Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/143

 much respected and esteemed, even by the opposite factions."

Blake's fate as to a peerage is suggestive and significant as to the peerage question. If a peerage were intended as a public recognition of great public services, never man had earned a peerage more truly than Robert Blake. If Blake had lived at the time when peers were persons who wore a coat of mail and not a footman's livery, his fate would have been at least to escape the ignominy of the "mean revenge" which insulted his body by dragging it from the place where it had been entombed "with," says Johnson, "all the funeral solemnity due to the remains of a man so famed for his bravery, and so spotless in his integrity."

Whatever weight may be attached to the investigation of the Lords' Committee on the subject of the Barones Majores having the right to sit in the Legislative Assemblies without being summoned by the King's Writ, it must be evident that peers who levied war against the Plantagenets were a different order of persons from peers who might bear the very titles of the Nevilles and the Percies under the Tudors and the Stuarts. Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, was a very different Earl of Salisbury from Richard Nevill, Earl of Salisbury