CHAPTER VII.

157

THE HARMONY OF THE SEVERAL POWERS IN THE STATE.

How vari

ances between

the Crown

ment are settled.

§ I. We have seen that the prerogatives of the Crown are administered through certain great officers of state; and we have ascertained the respective rights in relation to these officers of the Crown and of Parliament. The King has the undoubted and Parlia right to appoint and to retain in his service any ministers that he thinks fit. His Parliament has a right equally indisputable to advise him to dismiss the ministers thus appointed. If the King decline to accept that advice, the harmony between the Crown and the Parliament, between the Executive and the Legislature, is at an end. In such a case the King has no other course than to dismiss the Parliament whose advice he no longer finds suitable to his requirements. But even in former times the Government of the country could not be conducted for any considerable time without a Parliament; and under our present arrangements an annual session is absolutely necessary. Experience has fully shown that penal dissolutions, when the public mind is bent upon any object, only serve to exasperate the quarrel. It is therefore understood that if the constituent body support the representative body, if the new House of Commons remain of the same opinion as its predecessor, that opinion shall prevail. Ministers must yield to Parliament, and Parliament

is not to be new-modelled until it is fitted to the purposes of ministers. The opinion of the House of Commons as existing at any particular time may be disregarded, but the opinion of that House as a branch of the Constitution is conclusive.* Although provision is thus made for the final adjustment of differences between the Crown and the Parliament, such differences are in themselves a disturbance of the Constitution. The normal action of the political system is during their continuance suspended. Thus the speedy settlement of such differences is hardly less important than their satisfactory settlement. When, therefore, an appeal to the country is about to take place, both the existing Parliament should be dissolved and the new Parliament should be convened with as little delay as possible. Except by special agreement, and for the acknowledged convenience of the public service, the ministry should not, after a hostile vote, bring before Parliament any important business; and supplies should be granted not for the whole year but for six months, or some shorter period.†

All these subjects were discussed in, and are supposed to have been settled by, the great controversy of 1784 In the early part of that year, much against the wishes of the King, a Coalition Ministry was formed by Mr. Fox and Lord North. This ministry, with the King's consent, brought into the House of Commons a bill for the better government of India. During the progress of this bill the King's views respecting it underwent a change, but he had no communication with his ministers on the subject. When the bill reached the House of Lords His Majesty authorized Earl Temple, with whom he had been in consultation, to make it privately known * Lord Russell's Life of Fox, ii. 95.

+ See Sir Robert Peel's Speeches, iii. 778, 786.

that the King would regard as a personal enemy every Peer who voted for the bill. The bill was accordingly rejected, and the King immediately dismissed his ministers and formed a new administration under Mr. Pitt. The House of Commons in which the dismissed ministry commanded a large majority, condemned in no measured terms the whole transaction; repeatedly declared its want of confidence in the new ministers, and requested the King to remove them. The King replied, as we have already seen, that no charge had been made against his ministers; and intimated his belief that the sentiments of the House were not shared by the country. The House angrily protested against the dissolution which the latter remark suggested, and had previously endeavoured by postponing the supplies to secure itself against such an event. During this contest, which lasted from December to the latter part of the following March, a dispute, to which I have already referred, arose between the two Houses upon an objection taken by the Lords to an expression of opinion by the Commons respecting the exercise of a certain discretion entrusted by statute to the Treasury. Ultimately, on the 24th March, 1785, Parliament was dissolved without an Appropriation Act. At the elections the Whig party was utterly routed; and Mr. Pitt commenced, with an immense majority, his long and famous administration.

Apart from the conduct of the King to his ministers, this case raises numerous questions. Must Parliament, if it object to a ministry, assign reasons for its objection? May the House of Commons express its opinion as to the mode in which a public body should exercise its lawful discretion? May the King attempt to influence in any private way the proceedings of either House? Does the appointment of the First Minister rest with the

Crown exclusively, or is that officer elected by the leaders of the prevailing party? May Parliament be dissolved against its will during the currency of a session? May it be dissolved without an Appropriation Act? Is the result of the elections conclusive as to the continuance of the ministry? Of the first two questions I have already treated. On the third I shall presently offer some remarks. The claim to elect a Premier has long been abandoned. It was doubtless but a crude form of the principle that ministers are political officers, and not mere personal dependents of the Crown. This claim, too, was never openly made; it was a plain encroachment on the prerogative, and at that time even the boldest hesitated to express on such a subject what was uppermost in their minds. It would be needless to notice this obscure and forgotten controversy, were it not that it throws light upon much in the history of those times that would otherwise be hard to understand. In this place it is enough to point out that in the pre-reform days the Whig leaders* held to this principle as an essential, though mysterious, doctrine of the Constitution, and that it has been abandoned as noiselessly as it was maintained. The contention that Parliament could not be dissolved during a session was at least plausible. Mr. Fox alleged that the Crown had no power of dissolution during a session. It was indeed true that no Parliament of Great Britain had ever been thus dissolved. The preceding Kings of the House of Hanover had never exercised such a power. For eighty years Parliaments had died a natural death. terminated either by effluxion of time or by the demise of the Crown. The last occasion on which a premature dissolution had taken place was the dispute of the two

They had

* See on this subject Stapleton's Canning and his Times, 202; Massey's History of George III., iii. 213; Todd's Parliamentary Government, i. 218.

Houses in the reign of Queen Anne about the Aylesbury men. Even on that occasion the Royal interference only anticipated by a very brief space the natural close of the Parliament's existence. The result, therefore, of this contest, the dissolution of the Parliament even before the Appropriation Act was passed, and the triumphant majority of Mr. Pitt in the new House of Commons, established beyond a doubt the right of the King to decline the advice of the existing House of Commons, and to send back its members to their respective constituents. But although the other subjects were then more largely discussed than at any subsequent occasion, it seems somewhat too much to say that the precedent of 1784 was conclusive beyond the extent I have mentioned. It is indeed probable that if the elections had given a different result Mr. Pitt would not have retained his office. But no case of such a resignation occurred before 1835. In the autumn of the preceding year King William the Fourth summarily dismissed his ministers, and formed a new administration, of which Sir Robert Peel was the Chief. The new ministry did not meet the existing Parliament, but advised an immediate dissolution. It was not denied that in the former Parliament the ministry would have been in a considerable minority; and the dissolution must therefore be taken as if a hostile vote had actually been passed and an appeal therefrom made, according to the precedent of 1784, to the constituent bodies. But on the meeting of the new Parliament Sir Robert Peel found himself still in a minority, and after a gallant but unavailing struggle resigned. In describing these events an acute contemporary observer† notices with surprise the intensity of feeling which marked this contest. The bitterness of

* See Lord Russell's Memorials of Fox, ii. 246.

+ See Mr. Greville's Memoirs (First Series), iii. 217.