Of Elizabeth herself, whose great example is his perpetual praise, he has observed elsewhere that, “instead of struggling through trouble and danger to bend the constitution to any particular views of her own, she accommodated her notions, her views, and her whole character to it;” and he proceeds to say, “a free people expects this of their prince. He is made for their sakes, not they for his;” and again, “the merit of a wise governor is wisely to superintend the whole.” He expresses his ideal of an impartial and democratic King in his “Spirit of Patriotism” as of one who should “govern all by all.” He further, in many direct passages, distinctly looks forward to a transference of power from caballing cliques led by selfish ambition, to the nation at large, and he calls on the King to be a truly national ruler. He desires, under changes, descried in the dim distance, that the “sense of the Court, the sense of the Parliament, and the sense of the People should be the same;” that the King, as he expresses it, should prove the “centre of the nation,” and, as Disraeli has expressed it, should be above “class interests;” should, in a country of classes, respond to every class, and favouritise none. To this end he harped, as did Disraeli from first to last, on what he admits to be a seeming solecism—a “National Party;” and by this he means—as I could prove by countless passages—a party whose main object is national and imperial unity; one that is, moreover, comprehensive instead of being exclusive.
These ideas, in happier times and altered circumstances, passed to Disraeli. In 1859, repeating in part what he had affirmed of “Bolingbroke” in the Letter to Lord Lyndhurst, indited nearly twenty-five years earlier, he said of the Conservative party: “... In attempting, however humbly, to regulate its fortunes, I have always striven to distinguish that which was eternal from that which was but accidental in its opinions. I have always striven to assist in building it upon a broad and national basis, because I believed it to be a party peculiarly and essentially national—a party which adhered to the institutions of the country as embodying the national necessities and forming the best security for the liberty, the power, and the prosperity of England.”
In his Runnymede Letter to Peel of 1836, he calls on him to head this “national party.” In his Crystal Palace oration of 1872, he showed that the ideal of a “Conservative” party seeking to preserve, adapt, and expand traditional institutions is to be national. In this striking speech, after deprecating that, in the days of Eldon, “... instead of the principles professed by Mr. Pitt and Lord Grenville, and which those great men inherited ‘from predecessors’ not less illustrious, the Tory system had degenerated into a policy which formed an adequate basis on the principles of exclusiveness and restriction,” he urged, as he had always urged: “... The Tory party, unless it is a national party, is nothing. It is not a confederacy of nobles, it is not a democratic multitude; it is a party formed from all the numerous classes in the realm—classes alike and equal before the law, but whose different conditions and different aims give vigour and variety to our national life.”
For the essence of these ideas, the forms which have since appeared or vanished—the development of the ministerial system, the organisation of public opinion—are immaterial. Of course Bolingbroke could not foresee the routine of the far future; it was its spirit which he foresaw, and to which, through Disraeli, he contributed. In his own language about another, he “... had the wisdom to discern, not only the actual alteration which was already made, but the growing alteration which would every day increase.” And this, too, may be affirmed of Disraeli.
I think that, in the denial of Bolingbroke’s real objects, achieved by Disraeli, some misconception has arisen from the constant use towards the close of the eighteenth century of “to govern by party connections.”
George III., a student of Bolingbroke, but a narrow abuser on his first trial of his doctrine, was accused of meaning to dispense with this watchword of oligarchs. But the quarrels of his time proved that what George III. really wanted was to dispense with one party alone, to escape from the dictation of a few governing families, and to choose his own ministers. There may be—there have been—great parties based on principles of disruption and contraction rather than of union and expansion, or parties based on principles more international or continental than national and British. A “national” party does not exclude their existence and criticism, any more than it does that of another “national” party taking another outlook on “general principles.” What it ought more and more to exclude, what the monarch as the centre of union should more and more render impossible, is an anti-national group, and the remedy that Burke suggests for such an ailment is that propounded by Bolingbroke and upheld by Disraeli—the limited and constitutional prerogatives of the Crown—which should render less possible those gangs of office-mongers who, in Bolingbroke’s phrase, pay “a private court at the public expense,” and in Disraeli’s, are “public traders of easy virtue.”
These ideas, shared by Bolingbroke, by Burke, by Canning, and by Disraeli, are no tiresome theories, but lively and practical issues. We too must look ahead. How far under modern conditions, and apart from the spasms and clamours of party, can the sovereign power as a force consolidating the Empire be strengthened, and the royal prerogatives wisely displayed in the light of day? Ought a King’s personality to prove also the means of his power? Time will show.