THE CORONATION OATH.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE 'SPECTATOR."]
cannot think that the question which has been raised respecting the Coronation Oath is a light one. It touches very deep moral principles ; if it is dismissed with a contemptuous shrug, it will appear again ; it will mingle with our thoughts respecting our own obligations ; what we supposed was a subject for statesmen to settle may embarrass the acts of our daily life.
It seems to me that the distinction between a personal and an official conscience is one which can never bear investigation. When is conscience to come into play, if not when I am to fulfil
an office, to perform a duty How can I shift the conscience from myself to the very work about which it bears witness ? There must be endless confusion, a hopeless succession of subter- fuges, if we tolerate such a notion. Say that the conscience is a dream, if you please ; deny that it means anything to Sovereigns or to subjects ; but do not speak of it and appeal to it whilst you are explaining away all that makes it a reality to either.
Do I, then, affirm that a Sovereign is to act as George III. acted; continually to oppose his own rash and uarrowjudgment to the judg- ment of his wisest counsellors ; to hinder concessions at a time when they might have been acceptable, making them necessary in after generations, when they had lost much of their worth ? No. Just because I reverence the conscience above all things--George
conscience as much as any man's—do I protest against the mistake which he made in confusing that honest conscience with that very feeble and ignorant judgment. The one testified of great ends or objects which he as a Sovereign was sworn to pursue, which he must never sacrifice to any paltry, selfish purposes, to any priestly counsellors, to any petty conceits of his own intellect. The more intensely he felt that he was bound in the sight of the everlasting God to uphold the order and constitution of his land, to let no lower motives interfere with that duty, the more utterly he cast to the wind the fancy that this oath might be construed in some non- natural sense as binding him officially, not personally, the more would he be warned against the tendency to make himself an arbitrary ruler in any sense of that word—especially in the sense of making his arbitrizon the measure of what was best for his land. It was precisely the inability of George III. to distinguish his arbitrary instincts and his sense of his own transcendent wisdom from his conscience which made him a madman ;—may not that be the secret of all madness ? If he had not fallen into this insanity he would doubtless have felt that the judgment of the minister whom he believed that he could generally trust might be more trustworthy than his own, as to the best means of upholding the Protestant Constitution in Church and State. He would have asked himself whether it was not at least possible that Mr. Pitt— even if in this instance his leading opponents had not agreed with him—might see better what was needful to make Ireland and England a united country than the monarch had seen. And if he could have entertained the thought of that possibility, the more active and alive his conscience was, the more he feared to violate his oath, the more he would have hesitated to set up his private judgment against more cultivated judgments. I believe this is an ordinary process of the conscience in a common citizen. Just because he is profoundly solicitous about some great end which he is pledged to promote, he is diffident in the choice of means. He perceives that means may vary, that what would have contributed to the object at one time may defeat it at another. He has, therefore, his mind open to suggestions and counsels. They perplex him terribly, if he does not know what his aim is. They help him greatly if he keeps that aim steadily before him.
In what respect is the Sovereign's conscience different from the subject's? Shall I be told that it is different in this respect ?— " The Sovereign knows that there are counsellors who entertain the same opinion which he or she entertains on a given topic, as well as counsellors who entertain an adverse opinion. Why not accept the judgment of the one instead of the other ?" I answer, "that happens to every one who deliberates, subject or Sovereign. And in the subject's case it is lawful to accept for various reasons the judgments of those counsellors with whom he does not agree, provided such acceptance is with a direct view to the end which he deems that he ought to promote." Mr. Kinglake says that Lord Raglan yielded in more than one instance his judgment to that of the French Generals in the Crimea. The historian thinks the English commander's judgment was the best, but he does not doubt that it was an act of conscience on the part of Lord Raglan not to enforce his opinion ; he believed the interests of the campaign, on the whole, would be forwarded by the sacrifice of it. The only difference I can perceive in the Sovereign's case is this. By the order of the English Government, by the habit and tradition, to say the least, of the Constitution which he or she swears to observe, advisers who do not express the sentiment of the nation must be changed for those who do. This habit and tradition do not increase the difficulty of determining when it is a duty to abandon a private judgment ; they greatly diminish the difficulty. The Sovereign vindicates the Constitution, vindicates the Coronation Oath, in the very act of surrendering an individual opinion.
I have not the least reason to suppose that the discussion of this subject is rendered necessary by any doubts in the mind of our
present Sovereign as to her duty if a Bill should pass through Parliament for " disestablishing " the Irish Church. The sug- gestion that such doubts exist is an obvious, though not a very loyal, party manoeuvre. But the question is interesting on its own merits, and I rejoice that it has been revived, because it is evident from the number of letters which have appeared on both sides in the Times and elsewhere that it is disquieting many persons, that they may resort to maxims of moat doubtful morality for the pur- pose of settling it. A rector and a vicar are disputing whether the Queen's oath is an oath to God or to the nation ; some would make the oath a mere nullity, either as an appeal to God or as a security to the nation. It seems to me a most genuine appeal to God against all assumptions of Popes and priests to exercise a dominion over the Sovereign's conscience ; therefore, a great security to the nation. It seems to me a solemn renunciation upon the Sovereign's part of arbitrary or absolute dominion; there- fore, such a security to the nation as no fantastical theory of popular sovereignty can ever be. It is a truly Protestant oath, which none should be more anxious to uphold in its integrity than those who think that Protestantism must be feeble in Ireland so long as it is supported by symbols of English conquest.
But the subject has another most important aspect. George III. identified conscience with private judgment. The consequence was not merely that he involved the nation in most foolish acts, but that his own sense of right and wrong became grievously perverted. Hu would not yield to the judgment of Mr. Pitt or Lord Castlereagh that the concession of the Roman Catholic claims was needful for the pacification of Ireland. lie had not the least scruple in allowing those ministers to practise any amount of corruption for the same purpose. Therefore, though I have called his conscience an honest one, and, I think, within certain limits it deserves the name, I must believe that it became soiled and debased by the arbitrary notions which he allowed to mix with it. The man who with his own purse bribed Englishmen to sell their consciences, who never could see the least harm in persuading Africans to sell their wives and children, must have laboured under a disease which affected more than his intellect. The lesson is an awful one. If we exalt our private judgmenta to the level of our consciences, instead of believing that we are often to surrender our private judgments for the sake of our consciences, shall we not in our own spheres be subject to his delusions ?—I
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