“Anyway, I think that over all the Crown would be just as happy to leave the premiership where it is. Much as I like and respect your cousin, honesty compels me to point out that she does have a vested interest in maintaining an hereditary aristocratic system. And I suppose that while I’m in honest mode, I should probably point out that you and I do, too. Now, at least.

“But for generations, the Crown has wanted to see a better balance between the powers of the Commons and the Lords, and the best way to accomplish that would be to give the Commons control of the purse as a counterweight to leaving the premiership permanently lodged in the Lords. Except that the Crown has never been able to assemble the required majority in the Lords to amend the Constitution to transfer that power to the lower house.”

“Of course not,” Henke snorted with the rich contempt for aristocratic defense of privilege possible only for one born to that same aristocracy. “What? You really think that anyone who has as good a thing going for them as the peers do is going to vote to give half of her power to someone else?”

“Actually,” Honor said seriously, “that’s exactly what High Ridge is afraid of, and a lot of the Independents agree with him.”

“That’s what Mom said,” Henke said in an exasperated voice, “but I just can’t see it happening, somehow.”

“High Ridge can. And so can Elizabeth and Willie Alexander. It’s all a matter of numbers, Mike, and the San Martino peers could very well shift the balance in the Lords to a point that makes it possible for the Queen to pull it off at last. But the joker in the deck is the combination of the Constitution’s limit on the creation of new peerages and the terms of the Act of Annexation which admitted Trevor’s Star to the Star Kingdom. The Constitution limits increases in the total membership of the House of Lords to no more than ten percent between any two general elections, and the Act of Annexation specifies that none of the new peers from San Martin will be confirmed or seated until after the next general election.

“So what the Government and its supporters in the Lords are trying to do is to postpone that election as long as possible. At the moment, there’s not much question that the San Martinos are very solidly behind the Queen and the Centrists. After all, it was our Navy, under Elizabeth and the Cromarty Government, which kicked the Peeps out of the Trevor’s Star System and liberated them, and it was Cromarty and your father, as Foreign Secretary, who negotiated the actual terms of their admission to the Star Kingdom. Not only that, but San Martin had no hereditary aristocracy before its annexation, so it’s not likely that the San Martinos are going to have the same… devoted attachment to the status quo in Parliament. Gratitude to the people they see as responsible for their liberation, coupled with that lack of aristocratic tradition, means the new peers would be likely—almost certain, in fact—to support a motion by Lord Alexander, as the leader of the Centrist Party, to transfer that power of the purse to the House of Commons.