The Political Offices Pensions Act, 1869, embodies the following section of the Act of 1834:
And whereas the principle of the regulations for granting allowances of this nature is and ought to be founded on a consideration not only of the services performed by the individual to the State, but of the inadequacy of his private fortune to maintain his station in life; be it therefore enacted that from and after the passing of this Act, whenever any person shall seek to obtain one of the pensions before mentioned his application for that purpose shall be made in writing to the Commissioners of his Majesty’s Treasury, to which he shall subscribe his name, and which shall contain not only a statement of the services performed by him and the grounds on which such pension is claimed, but a specific declaration that the amount of his income from other sources is so limited as to bring him within the intent and meaning of this Act and the principle hereinabove declared, and without such declaration no pension as hereinbefore provided or authorized shall be granted.
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It is not generally known that Benjamin Disraeli was a pensioner under the Act of 1834. There is but an obscure and passing reference to it in Buckle’s Life of Lord Beaconsfield. Lord Derby granted him a first-class pension in June, 1859. Disraeli was the only Prime Minister of modern times who received a political pension. He was in receipt of it when he died as Lord Beaconsfield in April, 1881. The pension was, of course, suspended while he was in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer or First Lord of the Treasury (including his two terms as Prime Minister), but the total amount drawn by him in pensions, between 1859 and 1881, was £26,456 6s. 7d. Other distinguished pensioners under the Act of 1834 were Spencer Walpole, three times Home Secretary, who from May, 1867, until his death in May, 1898, received in the aggregate a sum of £62,032 19s. 4d.; Sir George Grey, four times Home Secretary, who from 1857 to 1882 drew £39,070 2s. 6d.; and Thomas Milner Gibson, President of the Board of Trade, who was paid £35,275 1s. 3d. between 1866 and 1884.
The first beneficiary under the Act of 1869 was Charles Pelham Villiers, the associate of Cobden and Bright in the agitation for Free Trade. He entered Parliament for Wolverhampton in 1835, and sat for the same constituency until his death in 1898 at the great age of ninety-six. For some years at the end of his long career as a member of Parliament he was Father of the House of Commons. Villiers has a place among the few public men who have had statues erected to them in their lifetime. He was so honoured by Wolverhampton ten years before his death. Villiers held office in two Liberal Administrations, having been Judge Advocate-General for six years, and for the same period President of the Poor Law Board, an office long since merged in the Local Government Board, now the Ministry of Health.
Villiers was awarded a second-class pension of £1,200 by Gladstone on August 19, 1869, a few days after the Political Offices Pensions Act became law. Although this amount was reduced to £450 a year until January 5, 1874, as Villiers had also a pension of £750 from the Suitors’ Fee Fund of the Court of Chancery—is there not quite a touch of eighteenth-century sinecure in this?—Villiers received altogether, under the Act of 1869, the large sum of £30,810 12s. 8d., and was drawing the pension at his death in 1898. It may be said that no man better earned a pension than Villiers. His record of public service is unparalleled in the annals of the House of Commons. But on the proving of his will it was found that he had been a very wealthy man. He left, in fact, a fortune of £250,000.
Gladstone, subsequently to the award of the pension to Villiers, made a rule by which every ex-Minister to whom he, as First Lord of the Treasury, granted a pension was required not only to make the statutory declaration that he was unable to maintain his social station, but was also obliged to engage to surrender the pension should he come into a private fortune, or obtain a highly paid appointment. Villiers, it seems, had an accession of fortune, but evidently he did not consider that the new engagement applied to him, as he had not signed it.
As these pensions are paid, not out of monies voted by Parliament, but directly out of the Consolidated Fund, like the salaries and retiring allowances of the Judges, they cannot be raised as a subject of debate in the House of Commons. Attention, however, was drawn by means of questions to Villiers’ case, and subsequently to the case of Viscount Cross, who died in March, 1914, leaving a personal estate of the value of £72,299, after having drawn a second-class pension of £2,000 for over twenty years, which amounted in the aggregate to £40,760. It appeared that Lord Cross, like Villiers, did not sign the declaration to surrender his pension in the event of an improvement in his pecuniary circumstances. As Lord Beaconsfield left £84,000 at his death, his case differs only in one respect from those of Villiers and Cross—he had been twice Prime Minister of England.
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The First Lord of the Treasury is restricted by precedent to granting these political pensions only to ex-Ministers of his own Party. In 1883 an application was made to Gladstone for a pension for a Conservative ex-Minister. It was refused on the ground “that no political pension has been granted by any Minister during the last fifty years, except to one with whom he stood on terms of general confidence and co-operation.” The Prime Minister went on to say, “the examination of private circumstances, such as I consider the Act to require, is, for its nature, difficult and invidious; but the examination of competing cases in the ex-official corps is a function that could not be discharged with the necessary combination of free responsible action and of exemption from offence and suspicion.” Gladstone therefore declined to “create a precedent of deviation from a course undeviatingly pursued by my predecessors of all Parties.” Lord Morley, who gives this letter in his Life of Gladstone, observes in a note: “Mr. Gladstone had suffered an unpleasant experience in another case of the relations brought about by the refusal of a political pension, after inquiry as to the accuracy of the necessary statement as to the applicant’s need of it.”