The Speaker receives a pension of £4,000 a year. John Evelyn Denison refused this retiring allowance. “Though without any pretensions to wealth,” he wrote to Gladstone, then Prime Minister, “I have a private fortune which will suffice, and for the few years of life that remain to me I should be happier in feeling that I am not a burden to my fellow-countrymen.” He retired in February 1872, and died, without heir, in March 1873. A peerage is also conferred on the Speaker when he resigns. This was not the custom in the eighteenth century. When Arthur Onslow retired in 1761, after his long service of thirty-five years, George III, in reply to the address of the Commons to confer on Onslow “some signal mark of honour,” gave him a pension of £3,000 a year for the lives of himself and his son, but no peerage. The custom began in the nineteenth century with Charles Abbot, who, on retiring in 1817, was made Baron Colchester. Since then every Speaker has been “called to the House of Lords”—Manners-Sutton as Lord Canterbury; Abercromby as Lord Dunfermline; Shaw-Lefevre as Lord Eversley; Denison as Lord Ossington; Brand as Lord Hampton; Peel as Lord Peel; Gully as Lord Selby. But he is Speaker no longer; another presides in his place; and what a shadowy personage he seems, even as a Lord, compared with the resounding fame and distinction that were his in the glorious years when he filled with pomp and dignity the Chair of the House of Commons! CHAPTER XII HOW A GOVERNMENT IS MADE 1 Macaulay, writing to his sister Hannah on December 19, 1845, says: “It is an odd thing to see a Ministry making. I never witnessed the process before. Lord John Russell has been all day in his inner library. His antechamber has been filled with comers and goers, some talking in knots, some writing notes at tables. Every five minutes somebody is called into the inner room. As the people who have been closeted come out, the cry of the whole body of expectants is: ‘What are you?’ I was summoned almost as soon as I arrived, and found Lord Auckland and Lord Clarendon sitting with Lord John. After some talk about other matters, Lord John told me that he had be trying to ascertain my wishes, and that he found I wanted leisure and quiet more than salary and business. Labouchere had told him this. He therefore offered me the Pay Office, one of the three places which, as I have told you, I should prefer. I at once accepted it.”