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Bishops and Scottish Representative Peers in the House of Lords, 1760-1775*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2014
Extract
Despite all the attention lavished on the mid-eighteenth-century parliament, the House of Lords has been largely ignored by historians. The Whig historians of the nineteenth century were concerned with tracing the development of the House of Commons as the principal vehicle of constitutional progress, and in this century Namierites and neo-Whigs have alternately challenged and defended the Whig position, basing their arguments almost entirely on their views of proceedings in the lower chamber. The House of Lords was easy to neglect, one suspects, because most historians assumed that the upper House could be conveniently explained away as an appendage of the crown where an institutionalized majority of bishops, Scottish representative peers, placeholders, and newly-created peers could easily maintain a ministry. This, in turn, has led to a tendency to explain events in the House of Lords at any point in the century in terms of a static political structure, largely without regard to current issues or changes in the “structure of politics” at the national level.
The two most conspicuous segments of the “Party of the Crown” in the Lords (and the two most abused for their alleged political servility) were the bishops and representative Scottish peers. The second Earl of Effingham expressed the conventional political wisdom of the eighteenth century when he told the House in 1780 that “those two descriptions threw a great weight into the scale of the Crown,” and historians have generally echoed this view. In the past two decades scholarship has begun to modify this picture for both ends of the century, though the old clichés still hold sway for the decades from Walpole to North.
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- Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1978
Footnotes
*
I would like to thank Professor Robert A. Smith of Emory University for his comments on an earlier draft of this article; as well as to express my appreciation to Earl Fitzwilliam and his Trustees for permission to consult and quote from material in the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, and to His Grace, the Duke of Newcastle for permission to consult and microfilm items in the Newcastle (Clumber) Manuscripts.
References
1. Perhaps the best example of this preoccupation with the House of Commons is the series somewhat misleadingly called The History of Parliament. This impressive scholarly achievement confines itself almost exclusively to the Commons, and even its biographical sketches treat cursorily or completely neglect the subsequent careers of most M.P.s who became peers. See, for example, the entries for William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, third Duke of Portland, and William Bouverie, first Earl of Radnor: SirNamier, Lewis and Brooke, John, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1754-90, 3 vols. (London, 1964), II, 84-85, 106Google Scholar.
2. This view generally prevails in Turberville, A. S., The House of Lords in the XVIIIth Century (Oxford, 1927)Google Scholar, still the only scholarly survey of the subject. For more recent statements of this viewpoint, see Pares, Richard, King George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1953), pp. 41–42Google Scholar and Williams, E. N., The Eighteenth Century Constitution (Cambridge, 1965), p. 136Google Scholar. Large, David, “The Decline of the ‘Party of the Crown’ and the Rise of Parties in the House of Lords, 1783-1837,” English Historical Review (hereafter EHR), LXXVIII(1963), 669–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar, accepts this picture of the House's political structure as his point of departure.
3. Thus John Cannon in his important work, The Fox-North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution, 1782-4 (Cambridge, 1967)Google Scholar, prefaces his treatment of the India Bill's consideration in the Lords with the statement that “It was, in fact, unknown for the government to be defeited in the House of Lords …. In practice, it was an adjunct of the crown, and the Scottish representative peers, the bishops and the household peers, augmented by the miniters and their friends, constituted an automatic majority for the government of the day” (p. 125).
4. Parliamentary History, XXI, 229Google Scholar; partially quoted in Williams, , Eighteenth Century Constitution, p. 138Google Scholar.
5. Holmes, Geoffrey, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1967)Google Scholar contains an excellent chapter on the House of Lords, and includes a number of instances of both episcopal and Scottish opposition to ministers. Large's article, mentioned above, shows the changing character of the House's politics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. McCahill, Michael W., “The Scottish Peerage and the House of Lords in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Scottish Historical Review, LI(1972), 172–96Google Scholar, shows that this segment of the House's membership was much less uniform in its parliamentary conduct in the 1780s. and 1790s than manv (including Lirge) hive thought.
6. Turberville's widely-quoted estimate of 220 as the average pre-1783 membership of the House of Lords (House of Lords in the XVIIlth Century, p. 5) is rather too high and was apparently reached by adding the 42 bishops and representative peers to the total number of English and British peers (including minors and Roman Catholic peers). There were 157 adult conforming English and British peers in 1760 and one duke of the blood royal. In 1775 these categories numbered 159 and 2 respectively.
7. Turberville, , House of Lords in the XVlIlth Century, pp. 422–23Google Scholar; Sykes, Norman, Church and State in England in the XVIIIth Century (Cambridge, 1934), pp. 61–67Google Scholar.
8. Sykes, , Church and State, pp. 50–51Google Scholar.
9. Pares, , George III and the Politicians, p. 41Google Scholar.
10. O'Gorman, Frank, The Rise of Party in England. The Rockingham Whigs, 1760-1782 (London, 1975), p. 205Google Scholar. For episcopal voting in these divisions, see Table I below.
11. Sykes, Church and State, Ch. 2.
12. Proxies were governed by the House's Standing Orders 79-85 and by customary usage. The written proxies were entered with the house's clerks and recorde in a book that could be consulted by any member of the House. Proxies remained valid until the reappearance of the donor or the end of the session. The maximum number of proxies any peer could hold was two; only a bishop could hold an episcopal proxy and only a lay lord a secular proxy. The use of proxies was to some extent limited by the practice of pairing, a device used on a modest scale during this period. See, for example, Nottingham University Library, the Duke of Manchester to the Duke of Portland, [received 2 July 1767], and Lord Walpole to Portland, 24 June [1767], Portland Papers, PwF 6918, 8924.
13. For example, of the 100 divisions of greatest political content between 1760 and 1775, proxies were called for in 29. In none of these did they reverse the decision reached by the peers present.
14. This information is based on compilations from the daily lists of those present in the Journals of the House of Lords (hereafter JHL), XXX-XXXIV. It might be noted that the lists in the JHL are not absolutely accurate, and it is sometimes possible to prove the presence of a peer not included in the published lists. The frequency of such omissions, however, is not great and does not invalidate the use of the lists as records of general attendance habits of individual peers. For a table of sessional attendance totals for members of the House during this period, see my 1975 Emory University Ph.D. thesis, “Politics in the House of Lords, 1760-1775,” pp. 945-53.
15. The determination of what was or was not a division of “significant political content” is inevitably subjective as some divisions were obviously more overtly “political” than others. In this category I have included divisions in which the question at issue was itself of political importance, questions less inherently political but which precipitated partisan positions by government and/or opposition, and procedural questions masking clearly partisan differences of opinion. The 84 days used here as a standard for testing attendance witnessed 100 divisions.
16. This statement is based on the daily lists in the JHL. Taking all 84 days together, the bishops made up 13.4% of those present.
17. For example, see Bodleian Library, Brownlow North, Bishop of Worcester, to the Earl of Guilford, 11 November [1775], North MSS, d. 26, f. 24. It might be pointed out that age was an important factor inhibiting episcopal attendance. The average age at elevation of the 42 men who held episcopal office between 1760 and 1775 was 49, while the average age of the bench as a whole in 1765 was 60. The bishops were notoriously subject to physical infirmities, and ill-health was a frequently cited excuse for parliamentary absence.
18. House of Lords Record Office (hereafter HLRO), Proxy Books, 1760-61 to 1774-75. It might be noted, as a rough gauge of the bishops' use of proxies, that of 921 proxies entered in these 15 sessions, 99 (or 10.8%) were from bishops.
19. On the bishops' reputation for silence, see Bishop Newton's autobiography in The Works of the Right Reverend Thomas Newton, D.D., Late Lord Bishop of Bristol and Dean of St. Paul's (London, 1787), I, 137Google Scholar; and Warburton, Bishop, “Thoughts on Various Subjects,” A Selection from Unpublished Papers of the Right Reverend William Warburton, D.D., Late Lord Bishop of Gloucester, ed. Rev. Kilvert, Francis (London, 1841), pp. 341–42Google Scholar.
20. For example, Hinchliffe of Peterborough and Archbishop Cornwallis both spoke on American affairs in 1775: Parliamentary History, XVIII, 269-91, 655–76Google Scholar.
21. Ashburnham, Beauclerk, Cornwallis, Egerton, Ewer, Green, Hume, Johnson, Keene, Keppel, Lowth, Lyttelton, Mawson, Newcome, Newton, Pearce, Squire, Terrick, Treyor, Warburton, and Yonge each voted with the opposition at least once in this period. For the extant voting records of members of the House during the period 1760-1775, see my Ph.D. thesis, pp. 966-74.
22. British Library, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32947, f. 337. It is likely that at least 8 bishops (out of 17 present) voted against the same bill two days later. See Parliamentary History, XVI, 1316Google Scholar, and BL, Add. MS 32948, ff. 9-10. At lea t one bishop, Beauclerk of Hereford, appears to have voted against the Cider Tax because of the threat it was thought to represent to the economic interests of his diocese, and received a hero's welcome on his return to Hereford: Gentleman's Magazine, XXXIII(1763), 255Google Scholar.
23. BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32953, f. 109. Wilkes, to whose case this resolution related, was originally brought to the attention of the House of Lords on a complaint of breach of privilege against Bishop Warburton (in connection with the Essay on Woman) and his cause was not popular with the bench. See Sykes, , Church and State, pp. 55–56Google Scholar.
24. BL, Bishops Yonge and Hume to Newcastle, 26 March 1765, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32966, ff. 105, 107. The bill was defeated by 56 votes to 23 with all bishops present against it.
25. Sheffield Central Library, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments (hereafter WWM), Rockingham Papers, R53-22, R53-9. BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32966, ff. 149, 156, 158-59. Archbishop Drummond, at least, had a very negative opinion of the bill, terming it “the most pernicious sketch of democratical intention that has been in this country, tho' I have seen the Militia established & the revenues of the crown altered” (Ibid., letter to Newcastle, 2 Apr. 1765, ff. 146-47). On the confused political situation surrounding the ultimate defeat of Gilbert's Poor Bill and the role it played in the demise of the Grenville administration, see Jarrett, Derek, “The Regency Crisis of 1765,” EHR, LXXXV(1970), 282–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26. BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 33035, ff. 134-35.
27. On 4 Feb. 1766 the bishops divided 9 to 8 against the government (with one abstention) in a division lost to 63 votes to 60: BL, Newca-tle Papers, Add. MS 33035, ff. 276-77. Two days later as many as 11 of the 16 bishops present may have voted against the government in a division it lost by 55 votes to 59: Sheffield Central Library, WWM, R53-56. It should be noted that the list of 60 peers voting with the government on 4 Feb. 1766 printed in O'Gorman, Rise of Parly, p. 538, contains numerous inaccuracies and is, in fact, a list of peers (less Rockingham) who attended the eve-of-session meeting at the Marquess's house on 16 Dec. 1765: cf. The Correspondence of King George the Third, ed. SirFortescue, John, 6 vols. (London, 1927–1928), I, 200–01Google Scholar. The partial list of the opposition given by O'Gorman is correct as far as it goes, though the full majority was recorded by Newcastle in the list cited above.
28. BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 33035, ff. 389-91. Episcopal proxies in this division were eight to one for repeal. Bishops also voted against the government in at least two other divisions in the session of 1765-66. On 17 Dec. 1765, two bishops voted for an amendment to the address of thanks, fifteen supported the address, and one abstained: Sheffield Central Library, WWM, R53-12. A partial division for 28 May 1766 reveals two bishops opposing the government on the window tax and five supporting it: Correspondence of George III, I, 344Google Scholar.
29. The divisions of 6 May (BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 33036, ff. 451-54), 22 May (Ibid., Add. MS 33037, ff. 17-19), and the two divisions of 26 May (Ibid., ff. 51-54) each concerned the Massachusetts Bay Indemnity Act; that of 2 June related to consideration of papers on Quebec (Ibid., ff. 73-74, 77-78); while those of 17 June (Ibid., ff. 111-12, 115-16, 119) and 25 June (Ibid., ff. 151-52, 155) were relative to the East India Company Dividend Bill. Proxies were voted only in the first and sixth of these divisions, and both times episcopal proxies went against the government: two to one on 6 May and three to one on 17 June. Thus if proxies are counted, the government lost its single episcopal majority. For the political background to these divisions, see Brooke, John, The Chatham Administration, 1766-1768 (London, 1956), pp. 142–57Google Scholar.
30. BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 33036, f. 285.
31. Despite the House's occasional attempts at punishment, protests (unlike votes and speeches) were usually published.
32. JHL, XXVI, 131–32Google Scholar; Rogers, J. E. Thorold, A Complete Collection of the Protests of the House of Lords with Historical Introductions, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1875), II, 24–28Google Scholar.
33. Ibid., pp. 63-98 prints six of the protests. The seventh was Lord Temple's lone dissent from the King's Brothers' Annuity Bill on 7 April 1767 (JHL, XXXI, 559). This protest, like others to which no reasons were appended, was omitted by Thorold Rogers.
34. Sykes, Norman, “The Duke of Newcastle as Ecclesiastical Minister,” EHR, LVII(1942), 59–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Sykes shows, Newcastle was surprisingly successful in preferring his own candidates in the interval between George III's accession and his own resignation.
35. Walpole, Horace, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. Barker, G. F. Russell (London, 1894), I, 134Google Scholar; Lecky, W. E. H., A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1903), III, 206Google Scholar.
36. There was but one vacancy during the Bute administration, one under Grenville, one during the first Rockingham administration (when Newcastle was back in office), and one during the Chatham administration before the summer of 1768.
37. BL, Newcastle to the Duke of Devonshire, 16 Nov. 1762 (copy), Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32945, f. 53. Neither Seeker nor Drummond can be shown to have voted in opposition with Newcastle, though both recorded numerous absences and abstentions on days of divisions and both loyally supported the Duke when he returned to office in 1765-66.
38. Newcastle remained influential with Green, Hume, Johnson, Mawson, and Yonge until his death. Ashburnham and Cornwallis were loyal to the Duke during his first period in opposition (1762-65), but were alienated by the Duke's machinations over the See of Salisbury in 1766 (as were their noble relations) and refused to follow the Duke into opposition in 1767. On the Salisbury episode, see Sykes, , “Newcastle as Ecclesiastical Minister,” EHR, LVII(1942), 77–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39. Bedford Estate Office, London, Egerton to Bedford, 13 July 1765, Woburn MSS, LII, f. 54. Bishop Egerton was a cousin of the Duke of Bridgewater and an in-law of Bedford and Lord Gower.
40. Bury St. Edmunds and West Suffolk Record Office, Egerton to Grafton, 13 Aug. 1768, Grafton MSS, 423/345.
41. Nottingham University Library, 9 June 1767, Newcastle (Clumber) MSS, NeC 2961. Lincoln was Newcastle's nephew and principal heir and Hume had been his tutor.When Lincoln broke with Newcastle and followed Pitt, Hume remained loyal to the Duke. For Lincoln's role in Hume's translation to Salisbury, see Sykes, , “Newcastle as Ecclesiastical Minister,” EHR, LVII(1942), 80–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the draft of Lincoln's letter to Pitt, [27 July 1766], Newcastle (Clumber) MSS, NeC 2960. Hume was unmoved by Lincoln's stinging reply (NeC 2962), and prior to the next session sent Newcastle a blank proxy, “which can be filled up by whomsoever you please should represent me.” BL, Hume to Newcastle, 19 Nov. 1767, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32987, f. 51.
42. Newton, , Works, I, 115Google Scholar; Bury St. Edmunds and West Suffolk Record Office, Newton to Grafton, 3 and 22 Aug. 1768, Grafton MSS, 423/344, 423/346. In the first of these letters Newton wrote: “I would also scorn to solicit a favor, if I did not mean to be grateful for it.”
43. E.g., Bishop Hinchliffe was a loyal follower of the Duke of Grafton, going into opposition with him in the autumn of 1775 (Bodleian Library, Bishop North to Lord Guilford, [27 Oct. 1775], North MSS, d. ff. 47-49); while Bishop Ewer followed the Marquess of Granby (his former pupil) and the Duke of Rutland, voting with the opposition on several occasions in the mid-1760s and early 1770s.
44. Walpole, , Memoirs of George III, III, 45–46Google Scholar.
45. Between August 1768 and May 1775, ten bishops died, resulting in the same number of elevations and eight translations.
46. For example, in the division of 2 Mar. 1769, relative to the Civil List, only one bishop (Keppel) voted with the opposition, while six voted with the Court and four abstained: Sheffield Central Library, WWM, Rl-1258. Of those who had voted with Newcastle in 1767, one (Hume) voted with the government and two others (Green and Johnson) abstained.
47. Only Keppel and Ewer voted regularly with the opposition in 1770, while Bishop Lowth did so once (Sheffield Central Library, WWM, R5).
48. On Shipley, see Brown, Peter, The Chathamites (London, 1967), pp. 325–38Google Scholar. On Lowth, see Walpole, Horace, Journal of the Reign of King George the Third from the Year 1771 to 1783, ed. Doran, J. (London, 1859), I, 36-37, 94–95Google Scholar.
49. Twenty-one bishops attended the second reading of the initial Dissenters' Relief Bill on 19 May 1772 (JHL, XXXIII, 416 ) and seventeen the second on 2 April 1773 (ibid., 597-98). Both bills were supported by the Rockinghamite and Chathamite oppositions and were defeated by large margins. A division list for the 1772 bill shows all bishops present voting against the bill (Public Record Office, State Papers Domestic, 37/10, f. 219), while a minority list for the 1773 division includes only Green of Lincoln among the bishops present (Parliamentary History, XVII, 790–91Google Scholar). The King and North relied on the bishops to follow their own inclinations in throwing out these bills, and let them pass through the Commons. Rochford, the government leader in the Lords, orchestrated their defeat behind the scenes. See George III to North and reply, 2 April 1772, Correspondence of George III, II, 334–35Google Scholar; and Rochford to various bishops and peers, 27 March [1773], Calendar of Home Office Papers of the Reign of George III, 1770-1772, ed. Roberts, R. A. (London, 1881), p. 64Google Scholar.
50. These figures have been arrived at by averaging the daily episcopal attendance recorded in the JHL on days of political divisions. The number of days of such divisions in each session were: 1765, six; 1765-66, seven; 1766-67, nine; 1767-68, one; 1768-69, three; 1770, fourteen; 1770-71, eleven; 1772, six; 1772-73, eight; 1774, five; 1774-75, ten. When the two Dissenters' Relief Bills are eliminated, the average episcopal attendance on days of divisions in 1772 and 1772-73 is reduced to 14.8 and 5.0 respectively.
51. Though systematic reckoning of abstentions is impossible, the superficial impression left by surviving voting lists is that bishops were more likely to abstain than were other categories of the House's membership. Of 47 abstentions specifically noted on voting lists that relate to the whole House during our period, 11 (or just over 23% ) were by bishops. See the voting records in my Ph.D. thesis, pp. 968-74.
52. 6 Anne. c. 11. c. 78; SirFergusson, James, The Sixteen Peers of Scotland (Oxford, 1960), pp. 13–19Google Scholar. In 1709 the House of Lords decided that no peer sitting in the House by virtue of a British peerage could vote in peers' elections, while in 1711 the House decreed that no British peerage granted to one who was a peer of Scotland at the time of the Union could entitle that peer to sit in the upper House: JHL, XVIII, 609, XIX, 346-47; Holmes, Geoffrey S., “The Hamilton Affair of 1711-12, A Crisis in Anglo-Scottish Relations,” EHR, LXXVII(1962), 257–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The House reversed the first decision in 1793 and the second in 1782.
53. Holmes, , Politics in the Age of Anne, p. 395Google Scholar.
54. McCahill, , “Scottish Peerage and the House of Lords,” Scottish Historical Review, LI(1972), 177–96Google Scholar.
55. One of the most important differences in the influences on the parliamentary conduct of the Scottish peers in the 1760s and 1770s and the last two decades of the century is that during the earlier period the assertion of equality with the English peerage, stressed in McCahill's article, is not nearly as noticeable. A related difference is that in the 1780s and 1790s most of the greater Scottiih peers who did not already possess British peerages received them, while before 1782 all but a handful of Scottish peers had perforce to center their parliamentary ambitions on peers' elections. On this, see note 79 below.
56. Marchmont and Abercorn each attended the House more than fifty times a session in all of the fifteen sessions from 1760 to 1775. Lothian attended the House in only two of the six sessions he was a representative peer (1768-74), while Irvine attended the House but thirty-one times in eight sessions following his election in 1768.
57. For example, Scottish Record Office, the Earl of Stair to Lord [Suffolk or Rochford], 17 Nov. 1772 (copy), Stair MSS, GD 135/167; the Earl of Breadalbane to Suffolk, 1 Dec. 1774, Calendar of Home Office Papers of the Reign of George III, 1773-1775, ed. Roberts, R. A. (London, 1889), p. 261Google Scholar. On behalf of the representative peers, it might be pointed out that they seem to have left proxies more frequently than did the bishops. Of 921 proxies entered in the Proxy Books between November 1760 and May 1775, 101 (or almost 11%) were from representative peers (who composed approximately 8% of the House's membership).
58. McCahill has studied Scottish attendance in detail for several sessions in the 1780s and 1790s and concluded that “a significant proportion of representative peers were very active members of the House” (“Scottish Peerage and the House of Lords,” Scottish Historical Review, LI(1972), 187)Google Scholar. See also his table on “Levels of Participation” on p. 186. As far as the 1760s and 1770s are concerned, it is open to question how far participation on select committees can be equated with involvement in parliamentary politics. Most of the important (and partisan) legislation of this period was submitted to a committee of the whole House. Select committees usually dealt with public bills of less than national importance as well as private bills. Their primary political importance was probably in providing a means whereby peers could influence legislation affecting the localities in which they had interests.
59. These averages have been arrived at by the same process (changing bishops for Scots) described in note 50 above.
60. George III to North, 9 Nov. 1770 and 5 Oct. 1774, Correspondence of George III, II, 166Google Scholar; III, 141.
61. Brewer, John, “The Earl of Bute,” in The Prime Ministers, ed. Van Thal, Herbert (New York, 1975), pp. 105–13Google Scholar. Despite the fact that Bute exercised an important influence throughout the early and middle 1760s, his personal impact on the House of Lords was surprisingly slight. After his less than spectacular ministerial leadership of the House, Bute seldom attended (though he remained a representative peer until 1780), and his post-ministerial parliamentary career was highlighted only by his “private” opposition to the Rockingham administration's American policy in 1766.
62. See, for example, Marchmont to Rockingham, 1 Feb. [1766], Sheffield Central Library, WWM, Rl-569; National Library of Scotland, William Fraser to Marchmont and draft reply, 9 Oct. 1774, Marchmont-Rose Correspondence, MS 3523, ff. 58-59.
63. Marchmont, Abercorn, and Cathcart all chaired various select committees and occasional committees of the whole House during this period: HLRO, Manuscript Minutes, Minute Books, 1760-61 to 1774-75, Committee Books, 1760-61 to 1774-75.
64. Abercorn, Bute, Cathcart, Eglinton, Loudon, and March all opposed the repeal in person, Rothes and Sutherland did so by proxy: BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 33035, ff. 389-91. All of these but Cathcart and the proctorial votes had opposed in the divisions lost by administration on 4 and 6 Feb. (Ibid., ff. 276-77; Sheffield Central Library, WWM, R53-6), as had the Duke of Argyll. Lord Morton also voted against the government on 4 Feb. Abercorn had opposed at the opening of the session (BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 33035, f. 206). Three representative peers (Argyll, Dunmore, and Marchmont) voted for the repeal of the Stamp Act in person and three more (Breadalbane, Hyndford, and Stormont) did so by proxy.
65. These were those of 4 and 6 Feb. and 11 March 1766. No Scots were in the minority of five (against 125) that opposed the “Declaratory” resolution of 3 Feb. 1766. Another Scottish opposition vote in the session was recorded by Eglinton on the Window Tax Bill in May 1766: Correspondence of George III, I, 344Google Scholar.
66. BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 33035, ff. 69-70.
67. Sheffield Central Library, WWM, R53-22, R53-9; BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 32966, ff. 149, 156, 158-59. Abercorn and Breadalbane voted with the opposition in all three divisions, and Morton did so in the first two. Eglinton may also have opposed in the second: Rockingham, author of the list for this division, was unsure of the exact composition of the majority and included Eglinton as a possible opposition vote.
68. Abercorn, Breadalbane, and Eglinton all appeared in the opposition at various points in the session: BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 33036, ff. 451-54; Add. MS 33037, ff. 17-19, 51-54, 73-74, 77-78, 111-12, 115-16, 119, 151-52, 155.
69. Rogers, Thorold, Complete Protests, II, 63–98Google Scholar.
70. BL, Newcastle Papers, Add. MS 33036, f. 285; Parliamentary History, XVII, 790–91Google Scholar.
71. Scottish Record Office, William Bollan (Massachusetts Agent) to Stair, 29 Sept. 1774, Stair MSS, GD 135/167, f. 131. Stair also wrote two pamphlets on American affairs.
72. For example, in 1774-75 eleven of the representative peers attended the House twenty times or better, and as Table III shows, on average slightly over half attended on days of important business. There is no record of any representative peer voting with the opposition during the session.
73. Atholl attended the House in 1768-69, 1770-71, and 1772-73; Gordon in 1770, 1772, and 1774. From 1770-71 to 1772-73 the one attending held the other's proxy: HLRO, Proxy Books, 1770-71 to 1772-73.
74. Lord Stormont was envoy to Warsaw (1756-61) and ambassador to Austria (1763-72) and France (1772-78). Cathcart was ambassador to Russia (1768-71). Dunmore was resident governor of New York (1770-71) and Virginia (1771-75). Rothes was commander-in-chief of the forces in Ireland (1758-67).
75. See, for example, National Library of Scotland, Atholl to John Mackenzie of Delvine, 13 July 1767, Delvine MS 1405, f. 161.
76. BL, Breadalbane to Hardwkke, 11 Oct. 1774, Hardwicke Papers, Add. MS 35421, f. 216.
77. For example, see the Duke of Richmond's comments to the House on 10 March 1780, in a debate on a motion for a list of places and pensions held by peers: Parliamentary History, XXI, 231–32Google Scholar.
78. Simpson, John M., “Who Steered the Gravy Train, 1707-1766?” Scotland in the Age of Improvement, eds. Phillipson, N. T. and Mitchison, Rosalind (Edinburgh, 1970), pp. 47–72Google Scholar.
79. One of the reasons for this was the lack of alternate ways, apart from the Order of the Thistle, with which the greater Scottish families could mark their importance. The decision of the House of Lords in 1711 (mentioned in note 52 above) effectively forbade the creation of existing Scottish peers as British peers until reversed in 1782. This ban could only be circumvented by the grant of a British peerage to the heir of a Scottish peer who, when succeeding to the Scottish title, combined the two titles and continued to sit in the House of Lords by virtue of the British title. (McCahill's contention, on p. 176n of his article, that such peers had to be returned among the sixteen representative peers after succeeding to the Scottish peerage is incorrect.) The relative rarity of creations of eldest sons is witnessed by the fact that in 1775 only four Scottish peers sat in the House of Lords by virtue of British peerages granted after 1711: the Dukes of Argyll (as Lord Sundridge), Roxburghe (as Earl Ker), and Montrose (as Earl Graham) and the Earl of Kinnoull (as Lord Hay). A fifth, the Duke of Bucdeuch, sat as Earl of Doncaster by virtue of an English peerage granted to a seventeenth-century ancestor.
80. Lord Irvine, an Englishman with a Scottish peerage, was elected in 1768. The ministers' nomination of Lord Dysart, another Englishman, in 1771 provoked an opposition among the Scottish peers that continued (unsuccessfully) after the ministers threw over Dysart for Stair. The General Election of 1774 was also contested. See Fergusson, , Sixteen Peers, pp. 81–84Google Scholar; and McCahill, , “Scottish Peerage and the House of Lords,” Scottish Historical Review, LI(1972), 178–83Google Scholar.
81. Scottish Record Office, Stair to William Bollan, 4 Oct. 1774 (copy), Stair MSS, GD 135/167, f. 131.
82. See, for example, National Library of Scotland, Marchmont to George Rose, 25 Dec. 1774 and 8 Jan. 1775, Marchmont-Rose Correspondence, MS 3523, ff. 85, 87. In the first letter Marchmont wrote: “The whole of this reign looks to me like a stone going down hill that never rests till it come to the lowest point of all.”
83. National Library of Scotland, Atholl to John Mackenzie of Delvine, 10 Dec. 1770, Delvine MS 1406, ff. 117-18. The previous day Atholl had described the House's proceedings as “only helping one another to do nothing,” paraphrasing Gay: “Its all a Farce & all things show it I thought so once but now I know it” (Ibid., f. 115).
84. It is interesting to note in this regard that only six of the thirty-three Scots who sat as representative peers during this period had previous parliamentary experience in the Commons. By contrast, the 250 British and English peers who sat in the House from 1760 to 1775 numbered 127 former M.P.s.
85. BL, Breadalbane to Hardwicke, 25 Aug. 1767, Hardwicke Papers, Add. MS 35451, f. 172. On the Douglas case, see Steuart, A. Frances (ed.), The Douglas Cause (Glasgow and Edinburgh, 1909)Google Scholar.
86. For example, see his letters to North of 4 and 26 Feb. 1772, Correspondence of George III, II, 310, 325Google Scholar.
87. Though seven of the Scots left proxies, three of the five divisions on the bill took place in commiteee: HLRO, Manuscript Minutes, Minute Book 1772.
88. For example, Bishop Ewer and Lord Breadalbane, both of whom had voted in the opposition earlier in the period, both supported punitive measures against the colonies. Many bishops were alienated by opposition to an American episcopate, and Ewer termed the colonists “infidels and barbarians … living without remembrance or knowledge of God” on this score. A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts at their Anniversary Meeting … February 20, 1767 (London, 1767)Google Scholar. Breadalbane felt American resistance was “as much a Rebellion as those of 1715 & 1745” and that “all the Sophistry of Opposition” could not prove it otherwise. BL, letter to Hardwicke, 11 Dec. 1775, Hardwicke Papers, Add. MS 35451, f. 220.