The Crown has been deprived in the same way of other powers once possessed or claimed under the prerogative. The Bill of Rights, for example, declared illegal the suspending or dispensing with laws, and the maintenance of a standing army in time of peace without the consent of Parliament. Some powers have, from long disuse, become obsolete and have been lost; such as the right to confer on boroughs the privilege of electing members to the House of Commons;[25:3] and the power to create life peers with votes in the House of Lords.[25:4] Other powers again, although legally unimpaired, have become obsolete in practice, and can no longer be exerted. The illustration commonly given of this is the right of the Crown to withhold its assent to a bill passed by Parliament,—popularly called, or miscalled, the veto. The right has not been exercised since the days of Queen Anne; but it may not be gone so completely beyond revival as is generally supposed. It could, of course, be used only on the advice of the ministry of the day, and under ordinary circumstances a ministry willing to withhold the royal assent to a bill would be bound to treat the passage of that bill by the House of Commons as a ground for resignation or dissolution. One can imagine, however, a case where after a bill has passed the Commons the ministry should resign, and the House of Lords should insist on passing the bill in spite of the opposition of the new cabinet. It would be rash to assert that in such a case the royal assent would not be withheld. Something of the kind very nearly occurred in 1858, when the ministry threatened to advise the Queen to withhold her assent to a private bill unless the Lords gave permission to the Board of Works to appear before the private bill committee and oppose the plans.[26:1]
Powers of the Crown exercised by Ministers.
Since the accession of the House of Hanover the new powers conferred upon the Crown by statute have probably more than made up for the loss to the prerogative of powers which have either been restricted by the same process or become obsolete by disuse. By far the greater part of the prerogative, as it existed at that time, has remained legally vested in the Crown, and can be exercised to-day; but it is no longer used in accordance with the personal wishes of the sovereign. By a gradual process his authority has come more and more under the control of his ministers, until it is now almost entirely in the hands of the cabinet, which is responsible to Parliament, and through Parliament to the nation. The cabinet is to-day the mainspring of the whole political system, and the clearest method of explaining the relations of the different branches of the government to each other is to describe in succession their relations with the cabinet.
FOOTNOTES:
[16:1] 12-13 Will. III., c. 2.
[17:1] Except, of course, that the eldest of several sisters succeeds instead of all having equal rights as co-parceners.
[18:1] "Law of the Constitution," 355.
[19:1] The statement is made with this limitation because the Crown has always had inherent authority to legislate directly for Crown colonies acquired by conquest; but if the Crown once grants a representative legislature to such a colony without reserving its own legislative authority, it surrenders that authority over the colony forever. See Jenkyns, "British Rule and Jurisdiction Beyond the Seas," 4-6, 95; Campbell vs. Hall, Cowp., 204.
[19:2] Coke's Reports, XII., 76.