1 The Evolution of Constitutional Monarchy

A monarchy in the strict sense of the term is a state ruled by a single absolute hereditary ruler. A constitutional monarchy, however, is a state headed by a sovereign who rules according to the constitution. Such a constitution may be ‘written’ and codified, as indeed it is in the vast majority of the constitutional monarchies of the modern world. But Britain is one of only two constitutional monarchies—the other is New Zealand—where the constitution remains ‘unwritten’ and uncodified.

The term ‘constitutional monarchy’ seems first to have been used by a French writer, W. Dupré, who wrote in 1801 of ‘La monarchie constitutionnelle’ and ‘Un roi constitutionnel’. In a modern constitutional monarchy, the constitution, whether codified or not, permits the sovereign to perform only a very small number of public acts without the sanction of his or her ministers. Thus today a constitutional monarchy is also a limited monarchy: the constitution does not allow the sovereign actually to govern. Macaulay was one of the first, perhaps the very first, to notice this modern meaning of ‘constitutional monarchy’ when he wrote in 1855 in his History of England: ‘According to the pure idea of constitutional royalty, the prince reigns, and does not govern; and constitutional royalty, as it now exists in England, comes nearer than in any other country to the pure idea.’¹ A constitutional monarchy, then, can be defined as a state which is headed by a sovereign who reigns but does not rule.

Until the First World War, monarchy was by far the prevalent form of government. Indeed, in 1914 there were only three republican governments in Europe—France, Portugal (whose sovereign had been deposed as recently as 1910), and Switzerland. Not every monarchy was constitutional, however. Constitutional monarchy was restricted to Britain, Italy, the Scandinavian monarchies—Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—and the Low Countries—Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Of the three great continental empires, Austria–Hungary might just have been called a constitutional state, but Germany was doubtfully constitutional, and Tsarist Russia certainly was not; nor were the monarchies of the smaller states of Central Europe.

Today, by contrast, although the majority of states in Europe are republics, all of the monarchies which have survived are without doubt constitutional monarchies. Seven European states apart from Britain are monarchies—the three Scandinavian countries, the Low Countries, and Spain (where the monarchy was restored in 1975 after the death of General Franco). These states are amongst the most stable and prosperous in the modern world, and, with the exception of Spain, their history has been one of evolution rather than radical change. The survival of monarchy may indeed be said to symbolize this process of evolutionary change.

Of the European monarchies, the British is by far the oldest, except perhaps for that of Denmark. Queen Elizabeth can trace her descent back to Egbert, King of Wessex, in the ninth century; and, except for the brief Cromwellian interregnum between 1649 and 1660, the descendants of Egbert have reigned continuously in Britain for nearly twelve hundred years. It is indeed the remarkable dynastic continuity of the British monarchy which differentiates it from its continental counterparts, and forms perhaps its most striking characteristic.

From very early times, there were attempts to ensure that the sovereign governed, not solely according to his or her own wishes, but according to law. Succession to the throne required more than simply a claim based upon descent. In Anglo‐Saxon times it was accepted that a new sovereign had to belong to the royal house, but actual succession depended on the outcome of complex dynastic loyalties and feuds. The succession to the throne would be determined by the leading territorial magnates who comprised the Witan—the council of the sovereign's advisers—which had the power to depose a sovereign who proved inadequate. One can perhaps perceive, in these arrangements, the germs of contractual monarchy bound by statute, which the monarchy was to become after 1689. The sovereign was conceived of as being responsible to the community which the Witan was supposed to represent.

The early Norman kings went through a form of election or ‘recognition’ by the Witan's successor, the Commune Concilium. Obedience was granted in exchange for royal protection. Both William the Conqueror in his coronation oath and Henry I in his coronation charter in 1100 promised to observe the laws of Edward the Confessor, and their subjects in return promised to be faithful. In practice, however, the Norman monarchy tended to absolutism.²

The real beginning of the idea of constitutional monarchy dates from Magna Carta in 1215, for the terms of Magna Carta are more precise than the promises of the coronation oath. Magna Carta has been described indeed as a ‘first attempt to express in exact legal terms some of the leading ideas of constitutional government’.³ It consisted of a preamble and sixty‐three clauses, the most influential of which concern the freedom of the Church, the redress of feudal grievances concerning land, the need to consult before new taxation is imposed, regulation of the machinery of justice to ensure that justice is available to all, and the need to control the behaviour of royal officials. Perhaps the most important clause was clause 39, which declared that no one could be imprisoned without due process of law.⁴

The significance of Magna Carta, however, lies less in its specific provisions than in the two fundamental principles which it implied. The first principle required the sovereign to rule according to law and to make himself or herself accountable for the way in which he or she ruled. Magna Carta was indeed the first formal document to insist that the sovereign was as much under the rule of law as his or her subjects. The second fundamental principle was that the rights of individuals took precedence over the personal wishes of the sovereign.

Magna Carta not only implied fundamental principles. It also, for the first time, devised means to ensure that the principles were observed. The charter was drawn up by the barons and accepted by King John, at Runnymede, on 19 June 1215, under threat of civil war. Clause 61 of Magna Carta established a council of twenty‐five barons who were to ensure that the sovereign observed the charter, and the barons were to have the right of waging war on him if he did not. Magna Carta thus had something of the character of a treaty, under which the king would be granted allegiance by his subjects only in return for recognizing reciprocal duties towards them. Moreover, Magna Carta showed that there was a politically active class developing in England, based primarily upon the barons, but extending to the knights and the gentry. This was of considerable significance for the growth of representative government, and indeed parliament first met during the reign of Edward I (1272–1307).

So fundamental has Magna Carta been to the English self‐image that, even though hardly anything of it survives on the statute book, the great nineteenth‐century medieval historian Stubbs declared that ‘the whole of the constitutional history of England’ was but a ‘commentary’ upon it.⁵

Although the principles embodied in Magna Carta were in no way entrenched but declaratory, and were often to be repudiated in later centuries, they none the less echo through the ages, They were heard in the great constitutional battles of the seventeenth century, when Magna Carta was used by parliamentarians as a weapon against the divine‐right theory of the Stuart kings. The jurist Sir Edward Coke, for example, based the Petition of Right of 1628, which proposed further to limit the royal prerogative, upon the principles enshrined in Magna Carta, which was, he claimed, ‘declaratory of the principal grounds of the fundamental laws of England’. Magna Carta thus acquired a symbolic significance, enabling reformers to declare that it was they who were the genuine conservatives since they were acting in conformity with long‐established principles, and that it was the Stuart kings who, in seeking to undermine these principles, were the real radicals. This, of course, is a familiar motif in Britain's constitutional history.

The principles of Magna Carta were elaborated in the Glorious Revolution of 1689, an essentially pragmatic adjustment of the relationship between the sovereign and parliament. The Glorious Revolution achieved two things. First, it changed the line of succession to the throne, showing that parliament could alter the title to the throne in case of royal misgovernment. Secondly, through the Bill of Rights, the Glorious Revolution limited the power of the sovereign so as to prevent abuses of power such as had occurred during the reign of James II.

In contemporary usage, a Bill of Rights, as in the United States, is a code which seeks to limit the powers of government and parliament over the citizen. The Bill of Rights of 1689, however, was something quite different. It sought, not to limit the powers of government or parliament, but to limit the powers of the sovereign vis‐à‐vis parliament, and to establish a parliamentary monarchy.

In 1689 James II, having fled the country, was declared by a Convention Parliament, comprising the House of Commons and the House of Lords meeting together, to have ‘abdicated’. The Convention Parliament, breaking with the doctrine of perpetuity by which the sovereign never dies, declared the throne to be vacant, and invited William of Orange and Mary to fill it as joint sovereigns. But William and Mary's claim to the throne could not be based solely on hereditary right, nor ought it, in the Convention's view, to be based solely on the right of conquest. Instead, William and Mary became sovereigns primarily in virtue of an Act of Parliament, although it could be argued that, if James II had abdicated and if, as was alleged, his son was illegitimate, then Mary was the next in line. Nevertheless, it appeared to many that a deliberate breach had been made in the order of succession so as to bring the monarchy once again under the rule of law, as Magna Carta had implied nearly five centuries earlier.

On 12 February 1689 the Convention Parliament drew up a Declaration of Rights, which was presented to William and Mary at a formal ceremony at which they were jointly offered the Crown. The Crown was admittedly not offered on condition that William and Mary accepted the Declaration, but the Declaration nevertheless served to remind the new joint sovereigns of the basis under which they were to rule; and, after accepting the Crown in the Banqueting House on 13 February 1689, William promised to fulfil its provisions and ‘to preserve your religion, laws and liberties’.

The Bill of Rights is the final legislative form of the Declaration of Rights, and it received the Royal Assent on 16 December 1689.⁶ It regulated the succession by making the exclusion of James II and his heirs general and excluding all Catholics and those married to Catholics from the throne. The Coronation Oath Act of 1689 had already required the sovereign to swear to maintain the Protestant religion.

The Bill of Rights linked succession to the throne with the preservation of popular rights and liberties, to be secured through parliament. It severely limited the powers of the sovereign, preventing him or her from suspending laws he or she disagreed with, or executing laws or raising taxation without the consent of parliament. The sovereign was deprived of his or her power to interfere with elections. He or she was also forbidden to interfere with the legal system by establishing personal courts or initiating arbitrary prosecutions. The Stuart kings had used this power for political ends. In the case of Godden v. Hales, 1686, for example, James II had dismissed no less than six judges, together with the solicitor‐general, to secure the verdict that he wanted. The Act of Settlement in 1701 was to provide that judges should hold office during good behaviour, and could be dismissed only through an address by both Houses of Parliament. The effect of these fundamental provisions was to ensure that parliament was able to function without royal interference.

But the Bill of Rights also provided for guarantees against the abuses of power of which James II and previous Stuart kings had been accused. The sovereign was required to summon parliament regularly, a provision made more precise by the Triennial Act, 1694, requiring parliaments to be summoned at least once every three years. Freedom of speech and debate in parliament were guaranteed. The sovereign was forbidden to maintain a standing army in peacetime without the consent of parliament. Above all, the sovereign was made largely dependent on parliament for funds. During the reigns of the later Stuarts—Charles II and James II—between 1660 and 1688, the condition of the royal finances became such that sovereigns were able to avoid seeking parliamentary approval for their actions. Indeed, during the last four years of his reign, Charles II had been able to dispense with parliament altogether. Under the provisions of the Civil List Act of 1697, however, the sovereign was made dependent upon parliament for annual grants fixed at the beginning of each reign. During the reign of George II, revival of trade increased the value of the duties granted on the hereditary revenues which the sovereign had been allowed to retain and threatened to make the sovereign as independent of parliament as Charles II had been. But, in 1760, George III voluntarily surrendered the bulk of the hereditary revenues and was forced to go back to parliament on more than one occasion, under humiliating circumstances. Under the principle requiring ‘redress of grievances before supply’, the right of MPs to withhold funds if the sovereign failed to comply with their wishes was to be explicitly recognized. The Bill of Rights, therefore, ensured that the sovereign would come to be financially dependent upon parliament.⁷

The Act of Settlement of 1701 gave further definition to the idea of constitutional monarchy. It provided for the succession to the throne as being with Princess Sophia, Electress of Hanover, granddaughter of James I, and her descendants, provided that they were Protestant. In fact, Sophia predeceased Queen Anne in 1714 by some eight weeks, and the throne passed to Sophia's son, the Elector of Hanover, who became George I, King of Britain. The Act of Settlement confirmed that no Catholic nor anyone married to a Catholic could succeed to the throne. It also required the sovereign to be in communion with the Church of England and to swear to maintain it. After the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland in 1707, the sovereign was required to swear to maintain the presbyterian Church of Scotland also.

The Act of Settlement was a further breach with the hereditary right of succession. In terms of hereditary right, there were over fifty descendants of the Stuart kings who had a better claim to the throne than George I. The Act of Settlement thus reinforced the fundamental constitutional rule established when William and Mary came to the throne, that parliament had the right both to determine the succession to the throne and also the conditions under which the Crown was to be held.⁸

This process of constitutional evolution from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement established the principle that in Britain the sovereign owed his or her position not only to hereditary right, but also to the consent of parliament, and that it could be taken away if he or she misgoverned. The implication of the 1689 settlement, enshrined in the coronation oath in which the sovereign promised to govern according to ‘the statutes in parliament agreed upon, and the laws and customs of the same’, is that the sovereign rules through the consent of parliament. Allegiance to the sovereign is not unconditional but dependent upon the sovereign's keeping to the terms of this oath. Thus the Glorious Revolution not merely altered the succession; it also fundamentally changed the basis on which the sovereign reigned. The sovereign was deprived of the ability to attack the position or the independence of parliament in the constitution. Since 1689, indeed, parliament has met every year and the monarchy has owed its title to parliament. Thus the new settlement made the monarchy into a parliamentary, and therefore constitutional monarchy. From 1689 onwards, the supreme power in the state no longer lay with the sovereign alone, but with the sovereign in parliament. It is perhaps for this reason that one authority regards 1689 as ‘a watershed in the political and constitutional history of Eastern and Western Europe. It is the greatest in the sense of being the most effective, of the revolutions that occurred in early modern European history.’⁹ In the mid‐nineteenth century, Macaulay was to argue that ‘It is because we had a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth.’¹⁰

The ‘preserving revolution’ of the seventeenth century established the principle of the supremacy of parliament. But, under the eighteenth‐century ‘mixed constitution’, power came in practice to be shared between the sovereign and parliament. ‘Content with its practical assertion of the ultimate supremacy of Parliament, it left to the tact and self‐interest of subsequent monarchs the avoidance of any constitutional deadlocks that might arise from unwise insistence on the letter of the prerogative.’¹¹ The precise balance of power depended upon the political vicissitudes of the day.

The sovereign still retained wide powers which could be exercised without parliamentary approval. He or she retained, in particular, the right to appoint and dismiss ministers and to determine general policy. Indeed, until the accession of George I in 1714, it could still be said that the sovereign governed the country, even though required to govern through ministers.¹²

The powers which the sovereign retained enabled him or her to exercise considerable, and sometimes a determining influence on policy. But these powers had to be exercised within a framework of constitutional rules, which precluded arbitrary government. The sovereign's powers depended upon getting a responsible minister to defend him or her in parliament. Within this framework, sovereigns still sought to secure governments which could carry out their policies, but they had to achieve this through methods of political management. They could no longer interfere with elections, but they could seek to influence them. Indeed, George III, seeking to build up a party of his own, became ‘the first of the borough‐mongering, electioneering gentlemen of England’.¹³ Similarly, sovereigns could no longer ignore parliament, but they could seek to influence it. In the eighteenth century, they sought to manage parliament and elections through royal patronage, and parliamentary placemen, the ‘King's Friends’. Until 1784, indeed, there were generally around 200 such ‘King's Friends’ in the House of Commons who could be relied upon to support whichever ministers the king appointed.¹⁴

A further factor conducive to royal power was that government was far less dominated by legislation than it has come to be in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Governments in the eighteenth century existed primarily to govern rather than to legislate.¹⁵ As late as the 1830s, indeed, Lord Melbourne could tell the House of Lords that the making of laws was ‘only a subsidiary and incidental duty of Parliament’.¹⁶ Because legislation played a less important role in government than was later to be the case, George II, even more than George III, ‘frequently, and often with impunity,—ignored or overrode the advice of his ministers;—his was the dominant voice in the conduct of war and diplomacy’.¹⁷

But the Hanoverian kings, unlike their Stuart predecessors, had to operate through parliament. They had to persuade parliament. They could not, in the last resort, overcome it. It is this factor which distinguishes the constitutional monarchy in eighteenth‐century Britain from the personal monarchy in eighteenth‐century France before the revolution.¹⁸

During the period between the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and the Reform Act of 1832, the sovereign's powers were gradually diminished, despite a powerful rearguard action fought by George III; and by the time of the Reform Act, the sovereign's power to determine policy had effectively been reduced to influence. In the eighteenth century, anyone who sought to become a minister would benefit by enjoying the sovereign's support, but such support was becoming neither sufficient nor necessary. George II was unable to keep Walpole in office in 1742, nor Carteret in 1744. He succeeded admittedly in keeping the elder Pitt out of office for many years, and Pitt complained in 1754 that ‘The weight of the irremovable royal displeasure is too heavy for any man to move under . . . ’¹⁹ Yet, in 1756, the king was forced to accept him. Pitt certainly believed that, to remain in office, he needed royal support, which he did his best to cultivate. It was said, indeed, that he bowed so low in the closet that his hooked nose could be seen from behind his bowed legs.²⁰ The position of the prime minister, however, came gradually to rest not so much on royal support, as upon the support of the Commons; although, in the eighteenth century, ‘The longest and most stable administrations—those of Walpole, Pelham, North, and the Younger Pitt—were when the crown found a minister who could both serve its needs and command the Commons.’²¹

‘Ministers’, George II had complained as early as 1744, ‘are the kings in this country.’²² Yet, until the late eighteenth century, ministers were seen as no more than advisers to the sovereign. Their task was to proffer advice, and it was then for the sovereign to consider whether or not to accept that advice. Once the sovereign had made a decision, ministers were under a duty to comply, even if their advice had been rejected. During the first part of the reign of George III, from 1760 until 1783, a genuine constitutional conflict took place between this conception of the relationship between the king and his ministers, and the modern conception according to which the sovereign was required to accept the advice of ministers even if it was unpalatable. The conflict was resolved after the defeat of British troops at Yorktown in 1781 in the American War of Independence, when the king was compelled to accept the resignation of Lord North, and the appointment of the Marquess of Rockingham as his successor. Before accepting office, Rockingham in effect dictated terms to the king by insisting that he would no longer veto American independence. The king, who keenly felt ‘the indignity offered to His Person’, threatened abdication, but in the end gave way.²³

Royal power, however, had by no means come to an end. In 1783 George III was able to secure the rejection of the India Bill, a measure which sought to reform the East India Company. The Bill was passed comfortably in the Commons by 229 votes to 120, and would, in the normal course of events, have passed in the Lords also, since the government enjoyed a majority in the upper house. Shortly before the second reading in the Lords, however, the king allowed it to be said ‘that whoever voted for the India Bill was not only not his friend, but would be considered by him as an enemy’,²⁴ even though the Bill was one that was being proposed by the king's own cabinet. Knowledge of the king's disapproval of the Bill was sufficient for it to be defeated in the Lords.

In 1783 George III followed his campaign against the India Bill by dismissing his government, the Fox–North coalition, and appointing the younger Pitt prime minister. Pitt lacked a majority in the Commons, but the king used his powers of patronage to whittle away the majority against his new prime minister. Despite lacking majority support, Pitt ruled for three months, until the majority against him had been reduced to one. The king then dissolved parliament. The power of the king's name, together with the use of royal influence, which did not exclude bribery, were deployed in Pitt's favour, but there is no doubt, despite the criticisms of Burke, that the unbribed portion of the electorate overwhelmingly supported George III against the Fox–North Coalition. Pitt proved victorious in the general election of 1784 and this seemed an electoral vindication of the course that the king had taken.

Pitt was now to find himself in a stronger position vis‐à‐vis the king than previous prime ministers. George III could not dismiss him as he had dismissed his predecessors, for fear that he would have once more to seek a Whig prime minister and find himself compelled to return to his bête noire, Charles James Fox. The degree of independence which Pitt enjoyed has caused one authority to regard him as the first modern prime minister, since he was the first effective head of an administration who was not under the control of the sovereign.²⁵ Nevertheless, when, in 1785, Pitt sought parliamentary reform, it was the king who in effect stopped it, just as he was later to prevent Catholic Emancipation. Government during this period can best be understood, then, not by analogy with modern conceptions of cabinet government, but as a partnership between the king and a prime minister chosen by him, yet broadly accountable to parliament and to the electorate, both of which were nevertheless open to ‘influence’ by the king.

Even though the power of the sovereign was weakening after 1784, it still remained an important factor in political calculations. In 1801 George III declared that anyone who voted for Catholic Emancipation, a measure which the king believed would violate his coronation oath to maintain the Protestant religion, was his enemy. In consequence, Pitt insisted on resigning, although the king tried to dissuade him. In 1807 the king in effect dismissed Grenville's Ministry of All the Talents because it refused to accede to the royal request that it would never again propose Catholic Emancipation.

Once, however, it had become accepted that the prime minister owed his or her position, not only to royal favour but also to parliamentary approval, the sovereign's role came inevitably to be limited. The growth of ‘connection’ in the late eighteenth century—a ‘connection’ being a group of politicians acting together because animated by a similar set of ideas—circumscribed that influence even more severely. The one factor needed to transform the monarchy into a constitutional monarchy of the modern type was the development of a disciplined party system. In the eighteenth century the ties of ‘connection’ were far looser than those animating political parties today. But the idea of the legitimacy of opposition was gaining ground, although the phrase ‘His Majesty's Opposition’ was not actually employed until 1826; and when J. C. Hobhouse first used the words in the House of Commons in that year, it was to the accompaniment of laughter.²⁶ For much of the eighteenth century it had been regarded as factious to oppose the policy of the king's government; a responsible politician was one who assisted the king, rather than obstructing his advisers. The interests of the sovereign were those of the nation, and anyone who consistently opposed the sovereign rendered himself liable to the accusation of lack of patriotism.

During the eighteenth century, however, the working of monarchy came to be profoundly affected by the development of constitutional conventions, non‐legal rules which, nevertheless, acquire a binding force. Conventions play an important part in all constitutions, but are perhaps particularly important in Britain, since the constitution remains uncodified. It may be argued, indeed, that constitutional monarchy became a reality as much through the development of conventions in the eighteenth century as through the seventeenth‐century revolution and the enactments which followed it.

The most important of the conventions to develop in the eighteenth century was the principle of responsible government. From 1717 George I began to absent himself from cabinet meetings, his place being taken by the senior minister, who eventually came to be known as the prime minister. Since the time of George I, the sovereign has attended cabinet meetings only on a very small number of formal occasions, or to consider pardons, and since 1837 the sovereign has not attended cabinet at all. Thus the sovereign gradually came to play a smaller role in the general determination of policy.²⁷ A clear distinction was coming to be drawn between the head of state, the sovereign, and the head of government, the prime minister.

It followed that, if the sovereign was not primarily responsible for the determination of policy, he or she ought not to be held responsible for the outcome. As Palmerston was to put it in 1859:

The maxim of the British Constitution is that the Sovereign can do no wrong, but that does not mean that no wrong can be done by Royal authority; it means that if wrong be done, the public servant who advised the act, and not the Sovereign, must be held answerable for the wrongdoing.²⁸

This principle is one of fundamental importance to the development of constitutional monarchy.

It was indeed precisely this principle which was at issue in 1807 when George III demanded pledges from the Whigs, before he would admit them to office, that they would not again bring forward the Catholic question. The Whigs took the view that such a request amounted to a violation of their oath as privy counsellors and contradicted the principle of ministerial responsibility. They conceded that the king had the right to choose his ministers, but contended that he had no right to restrict the advice which they might offer him, for they would then not be wholly responsible for that advice, and this conflicted with the maxim that the king could do no wrong. Thus royal immunity depended upon ministerial responsibility. Ministers could not be called to account for advice if they had already pledged themselves to withhold advice in any area of policy. Although the king carried his point in 1807, never again did the sovereign successfully demand pledges from his ministers. Thus the power to determine policy could no longer be divided between the sovereign and the prime minister. The unrestricted power to give advice had to be in the hands of the government of the day; and the sovereign would have no option but to accept it.

In 1810 George III became incurably insane, and his son, the future George IV, became Prince Regent in the following year. The reign of George IV from 1820 to 1830 saw a further weakening of royal power. The growth of a strong Tory party, sustained by the House of Commons, which held office during most of the period of the Napoleonic wars, and then continuously until 1830, altered the conditions of political life and proved an important factor in further constraining the sovereign. George IV, unlike his father, was unable to prevent Catholic Emancipation, which was passed in 1829 against his wishes, and despite the king's threat of abdication. Earlier, in 1824, his only recourse against Canning's recognition of the South American republics of Buenos Aires, Mexico, and Colombia had been to refuse to read the royal speech announcing this step, pleading that he was suffering from gout and had lost his false teeth.²⁹

Thus the sovereign was no longer in a position to overcome a determined government. One of the factors causing this change was the rising power of the press and of pressure groups, themselves the product of a newly articulate public opinion which was shaping political issues so that the country was gradually coming to be divided between reformers and conservatives.³⁰ The passage of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 marks an important watershed in the evolution of constitutional monarchy, by which the sovereign was ceasing to be an independent power in the realm.

The conflict between reformers and conservatives came to a head in November 1830, when the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, declared in the House of Lords against parliamentary reform, a declaration which led to the defeat and resignation of his government. The fact that Wellington retained the support of his sovereign could not save him in the face of a hostile parliamentary majority and he was replaced by the Whig leader, Earl Grey. In April 1831 the new king was forced to grant a dissolution to Grey, so that the government could seek a mandate for parliamentary reform. In 1832 the king had to promise to create peers to overcome the opposition of the House of Lords to the Reform Bill, and he pressed Tory peers to abandon their hostility to the Bill, even though he was himself a very half‐hearted reformer.

The 1832 Reform Act seemed to have made parliament the indisputable victor in its conflict with the king. Yet the triumph of parliament was to be short lived, for parliament itself was, even before the reign of Queen Victoria had ended, ultimately to be deposed by a new force unleashed by the Reform Act—the modern organized political party, which, under a democratic system, becomes the final arbiter of who is to govern and what broad lines of policy that government must follow.

The Reform Act of 1832 had fundamental consequences for the evolution of constitutional monarchy. It both abolished rotten and nomination boroughs, and expanded and rationalized the franchise. It stimulated the growth of new electoral organization which could reach out to the new voters. It also stimulated the development of the modern party system.

During the nineteenth century, these two interconnected factors—the expansion of the franchise and the development of organized political parties—were to limit, not the power of the sovereign (that had already been almost wholly undermined before the Reform Act), but his or her influence. As long as parliament was composed of groups and factions, the sovereign could safely manœuvre amongst the various combinations. But, in expanding the electorate, the Reform Act put a premium on party organization and a united appeal to the country. Indeed, the first modern party programme was put forward within two years of the Act, in 1834, when Peel, in his Tamworth Manifesto, abjured reaction, accepted parliamentary reform, and committed the Conservatives to a policy of cautious and moderate progress.

With the rise of party, the sovereign's room for manœuvre came to be severely limited. If a government was supported by a majority in the Commons and that majority remained disciplined, the sovereign would be unable to find an alternative administration. Therefore, he or she had no alternative but to accept the advice of ministers, however unpalatable that might be.

Moreover, the expansion of the electorate and the development of electoral organization made it more difficult for the sovereign to influence general elections. This meant that the sovereign could no longer manage the House of Commons through a party of ‘the King's Friends’. As Sir Francis Burdett, a Radical MP, appreciated, ‘by the Reform Bill he [i.e. the king] cannot in reality appoint his Ministers, as whoever he appoints must go to large bodies of constituents to be approved’.³¹ A government appointed by the sovereign could no longer be sure of endorsement by the electorate. Moreover, since the sovereign was no longer able to influence the outcome of the election, a royal dissolution of parliament, such as George III had undertaken in 1784, would be a risky undertaking. By 1846, indeed, Queen Victoria told Lord John Russell that the sovereign's power of dissolution had become a weapon ‘which ought not to be used except in extreme cases and with a certainty of success. To use this instrument and be defeated is a thing most lowering to the Crown and hurtful to the country.’³²

Since the backing of the Crown was no longer a factor that would enable an administration to win a general election, the Reform Act drastically undermined the sovereign's power to appoint a prime minister, for, unless the prime minister enjoyed support in the country, he or she could not survive. This was shown in 1834, when William IV, following the precedent of 1783, dismissed the Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne, and appointed a Conservative, Peel, as premier, even though Peel was in a minority in the Commons. Peel took office with some reluctance, but in the belief that, if he did not, his sovereign would be humiliated. He obtained a dissolution of parliament, and, in the Tamworth Manifesto, he declared that he ‘had a firm belief that the people of this country will so far maintain the prerogative of the King, as to give the Ministers of his choice not an implicit confidence, but a fair trial’.³³

The Conservatives, however, despite nearly doubling their representation and becoming the largest single party in the House, were still unable to carry the Commons. But, because he believed that the king's government was entitled to a fair trial in the new House, Peel nevertheless sought to continue in office. The king took the eighteenth‐century view that ‘the confidence, the countenance, and the support of the Sovereign are indispensable to the existence and the maintenance of the Government, so long as the Constitution of the country is monarchical’. The change of administration in 1834 was, he insisted, ‘his own immediate and exclusive Act. He removed Ministers whom he considered no longer capable of carrying on the business of the country with advantage, and he called to his councils others whom he considered deserving of his confidence.’ Thus any censure on the government ‘would be a direct censure passed upon His Majesty's conduct, by a party avowing its determination to force itself upon him, and into his councils, in opposition to his declared principles and sentiments, his wishes and his conscience’. It was, he concluded, ‘impossible that he can give his confidence to men so introduced to his councils’.³⁴ In obedience to the view which held that it was factious to oppose the king's government, the Whigs refrained from any direct vote of censure upon Peel's administration. Since the existence of disciplined blocs in the House of Commons was a new phenomenon, it was not yet appreciated that a parliamentary majority rather than the support of the sovereign was the key factor necessary for a government to remain in office. Yet, by clinging to office without the support of the Commons, Peel laid himself open to the quip that he had every virtue except resignation; and in April 1835 he was finally forced to resign, having been defeated six times within six weeks. William IV was then compelled again to accept the Whigs, even though he had declared that he could have no confidence in a Whig government. This was the last occasion on which the sovereign dismissed a government.

When Queen Victoria acceded to the throne on the death of William IV in 1837, she, understandably, failed fully to appreciate the significance of the constitutional revolution that had almost wholly destroyed the power of the sovereign and was severly limiting its influence. She still hankered after the earlier world in which she had been brought up, in which the sovereign was an independent political power able to make and unmake ministries. She was not attuned—how could she have been—to the modern world in which the sovereign's role is one of constitutionally restricted influence rather than power. It is futile, however, to blame her for not acting by the precedents of George V, when the precedents she was familiar with were those of George III and George IV.

From the point of view of the constitutional historian, Queen Victoria's reign can be divided into four distinct phases. The first, which lasted from her accession in 1837 to her marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe‐Coburg Gotha in 1840, was characterized by excessive reliance, due to inexperience, on her prime minister, Lord Melbourne. The second phase, which lasted from 1840 to the Prince Consort's death in 1861, was almost a joint monarchy, and was the period of greatest royal influence during the Victorian age. The third phase, lasting from 1861 to around 1876, was characterized by a withdrawal from public life and the beginnings of a republican campaign against the monarchy. The fourth phase, lasting until the queen's death in 1901, was characterized by renewed attempts to exercise royal influence, and blatant partisanship against the Liberal governments of the period and their leader, W. E. Gladstone.

At the beginning of her reign, the queen still regarded the government as her government and its ministers as her ministers. Her first prime minister was the Whig Lord Melbourne, to whom she grew greatly attached. When he resigned in 1839, she was forced to send for Peel, the Conservative leader. But she continued to seek the advice of the outgoing prime minister during the abortive negotiations for the formation of a Conservative government, and this gave rise to the ‘Bedchamber incident’: Peel sought, as a mark of confidence, that the queen remove those Ladies of the Bedchamber who were related to the outgoing Whig ministers. This the queen refused to do. Peel accordingly refused to take office, and the Whigs once again took up the reins of government.

The ‘Bedchamber incident’ led to much personal unpopularity for the new queen. ‘It is’, declared Greville, ‘a high trial of our institutions when the caprice of a girl of nineteen can overturn a great ministerial combination.’³⁵ Following the incident, the royal toast was received in silence at Tory banquets, and, in her later years, the queen realized that she had made a mistake. Much later in her reign, she was to tell her private secretary that Melbourne had been ‘an excellent man, but too much of a party man and made me a party Queen’.³⁶

That Queen Victoria should have been ‘a party Queen’ accorded with the precedents governing the actions of the monarchy. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the political opinions of the sovereign were open and avowed. No one doubted, for example, that George III was a Tory; while, on the accession of Queen Victoria, Greville declared that ‘No one can deny that [it] has given the Whig Government an advantage over the Tories. Hitherto the Government have been working against the stream, inasmuch as they had the influence of the Crown dead against them’,³⁷ while the Duke of Wellington was to complain of ‘being governed by a Sovereign who is the head of an adverse party’.³⁸ All the same, the ‘Bedchamber incident’ was to prove the last occasion on which a sovereign was able to frustrate the formation of a government to which she was politically opposed.

In 1840 the queen married Prince Albert of Saxe‐Coburg Gotha, and this ended her emotional dependence upon Melbourne. Albert eased the transition to the Peel government after Melbourne was defeated in the general election of 1841. When Peel took office, the queen at first sought to continue her correspondence with her former prime minister, but Peel insisted that this come to an end, and Albert supported Peel. The queen soon came to accept Peel on the same terms as Melbourne. From 1841 until the formation of Disraeli's second government in 1874, she assumed a position of broad neutrality between the parties. The sovereign began to work with, rather than against, the grain of politics, concerned to co‐operate with and sustain her governments rather than frustrating or obstructing them.³⁹

The Times described the general election of 1841 as a ‘Triumph over the Influence of the Court.’⁴⁰ It was the first election which failed to return a government enjoying the favour of the sovereign. Before 1841, no prime minister appointed by the sovereign had lost a general election. The election of 1841, indeed, marked a fundamental change in the relationship between the sovereign and the electorate. Before that date, general elections had tended to follow changes of government, rather than preceding them, as is the case today. The purpose of a general election had been, as in 1784, to endorse the sovereign's choice of prime minister. It was, therefore, considered dishonourable for a prime minister to seek a dissolution unless there were a real prospect of increasing his strength, since the act of dissolution was considered the personal act of the sovereign and not of the government. Thus the Prince Consort's private secretary begged Melbourne in 1841 not to dissolve ‘unless he thought there was some prospect of increasing his strength, and begged him to remember that what was done would not be considered the act of the Government but that of himself and the Queen, and that he individually would be held as the responsible person.’⁴¹ Lord Brougham, a former lord chancellor, told Queen Victoria in 1841 that for a prime minister to seek a dissolution when the opposition might win would be ‘perverting to the mere purposes of party the exercise of by far the most eminent of the Royal prerogatives’; while ‘I pass over as wholly unworthy of notice the only other supposition which can with any decency be made . . . namely, that of a dissolution in entire ignorance of the national opinion and for the purpose of ascertaining to which side it inclines.’⁴² Nevertheless, defeated on a noconfidence motion in the Commons, Melbourne dissolved in 1841 instead of resigning, thus exposing Queen Victoria to what she thought of as a personal humiliation when Peel won the ensuing general election; and in 1846 the queen told Russell that ‘she strongly feels that she made a mistake in allowing the Dissolution in 1841; the result has been a majority returned against her of nearly one hundred votes’.⁴³ Although the Conservatives won a majority, Melbourne decided to meet parliament, but resigned after being defeated on an amendment to the address.

This, then, was a further stage in the weakening of the power of the sovereign. In 1782, when George III had been compelled to accept Rockingham, it was clear that a determined parliamentary majority could force upon the sovereign a prime minister who lacked royal confidence. In 1830, when William IV could not save Wellington, it had become clear that royal confidence was of no avail when a prime minister had lost the confidence of the Commons. In 1841 it had become apparent that the confidence of the sovereign was of little use if a prime minister did not also enjoy the confidence of the electorate. Peel did not understand this development. As a man who still retained many of the instincts of an eighteenth‐century man of government, he saw himself as the servant of the Crown, rather than of his party or of the people, a factor that led to his downfall in 1846 when he insisted upon repealing the Corn Laws in opposition to the instincts of the bulk of his party. Yet, had Peel's position been dependent upon royal confidence, he would never have become prime minister. It was the electorate and not his sovereign who had given him office in 1841.

The general election of 1841 did not, however, immediately set the pattern for the future. Between 1841 and 1868, every government fell, not through defeat at the polls, but through defeat in the Commons, defeat in a House which had been elected to support it. This was the result, not of royal intervention, but of the flux of parties which followed the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the split in the Conservative Party between the Peelites and the protectionists. The incipient two‐party system of 1841 was broken up and replaced by a group system incapable of creating a stable majority. The absence of such a stable majority, although in no way due to royal action, gave the sovereign some room for manœuvre, and it was indeed during the middle years of her reign between 1846 and 1868 that Queen Victoria's influence was probably at its greatest. Even during these years, however, her position was much weaker than George III's had been. Fox, having incurred the displeasure of George III in 1772, spent thirty‐two of the remaining thirty‐four years of his life in opposition. Palmerston, despite incurring the displeasure of the queen, who caused his resignation from the Foreign Office in 1851, nevertheless returned to government the following year, and was in power for all but two of the remaining fourteen years of his life, nine of them as prime minister.

Queen Victoria's non‐partisanship during the middle period of her reign was in large part the result of the new political configuration following the Reform Act. But it was also due to the influence of Prince Albert who became Prince Consort in 1857, having been known unofficially by that title for many years previously. After the birth of their first child, in November 1840, the prince was given a key to government boxes and he became accustomed to attend audiences with the queen. He became, in Lord John Russell's words, ‘an informal but potent member of all Cabinets.’⁴⁴

Prince Albert was as devoted a partisan of Peel as the queen had been of Melbourne. He went so far as publicly to indicate his support for Peel by attending the House of Commons in February 1846, the first night of the debate on the repeal of the Corn Laws, and was duly rebuked by Lord George Bentinck, leader of the Protectionist wing of the Conservatives. But, after Peel's defeat in 1846, the prince ceased to be a party man. Indeed, it may be argued that Prince Albert's fundamental contribution to the development of constitutional monarchy was to insist that the Crown remain above party. It was he who, together with Queen Victoria, first began to adopt the methods that characterize the modern working of constitutional monarchy.

‘The manner in which the Queen, in her own name, but under the influence of the Prince,’ the diarist Greville reported Lord Clarendon as saying on 19 October 1857, when Albert was made Prince Consort,

exercised her functions was exceedingly good, and well became her position, and was exceedingly useful. She held each minister to the discharge of his duty and his responsibility to her, and constantly desired to be furnished with accurate and detailed information about all important matters, keeping a record of all the reports that were made to her, and constantly recurring to them . . . and again weeks or months afterwards referring to these returns and desiring to have everything relating to them explained and accounted for and so throughout every department. This is what none of her predecessors ever did, and is in fact the act of Albert, who is to all intents and purposes King, only acting entirely in her name. All his views and notions are those of a constitutional sovereign, and he fulfils the duties of one, and at the same time makes the Crown an entity and discharges the functions which properly belong to the Sovereign.⁴⁵

Albert's ‘views and notions’ were not, however, despite Greville, ‘those of a constitutional sovereign’ in the modern sense. Albert took the view that the sovereign should remain detached from parties so as to be in a stronger position to influence policy, an influence which could be exerted all the more effectively because he or she was not partisan. He was considerably influenced in his view of the functions of monarchy by Baron Stockmar, who had previously been an adviser to the King of the Belgians. But Stockmar's grasp of the British Constitution was not wholly secure, being, in Gladstone's words, ‘only an English top‐dressing on a German soil’.⁴⁶

In fact, Stockmar sought, through Albert, to introduce an ideology of monarchy into British life. The monarchy for him was an estate of the realm, since, unlike politicians, who were inevitably partisan, the monarch alone represented the state. Stockmar persuaded Albert that the sovereign could be a kind of umpire or arbiter who could use his or her powers in an independent manner for the good of the nation. The sovereign, then, could be the guide to the nation. He or she should, therefore, be neutral between parties, but only because that would enable him or her to exert more influence upon legislation, and increase the influence of the monarchy. Albert sought to strengthen the monarchy as a political factor in the realm. The prince believed that the sovereign was, as it were, a permanent prime minister, to whom the temporary head of the cabinet was required to appeal. He thought that the sovereign had a right to preside at every meeting of the cabinet, and even that a sagacious sovereign should ‘take his share in the preparatory arrangements of party organisation’.

Nowhere [Albert declared], does the Constitution demand an indifference on the part of the sovereign to the march of political events . . . Why are princes alone to be denied the credit of having political opinions based upon an anxiety for the national interests and honour of their country and the welfare of mankind? Are they not more independently placed than any other politician in the State? Are their interests not most intimately bound up with those of their country? Is the sovereign not the natural guardian of the honour of his country, is he not necessarily a politician?⁴⁷

Albert believed that the monarchy's independent role was of particular importance in the field of foreign affairs, where he was a supporter of conservative and legitimist monarchies of the Continent against the liberal tendencies of the governments of the day. In 1843 Albert wrote to his cousin, Ferdinand, King of Portugal, without Peel's knowledge, revealing that he disagreed with the policies being pursued by his prime minister. He was later to brief newspapers and to plant articles in them in favour of Austrian rule in Poland and in Italy, a position which conflicted with the standpoint of the Whig governments of Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston.

Albert's philosophy of monarchy was quite against the trends of the times, and could have led to serious difficulties with the queen's ministers. The main reason why the difficulties were so few is to be found in the flux of parties after 1846, which gave the queen and Prince Albert quite exceptional room for manœuvre, so that, after 1846, it became acceptable and even necessary for the sovereign to play an important role in the formation of governments. It was, in large part, through royal influence that the coalition government led by Lord Aberdeen came into existence in 1852, although this influence proved insufficient to maintain it in power after the disasters of the Crimean war. Royal influence was also to prove important in the formation of the next government in 1855, led by Palmerston, whose robust patriotism had partially overcome royal distrust, and it played its part also in the formation of Palmerston's second government in 1859.

It has been said that, in the late 1850s, ‘To discuss the influence of the crown is to discuss the influence of the Prince.’⁴⁸ The Prince Consort's influence was generally employed in the direction of conciliation, and his last political initiative, in 1861, was to cause Palmerston to modify a harsh diplomatic note to the Northern states in the American civil war, whose tone might otherwise have led to a breach of diplomatic relations.

It was because of the flux of parties after 1846, rather than the Prince Consort's philosophy of monarchy, that the constitutional functions of monarchy were carried out so effectively during the Prince Consort's lifetime. Bagehot, writing in 1865, was to declare that ‘it is only during the period of the present reign that in England the duties of a constitutional sovereign have ever been well performed’.⁴⁹ In 1858 Count Vitzthum, the Saxon Minister in London, summed up the role of the sovereign in the mid‐Victorian Constitution:

What is called the British Constitution is like a whist party à trois. The dummy is public opinion. The House of Commons has now for many years been holding this dummy. The Crown and the House of Lords have, therefore, been obliged to play against it . . . The House of Lords has lost many a trick. I must admit, however, that the Crown's hand has not been played so well for a long time as it has been of late years.⁵⁰

On the Prince Consort's death in December 1861, Disraeli told Lord Stanley that he

had undoubtedly a fixed determination to increase the personal power of the Crown: had he lived to add to his great industry and talent the weight which age and long experience would have given in dealing with statesmen of his own standing, he might have made himself almost as powerful as the Prime Minister of the day.⁵¹

Disraeli also declared that ‘If he had outlived some of our “old stagers”, he would have given us, while retaining all our constitutional guarantees, the blessings of absolute government.’⁵² What he may have meant by this delphic utterance was that the Prince Consort would have elevated the constitutional position of the sovereign, since, in Albert's view, only the sovereign could comprehend the true interests of his or her people and acquire a dispassionate view of the public good. It is unclear, however, how such a position would have proved compatible with the development of party government, and it was perhaps fortunate that the Prince Consort did not have to put his theories to the test in the late‐Victorian period when politics was coming to be dominated by organized political parties. Indeed, Albert's conception of monarchy could have caused constitutional as well as political difficulties for the sovereign's relations with her ministers. The constitution makes no provision for a joint monarchy, since it is only the sovereign and not her consort who, being required to act on advice, is protected by the principle of ministerial responsibility to parliament.

From the 1870s, indeed, Victoria sought to resurrect the Prince Consort's notion of the sovereign as an independent power in politics, adopting, however, a far more partisan position than Albert would ever have allowed himself. The main significance of the queen's reign from 1861, however, was the failure of the attempt to make the monarchy an independent power in politics, for the growth of organized parties pushed the sovereign, somewhat against her will, above party.

The period of party flux came to an end in 1868, when, for the second time—1841 having been the first—a prime minister came to be designated through a general election. But in 1868, by contrast with 1841, Disraeli, having been defeated by Gladstone, resigned without bothering to meet parliament, thus acknowledging that it was public opinion and not the House of Commons which made and unmade governments. Thus the century‐long conflict between the sovereign and parliament was finally resolved, not through the victory of either side to the conflict, but by the triumph of a new force, the force of public opinion making itself felt through party, a force which lay beyond the power of the sovereign to influence. It was now apparent that a government, even if it had the support of the House of Commons, had also to secure the support of the voters, and the sovereign could no longer influence the voters to return his or her preferred choice as prime minister. With public opinion now being the motive force of government, there was a fundamental change in the character of monarchy. The means by which the sovereign could exert influence came to change. It was not so much that the influence of the monarchy declined, but rather that it had to be exercised in a different manner, a manner that was both impartial and also private.

These developments were, quite understandably, hidden both from the queen and from most of her ministers, who continued to act as if the old style of monarchy remained in place. The queen herself reacted to the death of the Prince Consort by withdrawing almost completely from public life and in the 1860s she came to be known as the ‘Widow of Windsor’.

In the late 1860s and early 1870s there was a brief flurry of republicanism, a novel development in British politics. The Hanoverian monarchs had not been particularly respected, and yet, in the days before popular politics, there had been no organized movement against the monarchy. Moreover, republicanism amongst the workingclass Chartist movement in the 1830s and 1840s had been comparatively muted. Chartist leaders called on the sovereign to dismiss ministers, but they did not call for the removal of the monarchy, which was seen as something separate from and even above the reactionary politicians who temporarily served it.

The seclusion of the queen after 1861 was a primary cause of republicanism in Britain. But republicanism was becoming an international phenomenon. After the abdication of Emperor Napoleon III in France in 1870, ‘La Marseillaise’ was sung in Trafalgar Square, and speakers looked forward to a ‘Republic of England’. American influence was also strong amongst many on the Left. In 1871 a meeting of the London Republican Club was attended by 18,000 members, and the radical Charles Bradlaugh, later to achieve notoriety as the first avowed atheist to be returned to the Commons, published a republican pamphlet entitled ‘Impeachment of the House of Brunswick’. The cause was taken up by the aristocratic radical Sir Charles Dilke, who, in a speech at Newcastle in November 1871, became the first Member of Parliament to declare himself a republican. He was in fact descended from no less than three men who had condemned Charles I to death.⁵³ Dilke was supported by his friend, the radical mayor of Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain, who was to enter the Commons in 1876, and who told Dilke in 1871 that ‘The Republic must come, and at the rate at which we are moving, it will come in our generation.’⁵⁴

In November 1871, however, the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, was stricken with typhoid fever, and seemed, at one time, near to death. Upon his recovery, a thanksgiving service was held, in February 1872, at St Paul's, and this is generally held to mark the end of republican sentiment. In the following month, Dilke moved in the Commons a motion for an inquiry into the Civil List, but found himself supported by only two other MPs. The last republican conference was held at Birmingham in 1873, but Chamberlain did not come, and in 1874, as mayor, he received the Prince and Princess of Wales. In 1882 Dilke repudiated his early republicanism as ‘opinions of political infancy’; and, since that date, there has never been any significant popular republican movement in Britain. The British Left, whether radical or socialist, has in general been as monarchist as the Conservative Party; and those on the Left who held republican sentiments have recognized that to attack the monarchy would alienate popular support. In 1933 Harold Laski, the socialist intellectual, who had criticized the role of George V during the 1931 crisis, confessed that the Labour Party could not hope to abolish the monarchy, since it was too popular. The best it could hope for was to demand that the throne be ‘automatically neutral’.⁵⁵

How strong was the republican movement in the 1860s? The positivist Frederic Harrison argued that

there is a very wide and deep republican feeling more or less definite and conscious. In London and the great cities the bulk of the working‐classes are republican by conviction, unless where they are perfectly indifferent. There are a score of towns in the north and centre where the republican feeling is at fever‐heat . . . Our whole cast of action and of life is now so essentially republican, that to any thoughtful mind hereditary monarchy as a principle can present itself only as a conspiracy or mummery.⁵⁶

Yet, although it is impossible to gauge accurately the state of public opinion in Victorian times, it would be a mistake to deduce from the support given to leaders such as Bradlaugh and Dilke that the republican movement was a strong one. The objections of the public in the 1860s were perhaps not so much to monarchy as an institution but to the fact that they never saw the monarch. Such popular criticism as there was directed itself not to the issue of extravagance, which Dilke highlighted, as to the absence of ceremony and colour associated with monarchy. Lord Halifax was probably nearer to the truth than Frederic Harrison when, in August 1871, he told the queen's private secretary, Henry Ponsonby, that ‘the mass of the people expect a King or a Queen to look and play the part. They want to see a Crown and Sceptre and all that sort of thing. They want the gilding for their money.’⁵⁷ Paradoxically, the criticism was that there was too little monarchy, not too much. The monarchy, as both Bagehot and Disraeli were to appreciate, was becoming an emotional focus for the newly enfranchised masses. This meant that the ceremonial and symbolic functions were now part of its very essence. During her period of seclusion, the queen worked assiduously at her papers, and fulfilled all of her constitutional functions. But this mattered little to her subjects, many of whom, no doubt, were quite unaware of what these constitutional functions amounted to. What they missed was not the constitutional but the theatrical side of monarchy. ‘To be invisible’, wrote Bagehot, ‘is to be forgotten . . . To be a symbol, and an effective symbol, you must be vividly and often seen.’⁵⁸ So it was that ‘the Queen has done almost as much to injure the popularity of the monarchy by her long retirement from public life as the most unworthy of her predecessors did by his profligacy and frivolity’.⁵⁹

The final phase of Queen Victoria's reign was marked by a strong anti‐Liberal partisanship, which led her to undermine her Liberal governments and encourage her Conservative ones. Part of the reason for this partisanship was personal—the development of a close friendship with Disraeli and a bitter antagonism towards Gladstone. But the personal element in the queen's attitudes has probably been exaggerated. The queen was just as hostile to Gladstone's Liberal successor, Lord Rosebery, prime minister from 1894 to 1895, who was her own choice, as she had been to Gladstone; and she was as sympathetic to Lord Salisbury, Disraeli's successor as Conservative leader, as she had been to Disraeli himself.

Upon his appointment in 1870, the queen's private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, noticed the strongly anti‐Liberal orientation of the court. The queen's predilections towards the Conservatives were strengthened by Gladstone's approach, in opposition, to the Eastern Question in 1876. In attacking Disraeli's policy towards the Ottoman Empire, Gladstone was, in the queen's view, breaking the convention of bi‐partisanship in foreign policy and undermining the national interest. Gladstone's general hostility to imperialism was seen by the queen as opposition to the extension of her own rule, and a willingness to surrender territory over which she reigned. But the queen was shocked as much by the methods which Gladstone employed in his attack on Disraeli's government, as by the attack itself. Gladstone was the first political leader to take his case to the people by conducting a popular agitation in the country, something that had previously been undertaken only by radicals outside the magic circle of those likely to be called to office.

In 1880, after the Liberal victory in the general election, the queen did not call upon Gladstone to form a government, but upon Lord Hartington, the Liberal leader in the Commons.⁶⁰ This was technically correct, but ignored the crucial political fact that Gladstone was responsible for the Liberal victory and that no Liberal government could be formed without him at its head. In December 1879 Lord Hartington had declared that ‘There is not room for argument about the proposition that the man who leads the Liberal Party out of doors ought to lead it in Parliament. It is only fair to the Queen, to the country, to the party, that this should be acknowledged at once.’⁶¹ It was understandable, however, that Queen Victoria should be slow to understand that the expansion of the franchise meant that what happened outside parliament was coming to determine what happened inside the Palace of Westminster and that the political centre of gravity was coming to be moved away from parliament to the platform. The growth of party was coming to deprive the sovereign of the power to choose the prime minister. This power would now be exercised by the party itself, as it was for the first time in 1880.

During Gladstone's second ministry, the queen lost no opportunity of harassing or obstructing her government, and when, in 1885, Gladstone declared for Home Rule, a policy which the queen believed would lead to the break‐up of her kingdom, her hostility knew no bounds. She intrigued, behind Gladstone's back, with Whig members of his party, to form a ‘patriotic’ coalition with the Conservatives which could defeat Home Rule and she informed opposition leaders of her conversations with her prime minister. By the end of her reign, the queen was, without question, a Conservative partisan.

Little of this was known, however, to the wider public, for there were only two occasions on which the queen's views were publicly announced. The first was in 1876, when Disraeli made it clear that it was the queen's wish that she be given the title Empress of India. The second was in 1885, after the murder of General Gordon in Khartoum, when the queen sent a telegram en clair to the government deploring its negligence. Gladstone's response to this telegram was to threaten resignation. If Gladstone had resigned, the queen's name would have been brought into politics and the monarchy threatened. But Gladstone, a strong monarchist, exercised considerable, perhaps superhuman restraint, in dealing with the queen's incessant harassment. It is due to him as much as to Disraeli that, until the publication of the third series of Queen Victoria's letters between 1930 and 1932, the general public had little idea of the extent of the queen's partisanship. So it was that, by the end of her reign, Victoria was seen by most of her subjects not as a fervent party politician but as Britain's first constitutional monarch.

Paradoxically, however, the final period of Queen Victoria's reign, when she was at her most partisan, was also the period when she exercised the least influence. One of her most important personal prerogatives—the right to appoint the prime minister—had come to be severely circumscribed, while another—the right to veto the appointment of individual cabinet ministers—had been entirely extinguished. The reign of Queen Victoria also saw the end of the sovereign's supposed special responsibility for foreign affairs and the army, these areas of policy coming to fall under the general rules of ministerial responsibility and advice.

William IV, when he appointed Melbourne and Peel as prime ministers in 1834, was also appointing the leaders of the Whig and Tory parties. In the same way, Queen Victoria would make Salisbury in 1885 and Rosebery in 1894 the leaders of their respective parties. But, as we have seen, the expansion of the electorate and the growth of organized parties severely limited the sovereign's scope in appointing a prime minister. When, in 1880, Victoria tried to avoid appointing Gladstone, she was rebuffed, since it was clear that the Liberals would serve under no one else. The Liberal Party, or rather Liberal voters, insisted upon Gladstone.

The selection of Rosebery in 1894 seems at first sight a counter‐example. The Queen did not consult the outgoing prime minister, Gladstone, who would have preferred Lord Spencer to have succeeded him, while the majority of Liberal MPs seem to have preferred Sir William Harcourt. The queen, however, was under no obligation to consult Gladstone, who was resigning because he had been repudiated by his cabinet on the issue of a reduction in naval expenditure. Gladstone had thus lost the authority which gave him the right to be consulted; and in any case Lord Spencer later declared that he would not have accepted appointment as premier. As for Harcourt, Liberal cabinet ministers would probably not have served under him, since they regarded him as an impossible colleague. Harcourt's biographer himself admits that ‘Lord Rosebery was already emerging as the choice of the Cabinet’.⁶² Had the Liberals seriously wished to serve under someone other than Rosebery, they could have acted as they undoubtedly would have done in 1880 had Hartington been nominated for the premiership; they could have refused to serve. In fact, however, the majority of the Liberal cabinet in 1894 seems definitely to have preferred Rosebery. Thus, ‘the Queen was working with the grain of politics when she sent for Rosebery. She was exercising a casting vote rather than expressing a purely personal preference.’⁶³

So, from having a fairly wide choice, the power of the sovereign in appointing a prime minister was coming to be severely restricted since the queen was required to choose the person who was most acceptable to the cabinet and whom the governing party also would accept. It was perhaps only a logical consequence that, rather than relying upon the sovereign to judge, perhaps inaccurately, the state of opinion, the parties would themselves elect their leader, so almost totally depriving the sovereign of the prerogative of choosing the prime minister.

During the latter part of Victoria's reign, the sovereign also lost the power to choose or to veto ministerial appointments against the wish of a determined premier and a united cabinet. The most that the queen could do was to ensure that ministers whom she disliked, such as Chamberlain, in his radical phase, and Dilke, were not given offices that brought them into personal contact with her. The only ministerial appointment which she successfully vetoed in the latter part of her reign was that of Henry Labouchere—a radical who had insulted the royal family—in 1892. But Labouchere had little popular following, and Gladstone was perhaps not too distressed at his exclusion. After the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, no sovereign was able to veto the appointment of a minister.

A wholly new conception of the monarchy was gradually coming into being during the latter part of Queen Victoria's reign. In place of power and partisanship, the sovereign was coming to be seen as above the political battle, so that his or her influence would be used, not for partisan purposes, but in a neutral and detached way. This subtle change in the evolution of monarchy was not generally understood during the Victorian era. Some believed that the decline of monarchical power would render the monarchy a cipher, a mere machine for undertaking various state acts, ‘nothing but a mandarin figure which has to nod its head in assent, or shake it in denial, as his Minister pleases’.⁶⁴ In reality, however, during the Victorian era the monarchy, almost despite itself, was developing a new form of influence, one which relied for its efficacy on being exercised in private and in an entirely non‐partisan way. It was, paradoxically, Gladstone, so often the victim of Queen Victoria's harassment, who was the first to have understood that there had been a ‘subtle and silent, yet an almost entire transformation’ in the role of the sovereign which ‘may chiefly be perceived in a beneficial substitution of influence for power’; and that this influence conferred ‘much benefit on the country without in the smallest degree relieving the advisers of the Crown from their undivided responsibility’.⁶⁵

Queen Victoria was slow to appreciate, if she ever did, that the growth of party meant the inevitable limitation of her prerogative. In the future, it would only be when party lines became fluid, as in 1886, 1916, or 1931, or when it fell to the sovereign to choose a new prime minister in the absence of a party mechanism for selecting a leader, as in 1894 or 1923, or during a period of chronic constitutional crisis, such as occurred during the years 1910–14, that the sovereign would be able to exercise real power.

The monarchy, no longer encumbered by partisanship, could assume a new role as mediator between the parties during periods of acute political controversy, especially when this involved conflict between the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Victoria was the first sovereign to take this role seriously. In 1867 she sought to persuade the Conservatives not to oppose the Liberal Reform Bill, and then to persuade the Liberals to support the Conservative Bill. In 1869 and 1884–5 she mediated between the Liberal government and the Conservative opposition, dominant in the Lords, so as to prevent a clash between the two Houses. Edward VII was to attempt to mediate in the crises caused by the House of Lords' rejection of the Education Bill of 1906 and Lloyd George's ‘People's Budget’ of 1909. George V, in 1914, on Irish Home Rule, in 1915, over conscription, and in 1916 and 1931, when coalition governments were formed, held inter‐party conferences at Buckingham Palace in an attempt to resolve differences. This use of the sovereign's symbolic powers to mediate presupposed that the head of state was politically neutral and above party.

The new role of the sovereign, then, depended upon influence rather than power. But the extent of the influence which the sovereign could exert would depend upon his or her assiduity in studying and understanding government policy. In this respect, Queen Victoria set to her successors an example of massive conscientiousness. It was, she declared, her ‘great aim to follow the Prince's plan, which was to sign nothing until he had read it and made notes upon what he signed’.⁶⁶ It was not easy, however, for the sovereign to keep himself or herself informed before the formation of the Cabinet Secretariat in 1916, which instituted regular procedures for circulating the sovereign with cabinet papers. The extent to which sovereigns were informed before 1916 depended largely on the industry of the prime minister and ministers concerned with particular proposals. Before 1916 there was no published cabinet agenda, and the sovereign would not know what was going to be discussed unless the prime minister provided the information and ministers circulated the relevant memoranda. It was the custom, however, after every cabinet meeting, for the prime minister to send the sovereign a letter telling him or her what the cabinet had discussed and what decisions had been made. This was indeed the only record extant of cabinet decisions and, on occasion, the letter from the prime minister was perfunctory. An extreme example was the report which Sir Henry Campbell‐Bannerman, the Liberal prime minister, sent to Edward VII in November 1906, which stated merely that ‘the Cabinet met to‐day and was entirely engaged with arrangements of public business necessary for the conclusion of the session’.⁶⁷ In November 1907 Lord Knollys, the king's private secretary, wrote that Campbell‐Bannerman's perfunctory reports of cabinet meetings were ‘really making an absolute fool of the King’.⁶⁸ However, one reason why ministers took little trouble to keep Edward VII informed was that they knew that Edward VII was far less assiduous, and less interested in domestic politics, than Queen Victoria had been. For the sovereign to be able to exercise influence, therefore, the prime requirement was coming to be an unremitting dedication to work—work which could not be delegated.

As well as dedicating herself to work, Queen Victoria also proved herself a striking exemplar of the domestic virtues. This enabled the monarchy to become a moral force in Victorian society. ‘The exaltation of Royalty is possible’, Albert had told Stockmar in January 1846, ‘only through the personal character of the Sovereign.’⁶⁹

It was during Queen Victoria's reign that the monarchy first attained the prestige which it still enjoys today. Victoria's predecessors had been little respected and their private lives had been scandalous. Her three immediate predecessors, George III, George IV, and William IV, had been described as an imbecile, a profligate, and a buffoon. In 1830 The Times obituary of George IV declared that ‘there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased King’, and Sir Robert Peel declared that the monarchy had become so unpopular that only a miracle could save it.⁷⁰ The best The Times could say of William IV at his death in 1837 was that he had done no harm. ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the accession of the Princess Victoria reinstated the English monarchy in the affections of the people. George IV had made the Throne unpopular; William IV had restored its popularity, but not its dignity.’⁷¹ When Victoria ascended the throne, the status of the monarchy was low and its future uncertain. By the time of her death in 1901, it had reached a pinnacle of respect, and the institution of monarchy had assumed the basic form which it retains today.

Far from weakening the authority of the Crown, then, the transformation from power to influence served to increase it. The sovereign came to be seen as head of the nation as well as head of state.⁷² ‘I have always felt’, Lord Salisbury declared, ‘that when I knew what the Queen thought I knew pretty certainly what view her subjects would take, and especially the middle class of her subjects.’⁷³ Monarchy thus acquired a massive emotional significance in the new age of popular government. This fundamental change was first noticed by two men of genius, one the most brilliant journalist of the age, Walter Bagehot, the other its most imaginative politician, Benjamin Disraeli. In contrast to the Prince Consort's conception of a politically active monarchy, a presidential monarchy, they understood that the sovereign could prove a beneficent influence only in so far as he or she abstained entirely from seeking to rule. Only then could the head of the state become the head of the nation.

As Bagehot had foreseen, the magic of monarchy, its ‘dignified’ element, was dependent upon the withering‐away of its ‘efficient’ functions, of its prerogatives, of its power. David Cannadine has shown that many of the ceremonies which are thought of as being hallowed by time immemorial were in fact developed during the Victorian era. In his view they were consciously created to attach popular sentiments to the monarchy.⁷⁴ It would, however, be a mistake to regard this development as a conscious ‘invention of tradition’. Under a system of popular government, towards which Britain was evolving, popular attachment to the monarchy developed in a natural way and this attachment is not to be explained through metaphors of contrivance and invention, for it lies at a far deeper, and perhaps subconscious level. ‘The tendency of advanced civilisation’, Disraeli makes his philosopher hero, Sidonia, remark in his novel, Coningsby, published in 1845, ‘is in truth to pure Monarchy’.⁷⁵ Monarchy, Disraeli appreciated, far from being an institution of merely historic significance, was in fact a form of government profoundly attuned to a system of popular rule since it satisfied deep‐seated and widespread popular needs, needs perhaps imperfectly articulated and perhaps impossible to articulate with any degree of clarity, but none the less real for that. An élite system of government might not need the emotional sustenance which monarchy could provide. A popular system of government, however, undoubtedly did. It is not accidental, then, that Disraeli, the ideologist of party, the first politician to appreciate the centrality of party to parliamentary government—‘I say it is utterly impossible to carry on your Parliamentary Constitution except by political parties’⁷⁶—was also the ideologist of constitutional monarchy, appreciating that the development of party was changing the functions of monarchy while in no way lessening its importance. He it was who discerned the new relationships between Crown and Party, the new realities which, ‘once shaped, were soon to be mistaken for primordial elements of the British Constitution’.⁷⁷

This emotional attachment to monarchy was strengthened, as Disraeli had foreseen, by the growth of imperialism. At the beginning of Victoria's reign, the empire was in disarray. Canada was in a state of rebellion, while India was governed by a private company. The general belief was that the colonies were, in an era of free trade, merely an unwanted expense for the mother country, and that they would, in due course, detach themselves from her. ‘Colonies’, the French economist Turgot had declared in the eighteenth century, ‘are like fruits which cling to the tree only till they ripen.’⁷⁸ In consequence, however, of the Durham Report of 1839, Canada, and later the other colonies of settlement, acquired a system of responsible self‐government which was to prove perfectly compatible with retention of the imperial tie.

During the latter part of Victoria's reign, imperialism became a popular force, and the Royal Titles Act of 1876, by which the queen added the title ‘Empress of India’ to her existing title ‘Queen of Great Britain and Ireland’, linked the monarchy to this rising force. But it was the colonies of settlement which led the way in terms of constitutional evolution. This increased the importance of the monarchy as a personal link between the colonies and the ‘mother country’. The queen was the head of what seemed to many to be a ‘Greater Britain’, the title of a book published by Dilke, a radical imperialist, in 1868. The Crown was to become the emblem of empire, and Edward VII was the first king to be proclaimed Emperor of India and ruler ‘of the British Dominions beyond the seas’.⁷⁹ Writing to Edward VII in February 1901, shortly after the death of Queen Victoria, A. J. Balfour, the leader of the House of Commons, stressed this new function of monarchy.

The King [he wrote] ‘is no longer merely King of Great Britain and Ireland and of a few dependencies whose whole value consisted in ministering to the wealth and security of Great Britain and Ireland. He is now the greatest constitutional bond uniting together in a single Empire communities of free men separated by half the circumference of the Globe. All the patriotic sentiment which makes such an Empire possible centres in him or centres chiefly in him; and everything which emphasises his personality to our kinsmen across the seas must be a gain to the Monarchy and the Empire.⁸⁰

‘During the latter half of Queen Victoria's reign,’ Balfour declared in 1909, ‘and more than ever now, Great Britain means the British Empire. Our people overseas do not care a rush for Asquith and me. They hardly know our names. For them the symbol of the Empire is the King.’⁸¹ This new conception of the relationship of the sovereign to the colonies of settlement overseas was one which was to continue beyond the end of empire even to the present day, when the sovereign has become Head of the Commonwealth, the only link between fifty‐one otherwise quite disparate countries.

But how was it that constitutional monarchy took such strong root in Britain? The main developments in Victoria's reign which transformed the nature of the monarchy—the expansion of the franchise, the development of party, and of responsible government, both in Britain and in the colonies of settlement—were the product of the spread of liberal ideas. Victoria was profoundly sceptical of the spread of liberalism and downright hostile to democratic rule. ‘She cannot’, she told W. E. Forster in 1880, ‘and will not be the Queen of a democratic monarchy.’⁸² Yet, paradoxically, the prestige of the monarchy at the end of her reign stemmed from its association with parliamentary government, from the idea of an executive responsible to a parliament which was elected by popular vote. It was this which, at the end of the nineteenth century, distinguished Britain and the colonies of settlement from the great empires of the Continent—Austria‐Hungary, Germany, and Russia. Indeed, it was only because Britain already enjoyed liberal institutions that they could be exported to the colonies of settlement. Only after Britain itself enjoyed responsible government would it be possible to create a government elsewhere based on the same principle; and it was responsible government which made Dominion status possible.

The association of the monarchy with liberalism enhanced it as an institution, since at that time liberalism was seen as the ideology of human progress. It is a paradox, however, that the development of modern constitutional monarchy came about as a result of political forces with which Victoria herself barely sympathized. She devoted much of the latter part of her reign trying to stem the tide of that very parliamentary liberalism which was modernizing the monarchy. So it was that modern constitutional monarchy came about much against the will of the queen who was Britain's first constitutional monarch.⁸³

During the Victorian era, constitutional monarchy achieved its modern form. The sovereigns who succeeded Victoria all sought to reign according to the fundamental precepts of constitutional monarchy as laid down by Bagehot—for the writings of Bagehot were to attain canonical status. It is known, indeed, that George V, George VI, Elizabeth II, and the Prince of Wales have all studied The English Constitution. Since Victoria the changes in the role of the monarchy have been changes in degree and not in kind. There have been no fundamental alterations to the monarchical model as it had evolved by the end of Victoria's reign.

The remainder of this book, therefore, is devoted to describing and analysing this model and how it has actually operated in the country which gave birth to the notion of constitutional monarchy.