-L-500 a Day

In 1775, the Rev. John Home Tooke, philologist,* scholar and political agitator, was moved to such indignation at the sacrifices which had taken place on the battlefields of Lexington and Concord that he launched in London a public subscription in behalf of "our beloved American fellow subjects." Result: he was fined -L-200 and clapped into King's Bench prison for a year. The kindness of his Tory gaolers in permitting him to dine out once a week at the nearby Dog & Duck tavern only served to increase Whig Tooke's bitterness against them; he blamed the gout from which he suffered all the last years of his life on the claret drunk on these outings.

In 1801, free at last but still implacably anti-Tory, Tooke got himself elected to Parliament. For a century and a half, clergymen had been permitted to sit as members of the House of Commons, but when Tooke showed up, his Tory enemies revived an ancient ban barring officers of the Church of England (members of the First Estate) from the convocation of Britain's commoners. The ban was enacted into law over Tooke's violent objection, and extended to cover clergymen of the Churches of Ireland and Scotland and the Roman Catholic Church.

In later years, when Tooke was gone, the ban was lifted from the Scots, the Anglicans and the Catholics, but the clergymen of the Church of Ireland were overlooked in the new dispensation./-

Last week the judicial committee of the Privy Council, highest legal authority in Britain, decided that clergymen of the Church of Ireland are still forbidden by law to sit in Britain's House of Commons, and liable to a fine of -L-500 for each day they do so. The old Tory gesture of spite against Tooke had come home to roost. From the present Parliament, where divisions are too close for comfort, the council decision effectively banned a pulpitless Church of Ireland clergyman named J. G. MacManaway, who was recently elected Tory M.P. from West Belfast.

Five times since his election, M.P. MacManaway has risked the -L-500 fine to vote in close divisions (like that over steel nationalization) while his case was being decided. The government has announced that it will introduce special legislation so that he won't have to pay the -L-2,500, but MacManaway is still indignant over his ejection.

"I have been returned to this House," he said last week, "by the will of the people in the biggest working-class constituency in the whole of the United Kingdom, but apparently their will is not to count. It is to be brushed aside because of some archaic legal enactment."

* One of whose etymological studies was cited by Poet Bret Harte in his Ballad of Mr. Cooke:

Haughtily that young man spoke;

"I descend from noble folk;

" 'Seven Oaks' and then 'Se'nnoak,'

"Lastly 'Snook'

"Is the way my name I trace . . ."

"Clifford Snook, I know thy claim

"To that lineage and name

"And I think I've read the same

"In Horne Tooke . . ."

/- The Church of Ireland, an offshoot of the Church of England, has about 500,000 members, owns such famous institutions as Christ Church and St. Patrick's Cathedral in Roman Catholic Dublin.

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