An Essay on the History of the English Government and Constitution, from the Reign of Henry Vii

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1821 edition. Excerpt: ... Speaker Onslow was of opinion, that much weight and authority were added to the House of Commons by the Septennial Act. We now find, therefore, a party ruling the country through the House of Commons; a species of government which has been assailed with vehemence, with plausibility, eloquence, and wit, by Swift, and Bolingbroke, and the M whole party of Tories in the reigns of George 1. and II.; by Lord Bute and the King's friends in the commencement of the late reign, and by a party of parliamentary reformers in our own time. The sum of their objection to it is this,--That it mixes and confounds the functions of the King with those of the House of Commons; that the King hereby loses his prerogative of choosing his own servants, and becomes a slave to his powerful subjects, whilst the House of Commons, by interfering in the executive government, open their door to corruption; and, instead of being the vigilant guardians of the public purse, become the accomplices of an ambitious oligarchy. Now this objection, if good, is fatal to our whole constitution; for we have seen, in reviewing the reign of Charles I., that a Kingwhose servants are quite independent of Parliament, and a Parliament which is adverse to all abuses of power, cannot exist together: submission from one or other of the parties, or civil war, must ensue. The question, then, for us to consider, is not whether the government of the two first Princes of the House of Brunswick was a corruption of the English constitution, but whether it was upon the whole a good or an evil. The first consideration that must strike us is, that, upon the whole, the liberty of the subject was secure. The chief exceptions to this remark are, the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act on Layer's plot, and the...