The Rise of the Democracy Part 9

Hence the bulk of the nation, ignored by the Commonwealth Government, and alienated by Puritanism, accepted quite amiably--indeed, with enthusiasm--the restoration of the monarchy on the return of Charles II., and was unmoved by the royalist reaction against Parliamentary Government that followed on the Restoration.

The House of Commons itself, when Monk and his army had gone over to the side of Charles, voted, in the Convention Parliament of 1660, "that according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this Kingdom, the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons," and Charles II. was received in London with uproarious enthusiasm.

The army was disbanded; a royalist House of Commons restored the Church of England and ordered general acceptance of its Prayer Book. Puritanism, driven from rule, could only remain in power in the heart and conscience of its adherents.

To the old Commonwealth man it might seem, in the reaction against Puritanism, and in the popularity of the King, that all that had been striven for in the civil war had been lost, in the same way as after the death of Simon of Montfort it might have appeared that "the good cause" had perished with its great leader. In reality the House of Commons stood on stronger ground than ever, and was to show its strength when James II.

attempted to override its decisions. In the main the very forms of Parliamentary procedure were settled in the seventeenth century, to remain undisturbed till the nineteenth century. "The Parliamentary procedure of 1844 was essentially the procedure on which the House of Commons conducted its business during the Long Parliament."[63]

With Charles II. on the throne the absolutism of the Crown over Parliament pa.s.sed for ever from England. Cromwell had set up the supremacy of the army over the Commons: this, too, was gone, never to be restored.

Henceforth government was to be by King, Lords, and Commons; but sovereignty was to reside in Parliament. Not till a century later would democracy again be heard of, and its merits urged, as Lilburne had urged them under the Commonwealth.

CHAPTER V

CONSt.i.tUTIONAL GOVERNMENT--ARISTOCRACY TRIUMPHANT

GOVERNMENT BY ARISTOCRACY

For nearly two centuries--from 1660 to 1830--England was governed by an aristocracy of landowners. Charles II. kept the throne for twenty-five years, because he had wit enough to avoid an open collision with Parliament. James II. fled the country after three years--understanding no more than his father had understood that tyranny was not possible save by consent of Parliament or by military prowess. At the Restoration the royal prerogative was dead, and nothing in Charles II.'s reign tended to diminish the power of Parliament in favour of the throne. Charles was an astute monarch who did not wish to be sent on his travels again, and consequently took care not to outrage the nation by any attempt upon the liberties of Parliament. Only by the Tudor method of using Parliament as the instrument of the royal will could James II. have accomplished the const.i.tutional changes he had set his heart upon. In attempting to set up toleration for the Roman Catholic religion, and in openly appointing Roman Catholics to positions of importance, James II. set Parliament at defiance and ranged the forces of the Established Church against himself. The method was doomed to failure. "None have gone about to break Parliaments but in the end Parliaments have broken them."[64] In any case the notion of restoring political liberty to Catholics was a bold endeavour in 1685. Against the will of Parliament the project was folly. To overthrow the rights of corporations and of the Universities, and to attempt to bully the Church of England, after Elizabeth's fashion, at the very beginning of a pro-Catholic movement, was to provoke defeat.

Parliament decided that James II. had "abdicated," when, deserted by Churchill, he fled to France, and William and Mary came to the throne at the express invitation of Parliament. The Revolution completed the work of the Long Parliament by defining the limits of monarchy, and establishing const.i.tutional government. It was not--this Revolution, of 1688--the first time Parliament had sanctioned the deposing of the King of England and the appointment of his successor,[65] but it was the last. Never again since the accession of William and Mary have the relations of the Crown and Parliament been strained to breaking point; never has the supremacy of Parliament been seriously threatened by the power of the throne.

The full effects of the Revolution of 1688 were seen in the course of the next fifty years. Aristocracy, then mainly Whig, was triumphant, and under its rule, while large measures of civil and religious liberty were pa.s.sed, the condition of the ma.s.s of labouring people was generally wretched in the extreme. The rule of the aristocracy saw England become a great power among the nations of the world, and the British Navy supreme over the navies of Europe; but it saw also an industrial population, untaught and uncared for, sink deeper and deeper into savagery and misery. For a time in the eighteenth century the farmer and the peasant were prosperous, but by the close of that century the small farmer was a ruined man, and with the labourer was carried by the industrial revolution into the town. The worst times for the English labourer in town and country since the Norman Conquest were the reign of Edward VI. and the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

The development of our political inst.i.tutions into their present form; the establishment of our Party system of government by Cabinet, and of the authority of the Prime Minister; the growth of the supreme power of the Commons, not only over the throne but over the Lords also: these were the work of the aristocracy of the eighteenth century, and were attained by steps so gradual as to be almost imperceptible. No idea of democracy guided the process; yet our modern democratic system is firm-rooted upon the principles and privileges of the Const.i.tution as thus established. Social misery deepened, without check from the politicians; and the most enlightened statesmen of the Whig regime were very far from our present conceptions of the duties and possibilities of Parliament.

CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

James II. was tumbled from the throne for his vain attempt to establish toleration for Catholics and Nonconformists without consent of Parliament.

Yet the Whig aristocracy which followed, while it did nothing for Catholics, laid broad principles of civil and religious liberty for democracy to build upon.[66]

The Declaration of Right, presented by Parliament to William and Mary on their arrival in London, was turned into the Bill of Rights, and pa.s.sed into law in 1689. It stands as the last of the great charters of political liberty, and states clearly both what is not permitted to the Crown, and what privileges are allowed to the people.

Under the Bill of Rights the King was denied the power of suspending or dispensing, of levying money, or maintaining a standing army without consent of Parliament. The people were a.s.sured of the right of the subject to pet.i.tion the Crown, and of the free election of representatives in Parliament, and of full and free debate in Parliament. Any profession of the Catholic religion, or marriage with a Catholic, disqualified from inheritance to or possession of the throne.

So there was an end to the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, and four hundred non-juring clergymen--including half-a-dozen bishops--of the Church of England were deprived of their ecclesiastical appointments for refusing to accept the accomplished fact, and acknowledge William III. as the lawful King of England. By making William King, to the exclusion of the children of James II., Parliament destroyed for all future time in England the belief in the sacred character of kingship. The King was henceforth a part of the const.i.tution, and came to the throne by authority of Parliament, on conditions laid down by Parliament.

William resented the decision of Parliament not to allow the Crown a revenue for life, but to vote an annual supply; but the decision was adhered to, and has remained in force ever since. The Mutiny Act, pa.s.sed the same year, placed the army under the control of Parliament, and the annual vote for military expenses has, in like manner, remained.

The Toleration Act (1689) gave Nonconformists a legal right to worship in their own chapels, but expressly excluded Unitarians and Roman Catholics from this liberty. Life was made still harder for Roman Catholics in England by the Act of 1700, which forbade a Catholic priest, under penalty of imprisonment for life, to say ma.s.s, hear confessions, or exercise any clerical function, and denied the right of the Catholic laity to hold, buy or inherit property, or to have their children educated abroad. The objection to Roman Catholics was that their loyalty to the Pope was an allegiance to a "foreign" ruler which prevented their being good citizens at home. Against this prejudice it was useless to point to what had been done by Englishmen for their country, when all the land was Catholic, and all accepted the supremacy of the Pope. It was not till 1778 that the first Catholic Relief Bill was carried, a Bill that "shook the general prejudice against Catholics to the centre, and restored to them a thousand indescribable charities in the ordinary intercourse of social life which they had seldom experienced."

The last Roman Catholic to die for conscience' sake was Oliver Plunket, Archbishop of Armagh, who was executed at Tyburn, when Charles II. was King, in 1681. After the Revolution, Nonconformists and Catholics were no longer hanged or tortured for declining the ministrations of the Established Church, but still were penalised in many lesser ways. But the spirit of the eighteenth century made for toleration, and the Whigs were as unostentatious in their own piety as they were indifferent to the piety of others.

The killing of "witches," however, went on in Scotland and in England long after toleration had been secured for Nonconformists. As late as 1712 a woman was executed for witchcraft in England.[67]

GROWTH OF CABINET RULE

William III. began with a mixed ministry of Whigs and Tories, which included men like Danby and G.o.dolphin, who had served under James II. But the fierce wrangling that went on over the war then being waged on the Continent was decidedly inconvenient, and by 1696 the Whigs had succeeded in driving all the Tories--who were against the war--out of office. Then for the first time a united ministry was in power, and from a Cabinet of men with common political opinions the next step was to secure that the Cabinet should represent the party with a majority in the House of Commons.

Our present system of Cabinet rule, dependent on the will of the majority of the Commons, is found in full operation by the middle of the eighteenth century. The fact that William III., George I., and George II. were all foreigners necessitated the King's ministers using considerable powers. But George III. was English, and effected a revival in the personal power of the King by his determination that the choice of ministers should rest with the Crown, and not with the House of Commons. He succeeded in breaking up the long Whig ascendancy, and so accustomed became the people to the King making and unmaking ministries, that on George IV.'s accession in 1820 it was fully expected the new King would turn out the Tories and put in Whigs.

William IV. in 1835 did what no sovereign has done since--dissolved Parliament against the wish of the government.

From 1696 to 1701 the Whigs were in office. Then on the death of William and the accession of Anne, Tory ministers were included in the government, and for seven years the Cabinet was composite again. But Marlborough and G.o.dolphin found that if they were to remain in power it must be by the support of the Whigs, who had made the support of the war against France a party question; and from 1708 to 1710 the ministry was definitely Whig. By 1710 the war had ceased to be popular, and the general election of that year sent back a strong Tory majority to the House of Commons, with the result that the Tory leaders, Harley (Earl of Oxford) and Henry St. John (Bolingbroke) took office. The Tories fell on the death of Anne, because their plot to place James (generally called the Chevalier or the old Pretender), the Queen's half-brother, on the throne was defeated by the readiness of the Whig Dukes of Somerset and Argyll to proclaim George, Elector of Hanover, King of England. By the Act of Settlement, 1701, Parliament had decided that the Crown should pa.s.s from Anne to the heirs of Sophia, Electress of Hanover and daughter of James I.; and the fact that the Chevalier was a Catholic made his accession impossible according to law, and the policy of Bolingbroke highly treasonable.

George I. could not speak English, and relied entirely on his Whig ministers. Bolingbroke fled to the Continent, but was permitted to return from exile nine years later. Oxford was impeached and sent to the Tower.

The Whigs were left in triumph to rule the country for nearly fifty years--until the restiveness of George III. broke up their dominion--and for more than twenty years of that period Walpole was Prime Minister.

Cabinet government--that is, government by a small body of men, agreed upon main questions of policy, and commanding the confidence of the majority of the House of Commons--was now in full swing, and in spite of the monarchist revival under George III., no King henceforth ever refused consent to a Bill pa.s.sed by Parliament.

The Whigs did nothing in those first sixty years of the eighteenth century to make the House of Commons more representative of the people. They were content to repeat the old cries of the Revolution, and to oppose all proposals of change. But they governed England without oppression, and Walpole's commercial and financial measures satisfied the trading cla.s.ses and kept national credit sound.

WALPOLE'S RULE

Walpole remained in power from 1720 to 1742 by sheer corruption--there was no other way open to him. He laughed openly at all talk of honesty and purity, and his influence lowered the whole tone of public life.[68] But he kept in touch with the middle cla.s.ses, was honest personally, and had a large amount of tact and good sense. His power in the House of Commons endured because he understood the management of parliamentary affairs, and had a genius for discerning the men whose support he could buy, and whose support was valuable.

George III. went to work in much the same way as Walpole had done, and only succeeded in breaking down the power of the Whig houses by using the same corrupt methods that Walpole had employed. The "King's friends," as they were called, acted independently of the party leaders, and in the pay of the King were the chief instrument of George III.'s will.

THE CHANGE IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS

But George III. not only turned the Whigs out of office, he altered permanently the political complexion of the House of Lords. From the time of the Revolution of 1688 to the death of George II. in 1760, the Lords were Whiggish, and the majority of English n.o.bles held Whig principles.

They were, on the whole, men of better education than the average member of the House of Commons, who was in most cases a fox-hunting squire, of the Squire Western type. The House of Lords stood in the way of the Commons when, in the Tory reaction of 1701, the Commons proposed to impeach Somers, the Whig Chancellor, a high-minded and skilful lawyer, "courteous and complaisant, humane and benevolent," for his share in the Second Part.i.tion Treaty of 1699, and this was the beginning of a bitter contest between the Tory Commons and the Whig Lords. An attempt was made by the Commons to impeach Walpole on his fall in 1742, but the Lords threw out a Bill proposing to remit the penalties to which his prosecutor might be liable, and the King made Walpole a peer. George III., by an unsparing use of his prerogative, changed the character and politics of the Upper House. His creations were country gentlemen of sufficient wealth to own "pocket"

boroughs in the House of Commons, and lawyers who supported the Royal prerogative.[69]

From George III.'s time onward there has always been a standing and ever-increasing majority of Tory peers in the House of Lords. And while the actual number of members of the Upper House has been enlarged enormously, this majority has became enlarged out of all proportion. Liberal and Tory Prime Ministers were busy throughout the nineteenth century adding to the peerage--no less than 376 new peers were created between 1800 and 1907; but comparatively few Liberals retained their principles when they became peers, and two of the present chiefs of the Unionist Party in the House of Lords--Lords Lansdowne and Selborne--are the sons of eminent Liberals.

So it has come about that while the House of Commons has been steadily opening its doors to men of all ranks and cla.s.ses, and in our time has become increasingly democratic in character, the House of Lords, confined in the main to men of wealth and social importance, has become an enormous a.s.sembly of undistinguished persons, where only a small minority are active politicians, and of this minority at least three-fourths are Conservatives.

This change in the House of Lords began, as we have seen, in the reign of George III., when the Whig ascendancy in Parliament had pa.s.sed. But the Whigs did nothing during their long lease of power to bring democracy nearer, and were entirely contemptuous of popular aspirations. At the very time when the democratic idea was the theme of philosophers, and was to be seen expressed in the const.i.tution of the revolted American colonies, and in the French Revolution, England remained under an aristocracy, governed first by Whigs, and then by Tories. It is true democracy was not without its spokesmen in England in the eighteenth century, but there was no popular movement in politics to stir the ma.s.ses of the people, as the preaching of the Methodists stirred their hearts for religion. Democratic ideas were as remote from popular discussion in the eighteenth century as they had been made familiar by Lilburne for a brief season in the seventeenth century.

"WILKES AND LIBERTY"

A word must be said about John Wilkes, a man of disreputable character and considerable ability, who for some ten years--1763-73--contended for the rights of electors against the Whig Government. The battle began when George Grenville, the Whig Prime Minister, had Wilkes arrested on a general warrant for an article attacking the King's Speech in No. 45 of the _North Briton_, a scurrilous newspaper which belonged to Wilkes. Chief Justice Pratt declared the arrest illegal on the ground that the warrant was bad, and that Wilkes, being at the time M.P. for Aylesbury, enjoyed the privilege of Parliament. A jury awarded Wilkes heavy damages against the Government for false imprisonment, and the result of the trial made Wilkes a popular hero. Then, in 1764, the Government brought a new charge of blasphemy and libel, and Wilkes, expelled from the House of Commons, and condemned by the King's Bench, fled to France, and was promptly declared an outlaw. He returned, however, a year or two later, and while in prison was elected M.P. for Middles.e.x. The House of Commons, led by the Government, set the election aside, and riots for "Wilkes and Liberty" broke out in London. The question was: Had the House of Commons a right to exclude a member duly elected for a const.i.tuency?--the same question that was raised over Charles Bradlaugh, a man of very different character, in the Parliament of 1880. Again and again in 1768 and 1769 Wilkes was re-elected for Middles.e.x, only to be expelled, and finally the House decided that Wilkes' opponent, Colonel Luttrell, was to sit, although Luttrell was manifestly not chosen by the majority of electors. The citizens of London replied to this by choosing Wilkes for Sheriff and Alderman in 1770, and by making him Lord Mayor four years later. The Government gave up the contest at last, and Wilkes was allowed to take his seat. Besides vindicating the right of const.i.tuencies against the claim of Parliament to exclude undesirable persons, Wilkes did a good deal towards securing that right of Parliamentary debating which was practically admitted after 1771.

But the "Wilkes and Liberty" movement was no more than a popular enthusiasm of the London mob for an enemy of the Government, and a determination of London citizens and Middles.e.x electors not to be brow-beaten by the Government. Wilkes himself always denied that he was a "Wilkesite," and he had no following in the country or in Parliament.

CHAPTER VI

THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA

THE WITNESS OF THE MIDDLE AGES

The idea of const.i.tutional government has its witnesses in the Middle Ages, democratic theories are common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it is not till the eighteenth century that France, aflame to realise a political ideal, proves that democracy has pa.s.sed from the books of schoolmen and philosophers, and is to be put in practice by a nation in arms.

In the thirteenth century the friars rallied to Simon of Montfort and preached, not democracy, but const.i.tutional liberty.[70] Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominican doctor, became the chief exponent of political theory, and maintained that sovereignty expressed in legislative power should be exercised for the common good, and that a mixed government of monarch, n.o.bles, and people, with the Pope as a final Court of Appeal, would best attain that end.[71]