Formation of the first party Ministry—Reintroduction of the Triennial Bill and its defeat—Of the Place Bill and its veto—Causes of the disallowance—Macaulay's account examined—Campaign of 1694—Death of Mary.
I am now to speak of one of the most important, as it is sometimes regarded, of all the steps made under William's auspices in the development of our parliamentary polity—a step represented as even more influential in fixing and determining that system of strict party government under which the nation is thriving or declining at the present era than even the Revolution itself—the formation of the first Ministry of the modern type. "No writer," says Macaulay in speaking of it, "has yet attempted to trace the progress of this institution—an institution indispensable to the harmonious working of our other institutions. The first Ministry was the work partly of chance and partly of wisdom—not however of that highest wisdom that is conversant with great principles of political philosophy, but of that lower wisdom which meets daily exigencies by daily expedients. Neither William nor the most enlightened of his advisers fully understood the nature and importance of that noiseless revolution—for it was no less—which began about the close of 1693, and was completed about the close of 1696. But everybody could perceive that at the close of 1693 the chief offices in the Government were distributed not unequally between the two great parties, that the men who held these offices were perpetually caballing against each other, haranguing against each other, moving votes of censure on each other, exhibiting articles of impeachment against each other, and that the temper of the House of Commons was wild, ungovernable and uncertain. Everybody could perceive that at the close of 1696 all the principal servants of the Crown were Whigs, closely bound together by public and private ties, and prompt to defend one another against every attack, and that the majority of the House of Commons was arrayed in good order under these leaders, and had learned to move like one man at the word of command."
There are perhaps not many passages of the famous history in which its author's love of dramatic antithesis has displayed itself in a statement more likely to mislead the student. Because the change which took place in the relation of Ministers of the Crown between 1693 and 1696 was a striking one Macaulay cannot resist the temptation of describing it as though it were a final one. In 1693 Ministers in disagreement with each other, in 1696 Ministers in accord with each other—the suggestion of course being that they "lived happily ever afterwards." Certainly no one previously unacquainted with the facts would suppose from this account of them that the first politically homogeneous Ministry was a purely experimental one, and that the experiment was not repeated by William, and never even attempted by his successor, under whom the old system prevailed, though with gradual modification, throughout her reign; that on many later occasions in our history the men in the chief offices of the Government were to be found "caballing" and sometimes even "haranguing" against each other; and, in short, that it was not till far on in the next century that the idea of Ministers being men of like political opinions "bound together by public and private ties," and supported by a majority "arrayed in good order under them, and moving like one man at the word of command," became uniformly and permanently associated with the constitution. Yet this is in fact the case. The "lower political wisdom meeting daily exigencies by daily expedients" did not devise an arrangement calculated to endure for all time; and no one ought to have been more surprised than Macaulay if it had. It met a particular exigency by a particular expedient, and as that particular exigency did not uniformly recur, the particular expedient naturally did not at once stereotype itself in our parliamentary polity. The pure Whig Government of 1696 attained the object of its formation, namely, to carry out his war policy, and passed away. William's later ministries were of a mixed character; the ministries of Anne were partly Whig and partly Tory; and the political unity which prevailed in the Walpole Administration was succeeded by a return to the old practice under Pulteney. It was not, as has been said, until well on in the century that it became an admitted political axiom that Cabinets should be constructed upon some bases of political union agreed upon by the members composing the same when they accept office together.
But though it is delusive to represent a mere political experiment as the consummation of a great constitutional change, yet an experiment by which such change was foreshadowed cannot of course be otherwise than deeply interesting. And such undoubtedly is the character of the ministerial reconstruction which took place in 1693. The particular exigency which the expedient was designed to meet is almost patent on the face of the European situation, as it must have presented itself to a statesman of William's views and with William's policy at heart. The one fact that the Whigs were in favour of a vigorous prosecution of the war with Louis on its continental theatre, while the Tories favoured the husbanding of English military resources and the maintenance of a defensive attitude behind our "silver streak," and under the protection of our navy, would undoubtedly have sufficed of itself to determine William's choice of the former party. In all other respects he probably regarded both English parties at this as at all other times of his life with equal indifference—if indeed one should not say with equal aversion. He could have no love for men who, like the Whigs, regarded him as a king of their own making, or who, like the Tories, considered him no king, in the full sense of the word, at all. Whichever of the two English parties were more willing to assist his efforts for a country which he loved far better than England was virtually assured of his favour; and though no doubt he believed honestly enough that the interests not only of continental Europe, but of insular England, were identified with those of the United Provinces—though no doubt he honestly regarded Holland as only the vanguard of European and English liberties, menaced by the insatiable ambition of Louis—yet it is impossible to credit him, or any other mortal man in the same situation, with the capacity of impartial judgment on any point at which the interests of England and those of Holland might have diverged. Nor is it, I think, unjust to add that even when the balance of English advantage might have appeared to William himself to incline somewhat against any contemplated course of conduct, he would perhaps have held himself justified in proceeding from contemplation to action. He was in all probability firmly, and one cannot say unreasonably, possessed with the idea that England was largely his debtor and the debtor of his country; and that she should, at least within reason, make sacrifices for the protection of that nation, who and whose Prince had rendered such services to her. Whichever English party showed most disposition, or rather least reluctance, to make common cause with the United Provinces in the defence of Dutch (and therefore of English and European) liberties, became thereby the party of William's choice. No doubt his gradual construction of a pure Whig Ministry was in part dictated by a desire to secure greater stability of counsel and unity of action in the House of Commons. No doubt his laudable experiment of governing by means of both parties had had results with which he could hardly have been satisfied. But he had borne for five years with the parliamentary factiousness which that experiment had undoubtedly tended to aggravate, and there is no visible reason, save that which I have indicated, for his putting an end to the experiment at this particular moment and in this particular way. He had made shift to do without a homogeneous Ministry ever since his accession. If now he needed a Ministry which should be not only homogeneous, but homogeneously Whig, we must look to the exigencies of his continental policy for the cause.
The process, however, of replacing the Tories of the Administration by Whigs was a very gradual one, and it was not of course until it was complete that the Whig party in the House of Commons could be trusted to support the Administration, "right or wrong," as, without much suspicion of satire, we may say to have now become the accepted constitutional practice. Nottingham and the Tory Naval administrators were the first to go, their retirement having been in the one case consequentially, and in the other directly necessitated by the narrow escape of the latter from parliamentary censure in respect of the late naval miscarriages. Russell became First Lord of the Admiralty, and with him Nottingham, who, as Secretary of State, was then responsible for the military service, was of course unable to serve. His place, however, was not immediately filled up, nor was it till the end of the session that any further ministerial changes were made. And this session itself was one of peculiar constitutional interest on other grounds. In the first place the Triennial Bill, vetoed by William in the previous session, was reintroduced, and met with a most unexpected fate. It was brought in this time in the House of Commons, and passed through all its stages up to the final one without a division. But the motion that "the Bill do now pass" was rejected by a majority of ten. The whole affair is involved in much obscurity, and the cause or causes of the unlooked-for rejection of the measure must always remain matter of conjecture. Macaulay declares its defeat to have been brought about by the instrumentality of the expert parliamentary intriguer Seymour; and as no House of Commons that ever lived is likely to have relished the idea of putting a term to its own existence, it is not difficult to guess the kind of sentiment to which Seymour might have appealed. But one point not unworthy of notice in the matter is that the numbers voting in the division, 146 Noes and 136 Ayes, did not together compose a very full House. They fell short by thirty-two of the numbers who voted in the division by which the second edition of the Triennial Bill, introduced in, and passed through, the House of Lords, and sent down to the House of Commons, was rejected a fortnight afterwards. In this case, of course, the adverse majority of 197 were able to allege that they were not opposing the limitation of Parliament, but merely resisting a usurpation of constitutional jurisdiction on the part of the Peers. But it should be observed that this argument does not appear to have produced many defections from the party of the Ayes. They number 127, or only nine short of their original strength; and assuming that these nine votes were transferred to the Noes, it will still leave some forty new votes to be accounted for. It looks rather as if these were the votes of members who would have divided against the Bill if they had dared (and as they did so soon as they got a plausible pretext for doing so), but not daring, consented to assist in compassing its rejection by absenting themselves from the division.
The Place Bill, another abortive measure of this session, had a quite different history. It was introduced in much the same shape as in the previous year, and passed the Lower House substantially unchanged. In the Lords, however, it underwent a material amendment. As originally drawn it provided that no member of the House of Commons elected after the 1st of January 1694 should accept any place of profit under the Crown on pain of forfeiting his seat, and of being incapable of sitting again in the same Parliament. The Lords, while maintaining the provision for the forfeiture of the seat, introduced words qualifying the acceptor of office to sit in the same Parliament if again chosen as a representative. This amendment the Commons adopted, and the Bill thus modified, having passed both Houses, was, somewhat to the surprise of everybody and to the disgust of many people, vetoed by the King. This exercise of the prerogative was received with far less patience than on the two former occasions, and for a few days a serious conflict between the Legislature and the Crown appeared to be imminent. An address of remonstrance was presented to William, who replied in conciliatory language, but without holding out any hopes that his veto would be withdrawn. Another debate of a somewhat excited character followed, but calmer counsels than had at first found favour with the House of Commons ultimately prevailed. A motion to prepare a new representation or remonstrance was rejected by a very large majority, and the Place Bill dropped. The great Whig historian's account of the matter is that the amendment "deprived the Bill of all efficacy both for good and evil"; but that the Commons "so little understood what they were about that, after framing a law, in one view most mischievous"—namely, in respect of its tending to keep the chief Ministers of the Crown out of the House of Commons, "and in another view most beneficial"—namely, as tending to keep subordinate officials out of the House of Commons, they were perfectly willing that it should be "transformed into a law quite harmless and almost useless"; and that William went out of the way to veto this quite harmless and almost useless law, because he "understood the question as little as the Commons themselves."
This is not a very plausible theory; nor does one well see why Macaulay should describe that proviso of a right to re-election—which was afterwards adopted, and which is an essential feature of our still subsisting Act of Anne—as depriving the Bill of nine-tenths of its power both for good and for evil. Surely both King and Parliament might have been credited with knowing their own business a little better than that. It seems reasonable rather to ask ourselves whether the amendment was such as to militate in any serious degree against the legislative object of the Commons, or in any similar degree to disarm the objections which William entertained to the measure. If it did neither of these things, there was nothing paradoxical either in the Commons accepting or the King pronouncing his veto upon the Place Bill; and it seems to me to be clear that the amendment did neither of these things in fact. No doubt it was desirable, from the point of view of the majority, that office-holders should cease to sit in Parliament and become incapacitated for re-election; and this on the abstract and general ground that such persons were not sufficiently independent to be able to discharge the functions of legislators with advantage to the country. So far, then, as the general principle relating to office-holders was concerned, the amendment was opposed to the real wishes of the Commons, and had no reason therefore to provoke the hostility of the King. But there was a specific ground on which the House had cause to dislike office-holders, and a specific class of appointments to which this ground applied; and the Bill, even as modified by the Lords' proviso, would have limited the royal influence in respect of these appointments to an extent quite sufficient to account both for the Commons adopting the amendment of the Upper House, and for the King refusing his assent to the Bill. It would obviously have dealt a heavy, though not, of course, a final, blow to the employment of the patronage of the Crown for the purpose of "managing" the Legislature. It would have made it a far more difficult thing for the Court or the Government to maintain their majority in the House of Commons by what would now be called a corrupt use of its patronage, but what was then regarded, or getting to be regarded—at any rate by the party in power,—as one of the legitimate arts of rule. For whenever the Sovereign or his Ministers endeavoured to convert a hostile into a friendly vote by the bestowal of office upon its possessor, he or they would always have to reckon with the possibility that the constituents of the bought member might not care to have their interests sold along with their parliamentary representative. They might, and on a question which strongly moved them they very probably would, have expressed their disapproval of his conduct by refusing to re-elect him; in which case the Government would, of course, have found themselves at the end of the transaction with one piece of patronage the less, but not with one vote the more. In a word, the Place Bill, as amended by the Lords, though it would have left untouched the power of the Crown to bring office-holders into Parliament, would materially have impaired its power of turning members of Parliament into office-holders; and apparently it was only because Macaulay viewed the Bill too exclusively in its relation to the former power, and took no account of its bearing on the latter, that he could have regarded it as a measure in which William had no real concern, and which he only vetoed through some vague dislike of it as affecting his prerogative he hardly knew how. So far from this, it seems to me that his objection may well have been a very definite one, and that he perfectly understood, and was not at all disposed to undervalue, the particular exercise of his prerogative which it threatened. For whatever may have been his original or even his persistent repugnance to the acts of parliamentary management by means of parliamentary corruption, he had probably come by this time to regard it as among the inevitable if disagreeable necessities of royal and ministerial policy under the English system of party government.
The close of this session witnessed the virtual completion of the work of ministerial reconstruction on a purely Whig basis. Shrewsbury, who had been offered the Secretaryship of State left vacant by the retirement of Nottingham, after some months of hesitation accepted the office. Trenchard, the other Secretary of State, was also a member of the Whig party. The rising Whig financier, Charles Montague, who had during this session devised and carried out the legislative measure for the establishment of the Bank of England, was for this service elevated to the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Keeper of the Seal was the Whig Somers. The Whig Russell was First Lord of the Admiralty. All the important offices of the State were now in fact in the hands of the Whig party, and William, now fairly embarked upon the experiment recommended by Sunderland, made one last concession to his old policy of balancing one party against the other by a liberal distribution of honours among the displaced Tories.
The military and naval operations of 1694 were marked by none of these successes which catch the public eye, but the year was really one of more moment to the history of the struggle with Louis than at first sight appears. Mismanagement and treachery brought disaster on the expedition against Brest, and the disgrace was certainly not redeemed by the subsequent bombardment and destruction of Dieppe and Havre. But the despatch of Russell's fleet to the Mediterranean yielded solid gains which more than compensated for our losses in the Channel. Russell relieved Barcelona, blockaded Toulon, brought the hostile Italian States to reason, and compelled them, for the first time, to acknowledge William's titles, reanimated the Duke of Savoy, who had begun to think of a separate peace with France, and, indeed, practically brought the Mediterranean under English maritime control. As a consequence, our commerce, which had been declining ever since the Revolution, began rapidly to revive.
The land campaign, though equally undistinguished by any striking triumph, was no less fruitful in matter for solid satisfaction. An attempt of William to carry the war into the enemy's country was foiled, it is true, by the skill of Luxembourg, who repulsed the advance of the Elector of Bavaria upon French Flanders, and this check was, of course, more important on one side than William's capture of the inconsiderable fortress of Huy was on the other. But in Spain, where Russell's appearance before Barcelona had compelled De Noailles to retreat; on the Rhine, where the Prince of Baden drove back Delorges, and established himself for the summer in Alsace; and in Piedmont, where, in spite of the vacillations of the Duke of Savoy, the French gained no material advantage—the course of events, particularly as contrasted with those of the three previous years, gave ample justification for the words with which William met his Parliament on the 9th of November. "With respect," he said, "to the war by land, I think I may say that this year has put a stop to the progress of the French arms." Loyal addresses were returned, and supplies to the amount of five millions were readily voted; but, along with the Supply Bill, the Triennial Bill was again introduced. It was probably intimated to Parliament, through some of the private channels of communication with the Court, that William was not prepared to veto it a second time. The Bill was brought in on the first day of the session, and, together with a Bill settling the Customs on the Crown, received the royal assent on the 22d of December. November of 1696 was fixed as the limit of the life of the existing Parliament. The Place Bill, vetoed by the King in the previous session, was again introduced, and with exactly the same results as had followed the second attempt to pass the Triennial Bill. This measure, it will be remembered, after failing to obtain the royal assent in the session of 1692-3, was defeated in the Commons in 1693-4, and so also it happened with the Place Bill. The inference which I think suggests itself in both cases is that the exercise of the royal veto, though unpopular with the country, was not by any means equally so with the House of Commons; that there were many Tories who were not particularly keen on purging Parliament of office-holders, and not a few Whigs whose zeal for the limitation of its constitutional life was somewhat lukewarm; and that both Whigs and Tories of this order were not sorry to be able to evade their party obligations to vote for these measures by pleading their unwillingness to force the King's hand, and perhaps provoke a constitutional crisis.
The day on which William gave his assent to the Triennial Bill was to him a day of grave anxiety; and a year fairly prosperous abroad and peaceful at home was to bring him ere its close the heaviest calamity of his life. The illness of the Queen, who had been for two or three days confined to her bed, was on the evening of the 21st of December recognised by her physician as smallpox. A week afterwards, at one in the morning of the 28th of December, she died. William's grief at her loss was uncontrollable, and to all but those, and they were few, who had penetrated the stoicism beneath which he was accustomed to conceal deep feelings, it must have been a strange and moving sight. He remained for days at her bedside scarcely taking food or sleep. He broke out in the presence of Burnet into passionate outcries upon his agony at the thought of losing her, and into fervent praises of her love and virtues. "He cried out," says the Bishop, "that there was no hope, and that from being the happiest he was now going to be the miserablest creature on earth. He said that during the whole course of their marriage he had never known one single fault in her; there was a worth in her which nobody knew besides himself.... The King's affection was greater than those who knew him best thought his temper capable of; he went beyond all bounds in it; during her sickness he was in an agony that amazed us all, fainting often and breaking out into most violent lamentations; when she died his spirits sank so low that there was great reason to apprehend that he was following her; for some weeks after he was so little master of himself that he was not capable of minding business or of seeing company."
The depth of this affection, moreover, was not disproportioned, as is sometimes the case in examples of conjugal devotion, to the worthiness of the object. Even Evelyn, who was shocked as a Tory and legitimate king's-man by the levity of Mary's behaviour (for which, however, an explanation has been suggested) on her arrival at Whitehall after James's flight, affirms of her that "she was such an admirable woman, abating for taking the crown without a due apology, as does, if possible, outdo the renowned Queen Elizabeth." The comparison, extravagant as it may appear at first sight, is not without some justification in the spirited behaviour of Mary on the great national crisis which occurred during her husband's absence in the Irish campaign. It would be absurd of course to credit Mary with Elizabeth's gifts of statecraft, or with her intellectual capacity in general, but in courage and composure in the presence of danger she was no unworthy successor of that great queen. In William's passionate declarations of his debt to her there was no extravagance at all. To him she had been the most affectionate, dutiful, and forbearing of wives, and if her influence over him fell short of retaining his marital constancy, she endeared herself more closely to him on the side of the purer emotions by her magnanimous forgiveness of his errors. It cannot but soften the harsher outlines of our conception of William, and help to supply that human and homely element which is too much wanting in his character, to know that he was capable both of inspiring and reciprocating so true an affection as this.
