When did the balance of power in the United Kingdom switch over to the Prime Minister from the monarchy? I’m guessing that this was a gradual change, but there must have been an instance when the PM was more in charge of events than the current King and Queen…
Hmmmm, I’ll bump this maybe because I often wondered myself. The Monarchy has been brought down a notch several times in history, I just never seemed to pick up at school when exactly in history the PM suddenly found himself with more power or responsibility than the King or Queen.
Well, first of all, the first person to clearly be PM was Walpole, in 1721.
As for when the Prime Ministership became more powerful than the monarch: Probably around the time that George III started to lose his capacities.
Not easy, even after the restoration of Charles II, the monarch had immense power, being able to direct the House of Lords to certain actions, using patronage as a powerful tool.
Ultimate power rested with parliament, but all its lawmaking acts had to be approved through the House of Lords which had a veto.
The monach could install the Noble they wanted to relflect Royal views.
In 1828 Duke of Wellinton had one heck of a struggle to change the laws over the emancipation of the Catholics in Ireland, the King would not countenace it, but after extreme brinkmanship, Wellington got his act through.
This helped limit the amount of Royal interferance in genral policy making but was not codified, it simply set an invisible precedent, and lots of UK parliamentray rules work in this way. not having a written constitution.
That said, Wellington did oppose the reform bill which put power down toward the masses but eventually popular pressure made him accept the inevitable.
Ironically it was King George V whose intervention in politics that was to do the most to reduce the influence of Royal power and make the Prime Minister pre-eminent.
The issue of the House of Lords having a veto over laws enacted by Parliament became of more importance as the 19thC wore on into the 20thC.
It came to a head as a result of a more Liberal policy, indeed socialist(at the time)
Herbert Asquith was Prime Minister and David Lloyd George was his Chancellor, and they became the acrchitects of the social state, by trying to introduce old age pensions, and changing income tax to pay for it.
Furthermore, income tax was to be graded by the amount you earned, so the wealthy had to pay a greater percentage of their income than the poor.It also incuded death duties on the esteates of the wealthy too.
Naturally the wealthy included the vast majority of the titled Lords that sat in the House of Lords, and they objected strongly to this and vetoed the bill that would have become law making the changes happen.
These changes were part of the budget plans for 1910, and since we have no written constitution, much of the way our government runs is based upon precedent, and one precedent was that whenever Parliament set a national budget, this was always passed by the House of Lords.
So by vetoing this budget the Liberals claimed that it was not possibe for the country to operate and Parliament was dissolved so that a general election could be held.
This was a very clever move, it made the Conservatives extremely unpopular, the Lords even more so, peopel asked by what right did unelected and inaccountable priveledge nobles have to deny the will of the majority of the governed classes.
There was only one real issue in that election campaign, the power of the Lords to veto the will of the people, and the Liberals won by a landslide.
When the Liberal government was reinstalled it decided not only to pass its act on social policy into law by pushing it through the House of Lords, it also decided that the Lords had broken the system of precedents and attempted to pass legislation that would limit the veto the the Lords had over Parliaments bills being made into law.
This was called the Parliament Act.
The Lords now had double reason to try and stop this law, it reduced their power, and it taxed them more heavily.
The Parliament presented the bill to the House of Lords for final approval, it was vetoed and Herbert Asquith then enlisted the help of George V.
Asquith threatened to call another election, and it was obvious he would have won by an even greaer margin, George V realised that this would lead to Parliamentary crisis, and possibly unrest, and realising that he decided the best course of action was to intervene and enable something resembling true deomcracy.
George V then threatened to create enough Liberal Lords to outvote the Conservative Lords, and the bill would then be passed into law.
The Lord knew that once a lord was created, it would mean a permanent majority of Liberal Lords, and they would lose all infuence for ever, and so they were forced to give way and allow the bill to pass.
The House of Lords had to give way and could no longer veto Parliamentary acts, thought these could be returned to the Parliament for further review a maximum of three times.
This was the Parliament Act and this act of law is currently being used to eliminate the historic form of the House of Lords(which is unelected) and replace this upper house with something slightly more accountable to the electorate, though the path of accountability is quite tortuous.
The intervention of George V in turn has limited the ability of the Monarch to influence Parliaments processes, since now the House of Lords cannot stop legislation, and the House of Lords itself was largely made up of Peers created by the Monarchy.
Since then, the influence of the Monarchy has waned, and that of the Prime Minister has increased.
Here is an interpretation of the Parliament Act.
http://www.justis.com/news/jc_010405.html
from
http://www.parliament.uk/works/parliament.cfm#parlacts
Apart from the English Civil War, the Parliament Act has probably had more influence in reducing the role of the Monarchy than any other.
Interesting Casdave
I was just consulting my ancient Pears Encylopedia’s time line of history; After the death of William of Orange and his sucessor Anne, the German George I was installed as King of England. Lacking any interest in running the country as a monarch, parliament was allowed to run the country by a cabinet of ministers. This helped make it more powerful. Is my old encylocpedia correct?
It would depend upon where you draw a line.
George I would certainly have had the power, had he wanted to exercise it, and this would be true of later Monarchs, however what we currently have is a Monarch whose speeches on the legislative Parliamentary timetable are actually written for her by Parliament, which is a measure of how much Royal power has declined.
George I could have used the Lords to veto any Parliamentary legislation, had he so desired.
In one way, it could be stated that this lack of interest in internal affairs by the Monarch of the day was setting one of those unwritten precedents, however it has to be said that George III in his sane years did much to reign in the power of Parliament, by use of patronage, coercion and any other means available.
As a measure of just how much power he recovered from Parliament, it should be noted that it was the taxation policies of George III and his insistance on continuation of the war in the Americas, that led to US independance.
It was George III that was the driving political force in ensuring US subjects had no representation(but then most Britons had no vote either), and it was he who insisted, long after the Parliamentary Chancellor had advised that the financial burden was too great, that the war be continued to the final defeat at Yorktown.
In fact the loss of the US colonies weakened George III position and possibly pushed him toward madness, but even then he still had the means to drive the then Prime Minister, William Pitt, from office.
The idea that a current Monarch could simply drive out a serving Prime Minister solely upon Royal volition nowadays is unthinkable, and that is a measure of how powerful the Monarch was, compared to the Prime Minister.
George III’s son, you may guess his title, was far less interested in state politics, seeming only interested in having a good time, and I suppose it is fair to say his scandalous behaviour became so out of touch with the emerging desire by an expanding middle class for fairer representation, that it became the rod with which to beat the next Monarch William IV.
It was during the reign of William VI that the reform act was finally passed, and this needed a huge amount of support from William himself. His opponents were the Tories, and the Prime Minister with which he crossed political opinions was none other than the Duke Of Wellington.
During William IV reign, Europe was ablaze (literally at times) with changes for more democracy and the landed classes largely represented by Wellesly just could not see the writing on the wall.
Wellesly himself demonstrated how the power of Monarchs could be moderated by playing brinkmanship with his threatened resignation over the emancipation of Catholics in Ireland, when William was eventually forced to give way.
This is ironic since George IV had a serious affair with a Catholic woman and had been forced to give up his plans to marry her as it the would have been disqualified from being installed as Monarch, one might have thought that in Royal circles, at least, there would have been more sympathy for Catholic rights.
Anyway, back to normal service, the Reform Act had a stormy passage, being presented to the House of Lords and vetoed on two occasions, and that was after it had had a difficult passage through Parliament.
Wellesly was intrumental in those vetoes, but it was Williams threat to change the balance of power in the House of Lords by creating enough moderate Lords to get the bill passed in this upper chamber.
You will see a similarity here between what happened in 1832 and 1910-11.
The reform bill widened the voting franchise dramatically, and was later used to enfranchise an ever greater percentage of the population.
You could make a very good case for saying that this was the beginning of the end for the real power of the Monarchy, however I personally feel it was just that, a beginning.
Queen Victoria arrived at a time when the now voting British public were not all that keen on the Monarchy, but by clever use of spin, and by keeping out of domestic politics and diverting her attention to exercising her Royal connections with her family ties in Europe to influence international affairs, she regained public trust. One has to put much of this down to Prince Albert.
The Monarchy was put to nationalistic uses, meanwhile the political parties had to evolve and grow with the greater domestic freedom they now had.
The final limit on Parliament was the House of Lords, and this was hugely influenced by the Monarchy, and when its power was limited by the Parliament Act, the Monarchy had effectively lost its remaining real power.
One can look at the handful of times that the Parliament Act has been invoked and conclude that it has been used so seldom that it cannot have had that much influence, but that is not the whole picture, many times Acts of Parliament have been returned to Parliament for further consideration by the House of Lords but on third presentation to the upper chamber, the House of Lords has had the prospect of the Parliament Act being invoked and so has given way.
Pushkin, the Hanoverian accession certainly helped the process, but I don’t think that George I was uninterested in running the country. Rather, he was completely unfamiliar with the politics of his new realm, and didn’t speak English very well, so he pretty much had to rely on English politicians to run his government. It’s not for nothing that the term “Prime Minister” (which has no legal status) began to be used at this time. It was originally a term of mild derision, to indicate that Walpole was getting above himself, but it shows the trend.
With respect to the OP, the transfer of authority from the monarch to the Prime Minister took a long time, and was a step-by-step thing, so it’s hard to point to any one event as marking the definitive change in power. You’ll likely hear different events suggested by different people. I certainly understand why casdave argues for the Parliament Act of 1911, but personally, I would place the balance point some 80 years earlier, with the resignation of the Grey Ministry in 1832, for two reasons.
First, was the point of principle involved. What triggered the resignation was that William IV was backing away from supporting the great parliamentary Reform Bill that Earl Grey was proposing, and declined to appoint additional peers to the Lords to ensure its passage. So, the conflict between the PM and the King was very much over the balance of power between the aristocracy versus the people at large. Limiting the power of the aristocracy and increasing the power of the population at large would have the implication that the King’s powers would also be reduced. (Yes, I know the Reform Bill of 1832 didn’t contemplate a universal franchise, but in the tenor of the times, it was a major blow to the aristocracy’s control of power.)
The second reason I would say this was the tipping point was the consequence: after Earl Grey resigned, William called on the Duke of Wellington to form a government. Wellington had been in power shortly before and had successfully pushed through Catholic Emancipation, as casdave notes, so William hoped that Wellington could do something with Reform short of Grey’s drastic changes. Wellington tried to form a government but failed, leaving William no choice but to call on Earl Grey to come back and form a government. Prior to this event, the Crown’s extensive patronage had enabled it keep in power governments that didn’t have a lot of support. It didn’t work this time, and the events were a very public demonstration that the King was forced to accept a government that he didn’t want, with a policy that he didn’t whole-heartedly support.
Overall, I would suggest that when William was forced to accept Grey back in office, it demonstrated that the balance of power had shifted from King to PM.
Maybe APB will come along shortly to contribute to the debate. {On preview, I see that casdave has also referred to the Reform bill. I’ll post this anyway.
p.s. - one quibble with the terminology of casdave’s post: “Parliament” is made up of the Commons, the Lords, and the Crown. Most of the time when casdave uses the term “Parliament” in opposition to the Lords, I think the context means that he’s really referring to the Commons.
Fascinating thread. I have one further question. In my very limited knowledge or English (or British) history, I have the impression that originally the only reason the King would call parliament into session was to raise taxes, usually when the King was into some military adventure. When did it come to pass that parliament was put in more or less continuous session? I think that once that happened, the rest was inevitable. Of course, you could argue that once the King lost power to raise taxes by himself, the rest was inevitable.
By the time the Stuarts came to power, there had been more-or-less regular meetings of Parliament for a considerable time under the Tudors, but the summoning of Parliament was still left to the King’s prerogative.
Then the troubles began in the latter part of James I’s rule and the beginning of Charles I’s rule. In the last ten years of his reign, James only called one Parliament, nicknamed the “Addled Parliament” since it only sat for a brief time, passed no acts, and did not grant any appropriations. That was in 1614, and James didn’t call another prior to his death in 1621.
Charles called a few Parliaments and then stopped, ruling for 11 years without calling Parliament, the period called the Personal Rule. Eventually, however, the need for money compelled him to call a Parliament in 1640. He dissolved it within a few weeks, so it became known as the “Short Parliament”. Events forced him to call another one in 1640, which eventually became known as the Long Parliament, since it was not formally dissolved until the Restoration in 1660.
The Long Parliament passed the first act which purported to regulate the calling and timing of Parliament, called the Triennial Act, which required that a Parliament be summoned every three years. Charles reluctantly gave royal assent to it, although he felt that it infringed on his prerogative.
If I remember correctly, the Restoration Parliament under Charles II repealed the Triennial Act. However, after the Glorious Revolution, the English Bill of Rights dealt with this issue, stating:
Parliament implemented this provision by an act in 1694, with the Meeting of Parliament Act, which required that a parliament be held every three years. In 1716, under George I, this was modified by extending the duration of a Parliament to not more than 7 years, in the Septennial Act.
The current position is that elections are held not more than 5 years apart, according to the Parliament website. As well, since Appropriations Acts are normally only for one year, fiscal realities requires that Parliament meet at least once a year.
By the time the Stuarts came to power, there had been more-or-less regular meetings of Parliament for a considerable time under the Tudors, but the summoning of Parliament was still left to the King’s prerogative.
Then the troubles began in the latter part of James I’s rule and the beginning of Charles I’s rule. In the last ten years of his reign, James only called one Parliament, nicknamed the “Addled Parliament” since it only sat for a brief time, passed no acts, and did not grant any appropriations. That was in 1614, and James didn’t call another prior to his death in 1621.
Charles called a few Parliaments and then stopped, ruling for 11 years without calling Parliament, the period called the Personal Rule. Eventually, however, the need for money compelled him to call a Parliament in 1640. He dissolved it within a few weeks, so it became known as the “Short Parliament”. Events forced him to call another one in 1640, which eventually became known as the Long Parliament, since it was not formally dissolved until the Restoration in 1660.
The Long Parliament passed the first act which purported to regulate the calling and timing of Parliament, called the Triennial Act, which required that a Parliament be summoned every three years. Charles reluctantly gave royal assent to it, although he felt that it infringed on his prerogative.
If I remember correctly, the Restoration Parliament under Charles II repealed the Triennial Act. However, after the Glorious Revolution, the English Bill of Rights dealt with this issue, stating:
Parliament implemented this provision by an act in 1694, with the Meeting of Parliament Act, which required that a parliament be held every three years. In 1716, under George I, this was modified by extending the duration of a Parliament to not more than 7 years, in the Septennial Act.
The current position is that elections are held not more than 5 years apart, according to the Parliament website. As well, since Appropriations Acts are normally only for one year, fiscal realities requires that Parliament meet at least once a year.
- One of the terms of the Provisions of Oxford was that Parliament should meet at least three times every year.
But King Henry III reneged (twice), and a war (the Baron’s War) ensued, which the future Edward I won (Battle of Evesham, 1265). There ensued 422 years of Royal tyranny, and the rule of Law was not re-established until the Glorious Revolution.
Regards,
Agback
You guys are managing just fine on your own.
The passage of the Great Reform Bill is as plausible as a date as any. Having to recall Grey was undoubtedly a setback for William IV. Not that it was entirely unprecedented for the monarch to have to accept a prime minister they didn’t want - the most obvious example would be imposition of the Duke of Portland on George III by Fox and North in 1783, although George III was able to get rid of them easily enough within the year. Once the Reform Bill had passed, it did weaken the ability of the incumbant government to influence the outcome of any future election. That had previously worked to the advantage of whomever it was that the king had already appointed as his ministers.
The only other point which I think needs to be added is that political power was not just about who had ultimate authority at times of political crisis. Control of the everyday workings of government was also important. What mattered was paying attention to the details. A king who ‘did his boxes’ was always better placed to develop his own views rather than just follow his ministers. From the seventeenth century onwards, this became ever more difficult as government business grew in scale and complexity. Particularly crucial was the changing nature of government finance. As early as the eighteenth century, this had become a subject which only the very brightest politicians could master. This put everyone else, not just the king, at a disadvantage. The less technical the policy area, the longer royal influence survived. The biggest exception was military policy where successive kings were only too happy to master the most arcane of technical details.
Could a King or Queen, or Prince of Wales run for Prime Minister?
No, conventyially the Prime Minister must be a member of the house of Commons, members of the Royal fmaily cannot be members of the house of Commons and also are not allowed to get involved in poltics.
No. Kings and Queens can’t serve in either House of Parliament, and, while the Prince of Wales (until recently) could serve in the House of Lords, he (under the old rules) would have neither a voice nor a vote.
Perhaps it’s worth adding that Prime Minister is not a directly elected post like President, so nobody actually runs for it as such. The person who becomes Prime Minister just stands for election as a Member of Parliament like any other these days. If by some bizarre consequence the leader of the majority party didn’t win his seat they’d have to give the job to someone else.
Prime Ministers have been members of the House of Lords in the past, the last one being the 14th Earl of Home for a few days in 1963 before he renounced his peerage and stood at a by-election to the House of Commons as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. The last person to act as PM for a full parliament from the HoL was Lord Salisbury in the 1890s.
Not necessarily. There’s usually some party stalwart who’s willing to resign his/her seat to allow the leader of the party to run in a by-election. At least, that’s how it works here in Canada.
For example, Prime Minister Mackenzie King lost his seat twice, in the general elections of 1925 and again in 1945, as shown on this chart. In 1925, he was defeated in a riding in North York, Ontario, so the sitting MP for Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, resigned his seat and PM King ran there in a by-election. He continued to represent Prince Albert riding for 20 years, until the voters in P.A. turfed him out, so a backbencher representing Glengarry, Ontario, resigned and King ran there in a by-election. Losing his seat did not mean that he stopped being Prime Minister, although the 1925 loss weakened him politically within his own party.
Two other Canadian PMs have lost their seats, but in the context of their party also being defeated. Arthur Meighen was Prime Minister from 1920 to 1921. In the 1921 election, his Conservative-Liberal government was defeated by King’s Liberals, and Meighen lost his seat in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. Although his party lost the election, Meighen retained the confidence of his party as leader. A backbencher representing Greenville, Ontario, resigned his seat and Meighen successfully ran in the by-election, so he could sit in the Commons as the Leader of the Opposition.
Meighen was briefly Prime Minister in 1926, but in the general election of that year his party was defeated and he again lost his own seat. This time he stayed out.
And of course there’s Prime Minister Kim Campbell, who led the Tories to the 1993 debacle: from majority government to two seats in the Commons, neither of them hers. She took the hint and left federal politics.
Posted by Northern Piper:
Do you mean the post of prime minister still has no legal status? Even today? That’s hard (for a Yank) to believe. How exactly, technically, does one become p.m., anyway? Presumably the House of Commons takes some kind of vote in the first session following an election – but what is the nature of that vote? What are they voting on? A resolution? A statute?Something else?
There’s no need for a vote in the Commons, if the election results are clear. For example, when Major lost to Blair, Labour had won a massive majority, so there was no need to go to the Commons. Major immediately advised Her Majesty that he was resigning. HM can read the election results as well as the next person, and knew that Tony had a majority, so she summoned him and asked him to form a government. He naturally said: “Great, thanks! here’s my list of Cabinet members.” He gets sworn in as First Lord of the Treasury, the people on his list get sworn in as ministers of the Crown, and bob’s your uncle - change of government, usually within 24 hours of the election. (Literally - it’s the job of the Prime Minister’s spouse to make all the arrangments to be out of 10 Downing Street within 24 hours of the election.)
But, the point I was making is that the office of “Prime Minister” is not set out in any statute. I think the term is used in a few statutes dealing with the PM’s official residences, but there’s nothing equivalent to Article II of the U.S. Constitution.
It’s the same in a lot of Commonwealth countries that have followed the Westminster model. The only reference to the Prime Minister in the Canadian constitution is his duty to call a constitutional convention, set out in s. 35.1 of the Constitution Act, 1982, a duty which has been performed and is now effete.