THE COMPLETE PEERAGE.•
MR. VICARY GIBBS, with his collaborator Mr. H. A. Double- day, is to be congratulated on the resumption of his monu-' mental work, The Complete Peerage, which was suspended during the war. The appearance of the fifth volume, finely printed, with broad margins and neatly bound, is a great event for all serious historical and genealogical students. We trust that the work will now progress steadily to completion in the twelve substantial volumes which it is estimated to fill. Mr. Gibbs modestly describes the book as a " new edition, revised and much enlarged," of the well-known Complete Peerage compiled by his uncle, the late G. E. Cokayne, Clarenceux King-at-Arms. Now, Cokayne's book, so far as it went, was, and is, invaluable. Its eight volumes, published between 1887 and 1898, formed by far the most complete and accurate record of the peerage that had ever been printed. That any scholar, single-handed, should have compiled such a trustworthy com- pendium of innumerable facts was a matter for wonder. Yet the most meticulous critics, including even Mr. J. H. Round, have repeatedly testified to the soundness of Cokayne's methods. But Cokayne, being only human, did not exhaust the subject. For the pre-Tudor peerage, which necessarily raises the most interesting and difficult problems, he had to content himself with using the printed authorities. He could not attempt to utilize the enormous masses of manuscript materials which exist in the Record Office, the British Museum and elsewhere. What he did not and could not do is now being done by his nephew, a scholar of high repute with boundless enthusiasm. Mr. Vicary Gibbs, at his own expense, has organized elaborate and costly researches into the early peerages, and is placing the history of our old families on a thoroughly scientific basis for the first time. His Complete Peerage is thus in large part an entirely new work, though it owes much to the fine initiative and unwearied labours of G. E. Cokayne.
To give some idea of Mr. Gibbs's labours, we may mention that the section of the peerage from E to G of which he treats in this volume fills. nearly eight hundred large pages. In Cokayne's book the same section filled about three hundred small pages, including some fourteen peerages which Mr. Gibbs has had to defer to his next volume. A comparison between the earlier and later notes on very old peerages, such as Fitzwarin, Exeter, or Essex—beginning with Geoffrey de Mandeville— will show at once the immense superiority of Mr. Gibbs's book. It is not only far more complete, with abundant new materials from the records, it is also much more entertaining. Cokayne, in his footnotes, sometimes quoted unflattering estimates of peers by their contemporaries. Mr. Gibbs, however, is a most prolific annotator, with none of that humility which most writers on the peerage assume as a matter of course. In his first volume, published in 1910, he said that " in the notes the editor has allowed himself a free hand." His freedom is apparent, for instance, in the notes to the first peerage in this volume, Eardley of Spalding. Cokayne stated that this peer was the son and namesake of a Portuguese Jew, Sampson Gideon, who was a wealthy stockbroker and bought a baronetcy for his boy in 1759, and that the youth, after marrying the daughter of Sir John Eardley Wilmot, Chief Justice, changed his name from Gideon to Eardley and then acquired a peerage from the younger Pitt. Mr. Gibbs has a few things to say about this Irish peer, of whom " Mr. Pitt observed that he had never been a Jew." In the notice of Lord North—son of George III.'s well-known Prime Minister—who married a daughter of Coutts the banker, we are told that her wedding gift was a draft for f150,000.
• The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Edind,or Dormant. By G. E. C. New Edition, Revised and Much Enlarged. Edited by the lion. Vicary Gibbs and IL A. Doubleday. Volume V.: Eardley of Spalding to Gwydir. London : St. Catharine Press. 1£3 13e. Gd. net.)
Little items like this do not appear in the orthodox peerage, but they are by no means without significance. Mr. Gibbs, in the preface to his first volume, justified his more frivolous citations by the argument of Francis Osborn " Neither can I apprehend it a greater folly in me to register the yellowness of Queen Anne's hair with other levities, which may seem pertinent to posterity though trivial now, yet of as high concernment as Caesar's nose.
And Mr. Gibbs went on to promise that the reader might turn from grave to gay, and might " learn who were the Scottish nobles slain at Flodden or discover how two noble ladies were locked up in ` the Cage' for being drunk and disorderly." The promise has been most faithfully performed.
In the appendices to the new volume several interesting problems are discussed, especially the question whether a man married to an heiress could sit in the House. of Lords in right of his wife. A number of precedents are cited, and the well-known case of Dacre is examined in detail. Sampson Lenard of Chevening married in 1564 Margaret Fiennes, Baroness Dacre, and claimed to be summoned to the House of Lords. He produced in support of the claim, which he made repeatedly for many years, an " award " said to have been issued by Edward IV. in favour of Sir Richard Fiennes of Hurst- monceaux, who had married the heiress of the Dacres and soughtthe barony in right of her. The editors are almost inclined to regard this " award " as a skilful forgery produced by " two of the worst Knaves in the College of Arms," which, in the reign of Elizabeth, was, he says, capable of anything, like Habakkuk- The case illustrates the pitfalls in the path of the historical inquirer. It shows, too, how hopelessly divergent are the lawyer's and the historian's views on peerage questions. As Mr. Gibbs said in the preface to his first volume, " it is impossible to reconcile the facts of history with the law of peerage." The more we learn about the later thirteenth century, and Edward L's methods of summoning barons to his council, the more preposterous do the decisions of the House of Lords Committee for Privileges appear.
They are not merely unhistorical, but are also hopelessly incon- sistent. The facts, so far as they can be ascertained, are, how- ever, set forth in this book, from 1283 onwards. The author's object has not been to solve peerage law conundrums so much as to throw light on the careers of all who have held titles of honour in these islands. We trust that his scholarly enterprise will now proceed unchecked and receive the support it certainly deserves.
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