Last British Monarch with power?

OK, I’m not very knowledgeable about the British Parliamentary system and the monarchy, but it seems Queen Elizabeth has no power beyond ceremonal. From what I gather the situation was somewhat similar with Queen Victoria. Yet, years back when I read “Guns of August,” you get the impression that King George VI had some power the way Barbara Tuchman sets the rivalry between him and Kaiser Wilhelm II. So, finally, who was the last British monarch who had any significant power to declare war, etc?

At a guess I’d say that it all started to go downhill with George III who died in 1820 and their power was effective ‘lost’ when Victoria was Queen and the monarchy where the King or Queen has the final say became a constitutional monarchy instead.

To answer your question, I believe that George IV was maybe the last to have ‘any significant power’.

It was Edward VII who was king in the run-up to WWI, not George VI. Yes, he was influential in helping to establish the cordial entente with France, but the key point is that was the policy of the British government of the day. Edward didn’t establish that policy. If the British government had wanted to go the other way, and establish closer relations with Germany, not France, Edward couldn’t have prevented it.

The odd thing about the rivalry between Edward and Wilhelm was that Wilhelm and the Germans didn’t really understand how little political power the King had, since they tended to think in terms of the amount of power the German emperor had. So Wilhelm tended to personalize the antagonism between the two countries, not appreciating that it was the policy of the British government as a whole to oppose Germany’s imperial ambitions, particularly in the area of naval supremacy.

In response to the OP, I would say that George IV was the last king to exercise true power, in that he still actually chose governments to suit his policies - not very successfully. His successor on the throne, William IV, tried to dismiss the Grey government, and found that he could not find anyone with enough support to form a new government. He had to call Earl Grey back. That to my mind marked the tipping point, because it established for all to see that the king had to choose as Prime Minister the person who had the confidence of the House, not the one that he personally favoured.

Now, Queen Elizabeth did get to choose the Prime Minister, but that was more a quirk of the Conservative Party at the time, since it didn’t have a clear means to chose a successor. But I think that was just an historical exception - and there was no doubt that Her Majesty would choose a Conservative, since the Conservatives had the majority in the House.

To be something of a wise-ass, the monarch always chooses tbe P.M., but he/she must choose a person who can command the support of the House of Commons. In most circumstances, that leaves his/her choice akin to that offered by Mr. Hobson – the head of the majority party, or of the coalition commanding a majority in the absence of a single-party majority. (Minority governments such as Harper’s in Canada are aberrant; ordinarily they will be defeated on a confidence vote sooner rather than later.)

While this is a ceremonial and technical point, it does have theoretical practical value. Suppose for argument’s sake that a terrorist attack destroys the Houses of Parliament at a time when most members are present, including nearly all the Cabinet, for an important division say. Secondary attacks take out Buckingham Palace, where the Queen presently is, and a ceremonial event in Aberdeen attended by Prince Charles. At the precise instant of his grandmother’s death (or his father’s, depending on who is snuffed first), Prince William becomes King – and he is able to name a P.M. who is constitutionally empowered to act in this crisis – and, later, issue writs of election for a new Commons. British government survives, and is able to react to the crisis.

Same thing, with appropriate changes, would hold for Ottawa or Canberra – presumably the Queen would contact a Lieutenant Governor and say, in effect, “You’re G.G. ad interim – get a government in place to deal with the mess. You’re acting with my authority as Queen of Canada/Australia – follow the constitutional guidelines.”

There is a point to some of the traditions.

Polycarp reminds me of one writer (McKinnon, The Crown in Canada) who describes the office of Governor General (and likewise that of the monarch) as “constitutional fire extinguishers with a potent mixture of powers for use in great emergencies…Like real extinguishers, they appear in bright colours and are strategically located. But everyone hopes their emergency powers will never be used; the fact they are not used does not render them useless, and it is generally understood there are severe penalties for tampering with them.”

To answer the OP, for actual power, we had a civil war in the 17th century which established the supremacy of Parliament. So either Charles I or Richard Cromwell fit the bill, depending upon your definition of Monarch. After that, kings and queens held power in Britain at the behest of Parliament (q.v. Edward VIII, William and Mary, George I). However, the monarchs from George III to William IV were also Kings of Hanover, and I do not know what power they had there.

Influence is another matter entirely, and our Kings and Queens have long had a great deal of that.

Anne was the last monarch to refuse to grant assent to an act of Parliament, in 1707. George III threatened to withold his assent to several bills that would’ve granted Roman Catholics the franchise; none were actually passed during his reign. He probally would’ve actually followed through on his threats if one did pass.

You can pretty much choose any monarch from the current one to the earliest Anglo-Saxon kings. The point is that British Monarchs were never really absolute they always had to defer to the aristocracy (and later the house of commons) to some degree, but at the same time they never really lost any of the their powers (the Queen still appoints governments and signs laws into being).

The process from actual Monarch with real power, to constitutional figurehead was a pretty gradual one. There is no one point which it switched from one to another.

If I recall from my rusty memories of school history lessons, James II was the last king with any real power, untill he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution. Parliament invited William & Mary to be co-monarchs, but with no or few actual powers.

If I recall from my rusty memory of earlier in this thread, this isn’t true. We’ve already seen examples of monarchs weilding their powers considerably later then William and Mary.

James II was the last king with a pretense to “Divine Right”; when Parliament invited William and Mary in, they took the throne on condition of ratifying the Petition of Right – step one in the transfer of ordinary power from monarch to parliament. After William and Anne, George I was content to let his ministers rule in his name, provided he got money and help for his beloved Hannover. This set a precedent – the king named the ministers, but the ministers did the governing for him. Slowly but surely, the idea that the ministers had to be acceptable to the king morphed into “acceptable to the Commons.”

Her Majesty could appoint the guy with the awful Belfast accent who makes the announcements at Temple Tube Station if she so desired. It is a convention not law that she must select the person who commands a majority in the House of Commons, it dates from Sir Robert Peels failed attempts to govern without one in the 1830’s.

The answer to the OP, the last British monarch with power; Elizabeth II, the present Queen, she has as many powers as any of her predessessors, in theory, politically well the transfer of power was a gradual one and its hard to say as there are still instances that the Monrach could exersise power.

William IV did indeed bow to parlimentary pressure, but ironically he did so on a point of royal power: the Whigs wanted him to enlarge the peerage in order to stack the House of Lords. William sent a secret letter to the Tory opposition saying in effect “don’t make me have to do this”.

duplicate (please remove)

Please excuse my sarcastic (but heartfelt) interjection.

Following the recent scandal of UK politician’s expenses, it is clear that our Parliament will literally do anything for money. :rolleyes:
They also love receiving titles.
Since the Royal Family are wealthy (and can give out titles), they therefore have a lot of power. :smack:

I like this very much. It nicely compliments Bagehot’s dictum that the British monarch has “The right to be consulted, the right to advise, and the right to warn.”

The last time a British monarch can be said to force the PM to change his policy was probably in 1931. Ramsay Macdonald wanted to resign the PM when his Labour Party split on budget issues. George V convinced him to try a coalition with the Tories and Liberals, and in some accounts even refused to accept his resignation until Macdonald conferred with the other parties. Supposedly, George VI in 1945 suggested that Clement Attlee make Ernest Bevin his Foreign Secretary rather than his original choice of Hugh Dalton. However, the readiness by which Attlee agreed suggested he was thinking that way already.

Wasn’t it before 1689, with the Glorious Revolution?

Actually, further to this question, didn’t Malcolm Kerr as vice-regal, or Governor General exercise real power in Australian on November 10, 1975? He fired the Prime Minister, appointed the opposition leader as Prime Minister and called elections.

It depends on what you mean by ‘power’. If you mean the power to do anything they liked formally, that’s debatable - arguably, none has existed. But if you mean, no formal constraints and pretty much had the right to attempt to do anything they liked, probably Henry VIII - although, as he himself said, “We be informed by our judges that we at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of parliament”.

If it’s the monarch with the widest powers within constitutional restraints, probably Charles I - until it went wrong for him. It was his tendency to push the envelope of his powers that sparked the civil war.

Then powers progressively narrowed as they were informally exercised by a Cabinet accountable to Parliament. But monarchs still had the power to choose their Cabinet, and while George I and II tended not to be terribly interested in British politics, George III was quite active and swung his vocal support behind his favoured parliamentarians. He was also not above making his opinions known about legislation he liked or disliked, and openly influenced parliamentarians.

The last king to formally sack a ministry was William IV, and the bad experience of that kind of shut that independent power down. Victoria, under the influence of Prince Albert, completed the atrophy of the monarchy’s remaining outward powers, favouring informal, private influence.

And that’s the thing - the Queen is still an enormously powerful person. But you don’t need formally conferred constitutional powers to be powerful. She has longevity, charisma, public respect, considerable experience, and the ear of the most powerful people in the country.

And the role is always evolving and changing in response to public demands and expectations.