Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 09.pdf/262

 Election Petition Trials in England. the right of granting supplies, the most pre cious of the privileges of the Lower House. The whole course of English history might have been changed if the transference of 1604 had not taken place. Charles I's trouble with the Oxford Parliament in 1625 need not have happened if he could have seated whom he liked as the representatives of the people. Nor would there have been any need for the quo warranta proceedings of Charles II and James II, if these sovereigns could have appointed the judges of election. Undertaking at parliamentary elections, or, as it would be called in this country, bossing the elections, can be traced much further back than the early years of the seventeenth century. It was practiced a little in the time of Henry VIII; it grew more common in the days of Elizabeth. But it became a business in the reigns of James I and Charles I. Erom the Restoration, to George Ill's reign, every sovereign, except George I, took a hand in it. The last king personally to engage in it, George III, was the greatest adept at electioneering that English parliamentary history can produce. He could boss an election, whether at Wind sor or Westminster, with exceeding adroit ness, and in his day George III had only two contemporaries who could approach him in this line of work. These were the first Earl of Lonsdale and Lord Melville. Melville bossed Scotland and its elections for two generations. Lonsdale, as Sir James Lowther, bossed the counties of Westmore land and Cumberland, and in his best days could count on returning no fewer than nine of his adherents, privadoes or creatures they would have been called in Charles I's time, to the House of Commons. The English sovereigns from James I to George III would have had but a small field for the exercise of these talents but for the transference of election cases from the law courts to the Commons in 1604. Some of the sovereigns enjoyed the work of manipu lating the elections. George III certainly

233

did, or he would never have economized in domestic life to save money to be spent in carrying his candidates. But to James I and Charles I it was somewhat distasteful work. For them it was attended at times with disheartening failures, and if the usage of the Tudor days had been continued, it would have been easier to determine the make-up of the House of Commons through decisions of election cases than to try to bring about the same result through selfseeking parliamentary borough masters or sordid and grasping aldermen and freemen. In short, English history would not have been what it is, perhaps not half so interest ing, had it not been for the signal success of the House of Commons in the early days of James I. For the first half century or so after the House possessed itself of the privilege of determining its own membership, election petitions were tried by the Committee of Privileges. This was a standing committee appointed at the commencement of each Parliament. On it usually served all the distinguished lawyers who were of the Lower House. Many of them added largely to their reputations by service on this committee, in whose records in the Journals of the House, their names and their services in the upbuilding of the parliamentary system of England are perpetuated. About 1672, during the time of the Pen sioner Parliament, when seats in the House of Commons were more in demand and cost more to obtain and hold than at any time previously in the seventeenth century, the work of hearing petitions was taken from the Committee of Privileges and Elections, and dealt with in Committee of the Whole House. As the eighteenth century advanced it became the practice to hear election cases at the bar of the House. From the Resto ration until the Grenville Act of 1770, how ever, under which petitions were referred to a small committee chosen in a way calcu lated to ensure a fair report, it mattered little