Chapter IV (1)

Changes of Administration.--The Coalition Ministry.--The Establishment of the Prince of Wales.--Fox's India Bill.--The King Defeats it by the Agency of Lord Temple.--The Ministry is Dismissed, and Succeeded by Mr. Pitt's Administration.--Opposition to the New Ministry in the House of Commons.--Merits of the Contest between the Old and the New Ministry.--Power of Pitt.--Pitt's India Bill.--Bill for the Government of Canada.--The Marriage of the Prince of Wales to Mrs. Fitzherbert.--The King becomes Deranged.--Proposal of a Regency.--Opinions of Various Writers on the Course adopted.--Spread of Revolutionary Societies and Opinions.--Bills for the Repression of Sedition and Treason.--The Alien Act.--The Traitorous Correspondence Act.--Treason and Sedition Bills.--Failure of some Prosecutions under them.

The occurrences of the next year brought the question of the influence of the crown into greater prominence. Lord Rockingham's administration, unfortunately, came to a premature termination by his death at the beginning of July. With a strange arrogance, Fox claimed the right of dictating the choice of his successor to the King, making his pretensions the more unwarrantable by the character of the person whom he desired to nominate, the Duke of Portland, who, though a man of vast property and considerable borough influence, was destitute of ability of any kind, and had not even any of that official experience which in some situations may at times compensate or conceal the want of talent.[73] The King preferred Lord Shelburne, a statesman whose capacity was confessedly of a very high order, who had more than once been Secretary of State,[74] and who had been recognized as the leader of what was sometimes called the Chatham section of the Whigs, ever since the death of the great Earl. Indeed, if George III. had been guided by his own wishes and judgment alone, he would have placed him at the Treasury, in preference to Lord Rockingham, three months before. But, during the last three months, jealousies had arisen between him and Fox, his colleague in office, who charged him with concealing from him the knowledge of various circumstances, the communication of which he had a right to require. It was more certain that on one or two points connected with the negotiations with the United States there had been divisions between them, and that the majority of the cabinet had agreed with Lord Shelburne. Lord Shelburne, therefore, became Prime-minister,[75] and Fox, with some of his friends, resigned; Fox indemnifying himself by a violent philippic against "those men who were now to direct the counsels of the country," and whom he proceeded to describe as "men whom neither promises could bind nor principles of honor could secure; who would abandon fifty principles for the sake of power, and forget fifty promises when they were no longer necessary to their ends; who, he had no doubt, to secure themselves in the power which they had by the labor of others obtained, would strive to strengthen it by any means which corruption could procure."[76]

Fox at once went into what even those most disposed to cherish his memory admit to have been a factious opposition. He caballed with the very men to whom he had hitherto been most vehemently opposed for the sole object of expelling Lord Shelburne from office. And when, at the beginning of the session of 1783, the merits of the preliminary articles of peace which had been provisionally concluded with the United States came under discussion, though the peers approved of them, in the House of Commons he defeated the ministers in two separate divisions,[77] and thus rendered their retention of office impossible. He had gained this victory by uniting with Lord North and a portion of the Tory party whom, ever since his dismissal from office in 1774, he had been unwearied in denouncing, threatening Lord North himself with impeachment. And he now used it to compel the King to intrust the chief office in the government to the very man whom his Majesty had refused to employ in such an office six months before.

The transactions of the next twelve months exhibit in a striking light more than one part of the practical working of our monarchical and parliamentary constitution, not only in its correspondence with, but, what is more important to notice, in its occasional partial deviations from, strict theory. The theory has sometimes been expressed in the formula, "The King reigns, but does not govern." But, like many another terse apophthegm, it conveys an idea which requires some modification before it can be regarded as an entirely correct representation of the fact; and the King himself, especially if endowed with fair capacity and force of character, imbued with earnest convictions, and animated by a genuine zeal for the honor and welfare of his kingdom, will be likely to dwell more on the possible modifications than on the rigid theory. Even those who insist most on the letter of the theory will not deny that, if the King has not actual power, he has at least great influence; and the line between authority and influence is hard to draw. One of George the Third's earliest ministers had explained to his Majesty that the principle of the constitution was, "that the crown had an undoubted right to choose its ministers, and that it was the duty of subjects to support them, unless there were some very strong and urgent reasons to the contrary."[78] And such a doctrine was too much in harmony with the feelings of George III. himself not to be cordially accepted. For George III. was by no means inclined to be a _Roi fainéant_. No sovereign was ever penetrated with a more conscientious desire to do his duty to his people. Conscious, perhaps, that his capacity was rather solid than brilliant, he gave unremitting attention to the affairs of the nation in every department of the government; and, perhaps not very unnaturally, conceived that his doing so justified him, as far as he might be able, in putting a constraint on his ministers to carry out his views. Thus, he had notoriously induced Lord North to persevere in the late civil war in America long after that minister had seen the hopelessness of the contest; and it was, probably, only the knowledge of the strength of his feelings on that subject, and of his warm attachment to that minister, that caused the Parliament so long to withstand all the eloquence of the advocates of peace, and the still stronger arguments of circumstances. He might fairly think that he had now greater reason to adhere to his own judgment; for Fox's recommendation of the Duke of Portland in preference to Lord Shelburne was an act not only of unwarrantable presumption, but of inconceivable folly, since there was no comparison between the qualifications of the two men; and the coalition by which, six months afterward, he had, as it were, revenged himself for the rebuff, and had driven Lord Shelburne from office, was, as the King well knew, and as even Fox's own friends did not conceal from themselves, almost universally condemned out-of-doors.[79] To this combination, therefore, his Majesty tried every expedient to escape from yielding. And when Pitt's well-considered and judicious refusal of the government left him no alternative but that of submission to Fox's dictation, it would hardly have been very unnatural if his disposition and attitude toward a ministry which had thus forced itself upon him had been those attributed to him by Lord John Russell, of "an enemy constantly on the watch against it."[80] But for some time that was not the impression of the ministers themselves. In July, when they had been in office more than three months, Fox admitted that he had never behaved toward them as if he were displeased with them, and that he had no project of substituting any other administration for the present one.[81] And his temperate treatment of them was the more remarkable, because a flagrant blunder of Burke (who filled the post of Paymaster), in reinstating some clerks who had been dismissed by his predecessor for dishonesty, had manifestly weakened the ministry in the House of Commons;[82] while in another case, in which the King had clearly in no slight degree a personal right to have his opinion consulted and his wishes accepted by them as the guide for their conduct, the establishment to be arranged for the Prince of Wales, whose twenty-first birthday was approaching, Fox persuaded the Parliament to settle on the young Prince an allowance of so large an amount that some even of his own colleagues disliked it as extravagant;[83] while the King himself reasonably disapproved both of the amount and of the mode of giving it, the amount being large beyond all precedent, and the fact of its being given by Parliament rendering the Prince entirely independent of his parental control, of which his conduct had given abundant proof that he stood greatly in need.

That he presently changed his line of behavior toward them was caused by their introduction of a bill which he regarded as aimed in no small degree at his own prerogative and independence--the celebrated India Bill, by which, in the November session, Fox proposed to abrogate all the charters which different sovereigns had granted to the East India Company, to abolish all vested rights of either the Company or individuals, and to confer on a board of seven persons, to be named by Parliament, the entire administration of all the territories in any way occupied by the Company. It was at once objected to by the Opposition in the House of Commons, now led by Mr. Pitt, as a measure thoroughly unconstitutional, on the twofold ground that such an abrogation of formally granted charters, and such an extinction of vested rights, was absolutely without precedent; and also that one real, if concealed, object of the bill was to confer on the ministers who had framed and introduced it so vast an amount of patronage as would render them absolute masters of the House of Commons, and indirectly, therefore, of the King himself, who would be practically disabled from ever dismissing them. That such a revocation of ancient charters, and such an immovable establishment of an administration, were inconsistent with the principles of the constitution, was not a position taken up by Pitt in the heat of debate, but was his deliberate opinion, as may be fairly inferred from his assertion of it in a private letter[84] to his friend the Duke of Rutland. It may, however, be doubted whether the epithet "unconstitutional" could be properly applied to the bill on either ground. There is, indeed, a certain vagueness in the meaning, or at all events in the frequent use of this adjective. Sometimes it is used to imply a violation of the provisions of the Great Charter, or of its later development, the Bill of Rights; sometimes to impute some imagined departure from the principles which guided the framers of those enactments. But in neither sense does it seem applicable to this bill. To designate the infringement or revocation of a charter by such a description would be to affirm the existence of a right in the sovereign to invest a charter, from whatever motive it may originally have been granted, with such a character of inviolability or perpetuity that no Parliament should, on ever such strong grounds of public good, have the power of interfering with it. And to attribute such a power to the crown appears less consistent with the limitations affixed to the royal prerogative by the constitution, than to regard all trusts created by the crown as subject to parliamentary revision in the interests of the entire nation. On the second ground the description seems even less applicable. An arrangement of patronage is a mere matter of detail, not of principle. For the minister to propose such an arrangement as should secure for himself and his party a perpetual monopoly of power and office might be grasping and arrogant; for Parliament (and Parliament consists of the sovereign and the peers, as well as of the House of Commons) to assent to such an arrangement might be short-sighted and impolitic; but it is not clear that either the minister in proposing such an enactment, or the Parliament in adopting it, would be violating either the letter or the spirit of the constitution. Every member of the Governing Board was to be appointed by the Parliament itself; and, though unquestionably Fox would have the nomination, and though he could reckon on the support of the majority in the House of Commons for those whom he might select, still it was a strictly constitutional machinery that he was putting in motion.

A measure, however, may be very objectionable without being unconstitutional, and such a view of the India Bill the progress of the debates in the House of Commons disposed the King to take of it. In the House of Peers Lord Thurlow described the bill as one to take the crown off his head and place it on that of Mr. Fox; and, even without adopting that description to its full extent, the King might easily regard the bill as a very unscrupulous attempt to curtail his legitimate authority and influence. He became most anxious to prevent the bill from being presented to him for his royal assent. And it was presently represented to him that the knowledge of his desire would probably induce the Lords to reject it. Among the peers who had attacked the bill on its first introduction into their House was Earl Temple, whose father had taken so prominent a part in the negotiations for the formation of a new ministry in 1765, and who had himself been Lord-lieutenant of Ireland under Lord Shelburne's administration. But he had not thought it prudent to divide the House against its first reading, and felt great doubts as to his success in a division on the second, unless he could fortify his opposition by some arguments as yet untried. He had no difficulty in finding a willing and effective coadjutor. Since the retirement of Lord Bute from court, no peer had made himself so personally acceptable to the King as Lord Thurlow, who had been Lord Chancellor during the last four years of Lord North's administration, and, in consequence, as it was generally understood, of the earnest request of George III., had been allowed to retain the seals by Lord Rockingham, and afterward by Lord Shelburne. What special attraction drew the King toward him, unless it were some idea of his honesty and attachment to the King himself--on both of which points subsequent events proved his Majesty to be wholly mistaken--it is not very easy to divine; but his interest with the King at this time was notorious, and equally notorious was the deep resentment which he cherished against Fox and Lord North, of whom, as he alleged, the former had proscribed and the latter had betrayed him. To him, therefore, Lord Temple now applied for advice as to the best mode of working on the King's mind, and, with his assistance, drew up a memorial on the character of the India Bill, on its inevitable fruits if it should pass (which it described as an extinction of "more than half of the royal power, and a consequent disabling of his Majesty for the rest of his reign"), and on the most effectual plan for defeating it; for which end it was suggested that his Majesty should authorize some one to make some of the Lords "acquainted with his wishes" that the bill should be rejected.[85]

George III. eagerly adopted the suggestion, and drew up a brief note, which he intrusted to Lord Temple himself, and which stated that "his Majesty allowed Earl Temple to say that whoever voted for the India Bill was not only not his friend, but would be considered by him as his enemy. And, if these words were not strong enough, Earl Temple might whatever words he might deem stronger and more to the purpose."[86]

Lord Temple lost no time in availing himself of the permission thus granted him; and, as it was by no means his object to keep the transaction secret, his conduct was made the subject of severe comment by the Prime-minister himself the next time that the bill was mentioned in the Upper House. The Duke of Portland, indeed, professed to have learned it only from common report, and to hope that the report was unfounded, since, were it true, "he should be wanting in the duty he owed to the public as a minister if he did not take the opportunity of proposing a measure upon it to their lordships that would prove that they felt the same jealousy, the same detestation, the same desire to mark and stigmatize every attempt to violate the constitution as he did." Lord Temple, in reply, abstained from introducing any mention of the King's opinions or wishes, but avowed plainly that he had used his privilege as a peer to solicit an interview with his Majesty, and that at that interview "he had given his advice. What that advice had been he would not then say; it was lodged in the breast of his Majesty, nor would he declare the purport of it without the royal consent, or till he saw a proper occasion. But, though he would not declare affirmatively what his advice to his sovereign was, he would tell their lordships negatively what it was not. It was not friendly to the principle and objects of the bill."[87] The debate lasted till near midnight. Of the speakers, a great majority declared against the bill; and, on the division, it was rejected by a majority of nineteen.[88] This took place on the 15th of December. On the 18th, as the ministers had not resigned--not regarding a single defeat in the Upper House as a necessary cause for such a step--the King sent messengers to them to demand their resignation, and the next day it was publicly announced in the House of Commons that Pitt had accepted the office of Prime-minister.

But Fox, who had anticipated the dismissal of himself and his colleagues, was by no means inclined to acquiesce in it, or to yield without a struggle; and on the 17th one of his partisans in the House of Commons, Mr. Baker, one of the members for Hertfordshire, brought forward some resolutions on the subject of the late division in the House of Lords. He professed to rest them solely on rumors, but he urged that "it was the duty of that House to express its abhorrence even of that rumor," since by such an action as was alleged "that responsibility of ministers which was the life of the constitution would be taken away, and with it the principal check that the public had upon the crown." And he urged "the members of that House, as the guardians of the constitution, to stand forward and preserve it from ruin, to maintain that equilibrium between the three branches of the Legislature, and that independence without which the constitution could no longer exist," and with this view to resolve "that to report any opinion, or pretended opinion, of his Majesty upon any bill or other proceeding depending in either House of Parliament, with a view to influence the votes of the members, is a high crime and misdemeanor, derogatory to the honor of the crown, a breach of the fundamental privileges of Parliament, and subversive of the constitution of the country." It was opposed by Pitt, chiefly on the ground that Mr. Baker only based the necessity for such a resolution on common report, which he, fairly enough, denied to be a sufficient justification of it; and partly on the undoubted and "inalienable right of peers, either individually or collectively, to advise his Majesty, whenever they thought the situation of public affairs made such a step an essential part of their duty." But it was supported by Lord North as "necessary on constitutional principles," since the acts so generally reported and believed "affected the freedom of debate;" and by Fox, who declared that the action which was reported, if true, "struck at the great bulwark of our liberties, and went to the absolute annihilation, not of our chartered rights only, but of those radical and fundamental ones which are paramount to all charters, which were consigned to our care by the sovereign disposition of Nature, which we cannot relinquish without violating the most sacred of all obligations, to which we are entitled, not as members of society, but as individuals and as men; the right of adhering steadily and uniformly to the great and supreme laws of conscience and duty; of preferring, at all hazards and without equivocation, those general and substantial interests which members have sworn to prefer; of acquitting themselves honorably to their constituents, to their friends, to their own minds, and to that public whose trustees they were, and for whom they acted." He avowed his conviction that rumor in this instance spoke truth, and, affirming that "the responsibility of ministers is the only pledge and security the people of England possesses against the infinite abuses so natural to the exercise of royal powers," argued that, if "this great bulwark of the constitution were once removed, the people would become in every respect the slaves and property of despotism. This must be the necessary consequence of secret influence." He argued that the sole distinction between an absolute and a limited monarchy was that the sovereign in one is a despot, and may do as he pleases, but that in the other he is himself subjected to the laws, and consequently is not at liberty to advise with any one in public affairs who is not responsible for that advice, and that the constitution has clearly directed his negative to operate under the same wise restrictions. Mr. Baker's resolution was carried by a large majority; but, as we have seen, did not deter the King from dismissing the ministry.

The conduct of George III. in this transaction has been discussed by writers of both parties with such candor that the Tory historian, Lord Stanhope, while evidently desirous to defend it by implication, passes a slight censure on it in the phrase that "the course pursued by the King was most unusual, and most extreme, and most undesirable to establish as a precedent;"[89] while, on the other hand, so rigid a Whig as Lord Campbell urges in his favor "that if it be ever excusable in a King of England to cabal against his ministers, George III. may well be defended for the course he now took, for they had been forced upon him by a factious intrigue, and public opinion was decidedly in his favor."[90] But to those who regard not the excuse which previous provocation may be conceived in some degree to furnish to human infirmity, but only the strict theory and principle of the constitution on which the doctrine of the responsibility of the ministers and the consequent irresponsibility of the sovereign rests, Lord Campbell's conditional justification for the communication made through Lord Temple will hardly appear admissible. We cannot be sure how far Mr. Grenville's "Diary" is to be trusted for transactions in which he was not personally concerned, or for conversations at which he was not present; but in giving an account[91] of some of the occurrences of the spring of 1766, while Lord Rockingham was Prime-minister, we find him relating a conversation between the King and Lord Mansfield on the ministerial measure for conciliating the American Colonies by the repeal of the Stamp Act, combined, however, with an assertion of the _right_ to tax. "He (Lord Mansfield) took notice of the King's name having been bandied about in a very improper manner; to which the King assented, saying he had been very much displeased at it, as thinking it unconstitutional to have his name mentioned as a means to sway any man's opinion in any business which was before Parliament; and that all those who approached him knew that to be his sentiment. Lord Mansfield said he differed from his Majesty in that opinion, for that, though it would be unconstitutional to endeavor by his Majesty's name to carry questions in Parliament, yet where the lawful rights of the King and Parliament were to be asserted and maintained, he thought the making his Majesty's opinion in support of those rights to be known was very fit and becoming." The line here alleged to have been drawn by the great Chief-justice, between proclaiming the King's opinion in support of rights, but withholding it in the case of measures, is, perhaps, too fine to be perceptible by ordinary intellects. But however the King may have understood the judge, it is clear that the doctrine thus asserted does not justify, but condemns, such an act as the communication of the King's opinion and wishes in the case under consideration. If it "would be unconstitutional to endeavor by his Majesty's name to carry questions in Parliament," it must be at least equally so to use his name to defeat them. And the case is infinitely stronger, if the measure to be defeated be one which has been introduced by his ministers. For there can be no doubt whatever that, so long as they are his ministers, they are entitled to his full and complete support on every question; alike in their general policy and on each separate measure. When he can no longer give them that support, which the very act of conferring their offices on them promised them, his only legitimate and becoming course is to dismiss them from their offices, and to abide the judgment of Parliament and the nation on that act. Thus William IV. acted in the autumn of 1834; and thus George III. himself acted at the end of the month of which we are speaking. But to retain them in their offices, and to employ an unofficial declaration of his dissent from them to defeat their policy, is neither consistent with the straightforward conduct due from one gentleman to another, nor with the principle on which the system of administration, such as prevails in this country, is founded.

As has been already mentioned, the King at once dismissed the Coalition Ministry. Mr. Pitt accepted the conduct of affairs, and by so doing accepted the responsibility for all the acts of the King which had conduced to his appointment. Lord John Russell, who in his "Memorials and Correspondence of Fox" has related and examined the whole transaction at considerable though not superfluous length, while blaming the prudence, and in some points the propriety, of Fox's conduct, at the same time severely censures Pitt as "committing a great fault in accepting office as the price of an unworthy intrigue," and affirms that "he and his colleagues who accepted office upon the success of this intrigue placed themselves in an unconstitutional position."[92] This seems to be a charge which can hardly be borne out. In dismissing his former ministry, the King was clearly acting within his right; and, if so, Pitt was equally within his in undertaking the government. The truer doctrine would seem to be, that, in so undertaking it, he assumed the entire responsibility for the dismissal of his predecessors,[93] and left it to the people at large, by the votes of their representatives, to decide whether that dismissal were justified, and whether, as its inevitable consequence, his acceptance of office were also justified or not. The entire series of transactions, from the meeting of Parliament in November, 1783, to its dissolution in the following March, may be constitutionally regarded as an appeal by the King from the existing House of Commons to the entire nation, as represented by the constituencies; and their verdict, as is well known, ratified in the most emphatic manner all that had been done. And we may assert this without implying that, if the single act of empowering Lord Temple to influence the peers by the declaration of the King's private feeling had been submitted by itself to the electors, they would have justified that. The stirring excitement of the three months' contest between the great rivals led them to pronounce upon the transaction as a whole, and to leave unnoticed what seemed for the moment to be the minor issues--the moves, if we may borrow a metaphor from the chess-table, which opened the game; and it may be observed that, though, on the 17th of December, Pitt resisted Mr. Baker's resolution with his utmost energy, in the numerous debates which ensued he carefully avoided all allusion to Lord Temple's conduct, or to the measure which had led to the dismissal of his predecessors, farther than was necessary for the explanation of the principles of his own India Bill. It may even be surmised that, if he had been inclined to recognize Lord Temple's interference as warrantable, the breach between that peer and himself, which occurred before the end of the week, would not have taken place, since it seems nearly certain that the cause of that breach was a refusal on the part of Pitt to recommend his cousin for promotion in the peerage, a step which, at such a moment, would have had the appearance of an approval of his most recent deed,[94] but which he could hardly have refused, if it had been done with his privity. The battle, as need hardly be told, was first fought among the representatives of the people in the House of Commons; for there was only one occasion on which the opinion of the Lords was invited, when they declared in favor of Pitt by a decisive majority.[95] But in the Lower House the contest was carried on for more than two months with extraordinary activity and ability, by a series of resolutions and motions brought forward by the partisans of the coalition, and contested by the youthful minister. In one respect the war was waged on very unequal terms, Pitt, who had been but three years in Parliament, and whose official experience could as yet only be counted by months, having to contend almost single-handed against the combined experience and eloquence of Lord North, Fox, and Burke. Fortunately, however, for him, their own mismanagement soon turned the advantage to his side. They were too angry and too confident to be skilful, or even ordinarily cautious. The leaders on both sides made professions in one respect similar; they both alike denied that a desire of office influenced either their conduct or their language (a denial for which Pitt's refusal of the Treasury, a year before, gained him more credit than could be expected by Fox after his coalition with Lord North), and both alike professed to be struggling for the constitution alone, for some fundamental principle which each charged his antagonist with violating; Fox on one occasion even going so far as, in some degree, to involve the King himself in his censures, declaring not only that "the struggle was, in fact, one between Pitt himself and the constitution," but that it was also one "between liberty and the influence of the crown," and "between prerogative and the constitution;" and that "Pitt had been brought into power by means absolutely subversive of the constitution."[96] But no act of which he thus accused the minister or the King showed such a disregard of the fundamental principle of the constitution of Parliament as was exhibited by Fox himself when, in the very first debate after the Christmas recess, he called in question that most undoubted prerogative of the crown to dissolve the Parliament, and, drawing a distinction which had certainly never been heard of before, declared that, though the King had an incontestable right to dissolve the Parliament after the close of a session, "many great lawyers" doubted whether he had such a right in the middle of a session, a dissolution at such a period being "a penal" one. Professing to believe that an immediate dissolution was intended, he even threatened to propose to the House of Commons "measures to guard against a step so inimical to the true interests of the country," and made a more direct attack than ever on the King himself, by the assertion of a probability that, even if Pitt did not contemplate a dissolution, his royal master might employ "secret influence" to overrule him, and might dissolve in spite of him,[97] an imputation which Lord North, with a strange departure from his customary good-humor, condescended to endorse.[98] There could be no doubt that both the doubt and the menace were of themselves distinct attacks on the constitution; and they were, moreover, singularly impolitic and inconsistent with others of the speaker's arguments, since, if the nation at large approved of his views and conduct, a dissolution--which would have placed the decision in its hands--would have been the very thing he should most have desired. On another evening, though he admitted as a principle that the sovereign had the prerogative of choosing his ministers, he not only sought to narrow the effect of that admission by the assertion that "to exercise that prerogative in opposition to the House of Commons would be a measure as unsafe as unjustifiable,"[99] but to confine the right of deciding the title of the ministers to confidence to the existing House of Commons. He accused Pitt of "courting the affection of the people, and on this foundation wishing to support himself in opposition to the repeated resolutions of the House passed in the last three weeks." Had he confined himself to urging the necessity of the ministers and the House of Commons being in harmony, even though such a mention of the House of Commons by itself were to a certain extent an ignoring of the weight of the other branches of the Legislature, he would have only been advancing a doctrine which is practically established at the present day, since there has been certainly more than one instance in which a ministry has retired which enjoyed the confidence of both the sovereign and the House of Lords, because it was not supported by a majority in the House of Commons. But when he proceeded to make it a charge against the minister that he trusted to the good-will of the people to enable him to disregard the verdict of the House of Commons, he forgot that it was only as representing the people that the House had any right to pronounce a verdict; and that, if it were true that the judgment of the people was more favorable to the minister than that of the House of Commons, the difference which thus existed was a condemnation of the existing House, and an irresistible reason for calling on the constituencies to elect another.

Pitt, therefore, had no slight advantage in defending himself against so rash an assailant. "He did not shrink," he said, "from avowing himself the friend of the King's just prerogative," and in doing so he maintained that he had a title to be regarded as the champion of the people not less than of the crown. "Prerogative had been justly called a part of the rights of the people, and he was sure it was a part of their rights which they were never more inclined to defend, of which they were never more jealous, than at that hour."[100] And he contended that Fox's objections to a dissolution betrayed a consciousness that he had not the confidence of the nation. At last, when the contest had lasted nearly two months, Fox took the matter into his own hands, and, no longer putting his partisans in the front of the battle, on the 1st of March he himself moved for an address to the King, the most essential clause of which "submitted to his Majesty's royal consideration that the continuance of an administration which did not possess the confidence of the representatives of the people must be injurious to the public service." ... And, therefore, that "his Majesty's faithful Commons did find themselves obliged again to beseech his Majesty that he would be graciously pleased to lay the foundation of a strong and stable government by the previous removal of his present ministers." In the speech with which he introduced this address he put himself forward as especially the champion of the House of Commons. He charged the Prime-minister with an express design "to reduce the House to insignificance, to render it a mere appendage to the court, an appurtenance to the administration." He asserted the existence of a systematic "design to degrade the House, after which there was not another step necessary to complete the catastrophe of the constitution." And on this occasion he distinguished the feelings of the King from those which influenced the minister, affirming his confidence "that the King's heart had no share in the present business."[101]

Pitt, on the other hand, in reply, affirmed that he was called on by duty "to defend the rights of the other branches of the Legislature; the just and constitutional prerogative of the sovereign," upon which the Opposition was seeking to encroach, without even having shown a single reason to justify such invasion. He freely admitted that, if the House of Commons or either of the other branches of the Legislature "disapproved of an administration on proper grounds, it would not be well for that administration to retain office." But in the present instance he contended that "no ground for disapprobation had been shown." The existing administration "had, in fact, by an unaccountable obstinacy and untowardness of circumstances, been deprived of all opportunity" of showing its capacity or its intentions. "If any accusations should be made and proved against it, if any charges should be substantiated, it would, indeed be proper for the ministers to resign; and if, in such a case he were afterward to continue in office, he would suffer himself to be stigmatized as the champion of prerogative, and the unconstitutional supporter of the usurpation of the crown. But till this period arrived, he should reckon it his duty to adhere to the principles of the constitution, as delivered to us by our ancestors; to defend them against innovation and encroachment, and to maintain them with firmness." "The constitution of this country," he presently added, "is its glory; but in what a nice adjustment does its excellence consist! Equally free from the distractions of democracy and the tyranny of monarchy, its happiness is to be found in its mixture of parts. It was this mixed government which the prudence of our ancestors devised, and which it will be our wisdom to support. They experienced all the vicissitudes and distractions of a republic; they felt all the vassalage and despotism of a simple monarchy. They abandoned both; and, by blending each together, extracted a system which has been the envy and admiration of the world. This system it is the object of the present address to defeat and destroy. It is the intention of this address to arrogate a power which does not belong to the House of Commons; to place a negative on the exercise of the prerogative, and to destroy the balance of power in the government as it was settled at the Revolution."

Fox had urged that our history afforded no example of a ministry retaining office after the House of Commons had passed a resolution condemning it. Pitt, in reply, urged that our history equally failed to furnish any instance of a ministry having been called on to retire without any misconduct being alleged against them. And the result of the division showed that his arguments and his firmness were producing an impression on the House, for, though he was again defeated, the majority against him (only twelve) was far smaller than on any previous division.[102] A week later, this feeling in his favor was shown still more decidedly, when Fox, on moving for a fresh address, or, as he termed it, a representation to the King that the House had received his Majesty's reply to their address "with surprise and affliction," he could only carry it by a single vote.[103] And this division closed the struggle. Fox made no farther effort. Before the end of the month the Parliament was dissolved, and the general election which ensued sent to the House a majority to support the ministers which Pitt was fairly warranted in claiming as the full justification of the course which he had pursued.

On a review of the whole of this extraordinary transaction, or series of transactions, it is impossible to avoid regarding the issue of the struggle as an all-important element in the case, and a test almost decisive of the correctness of conduct of the rival leaders. We may leave out of the question the action of the King in his communication to Lord Temple, which, although sanctioned by the great legal authority of Lord Thurlow, we are, for reasons already given, compelled to regard as unconstitutional, but for which Mr. Pitt was only technically responsible; having, indeed, made himself so by his subsequent acceptance of office, but having had no previous suspicion of the royal intentions. Similarly, we may dismiss from our consideration the merits or demerits of Fox's India Bill, the designs which were imputed to its framers, or the consequences which, whether intended or not by them, were predicted as certain to flow from it. And we may confine ourselves to the question whether, in the great Parliamentary struggle which ensued, and which lasted for more than three months,[104] the doctrines advanced by Mr. Fox, and the conduct pursued by him, were more or less in accordance with the admitted rules and principles of the constitution.

These doctrines may be reduced to two: the first a declaration that no minister is justified in retaining office any longer than he is sustained in it by the favorable judgment of the representatives of the people. Taken by itself, this, but for one consideration, might be pronounced the superfluous assertion of a truism; superfluous, because it is obvious that a House of Commons hostile to a minister can compel his resignation by obstructing all his measures. And Pitt himself recognized this as fully as Fox, though we may hardly agree with him that the Opposition was bound to allow him time to develop his policy, and to bring forward his various measures, before it pronounced an opinion adverse to them. In 1835, when Sir R. Peel first met Parliament after his acceptance of office, consequent on the King's dismissal of Lord Melbourne's ministry, the Opposition encountered and defeated him twice in the first week of the session--on the choice of a Speaker, and on the address, though the latter had been framed with the most skilful care to avoid any necessity for objection; but no attempt was made by him to call in question the perfect right of Lord J. Russell and his followers in the House to choose their own time and field of battle. But there is one farther consideration, that the authority belonging to the judgment of the House of Commons depends on that judgment being not solely its own, but the judgment also of the constituencies which have returned it, and whose mouth-piece it is; and also that the House is not immortal, but is liable to be sent back to those constituencies, to see whether they will ratify the judgment which their representatives have expressed; whether, in other words, their judgment be the judgment of the nation also. This farther consideration was, in fact, Pitt's plea for resisting the majorities which, through January and February, so repeatedly pronounced against him. And in determining to appeal to the constituencies, as the court of ultimate resort, he was clearly within the lines of the constitution.

It follows that Fox, in protesting against a dissolution, in threatening even to take steps to prevent it, was acting in self-evident violation of all constitutional principle and precedent. He was denying one of the most universally acknowledged of the royal prerogatives. The distinction which he endeavored to draw between a dissolution at the close of a session and one in the middle of it, had manifestly no validity in law or in common-sense. The minister had a clear right to appeal from the House of Commons to the people, and one equally clear to choose his own time for making that appeal. The appeal was made, the judgment of the nation was pronounced, and its pronouncement may be, and indeed must be, accepted as a sufficient justification, in a constitutional point of view, of Pitt's conduct both in accepting and retaining office. If he retained it for three months, in opposition to the voice of the existing House of Commons, he could certainly allege that he was retaining it in accordance with the deliberate judgment of the nation.

And this is the verdict of a modern statesman, a very careful student of the theory of our Parliamentary constitution, and one whom party connection would notoriously have inclined to defend the line taken by Mr. Fox, had it been possible to do so. Indeed, he may be said to show his bias in that statesman's favor when he affirms that he would have been right in moving a resolution of censure on Pitt for "his acceptance of office," which he presently calls the result of "the success of a court intrigue,"[105] and, without a particle of evidence to justify the imputation, affirms to "have been prepared beforehand with much art and combination." But _amicus Fox, sed magis arnica veritas_; and though he thus passes censure on Pitt, where the facts on which he bases it are at least unproved, on those points as to which the facts are clear and certain he condemns Fox altogether, affirming that his "attempt to show that the crown had not the prerogative of dissolving Parliament in the middle of a session had neither law nor precedent in its support."[106] And he proceeds to lay down, with great clearness and accuracy, "the practice as well as the theory of our mixed government," which is, that "when two of the powers of the state cannot" agree, and the business of the state is stopped, the only appeal is to the people at large. Thus, when in the reign of Queen Anne the House of Lords and the House of Commons fulminated resolutions at each other, a dissolution cleared the air and restored serenity. If no case had occurred since the Revolution of a quarrel between the crown and the House of Commons, the cause is to be sought in the prudence with which every sovereign who had reigned since that event had wielded his constitutional authority. If George III. had been wanting in that prudence, it did not follow that he was debarred from the right of appealing to the people. Any other doctrine would invest the House of Commons, elected for the ordinary business of the state, with a supreme power over every branch of it. This supreme power must rest somewhere; according to our constitution it rests in the common assent of the realm, signified by the persons duly qualified to elect the members of the House of Commons; and Lord Russell, in thus expounding his ideas on this subject, was undoubtedly expressing the view that ever since the transactions of which we have been speaking has been taken of the point chiefly in dispute. Since that day there has been more than one instance of Parliament being dissolved in the middle of a session; but, though the prudence of the different ministers who advised such dissolutions may, perhaps, have been questioned--nay, though in one memorable instance it was undoubtedly a penal dissolution in the fullest sense of the word[107]--no one has ever accused the sovereign's advisers of seducing him into an unconstitutional exercise of his prerogative.

Pitt was now Prime-minister, with a degree of power in Parliament and of popularity out-of-doors that no former minister, not even his own father, had ever enjoyed. As such, by the confession of one who was certainly no friendly critic,[108] "he became the greatest master of Parliamentary government that has ever existed." His administration may be regarded as a fresh starting-point in the history of the country, as the inauguration of the principle of steady amendment, improvement, and progress, in place of the maxims which had guided all his predecessors since the Revolution, of regarding every thing as permanently settled by the arrangements made at that time, and their own duty, consequently, as binding them to keep everything in its existing condition. But, of all the ministers recorded in our annals, there is not one so greatly in advance of his time as Pitt; and from the very outset of his ministerial career he applied himself, not only to the removal or correction of admitted abuses or defects, but, in cases where the fault, being in our general system of policy, had been less conspicuous, to the establishment of new principles of action which have been the rules of all succeeding statesmen. He was not, indeed, the first raiser of the question of Parliamentary Reform, but he was the first to produce an elaborate scheme with that object, parts of which, such as the suppression of the smaller boroughs and the enfranchisement of places which had gradually become more important, have been leading features of every subsequent bill on the subject. He was the first to propose the removal of those political disabilities under which the Roman Catholics labored, which no one before him had regarded as consistent with the safety of the state, and to which he sacrificed office. He was the first to conceive the idea of developing our national industries and resources by commercial treaties with other nations, even choosing for his essay-piece a treaty with a country with which our relations for nearly five hundred years had been almost uninterruptedly hostile, and which Fox, in the heat of his opposition, objected even to consider in any other light than that of an enemy. He laid the foundation for all subsequent legislation connected with our colonies in his Bill for the Government of Canada; and he established a system for the government of our Indian dependencies on so statesman-like a principle, that all subsequent administrations concurred in upholding it, till subsequent events compelled the abolition of all the share in the government of the country previously possessed by the Company.

A great writer of the past generation,[109] who in some respects has done full justice to his genius and political virtue, has, however (partly, it can hardly be doubted, from regarding himself as a follower of his great rival, Fox), contrasted his capacity as a War-minister with that of his father, drawing a comparison on this point very disadvantageous to the son. We need not stop to examine how far the praises which he bestows on Lord Chatham's talents as a planner of military operations are deserved; but it may very fairly be contended that the disparaging views of Pitt's military policy which he has advanced are founded solely on what is in this as well as in many other instances a most delusive criterion, success. It is true, unquestionably, that in the campaigns of 1793-4-5 against the French revolutionists, while he took upon this country the entire burden of the naval war, on land he contented himself with playing a secondary part, and employing a comparatively small force (which, however, doubled that which his father had sent to Minden),[110] for the success of the military operations trusting chiefly to the far stronger Austrian and Prussian divisions, under the command of Prince Coburg and the Duke of Brunswick, to which the British regiments were but auxiliaries. It is true, also, that the result of their operations was unfortunate, and that the German generals proved wholly unable to contend with the fiery and more skilful impetuosity of Jourdan and Pichégru. But the question is not whether Pitt's confidence in the prowess of his allies was misplaced, but whether he had not abundant reason to justify him in entertaining it. And, to judge fairly on this point, we must recollect the reputation which for the last forty years the Austrian and Prussian armies had enjoyed. The result of the seven years' war had established the renown of the Prussians, and the Duke of Brunswick was understood to be a favorite pupil of the Great Frederic. The same war had shown that the Austrians were not very unequal to the Prussians; while the reputation of the French troops had fallen to the lowest ebb, the most memorable event in their annals during the same war being the rout of Rosbach, when 60,000 of them fled before Frederic and 22,000. At the breaking out of the Revolution, it might be said that De Bouille was the only French general of the slightest reputation, and since the sad journey to Varennes he had been an exile from his country. And, though again in 1803 Pitt once more trusted for success on land to Continental alliances, not only does he deserve admiration for the diplomatic talent with which he united Austria, Prussia, and Russia against France, but it can hardly be doubted that confederacy would have been triumphant, had not the incompetent vanity of Alexander ruined all its prospects by his rash disregard at Austerlitz of the experienced warnings of his own staff.[111]