PRESS AND CRIMINALS.

Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 62, 10 September 1887, Page 2 (Supplement)

PRESS AND CRIMINALS.

Since the Trial of Lord Lovat in 1747 no peer has been tried for treason and since the trial of the Duchess of Kingston for bignniy in 1776 no peeress has been tried at all by the House of Lords. In the reigns of the Tudors and the Stuarts trials of peeis for treason were, of course common enough ; -and while brawls and duels were not infrequent amoug the aristocracy, trials like that of Lord Pembroke, or Lord Mahun, or Lord Byron were necessarily not unknown. But the last case of the kind was the abortive trial of Loid Cardigan for wounding Captain Harvey Tucker in 1841, and the softened manners of our times forbid the anticipation that the experience will be repeated. It is a remarkable fact, that, except ou impeachment by the House of Commons, as in the case of Lord Melville in 1806, no peer has ever been tried by the House of Lords for an offence agaiiii-t property. The telouies on which peers have been arraigned .have always bepn crimes of violence, and their crime has usually been murder. But since the age of the Planlagencts only four peers have been convicted, and only three have been executed for murder on judgment of the House of Lords — the ninth Lord Dacre iv 1541, the seventh Lord Stourton in 1557, aud the fourth Earl Ferrers in 17G0. Eoberfc Carr, Earl of Somerset, who, with his infamous wifo, was convicted in 1616 of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbuiy, was not executed. With the exception of Lord Ferrers, all of them are represented by numerous descendants in the present day, and it is consoling to reflect that whatever may be said about hereditary genius theve is nothing in the history of any of them to suggest the existence of heieditary crime.