wilfrid prest that “Politically and socially, and, to some extent intellectually, the peers were the leaders of the [British] nation” for at least a century after the Glorious Revolution.25 More recently the historian John Cannon has referred to the existence of a “massive consensus, based upon the widespread acceptance of aristocratic values and aristocratic leadership” in eighteenth-century Britain –notwithstanding various contra-indications in the form of agrarian and urban uprisings, apocalyptic, popular and quietistic religious sectarianism, financial and mercantile capitalism, moral evangelism, and radical proto-democratic or republican political stirrings.26 How far something similar might possibly be said of many Continental European societies, notwithstanding the great caesura of the French Revolution, is an interesting question, albeit one which must not detain us here. Moreover, the House of Lords was not in daily practice a totally lay body. The speaker of the House was either the lord chancellor, or if the chancellorship was in commission, as happened immediately after the Glorious Revolution, one of the commissioners, always by now a common lawyer. Lord Cowper, chancellor from 1714–18, could theoretically call upon the learned support of Lord Somers (who had himself been chancellor or lord keeper from 1693 –1700), Lord Harcourt (similarly placed from 1710 –14), Lord Trevor, formerly chief justice of Common Pleas, and after his ennoblement in 1716 as Baron Macclesfield until he himself became chancellor two years later, Thomas Parker, lord chief justice of King’s Bench. During George III’s long reign from 1760 to 1820 a number of chief justices who had been ennobled (like William Murray, Lord Mansfield and his successor Lloyd Kenyon, first Baron Kenyon) similarly sat with their fellow peers as of right. But in addition to lawyers elevated to the peerage, the twelve sitting judges of Westminster Hall continued to receive “writs of assistance”, which summoned them to attend the Lords in the capacity of non-voting “assistants.”27 While a 25 Holdsworth, William S. 1929, p. 309; how widely that leadership was recognized and respected is another matter. 26 Cannon, John 1984 p. viii. Cannon was reacting against depictions of post-1688 Britain as in some sense “essentially” bourgeois. 27 Bond, Maurice 1964 p. 22 187
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