It was a poignant moment, for anyone attached to British culture and tradition, when the surviving 84 hereditary peers in the House of Lords posed for a group photograph, prior to their eviction from Parliament at the end of this session. That photograph is likely to feature many times in history books and online sites, marking the passing of something ancient, noble and still useful, discarded by ideologues.

The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill 2024-25 that came into operation at the end of the latest parliamentary session is designed to appease the Labour party’s left-wingers, at no cost to the Government. But it comes at considerable cost to the constitutional and cultural fabric of the United Kingdom.

Justifying the measure, its sponsor, Nick Thomas-Symonds, Paymaster General and Minister for the Constitution and European Relations – a stranger title than any to be found among even the most rococo exemplars of the hereditary peerage – said: ‘It is indefensible that, in the 21st century, there are seats in our legislature allocated by an accident of birth. This is a long-overdue reform and a progressive first step on the road of change. To maintain trust in our democratic institutions it is important our second chamber reflects modern Britain.’

How, then, would Mr Thomas-Symonds defend the largest seat in our legislature – the throne – being routinely occupied at every State Opening of Parliament by an accident of birth? The elephant in the room during every discussion of the hereditary principle is the Monarchy. If the hereditary principle is ‘indefensible’ when it accords an individual a solitary vote on delaying an item of legislation by one year, why is it defensible when it accords another individual the enjoyment of all the powers, prerogatives and influence accruing to the sovereign?

The answer, of course, is that Labour dares not attempt to abolish the monarchy, but feels free instead to attack the principle on which it is founded, in the subordinate institution of the hereditary peerage. Since the king’s advisers must be aware of that agenda, that makes them all the more remiss in attempting to detach the monarchy from the hereditary peerage. This was evident at the dumbed-down coronation of Charles III, when the hereditary peers were conspicuous by their absence, with the result that the most dramatic moment in the ceremony, so spectacular at the crowning of Elizabeth II, when the body of peers, resplendent in their coronation robes, collectively put on their coronets immediately after the crown was placed on the queen’s head, was omitted. Perversely, too, those life peers who participated in the ceremony wore their parliamentary, rather than their coronation robes, specifically designed for the occasion.

Such a pageant contains more of British history than all the volumes of academics: it is a living tableau of ‘this sceptr’d isle’. As such, it was anathema to Blairite progressives (‘This is a young country’), but it was concerning that the Palace cooperated in that constitutional and aesthetic vandalism. The royal household should not imagine that dissociating itself from the other body whose identity derives from heredity will help its survival: the contrary is true.

As for the importance, proclaimed by Thomas-Symonds, of maintaining trust in our democratic institutions, such concern is hardly persuasive, coming from a minister in a government that has serially postponed elections and aspires to reduce access to trial by jury. The House of Lords is a revising chamber and the hereditary peers were especially qualified for such work. The government has succeeded in removing the one component of the House of Lords that was not dependent on patronage. What is ‘democratic’ about nominating donors to political parties, corporate magnates, activists from lobby groups and former MPs, while excluding representatives of families dedicated for generations to public service?

The politics of this measure goes beyond dogma: it is also a project to eliminate opposition in the upper house by changing its composition on a massive scale. Having won 411 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons at the 2024 General Election, the Government has complete control of the lower house.

In the House of Lords, however, the situation is different: Labour has regularly been defeated in the Lords since it came to power. Constitutionally, it is a healthy situation when a government with a landslide Commons majority does not also control the upper chamber: while the House of Lords cannot, and does not aspire to, block the programme of an elected government, its ability to refine legislation it considers extravagant and to impose some delays is precisely the kind of constitutional check and balance it exists to exercise.

Labour wishes to remove that stumbling block and make its control of both houses of Parliament absolute. Removing the hereditary peers will eliminate 45 Conservative votes and only lose four Labour. Simultaneously, the Government has appointed 96 peers since the General Election, the majority of them Labour.

The cynicism of those removing the hereditary peers is exemplified by the argument they have routinely deployed that the membership of the House of Lords is too large. A favourite catchline has been that the House of Lords is the largest legislative chamber in the world, except for the National People’s Congress of China. The spectacle of those same critics cramming more peers into the supposedly overfull upper chamber discredits that critique. Attacks on the House of Lords are notable for their contradictory character. At the same time that complaints are being made of overcrowding in the upper house, regular attendance is also being fetishised.

Why should a peer attend debates on topics to which he can contribute nothing of value? In the days before a 1999 Government reform reduced the number of hereditary peers to 92 and they became workhorses on committees, they tended to turn up at the House when subjects were being discussed of which they had specialised knowledge. Chief among them were rural affairs, but hereditary peers also had expertise in a surprising number of areas and avocations. Yet they were derided as ‘backwoodsmen’ for having the modesty only to participate when they had something worthwhile to contribute.

Labour may rue the day it made manipulation of numbers in the upper house an acceptable government practice. It is no longer unthinkable that a Reform UK government could be elected to power. In that eventuality, since Reform has only one seat in the House of Lords, whose holder Lord Offord has decided to resign, and the prime minister refused to recommend any Reform peers among the latest appointments, Nigel Farage would be within his rights in requesting a mass creation of Reform peers by the king, to facilitate his legislative programme. On the constitutional precedent of 1831, when William IV conceded that principle in relation to his royal prerogative, but was saved from having to exercise it by the Tories abandoning their resistance to the Reform Bill, Farage could demand the creation of, say, 300 Reform peers and the King would have no alternative but to comply.

The main losers from this legislative measure will not be the ejected peers, but the public interest and national identity. The hereditary peers know well that there is life after parliamentary expulsion and that their distinction as peers is not, as many assume, ineradicably bound up with Parliament. Centuries of involvement with the legislature may have created the impression that the principal characteristic of a peer is his legislative function, but history suggests otherwise.

The late Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, a notable herald and genealogist, prone to produce such conversational curiosities as the fact that Winston Churchill descended from a brother of St Thomas Aquinas, held strong views on the essentially non-parliamentary character of the Peerage. ‘But Peerage is not necessarily anything to do with Parliament,’ he wrote. ‘Earls existed long before the first Parliament.’ And in similar vein, on another occasion: ‘People link Peerage with Parliament too much. Men were created Irish peers specially to prevent them from sitting in the House of Lords, nor did peeresses in their own right have any seat until lately.’

That argument was supported by the evolution of the Peerage from the 6th-century eorls, the 10th-century thegns and the 11th-century ealdorman. Then came the post-Conquest emergence of barons, who were not parliamentarians until the 13th century, when they became bound to attend the great council to advise the king; finally, the great council metamorphosed into Parliament in the reign of Henry III, seven centuries after the first appearance of eorls. Every society had some kind of magnate class, based on land ownership, so that there was an inevitability about powerful men being drawn into the governance of their nation.

The concept of Peerage in England is said to have been inspired by the 12 Peers of France, six spiritual and six secular, which would explain the presence of bishops and abbots in early English parliaments, they being also major landowners. The earliest peerages were baronies by writ, summoning an individual to attend Parliament. Later peerage law held that if a man received such a writ and actually sat in Parliament, that created an hereditary right of peerage, despite the fact that many men of substance sat in Parliament, but were not followed by their sons.

Writs began to co-exist with, and later be supplanted by, letters patent, specifically naming the recipient a peer. That is the sole form in which peerages are created today. Yet it is misleading to talk of ‘peerage’, as if it were a single, uniform institution. In fact, there are five distinct types of peerage, with different characteristics and histories. These are: the Peerages of England, of Scotland, of Ireland, of Great Britain and of the United Kingdom. Some of these categories have had a greatly varied relationship with Parliament, sometimes being largely excluded from the legislature, at other times gaining full admission. That is what makes the current legislation so revolutionary and brutal, differing significantly from the 1999 ‘reform’, in that for the first time in parliamentary history it excludes the hereditary peers in their entirety.

The British concept of Peerage and the law governing it is mainly derived from the Peerage of England, dating from medieval times and ended in 1707, when the Union with Scotland extinguished both the English and Scots peerages, replaced by the Peerage of Great Britain. The essential characteristic of the Peerage of England is its preference for descent to heirs-male. The purpose of this was not to ‘discriminate’ against women, but to ensure that the peerage remained within the family that the sovereign intended to honour.

The expulsion of the hereditary peers from the legislature at least removes any pretext for interfering with the succession to their titles, thus frustrating the will of the sovereign who created them and laid down the rules of succession, known as the ‘remainder’. However, the Peerage of England is not exclusively remaindered to heirs-male: some very ancient earldoms and old baronies created by writ descend instead to heirs-general, by cognatic primogeniture. It is this minority system that has created the most contentious feature of English peerage law: the principle of abeyance.

In English law, when a peer has only daughters, the eldest daughter has no greater rights than her sisters: they all inherit equally. Since, however, multiple people cannot enjoy a peerage, it goes into ‘abeyance’ until such time as there is only one heir remaining, or the sovereign chooses to call it out of abeyance in favour of one heir out of several. It is a purely prerogative act: there is no obligation on the King to bestow the peerage on the most senior or the most worthy of those eligible.

More ink has been spilled over the law of abeyance than any other aspect of the peerage. It became a legal doctrine in the 17th century, defined by the celebrated jurist Edward Coke. The heraldic controversialist Horace Round, in the first volume of his Peerage and Pedigree, devoted 180 pages to the topic, under the appropriate heading ‘The Muddle of the Law’. It was in the 19th century that the doctrine of abeyance came into its own, in the era of gothic revival, Young England and the Eglinton Tournament.

In 1838, the principle of abeyance attracted public interest as peerage lawyers began to indulge in nobiliary archaeology, earning large fees in the service of claimants to long-abeyant baronies by writ. In 1839, the barony of Camoys was called out of abeyance after 413 years. That provoked a feeding frenzy; Disraeli satirised the craze for resurrecting baronies in his novel Sybil, via the character of the peerage lawyer Baptist Hatton (‘He has made more peers of the realm than our gracious Sovereign…’).

Yet it was a legitimate exercise in English law. A record was set as late as 1989, when a peerage was called out of abeyance after almost half a millennium: the barony of Grey of Codnor, abeyant for 493 years. Nearly all titles called out of abeyance were baronies, the exceptions being the earldoms of Cromartie and Arlington, with the attached viscountcy of Thetford. In 1927 a Select Committee of the House of Lords on Peerages in Abeyance made the highly contentious recommendation that no peerage should be called out of abeyance after more than 100 years.

That suggestion was not binding in law, which is fortunate since it flies in the face of natural justice. Today, genealogical science has made prodigious advances: it is much easier now to trace the heir to a medieval barony by writ than it was in Victorian times. To deprive heirs of their rights by creating an arbitrary cut-off date is not only unjust, it is an impediment to the revival of some of England’s most ancient peerages.

The Peerage of Scotland differs considerably from that of England. Abeyance is impossible in a Scottish peerage, since the eldest daughter takes precedence over her sisters and succeeds to the title. A peculiarity of the Scots Peerage is the confusing title of ‘Master’ (as in Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae), borne by the heir of a Scottish peer, with the difference that, when held by the heir apparent it is not a courtesy but a substantive title, with the right of sitting, though not of voting, in the Estates of Scotland, but if held by an heir presumptive it is merely a courtesy title. The lowest rank in the Peerage of Scotland is not Baron (a feudal title in Scotland), but Lord of Parliament.

No further creations in the Peerage of Scotland or England took place after the Act of Union in 1707: peerages created thereafter were in the Peerage of Great Britain. In 1707 there were 154 Scottish peers, almost as many as the 168 English, so it was deemed impossible to admit all the Scots, from a much smaller nation, into the House of Lords. Instead, they were given the right to elect a meagre representation of 16 peers from among their number. At each new Parliament the elections of representative peers were held in the Great Gallery of the Palace of Holyroodhouse and became considerable social occasions in Edinburgh. This custom ended in 1963, when the Peerage Act admitted the entire Scottish Peerage to the House of Lords (it also admitted peeresses in their own right to take their seats).

The Peerage of Ireland sat in its own House of Lords in Dublin until the Act of Union in 1800. It was modelled on the English Peerage, including the principle of abeyance which was specifically protected by the Act of Union. There is only one extant barony by writ in Ireland, that of La Poer, held by the Marquess of Waterford. Unlike the Scottish Union of 1707, Irish peerages did not cease to be created after 1800, though a restriction was placed limiting one new creation for every three peerage extinctions, but they no longer carried the automatic right to sit in a legislature; instead, 28 representative peers were elected for life (in contrast to the Scottish system). In these circumstances, Irish representative peers could be elected by postal vote, to fill vacancies. Irish peers, unless elected as representatives, could sit in the House of Commons.

The election of Irish representative peers ended after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. The alleged reason was that the officials responsible for calling elections of representative peers no longer existed; but since equivalent posts had been created in Northern Ireland, that pretext suggests a political motive, in that the Irish peers could be an embarrassment to the British government in its relations with the new Irish state. The already elected Irish representatives retained their seats in the House of Lords until the death of the last survivor, the Earl of Kilmorey, in 1961.

After the Irish Act of Union, the Peerage of Great Britain became the Peerage of the United Kingdom, essentially only a change of name. The peerage of the United Kingdom is the only version of the peerage in which creations are made today. Such creations have been dominated by barons for life (‘the day boys’, in Lords argot) since the Life Peerages Act 1958. Apart from the royal family, only three hereditary peerages have been created since 1965: two viscountcies (invariably hereditary) for men with no heirs and, in 1984, an earldom was conferred on former prime minister Harold Macmillan.

Today, there are 799 hereditary peerages in existence. Some hereditary peers still inhabit country estates, albeit of reduced acreages, some live in suburban villas. Their interests and occupations are wide and varied. The 5th Viscount Ridley is a popular science fiction writer; the 7th Earl of Rosslyn is a former Metropolitan Police commander; and the 12th Earl of Portland plays a character in the BBC radio soap opera The Archers.

By an unexpected twist in the plot, in the most recent list of peerage appointments, three hereditary peers will remain in the Lords: the Liberal Democrats nominated two hereditary peers, Earl Russell and Lord Addington, for life peerages, while the Earl of Kinnoull, Deputy Speaker of the Lords and a cross-bencher, was similarly nominated. So, at least two earls will survive, among a sea of barons, for their lifespan, unless the chamber itself is abolished during that period.

Now comes a further twist in the plot, with the Government yielding to the strong criticism of its removal of so many dedicated and experienced legislators from the revising chamber. The Government has let it be known that, as a partial compromise, it will appoint a larger number of life peers than usual later this year, allowing departing hereditary peers to apply for life baronies under the normal House of Lords appointments process. This would enable hereditary peers who sit on the Opposition front bench to retain their positions.

Some hereditary peers, bred to public service, will miss the connection with Parliament, though they will be free to stand for election as MPs. In any case, from the magistrate’s bench to local government and other public bodies, they are likely still to play a prominent role in the community. Now that networking within ‘the best club in London’ is no longer available to them, they would be well advised to maintain some kind of corporate identity. In that context, the Hereditary Peerage Association, formed in 2002 in the wake of the 1999 purge, already exists, chaired jointly by Viscount Torrington and Lord Newall. It seems probable it will experience a fresh surge of membership soon, when the new legislation takes effect.

‘You should study the Peerage, Gerald… it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done,’ Lord Illingworth advised in Act three of Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance. The British have traditionally taken a humorous view of the nobility, as epitomised by Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera Iolanthe, with a chorus of peers singing:

‘When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte,

As every child can tell,

The House of Peers, throughout the war,

Did nothing in particular,

And did it very well…’

However, it was good-natured satire: when some campaigners against the House of Lords asked permission to use the words in their propaganda, W.S. Gilbert refused. And who could contemplate guillotining an aristocracy personified by P. G. Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth or Bertie Wooster?

As for doing nothing in particular in wartime, such a notion was alien to the hereditary peerage families, which distinguished themselves disproportionately in military service, true to the doctrine of noblesse oblige, that privilege exacts duties. The First World War, in particular, drastically altered the succession to many peerages. The most prominent privilege of peerage was trial by one’s peers. This Magna Carta right was immortalised in Dorothy L. Sayers’ novel Clouds of Witness, wherein Lord Peter Wimsey’s elder brother, a duke, was tried for his life in the House of Lords.

Nine years after the publication of the novel, in 1935, the last trial by the House of Lords acquitted the 26th Lord de Clifford of manslaughter. Between 1499 and 1935 a total of 44 peers were tried for the capital crimes of treason, murder and bigamy, resulting in 17 executions. This privilege was ended by the peers themselves, since it disadvantaged them as they could not object to jurors, and peers took a stern view of fellow members who had apparently let the side down. The privilege of being hanged on a silken rope was not greatly appreciated and ended with the abolition of capital punishment in 1965.

Britain’s dukes should be a conservation concern: there are only 24 of them surviving, fortunately all with heirs. Marquesses are not much thicker on the ground, totalling 34, with the marquessate of Abergavenny likely to become extinct after the present holder. Some thought should be given, in such an event, to the king possibly extending the remainder to such titles, in an effort to secure their continuing survival. They are part of the pageant of British history.

The future of the House of Lords now looks more precarious than that of the hereditary peers. The hereditary members gave historical authenticity to the upper house, a kind of apostolic succession, conferring legitimacy on their one-generation confrères. As the departing Earl of Devon told the BBC: ‘We should be proud to sit here as embodiments of the hereditary principle dating back a millennium.’ With the genuine blue-bloods removed, a scarlet robe worn at state openings of Parliament cannot convincingly convert a roomful of company directors, trades unionists, quangocrats, party hacks and donors into a credible House of Lords.

A House of Lords anecdote from years ago relates how a noble member quoted the lament of the 17th-century judge Sir Ranulph Crewe for the medieval nobility: ‘Where is Bohun, where’s Mowbray, where’s Mortimer? Nay, which is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality.’ ‘Mowbray is here!’ came the instant rebuttal from the premier baron of England, the 25th Lord Mowbray, seated nearby.

Any such plaint will now meet with funereal silence. The wreckers have destroyed yet another pillar of British tradition. Within living memory, life peers were a novelty, but now they have voted to expel the indigenous inhabitants of the House of Lords: the grey squirrels have supplanted the red.