J. Wodderspoon.
Norwich, March 10. 1851.
Roman Catholic Peers (Vol. iii., p. 209.).—The proper comment has been passed on the Duke of Norfolk, but not on the other two Roman Catholic peers mentioned by Miss Martineau. She names Lord Clifford and Lord Dormer as "having obtained entrance at last to the legislative assembly, where their fathers sat and ruled when their faith was the law of the land." The term "fathers" is of course figuratively used, but we may conclude the writer meant to imply their ancestors possessing the same dignity of peerage, and enjoying, in virtue thereof, the right of "sitting and ruling" in the senate of their country. If such was the lady's meaning, what is her historical accuracy? The first Lord Dormer was created in the reign of James I., in the year 1615; and, dying the next year, never sat in parliament: and it has been remarked as a very singular fact that this barony had existed for upwards of two centuries before any of its possessors did so. But the first Lord Dormer, who sat in the House of Lords, was admitted, not by the Roman Catholic Relief Act, but by the fact of his being willing to take the usual oaths: this was John, the tenth lord, who succeeded his half-brother in 1819, and died without issue in 1826. As for Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, that family was not raised to the peerage until the year 1672, in the reign of Charles II.
J. G. N.
Election of a Pope (Vol. iii., p. 142.).—Probably T. refers to the (alleged) custom attendant upon the election of a pope, as part of the ceremony alluded to in the following lines in Hudibras:—
"So, cardinals, they say, do grope
At t'other end the new made Pope"
Part I. canto iii. l. 1249. [24mo. ed. of 1720.]
In the notes to the above edition (and probably to other of the old editions) your correspondent will find a detailed explanation of these two lines: I refer him to the work itself, as the "note" is scarcely fit to transcribe here.