Growing Importance of the Cabinet and the House of Commons

By 1720 the Whigs were triumphant over their enemies, the Tories were everywhere discredited, and the house of Hanover was firmly established on the throne. But George I was a very different man from William III. He made no attempt to be a personal ruler, and left everything to his ministers. He was not popular, and half the people of England would have been glad to get rid of him. He was German; and, speaking no English, could not talk to either ministers or people. Moreover, he had a greater interest in the affairs of Hanover than in those of Great Britain, and by his ignorance and indifference destroyed what affection or regard his English people might have had for him. He leaned entirely on the Whigs, and refused to have a Tory in his ministry. Consequently, party government in a new sense began to prevail, and the cabinet became the responsible governing body of the kingdom. George appointed his own ministers, but left them to manage affairs more or less as they pleased. Thus the power of the crown steadily declined, and the power of the cabinet steadily increased.

The House of Commons, too, underwent an important change. Under George I it gained in power and importance, until it was of more dignity and consequence than the House of Lords. Three causes may be assigned for this change,

Since the Triennial Act of 1694 a new parliament had to be elected every three years ; but in 1716 the Whigs, fearing to lose the election in case parliament were dissolved, passed the Septennial Act, which continued their session and that of succeeding parliaments for seven years. This law, which still prevails, had the undoubted effect of dignifying the House of Commons, though it also increased bribery, because membership for seven years was more valuable than for three.

A second cause was the fact that as government became more expensive, the House of Commons, which controlled the purse, became more and more influential. It was one thing to disburse £2,300,000 in 1699, and quite another to control £10,000,000 in 1743. The national debt had risen to £52,000,000 in 1714, and to £55,000,000 in 1721. Financial questions touching economy and expenditure became leading issues in the eighteenth century ; and the House of Commons was the storm-centre of debate.

Finally, the policy of Walpole, the greatest Whig minister of this time, had much to do with making the House of Commons more powerful than the House of Lords. During his entire ministry of twenty-one years, Walpole remained a commoner, and his seat of activity was the House of Commons.

Ministry of Walpole (I72I–1742)

Under Townshend, the Whig ministry had not been successful, and in 1717 Townshend was dismissed, Walpole resigned, and Sunderland and Stanhope became the leading ministers. Though Stanhope successfully carried through the war of 1719-1720 with Spain, he fell because of the financial excitement aroused by the South Sea Bubble. This enterprise was a huge speculation in the shares of the South Sea Company, which was organized to trade in South America and to take advantage of Spain's concessions in the treaty of Utrecht. The ministry got into trouble in the matter by allowing the company to take over the national debt, which had hitherto been managed by the Bank of England; on the condition that it would pay the debt out of the profits of its trade. But a frightful panic followed the wild scheme, and the Stanhope-Sunderland ministry was carried down in the crash. In 1721 Walpole and Townshend became the leaders of a new cabinet.

Walpole's long ministry forms an epoch by itself in English history. It was a period of peace, economy, and financial reform. It was not a time of progress in politics or legislation, for Walpole had little interest in the constitution as such. Nor was it a period made important by treaties or by diplomacy and foreign affairs; for in the main Europe was at peace. But it was a time marked by great progress in the wealth and comfort of the English people.

Walpole, who must be classed as a financier rather than a statesman, lived in an age of bribery and corruption, an age characterized chiefly by coarseness in manners and stagnation in religion, morals, and intellectual life. His own motto, “Let sleeping dogs lie," was characteristic of his age. He took good care to arouse no class of the people to passion or rage, by any attempts to change the political or religious conditions of the kingdom. Such a policy tended to make men and women indifferent and callous, because it did not arouse in them any interest in social or religious reform. Drunkenness, lawlessness, inhumanity, widely prevailed. Society lived for pleasure and personal gain. On the other hand, such a policy of neglect was in many ways most beneficial to the country at large. Trade and commerce increased; new towns in the north and west grew in size and wealth; and an interest in better agricultural methods, in landscape gardening and roads, was awakened. The indifference and lethargy could not be permanent, whereas the gains in wealth and resource were to stand Great Britain in good stead in the exciting years that were to follow.

Walpole had three general purposes : first, to unite the landowning and moneyed classes in support of the house of Hanover, and so make secure the throne of the Georges, whom he served; second, to develop trade and industrial activity at home, by reducing taxation and cutting down the national debt ; and third, to strengthen the navy and to encourage commerce with the colonies abroad, on the principle that the greater the prosperity of the colonies, the greater would be their demand for English goods.'

He began his work by restoring confidence in the nation's credit, which had suffered in the financial panic caused by the South Sea scheme. Then he inaugurated a great and far-reaching reform of the whole tariff system, partly to check smuggling and adulteration, and partly to encourage manufacturing at home and to relieve the poor. In 1721 he removed export duties from one hundred and six articles of British manufacture, and import duties from thirty-eight articles of raw material; and he further reduced the duties on many of the necessaries of life. His colonial policy was even more noteworthy. The mercantile classes, who still looked on the colonies as sources of supply for the mother country, wished to prevent the colonists from trading anywhere except in England, and from manufacturing anything that was likely to compete with the manufactures of England. Instead of enforcing rigorously the navigation acts, on which this policy depended, Walpole was rather inclined to neglect them and to allow the colonies to do as they pleased; instead of encouraging the passage of additional acts restricting colonial trade, he objected to the whole system whereby England monopolized that trade, and tried in one or two cases to overthrow the monopoly. In 1730 he allowed Carolina, and in 1735 Georgia, to send their rice to any European port south of Cape Finisterre, and in 1740 he allowed the traders of the West Indies to do the same with their sugar; provided, in both cases, the commodities were carried in ships that were built by British shipbuilders and manned by British sailors. He continued the bounty on colonial naval stores and removed the duty on colonial timber; but he did not prevent parliament in 1732 from forbidding the colonies to manufacture hats. His colonial policy opened new markets for colonial products, and the American colonies, made thirteen by the settlement of Georgia in 1732, entered on a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity.

ROBERT WALPOLE.

From the original of C. Jervas in the collection of Thomas Walpole, Esq.