The pageant of Parliament, vol. 1 of 2

CHAPTER XIV
THE KING AND HIS MINISTERS AND THE COUNTRY.

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The list of the proposed Administration is submitted by the Prime Minister to the King for approval. Constitutionally, the Sovereign has the right of veto, and may require any of the Ministerial appointments to be cancelled. This prerogative is now rarely, if ever, enforced. So far as is known, Queen Victoria was the last Sovereign to raise objections to certain of the names proposed to her. When Gladstone was forming his Government in 1880, she wished for Lord Hartington at the War Office, in place of Mr. Childers; but she was induced to give way. It was said in 1893, when Gladstone was again forming an Administration, that Henry Labouchere was not included solely because Queen Victoria refused her sanction. In the remoter past there are instances of the Sovereign not merely vetoing an appointment, but also of making one. But when George IV attempted to appoint Herries in 1827 Chancellor of the Exchequer, objection was successfully maintained. By modern usage, therefore, the position may be said to be that the Sovereign has the right to veto an appointment, but not to make one.

The Administration having been completely formed, a day is appointed by the King for taking leave of the outgoing Ministers, and receiving the incoming Ministers, at meetings of the Privy Council. The customary procedure is for the Clerk of the Council to collect all the seals of office from the various Departments beforehand and take them to Buckingham Palace for the ceremony. Only certain Ministers hold seals as insignia of office. The retiring Prime Minister has no seal to hand over, even though he may also hold, as he usually does, the office of First Lord of the Treasury; and therefore the new Prime Minister has none to receive. The Ministers having seals of office are the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Privy Seal, the five Secretaries of State—Home Department, Foreign Affairs, Colonies, War, and India (all of whom are constitutionally of co-equal and co-ordinate authority, and fully authorized to transact, if need be, each other’s business)—the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and the Secretary for Scotland.

The seals of office are sets of three seals, each made of metal, known respectively as the signet, the smaller seal, and the cachet. It is only at the Foreign Office that full use is made of the three. The signet is affixed to instruments for the ratification of treaties. The smaller seal is used for Royal Warrants countersigned by the Secretary. The cachet is used for the purpose of sealing letters sent by the King to Foreign Sovereigns on matters of State. Two seals only are used at the Colonial Office, the signet and the smaller seal; while at the Home Office and the India Office the smaller seal is used for all purposes. All the seals bear the Royal Arms, but have no image or device appropriate to the office of which each is the symbol. Each Minister receives the seals of his office enclosed in a velvet case from the King. No doubt curiosity impels him to examine the seals on that great day when he enters office, but he probably never sees them again until that other notable day when he quits office by handing the seals back to the King.

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The outgoing Ministers are first received by the King in the Council Chamber. The seals being sorted out, each Minister takes his and delivers it up to the King, thereby relinquishing his office. Ministers without seals resign office by formally taking leave of the King. Later on, the new Ministers arrive at the Palace. The second Council is then held. The first thing done is to administer the Privy Councillor’s oath to such Cabinet Ministers as are not yet members of the Privy Council. Each swears to be “a true and faithful servant unto the King’s Majesty,” and to reveal it to his Majesty should he come to know of “any manner of thing to be attempted, done or spoken, against his Person, Honour, Crown, or Dignity Royal,” and then proceeds to take a further oath upon which the secrecy of Cabinet proceedings rests. The passage is as follows:

The oath winds up, “So help you God and the Holy contents of this book,” though by an Act of 1889 affirmation may be substituted for the oath.

Disraeli, who knew something about the formation of Ministries, has described the antithesis of the Ministry of All the Talents, in his novel Endymion, as the Ministry of Untried Men. There is much fact and some fiction in the description. The Ministry was the one formed by Lord Derby in 1852, with Disraeli himself in it as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Derby, leader of the Protectionists, seemed to have a difficult task, for, barring himself, there was no one to choose who had already held office. The task, Disraeli tells us, was accomplished in this way: “A dozen men without the slightest experience of official life had to be sworn in as Privy Councillors before they could receive the seals and insignia of their intended offices. On their knees, according to official custom, a dozen men, all in the act of genuflexion at the same moment, and headed, too, by one of the most powerful peers in the country, the Lord of Alnwick Castle himself, humbled themselves before a female Sovereign, who looked serene and imperturbable before a spectacle never seen before, and which in all probability will never be seen again. One of the band, a gentleman without any experience whatever, was not only placed in the Cabinet, but was absolutely required to become the Leader of the House of Commons, which had never occurred before, except in the instance of Mr. Pitt in 1782.” Lord Beaconsfield’s confession, it is well to recall, appeared after his final disappearance from the political scene.

When the whole Cabinet has thus qualified for admission to the Privy Council, his Majesty declares Lord President of the Council the Minister appointed to that office, who thereupon takes the oath to “well and truly serve his Majesty,” and kisses his Majesty’s hand. The other Ministers take a similar oath in due order, beginning with the Lord Chancellor, who receives the Great Seal, followed by the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury; and those who are entitled to seals receive them from the King, while the others kiss his Majesty’s hand in acceptance of office. Thus does the Sovereign ratify the selections of the Prime Minister for the various posts in the Administration.

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Lord Campbell relates in his Diary that in 1859, as the members of the Palmerston Administration, in which he held the office of Lord Chancellor, were going down to Windsor by special train, they passed another express returning to London with the outgoing Premier, Lord Derby, and his colleagues. What an opening for aspiring young statesmen if a wicked wag of a railway director had ordered the two trains to be put on the same line, was the genial comment of the Lord Chancellor! Sir Stafford Northcote, who was a Minister in the next Derby Administration, formed in July 1866, also gives some interesting glimpses of the proceedings associated with a change of Government. He writes: “Queen’s carriages met us at the terminus and took us to Windsor Castle. As we went upstairs we met the late Ministers coming down, and shook hands with them. While we were waiting in the long room there was a sharp thunderstorm, and there was another while we were at luncheon, after taking office. The slopes of the Terrace looked as if there had been a fall of snow. Some thought this a bad omen for us. Disraeli had a bad omen of his own as we came down, for, thinking there was a seat at the end of the saloon carriage, he sat down there, and found himself unexpectedly on the floor.” This Administration lasted scarcely two years; but, despite the ill-omened accident to Disraeli, it was for that statesman a fortunate Administration. In it he first filled the great office of Prime Minister, to which he succeeded on the resignation of Lord Derby, on account of failing health, early in 1868.

But to return to Windsor Castle. Sir Stafford Northcote goes on to say: “Lord Derby was first sent for by the Queen, and had a short audience. We were then all taken along the corridor to the door of a small room, or, rather, closet. Lord Derby, Lord Chelmsford, and Walpole were called in; then the five new members of the Privy Council—Duke of Buckingham, Carnarvon, Cranborne, Hardy, and I—were called in together, and knelt before the Queen while we took the oath of allegiance; then we kissed hands, rose, and took the Privy Councillor’s oath standing. The Queen then named the Duke of Buckingham Lord President of the Council, and we all retired. The Prince of Wales and Duke of Edinburgh were in the room. We were then called in one by one and kissed hands on appointment to office, Lord Derby going first, then the Lord Chancellor, the Lord President, the Lord Privy Seal, the Secretaries of State (all together), the Chancellor of the Exchequer, etc. The seals were delivered to all these, except the Lord President. Lord Derby then had a long audience with the Queen, while we went to luncheon. Returned by special train at four o’clock.” John Bright was the only Minister who, so far as I know, was relieved of the obligation to kneel and kiss the Sovereign’s hands on receiving the seals of office. When he went to Windsor on his appointment as President of the Board of Trade, Queen Victoria, a great admirer of his speeches, sent Helps, Clerk to the Privy Council, to tell Bright she would dispense with the ceremony if that was more agreeable to his feelings as a Quaker, and he availed himself of this “considerate permission,” as he regarded it.

How a Minister (Henry Chaplin, afterwards Lord Chaplin) held the seals of the Secretary of State for War, for the briefest period possible, is mentioned in the diary of Lord Cranbrook, when he enters the visit to Windsor of the Conservative Ministry of 1885 upon taking office. “There was no contretemps but the careless omission of the kissing hands by Northcote, which was soon set right; and her Majesty gave Chaplin the War Office seals by mistake, easily rectified. Still, there should be some distinctive mark on each set.”

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But all is not over yet. A Member of the House of Commons who accepts an office of profit under the Crown thereby vacates his seat, and must seek re-election. This applies to the heads of all the great Departments. Minor Ministerial posts, such as the Secretary to the Treasury, the Under-Secretaries of State, the Parliamentary and Financial Secretaries of various Departments, are exempted from this parliamentary law, as they are regarded as holding office not by appointment of the Crown, but by appointment of the Ministers in charge of the different offices. The object of compelling a Minister to submit his acceptance of office to the judgment of his constituents, which was first established by an Act of the reign of Queen Anne—Succession to the Crown Act, 1707—was to restrain the corrupt influence of the Crown over Parliament by its power of conferring place on servile and obsequious Members. The danger the statute was designed to avert has, happily, past long since and gone for ever. The Act of Anne, however, continues in operation despite the fact that, owing to the complete revolution which has since been effected in the Constitution, it is entirely remote from the realities of these democratic times. The only modification of the original Act is a provision in the Reform Act of 1867, by which a Minister who is transferred to another office “in lieu of and in immediate succession the one to the other” need not submit himself to his constituents. A constitutional difficulty arose on the taking over of the Chancellorship of the Exchequer by Gladstone on the resignation of Lowe in 1873, during a parliamentary recess, Gladstone at the time being First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister. Did the right hon. gentleman come under the provision of the Act of 1867, and therefore not obliged to seek re-election? The law officers of the Crown—Coleridge, Attorney-General, and Jessel, Solicitor-General—came to the conclusion that the seat was not vacated; and their opinion was supported by Sir Erskine May, Clerk of the House of Commons. On the other hand, Lord Chancellor Selborne advanced the opposite view, holding that, as Gladstone had taken the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, not in lieu of and in immediate succession to, but in addition to, the office of First Lord of the Treasury, he must submit himself to his constituents. But this Gladstone was reluctant to do, as his seat for Greenwich was believed to be unsafe.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Opposition sought to make the situation more embarrassing for the Government. The Speaker is not empowered to issue his warrant for a new election during the Recess in the room of any Member who since the Prorogation has accepted any office whereby he has vacated his seat, unless on receipt of a certificate from two Members and a notification from the Member himself of the fact of such acceptance of office. What happened in this particular case is thus described by John Morley in his Life of Gladstone: “The unslumbering instinct of Party had quickly got upon a scent, and two keen-nosed sleuth-hounds of the Opposition, four or five weeks after Mr. Gladstone had taken the seals of the Exchequer, sent to the Speaker a certificate in the usual form, stating a vacancy at Greenwich, and requesting him to issue a writ for a new election. The Speaker reminded them, in reply, that the issue of writs during the recess in cases of acceptance of office required notification to him from the Member accepting, and he had received no such notification.” In the midst of the controversy Parliament was dissolved, and with it the difficulty.

Governments have tried to repeal the statute of Queen Anne. Arthur Balfour, who thought the law not only antiquated, but inimical to good government, once, when Prime Minister, brought in a Bill to abolish it. “I remember in my early days,” said he, in the session of 1905, “the Party to which I belong—it was in 1880—derived infinite enjoyment from the satisfaction of turning the late Sir William Harcourt out of his seat at Oxford on his taking office as Home Secretary. He found a seat after considerable inconvenience to Mr. Gladstone’s Government; and in my opinion, although it gave us great satisfaction as a good practical joke, it was a severe condemnation of the system on which we now carry on business, and which no practical assembly in the world but our own would tolerate for an instant.” Balfour failed, however, to get the House of Commons to agree to his Bill. I have heard several debates on the subject. The chief argument of the Treasury Bench for the repeal of the Act was that by reason of it no Prime Minister has ever been able to exercise a really free choice in the selection of his colleagues in the Administration; for often he has had to put a square man into a round hole, because the round man that would fit the round hole admirably held an unsafe seat, and therefore might not be re-elected. But the view of the back benches always has been that the Act supports the control of the House over the Government, and gives to the constituency the opportunity of expressing its opinion as to the action of its representative in accepting office under the Crown. This view has always prevailed. During the Great War the principle was twice suspended by emergency Acts. Members who accepted office in the two Coalition Governments of the War—one under Asquith in May and June 1915, and the other under Lloyd George in December 1916 and January 1917—were expressly absolved from the necessity of seeking re-election. But when the second Coalition Government, after the General Election of December 1918, submitted to the new Parliament, as their first measure, a Bill to repeal the statute of Queen Anne, feeling against it was very strong, and all that the House of Commons would assent to was to suspend for nine months the obligation on Members to go to their constituencies on the acceptance of office.

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With the re-election of the Ministers the work is at an end. The Administration has been duly constituted, according to long-established custom. However smoothly and rapidly it may have progressed, there are certain to be many sore hearts—those of the young with disappointed hopes, and, more pathetic still, those of the old, who are deemed to be no longer fit for office. But what of the outgoing Ministers? They no longer carry out of office the little perquisites which were permitted to some of their predecessors. At one time each Secretary of State, for instance, received on his appointment a silver inkstand, which he could retain and hand down as a keepsake to his children; but Gladstone, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, abolished this custom, and the only souvenir of office an outgoing Minister can take with him now is the red despatch box in which he used to carry his official papers to the House of Commons. How do they take their dismissal by the country? “There are two supreme political pleasures in life,” says Lord Rosebery. “One is ideal, the other real. The ideal is when a man receives the seals of office from the hands of his Sovereign; the real, when he hands them back.” It is the saying of a man who was sick and tired of office. But I beg leave to doubt its general application.