Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 4.djvu/746

 724 APPENDIX H quently we only had seven determinations in the next sixty years. With one exception the abeyance in these cases had lasted only a few years, and the persons in whose favour baronies were called out may be said to have had a reasonable claim to the consideration they received. With the present century we entered on entirely new conditions. The restraint observed by statesmen in the last century has been thrown to the winds by the lawyer-politicians of this. Peerage cases are not now taken up as a profession : they are run as a trade. Instead of six determi- nations in three years, we have had four in one day;(^) and there would have been a fifth but for the fact that there was an attainder in the Barony of Cobham, for a reversal of which a Bill was actually introduced at the expense of legislation urgently needed for the war in which we are fighting for our very existence. Writing in the Law Quarterly Review for July 19 15, W. Paley Baildon said : " The barony in fee is as much a legal fiction as John Doe and Richard Roe, and has nothing like the antiquity of those worthies. . . . The theory has been denounced and ridiculed by competent lawyers, historians, and heralds. ... Is not the time ripe for the application of the results of modern research ... to this particular theory of the barony in fee .'' A new Report on the Dignity of a Peer might well adopt Lord Redesdale's opinion that baronies by writ were not heritable before the time of Richard II, or might even go a step further, and, taking courage in both hands, denounce the whole doctrine as unsupported by and opposed to all historical evidence. No one would weep save the peerage- mongers." As long as the advice tendered to the Crown in these cases is controlled by " peerage-mongers," we cannot hope that the scandal will be abated. There is, however, a very simple way of putting an end to sham-peerage promotion. As the determination of an abeyance rests wholly in the discretion of the Crown and is an act of grace and favour, the Crown can declare that no more baronies will be called out of abeyance unless the petitioner can prove that he and his ancestors have been in uninterrupted possession of the estate held by that ancestor in the writ of summons to whom the right of peerage is claimed to have its origin. There would be no more petitions. (*) Burgh, Strabolgi, Dudley, Wharton. The hitherto unheard-of Barony of Strabolgi had been " in abeyance " 547 years.