Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 1.djvu/549

 APPENDIX I POLITICS OF PEERS The Rev. A. B. Beaven writes as follows in explanation of the principles by which he has been guided in assigning the party designations which the Editor has adopted, on his authority, in describing the politics of individual peers. " So far as I know no one has ever attempted to determine in a com- prehensive list, embracing the whole period from the reign of Charles II to the writer's own times, the political bias of individual members of the two Houses of Parliament. For the three-quarters of a century since the passing of the Reform Act we have the successive issues of Dod's Parlia- 7nentary Companion^ which publication records throughout the politics of the members of the House of Commons, and (explicitly from 1857 on- ward, as well as interentially in its earlier issues), though with frequent omissions, those of the peers. But we have no similar authority for the pre-Reform era. The Biographical Indexes to the House of Lords and the House of Commons respectively by Joshua Wilson, published in 1806 and 1808, are of some service for the parliaments with which they deal, but the attempts of Stooks Smith {Parliaments of England^ 3 vols, 1844-50) and Crosby {Parliamentary Record, 1841) to identify the political opinions of many of the members of the House of Commons in the i8th century with those of the Whig or the Tory party are more praiseworthy in intention than successful in execution: their numerous demonstrable inaccuracies render them practically worthless as authorities on this point, except to those who possess the requisite ' expert ' knowledge for correct- ing them. " The Protests of the Lords and the Division Lists in both houses, with the records of contemporary newspapers, periodicals and correspond- ence, afford the only trustworthy evidence on which the party allegiance of the less prominent political personages before 1832 can be determined with any degree of accuracy, and this material, which exists to a fairly adequate degree up to the fall of Walpole, is of comparatively scanty extent for the latter half of George II's reign, and not only during that period, but also through the greater part of the reign ot his successor, political connexions were so variable and transient that the knowledge we possess as to the