament and to take his seat in the House of Lords. He is thus, by right of birth, a member of the great council of the nation, an hereditary legislator, and an hereditary judge. Whatever other privileges, substantial or honorary, the peer may possess, they have all gathered round this central privilege, which is that which distinguishes the peer from all other men. The peer of parliament thus holds a different position from the lords spiritual, equally lords of parliament with himself, but holding their seats by a different tenure from that of an hereditary peerage. He holds a different position from the possible non-parliamentary peers implied in the decision of 1856. He holds a different position from the official lords of parliament created by the last Act. The number of the peerage is unlimited ; the crown may raise whom it will to any of its ranks ; but it is now understood that, in order to make the persons so raised peers in the full sense, to make them lords of parliament, the creation must extend to their heirs of some kind as well as to themselves.

The special character of the British peerage, as distinguished from privileged orders in any other time or place, springs directly from the fact that the essence of the peerage is the hereditary right of a personal summons to parliament. To determine the origin of the peerage is thus to determine how a certain body of men came to possess this hereditary right of summons. But, before we enter on this inquiry, one or two remarks will be needful which are naturally suggested by the definition of peerage which has just been given.

It has been said above that the holder of a peerage as defined is a lord of parliament in esse or in posse. It has become necessary during the present and last centuries to add these last words to the definition. For it is plain that, since the successive unions of England and Scotland and of Great Britain and Ireland, an hereditary peerage has not always in practice carried with it a seat in the House of Lords (cf. the Lords Report on the Dignity of a Peer, ii. 16). For since those unions certain persons, namely those peers of Scotland and Ireland who are not representative peers and who do not hold peerages of Eng land, of Great Britain, or of the United Kingdom, have been undoubted peers, they have enjoyed some or all of the 