George I. could not speak English, and relied entirely on his Whig ministers. Bolingbroke fled to the Continent, but was permitted to return from exile nine years later. Oxford was impeached and sent to the Tower. The Whigs were left in triumph to rule the country for nearly fifty years—until the restiveness of George III. broke up their dominion—and for more than twenty years of that period Walpole was Prime Minister. Cabinet government—that is, government by a small body of men, agreed upon main questions of policy, and commanding the confidence of the majority of the House of Commons—was now in full swing, and in spite of the monarchist revival under George III., no King henceforth ever refused consent to a Bill passed by Parliament.

The Whigs did nothing in those first sixty years of the eighteenth century to make the House of Commons more representative of the people. They were content to repeat the old cries of the Revolution, and to oppose all proposals of change. But they governed England without oppression, and Walpole's commercial and financial measures satisfied the trading classes and kept national credit sound.

Walpole's Rule

Walpole remained in power from 1720 to 1742 by sheer corruption—there was no other way open to him. He laughed openly at all talk of honesty and purity, and his influence lowered the whole tone of public life.[[68]] But he kept in touch with the middle classes, was honest personally, and had a large amount of tact and good sense. His power in the House of Commons endured because he understood the management of parliamentary affairs, and had a genius for discerning the men whose support he could buy, and whose support was valuable.

George III. went to work in much the same way as Walpole had done, and only succeeded in breaking down the power of the Whig houses by using the same corrupt methods that Walpole had employed. The "King's friends," as they were called, acted independently of the party leaders, and in the pay of the King were the chief instrument of George III.'s will.

The Change in the House of Lords

But George III. not only turned the Whigs out of office, he altered permanently the political complexion of the House of Lords. From the time of the Revolution of 1688 to the death of George II. in 1760, the Lords were Whiggish, and the majority of English nobles held Whig principles. They were, on the whole, men of better education than the average member of the House of Commons, who was in most cases a fox-hunting squire, of the Squire Western type. The House of Lords stood in the way of the Commons when, in the Tory reaction of 1701, the Commons proposed to impeach Somers, the Whig Chancellor, a high-minded and skilful lawyer, "courteous and complaisant, humane and benevolent," for his share in the Second Partition Treaty of 1699, and this was the beginning of a bitter contest between the Tory Commons and the Whig Lords. An attempt was made by the Commons to impeach Walpole on his fall in 1742, but the Lords threw out a Bill proposing to remit the penalties to which his prosecutor might be liable, and the King made Walpole a peer. George III., by an unsparing use of his prerogative, changed the character and politics of the Upper House. His creations were country gentlemen of sufficient wealth to own "pocket" boroughs in the House of Commons, and lawyers who supported the Royal prerogative.[[69]]

From George III.'s time onward there has always been a standing and ever-increasing majority of Tory peers in the House of Lords. And while the actual number of members of the Upper House has been enlarged enormously, this majority has became enlarged out of all proportion. Liberal and Tory Prime Ministers were busy throughout the nineteenth century adding to the peerage—no less than 376 new peers were created between 1800 and 1907; but comparatively few Liberals retained their principles when they became peers, and two of the present chiefs of the Unionist Party in the House of Lords—Lords Lansdowne and Selborne—are the sons of eminent Liberals.

So it has come about that while the House of Commons has been steadily opening its doors to men of all ranks and classes, and in our time has become increasingly democratic in character, the House of Lords, confined in the main to men of wealth and social importance, has become an enormous assembly of undistinguished persons, where only a small minority are active politicians, and of this minority at least three-fourths are Conservatives.

This change in the House of Lords began, as we have seen, in the reign of George III., when the Whig ascendancy in Parliament had passed. But the Whigs did nothing during their long lease of power to bring democracy nearer, and were entirely contemptuous of popular aspirations. At the very time when the democratic idea was the theme of philosophers, and was to be seen expressed in the constitution of the revolted American colonies, and in the French Revolution, England remained under an aristocracy, governed first by Whigs, and then by Tories. It is true democracy was not without its spokesmen in England in the eighteenth century, but there was no popular movement in politics to stir the masses of the people, as the preaching of the Methodists stirred their hearts for religion. Democratic ideas were as remote from popular discussion in the eighteenth century as they had been made familiar by Lilburne for a brief season in the seventeenth century.