Then it was that the lawyers of the Inns of Court, many of them Puritan in sympathy, disinterred the ancient records, and, on the strength of one or two summonses, insisted that such demesne towns, some mere villages, were boroughs by prescription, and as such possessed the right to send representatives to Parliament for all time. The consequence was that about thirty towns, in which great men at Court had an interest, resumed their lapsed privileges, and by the reign of Queen Elizabeth the Lower House had received an accession of sixty fresh members. This seems to have been brought about in the first instance by the sheriffs sending precepts to the places in question, and although in the thirteenth year of Elizabeth a debate took place regarding the admission of members from towns not hitherto represented, the practice was not seriously challenged owing to the efficient patronage and protection of the courtiers before named. In subsequent reigns the Commons themselves proceeded to enlarge their body. James I., indeed, talked of reform, but that pedantic monarch, far from checking the growth of the borough system, was the very sovereign to whom Tiverton was indebted for its charter. The small borough, in the nature of things, tended to become a pocket-borough. In the reign of Elizabeth the Earl of Leicester “owned” the town of Andover; and the degree to which this form of property was stretched is amusingly illustrated by the well-known story of Ann Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, who lived in the days of the Merry Monarch. The Secretary of State, Sir Joseph Williamson, had sent her a letter in which he named a particular candidate for her borough of Appleby. Incensed at this presumption, the haughty dame returned the following reply: “I have been bullied by an usurper, I have been neglected by a court, but I will not be dictated to by a subject. Your man shan’t stand.” The system, it goes without saying, lent itself to numberless kinds of abuse. It has been stated that at one period a mistress of the King of France acquired some borough, and that the Nabob of Arcot was able to secure the return of seven or eight members, all pledged to his interest. These assertions may be true or they may not, but the possibility of such anomalies did not deter apologists from affirming that the system was not by any means an unmixed evil.