RS 27

wilfrid prest archy may appear either as a faintly comic embarrassment, or alternatively the embodiment of unreformed “Old Corruption”. Yet the latter view may not have been widely held at the time, despite Jonathan Swift’s satirical question, put into the mouth of the King of Brobdingnag; “What Share of Knowledge these Lords had in the Laws of their Country, and how they came by it, so as to enable them to decide the Properties of their Fellow Subjects in the last Resort [?]”37 Indeed it is difficult to explain the expanded appellate functions of the early modern House of Lords, except on the assumption that litigants seeking to delay or if possible reverse unpalatable judicial outcomes were not deterred, but perhaps even encouraged, by the non-professional character of its judicature. This is not to deny the significance of institutional changes. The House was undoubtedly in a better position to provide the ultimate in litigation forum shopping after 1688, when annual parliamentary sessions became the norm, and its jurisdictional sphere was more clearly established, as likewise its judicial procedures. Their appellate role may also have assumed greater importance in the eyes of the peers themselves, as the House of Commons tightened its grip on financial policy and legislation. But litigants ultimately chose to use the Lords because they felt that their appeals would receive no less and possibly even more fair a trial at the hands of the peers than in lower reaches of the judicial hierarchy. The reputation of both English and Scots judges may have improved somewhat over the course of the eighteenth century, despite lingering memories of how justice had been subverted by an excessively complaisant or subservient judiciary under Charles II and and James II, and the scandal of Lord Chancellor Macclesfield’s impeachment for corruption in the 1720s. Yet given the still dubious public image of English lawyers and the English legal system generally throughout the eighteenth century, the largely lay character of the House of Lords may well have been its strongest drawcard for the relatively tiny numbers of elite litigants who comprised its client base. 37 Swift, Jonathan 1726 p. 172. 191

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