Charles declared himself satisfied of the expediency of the proposed measure, and resolved to carry it into effect. they were men of enormous private wealth only made the matter worse. The House of Commons is a checking body, and therefore it is desirable that it should, to a great extent, consist of men of independent fortune, who receive nothing and expect nothing from the government. But with executive boards the case is quite different. Their business is not to check, but to act. The very same things, therefore, which are the virtues of Parliaments, may be vices in Cabinets. We can hardly conceive a greater curse to the country than an administration, the members of which should be as perfectly independent of each other, and as little under the necessity of making mutual It is much to be regretted that Temple has left us no account of these conferences. Historians have, therefore, been left to form their own conjectures as to the object of this very extraordinary plan,-"this constitution," as Temple himself calls it. And we cannot say that any explanation which has yet been given seems to us quite satisfactory. Indeed, almost all the writers whom we have consulted appear to consider the change as merely a change of administration; and, so considering it, they generally applaud it. Mr. Courtenay, who has evidently examined this subject with more at-concessions, as the representatives of London tention than has often been bestowed upon it, seems to think Temple's scheme very strange, unintelligible, and absurd. It is with very great diffidence that we offer our own solution of what we have always thought one of the great riddles of English history. We are strongly inclined to suspect that the appointment of the new Privy Council was really a much more remarkable event than has generally been supposed; and that what Temple had in view was to effect, under colour of a change of administration, a permanent change in the constitution. and Devonshire in the House of Commons are, or ought to be. Now Temple's new Council was to contain fifteen members, who were to hold no offices, and the average amount of whose private estates was ten thousand pounds a year; an income which, in proportion to the wants of a man of rank of that period, was at least equal to thirty thousand a year in our own time. Was it to be expected that such men would gratuitously take on themselves the labour and responsibility of ministers, and the unpopularity which the best ministers must sometimes be prepared to brave? Could there be any doubt that an opposition would soon be formed within the cabinet itself, and that the consequence would be disunion, altercation, tardiness in operations, the divulging of secrets, every thing most alien from the nature of an executive council? ther escaped the notice of a man of Temple's sagacity and experience? One of two things appears to us to be certain,-either that his project has been misunderstood, or that his talents for public affairs have been overrated. We lean to the opinion that his project has been misunderstood. His new Council, as we have shown, would have been an exceedingly bad cabinet. The inference which we are inclined to draw is this, that he meant his Council to serve some other purpose than that of a mere cabinet. Barillon used four or five words which contain, we think, the key of the whole mystery. Mr. Courtenay calls them pithy words, but he does not, if we are right, apprehend their whole force. "Ce sont," said Barillon, The plan, considered as a plan for the formation of a cabinet, is so obviously inconvenient | that we cannot easily believe this to have been Temple's chief object. The number of the new Council alone would be a most serious objection. The largest cabinets of modern times have not, we believe, consisted of more than Is it possible to imagine that considerations fifteen members. Even this number has gene-so grave and so obvious should have altogerally been thought too large. The Marquess Wellesley, whose judgment, on a question of executive administration, is entitled to as much respect as that of any statesman that England ever produced, expressed, on a very important occasion, his conviction that even thirteen was an inconveniently large number. But in a cabinet of thirty members, what chance could there be of finding unity, secrecy, expedition, any of the qualities which such a body ought to possess? If indeed the members of such a cabinet were closely bound together by interest, if they all had a deep stake in the permanence of the administration, if the majority were dependent on a small number of leading men, the thirty might perhaps act as a smaller number would act, though more slowly, more" des états, non des consiels." awkwardly, and with more risk of improper In order clearly to understand what we imadisclosures. But the Council which Temple gine to have been Temple's views, we must proposed was so framed that if, instead of remember that the government of England was thirty members, it had contained only ten, it at that moment, and had been during nearly would still have teen the most unwieldy and eighty years, in a state of transition. A change, discordant cabinet that ever sat. One-half of not the less real nor the less extensive because the members were to be persons holding no disguised under ancient names and forms, was office,-persons who had no motive to compro- in constant progress. The theory of the conmise their opinions, or to take any share of the stitution-the fundamental laws which fix the responsibilty of an unpopular measure;-per-powers of the three branches of the legislature sons, therefore, who might be expected, as-underwent no material change between the often as there might be a crisis requiring the time of Elizabeth and the time of William III. most cordial co-operation, to draw off from the The most celebrated laws of the seventeenth rest, and to throw every difficulty in the way century on those subjects-the Petition of of the public business. The circumstance that Right-the Declaration of Right-are purely declaratory. They purport to be merely recitals of the old polity of England. They do * In the negotiations of 1812. at Whitehall as on the day when his father set up the royal standard at Nottingham. There was a short period of doting fondness, an hysterica passio of loyal repentance and love. But emotions of this sort are transitory; and the interests on which depends the progress of great societies are permanent. The transport of reconciliation was soon over, and the old struggle recommenced. The old struggle recommenced;-but not precisely after the old fashion. The sovereign was not, indeed, a man whom any common warning would have restrained from the grossest violations of law. But it was no common warning that he had received. All round him were the recent signs of the vengeance of an oppressed nation,-the fields on which the noblest blood of the island had been poured forth,-the castles shattered by the cannon of the parliamentary armies,—the hall where sat the stern tribunal to whose bar had been led, through lowering ranks of pikemen, the captive heir of a hundred kings,—the stately pilas. ters before which the great execution had been so fearlessly done in the face of heaven and earth. The restored prince, admonished by the fate of his father, never ventured to attack his Parliaments with open and arbitrary violence. It was at one time by means of the Parliament itself, at another time by means not establish free government as a salutary nised. The theory of the English constitution improvement, but claim it as an undoubted was the same on the day when the hand of and immemorial inheritance. Nevertheless, Charles II. was kissed by the kneeling Houses there can be no doubt that, during the period of which we speak, all the mutual relations of all the orders of the state did practically undergo an entire change. The letter of the law might be unaltered, but at the beginning of the seventeenth century the power of the crown was, in fact, decidedly predominant in the state; and at the end of that century the power of Parliament, and especially of the Lower House, had become, in fact, decidedly predominant. At the beginning of the century the sovereign perpetually violated, with little or no opposition, the clear privileges of Parliament. At the close of the century the Parliament had virtually drawn to itself just as much as it chose of the prerogative of the crown. The sovereign retained the shadow of that authority of which the Tudors had held the substance. He had a legislative veto which he never ventured to exercise,-a power of appointing ministers whom an address of the Commons could at any moment force him to discard, a power of declaring war, which, without parliamentary support, could not be carried on for a single day. The Houses of Parliament were now not merely legislative assemblies-not merely checking assemblies: they were great Councils of State, whose voice, when loudly and firmly raised, was decisive on | all questions of foreign and domestic policy. There was no part of the whole system of government with which they had not power to interfere by advice equivalent to command, and if they abstained from intermeddling with some department of the executive administration, they were withheld from doing so only by their own moderation, and by the confidence which they reposed in the ministers of the crown. There is perhaps no other instance in history of a change so complete in the real constitution of an empire, unaccompanied by any corresponding change in the theoretical constitution. The disguised transformation of the Roman commonwealth into a despotic monarchy, under the long administration of Augustus, is perhaps the nearest parallel. the courts of law, that he attempted to regain for the crown its old predominance. He began with great advantages. The Parliament of 1661 was called while the nation was still full of joy and tenderness. The great majority of the House of Commons were zealous royalists. All the means of influence which the patronage of the crown afforded were used without limit. Bribery was reduced to a system. The king, when he could spare money from his pleasures for nothing else, could spare it for purposes of corruption. While the defence of the coasts was neglected, while ships rotted, while arsenals lay empty, while turbulent crowds of unpaid seamen swarmed in the streets of the seaports, something could still be scraped toThis great alteration did not take place with-gether in the treasury for the members of the out strong and constant resistance on the part of the kings of the house of Stuart. Till 1642 that resistance was generally of an open, violent, and lawless nature. If the Commons refused supplies, the sovereign levied a "benevolence." If the Commons impeached a favourite minister, the sovereign threw the ief's of the Opposition into prison. Of these orts to keep down the Parliament by despotic force without the pretext of law, the last, the most celebrated, and the most wicked, was the attempt to seize the five members. That attempt was the signal for civil war, and was followed by eighteen years of blood and confusion. The days of trouble passed by, the exiles returned; the throne was again set up in its high place; the peerage and the hierarchy recovered their ancient splendour. The fundamental laws which had been recited in the Petition of Right were again solemnly recog House of Commons. The gold of France was largely employed for the same purpose. Yet it was found, as indeed might have been foreseen, that there is a natural limit to the effect which can be produced by means like these. There is one thing which the most corrupt senates are unwilling to sell, and that is the power which makes them worth buying. The same selfish motives which induce them to take a price for a particular vote, will induce them to oppose every measure of which the effect would be to lower the importance, and consequently the price, of their votes. About the income of their power, so to speak, they are quite ready to make bargains. But they are not easily persuaded to part with any fragment of the principal. It is curious to observe how, during the long continuance of this Parliament-the pensionary Parliament, as it was nicknamed by contemporaries-though every circumstance seemed to be favourable to the crown, the power of the crown was constantly growing power of the Commons. He was for sinking, and that of the Commons constantly allowing them their old authority, and not one rising. The meetings of the Houses were more atom more. He would never have claimed for frequent than in former reigns; their inter- the crown a right to levy taxes from the peoference was more harassing to the government ple, without the consent of Parliament. But than in former reigns; they had begun to make when the Parliament, in the first Dutch war, peace, to make war, to pull down, if they did most properly insisted on knowing how it was not set up, administrations. Already a new that the money which they had voted had proclass of statesmen had appeared, unheard of duced so little effect, and began to inquire before that time, but common ever since. Un-through what hands it had passed, and on der the Tudors and the earlier Stuarts, it was what services it had been expended, Clarendon generally by courtly arts or by official skill considered this as a monstrous innovation. He and knowledge that a politician raised himself told the king, as he himself says, "that he to power. From the time of Charles II. down could not be too indulgent in the defence of the to our own days a different species of talent, privileges of Parliament, and that he hoped he parliamentary talent, has been the most valu- would never violate any of them; but he deable of all the qualifications of an English sired him to be equally solicitous to prevent the statesman. It has stood in the place of all excesses in Parliament, and not to suffer them other acquirements. It has covered ignorance, to extend their jurisdiction to cases they have weakness, rashness, the most fatal maladminis- nothing to do with; and that to restrain them tration. A great negotiator is nothing when within their proper bounds and limits is as compared with a great debater; and a minis- necessary as it is to preserve them from being ter who can make a successful speech need invaded; and that this was such a new entrouble himself little about an unsuccessful croachment as had no bottom." This is a sinexpedition. This is the talent which has made gle instance. Others might easily be given. judges without law, and diplomatists without French-which has sent to the Admiralty men who did not know the stern of a ship from her bowsprit, and to the India Board men who did not know the difference between a rupee and a pagoda which made a foreign secretary of Mr. Pitt, who, as George II. said, had never opened Vattel--and which was very near making a chancellor of the exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not work a sum in long division. This was the sort of talent which raised Clifford from obscurity to the head of affairs. To this talent Danby-by birth a simple country gentleman-owed his white staff, his garter, and his dukedom. The encroachment of the power of the Parliament on the power of the crown resembled a fatality, or the operation of some great law of nature. The will of the individual on the throne or of the individuals in the two Houses seemed to go for nothing. The king might be eager to encroach, yet something constantly drove him back. The Parliament might be loyal, even servile, yet something constantly urged them forward. The bigotry, the strong passions, the haughty and disdainful temper, which made Clarendon's great abilities a source of almost unmixed evil to himself, and to the public, had no place in the, character of Temple. To Temple, however, as well as to Clarendon, the rapid change which was taking place in the real working of the constitution gave great disquiet; particularly as he had never sat in the English Parliament, and therefore regarded it with none of the predilection which men naturally feel for a body to which they belong, and for a theatre on which their own talents have been advantageously displayed. To wrest by force from the House of Com mons its newly acquired powers was impossible; nor was Temple a man to recommend such a stroke, even if it had been possible. But was it possible that the House of Commons might be induced to let those powers drop-that, as a great revolution had been effected without any change in the outward form of the government, so a great counter-revolution might be effected in the same mannerthat the crown and the Parliament might be placed in nearly the same relative position in which they had stood in the reign of Elizabeth, and this might be done without one sword drawn, without one execution, and with the general acquiescence of the nation? These things were done in the green tree. What then was likely to be done in the dry The Popish Plot and the general election came together, and found a people predisposed to the most violent excitation. The composition of the House of Commons was changed. The legislature was filled with men who leaned to The English people--it was probably thus Republicanism in politics, and to Presbyteri- that Temple argued-will not bear to be goanism in religion. They no sooner met than verned by the unchecked power of the sove they commenced a series of attacks on the go-reign, nor ought they to be so governed. At vernment, which, if successful, must have made them supreme in the state. present there is no check but the Parliament. The limits which separate the power of checkWhere was this to end? To us who have ing those who govern, from the power of goseen the solution, the question presents few verning, are not easily to be defined. The difficulties. But to a statesman of the age of Parliament, therefore, supported by the nation, Charles II.-to a statesman who wished, with-is rapidly drawing to itself all the powers of out depriving the Parliament of its privileges, to maintain the monarch in his old supremacy —it must have appeared very perplexing. Clarendon had, when minister, struggled, honestly perhaps, but, as was his wont, obstinately, proudly, and offensively, against the government. If it were possible to frame some other check on the power of the crown, some check which might be less galling to the sove reign than that by which he is now constantly tormented, and yet which might appear to the people to be a tolerable security against mal administration, Parliaments would probably meet, and their power, though still a part of the Thus we believe that Temple reasoned: for on this hypothesis his scheme is intelligible; and on any other hypothesis appears to us, as it does to Mr. Courtenay, exceedingly absurd and unmeaning. This Council was strictly what Barillon called it--an assembly of states. There are the representatives of all the great sections of the community-of the Church, of the Law, of the Peerage, of the Commons. The exclusion of one-half of the councillors from office under the crown-an exclusion which is quite absurd when we consider the Council merely as an executive board--becomes at once perfectly reasonable when we consider the Council as a body intended to restrain the crown, as well as to exercise the powers of the crown-to perform some of the functions of a Parliament, as well as the functions of a cabinet. We see, too, why Temple dwelt so much on the private wealth of the members-why he instituted a comparison between their united income and the united incomes of the members of the House of Commons. Such a parallel would have been idle in the case of a mere cabinet. It is extremely significant in the case of a body intended to supersede the House of Commons in some very important functions. Had this plan, with some modifications, been tried at an earlier period, in a more composed state of the public mind, and by a better sovereign, we are by no means certain that it would not have effected the purpose for which it was designed. The restraint imposed on the king by the Council of Thirty, whom he had himself chosen, would have been feeble indeed when compared with the restraint imposed by Parliament. But it would have been more constant. It would have acted every year, and all the year round; and before the Revolution the sessions of Parliament were short and the recesses long. The advice of the Council would probably have prevented any very monstrous and scandalous measures: and would conse followed such measures, and the salutary laws which are the fruits of such discontents. We believe, for example, that the second Dutch war would never have been approved by such a Council as that which Temple proposed. We are quite certain that the shutting up of the Exchequer would never even have been mentioned in such a Council. The people, pleased to think that Lord Russell, Lord Cavendish, and Mr. Powle, unplaced and unpensioned, were daily representing their grievances, and defending their rights in the royal presence, would not have pined quite so much for the meeting of Parliaments. The Parliament, when it met, would have found fewer and less glaring abuses to attack. There would have been less misgovernment and less reform. We should not have been cursed with the Cabal, or blessed with the Habeas Corpus Act. In the mean time, the Council would, unless some at least of its powers had been delegated to a smaller body, have been feeble, dilatory, divided, unfit for every thing which requires secrecy and despatch, and peculiarly unfit for the administration of war. The Revolution put an end, in a very different way, to the long contest between the king and the Parliament. From that time, the House of Commons has been predominant in the state. The cabinet has really been, from that time, a committee nominated by the crown out of the prevailing party in Parliament. Though the minority in the Commons are conWe can hardly help thinking that the notion stantly proposing to condemn executive meaof this Parliament on a small scale was sug-sures, or call for papers which may enable the gested to Temple by what he had himself seen House to sit in judgment on such measures, in the United Provinces. The original Assem- these propositions are scarcely ever carried: bly of the States-General consisted, as he tells and if a proposition of this kind is carried us, of above eight hundred persons. But this against the government, a change of Ministry great body was represented by a smaller coun- almost necessarily follows. Growing and cil of about thirty, which bore the name and struggling power always gives more annoy exercised the powers of the States-General. ance and is more unmanageable than estabAt las: the real States altogether ceased to lished power. The House of Commons gave infinitely more trouble to the ministers of It was a favourite exercise among the Greek Charles II. than to any minister of later times; sophists to write panegyrics on characters profor, in the time of Charles II. the House was verbial for depravity. One professor of rhetochecking ministers in whom it did not confide. ric sent to Socrates a panegyric on Busiris; Now that its ascendency is fully established, it and Isocrates himself wrote another which has either confides in ministers or turns them out. come down to us. It is, we presume, from an This is undoubtedly a far better state of things ambition of the same kind that some writers than that which Temple wished to introduce. have lately shown a disposition to eulogize The modern cabinet is a far better Executive Shaftesbury. But the attempt is vain. The Council than his. The worst House of Com- charges against him rest on evidence not to be mons that has sat since the Revolution was a invalidated by any arguments which human far more efficient check on misgovernment wit can devise; or by any information which than his fifteen independent councillors would may be found in old trunks and escrutoires. have been. Yet, every thing considered, it seems to us that his plan was the work of an observant, ingenious, and fertile mind. It is certain that, just before the Restoration, he declared to the regicides that he would be damned, body and soul, rather than suffer a hair of their heads to be hurt; and that, just after the Restoration, he was one of the judges who sentenced them to death. It is certain that he was a principal member of the most profligate administration ever known; and that he was afterwards a principal member of the most profligate Opposition ever known. It is certain that, in power, he did not scruple to violate the great fundamental principle of the constitution, in order to exalt the Catholics; and that, out of power, he did not scruple to violate every principle of justice, in order to destroy them. There were in that age honest men,-William Penn is an instance-who valued toleration so highly, that they would On this occasion, as on every occasion on which he came prominently forward, Temple had the rare good fortune to please the public as well as the sovereign. The general exultation was great when it was known that the old Council, made up of the most odious tools of power, was dismissed-that small interior committees, rendered odious by the recent memory of the Cabal, were to be disused—and | that the king would adopt no measure till it had been discussed and approved by a body, of which one half consisted of independent gentlemen and noblemen, and in which such persons as Russell, Cavendish, and Temple himself had seats. Town and country were in a ferment of joy. The bells were rung, bon-willingly have seen it established, even by an fires were lighted, and the acclamations of England were re-echoed by the Dutch, who considered the influence obtained by Temple as a certain omen of good for Europe. It is, indeed, much to the honour of his sagacity, that every one of his great measures should, in such times, have pleased every party which he had any interest in pleasing. This was the case with the Triple Alliance-with the Treaty which concluded the Second Dutch War-with the marriage of the Prince of Orange-and, finally, with the institution of this new Council. The only people who grumbled were those popular leaders of the House of Commons who were not among the thirty; and if our view of the measure be correct, they were precisely the people who had good reason to grumble. They were precisely the people whose activity and whose influence the new Council was intended to destroy. But there was very soon an end of the bright hopes and loud applauses with which the publication of this scheme had been hailed. The perfidious levity of the king and the ambition of the chiefs of parties produced the instant, entire, and irremediable failure of a plan which nothing but firmness, public spirit, and selfdenial on the part of all concerned in it could conduct to a happy issue. Even before the project was divulged, its author had already found reason to apprehend that it would fail. Considerable difficulty was experienced in framing the list of councillors. There were two men in particular about whom the king and Temple could not agree,—two men deeply tainted with the vices common to the English statesmen of that age, but unrivalled in talents, address, and influence. These were the Earl of Shaftesbury, and George Saville Viscount Halifax. He illegal exertion of the prerogative. There It is amusing to see the excuses that are made for him. We will give two specimens. It is acknowledged that he was one of the ministry who had made the alliance with France against Holland, and that this alliance was most pernicious. What, then, is the defence? Even this-that he betrayed his mas ter's counsels to the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, and tried to rouse all the Protestant powers of Germany to defend the States. Again, it is acknowledged that he was deeply |