List of Stewards of the Manor of Northstead


The position of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead is a procedural device to allow Members of Parliament to resign from the British House of Commons. Members of the House of Commons are technically forbidden from resigning. To circumvent this prohibition, a legal fiction is used. An appointment to an "office of profit under The Crown" disqualifies an individual from sitting as a Member of Parliament. As such, several such positions are maintained to allow MPs to resign. Currently, the positions of Steward of the Manor of Northstead and Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds are used, and are specifically designated as qualifying for this purpose under the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975; historically several other offices have also been used. The appointment is traditionally made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The position was reworked in 1861 by William Ewart Gladstone, who was worried about the honour conferred by appointment to people such as Edwin James, who had fled to the United States over £10,000 in debt. As such, the letter was rewritten to omit any references to honour.
The position was first used in this way on 20 March 1844 to allow Sir George Henry Rose, Member for Christchurch, to resign his seat in Parliament. Appointees to the offices of Steward of the Manor of Northstead and Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds are alternated so that two MPs can resign at once. However, every new appointment to the Stewardship revokes the previous appointment so there is no difficulty in situations in which more than two resign, such as the 1985 walkout of Ulster Unionist MPs when several separate appointments were made on a single day. If a resigning MP wishes to contest the following by-election, as Douglas Carswell did in 2014, they need to resign the stewardship to avoid further disqualification.
The current steward is John Bercow, formerly the Speaker of the House of Commons.

Key

PartyAbbreviation
All-for-Ireland LeagueAFIL
Coalition ConservativeCo Con
Coalition LiberalCo Lib
Conservative PartyCon
Home Rule LeagueHRL
IndependentInd

PartyAbbreviation
Irish National FederationINF
Irish Parliamentary PartyIPP
Unspecified Irish Nationalist partyNat
Labour Party Lab
Liberal Party Lib
Liberal NationalsL Nat

PartyAbbreviation
Liberal Unionist PartyLU
National LabourN Lab
Plaid CymruPC
Sinn FéinSF
Democratic Unionist PartyDUP
Ulster Unionist PartyUU
WhigWhig

Up to 1899

1900 to 1949

1950 to 1999

2000 to present

Office still in use