Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 4.djvu/776

 754 APPENDIX H G.E.C.'S NOTE ON BARONIES CALLED OUT OF ABEYANCE The early years of Queen Victoria's accession were the halcyon times for the Peerage lawyers. Men who might reasonably have expected to enter the Peerage from below found now a good prospect, especially if they were supporters of the Whig Government (Lord Melbourne's), of being placed over the heads of almost the entire Baronage {e.g. over such families as Stourton, St. John, Dormer, Roper, Clifford, Byron, i^c, whose ancestors had for hundreds of years consecutively held a Peerage), provided only that the Peerage lawyer could prove that there was in them (or, failing that, in their respective wives, which would equally benefit their posterity) some small fraction of co-representation ot some one oi the prodigious number of early Baronies which (according to modern interpretation) were created in fee by the numerous writs of summons issued by the Edwardian Kings. Before the time of George III (passing over the anomalous case of le Despenser) no abeyance had been terminated that had existed more than the space of some 30 years or so; that King, however, in four (Botetourt, Zouche, Ros, and Howard de Walden) out of the eight abeyances he thus terminated, introduced the pernicious practice of reviving the supposed Baronies of men whose estates had been entirely alienated, and whose imagined dignities, assuming them ever to have existed, had lapsed for a century or more. It was reserved, however, for the short space of little more than three years (Mar. 1838 to May 1841) to terminate the abeyance of six Baronies — of which five had long been disused, the " Caput Baronlae " and all estates belonging to them having been alienated and their very names having become unfamiliar. These five were (i) Vaux, which had been in abeyance about 175 years; (2) Braye, about 300 years, the newly established Baroness representing one of the younger of the six sisters and coheirs (of whom five at least left issue) of the 2nd Lord; (3) Beaumont, about 350 years; (4) Camoys, about 400 years, and, finally, (5) Hastings, which, though in abeyance only 300 years, had been dormant for about 450 years, the '■'■ late., lamented., Peer'' (Lord Hastings, Earl of Pembroke, the last person who, with any right thereto, bore the title) having died in the reign of Richard II ! Had this pace of terminating abeyances been continued, the Peerage would, since the accession of Queen Victoria, have by this time been " adorned " with about 100 such (strange) Baronies, consisting of Peers of great antiquity as to precedence, but whose ancestors had for centuries and centuries been guiltless of any pretence to nobility. Nor was there