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V. He is, in right of his crown, the generalissimo of all sea or land forces whatever; he alone can levy troops, equip fleets, build fortresses, and fill all the posts in them.

VI. He is, with regard to foreign nations, the representative and the depository of all the power and collective majesty of the nation; he sends and receives ambassadors; he contracts alliances; and has the prerogative of declaring war, and of making peace, on whatever conditions he thinks proper.

VII. In fine, what seems to carry so many powers to the height, is, its being a fundamental maxim, that THE KING CAN DO NO WRONG: which does not signify, however, that the king has not the power of doing ill, or, as it was pretended by certain persons in former times, that every thing he did was lawful; but only that he is above the reach of all courts of law whatever, and that his person is sacred and inviolable.*

* The Revolution of 1688 settled the prerogatives of the Crown on the one hand, and the legislative powers of the House of Commons, although the levying of taxes has been clearly defined by previous Acts of Parliament, from the Magna Charta downwards. The fallacies of Sir Robert Filmer and the advocates of passive obedience and non-resistance were abolished for ever, and the authority of the Sovereign has since been founded on incontestable principles, and, as observed by Bolingbroke, in his IDEA OF A PATRIOT-KING,-" on fairer deductions from them than on the chimeras of madmen, or, what has been more common, the sophisms of knaves. A human right, that cannot be controverted, is preferable, surely, to a pretended divine right, which every man must believe implicitly, as few will do, or not believe at all. Princes usually commit crimes and errors from having received a false education, and from being influenced by unworthy favourites or unprincipled ministers. Louis XIV. was a remarkable example of acting upon an education which made him consider the kingdom and his subjects as his property. Charles I. was another. The good of the people ought to be the legitimate and true end of government. The greatest good which people can enjoy is liberty without anarchy. Rulers are appointed for this end; and a patriot-king will consider the constitution as two tables, containing the rule of his government and the measure of his subjects' obedience; or as one system composed of different parts and power, but all duly proportioned to one another, and conspiring by their harmony to the perfection of the whole. He will make one, and but one, distinction between his rights and those of his people he will look on his to be a trust and theirs a property. He will discern that he can have a right to no more than is trusted to him

CHAPTER VI.

THE BOUNDARIES WHICH THE CONSTITUTION HAS SET TO THE ROYAL PREROGATIVE.

IN reading the foregoing enumeration of the powers with which the laws of England have entrusted the king, we are

by the constitution; and that his people, who had an original right to the whole by the law of nature, can have the whole indefeasible right to any part; and really have such a right to that part which they have reserved to themselves. In fine, the constitution will be reverenced by him as the law of God and of man: the force of which binds the king as much as the meanest subject; and the reason of which binds much more. A patriot-king is the most powerful of all reformers; for he is himself a sort of standing miracle, so rarely seen and so little understood, that the sure effects of his appearance will be admiration and love in every honest breast, confusion and terror to every guilty conscience, but submission and resignation in all. A new people will seem to arise with a new king."-Ed.

But the same sagacious writer does not pass over the dangers to which a sovereign is exposed by the bad company which it is difficult to prevent appearing at Court, consisting of persons "too low to be much regarded, and too high to be quite neglected, -the lumber," as he calls them, "of every administration—the furniture of every Court. These gilt carved things are seldom answerable for more than the men on a chess-board, who are moved about at will, and on whom the conduct of the game is not to be charged. Some of these every prince must have about him. The pageantry of a Court requires that he should; and this pageantry, like many other despicable things, ought not to be laid aside. But as much sameness as there may appear in the characters of this sort of men, there is one distinction that will be made whenever a good prince succeeds to the throne after an iniquitous administration: the distinction I mean is, between those who have affected to dip themselves deeply in precedent iniquities, and those who have had the virtue to keep aloof from them, or the good luck not to be called to any share in them. And thus much for the first point, that of purging his Court."-Ed.

With regard to those men whom a sovereign should call to his administration, he says-" A good prince will no more choose ill men than a wise prince will choose fools. Deception in one case is more easy than in the other, because a knave may be an artful hypocrite, whereas a silly fellow can never impose himself for a man of sense. But in a country like ours," he observes, "an ordinary degree of discernment will prevent deceptions in making such appointments. The reason is, because every man here who stands forward enough in rank and reputation to be

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at a loss to reconcile them with the idea of a monarchy, which, we are told, is limited. The king not only unites in himself all the branches of the executive power; he not only disposes, without control, of the whole military power in the state; but he is, moreover, it seems, master of the law itself, since he calls up and dismisses, at his will, the legislative bodies. We find him, therefore, at first sight, invested with all the prerogatives that ever were claimed by the most absolute monarchs; and we are at a loss to find that liberty which the English seem so confident they possess.

But the representatives of the people still have,-and that is saying enough,-they still have in their hands, now that the constitution is fully established, the same powerful weapon which enabled their ancestors to establish it. It is still from their liberality alone that the king can obtain subsidies; and in these days, when everything is rated by pecuniary estimation,-when gold is become the great moving spring of affairs,-it may be safely affirmed, that he who depends on the will of other men, with regard to so important an article, is (whatever his power may be in other respects) in a state of real dependence.*

called to the councils of the king, must have given proof beforehand of his patriotism, as well as of his capacity, if he has either, sufficient to determine his general character.-Ed.

"Of all men, sovereigns should endeavour to avoid appointing cunning persons. Cunning," says Bolingbroke, "is left-handed or crooked wisdom. A cunning man knows how to pack the cards, a wise man how to play the game better. But a wise man could not play the game without knowing it; nor administer the affairs of the state without sagacity, knowledge, and judgment."-Ed.

Bolingbroke's advice is admirable:-"To espouse no party, but to govern like the common father of his people, is so essential to the character of a patriot-king, that he who does otherwise forfeits the title. It is the peculiar privilege and glory of this character, that princes who maintain it, and they alone, are so far from the necessity, that they are not exposed to the temptation of governing by a party, which must always end in the government of a faction; the faction of a prince if he has ability, the faction of his ministers if he has not; and either one way or other in the oppression of the people."-Idea of a Patriot King.-Ed. * This was not, in practice, the case when De Lolme wrote. The Commons were not by any means the representatives of the people,—twothirds were nominees; and the Commons voted all supplies demanded by the ministry. At an early period, when they impeached Lord Latimer in the reign of Edward III. for high treason, the Commons

F

This is the case of the king of England. He has, in that capacity, and without the grant of his people, scarcely any revenue. A few hereditary duties on the exportation of wool, which (since the establishment of manufactures) are become tacitly extinguished; a branch of the excise, which, under Charles the Second, was annexed to the Crown as an indemnification for the military services it gave up, and which under George the First, [Second] was fixed at seven thousand pounds; a duty of two shillings on every ton of wine imported; the wrecks of ships of which the owners remained unknown; whales and sturgeons thrown on the coast; swans swimming on public rivers, and a few other feudal relics, now compose the whole appropriated revenue of the king, and are all that remain of the ancient inheritance of the Crown.*

The king of England, therefore, has the prerogative of had acquired both authority and weight, which, although often in abeyance, especially under the Tudors, reappeared and afterwards exercised functions that were founded on the laws of Edward I. and which ought legally to have enabled them to have prevented all the arbitrary and unjust acts of the sovereigns from the reign of Edward III. to the reign of George III. But the kings and their ministers not only managed by corruption or by intimidation to make false elections, but they soon learned to make the knights of the shires and the burgesses subservient to the royal will.—Ed.

Down to the period of the reformation, and even until the abdication of James II., the kings arrogated and acted upon maxims of high royal prerogatives; the aristocracy stood on their vested hereditary privileges; the ecclesiastics claimed assumptions which defied all civil government, and all laws but their canon; and the Commons alone, who were not corrupted or falsely returned to Parliament, asserted the natural rights of civil and political justice, of intellectual and religious freedom.- Ed.

The people, for whom all government ought justly to be instituted, being less instructed, more numerous, but not united, and ignorant of their strength and numbers, were held in bondage and in poverty: they were in reality the slaves of the three other powers. In an age of superstition, the church, not christianity, was triumphant. When the king was feeble, the aristocracy were turbulent and in the ascendant; when the king was a man of strong will, clear sagacity, powerful intellect, and undoubted bravery, the monarchy was paramount.-Ed.

It is fortunate that the Crown has the power to hold the meetings of the Clergy in convocation in abeyance; for were they, in the present state of religious feeling, and considering the great number of her Majesty's subjects who are dissenters, to assemble as a legislative or working convocation, we believe their meetings in that capacity would be attended with dangerous consequences.-Ed.

*These hereditary and undignified revenues have all been abolished, and an ample civil list voted for life at the beginning of each reign.-Ed.

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commanding armies and equipping fleets; but without the concurrence of his parliament he cannot maintain them. He can bestow places and employments; but without his parliaments he cannot pay for the salaries attending on them. He can declare war; but without his parliament it is impossible for him to carry it on. In a word, the royal prerogative, destitute as it is of the power of imposing taxes, is like a vast body, which cannot of itself accomplish its motions: or, if you please, it is like a ship completely equipped, but from which the parliament can at pleasure draw off the water, and leave it aground, and also set it afloat again, by granting subsidies.

And indeed we see, that since the establishment of this right of the representatives of the people to grant or refuse subsidies to the crown, their other privileges have been continually increasing. Though these representatives were not, in the beginning, admitted into parliament but upon the most disadvantageous terms, yet they soon found means, by joining petitions to their money-bills, to have a share in framing those laws by which they were in future to be governed: and this method of proceeding, which at first was only tolerated by the king, they afterwards converted into an express right, by declaring, under Henry the Fourth, that they would not thenceforward come to any resolutions with regard to subsidies, before the king had given a precise answer to their petitions.

In subsequent times we see the Commons constantly successful, by their exertion of the same privileges, in their endeavours to lop off the despotic powers which still made a part of the regal prerogative. Whenever abuses of power had taken place, which they were seriously determined to correct, they made grievances and supplies (to use the expression of Sir Thomas Wentworth) go hand in hand together; which always produced the redress of them. And in general, when a bill, in consequence of its being judged by the Commons essential to the public welfare, has been joined by them to a money-bill, it has seldem failed to pass in that agreeable company.*

* In mentioning the forcible use which the Commons have at times made of their power of granting subsidies, by joining provisions of a