Clarendon came back with Charles II and made a

strong effort to unite all elements, but contrary events were too strong for him. Clarendon was not an intolerant man. Perhaps the chief cause of his weakness and failures with the Cavalier parliament was his unwillingness to go as far as they wished in punishing the upholders of the Cromwell régime and repairing the losses that the Cavaliers had suffered under the protectorate. He was enough of a modern to desire to have his king follow the constitution and avoid encroachment upon existing parliamentary rights, but he was not enough of a modern to see that with the age of discussion the king must learn to govern through the parliament. Pym had insisted that the king's advisers were to be responsible to parliament. This was made one of the principal planks of the Grand Remonstrance. Clarendon tried to be responsible to both the king and parliament, and both deserted him. Danby paid more attention to parliament than Clarendon, but he was still the minister of the king. When we come to Somers there is a change. The parliament had clearly made William III king. Somers actually owed responsibility to parliament as well as to the king. A generation later Walpole, the first parliamentary prime minister, started his notable career, and for almost twenty years a commoner governed England in the name of the king. It is interesting to note that Walpole denied that he was prime minister, as Clarendon had made the same denial sixty years before, but it is equally clear that Walpole was prime minister in the modern sense, and that Clarendon was not. The vital thing which had happened was that which Pym had asked for in 1640. The advisers of the king had become responsible to parliament, and this made parliament the real executive.

But how was parliament to function? There was a narrow electorate to be sure. It has been well pointed out that this electorate was largely controlled by the great families of England. In the last generation a new emphasis has been put upon economic history, and the tendency is to explain that the landed interest, the church interest, or the new commercial and moneyed interest governed England during the first half of the 18th century. But this only pushes the inquiry back one step. How were the men representing these interests able to get along with one another? In the 15th century parliament had control of the king's council, but the various groups in parliament could not agree. They had no machinery by which they could settle their differences without destroying each other. Nor was the situation much improved in the 17th century. Pym and Strafford were both educated men, one a graduate of Cambridge, the other of Oxford. They were both able men - extremely able men. It is possible at this date, when far removed from the subject of their controversy, to believe that they were both patriotic men. There were those who would have saved Strafford's life, but Essex's answer seemed convincing: "stone-dead hath no fellow." The struggle was quite clearly "thy head or my head."

Men who feared for their own heads were not very careful of the heads of others. The spirit of the parliament in the early 17th century is well summed up in the sentence: "It will be time enough to settle rules to live by when we are sure to live." 2 Before a parliament could make any considerable headway in governing a nation it was necessary to make some progress in controlling its own fears and hates. In the proceedings to impeach Danby in 1678 the Earl of Carnarvon made a remarkable speech - attributed by one of his hearers to excessive indulgence in claret - in which he admirably summed up the results of the factional strife of the 17th century:

my Lord Bacon. The Duke of Buckingham he ran down my Lord Bacon, and your lordships know what happened to the Duke of Buckingham. Sir Thomas Wentworth, afterwards Earl of Strafford, ran down the Duke of Buckingham, and you all know what became of him. Sir Harry Vane, he ran down the Earl of Strafford, and your lordships know what became of Sir Harry Vane. Chancellor Hyde, he ran down Sir Harry Vane, and your lordships know what became of the Chancellor. Sir Thomas Osborne, now Earl of Danby, ran down Chancellor Hyde; but what will become of the Earl of Danby, your lordships best can tell. But let me see that man that dare run the Earl of Danby down, and we shall soon see what will become of him.1

Danby went to the Tower, but not to the scaffold. In 1715, Oxford and Bolingbroke were impeached, and this was the last purely political impeachment. The effort to impeach Walpole in 1742 failed. As Morley puts it: "Political mistake has ceased to be a crime." 2 Thereafter men whose only offense was to run counter to a majority lost their offices but not their heads. Parliament learned to govern in the 18th century where it had completely failed in the 15th, and partially failed in the 17th, because the members of parliament were learning to organize themselves. So far as our past experience goes, the generalization of Guizot would seem to be justified: "A popular assembly can only become the habitual instrument of a strong and regular government when it is itself strongly and regularly organized and governed; and this can only be the case when it is divided into great parties, united by common interests and principles, and proceeding in a consistent and disciplined manner, under acknowledged leaders, towards determinate ends." 3

The organization of the members of parliament into regular parties, which enabled parliamentary government to function, was not an easy task. The political party is not an exception to the general rule that enduring institutions are not made in a night. Macaulay and Guizot place the beginning of English parties in the parliamentary differences that arose at the beginning of the second session of the Long Parliament in 1641.1 Ranke, however, says that they came into full being as late as the reign of William III. Hallam dates the beginnings of Whigs and Tories from 1679. Professor W. C. Abbott places their origin between 1660 and 1675, that is, as early as the ministry of Clarendon. Certainly in the time of the Tudors there was no place for the actual party. In 1549 the erratic Lord Seymour desired a change in the government, and he tried to create an organization to bring it about. He received from former Chancellor Wriothesley the answer: "For God's sake, my lord, take heed what you do; I hear abroad that you make a party." The first edition of Bacon's essays was published in 1597, and at that time Bacon could write of " faction or party" that "leagues within the state are ever pernicious to monarchies; for they raise an obligation paramount to obligation of sovereignty." 3

But the struggle of men to associate themselves for specific political purposes had been going on successfully even under the Tudors. Professor Jameson has pointed out the important part that the "Association" played in the development of political action in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. The word "Association" in the prevailing usage at that time meant a "signed agreement to pursue a given course of public action." The time was not ripe for organization for the general conduct of the government. That was the function of the king and his council. But there were specific tasks that required concerted action. The Association prepared by Burghley and Walsingham for the protection of Queen Elizabeth in 1584 was signed not only by the principal officials in London but by prominent people in all the counties. The Scottish National Covenant of 1638; the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643; the Association attributed to Shaftesbury in 1681; Sir Edward Seymour's Association in 1688 designed in part to bring William of Orange to the throne; Sir Rowland Gwyn's Association in 1696 to protect King William; the Associations in 1715 and 1745 to protect the House of Hanover; all of these were extralegal. They owed their origin to similar devices in Holland and in France, and they formed an avenue of political action without recourse to the regular monarchical administration.1

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The extra-legal "Association" formed for a definite political purpose certainly antedated the party and was still used as a political device after parties became well established. As parliament slowly found its place there was need for something more than the sporadic "Association." Professor Abbott has given an excellent description of the gradual growth of parliamentary groups and parties between the restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the parliamentary session of 1675. "It was obvious that individuals as such could have at best but a limited influence among five hundred of their fellows. Some new device to direct this new power was therefore necessary, and that, as it gradually appeared, lay in but one direction, organization." 2 Voluntary organizations of men became more and more imperative. Men were beginning to learn what Burke later so well expressed: "Where men are not acquainted with each other's principles, nor experienced in each other's talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance