THE POLITICAL POWER OF THE CROWN.
MR. THEODORE MARTIN'S "Life of the Prince Consort," of which two-thirds, we suppose, have now been given to the world, make it very clear that Mr. Bagehot in his very able book on the British Constitution did not under-rate in any degree the political power of a sagacious monarch. Not, indeed, that the late Prince Consort wielded anything like the whole of that power. Had he been King in his own right, instead of merely the husband of the Queen, he would have 047 excited a great deal less jealousy, and commanded a far more com- plete reverence than he did. Nor, indeed, we suspect, did he cling with the tenacity of a keen politician to the influence which he clearly had. The Prince Consort, though a thought- ful and accomplished statesman, was evidently not a very eager one. He did not care with his whole heart to get his own way in politics, though it were only by the use of the strictest constitutional rights. If we may judge by the published life, it was only in great crises that he took pains to place his views with any pressure before the Ministers, and he did not apparently continue that pressure after the initial resolve which shaped the policy had been taken. In his case this reserve was wise, as well as natural. There was among the old statesmen with whom he, as a young prince and a foreigner, had to deal, quite enough disposition to kick against the pricks of too persistent a pressure, to render it politic that he should economise his influence, and apply it freely only at the critical moments. But when we see how great his influ- ence actually was, in spite of the temperament which made his mind sit somewhat loose to life, in spite of the jealousies which were entertained towards him as a foreigner, and in spite of the great age and 'experience of the Ministers with whom he had chiefly to do, we may be quite sure that Mr. Bagehot is not exaggerating the constitutional influence which a King of first-rate ability might exert, without infringing in any degree the spirit of the Constitution, when he describes it as the sort of power which "a wise man would choose above any other,"—" where he would find the best intellectual im- pulses best stimulated, and the worst intellectual impulses best controlled." In our review of last week we quoted the remarkable passage-at-arms between the Prince and the late Lord Palmerston, wherein Lord Palmerston, aged sixty-six, — who had been in Parliament for at least thirteen years before the Prince Consort was even born into the world, and who could recall the foreign policy of the period when Napoleon had turned Europe upside down,—was defending himself with agitated voice and tears in his eyes from the charge of treating the Throne with too little defer- ence ; while the Prince, at less than half his age, and possess- ing much less than half his experience, and not even wielding the fall authority of a Sovereign, was calmly reminding him " of the innumerable complaints and remonstrances which the Queen had had to make these last years," and interrogating him point-blank as to what he would do if a particular and not improbable contingency arose, when the Queen was at Balmoral and Lord John Russell (then Prime Minister) in another part of Scotland. No passage could illustrate more decisively Mr. Bagehot's remark, that " it would be childish to suppose that a conference between a Minister and his Sovereign can ever be a conference of pure argument." And though there is no reason to think that Lord Palmer- ston conversed with the Prince Consort on his knees, as Lord Chatham is said to have done with George III.,—an attitude in which, as Mr. Bagehot truly says, no man could really argue, —it is quite clear that even the Prince Consort could keep Lord Palmerston in a mental condition in which the full use even of that bold and energetic Minister's political sense and sagacity was hardly at his own disposal. And Mr. Martin's book supplies us with plenty of illustra- tions of the political opportunities of influence which the Prince had, and freely used, both in relation to foreign politics, and less, but still frequently, in relation also to home politics. Take the very question on which the Prince dilated to Lord Palmerston with all the consciousness of power which a dis- pleased University tutor would exert over an unruly under- graduate,—the Schlewig-Holstein question. The Prince states that the Queen had objected to the Protocol about Schleswig, but that her opinion had been overruled ; that she had differed steadily from Lord Palmerston's policy, but that like a good constitutional monarch, she had acquiesced when the Cabinet insisted, and had surrendered her own judgment. What the Prince expected was ample opportunity for the Queen to hear beforehand of each change of policy adopted, and to discuss it with her Ministers, whether she were obliged ultimately to succumb or not. Probably be secured Lord Palmerston's iobedience to these instructions for the future, and we all I know what was the result. Within two or three years of the Prince's death, the long and complicated series of the Schleswig-Holstein disputes culminated in a great crisis, in which Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister, and Lord Russell, then Foreign Minister, were both in favour of the policy which was displeasing to the Crown, while the nation and Parliament were sufficiently divided to render the casting-vote of the Sovereign of the highest significance. Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell were over-ruled, and the general policy which the Crown had favoured and pressed for years on the Ministers triumphed at last. We do not mean, of course, that this would have been so if the House of Commons had been hearty in its support of Lord Palmerston. We all know that it was not so,—that to have pressed the policy might have involved an appeal to the country, or else a Ministerial crisis, the occasion at which the power of the Crown is notoriously the greatest. But it is not at all likely that this was the only reason for the collapse of a policy so long and earnestly maintained. In all probability, the steady pressure of royal opinion during the discussions of years had weakened the confidence of Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell in their own position. At the critical moment they shrank from asserting their own conviction in the face of a displeased monarch as well as a hesitating nation. Had the Crown been with them, we suspect the appeal to the nation would have been made, and very likely would have been answered as a similar appeal was answered seven years before, in relation to war with China.
Take, again, the Prince Consort's Memorandum on the policy of Lord Minto's mission to Italy in 1847. The Prince Consort did not approve of sending Lord Minto to stir up Italian feeling against Austria. What he wanted to do was to send Lord Minto to Vienna, to say that while we quite admitted the right of Austria to take, in her own States, all the precau- tions she chose, to protect her own institutions, we did not admit her right to prevent the Italian States from remodelling themselves in a manner more consistent with popular and national feeling, and that any attempt of Austria's to interfere with this recast of Italian institutions would not be regarded by -England with indifference. " This," wrote the Prince, " would be a bold course to pursue, and one pledging us to a certain degree to a future struggle for the independence of Italy, while the sending a mission to Rome commits us to nothing The bold declaration of England for the right of independent States to manage their own internal affairs according to their own views will make her most popular all over the Continent." This Memorandum, again, though its counsel was neutralised for the time by the unfortunate collapse of the revolutionary movement in Italy, really antici- pated the policy of England in 1860, when Lord Russell was so much attacked for interposing to discourage the French dictation of that Federal constitution for Italy which was so unwelcome to the Italians themselves. And we can hardly doubt that, on the publication of the concluding volume, we shall find that when Lord Malmesbury was our Foreign Minister in 1858-9, and the Tory predilection for an Austrian alliance was noto- rioas, these convictions of the Prince Consort's exercised a very great influence on the policy of the country. Again, the Memorandum on our Turkish policy in 1854 shows conclusively how valuable the influence of the Prince over the Tory Ministry of the present day would have been had he been still with us. Though his advice took little effect at the Peace in 1856, the evidence of its soundness which he could have produced now, and the fatal consequences of its neglect to which he could have pointed, would have weighed heavily in the scale against the braggadocio of Mr. Disraeli, and the obsolete propagandism and frigid helplessness of Lord Derby's hesitation. But it is not only, though it may be chiefly, in foreign policy that the power of the Crown is illustrated in this Life of the Prince Consort. Nothing can be more striking, for instance, than his success in initiating the great movement of administrative University reform,—a success accomplished almost as soon as attempted after he became Chan- cellor of the University of Cambridge. No doubt it wits not in his political capacity as representing the Crown, but rather in his capacity as a great social power, that he carried the great reforms in studies and tests at Cambridge. He was installed in July, 1847, and on October 81, 1848, the new scheme of studies, more or less suggested and advocated by the Chancellor, passed the Senate. And this exercise of the social influence of the Crown no doubt resulted in giving a great impulse to the political measure which reformed the Universi- ties a few years later ; indeed, we shall expect to find when the concluding part appears, that the Prince's influence was no mean element in the force which carried that great measure.
In a word, we would ask for no better illustration of Mr. Bagehot's comments on the position of a Constitutional King than Mr. Martin's two volumes. A Prince who wishes to be a despot, says Mr. Bagehot, cannot have weighed " what Butler calls the doubtfulness things are involved in." "The notion of a far-seeing and despotic statesman, who can lay down plans for ages yet unborn, is a fancy generated by the pride of the human intellect, to which facts give no support. The plans of Charlemagne died with him ; those of Richelieu were mis- taken ; those of Napoleon gigantesque and frantic. But a wise and great constitutional monarch attempts no such vanities. His career is not in the air ; he labours in the world of sober fact ; he deals with schemes which can be effected,— schemes which are desirable,—schemes which are worth the cost. He says to the Ministry his people send to him, to Ministry after Ministry, ' I think so-and-so ; do you see if there is anything in it. I have put down my reasons in a certain memorandum which I will give you. Pro- bably it does not exhaust the subject, but it suggests materials for your consideration.' By years of discussion with Ministry after Ministry, the best plans of the wisest king would certainly be adopted, and the inferior plans, the impracticable plans, rooted out and rejected. He could not be uselessly beyond his time, for he would have been obliged to convince the representatives, the characteristic men of his time. He would have the best means of proving that he was right on all new and strange matters, for he would have won to his side, probably after years of discussion, the chosen agents of the common-place world,—men who were where they were because they had pleased the men of the existing age, who would never be much disposed to new conceptions or profound thoughts. A sagacious and original constitutional monarch might go to his grave in peace, if any man could. He would know that his best laws were in harmony with his age ; that they suited the people who were to work them, the people who were to be benefitted by them. And he would have passed a happy life. He would have passed a life in which he could always get his arguments heard, in which he would always make those who had the responsibility of action think of them before they acted,—in which he would know that the schemes which he had set at work in the world were not the casual accidents of an individual idiosyncracy which are mostly much wrong, but the likeliest of all things to be right, —the ideas of one very intelligent man accepted and acted on by the ordinary intelligent many." Such a Prince was the Prince Consort. And the influeyice which he wielded would have been almost doubled in the hands of a King of ability as great as his, and a temperament of a more politically tenacious kind. Even as it was, his political influence was very great, and grew steadily up to the time of his death.
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