THE QUEEN AND THE CABINET.
THE remarkable letters of " Verax " on the relation of the Crown to the Cabinet,* which have attracted so much attention, raise a very large question. We have said as strongly as " Verax " says that the publication of the third volume of the Prince Consort " Life " during the Turco-Russian crisis was a grave and lamentable indiscretion. And we are prepared even to go further, and say that it may well be that the Queen has hardly been well advised in so frankly taking the public into confidence as to the large influence exerted by the Crown on the statesmen of the day, not only during the Crimean war, but for a considerable period before it began. The letters of " Verax " show how much jealousy, may be created by the discovery that the Crown, instead of being a mere social power and a cipher in the political Constitution, except in the critical period between the breakdown of one Cabinet, and the formation of another, as was commonly supposed, is really one of the main forces in the determination of political events, * The Croton and the Cabinet. Five Letters in the Biography of the Prince Consort. By " Versa." Reprinted from the Jfanenester Weekly Times. Manchester, Aloiander Ireland; London, Simpkin and Marshall.
and especially of those political events which belong to the de- partment of foreign policy. We cannot say how far the frank acknowledgment that on the course of all great affairs the Crown seeks to exert, and very frequently does exert, a great, not to say a predominant influence, will for the moment be welcome or unwelcome to the people of Great Britain,—very probably welcome ; but even so, the acknowledgement itself will most probably involve future danger. The Crown once fairly known to be a great factor in the determination of events, it will be very difficult for statesmen to protect its action from all question with that complete success which the leaders of all parties have hitherto achieved. What has been so openly told with regard to the past, will have its influence on the present and the future ; and once let the Crown be well understood to be ranged on any question on the opposite side to the people at large, and the result might not be without danger.
So far we go with " Verax." But few thinking men who study his remarkable letters will be able, we think, to accept his general drift,—which is, first, that it has been the tendency of this reign to give the Crown greater power over the policy of this country than it bad before, instead of less ; and next, that our whole effort ought to be to reduce the position of our Constitutional Monarch to that of a mere cipher in politics, who should register the will of her Parliamentary Cabinet for the time being, without murmurs and without remark. Now neither of these assertions seems to us even plausible. Admit the influence of the Crown between 1850 and 1860 to have been as great as any reasonable deductions from the" Life of the Prince Consort " would suggest, and yet we main- tain that that influence was incalculably less than George III.'s at any time during his reign when he was in health, and in all proba- bility decidedly less than either that of the Prince Regent, or George IV., or William IV., all of whom can be shown to have exerted the most steady pressure on the policy of their Ministers on points which seemed to them to touch their personal pledges, or to compromise the dignity of the Crown and the Empire. Nor can we hold that there would be any ad- vantage in reducing the monarch to a lay figure in politics, who is to be forbidden from arguing questions of policy with the Ministry of the day, and influencing them, so far as argument backed by high station will always influence human beings, on the questions of policy brought before Parliament, or which re- quire the grave consideration of the Administration. Of course a Constitutional Monarch must accept whatever measures a Parliamentary Cabinet decide on, whether they be palatable to the Monarch or not, unless there is plausible reason to believe that the nation would repudiate them, in which case an appeal to the nation is always constitutional. But the very fact that the Constitution gives the Monarch the right, in the extreme case, of dissolving rather than accepting advice which is believed to be unpalatable to the nation, shows that the Monarch is not intended to be a mere lay figure, but to exercise, at least in criti- cal moments, a real political judgment. And how is this to be denied on any system compatible with Monarchy at all ? The political use of the Monarchy is to fill up the gaps between successive Parliamentary Administrations, and prevent any- thing like chaos or imbecility in the interval when one policy has been condemned and another has not yet been accepted. In order that it may do this effectually, it must have the power of insisting on a fresh appeal to the people, if there be real Parlia- mentary anarchy,— as there sometimes is. And to deprive the Monarch of that great prerogative would be to make a Constitu- tional Monarchy not stronger, but at most important crises indefinitely weaker, than any Republic known to the civilised world. Englishmen prefer to entrust the steps necessary for regain- ing a strong Parliamentary Government to the head of a family identified for many generations with the welfare and grandeur of the Empire, to one who has learned by long experience how essen- tial to that welfare it is to carry the people with the policy of the Government. The various Republics say that they prefer to dele- gate such a duty to a man chosen for a term of years for this very purpose. But no Government in the world could afford to leave such a function unprovided for ; and yet, so far as we can under- stand the theory of " Verax," that is what he would aim at.
The truth is that nothing is more important than to separate in our minds between the annoyance with which we see an im- portant State function misused, and the hasty impulse to abolish it altogether. It may be quite true that once or twice in this reign the Crown has overstrained its constitutional powers, as it did, not once or twice, but hosts of times in other reigns. We do hold that the blow struck at Lord Palmerston in 1852, was of an unconstitutional nature. But it was the concur- rence of the Prime Minister (Lord John Russell) which rendered it effective, and had he tendered his resignation rather than de- sert his colleagues, it would never have been struck. Again, it may well be that the late Prince Consort overstrained the powers of the Crown during the period of the Crimean war when he de- luged the responsible Ministers, in the manner described by Mr. Theodore Martin, with memoranda so voluminous that they would fill, he says, fifty folio volumes. It seems to us the duty of the Crown to leave the initiative on all points of policy to the responsible Administration, but to criticise, in the interests of the Empire, whatever policy is proposed to the Crown, wherever that seems to the Monarch to be mistaken. It is not, however, for the Crown, but for the chosen representatives of the public interests, to propose what seems to them best. Indeed, it is far from de- sirable that an unscrupulous Minister, in some epoch more demo- cratic than our own, should have the chance of saying, what many of the Ministers during the Crimean war, if they had been unscrupulous, might have said,—that their policy had been rather accepted at the suggestion of the Crown, than proposed by them- selves. In every department of policy the power of the Crown, in such a country as ours, ought to be latent until action in the interest of the country is recommended, and to remain so unless that action appears to the Monarch to be injurious action, but in the latter case we do not think the Monarch's criticism ought to be withheld. It would be not only to degrade our monarchs in their own eyes,—which can never be desirable,—but to deprive our Parliamentary Ministers of the benefit of a vast deal of shrewd observation and useful experience, to shut the mouths of our monarchs on the subject of the policy recommended to the country by the Administration. Lord Beaconsfield has connected his name with the idea of the " emancipation of the Monarchy," and it is quite possible, when we look to the very ill-conceived and misleading Memorandum by which Baron Stockmar mis- advised the Throne in 1853 as to the true position of the monarch, that Lord Beaconsfield has used his influence to enforce Baron Stockmar's mistaken ideas, and to prompt the Queen to take far more of an initiative in politics than is either wise in itself, or in keeping with the sounder and earlier counsel of Lord Mel- bourne. But when it is intimated that we are on the edge of an abyss, into which the political interference of the Crown in public affairs is in danger of plunging us, it is not easy to forget that there never has been a reign in which the Crown has accepted Parliamentary Government so frankly and implicitly as in this. Would George HI. or William IV. have thought of accepting the Disestablishment of the Irish Church without a murmur? Would George IV. have accepted the abolition of Purchase in the Army without a struggle on behalf of his brother the Duke of York ? It is simply childish to say that the present Queen,—whatever may have been the errors of the Crown during her reign, —has not been far more passive in the hands of Parliament than any previous English monarch.
Nevertheless, " Verax " is so far right, that it is most important that the record of the Prince Consort's too active initiative on all subjects during the Crimean war, should not be passed by without a warningand a protest that this was a precedent in the wrong direc- tion. Often, indeed, the Prince's views were thoroughly sound and wise, as, for example, those of his Memorandum of 1853, at that time so unpopular in its drift, as to the true object of the peace which ought to follow war with Russia. We only wish the Prince Consort had kept that Memorandum more thoroughly in view in 1856, and we believe that he would certainly have it fully in view if he were living now. But unquestionably, whether his views were wise or unwise, he pressed them too much on the Adminis- tration,—more as if he were a responsible adviser, instead of the mere confidential counsellor of the person advised. And of course this error of his may be bearing fruit now. It may be that the Queen still thinks herself bound to urge a policy on her responsible advisers, instead of merely bound to criticise and discuss with them such policy as they present to her. If this be so, the letters of " Verax " would be very profitable reading, both for Lord Beaconsfield and for her Majesty. But not the less those letters press the principle of self-restraint too far. We do not want to turn our monarchs into lay-figures, afraid to think of politics lest they should be tempted to form judgments of their own, and, when they were formed, to express them. All we want is, that the Cabinet should feel that it is for them to de- cide on the policy of the country,—whether that policy be agree- able to the Monarch or not. But let them have the Monarch's views first, by all means, on all issues of that calibre of importance that it compels the Monarch to form views. It is essential for the nation that these views should be subordinated to the policy of
the Ministers, if they do not agree with that policy. It is neither essential nor desirable for the nation that they should not be con- fidentially expressed at all. Still they should not be needlessly volunteered ; they should never be offered as an initiative in any policy ; they should be extracted, as it were, in the way of involuntary criticism from one whose identification with the nation is so absolute that it would be unnatural were she not to criticise, in the first instance, whatever seems to her mistaken and dangerous. Of course, the criticism of a policy by the Monarch should never anticipate the advice to be given, and should always be subdued in tone,--the criticism of one who knows that she may have to accept what she criticises. But with these reserves, we do not believe that Great Britain wishes to extinguish the interest of her Monarchs in the policy of the country ; and yet it would be simply impossible to silence them wholly without extinguishing that interest.
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