Lords-and-ladies

Like rather an unimaginative schoolmaster I am going to start with a bit of revision.

In the UK there are six divisions of the peerage, namely:

• The Peerage of England – titles created by the kings and queens of England before the Acts of Union in 1707.
• The Peerage of Scotland – titles created by the kings and queens of Scotland before 1707.
• The Peerage of Great Britain – titles created for the Kingdom of Great Britain between 1707 and 1801.
• The Peerage of Ireland – titles created by the kings and queens of England and Ireland for the Kingdom of Ireland before the Acts of Union in 1801, and some titles created later.
• The Peerage of the United Kingdom – most titles created since 1801 to the present.
• Life Peerages created under the Life Peerages Act, 1958, whose holders are Barons and whose peerages cannot be inherited.

Do make a comment as some of this may be over-simplified or simply wrong. It is of course wrong to have omitted titles created for women but take that as understood. Mostly it is culled from Wikipedia but I have made some amendments where Wiki has fallen, in my opinion, into error. I was recently having lunch at my club with an Irish Peer and a GB Peer. Just the two of us, so he is both, and knows a fair bit about Peerages. I posed the question “who are members of the House of Lords?”.

I have heard it said “he’s a member of the House of Lords” meaning he is a Peer. That doesn’t cut the mustard these days. It could be argued members are those Peers on the Roll of the Peerage. This sounds like an old scroll which if unrolled might have entries going back to Magna Carta. In fact it was created in 2004 as the College of Arms explains.

“On 1 June 2004 a Royal Warrant required the creation and maintenance of a new Roll of the Peerage by the then Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs. The responsibility for this now rests with the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. The need for this arose out of the changes to the composition of the House of Lords as a result of the House of Lords Act 1999. Up to that time, all Peers who proved succession, with the exception of Irish creations, received a Writ of Summons to Parliament. These successions were recorded in a register of The Lords Spiritual and Temporal, maintained by the Clerk of the Parliaments. Since the implementation of the House of Lords Act a list of members of the House of Lords including the 92 excepted hereditary peers, and a register of hereditary peers who wish to stand in any by-election, have been maintained by the Clerk of the Parliaments; peers not falling into any of these categories cannot be entered into it. The present Roll was therefore instituted to record the names of all those holding peerages, whether or not also enrolled in the register of the Clerk of the Parliaments.”

The conclusion we came to but with no great certainty is that now to be a member of The House of Lords you must have a seat therein. So that narrows down the field.

If you are fuming because I have omitted a seventh division of the peerage, I will come to that another time because I think it’s interesting and was not familiar to me until recently.