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The English Constitution

W >> Walter Bagehot >> The English Constitution




The civil wars of many years killed out the old councils (if I might
so say): that is, destroyed three parts of the greater nobility, who
were its most potent members, tired the small nobility and the
gentry, and overthrew the aristocratic organisation on which all
previous effectual resistance to the sovereign had been based.

The second period of the British Constitution begins with the
accession of the House of Tudor, and goes down to 1688; it is in
substance the history of the growth, development, and gradually
acquired supremacy of the new great council. I have no room and no
occasion to narrate again the familiar history of the many steps by
which the slavish Parliament of Henry VIII. grew into the murmuring
Parliament of Queen Elizabeth, the mutinous Parliament of James I.,
and the rebellious Parliament of Charles I. The steps were many, but
the energy was one--the growth of the English middle-class, using
that word in its most inclusive sense, and its animation under the
influence of Protestantism. No one, I think, can doubt that Lord
Macaulay is right in saying that political causes would not alone
have then provoked such a resistance to the sovereign unless
propelled by religious theory. Of course the English people went to
and fro from Catholicism to Protestantism, and from Protestantism to
Catholicism (not to mention that the Protestantism was of several
shades and sects), just as the first Tudor kings and queens wished.
But that was in the pre-Puritan era. The mass of Englishmen were in
an undecided state, just as Hooper tells us his father was--"Not
believing in Protestantism, yet not disinclined to it". Gradually,
however, a strong Evangelic spirit (as we should now speak) and a
still stronger anti-Papal spirit entered into the middle sort of
Englishmen, and added to that force, fibre, and substance which they
have never wanted, an ideal warmth and fervour which they have
almost always wanted. Hence the saying that Cromwell founded the
English Constitution. Of course, in seeming, Cromwell's work died
with him; his dynasty was rejected, his republic cast aside; but the
spirit which culminated in him never sank again, never ceased to be
a potent, though often a latent and volcanic force in the country.
Charles II. said that he would never go again on his travels for
anything or anybody; and he well knew that though the men whom he
met at Worcester might be dead, still the spirit which warmed them
was alive and young in others.

But the Cromwellian republic and the strict Puritan creed were
utterly hateful to most Englishmen. They were, if I may venture on
saying so, like the "Rouge" element in France and elsewhere--the
sole revolutionary force in the entire State, and were hated as
such. That force could do little of itself; indeed, its bare
appearance tended to frighten and alienate the moderate and dull as
well as the refined and reasoning classes. Alone it was impotent
against the solid clay of the English apathetic nature. But give
this fiery element a body of decent-looking earth; give it an excuse
for breaking out on an occasion, when the decent, the cultivated,
and aristocratic classes could join with it, and they would conquer
by means of it, and it could be disguised in their covering.

Such an excuse was found in 1688. James II., by incredible and
pertinacious folly, irritated not only the classes which had fought
AGAINST his father, but also those who had fought FOR his father. He
offended the Anglican classes as well as the Puritan classes; all
the Whig nobles, and half the Tory nobles, as well as the dissenting
bourgeois. The rule of Parliament was established by the concurrence
of the usual supporters of royalty with the usual opponents of it.
But the result was long weak. Our revolution has been called the
minimum of a revolution, because in law, at least, it only changed
the dynasty, but exactly on that account it was the greatest shock
to the common multitude, who see the dynasty but see nothing else.
The support of the main aristocracy held together the bulk of the
deferential classes, but it held them together imperfectly,
uneasily, and unwillingly. Huge masses of crude prejudice swayed
hither and thither for many years. If an able Stuart had with
credible sincerity professed Protestantism probably he might have
overturned the House of Hanover. So strong was inbred reverence for
hereditary right, that until the accession of George III. the
English Government was always subject to the unceasing attrition of
a competitive sovereign.

This was the result of what I insist on tediously, but what is most
necessary to insist on, for it is a cardinal particular in the whole
topic. Many of the English people--the higher and more educated
portion--had come to comprehend the nature of constitutional
government, but the mass did not comprehend it. They looked to the
sovereign as the Government, and to the sovereign only. These were
carried forward by the magic of the aristocracy and principally by
the influence of the great Whig families with their adjuncts.
Without that aid reason or liberty would never have held them.

Though the rule of Parliament was definitely established in 1688,
yet the mode of exercising that rule has since changed. At first
Parliament did not know how to exercise it; the organisation of
parties and the appointment of Cabinets by parties grew up in the
manner Macaulay has described so well. Up to the latest period the
sovereign was supposed, to a most mischievous extent, to interfere
in the choice of the persons to be Ministers. When George III.
finally became insane, in 1810, every one believed that George IV.,
on assuming power as Prince Regent, would turn out Mr. Perceval's
Government and empower Lord Grey or Lord Grenville, the Whig
leaders, to form another. The Tory Ministry was carrying on a
successful war--a war of existence--against Napoleon; but in the
people's minds, the necessity at such an occasion for an unchanged
Government did not outweigh the fancy that George IV. was a Whig.
And a Whig it is true he had been before the French Revolution, when
he lived an indescribable life in St. James's Street with Mr. Fox.
But Lord Grey and Lord Grenville were rigid men, and had no immoral
sort of influence. What liberalism of opinion the Regent ever had
was frightened out of him (as of other people) by the Reign of
Terror. He felt, according to the saying of another monarch, that
"he lived by being a royalist". It soon appeared that he was most
anxious to retain Mr. Perceval, and that he was most eager to
quarrel with the Whig Lords. As we all know, he kept the Ministry
whom he found in office; but that it should have been thought he
could then change them, is a significant example how exceedingly
modern our notions of the despotic action of Parliament in fact are.

By the steps of the struggle thus rudely mentioned (and by others
which I have no room to speak of, nor need I), the change which in
the Greek cities was effected both in appearance and in fact, has
been effected in England, though in reality only, and not in
outside. Here, too, the appendages of a monarchy have been converted
into the essence of a republic; only here, because of a more
numerous heterogeneous political population, it is needful to keep
the ancient show while we secretly interpolate the new reality.

This long and curious history has left its trace on almost every
part of our present political condition; its effects lie at the root
of many of our most important controversies; and because these
effects are not rightly perceived, many of these controversies are
misconceived.

One of the most curious peculiarities of the English people is its
dislike of the executive government. We are not in this respect "un
vrai peuple moderne," like the Americans. The Americans conceive of
the executive as one of their appointed agents; when it intervenes
in common life, it does so, they consider, in virtue of the mandate
of the sovereign people, and there is no invasion or dereliction of
freedom in that people interfering with itself. The French, the
Swiss, and all nations who breathe the full atmosphere of the
nineteenth century, think so too. The material necessities of this
age require a strong executive; a nation destitute of it cannot be
clean, or healthy, or vigorous, like a nation possessing it. By
definition, a nation calling itself free should have no jealousy of
the executive, for freedom means that the nation, the political part
of the nation, wields the executive. But our history has reversed
the English feeling: our freedom is the result of centuries of
resistance, more or less legal, or more or less illegal, more or
less audacious, or more or less timid, to the executive government.
We have, accordingly, inherited the traditions of conflict, and
preserve them in the fulness of victory. We look on State action,
not as our own action, but as alien action; as an imposed tyranny
from without, not as the consummated result of our own organised
wishes. I remember at the census of 1851 hearing a very sensible old
lady say that the "liberties of England were at an end"; if
Government might be thus inquisitorial, if they might ask who slept
in your house, or what your age was, what, she argued, might they
not ask and what might they not do?

The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority.
The introduction of effectual policemen was not liked; I know
people, old people, I admit, who to this day consider them an
infringement of freedom, and an imitation of the gendarmes of
France. If the original policemen had been started with the present
helmets, the result might have been dubious; there might have been a
cry of military tyranny, and the inbred insubordination of the
English people might have prevailed over the very modern love of
PERFECT peace and order. The old notion that the Government is an
extrinsic agency still rules our imaginations, though it is no
longer true, and though in calm and intellectual moments we well
know it is not. Nor is it merely our history which produces this
effect; we might get over that; but the results of that history co-
operate. Our double Government so acts: when we want to point the
antipathy to the executive, we refer to the jealousy of the Crown,
so deeply embedded in the very substance of constitutional
authority; so many people are loth to admit the Queen, in spite of
law and fact, to be the people's appointee and agent, that it is a
good rhetorical emphasis to speak of her prerogative as something
NON-popular, and therefore to be distrusted. By the very nature of
our government our executive cannot be liked and trusted as the
Swiss or the American is liked and trusted.

Out of the same history and the same results proceed our tolerance
of those "local authorities" which so puzzle many foreigners. In the
struggle with the Crown these local centres served as props and
fulcrums. In the early Parliaments it was the local bodies who sent
members to Parliament, the counties, and the boroughs; and in that
way, and because of THEIR free life, the Parliament was free too. If
active real bodies had not sent the representatives, they would have
been powerless. This is very much the reason why our old rights of
suffrage were so various; the Government let whatever people
happened to be the strongest in each town choose the members. They
applied to the electing bodies the test of "natural selection";
whatever set of people were locally strong enough to elect, did so.
Afterwards in the civil war, many of the corporations, like that of
London, were important bases of resistance. The case of London is
typical and remarkable. Probably, if there is any body more than
another which an educated Englishman nowadays regards with little
favour, it is the Corporation of London. He connects it with
hereditary abuses perfectly preserved, with large revenues
imperfectly accounted for, with a system which stops the principal
city government at an old archway, with the perpetuation of a
hundred detestable parishes, with the maintenance of a horde of
luxurious and useless bodies. For the want of all which makes Paris
nice and splendid we justly reproach the Corporation of London; for
the existence of much of what makes London mean and squalid we
justly reproach it too. Yet the Corporation of London was for
centuries a bulwark of English liberty. The conscious support of the
near and organised capital gave the Long Parliament a vigour and
vitality which they could have found nowhere else. Their leading
patriots took refuge in the City, and the nearest approach to an
English "sitting in permanence" is the committee at Guildhall, where
all members "that came were to have voices". Down to George III.'s
time the City was a useful centre of popular judgment. Here, as
elsewhere, we have built into our polity pieces of the scaffolding
by which it was erected.

De Tocqueville indeed used to maintain that in this matter the
English were not merely historically excusable but likewise
politically judicious. He founded what may be called the culte of
corporations. And it was natural, that in France, where there is
scarcely any power of self-organisation in the people, where the
prefet must be asked upon every subject, and take the initiative in
every movement, a solitary thinker should be repelled from the
exaggerations of which he knew the evil, to the contrary
exaggeration of which he did not. But in a country like England
where business is in the air, where we can organise a vigilance
committee on every abuse and an executive committee for every
remedy--as a matter of political instruction, which was De
Tocqueville's point--we need not care how much power is delegated to
outlying bodies, and how much is kept for the central body. We have
had the instruction municipalities could give us: we have been
through all that. Now we are quite grown up, and can put away
childish things.

The same causes account for the innumerable anomalies of our polity.
I own that I do not entirely sympathise with the horror of these
anomalies which haunts some of our best critics. It is natural that
those who by special and admirable culture have come to look at all
things upon the artistic side, should start back from these queer
peculiarities. But it is natural also that persons used to analyse
political institutions should look at these anomalies with a little
tenderness and a little interest. They MAY have something to teach
us. Political philosophy is still more imperfect; it has been framed
from observations taken upon regular specimens of politics and
States; as to these its teaching is most valuable. But we must ever
remember that its data are imperfect. The lessons are good where its
primitive assumptions hold, but may be false where those assumptions
fail. A philosophical politician regards a political anomaly as a
scientific physician regards a rare disease--it is to him an
"interesting case". There may still be instruction here, though we
have worked out the lessons of common cases. I cannot, therefore,
join in the full cry against anomalies; in my judgment it may
quickly overrun the scent, and so miss what we should be glad to
find.

Subject to this saving remark, however, I not only admit, but
maintain, that our Constitution is full of curious oddities, which
are impeding and mischievous, and ought to be struck out. Our law
very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot
for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so
capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that
they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green
lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often
find the change half complete. Just so the lines of our Constitution
were framed in old eras of sparse population, few wants, and simple
habits; and we adhere in seeming to their shape, though civilisation
has come with its dangers, complications, and enjoyments. These
anomalies, in a hundred instances, mark the old boundaries of a
constitutional struggle. The casual line was traced according to the
strength of deceased combatants; succeeding generations fought
elsewhere; and the hesitating line of a half-drawn battle was left
to stand for a perpetual limit.

I do not count as an anomaly the existence of our double government,
with all its infinite accidents, though half the superficial
peculiarities that are often complained of arise out of it. The co-
existence of a Queen's seeming prerogative and a Downing Street's
real government is just suited to such a country as this, in such an
age as ours. [Footnote: So well is our real government concealed,
that if you tell a cabman to drive to "Downing Street," he most
likely will never have heard of it, and will not in the least know
where to take you. It is only a "disguised republic".]

[The End]

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