Reign of Wm. III. His first Whig ministry. struct every successive minister in his duties, and with whom it is the most sacred point of honour to give true information, sincere advice, and strenuous assistance to their superior for the time being. To the experience, the ability, and the fidelity of this class of men is to be attributed the ease and safety with which the direction of affairs has been many times, within our own memory, transferred from Tories to Whigs, and from Whigs to Tories." In narrating the circumstances under which the ministers of the crown first obtained a legal right to sit in Parliament, we have somewhat anticipated the order of events, and must now revert to the history of the cabinet during the reign of William III. It was in the year 1693 that the king began to effect the important change in the status of the Cabinet Council which inaugurates a new era in the history of the English monarchy. By the advice of Sunderland, the king was induced to abandon his neutral position between the contending parties in the state, and to entrust his administration to the Whigs, who were at that time the strongest party in Parliament. Protracted negotiations were required before this arrangement could be fully carried out, and it was not until the following year that the new ministry, formed upon the basis of party, was complete. Even then, although the cabinet was mainly composed of Whigs, it was not exclusively so. The king was cautious, and still tried to share his favours between the two contending parties. Two more years elapsed before the last Tory was removed from the council-board, and a purely Whig ministry existed.* W Having at length succeeded in obtaining exclusive possession of the king's counsels, the Whigs devoted themselves to the work of instituting and maintaining Macaulay, v. 4, p. 339. 1 lb. p. * Ib. v. 4, pp. 438–467, 506. 732. discipline in their ranks, by the frequent assembling together of their friends and supporters in the House of Commons. Some of these meetings were numerous, others more select; but they formed the origin of a system of party organisation never before resorted to, but which has since been adopted and matured by every influential section in both Houses of Parlia ment." The first parliamentary ministry of King William was of brief duration. At the outset it was eminently successful in conciliating the goodwill of the House of Commons, but a general election made great changes, and it was soon apparent that the new House were not willing to co-operate with the existing administration." Montague, who filled the important offices of first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer,although not the premier, in the modern sense of the term, no such supremacy in the cabinet being yet acknowledged-became personally unpopular, and was violently assailed by his opponents in Parliament. According to our present theory of government, he should have resigned his office, and given place to the chiefs of the opposition. Out of office, the men who had become. so obnoxious to the House might have succeeded, by good statesmanship, in recovering its favour, and ere long have been summoned to resume their places. But these lessons, the fruits of the experience of five genera- His subsetions, had never been taught to the politicians of the quent ad17th century. Notions imbibed before the revolution tions. still kept possession of the public mind. Not even Somers, the foremost man of his age in civil wisdom, thought it strange that one party should be in possession of the executive administration while the other predominated in the legislature. Thus, at the beginning of 1699, there ceased to be a ministry; and years elapsed ▾ Macaulay, v. 4, p. 734. See Ib. v. 5, p. 123. ministra William III before the servants of the crown and the representatives of the people were again joined in a union as harmonious as that which had existed from the general election of 1695 to the general election of 1698. The anarchy lasted, with some short intervals of composedness, till the general election of 1705. No portion of our parliamentary history is less pleasing or more instructive. Deprived of the constitutional control afforded by the presence of ministers of the crown, in whom they were willing to confide, the painful scenes of the earlier years of this reign were re-enacted, and again the House of Commons became altogether ungovernable; abused its gigantic power with unjust and insolent caprice, browbeat king and Lords, the courts of common law and the constituent bodies, violated rights guaranteed by the Great Charter, and at length made itself so odious that the people were glad to take shelter under the protection of the throne and of the hereditary aristocracy, from the tyranny of the assembly which had been chosen by themselves.' a Such is the history, as drawn by the able pen of Macaulay, of the difficulties attending the first establishment of parliamentary government in England. With all his penetration, the king failed to perceive that the true remedy for these evils lay in the formation of an entirely new ministry possessed of the confidence of that parliamentary majority which he had found to be so unmanageable. He contented himself with making some minor changes; and with a view to conciliate the Opposition, selected his new appointments from the Tory ranks. But the device proved unsuccessful; and it soon appeared that the old practice of filling the chief offices of state with men taken from various parties, and hostile to one another, or at least unconnected with one another, was altogether unsuited to the new state of affairs; and that, since the Commons had become possessed of supreme power, the only way to prevent them from abusing that power with boundless folly and violence, was to entrust the government to a ministry which enjoyed their confidence."" Anne. In 1702 William III. closed his eventful career, and Queen was succeeded by Anne, during the greater part of whose reign conflicts, of more or less intensity, prevailed between the Whigs and the Jacobites, both in and out of Parliament. As yet no better system of government existed than that afforded by a ministry who, although they had seats in Parliament, were neither necessarily united amongst themselves, nor in harmony with the predominant political party in the legislature. Thus far the lessons of wisdom, taught by the experience of the preceding reign, had not been duly appreciated by succeeding statesmen. As a natural consequence, the queen's ministers were unable, at first, to control the legislature. But after awhile, the splendid successes of Marlborough in the Netherlands, in the campaigns of 1705 and 1706, gave strength to the government, and restored their supremacy. Thenceforward, the usual changes occurred in successive administrations, each party preponderating in turn, and then having to give place to their rivals But no events took place during this reign of material importance in the history of parliamentary government, with the exception of the formal repeal of the ill-advised provisions in the Act of Settlement in regard to the Privy Council, and the disqualification of office-holders to be elected to Parliament, which, had they ever gone into operation, would have hindered the development of cabinet governments, and have excluded the queen's ministers, in common with all other placemen, from a seat in the House of Commons. Shortly afterwards, as Macaulay, v. 5, pp. 184–187. 4 Anne, c. 8, secs. 24, 25. Complete acknow we have seen,a a new Place Bill was enacted, which expressly sanctioned their presence in Parliament, thereby affixing the seal of legislative approval to the new constitutional system, and establishing it upon a firm and unimpeachable basis. It is in this reign, in the year 1711, that we first ledgment meet with a positive declaration, in a debate in the of minis- House of Lords, that the sovereign ought not to be held responsi- personally responsible for acts of government, but that, terial bility. e ' according to the fundamental constitution of this kingdom, the ministers are accountable for all.' Furthermore, that there is no prerogative of the crown that may be exempted from parliamentary criticism and advice. But in the exercise of their acknowledged freedom of debate upon the conduct of the administration, there was some difficulty at first as to the phraseology to be employed in Parliament to designate the queen's advisers. Thus, on the occasion above mentioned, a discussion arose as to the propriety of using the term 'Cabinet Council'in an address to the queen. Through inadvertence this expression had been embodied in a formal motion; but it was afterwards objected to, as being 'a word unknown in our law.' In the course of the debate, Lord Peterborough told the House that he had heard the Privy Council defined as a body who were thought to know everything and knew nothing,' and the cabinet as those who thought nobody knew anything but themselves.' g More than half a century afterwards, in the elaborate treatises of Blackstone and De Lolme upon the British constitution, the existence of the cabinet was entirely ignored, and no writer has hitherto attempted See ante, p. 123. e Parl. Hist. v. 6, p. 972. Hearn, Eng. Govt. p. 135. See ante, v. 1, p. 264, where the first public assertion of this principle was erroneously assigned to a later date. |