Norwich, March 10. 1851.
{253}
_Roman Catholic Peers_ (Vol. iii., p. 209.).--The proper comment has been
passed on the Duke of Norfolk, but not on the other two Roman Catholic
peers mentioned by Miss Martineau. She names Lord Clifford and Lord Dormer
as "having obtained entrance _at last_ to the legislative assembly, where
their fathers sat and ruled when their faith was the law of the land." The
term "fathers" is of course figuratively used, but we may conclude the
writer meant to imply their ancestors possessing the same dignity of
peerage, and enjoying, in virtue thereof, the right of "sitting and ruling"
in the senate of their country. If such was the lady's meaning, what is her
historical accuracy? The first Lord Dormer was created in the reign of
James I., in the year 1615; and, dying the next year, never sat in
parliament: and it has been remarked as a very singular fact that this
barony had existed for upwards of two centuries before any of its
possessors did so. But the first Lord Dormer, who sat in the House of
Lords, was admitted, not by the Roman Catholic Relief Act, but by the fact
of his being willing to take the usual oaths: this was John, the tenth
lord, who succeeded his half-brother in 1819, and died without issue in
1826. As for Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, that family was not raised to the
peerage until the year 1672, in the reign of Charles II.