BRITISH CONSTITUTION

Most eighteenth-century Englishmen believed that they were the freest people in the world. Foreign observers, such as montesquieu and Voltaire from France or Jean-Louis De Lolme from Geneva, concurred. Great Britain had somehow created and protected a unique heritage—a constitution—that combined liberty with stability. This constitution was no single document nor even a collection of basic texts, although magna carta, the bill of rights of 1689, and other prominent documents were fundamental to the tradition. It depended as much upon a series of informal understandings within the ruling class as upon the written word. And it worked. It "insures, not only the liberty, but the general satisfaction in all respects, of those who are subject to it," affirmed De Lolme. This "consideration alone affords sufficient ground to conclude without looking farther," he believed, "that it is also much more likely to be preserved from ruin." Not everyone agreed. English radicals insisted by the 1770s that only electoral reform and a reduction of royal patronage could preserve British liberty much longer. A vigorous press, the most open in Europe, subjected ministers to constant and often scathing criticism, which a literate and growing public thoroughly enjoyed. Yet until late in the prerevolutionary crisis of 1763–1775, North Americans shared the general awe for the British constitution and frequently insisted that their provincial governments displayed the same virtues.

Apologists explained Britain's constitutional achievement in both legal and humanistic terms. The role of "mixed government" in preserving liberty appealed to a broad audience. Even lawyers used this theme to organize a bewildering mass of otherwise disparate information drawn from the common law, parliamentary statutes, and administrative practice. "And herein indeed consists the true excellence of the English government, that all parts of it form a mutual check upon each other," proclaimed Britain's foremost jurist, Sir william blackstone, in 1765. "In the legislature, the people are a check upon the nobility, and the nobility a check upon the people; … while the king is a check upon both, which preserves the executive power from encroachment. And this very executive power is again checked, and kept within due bounds by the two houses.…"

To work properly, mixed government (or a "mixed and balanced constitution") had to embody the basic elements of the social order: the crown, consisting not just of the monarch but of the army and navy, the law courts, and all other officeholders with royal appointments; the titled aristocracy with its numerous retainers and clients; and land-holding commoners. Each had deep social roots, a fixed place in government, and the power to protect itself from the others. United as king, lords, and commons (or as the one, the few, and the many of classical thought), they became a sovereign power beyond which there was no appeal except to revolution, as American colonists reluctantly admitted by 1775.

Although the king could do no wrong, his ministers could. Every royal act had to be implemented by a minister who could be held legally accountable for what he did. Into the early eighteenth century, this principle generated frequent impeachments, a cumbersome device for attempting to achieve responsible government. By mid-century, impeachment, like the royal veto, had fallen into disuse. Crown patronage had become so extensive that a parliamentary majority hostile to the government almost never occurred in the century after the Hanoverian Succession of 1714. When it did, or even when it merely seemed inevitable, as against Sir Robert Walpole in 1742 and Lord North in 1782, the minister usually resigned, eliminating the need for more drastic measures. When William Pitt the Younger refused to resign in the face of an implacably hostile commons majority in 1783–1784, his pertinacity alarmed many contemporaries. It seemed to portend a major crisis of the constitution until Pitt vindicated himself with a crushing victory in the general election of 1784.

British constitutionalism took for granted a thoroughly aristocratic society. Mixed government theory rested upon the recognition of distinct social orders, linked in countless ways through patron-client relationships. Its boast, that it provided a government of laws and not of men, had real merit, which an independent judiciary assidiously sustained. In like manner the House of Commons really did check the ambitions of the crown. The quest for responsible ministers still had not reached its nineteenth-century pattern of cabinet government, but it had moved a long way from the seventeenth-century reliance upon impeachment.

The Revolution converted American patriots from warm admirers to critics of British constitutionalism. Some, such as Carter Braxton of Virginia, hoped to change the British model as little as possible. Others, especially thomas paine, denounced the entire system of mixed government as decadent and corrupt, fit only for repudiation. Most Americans fell between these extremes. They agreed that they needed formal written constitutions. In drafting them, they discovered the necessity for other innovations. Lacking fixed social orders, they simply could not sustain a mixed government. Patron-client relations were also much weaker among the Americans, who had come to regard most crown patronage as inevitably corrupt, a sign of the decay of English liberty. Americans built governments with no organic roots in European social orders. In nearly every state, they separated the government into distinct branches—legislative, executive, and judicial—to keep each behaving legally and correctly. The separation of powers thus became the American answer to the mixed and balanced constitution. This rejection of government by king, lords and commons led inexorably to a redefinition of sovereignty as well. Americans removed sovereignty from government and lodged it with the people instead. To give this distinction substance, they invented the constitutional convention and the process of popular ratification. This transformation made true federalism possible. So long as sovereignty remained an attribute of government, it had to belong to one level or the other—to Parliament or the colonial legislatures. But once it rested with the people, they became free to grant some powers to the states and others to a central government. In 1787–1788, they finally took that step.

John M. Murrin
(1986)

Bibliography

Blackstone, William (1765–1769) 1979 Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed. by Stanley N. Katz et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brewer, John 1976 Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III. Cambridge: At the University Press.

De Lolme, J.L. 1775 The Constitution of England, or An Account of the English Government; In which it is compared with the Republican Form of Government, and occasionally with the other Monarchies in Europe. London: T. Spilsbury for G. Kearsley.

Pocock, J.G.A. 1975 The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Roberts, Clayton 1966 The Growth of Responsible Government in Stuart England. Cambridge: At the University Press.