HOUSE.*

• The Personal Story of the Upper House. By KOEMIO Wilkinson. "On the English Constitution" Series. London: T. Fisher Uuwin. [Ns]

realm grew into an independent Parliamentary assembly; how, and by what personal agencies, the hereditary Chamber became in a sense the parent of the elective ; on what issues, by what degrees, it co-operated with other agencies to establish the House of Commons ; how then, from seeing in that Chamber its natural ally, if not its political offspring, the Upper House gradually discovered in the Lower a rival and a foe,"—these, says the author of this interesting and even fascinating book, are the first, and from the standpoint of constitutional law the most important, points dealt with in it. But Mr. Wilkinson is true to the mood in which he starts his inquiry, which, he says, is one "conducted less in the spirit of a constitutional historian than from the point of view most likely to find acceptance with those who read to be interested as well as informed." He fixes the attention of his readers on the changes that in the course of generations and centuries have come over the House, but he fixes it still more on the men through—perhaps rather than directly by—whom these changes have been effected. Nor is his book the less valuable and readable that his standpoint is not that of the hero-worshipper, but of the good-humoured and sub-cynical observer. Occasionally Mr. Wilkinson's humour comes perilously near mere " smartness," as in " hits " like these :—

" Individual and strikingly representative peers like Lord Rosebery, the general utility man and occasional orator of the Empire, or the Duke of Devonshire, the accepted embodiment of the national statesmanship and common-sense."

" Socially the Upper House now forms the most august portion of the same part of the polite system as that comprehending the Athenaeum Club. It has become nominally by the sovereign's favour instead of by a Committee's selection, the meeting-ground of men belonging to all classes and all schools of thought, qualified for admission into it."

" Scientific research did not receive the highest recognition which the State can bestow before Lord Kelvin and Lord Lister were made free of a chamber which Lord Tennyson had already attended in silence."

But happily such passages are not so common as to be fatiguing, and as a rule the many clever things that Mr. Wilkinson says in the course of his volume are as appropriate to, and spring as inevitably from, their context as his most serious propositions.

The first four of Mr. Wilkinson's chapters and a portion of the fifth are devoted more to the constitutional development of the Upper House than to the personal characteristics of the men through whom the development took place. No doubt historical notabilities—Stephen Langton, Robert Fitz- waiter, Simon de Montfort, Fulk Fitzwarren, John of Gaunt, and Richard Neville—figure prominently in the hundred pages or so which bring us down to the Wars of the Roses ; but their personalities are of secondary importance compared with what they did, and still more with what they undid. Like writers on the evolution of our Constitution who have

preceded him, Mr. Wilkinson insists greatly on the fact that

social " caste " is not of the essence of aristocracy, or at least of English aristocracy. As be pointedly puts it,

" Movements towards exclusiveness of any kind never obtained general sanction ; they were even deprecated by the nobles them- selves. There are,' says Peter des Roches, `no English pares.' Nor did the word `peer' creep into the language before the Dispenser proceedings under Edward II. Nor until the next century were members of the House of Lords generally entitled peers."

Mr. Wilkinson has not much that is really fresh to say of the two movements which will be for ever associated with the

names of Stephen Langton and Simon de Montfort, although he admirably brings out the personal contrast between " the archbishop who in the process of wringing Magna Charta from the Crown consolidated a heterogeneous baronage in a single estate and the earl who finding the idea of representa- tive government in the primitive institutions of the land

formally embodied it in a system at Westminster." Of Langton he says that his chief characteristic was "absolute

self-surrender to what he regarded as the divine leading " ; of Leicester he writes that although " a more graceful and showy figure than the archbishop," he " resisted despotism but did not organise liberty." Mr. Wilkinson's power of looking at the present in the light of the past is well illus- trated by such a passage as this :- " Leicester's political strength lay chiefly in the towns and among the traders. For us of the twentieth century it may be interesting to know that, more than six hundred years ago, a cause, scarcely distinguishable from that of Fair Trade, had its champion in this remarkable man. The legates from Rome, charged with the execution of the various Papal interdicts under which England was laid, aimed at nothing more than the destruction of the rising commerce of the country. Leicester defied these attacks ; he would have punished those who made them by keeping out foreign goods. British resources were, he said, sufficient to supply all native wants without the intercourse of foreigners. This,' remarks the royalist chronicler, Wyke, was done to tickle plebeian ears, and was, of course, absurd, seeing that the interchange of goods from divers realms furnishes all sorts of advantages.' Phat may be true enough. It does not, however, do away with the fact that centuries before Free Trade and Fair Trade had become political war cries Earl Simon may be called the first and greatest of mediaeval Pro- tectionists."

Another aspect of the De Montfort ascendency in England is not less happily dealt with :— " The Battle of Lewes incidentally throws an interesting light on the social evolution of the peerage. From it dates the more general adoption of armorial bearings by noble families, as well as a deepened contrast between the titled aristocracy of England and the feudal caste of other countries. Till the thirteenth century had entered on its second half, the frequency of their intermarriages and other exclusive usages made the great nobles few in number. As a consequence, except at great national crises, they kept themselves apart from the body of the people. The period of the Barons' War not only identified the order with the championship of popular rights ; it promoted the social amalgamation between the victors and their plain fellow- subjects."

It is towards the close of his fifth chapter, when the "real Warwick" steps firmly on to the stage, that Mr. Wilkinson's main purpose of making his book a gallery of Peers' portraits stands fully revealed. His prelude to the successes of the Kingmaker may be said, indeed, to be the text on which he preaches through the remainder of his work. "Birth, beauty, wit, and wAilth are the four kings of English society. Other sovereigns die out or are deposed. This fourfold kingship survives all dynastic change, and rides safely through the stormiest sea of revolution." He does not find many illustra- tions of this text during the Tudor period ; at all events, his portraits of the Cecils cannot be considered as among his most effective. It is when he comes to the Stuart reigns that Mr. Wilkinson warms to his work. His portrait of Falkland is good, though in a sense conventional. It is all the better that he gives the more authentic, if also the less familiar, version of Falkland's ill-omened reading from Virgil in the Bodleian Library when he was in the company of Charles L Mr. Wilkinson delights in taking a favourable rather than an unfavourable view of human nature, and in presenting the good side of men whose evil manners live in brass and whose virtues have been generally written in water. Thus he says of Strafford :- " Strafford's charm lay in his essential humanity—his love for his children, the simplicity and happiness of his domestic life. Even the frank egotism of the man was not without a certain attraction. He insists on being to the end of the chapter himself and no mere creature of royal favour or political promotion. He may put on the court livery. He is still the great squire of Wentworth Wodehouse, the cock of the north' as his lineage has made him. The harshness and arrogance which were his conventional attributes did not prevent his nature being traversed by a vein of gentleness and even tenderness, brought out clearly and pleasantly in his private correspondence, especially with Laud. Nor does the Lord Deputy ever let the Archbishop's table at Addington lack a supply of Lenten fish, caught by the sender in some Irish stream. At another time Strafford presents the Primate with prime Yorkshire beef which proves so tough that the archiepiscopal teeth will not meet through it."

In a different style is the portrait of George Savile, the first Lord Halifax, who regarded the Upper House as a club and used it as each. We are told that " his calm, even languid, manner, his well-bred and musical voice, his Horatian wit gave him an absolute mastery of the Assembly," and" that with something of Lord Melbourne's interest in religion, he amused himself by talking theology with bishops."

It is when Mr. Wilkinson comes to deal with the House of Peers daring the Hanoverian dynasty that the variety

of his talent for portraiture is best exhibited. Walpole and

and if Chatham's portrait is not quite so convincing, that is no fault of Mr. Wilkinson's, but is due to the fact that there is really nothing fresh to be added to what has been said by

Macaulay and other masters of antithesis. Two aristocratic scoundrels are disposed of in as many sentences. " What Sandwich was among earls, Grafton may be described as being among dukes. His private life was infamous ; he wronged

every individual of either sex whom he had an opportunity of injuring." Of Wharton, "the most notorious among the blasphemers and profligates of the eighteenth-century peerage," it is declared with equal conciseness that " he only made the grand tour to convince each successive capital that he concentrated in himself the blackguardism of every city and every climate." That Mr. Wilkinson can make a skilful use of the materials which constitute the charm of ants may be seen in his treatment of " the haughty Duke of Somerset " :— " His second wife, a daughter of Lord Winchilsea, affectionately tapped him on the shoulder with her fan. His Grace drew himself up, looked severely at his spouse, saying, My first Duchess was a Percy, and she never thought of taking such a liberty. A ducal namesake, the painter, James Seymour, drank his health one day to the words, I have the honour of being of your Grace's family.' The proud duke rose from the table, and summoned his steward. Pay Seymour his bill and send him away,' were the only words which this grand gentleman's rage suffered him to articulate."

Of all the Georgian portraits, however, except perhaps that of "old Q," whose infamies are trundled too openly

into the street, the most remarkable is that of Chesterfield. The light that has recently been shed upon the complex character of this extraordinary man bas allowed a more amiable view of him to be taken than that accepted by his contemporaries. Mr. Wilkinson combines shade and light skilfully :— " The trunk of a giant on the legs of a dwarf, limbs so ill- shapen as narrowly to escape deformity, a countenance only redeemable from unsightliness by the play of an intellectual expression over the unlovely features. Such in the flesh seems to have been the man who was the cynosure of his own genera.. tion and in whom posterity has agreed to see the glass of fashion and the mould of form for all time."

On the other hand, Chesterfield made one of the best Viceroys Ireland ever had. He was a successful diplomatist. His sagacity was such that his political prophecies are almost unexampled in number and accuracy. " He predicted the French Revolution and the greatness of the American Republic. He fixed almost to a year the date at which the national independence of Poland ceased to exist. He foresaw the fall of the temporal power of the Pope."

Mr. Wilkinson's presentments of the more distinguished of the spiritual Peers are not amongst his successes. Thus he has nothing more to say of Samuel Wilberforce than what has been said a hundred times before, chiefly in the form of anecdotes. He has, however, revived with effect Henry Phillpotts, the Bishop of Exeter whom Melbourne detested :—

" Phillpotts was beyond a doubt the ablest as well as the best- known and most interesting among the occupants of the party bench. His personal appearance was all in his favour. A handsome intellectual countenance surmounted a stately and perfectly proportioned figure. The brow was really noble and justified the little personal vanity which caused the thick wiry hair to be brushed so far back as to display the ample forehead to its full extent and to seem like a ehevaux de fries guarding and crowning it. These personal effects were deepened directly Bishop Phillpotts rose to speak. Com- posure of manner, mild candour in the expression of his countenance, a voice subdued and soft yet musically clear, either gesture of the gentlest kind or a statuesque immobility of body— such were the chief impressions left upon those who sat through one of this bishop's orations. If the manner generally lacked animation, waves of strong feeling from time to time seemed to rush upon him. The entire performance was an intellectual treat to those who witnessed it ; its dramatic effects were only produced after an exhausting process of solitary absorption in a well- stored library and occasionally before a looking-glass."

In his concluding pages Mr. Wilkinson is obviously hampered by the fact that he is dealing with events and men too near our own time, and writes too much in the style of the professional Parliamentary lobbyist. But his book as a whole is a most valuable addition to the series of useful manuals to which it belongs, and is perhaps the most readable of them all.