RS 27

the house of lords as a court of appeal Yet we must pay no less attention to substance than to form. Early modern England lacked a monarchical equivalent to Maximilian I, Gustavus Adolphus or Louis XIV. The much expanded judicial role of the eighteenth-century House of Lords has been aptly characterised as illustrating the “subservience of the formal legal system to the political sovereign.”15 As became increasingly apparent, that sovereign was parliament (or rather, formally speaking, the king-in-parliament). Nor was the role of the House of Lords in Hanoverian parliaments merely formal and ceremonial. Indeed William Blackstone, the leading contemporary authority on the eighteenth-century British constitution, believed it “highly necessary that the body of nobles should have a distinct assembly, distinct deliberations, and distinct powers from the commons”16,while the modern historians John Beckett and Clyve Jones have maintained that “From 1689 the Lords were arguably the most formidable member of the parliamentary triumvirate” and “the dominant partner in the constitution for more than a hundred years.”17 That dominance had its outward and visible expression in the judicial role of the Lords, as the “one great court of appeal... the last resort in matters both of law and equity”18, exercising its supreme jurisdiction over all three of Great Britain’s constituent kingdoms: England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. This seems in functional terms little different from the role of many European courts of appeal, whose establishment had also served to consolidate and strengthen the power of the sovereign government – even if in their case that sovereign was a monarch, not a parliament or some other form of representative assembly. 15 Stevens, Robert 1979 pp. 4-5. 16 Blackstone, William 1765 i. 154; cf. ibid. 153: “A body of nobility is also more peculiarly necessary in our mixed and compounded constitution, in order to support the rights of both the crown and the people, by forming a barrier to withstand the encroachments of both.” 17 Beckett, John V. – Jones, Clyve 1980 pp. 18-19. 18 Blackstone, William 1768, iii. 60. 184

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