Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 2.djvu/80

 64 BEAUMONT wife) John (de Vere), Earl of Oxford, who d. lo Mar. 1 512/3. She d. 26 June 1537, and was bur. at Wivenhoe afsd. M.I. Will dat. 30 May 1537- VIII. 1840. 8. Miles Thomas Stapleton, of Carlton Towers, co. York, s. and h. of Thomas S., of the same, and of the Grove, Richmond, in the said co., by his ist wife, Mary Juliana, da. of Sir Robert Cansfield Gerard, 9th Bart., was b. 4 June 1805, at Richmond afsd. He sue. his father 4 July 1839. Being one of the coheirs of the Barony of Beaumont (see pedigree), he, though a Conservative,(^) was sum. to Pari, as a Baron (LORD BEAUMONT) by writ, 16 Oct. 1840, Queen Victoria having, upon his petition, terminated the abeyance of that Barony in his favour.C") On 26 Jan. 1841, he was placed in the House next below the Lord Camoys, a creation of 1383, the writ of 1432 (and petitioned for a termination in his favour of the abeyance of the Barony, as a coh. thereof. On 14 Mar. 1798 the House resolved that the Petitioner was a coh. of the Barony; and there, for above 40 years, the matter ended. A full account of these proceedings is given in Cruise, pp. 214-244. of time and expense was wasted in consequence of their Lordships having (in 1791) directed that " the representatives of Anne and Margaret, sisters of the attainted Henry Norreys (who, it must be remembered, himself Jefl issue), should be traced by Mr. Stapleton, and being found should be served with notices of his claim," their Lordships apparently believing that an attainder not only prevented the succession of the rightful heir to a dignity, but actually had the effect of introducing a new line of heirs. The result of his search is printed in the Prospectus and Specimen of a Fro- posed Work on the present State of Baronies by Writ, by Francis Townsend, Rouge Dragon Pursuivant of Arms [1820 to 1833], pp. 16, folio, no date. The author was s. (being also owner of the MSS.) of Francis Townsend, Windsor Herald [1784 to 1 8 19], whose valuable additions to Dugdale are given in the Coll. Top. et Gen. if) He was the only member of that party who succeeded in obtaining such a summons, of which there were several, at or about this time; see note "b" next below. V.G. C") For a list of Baronies called out of abeyance see vol. iv, Appendix H. The Editor has been unable to ascertain (in spite of assistance courteously rendered by the officials of the House of Lords) why the Barony was not allowed to date from 1309, when the first Beaumont was sum., for from that date to 1 432 there is a regular succession from father to son, and in the case of the ist and 3rd Lords there is proof of sitting. If the abeyance was to be determined at all, there does not seem any good reason, on the analogy of other cases where an abeyance has been terminated, why the precedency of 1309 should not have been granted. In 1870 Lord Beaumont petitioned for precedency above Lord Audley (13 13), and in 187 1 he altered his petition, claiming only to rank next below Audley, but he does not appear to have gone any further in the matter or to have appeared before the Committee for Privileges. The Fourth Report of the Committee on the Dignity of a Peer (commenting on the Report of 1798, see note "f " above) says, "The Committee thus avoided deciding whether the Dignity of Baron vested in William Viscount Beaumont was derived by descent from any of his ancestors except his father, summoned in the nth rectius lOth] of Henry the Sixth." V.G.
 * So loose were the then notions of representation, that a considerable amount