Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon — Volume 02

by Sir Henry Craik

Besides the King and the Duke of York and the two chief Ministers there were present Ashley, Arlington, and Coventry. The law officers were there to advise; and Downing was admitted that he might answer the objections to his scheme. Ashley began the discussion by inveighing against the proviso. The King checked this "by declaring that whatsoever had been done in the whole transaction of it had been with his privity and approbation, and the whole blame must be laid to his own charge, who, it seems, was like to suffer most by it." Whatever the tendency of the proviso, it is clear that such action made an end of all real ministerial responsibility, if the chief Ministers of the Crown were to find their authority undermined by schemes which the King might concoct with inferior officers. The appropriation of supplies might be a step towards financial control; but it was bought at a heavy cost if it was to be achieved by backstairs influence against the advice of the King's responsible advisers. Clarendon was not prepared to accept what he believed to be a breach of the Crown's constitutional prerogative; but, compared with his master, he had travelled far on the road towards constitutional monarchy. Charles's nonchalant surrender of the powers of the Crown was carried out with cynical disregard of all the principles of the constitution.

But the King did not refuse to admit the force of some of the adverse arguments. He confessed "that they had given some reasons against it which he had not thought of, and which in truth he could not answer," and he was waiting to hear it argued further. The first objection was its novelty. The new proviso would form a dangerous precedent, which would hereafter appear in every Bill. The King would not be "master of his own money, nor the Ministers of his revenue be able to assign monies to meet any casual expenses." The authority of the Treasurer and the Chancellor of the Exchequer must be vested in the Tellers of the Exchequer, who were subordinate officers. Clarendon's comment upon this is characteristic of his best vein of grave sarcasm.

"The King had in his nature so little reverence for antiquity, and did in truth so much contemn old orders, forms, and institutions, that the objections of novelty rather advanced than obstructed any proposition. He was a great lover of new inventions, and thought them the effects of wit and spirit, and fit to control the superstitious observation of the dictates of our ancestors; so that objection made little impression."

Many sore trials to his patience have lent point and acid to Clarendon's satirical picture of a master, whose cynicism made him fancy that blind pursuit of novelty sat well upon the occupant of a throne that rested chiefly upon ancient usage, and upon the glamour of reverence which that usage brought.

The overpowering temptation to the King was the chimera of a bank which, it was represented, would be created by this new proviso. It was in vain that Clarendon showed that the hope was an empty one; that heavy interest would have to be paid for advances; that good husbandry, and that alone, could restore order to the finances. Downing was an adept in specious argument. "He wrapped himself up, according to his custom, in a mist of words that nobody could see light in, but they who by often hearing the same chat thought they understood it."

To the King's credit it must be counted that he was not indifferent to the injustice involved to the bankers, who had already advanced large sums, on the credit of the King and his Minister, for which, under the new proviso, they could receive no reimbursement, and might thus be ruined. That and the other arguments impressed him. He went so far as to "wish that the matter had been better consulted," and confessed that Downing "had not answered many of the objections." But the balance of personal convenience, and the facilities which Downing lavishly promised, in the end carried the day. That vein of obstinacy, which was entwined with the love of ease in Charles, determined him to adopt an expedient, hazardous, indeed, but which promised some hope of financial fruit, and had been propounded on the King's own orders. Perhaps Clarendon himself contributed to this result by the natural, but imprudent, outbreak of indignation which moved him in the King's own presence to scold Downing in no measured terms. To do so was almost the same as to administer the scolding to the King himself; and even a temper so easy as that of Charles could hardly have taken such an outburst in good part.

"It was impossible," Clarendon told Downing, "for the King to be well served whilst fellows of his condition were admitted to speak as much as they had a mind to; and that, in the best times, such presumptions had been punished with imprisonment by the Lords of the Council without the King taking notice of it."

Clarendon himself seems to have felt that such an utterance, in the presence of the King, to one whom the King declared to have acted on his orders, was a straining of courtly etiquette which required some apology. It was uttered, he tells us, in the extremity of bodily pain; and he thought "it did not exceed the privilege and the dignity of the place he held." Clarendon certainly set himself no very strict bonds of courtliness in the freedom of his utterances to his King. On this particular occasion his plain speaking seems to have rankled.

What, then, was the real meaning of this change, so bitterly resented by Clarendon, and eventually adopted in the teeth of his advice by Parliament and King? It is absurd to suppose that any consuming desire for financial exactitude prompted the action of Downing, of Arlington, or of Coventry. No doubt they anticipated one necessary result of full Parliamentary control over finance, in the principle of appropriation. But what they really desired was to eliminate the discretion, and thereby the control over expenditure, which was exercised by the great officers of State. That also was bound to come. The rapidly increasing range of administration and of expenditure must inevitably have substituted routine rules and fixed practice for the personal intervention, and the exercise of personal authority, by those great officers of State. But Clarendon was loth to part with this personal authority; he distrusted, with good reason, the honesty and the independence of the inferior officials into whose hands the administration of finance was intended to pass, and who could easily, under the cover of routine practice, which relieved them from the intervention of their superiors, conceal a system of malversation. The change, indeed, embodied in its essentials the passing of authority from the great responsible officers to a bureaucracy. Its full results could not yet be seen. Its dangers have since then been prevented, and it is to be hoped they may not again arise. But Clarendon saw in the change the reversal of all former traditions; the diminishing of responsibility in the high officers and the substitution for them of a lower grade of petty officials, shielded by the great edifice of rules of routine in which they become experts, and, as such, are unassailable. It was a change which was bound to come. It was impossible that the vast machine of national finance could be guided by rules laid down for each case by a responsible Minister. The change was none the less a revolution, and was not more welcome to Clarendon, in that it was carried out by the scheming of an ambitious underling, working upon the facile temper of the King, who thus hoped to have an ampler supply of revenue, freed from the control of Ministers who could curb his extravagance.

The episode produced a marked increase of the estrangement between the King and the Minister who had served him so well. Clarendon's fierce denunciation of Downing's presumption rankled in Charles's memory, and those about him took care that it should not be smoothed over. "Whatever else was natural to wit sharpened with malice to suggest upon such an argument, they enforced with warmth, that they desired might be taken for zeal for his service and dignity, which was prostituted by those presumptions of the Chancellor." [Footnote: Life, iii. 24.] Clarendon soon learned the truth from the changed demeanour of the King. At first he was at a loss to explain this; but Charles soon spoke in terms that could not be mistaken, and expressed "a great resentment of it," as an unpardonable insult. "And all this," adds Clarendon, "in a choler very unnatural to him, which exceedingly troubled the Chancellor and made him more discern, though he had evidence enough of it before, that he stood upon very slippery ground." [Footnote: Life, iii. 25.] It was no part of Clarendon's character to take such a rebuke in silence or to leave it to pass gradually from the mind of the King. His conscience, he said, had not reproached him; but since his Majesty thought his behaviour so bad, "he must and did believe he had committed a great fault, for which he did humbly ask his pardon." It was impossible, he said, that any one could believe that he sought to keep the King from a clear view of his own affairs; and none knew better than his Majesty how earnestly he had striven "that his Majesty might never set his hand to anything before he fully understood it upon such references and reports as, according to the nature of the business, were to be for his full information." That innate reverence for the power of the Crown, which was Clarendon's guiding principle, could hardly have been united with sharper sarcasm upon the business methods of the King.