Part 9 (1/2)

Hence the bulk of the nation, ignored by the Commonwealth Government, and alienated by Puritanism, accepted quite amiably--indeed, with enthusiasm--the restoration of the monarchy on the return of Charles II., and was unmoved by the royalist reaction against Parliamentary Government that followed on the Restoration.

The House of Commons itself, when Monk and his army had gone over to the side of Charles, voted, in the Convention Parliament of 1660, ”that according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this Kingdom, the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons,” and Charles II. was received in London with uproarious enthusiasm.

The army was disbanded; a royalist House of Commons restored the Church of England and ordered general acceptance of its Prayer Book. Puritanism, driven from rule, could only remain in power in the heart and conscience of its adherents.

To the old Commonwealth man it might seem, in the reaction against Puritanism, and in the popularity of the King, that all that had been striven for in the civil war had been lost, in the same way as after the death of Simon of Montfort it might have appeared that ”the good cause” had perished with its great leader. In reality the House of Commons stood on stronger ground than ever, and was to show its strength when James II.

attempted to override its decisions. In the main the very forms of Parliamentary procedure were settled in the seventeenth century, to remain undisturbed till the nineteenth century. ”The Parliamentary procedure of 1844 was essentially the procedure on which the House of Commons conducted its business during the Long Parliament.”[63]

With Charles II. on the throne the absolutism of the Crown over Parliament pa.s.sed for ever from England. Cromwell had set up the supremacy of the army over the Commons: this, too, was gone, never to be restored.

Henceforth government was to be by King, Lords, and Commons; but sovereignty was to reside in Parliament. Not till a century later would democracy again be heard of, and its merits urged, as Lilburne had urged them under the Commonwealth.

CHAPTER V

CONSt.i.tUTIONAL GOVERNMENT--ARISTOCRACY TRIUMPHANT

GOVERNMENT BY ARISTOCRACY

For nearly two centuries--from 1660 to 1830--England was governed by an aristocracy of landowners. Charles II. kept the throne for twenty-five years, because he had wit enough to avoid an open collision with Parliament. James II. fled the country after three years--understanding no more than his father had understood that tyranny was not possible save by consent of Parliament or by military prowess. At the Restoration the royal prerogative was dead, and nothing in Charles II.'s reign tended to diminish the power of Parliament in favour of the throne. Charles was an astute monarch who did not wish to be sent on his travels again, and consequently took care not to outrage the nation by any attempt upon the liberties of Parliament. Only by the Tudor method of using Parliament as the instrument of the royal will could James II. have accomplished the const.i.tutional changes he had set his heart upon. In attempting to set up toleration for the Roman Catholic religion, and in openly appointing Roman Catholics to positions of importance, James II. set Parliament at defiance and ranged the forces of the Established Church against himself. The method was doomed to failure. ”None have gone about to break Parliaments but in the end Parliaments have broken them.”[64] In any case the notion of restoring political liberty to Catholics was a bold endeavour in 1685. Against the will of Parliament the project was folly. To overthrow the rights of corporations and of the Universities, and to attempt to bully the Church of England, after Elizabeth's fas.h.i.+on, at the very beginning of a pro-Catholic movement, was to provoke defeat.

Parliament decided that James II. had ”abdicated,” when, deserted by Churchill, he fled to France, and William and Mary came to the throne at the express invitation of Parliament. The Revolution completed the work of the Long Parliament by defining the limits of monarchy, and establis.h.i.+ng const.i.tutional government. It was not--this Revolution, of 1688--the first time Parliament had sanctioned the deposing of the King of England and the appointment of his successor,[65] but it was the last. Never again since the accession of William and Mary have the relations of the Crown and Parliament been strained to breaking point; never has the supremacy of Parliament been seriously threatened by the power of the throne.

The full effects of the Revolution of 1688 were seen in the course of the next fifty years. Aristocracy, then mainly Whig, was triumphant, and under its rule, while large measures of civil and religious liberty were pa.s.sed, the condition of the ma.s.s of labouring people was generally wretched in the extreme. The rule of the aristocracy saw England become a great power among the nations of the world, and the British Navy supreme over the navies of Europe; but it saw also an industrial population, untaught and uncared for, sink deeper and deeper into savagery and misery. For a time in the eighteenth century the farmer and the peasant were prosperous, but by the close of that century the small farmer was a ruined man, and with the labourer was carried by the industrial revolution into the town. The worst times for the English labourer in town and country since the Norman Conquest were the reign of Edward VI. and the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

The development of our political inst.i.tutions into their present form; the establishment of our Party system of government by Cabinet, and of the authority of the Prime Minister; the growth of the supreme power of the Commons, not only over the throne but over the Lords also: these were the work of the aristocracy of the eighteenth century, and were attained by steps so gradual as to be almost imperceptible. No idea of democracy guided the process; yet our modern democratic system is firm-rooted upon the principles and privileges of the Const.i.tution as thus established. Social misery deepened, without check from the politicians; and the most enlightened statesmen of the Whig regime were very far from our present conceptions of the duties and possibilities of Parliament.

CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

James II. was tumbled from the throne for his vain attempt to establish toleration for Catholics and Nonconformists without consent of Parliament.

Yet the Whig aristocracy which followed, while it did nothing for Catholics, laid broad principles of civil and religious liberty for democracy to build upon.[66]

The Declaration of Right, presented by Parliament to William and Mary on their arrival in London, was turned into the Bill of Rights, and pa.s.sed into law in 1689. It stands as the last of the great charters of political liberty, and states clearly both what is not permitted to the Crown, and what privileges are allowed to the people.

Under the Bill of Rights the King was denied the power of suspending or dispensing, of levying money, or maintaining a standing army without consent of Parliament. The people were a.s.sured of the right of the subject to pet.i.tion the Crown, and of the free election of representatives in Parliament, and of full and free debate in Parliament. Any profession of the Catholic religion, or marriage with a Catholic, disqualified from inheritance to or possession of the throne.

So there was an end to the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, and four hundred non-juring clergymen--including half-a-dozen bishops--of the Church of England were deprived of their ecclesiastical appointments for refusing to accept the accomplished fact, and acknowledge William III. as the lawful King of England. By making William King, to the exclusion of the children of James II., Parliament destroyed for all future time in England the belief in the sacred character of kings.h.i.+p. The King was henceforth a part of the const.i.tution, and came to the throne by authority of Parliament, on conditions laid down by Parliament.

William resented the decision of Parliament not to allow the Crown a revenue for life, but to vote an annual supply; but the decision was adhered to, and has remained in force ever since. The Mutiny Act, pa.s.sed the same year, placed the army under the control of Parliament, and the annual vote for military expenses has, in like manner, remained.

The Toleration Act (1689) gave Nonconformists a legal right to wors.h.i.+p in their own chapels, but expressly excluded Unitarians and Roman Catholics from this liberty. Life was made still harder for Roman Catholics in England by the Act of 1700, which forbade a Catholic priest, under penalty of imprisonment for life, to say ma.s.s, hear confessions, or exercise any clerical function, and denied the right of the Catholic laity to hold, buy or inherit property, or to have their children educated abroad. The objection to Roman Catholics was that their loyalty to the Pope was an allegiance to a ”foreign” ruler which prevented their being good citizens at home. Against this prejudice it was useless to point to what had been done by Englishmen for their country, when all the land was Catholic, and all accepted the supremacy of the Pope. It was not till 1778 that the first Catholic Relief Bill was carried, a Bill that ”shook the general prejudice against Catholics to the centre, and restored to them a thousand indescribable charities in the ordinary intercourse of social life which they had seldom experienced.”

The last Roman Catholic to die for conscience' sake was Oliver Plunket, Archbishop of Armagh, who was executed at Tyburn, when Charles II. was King, in 1681. After the Revolution, Nonconformists and Catholics were no longer hanged or tortured for declining the ministrations of the Established Church, but still were penalised in many lesser ways. But the spirit of the eighteenth century made for toleration, and the Whigs were as unostentatious in their own piety as they were indifferent to the piety of others.

The killing of ”witches,” however, went on in Scotland and in England long after toleration had been secured for Nonconformists. As late as 1712 a woman was executed for witchcraft in England.[67]

GROWTH OF CABINET RULE

William III. began with a mixed ministry of Whigs and Tories, which included men like Danby and G.o.dolphin, who had served under James II. But the fierce wrangling that went on over the war then being waged on the Continent was decidedly inconvenient, and by 1696 the Whigs had succeeded in driving all the Tories--who were against the war--out of office. Then for the first time a united ministry was in power, and from a Cabinet of men with common political opinions the next step was to secure that the Cabinet should represent the party with a majority in the House of Commons.