Constitutional History of England, Henry VII to George II. Volume 3 of 3

by Henry Hallam

Character and errors of William.—The demeanour of William, always cold and sometimes harsh, his foreign origin (a sort of crime in English eyes) and foreign favourites, the natural and almost laudable prejudice against one who had risen by the misfortunes of a very near relation, a desire of power not very judiciously displayed by him, conspired to keep alive this disaffection; and the opposite party, regardless of all the decencies of political lying, took care to aggravate it by the vilest calumnies against one, who, though not exempt from errors, must be accounted the greatest man of his own age. It is certain that his government was in very considerable danger for three or four years after the revolution, and even to the peace of Ryswick. The change appeared so marvellous, and contrary to the bent of men's expectation, that it could not be permanent. Hence he was surrounded by the timid and the treacherous; by those who meant to have merits to plead after a restoration, and those who meant at least to be secure. A new and revolutionary government is seldom fairly dealt with. Mankind, accustomed to forgive almost everything in favour of legitimate prescriptive power, exact an ideal faultlessness from that which claims allegiance on the score of its utility. The personal failings of its rulers, the negligences of their administration, even the inevitable privations and difficulties which the nature of human affairs or the misconduct of their predecessors create, are imputed to them with invidious minuteness. Those who deem their own merit unrewarded, become always a numerous and implacable class of adversaries; those whose schemes of public improvement have not been followed, think nothing gained by the change, and return to a restless censoriousness in which they have been accustomed to place delight. With all these it was natural that William should have to contend; but we cannot in justice impute all the unpopularity of his administration to the disaffection of one party, or the fickleness and ingratitude of another. It arose in no slight degree from errors of his own.

Jealousy of the whigs.—The king had been raised to the throne by the vigour and zeal of the whigs; but the opposite party were so nearly upon an equality in both houses that it would have been difficult to frame his government on an exclusive basis. It would also have been highly impolitic, and, with respect to some few persons, ungrateful, to put a slight upon those who had an undeniable majority in the most powerful classes. William acted, therefore, on a wise and liberal principle, in bestowing offices of trust on Lord Danby, so meritorious in the revolution, and on Lord Nottingham, whose probity was unimpeached; while he gave the whigs, as was due, a decided preponderance in his council. Many of them, however, with that indiscriminating acrimony which belongs to all factions, could not endure the elevation of men who had complied with the court too long, and seemed by their tardy opposition[162] to be rather the patriots of the church than of civil liberty. They remembered that Danby had been impeached as a corrupt and dangerous minister; that Halifax had been involved, at least by holding a confidential office at the time, in the last and worst part of Charles's reign. They saw Godolphin, who had concurred in the commitment of the bishops, and every other measure of the late king, still in the treasury; and, though they could not reproach Nottingham with any misconduct, were shocked that his conspicuous opposition to the new settlement should be rewarded with the post of secretary of state. The mismanagement of affairs in Ireland during 1689, which was very glaring, furnished specious grounds for suspicion that the king was betrayed.[163] It is probable that he was so, though not at that time by the chiefs of his ministry. This was the beginning of that dissatisfaction with the government of William, on the part of those who had the most zeal for his throne, which eventually became far more harassing than the conspiracies of his real enemies. Halifax gave way to the prejudices of the Commons, and retired from power. These prejudices were no doubt unjust, as they respected a man so sound in principle, though not uniform in conduct, and who had withstood the arbitrary maxims of Charles and James in that cabinet, of which he unfortunately continued too long a member. But his fall is a warning to English statesmen, that they will be deemed responsible to their country for measures which they countenance by remaining in office, though they may resist them in council.

Bill of indemnity.—The same honest warmth which impelled the whigs to murmur at the employment of men sullied by their compliance with the court, made them unwilling to concur in the king's desire of a total amnesty. They retained the bill of indemnity in the Commons; and excepting some by name, and many more by general clauses, gave their adversaries a pretext for alarming all those whose conduct had not been irreproachable. Clemency is indeed for the most part the wisest, as well as the most generous policy; yet it might seem dangerous to pass over with unlimited forgiveness that servile obedience to arbitrary power, especially in the judges, which, as it springs from a base motive, is best controlled by the fear of punishment. But some of the late king's instruments had fled with him, others were lost and ruined; it was better to follow the precedent set at the restoration, than to give them a chance of regaining public sympathy by a prosecution out of the regular course of law.[164] In one instance, the expulsion of Sir Robert Sawyer from the house, the majority displayed a just resentment against one of the most devoted adherents of the prerogative, so long as civil liberty alone was in danger. Sawyer had been latterly very conspicuous in defence of the church; and it was expedient to let the nation see that the days of Charles II. were not entirely forgotten.[165] Nothing was concluded as to the indemnity in this parliament; but in the next, William took the matter into his own hands by sending down an act of grace.

Bill for restoring corporations.—I scarcely venture, at this distance from the scene, to pronounce an opinion as to the clause introduced by the whigs into a bill for restoring corporations, which excluded for the space of seven years all who had acted or even concurred in surrendering charters from municipal offices of trust. This was no doubt intended to maintain their own superiority by keeping the church or tory faction out of corporations. It evidently was not calculated to assuage the prevailing animosities. But, on the other hand, the cowardly submissiveness of the others to the quo warrantos seemed at least to deserve this censure; and the measure could by no means be put on a level in point of rigour with the corporation act of Charles II. As the dissenters, unquestioned friends of the revolution, had been universally excluded by that statute, and the tories had lately been strong enough to prevent their re-admission, it was not unfair for the opposite party, or rather for the government, to provide some security against men, who, in spite of their oaths of allegiance, were not likely to have thoroughly abjured their former principles. This clause, which modern historians generally condemn as oppressive, had the strong support of Mr. Somers, then solicitor-general. It was, however, lost through the court's conjunction with the tories in the lower house, and the bill itself fell to the ground in the upper; so that those who had come into corporations by very ill means retained their power, to the great disadvantage of the revolution party; as the next elections made appear.[166]

But if the whigs behaved in these instances with too much of that passion, which, though offensive and mischievous in its excess, is yet almost inseparable from patriotism and incorrupt sentiments in so numerous an assembly as the House of Commons, they amply redeemed their glory by what cost them the new king's favour, their wise and admirable settlement of the revenue.

Settlement of the revenue.—The first parliament of Charles II. had fixed on £1,200,000 as the ordinary revenue of the Crown, sufficient in times of no peculiar exigency for the support of its dignity and for the public defence. For this they provided various resources; the hereditary excise on liquors granted in lieu of the king's feudal rights, other excise and custom duties granted for his life, the post-office, the crown lands, the tax called hearth money, or two shillings for every house, and some of smaller consequence. These in the beginning of that reign fell short of the estimate; but before its termination, by the improvement of trade and stricter management of the customs, they certainly exceeded that sum. For the revenue of James from these sources, on an average of the four years of his reign, amounted to £1,500,964; to which something more than £400,000 is to be added for the produce of duties imposed for eight years by his parliament of 1685.[167]

William appears to have entertained no doubt that this great revenue, as well as all the power and prerogative of the Crown, became vested in himself as King of England, or at least ought to be instantly settled by parliament according to the usual method.[168] There could indeed be no pretence for disputing his right to the hereditary excise, though this seems to have been questioned in debate; but the Commons soon displayed a considerable reluctance to grant the temporary revenue for the king's life. This had been done for several centuries in the first parliament of every reign. But the accounts, for which they called on this occasion, exhibited so considerable an increase of the receipts on one hand, so alarming a disposition of the expenditure on the other, that they deemed it expedient to restrain a liberality, which was not only likely to go beyond their intention, but to place them, at least in future times, too much within the power of the Crown. Its average expenses appeared to have been £1,700,000. Of this £610,000 was the charge of the late king's army, and £83,493 of the ordnance. Nearly £90,000 was set under the suspicious head of secret service, imprested to Mr. Guy, secretary of the treasury.[169] Thus it was evident that, far from sinking below the proper level, as had been the general complaint of the court in the Stuart reigns, the revenue was greatly and dangerously above it; and its excess might either be consumed in unnecessary luxury, or diverted to the worse purposes of despotism and corruption. They had indeed just declared a standing army to be illegal. But there could be no such security for the observance of this declaration as the want of means in the Crown to maintain one. Their experience of the interminable contention about supply, which had been fought with various success between the kings of England and their parliaments for some hundred years, dictated a course to which they wisely and steadily adhered, and to which, perhaps above all other changes at this revolution, the augmented authority of the House of Commons must be ascribed.

Appropriation of supplies.—They began by voting that £1,200,000 should be the annual revenue of the Crown in time of peace; and that one half of this should be appropriated to the maintenance of the king's government and royal family, or what is now called the civil list, the other to the public defence and contingent expenditure.[170] The breaking out of an eight years' war rendered it impossible to carry into effect these resolutions as to the peace establishment: but they did not lose sight of their principle, that the king's regular and domestic expenses should be determined by a fixed annual sum, distinct from the other departments of public service. They speedily improved upon their original scheme of a definite revenue, by taking a more close and constant superintendence of these departments, the navy, army, and ordnance. Estimates of the probable expenditure were regularly laid before them, and the supply granted was strictly appropriated to each particular service.

This great and fundamental principle, as it has long been justly considered, that the money voted by parliament is appropriated, and can only be applied, to certain specified heads of expenditure, was introduced, as I have before mentioned, in the reign of Charles II., and generally, though not in every instance, adopted by his parliament. The unworthy House of Commons that sat in 1685, not content with a needless augmentation of the revenue, took credit with the king for not having appropriated their supplies.[171] But from the revolution it has been the invariable usage. The lords of the treasury, by a clause annually repeated in the appropriation act of every session, are forbidden, under severe penalties, to order by their warrant any monies in the exchequer, so appropriated, from being issued for any other service, and the officers of the exchequer to obey any such warrant. This has given the House of Commons so effectual a control over the executive power, or, more truly speaking, has rendered it so much a participator in that power, that no administration can possibly subsist without its concurrence; nor can the session of parliament be intermitted for an entire year, without leaving both the naval and military force of the kingdom unprovided for. In time of war, or in circumstances that may induce war, it has not been very uncommon to deviate a little from the rule of appropriation, by a grant of considerable sums on a vote of credit, which the Crown is thus enabled to apply at its discretion during the recess of parliament; and we have had also too frequent experience, that the charges of public service have not been brought within the limits of the last year's appropriation. But the general principle has not perhaps been often transgressed without sufficient reason; and a House of Commons would be deeply responsible to the country, if through supine confidence it should abandon that high privilege which has made it the arbiter of court factions, and the regulator of foreign connections. It is to this transference of the executive government (for the phrase is hardly too strong) from the Crown to the two houses of parliament, and especially the Commons, that we owe the proud attitude which England has maintained since the revolution, so extraordinarily dissimilar, in the eyes of Europe, to her condition, under the Stuarts. The supplies meted out with niggardly caution by former parliaments to sovereigns whom they could not trust, have flowed with redundant profuseness, when they could judge of their necessity and direct their application. Doubtless the demand has always been fixed by the ministers of the Crown, and its influence has retrieved in some degree the loss of authority; but it is still true that no small portion of the executive power, according to the established laws and customs of our government, has passed into the hands of that body, which prescribes the application of the revenue, as well as investigates at its pleasure every act of the administration.[172]

Dissatisfaction of the king.—The convention parliament continued the revenue, as it already stood, until December 1690.[173] Their successors complied so far with the king's expectation as to grant the excise duties, besides those that were hereditary, for the lives of William and Mary, and that of the survivor.[174] The customs they only continued for four years. They provided extraordinary supplies for the conduct of the war on a scale of armament, and consequently of expenditure, unparalleled in the annals of England. But the hesitation, and, as the king imagined, the distrust they had shown in settling the ordinary revenue, sunk deep into his mind, and chiefly alienated him from the whigs, who were stronger and more conspicuous than their adversaries in the two sessions of 1689. If we believe Burnet, he felt so indignantly what appeared a systematic endeavour to reduce his power below the ancient standard of the monarchy, that he was inclined to abandon the government, and leave the nation to itself. He knew well, as he told the bishop, what was to be alleged for the two forms of government, a monarchy and a commonwealth, and would not determine which was preferable; but of all forms he thought the worst was that of a monarchy without the necessary powers.[175]