A measure, however, may be very objectionable without being unconstitutional, and such a view of the India Bill the progress of the debates in the House of Commons disposed the King to take of it. In the House of Peers Lord Thurlow described the bill as one to take the crown off his head and place it on that of Mr. Fox; and, even without adopting that description to its full extent, the King might easily regard the bill as a very unscrupulous attempt to curtail his legitimate authority and influence. He became most anxious to prevent the bill from being presented to him for his royal assent. And it was presently represented to him that the knowledge of his desire would probably induce the Lords to reject it. Among the peers who had attacked the bill on its first introduction into their House was Earl Temple, whose father had taken so prominent a part in the negotiations for the formation of a new ministry in 1765, and who had himself been Lord-lieutenant of Ireland under Lord Shelburne's administration. But he had not thought it prudent to divide the House against its first reading, and felt great doubts as to his success in a division on the second, unless he could fortify his opposition by some arguments as yet untried. He had no difficulty in finding a willing and effective coadjutor. Since the retirement of Lord Bute from court, no peer had made himself so personally acceptable to the King as Lord Thurlow, who had been Lord Chancellor during the last four years of Lord North's administration, and, in consequence, as it was generally understood, of the earnest request of George III., had been allowed to retain the seals by Lord Rockingham, and afterward by Lord Shelburne. What special attraction drew the King toward him, unless it were some idea of his honesty and attachment to the King himself-on both of which points subsequent events proved his Majesty to be wholly mistaken-it is not very easy to divine; but his interest with the King at this time was notorious, and equally notorious was the deep resentment which he cherished against Fox and Lord North, of whom, as he alleged, the former had proscribed and the latter had betrayed him. To him, therefore, Lord Temple now applied for advice as to the best mode of working on the King's mind, and, with his assistance, drew up a memorial on the character of the India Bill, on its inevitable fruits if it should pass (which it described as an extinction of "more than half of the royal power, and a consequent disabling of his Majesty for the rest of his reign"), and on the most effectual plan for defeating it; for which end it was suggested that his Majesty should authorize some one to make some of the Lords "acquainted with his wishes" that the bill should be rejected.[85]
George III. eagerly adopted the suggestion, and drew up a brief note, which he intrusted to Lord Temple himself, and which stated that "his Majesty allowed Earl Temple to say that whoever voted for the India Bill was not only not his friend, but would be considered by him as his enemy. And, if these words were not strong enough, Earl Temple might whatever words he might deem stronger and more to the purpose."[86]
Lord Temple lost no time in availing himself of the permission thus granted him; and, as it was by no means his object to keep the transaction secret, his conduct was made the subject of severe comment by the Prime-minister himself the next time that the bill was mentioned in the Upper House. The Duke of Portland, indeed, professed to have learned it only from common report, and to hope that the report was unfounded, since, were it true, "he should be wanting in the duty he owed to the public as a minister if he did not take the opportunity of proposing a measure upon it to their lordships that would prove that they felt the same jealousy, the same detestation, the same desire to mark and stigmatize every attempt to violate the constitution as he did." Lord Temple, in reply, abstained from introducing any mention of the King's opinions or wishes, but avowed plainly that he had used his privilege as a peer to solicit an interview with his Majesty, and that at that interview "he had given his advice. What that advice had been he would not then say; it was lodged in the breast of his Majesty, nor would he declare the purport of it without the royal consent, or till he saw a proper occasion. But, though he would not declare affirmatively what his advice to his sovereign was, he would tell their lordships negatively what it was not. It was not friendly to the principle and objects of the bill."[87] The debate lasted till near midnight. Of the speakers, a great majority declared against the bill; and, on the division, it was rejected by a majority of nineteen.[88] This took place on the 15th of December. On the 18th, as the ministers had not resigned-not regarding a single defeat in the Upper House as a necessary cause for such a step-the King sent messengers to them to demand their resignation, and the next day it was publicly announced in the House of Commons that Pitt had accepted the office of Prime-minister.
But Fox, who had anticipated the dismissal of himself and his colleagues, was by no means inclined to acquiesce in it, or to yield without a struggle; and on the 17th one of his partisans in the House of Commons, Mr. Baker, one of the members for Hertfordshire, brought forward some resolutions on the subject of the late division in the House of Lords. He professed to rest them solely on rumors, but he urged that "it was the duty of that House to express its abhorrence even of that rumor," since by such an action as was alleged "that responsibility of ministers which was the life of the constitution would be taken away, and with it the principal check that the public had upon the crown." And he urged "the members of that House, as the guardians of the constitution, to stand forward and preserve it from ruin, to maintain that equilibrium between the three branches of the Legislature, and that independence without which the constitution could no longer exist," and with this view to resolve "that to report any opinion, or pretended opinion, of his Majesty upon any bill or other proceeding depending in either House of Parliament, with a view to influence the votes of the members, is a high crime and misdemeanor, derogatory to the honor of the crown, a breach of the fundamental privileges of Parliament, and subversive of the constitution of the country." It was opposed by Pitt, chiefly on the ground that Mr. Baker only based the necessity for such a resolution on common report, which he, fairly enough, denied to be a sufficient justification of it; and partly on the undoubted and "inalienable right of peers, either individually or collectively, to advise his Majesty, whenever they thought the situation of public affairs made such a step an essential part of their duty." But it was supported by Lord North as "necessary on constitutional principles," since the acts so generally reported and believed "affected the freedom of debate;" and by Fox, who declared that the action which was reported, if true, "struck at the great bulwark of our liberties, and went to the absolute annihilation, not of our chartered rights only, but of those radical and fundamental ones which are paramount to all charters, which were consigned to our care by the sovereign disposition of Nature, which we cannot relinquish without violating the most sacred of all obligations, to which we are entitled, not as members of society, but as individuals and as men; the right of adhering steadily and uniformly to the great and supreme laws of conscience and duty; of preferring, at all hazards and without equivocation, those general and substantial interests which members have sworn to prefer; of acquitting themselves honorably to their constituents, to their friends, to their own minds, and to that public whose trustees they were, and for whom they acted." He avowed his conviction that rumor in this instance spoke truth, and, affirming that "the responsibility of ministers is the only pledge and security the people of England possesses against the infinite abuses so natural to the exercise of royal powers," argued that, if "this great bulwark of the constitution were once removed, the people would become in every respect the slaves and property of despotism. This must be the necessary consequence of secret influence." He argued that the sole distinction between an absolute and a limited monarchy was that the sovereign in one is a despot, and may do as he pleases, but that in the other he is himself subjected to the laws, and consequently is not at liberty to advise with any one in public affairs who is not responsible for that advice, and that the constitution has clearly directed his negative to operate under the same wise restrictions. Mr. Baker's resolution was carri
ed by a large majority; but, as we have seen, did not deter the King from dismissing the ministry.
The conduct of George III. in this transaction has been discussed by writers of both parties with such candor that the Tory historian, Lord Stanhope, while evidently desirous to defend it by implication, passes a slight censure on it in the phrase that "the course pursued by the King was most unusual, and most extreme, and most undesirable to establish as a precedent;"[89] while, on the other hand, so rigid a Whig as Lord Campbell urges in his favor "that if it be ever excusable in a King of England to cabal against his ministers, George III. may well be defended for the course he now took, for they had been forced upon him by a factious intrigue, and public opinion was decidedly in his favor."[90] But to those who regard not the excuse which previous provocation may be conceived in some degree to furnish to human infirmity, but only the strict theory and principle of the constitution on which the doctrine of the responsibility of the ministers and the consequent irresponsibility of the sovereign rests, Lord Campbell's conditional justification for the communication made through Lord Temple will hardly appear admissible. We cannot be sure how far Mr. Grenville's "Diary" is to be trusted for transactions in which he was not personally concerned, or for conversations at which he was not present; but in giving an account[91] of some of the occurrences of the spring of 1766, while Lord Rockingham was Prime-minister, we find him relating a conversation between the King and Lord Mansfield on the ministerial measure for conciliating the American Colonies by the repeal of the Stamp Act, combined, however, with an assertion of the right to tax. "He (Lord Mansfield) took notice of the King's name having been bandied about in a very improper manner; to which the King assented, saying he had been very much displeased at it, as thinking it unconstitutional to have his name mentioned as a means to sway any man's opinion in any business which was before Parliament; and that all those who approached him knew that to be his sentiment. Lord Mansfield said he differed from his Majesty in that opinion, for that, though it would be unconstitutional to endeavor by his Majesty's name to carry questions in Parliament, yet where the lawful rights of the King and Parliament were to be asserted and maintained, he thought the making his Majesty's opinion in support of those rights to be known was very fit and becoming." The line here alleged to have been drawn by the great Chief-justice, between proclaiming the King's opinion in support of rights, but withholding it in the case of measures, is, perhaps, too fine to be perceptible by ordinary intellects. But however the King may have understood the judge, it is clear that the doctrine thus asserted does not justify, but condemns, such an act as the communication of the King's opinion and wishes in the case under consideration. If it "would be unconstitutional to endeavor by his Majesty's name to carry questions in Parliament," it must be at least equally so to use his name to defeat them. And the case is infinitely stronger, if the measure to be defeated be one which has been introduced by his ministers. For there can be no doubt whatever that, so long as they are his ministers, they are entitled to his full and complete support on every question; alike in their general policy and on each separate measure. When he can no longer give them that support, which the very act of conferring their offices on them promised them, his only legitimate and becoming course is to dismiss them from their offices, and to abide the judgment of Parliament and the nation on that act. Thus William IV. acted in the autumn of 1834; and thus George III. himself acted at the end of the month of which we are speaking. But to retain them in their offices, and to employ an unofficial declaration of his dissent from them to defeat their policy, is neither consistent with the straightforward conduct due from one gentleman to another, nor with the principle on which the system of administration, such as prevails in this country, is founded.
As has been already mentioned, the King at once dismissed the Coalition Ministry. Mr. Pitt accepted the conduct of affairs, and by so doing accepted the responsibility for all the acts of the King which had conduced to his appointment. Lord John Russell, who in his "Memorials and Correspondence of Fox" has related and examined the whole transaction at considerable though not superfluous length, while blaming the prudence, and in some points the propriety, of Fox's conduct, at the same time severely censures Pitt as "committing a great fault in accepting office as the price of an unworthy intrigue," and affirms that "he and his colleagues who accepted office upon the success of this intrigue placed themselves in an unconstitutional position."[92] This seems to be a charge which can hardly be borne out. In dismissing his former ministry, the King was clearly acting within his right; and, if so, Pitt was equally within his in undertaking the government. The truer doctrine would seem to be, that, in so undertaking it, he assumed the entire responsibility for the dismissal of his predecessors,[93] and left it to the people at large, by the votes of their representatives, to decide whether that dismissal were justified, and whether, as its inevitable consequence, his acceptance of office were also justified or not. The entire series of transactions, from the meeting of Parliament in November, 1783, to its dissolution in the following March, may be constitutionally regarded as an appeal by the King from the existing House of Commons to the entire nation, as represented by the constituencies; and their verdict, as is well known, ratified in the most emphatic manner all that had been done. And we may assert this without implying that, if the single act of empowering Lord Temple to influence the peers by the declaration of the King's private feeling had been submitted by itself to the electors, they would have justified that. The stirring excitement of the three months' contest between the great rivals led them to pronounce upon the transaction as a whole, and to leave unnoticed what seemed for the moment to be the minor issues-the moves, if we may borrow a metaphor from the chess-table, which opened the game; and it may be observed that, though, on the 17th of December, Pitt resisted Mr. Baker's resolution with his utmost energy, in the numerous debates which ensued he carefully avoided all allusion to Lord Temple's conduct, or to the measure which had led to the dismissal of his predecessors, farther than was necessary for the explanation of the principles of his own India Bill. It may even be surmised that, if he had been inclined to recognize Lord Temple's interference as warrantable, the breach between that peer and himself, which occurred before the end of the week, would not have taken place, since it seems nearly certain that the cause of that breach was a refusal on the part of Pitt to recommend his cousin for promotion in the peerage, a step which, at such a moment, would have had the appearance of an approval of his most recent deed,[94] but which he could hardly have refused, if it had been done with his privity. The battle, as need hardly be told, was first fought among the representatives of the people in the House of Commons; for there was only one occasion on which the opinion of the Lords was invited, when they declared in favor of Pitt by a decisive majority.[95] But in the Lower House the contest was carried on for more than two months with extraordinary activity and ability, by a series of resolutions and motions brought forward by the partisans of the coalition, and contested by the youthful minister. In one respect the war was waged on very unequal terms, Pitt, who had been but three years in Parliament, and whose official experience could as yet only be counted by months, having to contend almost single-handed against the combined experience and eloquence of Lord North, Fox, and Burke. Fortunately, however, for him, their own mismanagement soon turned the advantage to his side. They were too angry and too confident to be skilful, or even ordinarily cautious. The leaders on both sides made professions in one respect similar; they both alike denied that a desire of office influenced either their conduct or their language (a denial for which Pitt's refusal of the Treasury, a year before, gained him more credit than could be expected by Fox after his coalition with Lord North), and both alike professed to be struggling for the constitution alone, for some fundamental principle which each charged his antagonist with violating; Fox on one occasion even going so far as, in some degree, to involve the King himself in his censures, declaring not only that "the st
ruggle was, in fact, one between Pitt himself and the constitution," but that it was also one "between liberty and the influence of the crown," and "between prerogative and the constitution;" and that "Pitt had been brought into power by means absolutely subversive of the constitution."[96] But no act of which he thus accused the minister or the King showed such a disregard of the fundamental principle of the constitution of Parliament as was exhibited by Fox himself when, in the very first debate after the Christmas recess, he called in question that most undoubted prerogative of the crown to dissolve the Parliament, and, drawing a distinction which had certainly never been heard of before, declared that, though the King had an incontestable right to dissolve the Parliament after the close of a session, "many great lawyers" doubted whether he had such a right in the middle of a session, a dissolution at such a period being "a penal" one. Professing to believe that an immediate dissolution was intended, he even threatened to propose to the House of Commons "measures to guard against a step so inimical to the true interests of the country," and made a more direct attack than ever on the King himself, by the assertion of a probability that, even if Pitt did not contemplate a dissolution, his royal master might employ "secret influence" to overrule him, and might dissolve in spite of him,[97] an imputation which Lord North, with a strange departure from his customary good-humor, condescended to endorse.[98] There could be no doubt that both the doubt and the menace were of themselves distinct attacks on the constitution; and they were, moreover, singularly impolitic and inconsistent with others of the speaker's arguments, since, if the nation at large approved of his views and conduct, a dissolution-which would have placed the decision in its hands-would have been the very thing he should most have desired. On another evening, though he admitted as a principle that the sovereign had the prerogative of choosing his ministers, he not only sought to narrow the effect of that admission by the assertion that "to exercise that prerogative in opposition to the House of Commons would be a measure as unsafe as unjustifiable,"[99] but to confine the right of deciding the title of the ministers to confidence to the existing House of Commons. He accused Pitt of "courting the affection of the people, and on this foundation wishing to support himself in opposition to the repeated resolutions of the House passed in the last three weeks." Had he confined himself to urging the necessity of the ministers and the House of Commons being in harmony, even though such a mention of the House of Commons by itself were to a certain extent an ignoring of the weight of the other branches of the Legislature, he would have only been advancing a doctrine which is practically established at the present day, since there has been certainly more than one instance in which a ministry has retired which enjoyed the confidence of both the sovereign and the House of Lords, because it was not supported by a majority in the House of Commons. But when he proceeded to make it a charge against the minister that he trusted to the good-will of the people to enable him to disregard the verdict of the House of Commons, he forgot that it was only as representing the people that the House had any right to pronounce a verdict; and that, if it were true that the judgment of the people was more favorable to the minister than that of the House of Commons, the difference which thus existed was a condemnation of the existing House, and an irresistible reason for calling on the constituencies to elect another.
The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 Page 13