Chiltern Hundreds

Which procedural device in the UK Parliament used to allow MPs to resign their seats, despite being unable formally to do so, takes its name from a former Buckinghamshire administrative area?

Um, the Chiltern Hundreds.

Right.

The loophole is needed due to a 1624 resolution stating that members of Parliament cannot directly resign their seat.

The members wishing to resign or seek re-election are appointed at their own request to an office of profit under the Crown.

So they either go to the Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds or the Steward of the Manor of Northstead.

Now, your guess is as good as mine, but I decided to punt.

I don't even care.

But if you reject the proverb altogether, if you say that two and three are the same sort of company, if you cannot see that there is a wider abyss between two and three than between three and three million, then I regret to inform you that you belong to the third class of human beings, that you shall have no company either of two or three, but shall be alone in a howling desert till you die.

The Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds The other day, on a stray spur of the Chiltern Hills, I climbed up upon one of those high, abrupt, windy churchyards, from which the dead seemed to look down upon all the living.

It was a mountain of ghosts, as Olympus was a mountain of gods.

In that church lay the bones of great Puritan lords of a time when most of the power of England was Puritan, even of the established church.

And looking over that deep green prospect on that luminous yellow evening, a lovely and austere thought came into my mind, a thought as beautiful as the green wood and as grave as the tombs.

The thought was this, that I should like to go into Parliament, quarrel with my party, accept the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, and then refuse to give it up.

We are so proud in England of our crazy constitutional anomalies that I fancy that very few readers indeed will need to be told about the steward of the Chiltern Hundreds.

But in case there should be here or there one happy man who has never heard of such twisted tomfooleries, I will rapidly remind you what this legal fiction is.