If the duties of the Speakership are arduous, its dignity is high and its emoluments handsome. In former times the Speaker was paid a salary of £5 a day, and a fee of £5 on every Private Bill. This fluctuating income was replaced by a fixed salary of £6,000 a year on the election of Henry Addington to the Chair in 1789. It was also decided at the same time that a sum of £1,000 equipment money was to be given to the Speaker on his first appointment. In the reign of William IV the salary was reduced to £5,000 to be paid, free of all taxes, out of the Consolidated Fund direct, without having to be voted every year by the House of Commons. At the same time an official secretary, with a salary of £500, was attached to the office. The Speaker also has a residence, furnished by the State and free of rent, rates and taxes, with coal and light supplied. The Speaker’s house is in that conspicuous wing of the Palace of Westminster, with its carved stonework and gothic windows, extending from the Clock Tower to the river. It was first occupied by John Evelyn Denison in 1857. Here the Speaker gives several official entertainments during session. There are dinners to the Ministers, to the leader Members of the Opposition, and to private Members. According to long-established custom, a Member who accepts an invitation to dine with Mr. Speaker is required to appear either in uniform or Court dress, ordinary evening dress being debarred. As a result, many eminent parliamentarians, such as William Cobbett, Joseph Hume, Richard Cobden, John Bright, Joseph Cowen, all sturdy democrats and Radicals, who could not bring themselves to wear Court dress, never had the pleasure of dining as guests of Mr. Speaker. The rule is still enforced. The only departure from it was made by Mr. Speaker Peel during the short Liberal Parliament of 1895, when he had a separate dinner party of the Labour Members of the House, and told them they might come in any dress they pleased. But that precedent, at least, has not once been followed at Westminster, though subsequent Speakers have in such cases given luncheons instead of dinners. The Speaker is attired at these dinners in a black velvet Court suit, knee-breeches with silk stockings, a steel-handled sword by his side, and lace ruffles round his neck and wrists. The table and huge sideboards in the oak-panelled rooms are spread with magnificent old plate, and the walls are hung with portraits of many famous “First Commoners.”
The Speaker is the First Commoner of the Realm, according to an Act of Parliament passed in 1688 (1 William and Mary, c. 21) after the Revolution. It provided that the Speaker’s place in the order of precedence is next after the peers of the Realm. In 1919 the Speaker was raised a great many steps in the scale. By an Order in Council issued by King George V it was ordained that he “shall have, hold and enjoy place, pre-eminence and precedence, immediately after the Lord President of the Council,” which makes him the seventh subject of the Realm. The order is: Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor, Archbishop of York, Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Lord President of the Council, the Speaker.
The Speakership is one of the highest prizes of political ambition. In dignity and importance it is next, perhaps, to the office of Prime Minister. Four Speakers have resigned in order to become Prime Ministers. One of them, Henry Addington, after being Speaker for twelve years, was summoned by George III, in 1801, to form an Administration in succession to Pitt’s, which failed to complete its Irish policy at the Union, owing to the King’s rooted objection to Catholic emancipation. The only position for which the Speakership would be relinquished is certainly that of Prime Minister. Sir John Freeman-Mitford, who followed Addington in the Chair, resigned after a year’s service in order to become Lord Chancellor of Ireland; but he did so only at the earnest solicitation of the King and the solatium of a salary of £10,000 per year and a peerage as Lord Redesdale. The Lord Chancellorship of Ireland is a high and honourable position, but it is unlikely that anyone would now give up the Speakership of the House of Commons for it. Charles Abbot resigned the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland—a post of greater political importance than that of the Lord Chancellorship—in order to succeed Freeman-Mitford as Speaker in 1802. Abbot refused the offer of a Secretaryship of State from Perceval, the Prime Minister, in 1809 during his occupancy of the Chair; and Manners-Sutton could have been Home Secretary in the Administration formed in 1827 by Canning, but he did not think it good enough.
On the other hand, Ministers have been willing to give up their portfolios for the Speaker’s Chair. Spring Rice, Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Melbourne Administration, had his heart set on that coveted office. He was in the running for the Speakership in 1835, when James Abercromby was elected. In 1838 Abercromby intimated to Lord Melbourne his intention to resign—throwing a curious side-light on the relations at the time between Mr. Speaker and the Treasury Bench—because from the attitude of Lord John Russell, the Leader of the House, he felt he no longer possessed that degree of Ministerial confidence which, in his opinion, was essential to the due conduct of public business and the maintenance of the authority of the Chair. The Prime Minister induced Abercromby to postpone his resignation, and at the same time satisfied the renewed pretensions of his Chancellor of the Exchequer with the promise that he should be the Government candidate for the Chair whenever it became vacant. But when Abercromby retired in the following year it was found that Spring Rice was not acceptable to the Radicals, and Shaw-Lefevre was selected in order to maintain the unity of the Party and preserve the Liberal succession to the Chair. Again, on the resignation of Arthur Wellesley Peel in 1895, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was willing to lay down his portfolio as Secretary of State for War in the then Liberal Government for the object of his ambition—the Speakership; and it is said that he reluctantly yielded to the urgent representations of his colleagues that the Party could ill spare his services. Just ten years later he became Prime Minister.
Still, the office has, as a rule, fallen to unofficial Members, or to Members who have held subordinate Ministerial appointments. Denison, in the opening passages of his Diary, states that on April 8, 1857, he was seated in his library at Ossington, when the letters were brought in, and among them was the following:
94 Piccadilly,
April 7, 1857.
My dear Denison,
We wish to be allowed to propose you for the Speakership of the House of Commons. Will you agree?
Yours sincerely,
Palmerston.
Denison says the proposal took him by surprise. “Though,” he writes, “I had attended of late years to several branches of the private business, and had taken more part in the public business of the House of Commons, I had never made the duties of the Chair my special study.” William Court Gully had been ten years in Parliament before his elevation to the Speaker’s Chair, but he was one of that large, modest band of “silent Members” who, confining themselves to voting in the division lobbies, are unknown in debate, and, consequently, are never mentioned in the papers. Moreover, being a busy lawyer, Gully took little or no part in the routine work of the House, such as service on Committees upstairs, which is supposed to afford a good training for the Speakership. Indeed, the Chair may be said to be the one great prize that is open to the occupants of the back benches as well as the front benches who possess the necessary physical and mental qualities. Personal appearance is undoubtedly an essential qualification for the office. This includes the possession of clear vision. A Speaker with spectacles would look incongruous in an assembly where the competition to catch his eye is so keen.