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The term of office of Mr. Speaker is usually short. Arthur Onslow, who was elected in 1726, continued in possession of the Chair for thirty-five years, through five successive Parliaments, apparently without ruffling a hair of his wig. So long an occupancy is now wellnigh impossible. For one thing, the duties of Mr. Speaker are physically more responsible and irksome. The sessions are longer, the sittings of the House more protracted, and the fatigue of the prolonged and often tedious hours in the Chair must be most severe mentally and physically. Besides, there has grown up of late a preference for a certain maturity of age in the Speaker. Arthur Onslow was only thirty-six when he was called to the office. Henry Addington, who occupied the Speaker’s Chair at the opening of the nineteenth century, was thirty-two only on his appointment. William Court Gully, who was in possession of the Chair at the opening of the twentieth century, had passed his sixtieth year on his election. The occupancy of the office must be comparatively brief if men are appointed to it only when their heads are grey or bald. Of recent Speakers, Henry Bouverie Brand sat for twelve years, Arthur Wellesley Peel eleven years, William Court Gully ten years, James William Lowther sixteen years.
The Speaker receives a pension of £4,000 a year. John Evelyn Denison refused this retiring allowance. “Though without any pretensions to wealth,” he wrote to Gladstone, then Prime Minister, “I have a private fortune which will suffice, and for the few years of life that remain to me I should be happier in feeling that I am not a burden to my fellow-countrymen.” He retired in February 1872, and died, without heir, in March 1873. A peerage is also conferred on the Speaker when he resigns. This was not the custom in the eighteenth century. When Arthur Onslow retired in 1761, after his long service of thirty-five years, George III, in reply to the address of the Commons to confer on Onslow “some signal mark of honour,” gave him a pension of £3,000 a year for the lives of himself and his son, but no peerage. The custom began in the nineteenth century with Charles Abbot, who, on retiring in 1817, was made Baron Colchester. Since then every Speaker has been “called to the House of Lords”—Manners-Sutton as Lord Canterbury; Abercromby as Lord Dunfermline; Shaw-Lefevre as Lord Eversley; Denison as Lord Ossington; Brand as Lord Hampton; Peel as Lord Peel; Gully as Lord Selby.
But he is Speaker no longer; another presides in his place; and what a shadowy personage he seems, even as a Lord, compared with the resounding fame and distinction that were his in the glorious years when he filled with pomp and dignity the Chair of the House of Commons!