The Supreme Court of Appeal had been violently attacked in the Commons, where certain members declared it to be inferior to any tribunal in the land. Palmerston in 1856 determined to remedy its defects by the addition of two Law Lords who should be life peers. This scheme was upheld by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Cranworth, but met with determined opposition in the Upper House. The Law Lords were especially opposed to it, fearing that, if such a precedent were allowed, no lawyer in the future would ever be given an hereditary peerage. On the Premier's recommendation the Queen proposed to confer life peerages upon two distinguished lawyers, Parke and Pemberton Leigh, and proceeded to issue a patent to the former, creating him Baron Wensleydale for life. When, however, the matter was referred to the Committee for Privileges, they decided that no life peer could either sit or vote in the House of Lords, and the Wensleydale and Kingsdown peerages had consequently to be made hereditary.
Persons who are raised to the peerage to-day are made peers of the United Kingdom. No Scotch peer has been created since the Union in 1707, and the right of conferring an Irish peerage which existed under certain restrictions in the Act of Union has ceased to be exercised except upon one notable recent occasion.[41]
During the last fifty years some one hundred and fifty additions have been made to the membership of the House of Lords. The only limit to the numerical increase of peers would seem to lie in the good sense of the Prime Minister or the patience of the Sovereign. It is of course the latter who confers peerages, though as the former usually brings suitable candidates for ennoblement to the royal notice, he is generally held responsible for the result of his recommendations.[42]
THE HOUSE OF LORDS IN 1742
FROM AN ENGRAVING BY JOHN FINE
The House of Lords now includes some 616 members, divided, as we have seen, into four classes; the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal—Princes of the Blood, Dukes, Marquesses, Earls, Viscounts, Barons—the Representative Peers of Scotland and Ireland, and the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary.
The writ of summons, which did not cease to be regarded as a burden until the reign of Edward II., is now looked upon as a privilege and right which few peers would willingly forego. And the question of mutual precedence which was never mooted until the creation of Viscounts in Henry VI.'s time, is now a matter of the utmost importance to the occupants of the Gilded Chamber.
The first Parliament that is recognized as conferring the right of peerage was that of the eleventh year of Edward I. The Lords decided, in the recent case of Lord Stourton claiming the Barony of Mowbray, that a writ summoning a peer to this Parliament, followed by a sitting, gave his descendants a seat in the House.
All Peers of the Realm—a phrase which came into use in 1322—are entitled to seats in the House of Lords once they have attained their majority. Infancy disqualifies a peer from receiving a writ of summons; failure to take the oath or to affirm deprives him of the right of sitting. No alien may sit in the Lords, nor may a bankrupt or a felon, and the House as a Court of Justice may at any time pass sentence disqualifying a peer from sitting.