36 Chapter II
consisted of King, Lords, and Commons. As Blackstone put it, the King sat in
Parliament with “the three estates of the realm,” the higher clergy, nobility, and
commons; they and the King constituted “the great corporation or body politic of
the kingdom.”^23 Parliament governed; it was sovereign. “Men are connected with
each other,” said Blackstone in speaking of Parliament, “as governors and gov-
erned; or, in other words, as magistrates and people.” Parliament was not supposed
to follow the wishes of voters or other influences “out of doors.” Representation
meant that certain people assembled from various parts of the country, as in
Languedoc or Württemberg, but how they were selected was hardly a matter for
Parliament to concern itself with. Hence the methods by which the House of
Commons was recruited seemed less peculiar to contemporaries than to modern
critics who see in the House an ancestor of democratic representation.
The King in Parliament was no legal fiction, as will be seen. The House of Lords
in 1760 consisted of about 230 members. Twenty- six of these were the bishops of
the Church of England. Like those of Languedoc they were mostly administrators
rather than religious leaders, and spent their most constructive efforts on matters
of state. Each of the 200 lay lords belonged to the House by personal right; most
had inherited their seats, for the frequent creation of new peers began later with
the younger Pitt, but the inheritance of most of them went back no further than
the preceding century, so that their noble lineage was scarcely more ancient than
that of French parlementaires.
The House of Commons consisted of 558 members, sent up from boroughs and
counties. In every county all men possessing a freehold worth forty shillings a year
appeared by personal right in a county assembly, where they chose two “knights of
the shire” to represent them in Parliament. Copyhold, as a form of property in land
considered inferior to the freehold, did not carry with it the right of suffrage. An
attempt to give the vote to copyholders in the 1750’s was defeated.
Four- fifths of the members of the House of Commons sat for the boroughs, but
most “burgesses” in the eighteenth century were in fact country gentlemen. It has
been estimated that three- fourths of all members of the House of Commons, from
1734 to 1832, drew their main income from landed rents. In some boroughs, nota-
bly Westminster, freemen in considerable numbers actually elected their burgesses;
but in most, as is well known, other and diverse methods were used to designate
the incumbents. No town had received the borough right since 1678.
Since about the year 1600 members paid their own expenses and received no
remuneration, so that only men of independent income, or those patronized by the
wealthy, could afford to sit in the House. An Act of 1710, by which the landed
aristocracy tried to check the moneyed and business interest, held that to qualify as
a knight of the shire one must own land of an annual rental value of £600, and that
23 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, first published in 1765. Blackstone’s views
on Parliament are given in Chapter ii of Book I. Porritt, Unreformed House of Commons (Cambridge,
Eng., 1903) is still standard. For most statistical data used here I am indebted to G. P. Judd, Members
of Parliament, 1734–1832 (New Haven, 1955). See also H. E. Witmer, Property Qualifications of Mem-
bers of Parliament (N.Y., 1943). It will be evident to the alert reader that I do not share the revisionist
admiration shown by L. B. Namier for the old House of Commons in his Structure of Politics at the
Accession of George III (London, 1929) and other writings.