§ COLONEL SANDYS (Lancashire, S.W., Bootle)I beg to ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether his attention has been drawn to a letter which appeared in the Morning Post of 14th July, from the Secretary to the Royal Commission appointed by the; late Government in 1884 on the Housing of the Working Classes, in which the writer says that—
Cardinal Manning was accorded his precedence on that Commission not as a matter of courtesy, but as a personage of princely rank;whether this accordance of precedence was in conformity with a precedent created in the grant of a Charter for the Royal University in Ireland by the Government in 1880; whether the concession of such precedence on a Commission appointed under the Royal Sign Manual now confers such rank and precedence upon Dr. Manning, and would confer them upon any other Cardinal appointed by the Pope to a see in Great Britain or Ireland; and whether Her Majesty's Government will take steps to prevent in future such precedence being accorded over the highest representatives of the Protestant Churches?
§ * MR. W. H. SMITHI have no official knowledge of what took place in 1884 under the Government of the right hon. Member for Mid Lothian, and no responsibility in respect to it. As Her Majesty's Government do not at present contemplate the appointment of any Cardinal upon any Royal Commission, it does not seem necessary to make any provisions with respect to the precedence which would be accorded to a Cardinal in such a case. The point raised in the second and third paragraphs of the hon. 1913 Member's question is a purely legal point, which I cannot undertake to answer.