MOTION FOR AN ADDRESS. (Hansard, 3 May 1869)

§ EARL STANHOPE
appealed to the noble Lord not to proceed at present with his Motion. If the Motion should be rejected, it would seem to negative the principle of the Bill of the noble Earl (Earl Russell); while if earned it 11 would apparently imply that no further step was required.

§ LORD REDESDALE
said, he must admit there was some force in the noble Earl's representation, and was not un-willing to accede to his appeal. The Address would affirm, to a limited extent, the principle of life peerages; and therefore it might be desirable, before the House was committed to it, to see the state in which the noble Earl's Bill would come out of Committee. This, however, was no new idea, for as long ago as 1851—a desire being felt to strengthen the appellate jurisdiction of the House—he suggested that the Law might be represented in the same way as the Church—namely, by certain offices entitling those who held them to sit in this House. Thus some years before the Wensleydale case was discussed, he (Lord Redesdale) had called attention to the subject; but he received no encouragement to proceed with his proposition, which was that the Chancellor, the two Chief Justices, and the Chief Baron, should be summoned in connection with their offices; and he thought, if those peerages were continued to them for life on their retirement from those offices, they would prove most useful Members of the House. It appeared to him that the Office of Chancellor stood in a peculiar position in reference to the House. Although the Lord Chancellor was not necessarily a Peer, still he was Speaker of the House ex officio; and it seemed to be a very natural conclusion that the office should have a peerage for life attached to it ex officio. At the same time that might be coupled with another proposition which would prevent it from being at all invidious — that a person so summoned in connection with his office might at any time have the peerage so granted to him made hereditary by special grant from the Crown. Perhaps the whole question would be better discussed when they knew the disposition of the House in regard to the Life Peerage question generally. Under these circumstances he would withdraw his Motion, reserving to himself the power of bringing it forward on a future occasion.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR
said, as his noble Friend had intimated his intention of withdrawing his Resolution, he would only make a single observation on the subject. His noble Friend com- 12 menced his Resolution by stating that "it would be for the advantage of the House and for the honour of the legal profession" that the course he recommended should be taken. It was not, of course, for him (the Lord Chancellor) to say what their Lordships would consider "for the advantage of the House;" but with regard to its being "for the honour of the legal profession" he must, at that moment, humbly enter his protest against the proposition that the Chancellor should be the marked exception from every other case, and that he alone should be fastened on as having the honour of sitting and voting in the House with simply a peerage for life. One other observation he would make his noble Friend would excuse him for suggesting that, while he proposed to create a barony, it would rather seem that he intended the Chancellor to be a corporation sole; because he would continue to be a Peer when his barony was gone—that is, when he ceased to be Chancellor. If the Resolution were carried, they would never again have a Lord Chancellor other than a life Peer. The question, if considered at all, had better be considered in Committee on the noble Earl's Bill.