Constitutional History.
[chap.
Privileges of
the peers.
Immunities
of peerage.
Minute and
honorary
privileges.
Right of
access to the
sovereign.
5τ6
453. The special privileges of peers of the realm were
sufficiently numerous, but only those need be noticed here which
are connected or contrasted with those of the house of commons.
The peers have immunity from arrest, not merely as members of
the house, but as barons of the realm; their wives have the same
privilege, and, under the statute of 1442, the right to be tried like
their husbands by their peers. The duration of the immunity is
not limited by the session of parliament, but the person of a peer
is ‘for ever sacred and inviolable.’ Yet this protection is only
against the processes of common law, and, notwithstanding
the dignity of peerage, instances of imprisonment for political
causes and on royal warrants are far more numerous in the case
of peers than of members of the house of commons. This then
is not a privilege of parliament, and has no relation to any
immunity resting on the summons or writ of the king, although,
as the peers are hereditary and perpetual counsellors, it has
a corresponding validity. The right of killing venison in the
ιoyal forests, allowed by the Charter of the Forests, the right of
obtaining heavier damages for slander than an ordinary subject1,
and all the rest of the invidious privileges which time has done
its best to make obsolete, may be left out of sight. The only
other important right of peerage is that of demanding access to
the sovereign; a privilege which every peer has, which the
ordinary subject has not, and which the member of the house of
commons can demand only iɪɪ the company of his fellow-members
with the speaker at their head. There have been times when
this right or the suspension of it were important political
points : it was by estranging Edward II from the society of his
barons that the Despensers brought about his downfall and their
own2 ; and Richard II, in the same way, held himself aloof
from the men who hated and despised him3. This was the right
the refusal of which provoked Warwick to fight at S. Alban's
and at Northampton1. But history in this, as in all the
previous instances of privilege, has to dwell on the breach
rather than on the observance.
1 2 Rich. II, c. 5.
3 See above, vol. ii. p. 497.
p See above, vol. H. p. 364.
1 See above, pp. 176, 189.
XX.]
Privileges of Peers.
517
In another chapter we shall have to attempt to trace the
social as distinct from the legal and technical working of the
influences here exemplified in matters of ceremony, form, and
privilege ; influences which have constantly tended to place the
house of commons and its members on a footing of firm and
equal solidity with the house of lords, to extinguish invidious
and vexatious immunities, and to produce for all political and
national purposes something like a self-forgetting and sympa-
thetic harmony of action.