1676-95] Political influence of the Bank.

The Press 271

merchants, who had risked their fortunes in the Bank of England, had fought for William as energetically and more successfully than his soldiers in the field. For the moment a Whig policy was imposed on a willing nation. The Bank plumped its weight on the side of Revolution and against the Church, and the bags of Whig money-lenders outweighed the sermons of Jacobite clergymen. Addison's famous allegory pictures the Stewart rushing into the Grocers' Hall, turning money-bags into bladders and gold coin into rubbish, and sending the goddess Credit off in a fainting fit. Whether or not James II would really have repudiated the State obligations contracted after 1688, is doubtful. But the belief that he would was a wide-spread and deep-rooted superstition, which contributed immensely to the stability of the new order of things and to the supremacy of the Whig party.

Before turning to the development of party government, we may deal with the great measure which established the freedom of the Press. For both these changes had eventually international effects, far wider than are usually caused by events of such an apparently domestic character. It is impossible to view any part of the reign of William without perceiving to how great an extent public opinion criticised and influenced political action. Even James himself had showed deference to that supreme tribunal, before it passed its irrevocable sentence upon him. The criticisms of minorities in Parliament had frequently revealed cases of grave injustice, and had prevented the perpetration of scandalous political jobs and maladministration alike under Charles, James and William. But a force stronger than the voices of the Opposition in Parliament was required to extend and to secure the power of public opinion, and that force could only be found in a free Press. In the Areopagitica Milton had nobly pleaded that cause; but the great soldier of the Commonwealth had exercised the most rigorous press-censorship ever known. Under Charles and James the Licensing Acts had been renewed; and in 1676 Sunderland had expressed his desire to suppress the "damnable trade" of supplying news-letters to the coffee-houses.

During the turmoil of the Revolution shoals of pamphlets had been unchecked by licensing or censorship. The pamphlets of Burnet, Locke, Somers, Chamberlain, and Paterson most powerfully influenced and moulded religious, political, and economic opinion. Owing to a series of accidents, needless to relate and unimportant in themselves, it was eventually decided (1695) not to renew the Licensing Act. Henceforth, the number of printing presses was not limited and vexatious restrictions were removed. Ministers still reserved the right of prosecuting printers for attacks on the Government, and under Anne, both Godolphin and Bolingbroke showed that serious restrictions could be imposed on the Press through this means and by the expedient of a paper-tax. But, apart from these restrictions, the liberty of the Press-with its subtle influences of suggestion, its broad powers of criticism, abuse and exhortation,

272

Privy Council committees

[1689-1702 with all its immeasurable consequences for securing the toleration and freedom of opinion was at last acknowledged and established.

To understand the political movements of the time, it is needful to grasp the form of the executive Government, as it then existed. The King could check the Lords by a threat of creating peers, and the Commons by the use of his veto and the power of dissolution. In these cases his power was immediate. But in administration also he had a wide and direct influence apart from his Ministers. King James had, with general applause, personally directed the naval administration and written his own speeches for Parliament and Privy Council. The relations of the King and his Council are equally significant. It is certain that before the reign of William, the power of the Privy Council had passed into the hands of a number of committees, which the King directly controlled. Some of these committees were permanent or "standing," as for Ireland and for trade; others secret, as for foreign affairs and foreign and domestic intelligence; others appointed ad hoc for various special purposes, diplomatic, commercial or judicial. All these bodies were indifferently described as "cabinets," though the term was more usually applied to the foreign committee and to that for intelligence. These committees dealt with matters in detail, decided upon them, and acquainted the King with their decisions, which, if approved by the King, were presented to the Privy Council. Discussions sometimes took place at that Council; but its consent was not very much more than formality. The power and authority of the King were really supreme. He alone constituted and selected the committees, and could dismiss recalcitrant committee members or privy councillors with a stroke of his pen. Further, he alone gave authority and legality to the committees. During William's reign those Ministers, who were members of the most committees and who held the dozen most important offices of State, gradually began to form a kind of general committee. This body is sometimes termed the Cabinet, and to it William often deferred. But he could always set aside its decisions as he did those of other committees, and its authority depended wholly upon his will. This is shown by the admitted fact that the King could take a step of his own in foreign policy on the advice of a single Minister. It is also evident that he could on his own authority, as in 1690 and 1692, constitute a Coun cil or Cabinet, whose numbers varied at his pleasure, as the supreme authority in his absence. The King's position, therefore, was that he transacted business with a number of different committees, in which he formed the centre of power and union. He had the main direction of foreign affairs, and immense opportunities for influence and control in other directions. He was really his own chief Minister; but, from inexperience in domestic affairs and preoccupation in foreign, William could not attend to administrative details or gauge the shifting currents of popular opinion. It is very evident that, under such conditions,

1689-94]

The executive and the legislature

273 a system of party government, based on a united Ministry, could not easily arise. For the King was the pivot on which everything turned ; and till the end of 1692 he refused either to be the instrument of a single party, or to devolve his power upon a single man or group of men.

In his relations with Parliament, William, his Ministers, and the House of Commons, were alike dominated by a most mischievous theory, to which the great authority of Locke had recently lent renewed life. This was the theory that legislature and executive were and ought to remain separate, that the King's Ministers were the executive, the two Houses the critical body. There was no doubt a sense in which this was true, in that Parliament and the Ministry ought to some extent to be independent of each other. But it was madness to assert this theory in its full completeness just after the Revolution had placed new and great powers in the hands of the Commons. In the event of an absolute exclusion of Crown officials from the Lower House, one of two results must have followed. Either the King would have drawn his Ministers exclusively from the peers in which case administration would have been entirely in the hands of the aristocracy; or he would have trained a staff of clerks in which case administration would have been in the hands of a bureaucracy. In either case the Commons would have been a body which could check, criticise and harass, but not actively direct the Government. The strength of the popular House must therefore have been weakened and endangered.

The insight of men of William's day did not pierce into the future; it was governed by remembrance of the past. Men were oppressed with the fear of the Crown and of the undue influence exercised by Charles and James upon members of Parliament, upon corporations, and lectors. This was the real cause of the vigour of Locke's theory and the real origin of the Place-Bills, of which the earliest was brought before the Commons at Christmas, 1692. It actually provided for the entire and absolute exclusion from the Commons of all holding office under the Crown. When it was known that existing place-holders would not be disturbed till the dissolution of the existing Parliament, the Bill passed the Commons with marvellous rapidity. It was thrown out by the narrowest majorities in the Lords. After various adventures the PlaceBill was finally rejected in the Commons in 1694. Thus was averted for the time being the danger of an absolute separation between executive and legislature, while the regular session of the latter was assured by the passing of a Bill providing for Triennial Parliaments (1694).

The extraordinary conduct of Parliament was largely due to imperfect harmony not only between King, Ministers, and legislature, but between party-leaders and their followers. This the Whigs were the first to realise, in a dim, imperfect fashion, through the agency of the discredited Sunderland. That ex-Minister's career had been such as to disgrace him even in that age of loose political conscience and easy public

C. M. H. V.

18

[1692-9

virtue. But his past did not prevent him from giving, not only the Whigs, but William himself, some valuable lessons in the art of government. In 1693 Sunderland counselled William to favour the Whigs and admit them to office, first because their political theory favoured the Revolution, next because they favoured the war, and last because they were the stronger party in the Lower House. The fact that the majority of the Commons, which in 1690 was certainly Tory, was in 1693 uncertain or inclining to be Whig, marks the lack of cohesion and the presence of chaos in the parties. This indeed is the explanation of the extraordinary vicissitudes that befel the various Place and Triennial Bills. After 1692 the Tories were gradually beginning to oppose the war, and the immense power of Crown influence over parliamentary placemen was naturally thrown against them. In addition to this a small knot or junto of statesmen was gradually imparting to the Whigs an organisation and discipline, such as Shaftesbury had given to the Exclusionists. Somers, already the first among the lawyers, Montagu, destined to prove the first of the financiers, Wharton, the first of the wire-pullers, and Russell, the naval hero of the day, formed the famous Whig "Junto," soon to be the ruling force in politics. It is certain that William did not appreciate the full import of Sunderland's advice; but he gradually and almost unconsciously began to act upon it. Somers had been made a peer and Lord Keeper so early as March, 1693; the Tory Nottingham was courteously dismissed; the Whig Shrewsbury resumed the seals of Secretary. The situation then became curious; for William's chief confidence was not yet given to the Whigs, though they formed the bulk of his Ministry. He still relied in the main upon the Tory Carmarthen and upon Sunderland, who was not a Minister at all.

In 1695 Caermarthen was implicated in the scandals of the East India Company, and was obliged to resign. His withdrawal was followed in 1697 by that of Godolphin, the last of the Tory Ministers. The Ministry became exclusively Whig, just at the moment when the Peace of Ryswyk was carried to a successful conclusion amid general rejoicings. With peace the old hatred of standing armies reasserted itself, and the forces were immediately cut down to 10,000 men in the face of William's intense disapproval. It was in vain that Somers wrote the famous " Balancing Letter," to calm the national hatred of militarism. The feeling may not have been justified, yet it was at least not partisan, but genuinely national. For, though the majority of the Commons was Whig, it united with the Tories against its own leaders; and in 1699 a hostile. House forced William to dismiss his famous "Blues,” his dearly-loved regiments of Dutch Guards. In 1699 Parliament severely attacked the grants of Irish lands, made by the King to his Dutch favourites and to Lady Orkney, and in the next year actually passed a Bill for their resumption. William in despair at length summoned the Tories Rochester and Godolphin to the Ministry. They succeeded in checking the attacks

1699-1701] The Act of Settlement.

Death of James II 275

on the King, by giving a free rein to attacks upon the former Ministers; Bentinck (now Earl of Portland), Russell (now Lord Orford), Montagu (now Earl of Halifax), and Somers, were all impeached. But it was not for nothing that William had filled the Upper House with Whig Bishops and peers. The impeachments eventually failed; but their effect had been to remove from office and to discredit the intended victims.

In the midst of all the turmoil and party intrigue of 1701, the Ministry contrived to add the keystone to the arch of the Revolution by passing the Act of Settlement. This famous Act had been necessitated by the death of the Duke of Gloucester - the only surviving son of Anne. The Act supplied two important omissions in the Bill of Rights. In the first place judges were to receive fixed salaries, and to be removable only after being convicted in the law-courts or on address from both Houses of Parliament. In other words the judge, though appointed, could not be removed, by the King. A long step was thus taken towards that separation of the powers, which Locke declared essential to liberty, and which 'Montesquieu was actually to regard as the characteristic excellence of the English constitution. The other important provision of the Act pf Settlement decided that the Crown should pass on the death of Anne to the Electress Sophia and her Protestant descendants. It is often said that this provision established the elective character of the English Crown." This was not the opinion of contemporaries, nor was it that of Burke. Mary and William had been acknowledged Queen and King, because the Prince of Wales was already excluded by the resolution that no Papist could reign, and the Act of Settlement merely confirmed this principle. Expediency had rendered it needful to alter the succession, and to make the Crown elective pro hac vice, but the case was not intended to form a precedent. In this, as in every other instance, the Revolution settlement rested upon compromise rather than upon the general principles, which, however, the particular action went far towards establishing in each case.

The Act of Settlement had not been passed before the international situation began to dwarf the importance of internal events. The accession of Louis' grandson, Philip, to the whole inheritance of Spain. destroyed the balance of power and endangered the existence of Holland. England, secure on the other side of the Channel, remained unmoved, and William wrote to Heinsius that he would secretly engage her in the coming war. But he did not find it easy to attain this object. At length the pride of Louis and the Whig merchants' evident apprehension of being entirely excluded from the commerce of the New World, began to stir the pulse of the nation. This resentment was inflamed to the highest pitch by Louis' action on the death of James (September 6, 1701), in recognising his son as James III of England. In a moment, the country was wild with rage, and William, riding on the wave of popular anger, was able to include England in his "Great Alliance."