Sorry, all, but this really makes me slightly nauseous right from the start. The Bishop of Leicester says in response to a question about Lords reform, ‘the Lords Spiritual are in the Lords as independent, individual Lords of Parliament and have been there on that basis for 600 years’. They were initially there as large landowners, and they took the (mostly conservative) whip well into the nineteenth century. Somehow the mythology of English history (viewed through a myopic retrospectoscope) overwhelms the facts…
Sorry, all, but this really makes me slightly nauseous right from the start. The Bishop of Leicester says in response to a question about Lords reform, ‘the Lords Spiritual are in the Lords as independent, individual Lords of Parliament and have been there on that basis for 600 years’. They were initially there as large landowners, and they took the (mostly conservative) whip well into the nineteenth century. Somehow the mythology of English history (viewed through a myopic retrospectoscope) overwhelms the facts…