The History of England - a Study in Political Evolution

by A. F. Pollard

The ablest, least scrupulous, and most popular of the Stuarts, he began his reign with two objects: the emancipation of the crown from control as far as possible, and the emancipation of the Roman Catholics from their position of political inferiority; but the pursuit of both objects was strictly conditioned by a determination not to embark on his travels again. The two objects were really incompatible. Charles could only make himself autocratic with the support of the Anglican church, and the church was determined to tolerate no relaxation of the penal code against other Catholics. At first Charles had to submit to Clarendon and the church; but in 1667 he gladly replaced Clarendon by the Cabal administration, among the members of which the only bond of unity was that it did not contain a sound Anglican churchman. With its assistance he published his Declarations of Indulgence for Roman Catholics and Dissenters (1672), and sought to secure himself against parliamentary recalcitrance by a secret treaty with Louis XIV (1670). This policy failed against the stubborn opposition of the church. The Cabal fell; Danby, a replica of Clarendon, came into office; and the Test Act of 1673 made the position of the Roman Catholics worse than it was before the Declaration.

This failure convinced Charles that one of his two designs must go by the board. He threw over the less popular cause of his co-religionists; and henceforth devoted himself to the task of emancipating the crown from parliamentary interference. But popular suspicion had been aroused by Charles's secret dealings and James's open professions; and Titus Oates, who knew something about real plans for the reconversion of England, inflated his knowledge into a monstrous tale of a popish plot. The Whigs, as the opposition party came to be called, used it for more than it was worth to damage the Tories under Danby. The panic produced one useful measure, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, many judicial murders, and a foolish attempt to exclude James from the succession, As it subsided, Charles deftly turned the reaction to the ruin of the Whigs (1681). Of their leaders, Shaftesbury fled to Holland, and Sidney and Russell were brought to the block; their parliamentary strongholds in the cities and towns were packed with Tories; and for the last four years of his reign Charles ruled without a parliament, but with the goodwill of the Tories and the church.

This half of the nation would probably have acquiesced in the growth of despotism under James II, had not the new king ostentatiously ignored the wisdom of Charles II. He began (1685) with everything in his favour: a Tory parliament, a discredited opposition, which further weakened its case by Argyll's and Monmouth's rebellions, and a great reputation for honesty. Within a couple of years he had thrown away all these advantages by his revival of Charles II's abandoned Roman Catholic policy, and had alienated the Anglican church, by whose support alone he could hope to rule as an English despot. He suspended and dispensed with laws, introduced Roman Catholics into the army, the universities, the privy council, raised a standing force of thirty thousand men, and finally prosecuted seven bishops for seditious libel. William III, the husband of James's daughter Mary, was invited by representatives of all parties to come over as England's deliverer, and James fled on his approach. He could not fight, like his father, because no English party supported his cause.

The Revolution of 1688 was singularly negative so far as its results were expressed in the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. These celebrated constitutional documents made little provision for national self-government. One king, it is true, had been evicted from the throne, and Roman Catholics were to be always excluded; and these measures disposed of divine hereditary right. But that had been a Stuart invention, and kings had been deposed before James II. Why should self-government follow on the events of 1688 any more than on those of 1399, 1461, or 1485? Future sovereigns were, indeed, to refrain from doing much that James had done. They were not to keep a standing army in time of peace, not to pardon ministers impeached by the House of Commons, not to dismiss judges except on an address from both Houses of Parliament, not to suspend laws at all nor to dispense with them in the way James had done, not to keep a parliament nor do without one longer than three years, and not to require excessive bail. Religious toleration, too, was secured in some measure, and freedom of the press to a limited extent. But all these enactments were safeguards against the abuse of royal power and infringement of civil liberty rather than provisions for self-government. No law was passed requiring the king to be guided by ministers enjoying the confidence of parliament; he was still the real and irresponsible executive, and parliament was limited to legislation. The favourite Whig toast of "civil and religious liberty" implied an Englishman's right to freedom from molestation, but not a right to a voice in the government of the country. Responsible self-government was not guaranteed by the laws, but it was ensured by the facts, of the Revolution.

The truth is, that the methods of English constitutional progress have been, down to this day, offensive strategy and defensive tactics. Positions have been taken up which necessitate the retirement of the forces of reaction, unless they are prepared to make attacks predestined to defeat; and so, nearly every Liberal advance has been made to appear the result of Tory aggression. The central position has always been control of the purse by parliament. At first it only embraced certain forms of direct taxation; gradually it was extended and developed by careful spade-work until it covered every source of revenue. Entrenched behind these formidable earthworks, parliament proceeded to dictate to the early Stuarts the terms of national policy. Charles I, provoked by its assumptions, made his attack on the central position, was foiled, and in his retreat left large portions of the crown's equipment in the hands of parliament. Rasher attacks by James II resulted in a still more precipitate retreat and in the abandonment of more of the royal prerogatives. The growth of the empire and of the expenses of government riveted more firmly than ever the hold of parliament over the crown; the greater the demands which it alone could meet, the higher the conditions it could impose upon their grant, until parliament determined absolutely the terms upon which the office of monarchy should be held. In a similar way the Commons used their control of the national purse to restrict the powers of the House of Lords; provocation has led to attacks on the central position, and the failure of these attacks has been followed by surrender. Prudent leaders have preferred to retire without courting the preliminary of defeat.

William III and his successors adopted this course when confronted with the impregnable position of parliament after the Revolution; and hence later constitutional gains, while no apparent part of the parliamentary position, were its inevitable consequences. William, absorbed in a life-and-death struggle with Louis XIV, required a constant stream of supplies from parliament; and to secure its regularity he had to rely on the good offices and advice of those who commanded most votes in the House of Commons. In the Lords, who then numbered less than two hundred, he could secure the balance of power through the appointment of bishops. In the Commons his situation was more difficult. The partial demise of personal monarchy in 1688 led to a scramble for its effects, and the scramble to the organization of the two principal competitors, the Whig and Tory parties. The Whigs formed a "junto," or caucus, and the Tories followed their example. William preferred the Whigs, because they sympathized with his wars; but the country sometimes preferred the Tories, because it hated William's Dutchmen and taxation. On William's death in 1702 the danger from Louis XIV was considered so acute that a ministry was formed from all parties in order to secure the united support of parliament; but gradually, in Anne's reign, the Tories who wanted to make peace left the ministry, until in 1708 it became purely Whig. In 1710 it fell, and the Tories took its place. They wanted a Stuart restoration, even at the price of undoing the Revolution, if only the Pretender would abandon his popery; while the Whigs were determined to maintain the Revolution even at the price of a Hanoverian dynasty. They returned to power in 1714 with the accession of George I, and monopolized office for more than half a century. As time went on, many Whigs became hardly distinguishable from Tories who had relinquished Jacobitism; and from Lord North's accession to office in 1770 down to 1830 the Tories enjoyed in their turn a half- century of nearly unbroken power.

During this period the party system and cabinet government were elaborated. Party supplanted the crown as the determining factor in British government, and the cabinet became the executive committee of the party possessing a majority in the House of Commons. Queen Anne had not the intellect nor vigour to assert her independence of ministers, and George I, who understood no English, ceased to attend cabinet meetings. The royal veto disappeared, and even the king's choice of ministers was severely limited, not by law but by practical necessities. Ministers, instead of giving individual advice which the sovereign might reject, met together without the king and tendered collective advice, the rejection of which by the sovereign meant their resignation, and if parliament agreed with them, its dissolution or surrender on the part of the crown. For the purpose of tendering this advice and maintaining order in the cabinet, a chief was needed; Walpole, by eliminating all competitors during his long administration (1721-1742), developed the office of prime minister, which, without any law to establish it, became one of the most important of British institutions. Similarly the cabinet itself grew and was not created by any Act; indeed, while the cabinet and the prime minister were growing, it would have been impossible to induce any parliament to create them, for parliament was still jealous of royal influence, and even wanted to exclude from its ranks all servants of the crown. But, fortunately, the absence of a written constitution enabled the British constitution to grow and adapt itself to circumstances without legal enactment.

The circumstance that the cabinet was the executive committee of the majority in the House of Commons gave it the command of the Lower House, and by means of the Commons' financial powers, of the crown. This party system was deplored by many; Bolingbroke, a Tory leader out of office, called for a national party, and urged the crown to emancipate itself from Whig domination by choosing ministers from all sections. Chatham thought that in the interests of national efficiency, the ablest ministers should be selected, whatever their political predilections. George III adapted these ideas to the purpose of making himself a king in deed. But his success in breaking down the party and cabinet system was partial and temporary; he only succeeded in humbling the Whig houses by giving himself a master in the person of the younger Pitt (1784), who was supported by the majority of the nation.

With the House of Lords the cabinet has had more prolonged and complicated troubles. Ostensibly and constitutionally the disputes have been between the two Houses of Parliament; and this was really the case before the development of the close connexion between the cabinet and the Commons. Both Houses had profited by the overthrow of the crown in the seventeenth century, and the extremes to which they sometimes pushed their claims suggest that they were as anxious as the crown had been to place themselves above the law. The House of Lords did succeed in making its judicial decisions law in spite of the crown and Commons, although the Commons were part of the "High Court of Parliament," and no law had granted the Lords supreme appellate jurisdiction; hence the constitutional position of the House of Lords was made by its own decisions and not by Act of Parliament or of the crown. This claim to appellate jurisdiction, which was much disputed by the Commons during the reign of Charles II, was only conceded in return for a similar concession to the Commons in financial matters. Here the Commons practically made their resolutions law, though the Lords insisted that the privilege should not be abused by "tacking" extraneous provisions on to financial measures.

There were some further disputes in the reigns of William III and Anne, but the only occasion upon which peers were actually made in order to carry a measure, was when the Tories created a dozen to pass the Peace of Utrecht in 1712. It is, indeed, a singular fact that no serious conflict between the two Houses occurred during the whole of the Georgian period from 1714 to 1830. The explanation seems to be that both Houses were simply the political agents of the same organized aristocracy. The humble townsfolk who figured in the parliaments of Edward I (see p. 65) disappeared when a seat in the House of Commons became a position of power and privilege; and to the first parliament (1547) for which journals of the Commons proved worth preserving, the eldest son of a peer thought it worth while seeking election. Many successors followed; towns were bribed or constrained to choose the nominees of peers and country magnates; burgage tenements were bought up by noble families to secure votes; and the Restoration parliament had material reasons for treating Cromwell's reforms as void, and restoring rotten boroughs and fancy franchises. By the time that parliament had emancipated itself from the control of the crown, it had also emancipated itself to a considerable extent from the control of the constituencies.