532 Proceedi)igs of the Royal Irish Academy, 



with the early precedents in the English Parliament, where the 

 practice of choosing a lawyer for the Chair doubtless originated in the 

 duty formerly cast upon the Speakers of expounding to the House of 

 Commons the purport of the measures laid before it, and the consequent 

 desirability of some legal training in the persons charged with such a 

 task. The invariable choice of a lawyer had perhaps a further justifi- 

 cation by analogy to the practice of the House of Lords, of which the 

 Lord Chancellor was the immemorial Speaker. In Tudor times, when, 

 as already noted, the championship of the royal prerogative seems to 

 have been one of the primary functions of the Speaker, it became 

 habitual to select not merely a member of the legal profession, but one 

 directly connected with the government, or, as we should now 

 say, a law officer. Thus of the Tudor and Stuart Speakers, 

 four held the office of Attorney-General, two that of Solicitor- 

 General, and two that of Prime Sergeant ; Sir Thomas Cusake^ 

 the earliest recorded Speaker, had been a Judge of the Common 

 Pleas before his election to the Chair, and Sir Mcholas Walsh was 

 Chief Justice of the Presidency of Munster. There are three examples 

 of the selection of the Recorder of Dublin — those of Stanihurst, Catelyn, 

 and Forster ; and the last-named was also Attorney-General at the same 

 time. All three represented the city of Dublin. Prom the reign of 

 Henry YIII. to that of Queen Anne the legal tradition remained 

 unbroken ; and although from the accessi on of the House of Hanover to 

 the Union there is no example of the nomination of a Crown lawyer 

 to the Chair, every one of the eighteenth- century Speakers, with a 

 single exception, had been called to the Bar. The exception is eminently 

 one of those which prove the rule, since the case of Speaker Conolly, 

 who filled the Chair during the reign of George L, is an example 

 which I believe is unique in the Parliamentary history of the Three 

 Kingdoms, of the selection of the Pirst Commoner from the ranks of 

 the Solicitors' profession. 



An examination of the careers of the legal Speakers subsequent to 

 their election to the Chair, shows that the pursuit of politics as a 

 royal road to professional preferment is no very modern practice. 

 Many of them attained to the highest judicial eminence, and almost 

 all of them ultimately ascended the Bench. Three of them — Sir 

 Thomas Cusake, Sir Maurice Eustace, and Alan Brodrick — reached the 

 Woolsack, thus exchanging the Speakership of the House of Commons 

 for that of the House of Lords ; and the first-named was also for a time 

 Master of the Rolls. Three — Sir Nicholas Walsh, Sir Richard Levinge, 

 and John Porster — not Lord Oriel, but the Speaker of Queen Anne's 



