The Change in the House of Lords
But George III. not only turned the Whigs out of office, he altered permanently the political complexion of the House of Lords. From the time of the Revolution of 1688 to the death of George II. in 1760, the Lords were Whiggish, and the majority of English nobles held Whig principles. They were, on the whole, men of better education than the average member of the House of Commons, who was in most cases a fox-hunting squire, of the Squire Western type. The House of Lords stood in the way of the Commons when, in the Tory reaction of 1701, the Commons proposed to impeach Somers, the Whig Chancellor, a high-minded and skilful lawyer, “courteous and complaisant, humane and benevolent,” for his share in the Second Partition Treaty of 1699, and this was the beginning of a bitter contest between the Tory Commons and the Whig Lords. An attempt was made by the Commons to impeach Walpole on his fall in 1742, but the Lords threw out a Bill proposing to remit the penalties to which his prosecutor might be liable, and the King made Walpole a peer. George III., by an unsparing use of his prerogative, changed the character and politics of the Upper House. His creations were country gentlemen of sufficient wealth to own “pocket” boroughs in the House of Commons, and lawyers who supported the Royal prerogative.69
From George III.’s time onward there has always been a standing and ever-increasing majority of Tory peers in the House of Lords. And while the actual number of members of the Upper House has been enlarged enormously, this majority has became enlarged out of all proportion. Liberal and Tory Prime Ministers were busy throughout the nineteenth century adding to the peerage—no less than 376 new peers were created between 1800 and 1907; but comparatively few Liberals retained their principles when they became peers, and two of the present chiefs of the Unionist Party in the House of Lords—Lords Lansdowne and Selborne—are the sons of eminent Liberals.
So it has come about that while the House of Commons has been steadily opening its doors to men of all ranks and classes, and in our time has become increasingly democratic in character, the House of Lords, confined in the main to men of wealth and social importance, has become an enormous assembly of undistinguished persons, where only a small minority are active politicians, and of this minority at least three-fourths are Conservatives.
This change in the House of Lords began, as we have seen, in the reign of George III., when the Whig ascendancy in Parliament had passed. But the Whigs did nothing during their long lease of power to bring democracy nearer, and were entirely contemptuous of popular aspirations. At the very time when the democratic idea was the theme of philosophers, and was to be seen expressed in the constitution of the revolted American colonies, and in the French Revolution, England remained under an aristocracy, governed first by Whigs, and then by Tories. It is true democracy was not without its spokesmen in England in the eighteenth century, but there was no popular movement in politics to stir the masses of the people, as the preaching of the Methodists stirred their hearts for religion. Democratic ideas were as remote from popular discussion in the eighteenth century as they had been made familiar by Lilburne for a brief season in the seventeenth century.