Miscellaneous - Humble Address from the House of Lords Regarding Abeyant Peerages [1986-12-18]

Miscellaneous - Humble Address from the House of Lords Regarding Abeyant Peerages [1986-12-18]

Peerages

House of Lords

Humble Address of the House of Lords to Queen Elizabeth II asking her to place limits on claims for peerages in abeyance.

House of Lords

College of Arms I84/280

1986-12-18

Mark Scott

Most Gracious Sovereign,
We, Your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Lords Spiritual & Temporal in Parliament assembled, humbly pray that the Address presented to Your Majesty's Royal Predecessor on 7th July 1927 be set aside and humbly submit to Your Majesty that if it is Your Majesty's gracious pleasure to place some limitation on claims to peerages in abeyance, such limitation would be effected if Your Majesty would be graciously pleased to issue the following instructions to the Attorney-General:

If it should appear to the Attorney-General that a claim to a peerage in abeyance is affected by either of the following considerations:-

i) that the commencement of the existing abeyance occurred more than one hundred years before the presentation of the petition; or
ii) that the petitioner (not being a child of the last holder of the dignity or a descendant of a parent of the last holder) represents less than one-third of the entire dignity, he should call attention to that in his report to the Crown, and (except where the petition was presented before 7th July 1927 or where there are special circumstances or special reasons to the contrary) recommend that no further proceedings should be taken with regard to the claim; and furthermore the Attorney-General should investigate the nature of any arrangement entered into by the co-heirs to a peerage in abeyance, and if he is of the opinion that there may be grounds for doubting the propriety of any such arrangement, he should bring the circumstances to the attention of the Crown and recommend that the petition be referred to the House of Lords;

and further submit to Your Majesty that when consideration is given to whether or not Your Majesty should be advised to extend Your Majesty's grace to the petitioner for a termination of the abeyance regard should be had to the character, position, and fitness of the petitioner. Die Jovis, 18 Decembris 1986

This text is taken from a handwritten transcript of the document and may not reflect the formatting of the original.

The 1927 Address can be found here.

The 1986 Address made two principal changes to the procedure for claiming abeyant peerages:

1. The requirement to notify the Crown if a person seeking the termination of an abeyance had presented a Petition for the introduction of bills into the House of Lords for restoration in blood in order to qualify for the Peerage was dropped. 
2. The Committee for Privileges would only investigate arrangements between co-heirs if the Attorney General believed there was some impropriety. 

The Committee for Privileges' report of June 9, 1986 noted that the current procedure was expensive and cumbersome and recommended that the Committee should only investigate allegations of impropriety when asked to do so by the Attorney General. The report did not address the removal of the language about bills for restoration in blood, but this was likely done because such bills were vanishingly rare by 1986.