acts upon the advice and responsibility of another-her first ministerto whom copies of despatches and other information are also communicated in order to enable him to give such advice effectually.' The Constitutional right of dismissing a minister, asserted in the tional right of dismissing Queen's Memorandum, is now practically placed at the disposal of the Constitu a Minister Premier and the Cabinet, who are thus enabled, as a whole, to exercise, through the Crown, a check upon each individual member. This was exemplified, shortly after the French coup d'état of the 2nd December, 1851, when Lord Palmerston was removed from the Foreign Secretaryship in Lord John Russell's Administration on the ground that he had exceeded his authority in expressing to the French Ambassador opinions favourable to the policy of the recent coup d'état and at variance ship in 1st. with the Non-Intervention despatch agreed upon by the Cabinet.* asserted in the removal of Lord Palmerston from the Foreign Secretary Increased power of the Executive. Revenues of the Crown. While the Personal influence of the Sovereign in the government of the country has steadily decreased since the reign of George III., the power of the Crown, as wielded by its Ministers, has continued to increase from the Revolution down to the present time. The expansion of the Empire, the great extension of public establishments, the vast increase of patronage-civil, military, and ecclesiastical-and the more profuse distribution of honours, have all largely added to the influence of the Executive Government, while its coercive power has been augmented by the establishment of the Police, the recent concentration of the military forces, the abolition of purchase in the army, and the transfer of the command and jurisdiction over the auxiliary forces to the Sovereign, to be exercised through the Secretary of State for War. During the present reign the power and influence of the Crown, always wisely and Constitutionally exercised for the public benefit, on the advice of responsible Ministers, have provoked no attempts at restraint; and the Personal power of the Sovereign, as distinguished from the power of the Regal office, having been restrained within due limits, the ancient jealousy of the Crown, inherited from the struggles of our ancestors, may now almost be said to have died out. It was at the Revolution that a limitation was for the first time imposed upon the personal expenditure of the Sovereign. Previously it had been customary for the Parliament, at the commencement of each reign, to grant to the King the ordinary Crown revenues consisting of (1) the hereditary revenues of the Crown itself, viz., the rents of Crown lands, the feudal rights (surrendered by Charles II. in 1 Statement by Lord John Russell, Hansard, Deb. 3rd ser. cxix. 91; May, Const. Hist. i. 160; Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, ii. 300 seq. May, Const. Hist. i. 161. 1660, in exchange for the excise duties), the proceeds of the Post-Office and wine licences; and (2) the produce of taxes voted to the King for life. The annual revenue of Charles II. from these sources was sometimes a little above, sometimes a little below, the sum of £1,200,000, which was fixed by Parliament as the ordinary revenue of the Crown; that of James II. amounted on an average to £1,500,964 a year, out of which the King was expected, in time of peace, to support the Royal dignity and Civil government and also the public defence. But whatever remained after payment of these necessary expenses of the government was at the King's absolute disposal; in addition to which Charles II. did not hesitate to apply to his own privy purse large sums of money which had been specially appropriated by Parliament for the purposes of the war. At the accession of William and Mary, however, Parliament fixed the annual revenue of the Crown, in time of peace, at £1,200,000, of which about £700,000 (derived from the hereditary revenues of the Crown, and from a part of the Excise duties) was separately appropriated to what was afterwards called the King's Civil List,' comprising the personal expenses The Civil of the King, the support of the Royal Household, and also the payment of civil offices and pensions, which were more fairly chargeable to the remaining portion of the Crown revenue devoted to the strictly public expenditure of the State. The principle that the King's regular and domestic expenses should be restricted to a fixed annual sum distinct from the other departments of public expenditure, was adhered to in succeeding reigns, and down to the accession of George II. the Civil List was maintained at £700,000. Both Anne and George I., however, incurred debts, the former of £1,200,000, the latter of £1,000,000, which were discharged by Parliament by loans charged upon the Civil List itself. The Civil List of George II. was fixed at a minimum of £800,000, Parliament undertaking that if the Hereditary revenues should produce less than that sum it would make up the deficiency-a liability which it discharged in 1746, by paying off a Civil List debt of £456,000. But the direct control of Parliament over the personal expenses of the King was first acquired on the accession of George III., who surrendered to the nation his life interest in the hereditary revenues, and all claims to any surplus which might accrue from them, in return for a fixed Civil List of £800,000 (increased in 1777 to £900,000) 'for the support of his household, and the honour and dignity of the Crown.' In addition, however, to the fixed Civil List, George III. enjoyed a considerable further income, derived from the Droits of the Crown and Admiralty and other sources, which was wholly independent of Parliamentary List.' Crown lands. control; and yet, notwithstanding the King's economical and even parsimonious mode of living, and the removal, from time to time, from the Civil List of various charges which were unconnected with the personal comfort and dignity of the Sovereign, his struggle to establish the ascendency of the Crown by systematic bribery of members of Parliament with places, pensions, and direct gifts of money, compelled him to make repeated applications to the nation for payment of debts upon the Civil List. Altogether, the arrears paid off by Parliament during his reign-exclusive of a debt of £300,000 charged on the Civil List in 1782, when its expenditure was curtailed and split up into separate classes-amounted to a total of £3,398,000.1 William IV., on his accession, surrendered not only the Hereditary revenues, but all the other sources of revenue which had been enjoyed by his predecessors; receiving in return a Civil List of £510,000, which was at the same time relieved from most of the charges which more properly belonged to the civil government of the State. The Civil List of Queen Victoria was settled, on the same principles, at the annual sum of £385,000; and while the removal of civil charges has freed the Crown from any suspicion of indirect influences, the improved administration of the present Sovereign and her two immediate predecessors has rendered it unnecessary to apply to Parliament during their reigns for the discharge of debts upon the Civil List. The surrender of the Crown lands to be disposed of by Parliament, like the other revenues of the State, for the public service-begun by George III. and now 'by a custom as strong as law' repeated by each sovereign at the beginning of his reign-is one instance among others of the return in modern Constitutional usage to the simpler principles of the older Constitution. We have seen, in an earlier chapter, how the Folkland, the land of the nation, which could not be alienated without the consent of the Witan, gradually changed into Terra Regis, the land of the King, to be dealt with according to his personal pleasure. Continually augmented by feudal escheats and forfeitures the Crown lands were as continually diminished by improvident grants to the Royal favourites and followers. Attempts were made to check this abuse from time to time, but without effect, and Charles I. still further diminished the Royal patrimony by extensive sales and mortgages. His example was followed by the Parliaments of the Commonwealth; and although at the Restoration these latter sales were declared void, Charles II. soon squandered the estates which 1 Report on Civil List, 1815, p. 4; May, Const. Hist. i. 243. had been restored to the Crown, and in three years reduced their annual income from £217,000 to £100,000. James II. and William III. were equally liberal and improvident, and, on the accession of Queen Anne, it was found by Parliament that the Crown lands had been so reduced that the net income from them scarcely exceeded the rent-roll of a squire. To preserve what still remained, an Act was passed (1 Anne, c. 8, s. 5) which after sadly reciting that the necessary expenses of supporting the Crown, or the greater part of them, were formerly defrayed by a land revenue, which had, from time to time, been impaired by the grants of former kings and queens, so that her Majesty's land revenues could then afford very little towards the support of her government,' prohibited absolute grants entirely, and prescribed stringent conditions as to the length of term and rentals of all future leases. Thus the small remnant of the land which had once been the land of the people was saved from utter dissipation, and since its restoration to the nation by George III. the Terra Regis of the Norman has once more become the folkland of the days of our earliest freedom.' perty of the This change has been accompanied by the restoration to the Crown Private proof a right which it had lost during its uncontrolled tenure of the Sovereign. hereditary estates. During the days when the Folkland was really the land of the people, the King, equally with the subject, had enjoyed the right of inheriting, purchasing, devising, and otherwise disposing of lands which were his own private property. But when the King. ship had become more strictly hereditary, and the lands of the nation came to be regarded as the property of the King, the person and the office of the King were held to be so thoroughly identified that his private estates were merged in the Royal demesne and made incapable of alienation by will. After the restoration of the Crown lands to the nation, it was felt to be reasonable 'that a restriction which belonged to a past state of things should be swept away, and that sovereigns who had surrendered an usurped power which they ought never to have held should be restored to the enjoyment of a natural right which ought never to have been taken from them.' Accordingly the Sove The Crown lands received some augmentation from forfeitures after the rebellions of 1715 and 1745; but during the first 25 years of Geo. III. they produced a net average rental of little more than 6,000 a year. Improved administration and the rise in the value of land have since rendered them much more productive. In 1798 they were valued at £201,250 a year; in 1812 at £283,160; in 1820 they actually yielded £114,852; in 1830 they produced 373.770; and in 1860 they returned an income of £416,530, exceeding the Civil List granted to the Queen. May, Const. Hist. i. 255. Freeman, Growth of Eng. Const. p. 134. 3 Supra, p. 13, lb. n. 1. Freeman, Growth of Eng. Const. p. 136; and see Allen, Royal Prerogative, P. 15+ II. The Number of Peers. Rapid increase under the Stuart kings. 16 Represen reign has again been invested with the right of acquiring and disposing of private property in the same manner as any other inember of the nation.1 II. The House of Lords. Since the Revolution, the House of Peers-the lineal representative of the old Great Councils and the older Witenagemots-has undergone changes in its numbers, composition, and political weight and influence, greater even than the changes which, during the same period, have so materially affected the practical exercise of the authority of the Crown in government and legislation. In the Parliament of 1454, the last held before the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, the number of lay Peers who attended was 53. In 1485, only 29 received writs of summons to the first Parliament of Henry VII.3 The greatest number summoned by Henry VIII. was 51, which had increased at the death of Elizabeth to 59. In the meantime, by the suppression of the monasteries and the consequent removal from the Upper House of about 36 abbots and priors, the Spiritual Peerage (including 5 of the new sees created by Henry VIII.') had been reduced to the number of 26, at which it has ever since remained. The four Stuart kings created 193 new Peers, but as during their reigns 99 peerages became extinct, the number of the Peerage at the Revolution of 1688 actually stood at about 150, which was raised by William III. and Queen Anne to 168. The House of Lords was Addition of further increased in 1707, on the passing of the Act of Union with tative Peers Scotland, by the addition of 16 Representative Peers from that kingof Scotland dom, elected at the commencement of every Parliament. This rapid augmentation of the Peerage, but more especially the realization of the power of the Crown to swamp the majority in the Upper House (manifested in 1711 by Queen Anne's creation of 12 peers in one batch), excited the jealousy of the Lords; and this feeling-acting in conjunction with the fear lest the Prince of Wales, who was in opposition to his father, should on coming to the throne make use of 1 See 39 & 40 Geo. III. c. 88; 4 Geo. IV. c. 18; 25 & 26 Vict. c. 37. in 1707. 2 Supra, pp. 188, 189. [Cf. L. O. Pike, Const. Hist. House of Lords, pp. 23– 26.] 3 Supra, p. 281. Supra, p. 319, n. 3. 5 [The fears to which such a practice might naturally give rise have been felt in much later days. In 1832 the Duke of Wellington wrote to Lord Lyndhurst, as cited in Sir Theodore Martin's Life of Lord Lyndhurst, Lond. 1883, p. 300, n. 1, They say here that the object of Lord Grey's visit to Brighton is to create peers. If it is so, I am convinced that he will be successful and that there is an end to the character and independence of the House of Lords.-C.] |