Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 1.djvu/19

 PREFACE ix as they have been obtainable, particulars of the parentage, birth, honours, orders, offices, public services, politics, marriage, death and burial, of every holder of a Peerage. In the above list the only novel item is that of the politics, which have been system- atically recorded from the period of the Exclusion Bill agitation of 1679-81 (when the terms Whig and Tory first came into general use as party definitions) to the present day. The Editor hopes that this additional information (which has not hitherto been obtainable in a collected form, and is not easy to procure individu- ally in the case of the less prominent politicians of the period before the Reform Bill of 1832) will not be without interest to the general reader, while it cannot fail to be of service to the future historian and biographer. ('') The party designations allotted in the text, as well as the notes appended in particular cases, to explain the political divagations of peers whom it is difficult to classify under one definite epithet, have all been furnished by the Rev. A. B. Beaven, whose familiarity with the minute details of the political and party history of England since the Restoration is probably unrivalled. C") Many more authorities have been cited in this than in the former edition, but it has been found impossible AUTHORITIES to quote them habitually on account of the intolerable size to which such a course would have swollen these volumes — e.g., such atypical (though imaginary) sentence as the following : — " He m., 14 April 1627, at Boston, CO. Lincoln, at her age of 17, and without the knowledge of her parents, Jane, only child of Sir John Smith, Mayor of Boston (1620), by Jane, da. of James Jones, of York, Leatherseller, " might well have been built up from a dozen different sources, and might entail references to (i) a Parish Register, (2) a News- letter, (3) a Peerage, (4) a Diary like Luttrell's, (5) an entry in a Bible, (6) a note in a genealogical magazine, (7) a private letter to the Editor from a friend with genealogical tastes, (8) Corres- pondence printed by the Hist. MSS. Com., (9) Pedigrees both of Smith and Jones, (10) an unedited MS. at the British Museum, Record Office, or College of Arms, etc. Accordingly, as a general (") The Dictionary of National Biogrtiphy is conspicuously lacking in such detnils with regard to members of both Houses of Parliament who were not, and even some who were, ' front bench ' men. (*") See Appendix I in this volume.