sion of the house of Hanover, all matters cognizable in the privy council "shall be transacted there, and all resolutions taken thereupon shall be signed by such of the privy council as shall advise and consent to the same," - a provision happily repealed years before it could come into operation.1 Upon the heels of that final attempt to check by positive law the growth of the new ministerial system an event occurred which clearly indicates the fact that the idea that offending ministers could be sufficiently punished for purely political offences by merely depriving them of office had not then sufficiently advanced to render obsolete the ancient procedure by impeachment, under which angry parliaments had so recently consigned Clarendon to exile and Danby to a long imprisonment in the Tower. In 1701, a Tory house of commons impeached of high treason Bentick, Russell, Montague, and Somers, the great Whig leaders, who were then peers, for their share in the making of the punish ministers. then recent Partition Treaties, and for other alleged offences. This "disgraceful instance of party spirit "3 failed, however, of its purpose, as a quarrel between the two houses culminated in a refusal upon the part of the commons to appear with their evidence upon the day appointed, and in the consequent acquittal of the respondents. impeachment still used as a weapon to Death of March 8, 1702; In the midst of this uproar of contending parties, William, whose personal idea from beginning to end had been to combine under his own leadership as the thinking head of the state "abilities in the public service without identity of aim, unison of expression, or the pretense of mutual trust," ended his great career on the 8th of March, 1702, after having commended Marlborough to Anne as the man most fit to command her armies and to guide her counsels. The new chief, who in a few years grew so great as to become "himself the Govthe Govern- ernment,' ,"5 did not venture at the outset to do more than so formed at reorganize the ministry as to give a decided preponderance to the Tories, with a respectable recognition of the Whigs,—an ministries; arrangement that continued down to 1705, when his great Marlborough becomes "himself ment;" first coalition 1 See above, p. 423. So 2 State Trials, vol. xiv. p. 233. 8 Hallam, Const. Hist., vol. iii. p. 147. 4 Torrens, Hist. of Cabinets, vol. i. p. 35. Ibid., p. 44, quoting from a letter of the duke of Wellington to Lord Mahon. under Sun triumph at Blenheim enabled him through a dissolution and new elections to obtain a majority in favor of the continuance of the war. Under these conditions, with the extreme Tories and Jacobites threatening him with ruin, Marlborough formed a coalition ministry of moderate Tories and such Whigs as sustained his foreign policy, and that system of political balance continued until the duke was forced in the following year to drive most of the moderate Tories from office, and to set up a party administration upon a purely Whig basis, under the lead first Whig of Sunderland as secretary of state. When Anne, who hated ministry party government in every form as an enslavement of the derland; crown, whose personal influence she attempted to uphold by presiding to the last at every weekly meeting of the cabinet council,1 and by exercising for the last time the veto power,2was thus forced to bow to the Whigs, whom she regarded as cise of the but little better than republicans, she declared in her letters to Godolphin, when the entry of Sunderland into the ministry had become inevitable, that "the appointment would be equiv- Anne's outalent to throwing herself entirely into the hands of a party; party gov that it was the object of her life to retain the faculty of appointing to her service honorable and useful men on either side; that if she placed the direction of affairs exclusively in the hands either of Whigs or Tories, she would be entirely their slave, the quiet of her life would be at an end, and her sovereignty would be no more than a name." 3 last exer veto power; cry against ernment. The ministry to which Anne thus committed the direction Union of of affairs with this prophetic warning consummated the most England important domestic transaction by which her reign is distin- Scotland; guished. William's last act was a message to the houses advising them to complete without delay a union of the three kingdoms, a measure made specially urgent so far as Scotland was concerned by reason of an Act of Settlement passed in the parliament of that kingdom in 1703, which, by omitting the tained in name of the Princess Sophia, clearly pointed to a recognition of Settleupon the death of Anne of the claims of the Pretender. Ever 1703; since the honest attempt made by Cromwell to establish a legis 1 Campbell, Chancellors, vol. iv. p. 287. 2 In 1707, when she rejected a Scotch militia bill. In 1693 and 1694 William III. had refused to assent to the Triennial Bill and the Place Bill. See 8 See Lecky, Hist. of Eng. in the threat con Scotch Act ment of lative union had come to nothing, thinking men had been difficulties trying to devise some plan that would overcome the serious arising out obstacles to such a result arising out of conflicting commercial ing inter- interests, and political and religious jealousies. And so when jealousies; the design came to be discussed, "some wished an entire union, of conflict ests and to federa upon basis first some a federal one, and these latter seemed to make the greater party." Somers brought the question to an issue by insisting legislative upon a legislative union against the Scotch proposal of a federaas opposed tive one, while Godolphin braved English prejudice by offering tive union; as a compensation free trade to Scotland. Upon that basis was completed in 1706 the scheme of union under which the two kingdoms were to be united under the name of Great Britain, completed the whole to be governed by a fusion parliament under a single crown, the right to which was to depend upon the English Act representa- of Settlement. Thus it was that forty-five Scotch members Scotland at were added to the English house of commons, and sixteen Westmin- representative peers to the English house of lords, through an scheme in 1706; tives of ster; of Union passed; incorporation which, while guaranteeing to Scotland both her law and her religion, has secured uniform systems of coinage and taxation and equal rights of trade to both nations. When in 1707 Act in 1707 the Treaty of Union was converted into an Act of Union, passed in that year by the parliaments of both kingdoms, the queen gave a prompt assent, expressing at the same time the hope and expectation to her "subjects of both nations that from henceforth they act with all possible respect and kindness to one another, that so it may appear to all the world they have hearts disposed to become one people.” Anne's noble words. Dismissal of all cluding Harley and In the year that followed the consummation of the union, Tories, in- Marlborough, hard pressed by fresh demands from the Whigs, was compelled to present a fresh cup of bitterness to the lips St. John; of Anne by demanding the dismissal from office of the whole of the moderate Tories, including Harley and St. John, -a Whig triumph crowned by the recall of Somers to office as lord president of the council. Thus matters continued until 1710, when the smouldering discontent at the prolongation of the war, from which it was supposed that the great duke was deriving disgraceful pecuniary profits, was fanned into flame 1 Torrens, Hist. of Cabinets, vol. i. p. 46, quoting Marchmont to the queen, 29th of December, 1705. "But the veteran official preferred the scheme of incorporation, as likely to bring about what he termed the mainest and greatest benefits.'"— Ibid. preached obedience grew into party his convic tion, and by two sermons preached in that year by Dr. Sacheverell, one Dr. Sacheat Derby the other at St. Paul's, in which that high church verell divine, while admitting the necessity of the Revolution, boldly passive assailed the only principles upon which it could be defended in 1710; through his advocacy of the doctrine of unconditional and unlimited passive obedience. Thus challenged, the Whig leaders unwisely resolved to impeach Sacheverell1 for a stupid per- his impeachment formance that grew into a mighty forensic struggle between the two political parties, in the course of which the advocates of a great the popular cause went so far as to assert, even in the queen's struggle, presence, that if the title to the crown was really hereditary and indefeasible, the right to wear it belonged to the Pretender beyond the sea, and not to one who derived her only claim from the popular election in which the Revolution culminated. While the lords by a small majority inflicted a light sentence resulting in upon the militant champion of non-resistance,2 he had the satisfaction of seeing the Whig ministers swept from office by in the exthe storm he had raised, and their places taken by the Tories under the lead of Harley and St. John, - bitter rivals, who put aside their personal differences for a moment in order to crush. Marlborough, and to end the war by the treaty concluded between England, France, and the Dutch at Utrecht in April, 1713. From that time onward the failing health of the queen question made the question of the succession supreme, the Whigs, to succession whose policy Harley, now Lord Oxford, strongly inclined, zeal- raised by ously advocating the rights of the house of Hanover, while St. failing John, now Lord Bolingbroke, plotted for the return of the Pretender. The popular story, discredited by some, is that on popular the 30th of July, 1714, when Anne was prostrated by a stroke story of of apoplexy, the privy council was at once assembled, and there- struggle upon the Whig dukes of Somerset and Argyle, members of supremacy; the council but not of the cabinet, suddenly appeared, though not specially summoned, and took their places at the board, at 1 State Trials, vol. xv. p. 1; Parl. Hist., vol. vi. p. 805; Coxe's Life of Marlborough, vol. iii. p. 141; Lockhart Papers, vol. ii. p. 312. 2 By a vote of 67 to 59 he was suspended from preaching for three years, and his sermons ordered to be burned by the common hangman. As a consolation the queen afterwards rewarded him with the rich living of St. An- 8 See the graphic account given by "One may be sure that none appeared masked, and that the dramatic tale of startling intrusion rests on mere misconception or on imagination.". Torrens, Hist. of Cabinets, vol. i. p. 50. pulsion of Whigs from office; of the the queen's health; the final for party the house been se kind of summing up of re sults at the whose head sat Shrewsbury, a rival of Bolingbroke, who, although the president of the council, was at heart a Whig. Then, while the Jacobites sat helpless and dispirited, Argyle and Somerset carried without opposition the proposal that the post of lord treasurer should be given to Shrewsbury by the rights of dying queen. Thus by a kind of coup d'état it is said that of Hanover the rights of the house of Hanover were secured, and the way said to have paved for the peaceful proclamation of Elector George upon cured by a the death of Anne on the 10th of August. No matter which coup d'état; version of this tragic scene is accepted, the fact is certain that at the critical moment there were bitter internal dissensions and divisions in that inner circle of the privy council which should have been capable of firm and united action. Therefore, after a careful review of all the facts, it is not difficult to accept with certain reservations the following statement, into which the last special inquirer has condensed his conclusions as to the advance actually made towards cabinet government during the period in question: "Government by cabinet was not a cunning device aforethought, or announced as a discovery on or about a particular day in the almanac. No group or body of advisers deserving that distinct appellation is recognizable in the reign of William or of Anne. Neither during the interregnum, when the transfer of the crown was pending, was there any effective combination of influential men in office capable of exercising the duties and responsibilities of executive rule."1 And yet, despite the internal disorganization thus existing in the embryonic ministerial system, we find before the close of the reign of Anne, in a discussion that took place in the house of lords in 1711, the first positive declaration that the sovereign should not be held responsible for the acts of his servants, but that, "according to the fundamental constitution of this kingdom, the ministers are accountable for all; "2 and that no prerogative of the crown may be exempt from parliamentary advice and criticism. On this occasion it was that an objection was made to the propriety of using the term "cabinet council" in an address to the throne, upon the ground that it was "a word unknown to the law;" whereupon Lord Peter end of period in question. 1 Torrens, Hist. of Cabinets, vol. i. p. 2. 2 Parl. Hist. vol. vi. p. 972; Hern, Eng. Government, p. 135. |