The Life of King Edward VII
_coup d'etat_; in the occasional exercise of the right of excluding
certain individuals from the Government--notably the case of Mr.
Labouchere a decade ago; in such direct exercise of influence as the
Queen's intervention in the matter of the Irish Church Disestablishment
Bill as related by the late Archbishop Tait. The Imperial influence of
the Sovereign has been shown in more than merely indirect ways. The
Queen's refusal to approve the first draft of the Royal Proclamation for
India in 1858 and her changes in the text were declared by Lord Canning
to have averted another insurrection. Her personal determination to send
the Prince of Wales to Canada in 1860 and her own visit to Ireland in
one of the last years of her reign were cases of actual initiative and
active policy. South Africa owed to the late Queen the several visits of
the Duke of Edinburgh and the exhibition of her well-known sympathy with
the views of Sir George Grey--who, had he been allowed a free hand,
would have consolidated and united those regions many years ago and
averted the recent disastrous struggle.
Australia owed to her the compliment of various visits from members of
the Royal family, the kindly personal treatment of its leaders and a
frequently expressed desire for its unity in one great and growing
nationality--British in allegiance and connection and power; Australian
in local authority, patriotism and development. India was indebted to
its Queen-Empress for continued sympathy and wise advice to its
Governors-General; for the phraseology in the Proclamation after the
Mutiny, already referred to, which rendered the new conditions of
allegiance comprehensible and satisfactory to the native mind; for the
important visit of the Prince of Wales to that country in 1877; and for
the support given to Lord Beaconfield's Imperial policy of asserting
England's place in the world, of purchasing the Suez Canal shares in
order to help in keeping the route to the East and of paving the way for
that acquisition of Egypt and the Soudan which has since made Cecil
Rhodes' dream of a great British-African empire a realizable
probability. The Colonies, as a whole, owed to Queen Victoria a
condition of government which made peaceful constitutional development
possible; which extinguished discontent and the elements or embers of
republicanism; which gradually eliminated the separative tendencies of
distance and slowly merged the Manchester school ideas of the past into
the Imperialism of the present; which made evolution rather than
revolution the guiding principle of British countries in the nineteenth
century.
THE MONARCHY IN HISTORY
How has the Crown become such an important factor in the modern
development of British peoples? The answer is not found altogether in
personal considerations nor even in those of loyalty to somewhat vague
and undefined principles of government. These considerations have had
great weight but so also has the traditional and actual power of the
Monarchy in moulding institutions and ideas during a thousand years of
history. To a much greater extent than is generally understood in these
democratic days has this latter influence been a factor. Through nearly
all British history the Sovereign has either represented the popular
instincts of the time or else led in the direction of extended territory
and power under the individual influence of royal valour or statecraft.
The history of England has not, of course, been confined to the
biography of its Kings or Queens, but it would be as absurd to trace
those annals without extended study of the rulers and their characters
as it would be to write the records without reference to the people and
popular progress. And the Monarchy has done much for the British Isles.
Its influence has effected their whole national life in war and in
peace, in religion and in morals, in literature and in art. The
individual achievements and actions of some of these rulers constitute
the very foundation stones in the structure of modern British power.
Others again have helped to build the walls of the national edifice
until the Sovereign at the beginning of the twentieth century has
become the pivot upon which turns the constitutional unity of a great
Empire and which forms the only possible centre for a common allegiance
amongst its varied peoples.
At first this monarchical principle was embodied in the form of military
power, was based upon feudal loyalty, and was associated with the noble
ideals, but somewhat reckless practices, of mediaeval chivalry. The
victories of Egbert and Alfred the Great transformed the Heptarchy into
a substantial English Kingdom. The military skill of William the
Conqueror gave an opportunity to blend the graces of Norman chivalry,
and a somewhat higher form of civilization, with the rougher virtues of
the Saxon character. Henry II. personally illustrated this combination,
with his ruddy English face and strong physical powers, and impressed
himself upon British history by the conquest of Ireland. Richard Coeur
de Lion gave his country many famous pages of crusading in the East, and
embodied in his life and character the adventurous and daring spirit of
the age. Edward I. dominated events by his energy and ability, subdued
Wales, and for a time conquered the Kingdom of Scotland. Edward III., in
his long reign of fifty years, carried the British flag over the fields
of France, and won immortality at the battles of Crecy and Poictiers.
Henry V. gained the victory of Agincourt, and won and wore the title of
King of France. Then came the Wars of the Roses and the turbulent
termination to a period of six centuries during which the English
Monarchs had represented the military spirit of their times, and had led
in the rough process of struggle and conquest out of which was growing
the United Kingdom of to-day.
With the reign of Henry VIII. commenced the period of religious
change--the struggles for religious liberty against ecclesiastical
dominance. Limited as were the achievements of Henry and Elizabeth, in
this respect, by prevailing bigotry and narrowness of view as well as
by diverse personal characteristics, they none the less did great
service to the country and the people. The rule of Cromwell--who, in the
exercise of Royal power and the possession of regal personal ability,
may properly be included in such a connection--gave that liberty of
worship to a portion of the masses with which previous Sovereigns had
more especially endowed the classes. During the reign of the Stuarts
religious dissensions and ecclesiastical controversies and intermittent
persecutions, illustrated the predominant passion of the period; and
forced the weak or indifferent monarch of the moment to be an
unconscious factor in the progress towards that general toleration which
the Revolution of 1688 and the crowning of William and Mary finally
accomplished. But, whether it was Henry persecuting the monks, or
Elizabeth the Roman Catholics, or Mary the Protestants, or Cromwell the
Episcopalians, or Charles II. the Dissenters, each ruler was being led,
to a great degree, by the undercurrent of surrounding bigotry and was,
in the main, representative of a strong, popular sentiment of the time.
Henry voiced the national uprising against Rome, just as the second
Charles embodied popular reaction against the Puritans, and as William
of Orange was enabled to lead a successful opposition to the gloomy and
personal bigotry of the last of the Royal Stuarts.
The third period of British monarchical history in this connection was
that marked by the growth toward constitutional government under the
sway of the House of Hanover. Coupled with this was the equally
important foundation of a great Colonial empire, and the loss of a large
portion of it in the reign of George III. But the development of
constitutional rule under the Georges should not be confounded with the
growth of the popular and Imperial system which exists to-day. The
latter is simply a progressive evolution out of the aristocratic and
oligarchical government of the Hanoverian period, just as that system
had been a step from the kingly power of the Tudors and the Stuarts,
which, in turn, had arisen upon the ruins of feudalism and military
monarchical power. It is this gradual growth, this "gently broadening
down from precedent to precedent," which makes the British constitution
of to-day the more or less perfected result of centuries of experience
and struggle. But that result has only been made possible by a peculiar
series of national adjustments in which the power of the Monarchs has
been modified from time to time to suit the will of the people, while
the ability of individual Sovereigns has been at the same time given
full scope in which to exercise wise kingcraft or pronounced military
skill. It has, in fact, been a most elastic system in its application
and to that elasticity has been due its prolonged stability of form
under a succession of dynastic or personal changes.
THE CONSTITUTION AND THE MONARCHY
It is a common mistake to minimize the importance and value of the
aristocratic rule by which the government of England was graded down
from the high exercise of royal power under the Tudors and Stuarts to
that beneficial exercise of royal influence which marks the opening of
the present century period. To the aristocracy of those two centuries is
mainly due the fact that the growth from paternal government and
personal rule to direct popular administration was a gradual
development, through only occasional scenes of storm and stress, instead
of involving a succession of revolutions alternating with civil war.
Somers and Godolphin, Walpole and Chatham, Pitt and Shelburne, Eldon and
Canning, Grey and Liverpool, Wellington and Durham, Melbourne and
Palmerston, were all of this aristocratic class, though of varying
degrees in rank and title and with varied views of politics. They filled
the chief places in the Government of the country during a period when
the people were being slowly trained in the perception and practice of
constitutional and religious liberty. At the best such processes are
difficult and often prove bitter tests of national endurance; and it was
well for Great Britain that the two centuries under review produced a
class of able and cultured men who--though naturally aristocratic at
heart--were upon the whole honestly bent upon furthering the best
interests of the masses. And this despite the mistakes of a Danby or a
North.
Yet, even towards the close of this period of preparation, popular
government, as now practised, was neither understood by the immediate
predecessors of Queen Victoria, nor by the nobles who presided over the
changing administrations of the day. It was not clearly comprehended by
Liberals like Russell and Grey; it was feared by Wellington and the
Tories as being republican and revolutionary; it was dreaded by many who
could hardly be called Tories and who, in the condition of things then
prevalent, could scarcely even be termed Loyalists. Writing in 1812,
Charles Knight, the historian, described the fierce national struggle of
the previous twenty years with Napoleon and expressed a longing wish for
the prop of a sincere and spontaneous loyalty to the throne in the
critical times that were to follow. But such a sentiment of loyalty was
not then expressed, and could hardly have been publicly evoked by a
ruler of the type of George IV., whether governing as Prince-Regent or
as King.
There is, however, no doubt of its having existed, and there seems to
have been, even through those troubled years, an inborn spirit of
loyalty to the Crown as being the symbol of the State and of public
order. Its wearer might make mistakes and be personally unpopular, but