“If at other times this paternal authority[110] were requisite, the authority to be exercised fœdere certo, by the nice tact of an experienced hand, how much more is it necessary when every institution is reeling, when
‘Excutimur cursu, et cœcis erramus in undis’!”
Sir Robert’s idea, then, of a constitutional sovereign was that of an unseen driver who holds the reins from within. The sailor-king of narrow mind but broad sympathies, just departed when Peel wrote, had not proved a cipher. He insisted on being for a space Lord High Admiral, despite Croker’s ungenerous retort that James II. had done the same. In 1828 he had offered wise advice to his ministers as to the unripeness of the times for a change in the form then proposed, which touched his heart. On his accession he emphatically expressed his pleasure in retaining his ministers. And, though he composed a couplet so bad that it might have been the jingle of Harley—
“A dissolution
Means revolution,”
yet throughout the brief and perplexed span of his reign he honestly tried to accord with the whole nation as opposed to cliques and sections of it that assumed the title of “the people.” The fact was that he acceded during one of those crises when the balance of power was shifting, and, his intellect being mediocre, he became bewildered. The new, the legitimate, the organised predominance of public opinion clashed with Parliament, and was played upon by ambitious ministers. William the Fourth lived in just fear and blunt defiance of that “Venetian oligarchy” which ever since 1704 had been the recurrent ideal of the place-engrossing, great revolution families. What he apprehended was foiled, principally by the personality of Sir Robert Peel, whom he summoned to his aid. Henceforward the monarchy became, as it ought long before to have become, completely, if gradually, popularised. When monarchy is popular, the invisibility of its office ceases to be an expedient. “... I think,” said Disraeli, in a speech of 1850, “it one of the great misfortunes of our time, and one most injurious to public liberty, that the power of the Crown has diminished.”
With Victoria and our present King—if we except a very transient spasm of George III., whose first essay to be a “patriot king” had been to dismiss and thwart the most popular minister that England has ever had—monarchy has for the first time during nearly two centuries proved wholly and nationally popular. Before the Stuarts, Elizabeth had ruled by the sole virtue of her popularity; she had “inflamed the national spirit,” and the checks introduced by the Revolution were only a necessity for unpopular sovereigns. The Press has now introduced a far greater check than any of these. Now that the nation is in full unison with the Crown, the King is doubly entitled to support the nation in hours of befitting emergency against the cabals or passions of a person, a clique, or a class. A modern English King is too cognisant of the popular feeling eloquent in an unbridled press ever to violate it; he could not do so with impunity. The last surrender of “independent kingship,” which Mr. Gladstone has noted, and others after him, was in 1827, when a weak sovereign renewed the “charter of administration of the day.” There is no pretext now for a King to yield or hide his just and popular privileges to serve the turn of ministers. The necessity for a “monarch of Downing Street” has disappeared.
Disraeli adverted to some of these topics at Manchester in 1872, long after the events of those times had passed, but when “the banner of republicanism” was once again unfurled.
“... Since the settlement of that constitution, now nearly two centuries ago, England has never experienced a revolution, though there is no country in which there has been so continuous and such considerable change. How is this? Because the wisdom of your forefathers placed the prize of supreme power without the sphere of human passions. Whatever the struggle of parties, whatever the strife of factions, whatever the excitement and exaltation of the public mind, there has always been something in this country round which all classes and powers could rally, representing the majesty of the law, the administration of justice, and involving at the same time the security for every man’s rights and the fountain of honour.” And then, after emphasising the non-partisanship of the Crown, the very end which Bolingbroke forecasted at the time when an unemancipated King was condemned to be a party man, he led the discussion to the conventional views of the King being not only outside politics, but outside affairs.
“... I know it will be said that, however beautiful in theory, the personal influence of the Sovereign is now absorbed in the responsibility of the minister. I think you will find there is a great fallacy in this view. The principles of the English Constitution do not contemplate the absence of personal influence on the part of the Sovereign; and if they did, the principles of human nature would prevent the fulfilment of such a theory.” He is here in complete accord with Peel. “Even,” he says, “with average ability, it is impossible not to perceive that such a Sovereign must soon attain a great mass of political information and political experience. Information and experience, ... whether they are possessed by a Sovereign or by the humblest of his subjects, are irresistible in life.... The longer the reign, the influence of that Sovereign must proportionately increase. All the illustrious statesmen who served his youth disappear. A new generation of public servants rises up. There is a critical conjuncture in affairs—a moment of perplexity and peril. Then it is that the Sovereign can appeal to a similar state of affairs that occurred perhaps thirty years before. When all are in doubt among his servants, he can quote the advice that was given by the illustrious men of his early years, and though he may maintain himself within the strictest limits of the Constitution, who can suppose, when such information and such suggestions are made by the most exalted person in the country, that they can be without effect? No; ... a minister who could venture to treat such influence with indifference would not be a Constitutional minister, but an arrogant idiot....” And in another speech of the same year, after insisting that English attachment to English institutions was no “political superstition,” but sprang from a resolve that “the principles of liberty, of order, of law, and of religion ought not to be entrusted to individual opinion, or to the caprice and passion of multitudes, but should be embodied in a form of permanence and power,” he also remarked: “... We associate with the Monarchy the ideas which it represents—the majesty of law, the administration of justice, the fountain of mercy and honour.” He might, in fitness with his other pronouncements, have added the ideas of loyalty and of leadership. Again, in 1871, a moment of republican revival, adverting to the superintendence of public business by the Sovereign, he insisted that “... there is not a dispatch received from abroad, or sent from this country abroad, which is not submitted to the Queen.... Those Cabinet Councils, ... which are necessarily the scene of anxious and important deliberations, are reported and communicated, ... and they often call from her critical remarks requiring considerable attention.... No person likely to administer the affairs of this country would treat the suggestions of Her Majesty with indifference, for at this moment there is probably no person living who has such complete control over the political conditions.... But, although there never was a Sovereign who would less arrogate any power or prerogative which the Constitution does not authorise, so I will say there never was one more wisely jealous of those which the Constitution has allotted to her, because she believes they are for the welfare of her people.”
It is by its constitutional prerogatives that, in the first place, the Crown can assert its lawful influence. They confer on him a deciding power in many spheres. Of these prerogatives Disraeli was a champion; and Mr. Gladstone upheld them in at least two interesting discussions among his “Gleanings.”