Writing on the 9th of January, 1856, in his Diary, Lord Campbell says, “Bethell, the Solicitor-General, has made Baron Parke a peer. The judicial business of the House of Lords could not go on another session as it did last. Pemberton Leigh was first offered a peerage, and I wish much that he had accepted it, but he positively refused to be _pitchforked_. I don’t know that anything less exceptional could be done than applying next to Baron Surrebutter.”[268] At the Lord Chancellor’s levee on the first day of Hilary Term, Lord Campbell asked him if there was any truth in the story that Parke’s peerage was to be for life. On hearing that it was, Lord Campbell replied, “Then sorry am I to say that I must make a row about it.” At first he thought that the grant of a life peerage was not illegal--for Coke asserted its legality--but merely unconstitutional. When, however, Lord Campbell studied the precedents, he became convinced that “no life peerage had been granted to any man for more than 400 years, and that there was no authenticated instance of a peer ever having sat and voted in the House of Lords having in him a life peerage only--the life peerages relied upon being superinduced on pre-existing peerages, _e.g._, De Vere, Earl of Oxford (a title which had been in his family since the Conquest), was created by Richard II. Marquis of Dublin for life.” Lord Campbell goes on to say, “My eyes were opened. The power of the Crown to give a right to vote in the House must depend on the exercise of the power; and no one _had_ voted in right of a peerage for life more than _of a peerage granted during the pleasure of the King_--for the granting of which there was at least one precedent.”[269] When Sir Theodore Martin says that “the right of the Crown to create a life peerage with a right to sit in Parliament” was “scarcely disputed in the discussions which arose,” his anxiety to exaggerate the Queen’s prerogative has led him into a grave error. As Lord Campbell says, “It was not necessary to resort to the doctrine of desuetude,” for “the non-exercise of a prerogative, ever since the Constitution was settled, afforded a strong inference that it had never lawfully existed.” The fact is that the arguments in favour of recognising the right of the Crown to create a peer for life, with the right of voting in the House of Lords, would have been equally good for creating a peer with a similar right, during the Sovereign’s pleasure. A peer who could at any moment be deprived of his rank and senatorial privileges would, of course, either be a creature of the Court or the minion of the Minister. Lord Lyndhurst, therefore, had little difficulty in carrying a motion referring Baron Parke’s Letters Patent to a Committee of Privileges, which reported against the right asserted by the Crown. The Government yielded, and Sir James Parke was finally created an hereditary peer in the ordinary way, under the title of Lord Wensleydale.