ABSTRACT
THE Commission's five-year term of life was due to expire in August 1839. Unless Parliament chose to renew it, the Commission would then disappear. The provisions of the 'Renewal Bill' not unnaturally monopolized the attentions of Somerset House. Such, however, was the weakness of the Whig Cabinet, such the unpopularity of the law, and so venomous the intestine feuds among the Commissioners that the Commission was renewed on a purely annual basis until 1842. Instead of being as Nicholls had once cheerfully put it 'enlightened and irremovable' 1, its dependence on politics became extreme, its existence precarious. A crowd of hostile influences burst in upon its administration. Continued only on sufferance, it provided an annual target for unremitting and unscrupulous attacks, for every trick of parliamentary obstl u.:ti~n. ... ad denunciation, its principles eternally re-argued, its provisions jeopardized.
