of the creation of the cabinet was stated by Charles II. in 1679 in the declaration that "the great number of the Council has made it unfit for the secrecy and despatch that are necessary in many great affairs." The growing authority of the select circle of advisors was the object of repeated attacks, and the name "cabinet" (arising from the king's habit of receiving the members in a small private room, or cabinet, in the royal palace) was applied at first as a term of reproach. The device met, however, a genuine need, and by 1689 its perpetuation was assured. The larger Privy Council was continued in existence, and it exists to-day; but its powers became long ago merely nominal.[40]
37. Principles of Cabinet Government Established.—Under William III. the cabinet took on rapidly the character which it bears to-day. Failing in the attempt to govern with a cabinet including both Whigs and Tories, William, in 1693–1696, gathered about himself a body of advisers composed exclusively of Whigs, and the principle speedily became established for all time that a cabinet group must be made up of men who in respect to all important matters of state are in substantial agreement. Before the close of the eighteenth century there had been fixed definitely the conception of the cabinet as a body necessarily consisting (a) of members of Parliament (b) of the same political views (c) chosen from the party possessing a majority in the House of Commons (d) prosecuting a concerted policy (e) under a common responsibility to be signified by collective resignation in the event of parliamentary censure, and (f) acknowledging a common subordination to one chief minister.[41] During the eighteenth-century era of royal weakness the cabinet acquired a measure of independence by which it was enabled to become, for all practical purposes, the ruling authority of the realm; and, under the limitation of strict accountability to the House of Commons, it fulfills substantially that function to-day. Its members, as will appear, are at the same time the heads of the principal executive departments, the leaders in the legislative chambers, and the authors of very nearly the whole of governmental policy and conduct.[42]
38. Beginnings of Political Parties.—A fourth phase of governmental development within the period under survey is the rise of political parties and the fixing of the broader aspects of the present party system. In no nation to-day does party play a rôle of larger importance than in Great Britain. Unknown to the written portions of the constitution, and all but unknown to the ordinary law, party management and party operations are, none the less, of constant and fundamental importance in the actual conduct of government. The origins of political parties in England fall clearly within the seventeenth century. It was the judgment of Macaulay that the earliest of groups to which the designation of political parties can be applied were the Cavalier and Roundhead elements as aligned after the adoption of the Grand Remonstrance by the Long Parliament in 1641. The first groups, however, which may be thought of as essentially analogous to the political parties of the present day, possessing continuity, fixity of principles, and some degree of compactness of organization, were the Whigs and Tories of the era of Charles II. Dividing in the first instance upon the issue of the exclusion of James, these two elements, with the passage of time, assumed well-defined and fundamentally irreconcilable positions upon the essential public questions of the day. Broadly, the Whigs stood for toleration in religion and for parliamentary supremacy in government; the Tories for Anglicanism and the prerogative. And long after the Stuart monarchy was a thing of the past these two great parties kept up their struggles upon these and other issues. After an unsuccessful attempt to govern with the co-operation of both parties William III., as has been pointed out, fell back definitely upon the support of the Whigs. At the accession of Queen Anne, in 1702, however, the Whigs were turned out of office and the Tories (who already had had a taste of power in 1698–1701) were put in control. They retained office during the larger portion of Queen Anne's reign, but at the accession of George I. they were compelled to give place to their rivals, and the period 1714–1761 was one of unbroken Whig ascendancy. This was, of course, the period of the development of the cabinet system, and between the rise of that system and the growth of government by party there was an intimate and inevitable connection. By the close of the eighteenth century the rule had become inflexible that the cabinet should be composed of men who were in sympathy with the party at the time dominant in the House of Commons, and that the returning by the nation to the representative chamber of a majority adverse to the ruling ministry should be followed by the retirement of the ministry.[43]
III. The Scottish and Irish Unions
39. The Union with Scotland, 1707.—Finally may be mentioned the important changes in the governmental structure which arose from the Act of Union with Scotland, in 1707, and the Act of Union with Ireland, in 1801. Except during a brief portion of the period of the Protectorate, the legal relation of England and Wales, on the one side, and the kingdom of Scotland, on the other, was from 1603 to 1707 that simply of a personal union through the crown. Scotland had her own parliament, her own established church, her own laws, her own courts, her own army, and her own system of finance. By the Act of 1707 a union was established of a far more substantial sort. The two countries were erected into a single kingdom, known henceforth as Great Britain. The Scottish parliament was abolished and representation was accorded the Scottish nobility and people in the British parliament at Westminster. The quota of commoners was fixed at forty-five (thirty to be chosen by the counties and fifteen by the boroughs) and that of peers (to be elected by the entire body of Scottish peers at the beginning of each parliament) at sixteen. All laws respecting trade, excises, and customs were required to be uniform throughout the two countries, but the local laws of Scotland upon other subjects were continued in operation, subject to revision by the common parliament. The Scottish judicial system remained unchanged;[44] likewise the status of the established Presbyterian Church.[45]
40. The Union with Ireland, 1801.—The history of Ireland, in most of its phases, is that of a conquered territory, and until late in the eighteenth century the constitutional status of the country approximated, most of the time, that of a crown colony. During the Middle Ages the Common Law and the institutions of England were introduced in the settled portions of the island (the Pale), and a parliament of the English type began to be developed; but Poynings's Law of 1494, by requiring the assent of the English king and council for the convening of an Irish parliament, by enjoining that all bills considered by the Irish parliament must first have been considered by the English parliament, and by declaring all existing statutes of the English parliament to be binding upon Ireland, effectually stifled, until its repeal in 1782, Irish parliamentary development. From the middle of the seventeenth century Catholics were debarred from membership, and, from the early eighteenth, from voting at parliamentary elections. The repeal of Poynings's Law in 1782 and the removal of the Catholic disqualification ten years later bettered the situation, yet at the close of the eighteenth century Irish governmental arrangements were still very unsatisfactory. Parliament was independent in the making of laws, but not in the control of administration; and it was in no true sense a national and representative body. The policy urged by Pitt, namely, the establishment of a legislative union on the plan of that which already existed between England and Scotland, gradually impressed itself upon the members of Parliament as more feasible than any other.
An Act of Union creating the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland" was adopted by the Irish parliament in February, 1800, and by the British parliament five months later, and, January 1, 1801, it was put in operation. Under the terms of this measure the Irish parliament was abolished, and it was arranged that Ireland should be represented in the common parliament[46] by four spiritual lords and twenty-eight temporal peers, chosen by the Irish peerage for life, and by one hundred members (sixty-four sitting for counties, thirty-five for boroughs, and one for the University of Dublin) of the House of Commons. The Anglican Church of Ireland was amalgamated with the established Church of England, though, subsequently in 1869, it was disestablished and disendowed. The union with Ireland was in the nature of a contract, and while in a number of respects the conditions which were involved in it have been altered within the past hundred years, its fundamentals stand to-day unchanged. It is these fundamentals, especially the assimilation of Ireland with Great Britain for legislative purposes, which are the object of relentless attack on the part of the Home Rule and other nationalistic and reforming elements.[47]
