The Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal and premier Peer of England, head of the great house of Howard, a name that for five centuries has held its own with highest honor.

The Marquis of Winchester, head of the Paulets, representative of the man who for three long years held Basing House for the King against all the forces which Cromwell could muster, but descended also from that earlier Marquis of Tudor creation, who, when he was asked how in those troublous times he succeeded in retaining the post of Lord High Treasurer, replied, “By being a willow and not an oak.”  To-day the boot is on the other leg.

The Earl of Shrewsbury, head of the Talbots, a race far famed alike in camp and field from the days of the Plantagenets.

The Viscount Falkland, representative of that noble Cavalier who fell at Newbury.

The Baron Mowbray and Segrave and Stourton, titles which carry us back almost to the days of the Great Charter.

Nor does the feudal train end there.  We see also a St. Maur, Duke of Somerset, whose family has aged since in the time of Henry VIII. men scoffed at it as new; a Clinton, Duke of Newcastle; a Percy, Duke and heir of Northumberland, that name of high romance; a De Burgh, Marquis of Clanricarde; a Lindsay, Earl of Crawford, twenty-sixth Earl, and head of a house which for eight centuries has stood on the steps of thrones; a Courtenay, Earl of Devon; an Erskine, Earl of Mar, an earldom whose origin is lost in the mists of antiquity, and many another.

And if we come to later days we have the Duke of Bedford, head of the great Whig house of Russell; the Dukes of Marlborough and Westminster, heirs of capacity and good fortune; Lords Bute and Salisbury, descendants of Prime Ministers; and not only Lord Selborne, but Lords Bathurst and Coventry, Hardwicke and Rosslyn, representatives of past Lord Chancellors.

These, and others such as they, inheritors of traditions bred in their very bones, spurning the suggestion that they should purchase the uncontamination of the Peerage by the forfeiture of their principles, fought the question to the end.  If they asked for a motto, surely theirs would have been, “Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra.”

And so we pass to the group who abstained, the great mass of the Peerage, too proud to wrangle where they could not win, too wise to knock their heads uselessly against a wall, too loyal not to do their utmost to spare their King.  More than three hundred followed Lord Lansdowne’s lead, taking for their motto, perhaps, the “Cavendo tutus” of his son-in-law.  And still there was fiery blood among them, and strong men swelling with righteous indignation.  There were Gay Gordons, as well as a cautious Cavendish, an Irish Beresford to quicken a Dutch Bentinck, and a Graham of Montrose as well as a Campbell of Argyll.  Three Earls, Pembroke, Powis, and Carnarvon, represented the cultured family of Herbert, and, as a counterpoise