It is much to be lamented that any account of this session which can be framed out of the scanty and dispersed materials now accessible must leave many things obscure. The relations of the parliamentary factions were, during this year, in a singularly complicated state. Each of the two Houses was divided and subdivided by several lines. To omit minor distinctions, there was the great line which separated the Whig party from the Tory party; and there was the great line which separated the official men and their friends and dependents, who were sometimes called the Court party, from those who were sometimes nicknamed the Grumbletonians and sometimes honoured with the appellation of the Country party. And these two great lines were intersecting lines.
For of the servants of the Crown and of their adherents about one half were Whigs and one half Tories. It is also to be remembered that there was, quite distinct from the feud between Whigs and Tories, quite distinct also from the feud between those who were in and those who were out, a feud between the Lords as Lords and the Commons as Commons. The spirit both of the hereditary and of the elective chamber had been thoroughly roused in the preceding session by the dispute about the Court of the Lord High Steward;and they met in a pugnacious mood.
The speech which the King made at the opening of the session was skilfully framed for the purpose of conciliating the Houses. He came, he told them, to ask for their advice and assistance. He congratulated them on the victory of La Hogue. He acknowledged with much concern that the operations of the allies had been less successful by land than by sea; but he warmly declared that, both by land and by sea, the valour of his English subjects had been preeminently conspicuous. The distress of his people, he said, was his own; his interest was inseparable from theirs; it was painful to him to call on them to make sacrifices; but from sacrifices which were necessary to the safety of the English nation and of the Protestant religion no good Englishman and no good Protestant would shrink.344The Commons thanked the King in cordial terms for his gracious speech.345 But the Lords were in a bad humour. Two of their body, Marlborough and Huntingdon, had, during the recess, when an invasion and an insurrection were hourly expected, been sent to the Tower, and were still under recognisances. Had a country gentleman or a merchant been taken up and held to bail on even slighter grounds at so alarming a crisis, the Lords would assuredly not have interfered. But they were easily moved to anger by any thing that looked like an indignity offered to their own order. They not only crossexamined with great severity Aaron Smith, the Solicitor of the Treasury, whose character, to say the truth, entitled him to little indulgence, but passed; by thirty-five votes to twenty-eight, a resolution implying a censure on the judges of the King's Bench, men certainly not inferior in probity, and very far superior in legal learning, to any peer of the realm. The King thought it prudent to soothe the wounded pride of the nobility by ordering the recognisances to be cancelled; and with this concession the House was satisfied, to the great vexation of the Jacobites, who had hoped that the quarrel would be prosecuted to some fatal issue, and who, finding themselves disappointed, vented their spleen by railing at the tameness of the degenerate barons of England.346Both Houses held long and earnest deliberations on the state of the nation. The King, when he requested their advice, had, perhaps, not foreseen that his words would be construed into an invitation to scrutinise every part of the administration, and to offer suggestions touching matters which parliaments have generally thought it expedient to leave entirely to the Crown.
Some of the discontented peers proposed that a Committee, chosen partly by the Lords and partly by the Commons, should be authorised to inquire into the whole management of public affairs. But it was generally apprehended that such a Committee would become a second and more powerful Privy Council, independent of the Crown, and unknown to the Constitution. The motion was therefore rejected by forty-eight votes to thirty-six.
