CHAPTER X
KING AND COUNCIL
I
During the weeks of the Jubilee recess the King had spent his spare moments in taking notes, and priming himself on fresh points of constitutional usage.
The Comptroller-General was greatly puzzled to see writing going on day after day in which neither he nor any of the secretaries were invited to take part. He was more puzzled still when, by means available to him, he obtained access to what the King had actually written.
After a single reading he felt it his duty to report to the Prime Minister.
"He seems to be writing a history of the Constitution," said the General. "Where he gets his facts from I don't know, but they don't seem to have come from you; quite the other side I should say."
On this note-taking, so voluminous that it resembled the writing of a history, the King was getting into his stride, and was discovering how very much better all these years he could have made his own speeches, had he only been allowed to. He had within him the gift of expression, though not the power of condensing it; he had industry, a good case, and now at last behind his back an unimpeachable authority. And so, at its next meeting he came down into Council stuffed full of facts and phrases, and quite determined that before things went any further his Ministry should hear them.
The constitutional crisis had reached a head as soon as Parliament again met. The defiant action of the Bishops had thrown the Government's program so much into arrears that a drastic quickening of the pace had become necessary; and if, in spite of scare and warning, the Bishops meant to go on doing as they had hitherto done it was evident that their constitutional powers must be limited. The Archimandrite and the Free Churchmen between them might supply the Government with a bare working majority; but that alone would not be sufficient to make legislation fruitful between then and the next general election. Unless the Government, after striking the blow, could come before the country bearing its sheaves with it, there was a very serious chance that its patriotic intention of continuing in power would be frustrated; and even a Government busily engaged in marking time to suit its own bureaucratic interests must appear to have covered the ground mapped out for it.
For this reason Cabinet ministers had been meeting and deciding on a good many things behind the King's back; and the "Spiritual Limitations Bill"—all the world has since heard of it—was the device they had adopted as most suitable to their needs. They proposed to bring it forward in a late winter session.