Introduction: The Revolution in France and Its Consequences
In the first part of this conversation, we have examined the course of the French Revolution until the rise of the Directorate through the prism of the shifts in the power of the legislature compared to that of the Executive.
We have seen how politically, the State had triumphed over the centrifugal powers of Feudal society, and how the main despite their respective revolutions, France and Britain had maintained a very typical division of power within the State - in Britain, the legislative branch reigned supreme over the administration while in France, the Executive was, at the end, victorious.
But while this perspective, I believe, is valuable, it ignores the new question that rose prior to the Revolution and that allowed for the exposure of the utter inaptitude of the French royal Executive - that of ideology.
Executive Weakness and Ideology
As a general rule, executive-led states are more susceptible to the vagaries of ideology and less competent than those where the legislature has the upper hand.
The national Executive's scope of action is, well, national. Even a talented person in that position would find it difficult to give each regional problem the proper focus it requires and to integrate it into a national policy. Something must always slip through the cracks, which in an administrative state takes the form of officials left without defined policy to guide them. Such officials are therefore incentivized to continue, by rote, to perform the same functions that were assigned to them by the last policy as to avoid charges of neglect and malfeasance, since they can point out to the last direct guidance or regulatory code issued to absolve themselves of responsibility. Worse still, they can take advantage of the distracted Executive (especially if he is preoccupied with a grand project that does not concern their department directly) and present reasonably-sounding demands to increase in pay, pensions, departmental resources and staff. The Executive, being a single person or a limited number of people, can be easily be gripped by an ideology, a grand project or a fascination. Even where a legislature exists in a meaningful manner, it is often reduced to a house divided in two: those who support the Executive's goals, ambitions and fascinations and those who oppose them.
In a legislature-dominated polity, however, where the men controlling and monitoring the government are elected by small constituencies with distinct and well defined interests, grievances and aspirations.
This is both a strength and a weakness: the chances of such small details escaping the government's attention are much smaller. Legislators are incentivized to focus each on the issues that touch mostly their own constituencies, and therefore are less susceptible to ideology - One can be a good old free marketeer, but God and Adam Smith help us if the factory that employs half the district is threatened by foreign competition that has the temerity to produce goods that are cheaper and better.
The Ideological Meaning of the Revolution
While the Revolution has been a failure in changing the structure of government in France, it was an utter and unmitigated success in changing its ideology.
Gone was the Divine Right of Kings, the traditional "Society of Orders" and the Galican concordant. Now and forever, French governments, even conservative ones, would draw their legitimacy from the consent (real or feigned) of the governed.
As Edmund Burke put it:
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles...
I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy...
But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.
We must not let our previous description of the rise of royal power since the high middle ages tempt us away from taking Burke seriously.
The French monarchy was an old, traditional institution. The dignity and awe it genuinely inspired predated France itself- perhaps even the settlement of Roman Gaul by the Franks. Even during the high watermark of the Feudal order, when the King of France possessed little beyond the walls of Paris- that little was the honor and majesty of his title. The tradition Burke describes was genuine and heartfelt.
But like all traditional, genuine and heartfelt institution, there was virtually no way to truly restore it on its own terms when the veil have been torn and a queen was discovered to be as vulnerable to injury and insult as mortal women, the king as susceptible to the blade as any man.
To reinstate such feeling, there would be a need for something occupying the space right between cerebral reasoning and religious enthusiasm, something which could work upon the mind and still stir the heart, that could satisfy the analytic faculties of the educated and excite the fantasies of the common masses. In other words, the traditional order would acquire for its salvation the modern tool of ideology, or perish.
Luckily for the traditionalists, there was already a country in Europe (or really of Europe) in possession of such an ideology, who brought its monarchy back from the dead not once, but three times, each times binding it closer to the body politic: it was the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
I: The First Conservatives: English Royalist and Tories, from the death of Charles I to the reign of George III.
The demise of Charles I had led his supporters, the royalists, to something worse than despair - they had now had all their hopes pinned on three young men - the future Charles II and his brothers James (later, James II) and Henry (Duke of Gloucester).
With all the faults of their father, he have been a mature and wily statesman, a worthy rival to both Fairfax and Cromwell - who were but his latest enemies. His sons were, respectively, 19, 16 and 9 years of age. They had no independent means, little training in war and politics and but few friends.
These few friends had their work cut to them. Some had to marshall what little escaped the plunder and confiscation of the Revolution in continuation of the royal cause, such as the abortive attempt to crown Charles as king in Scotland, while others did their best to provide for the late king's family.
But the most important work was done in the formulation of a new ideology -perhaps the first European Ideology to come into existence- intended to achieve two goals:
To keep the royal cause alive and as a preeminent challenge to the Commonwealth.
To bring in the common people to this cause.
Unlike Hobbes, who strayed and became, ironically, the father of the liberal theory of consent as the origin of government, these new royalist ideologues did not bother with rationalistic justification of monarchy and government. Rather, they have argued, partially from religious sources and partially from observation of human nature and culture, that the English monarchy does not require any source of legitimacy beyond the Grace of God. In other words, its authority and dignity are inherent. One should be loyal to One's king since that is the right and decent relationship between sovereign and subject.
More elaborately, monarchy was associated with everything good, cozy and English. The King was as English as Father Christmas, warm ale and high-church service.
The propaganda for the cause of the king in exile was extremely potent and aimed at the sentiments of the English people, at their tendency to identify with the desperado, the disinherited. It tugged at their nostalgic heartstrings and as Cromwell's Protectorate had embraced ever stricter forms of puritanism, the royal cause came to be associated with Merry Olde England, with drinking, good company and the bawdy tale. This propaganda was spread competently and insidiously in song, smuggled print and pamphlet. Even seemingly innocent tracts such as The Examination and Trial of Christmas had in them clearly anti-commonwealth and pro-royalist hidden messages, down to the frontispiece showing a Father Christmas suspiciously resembling Charles I.
Let us imagine ourselves sitting in some cheap eatery or public house. The crowd is petty merchants, actors and actresses specializing in the seedy comedy which have lately come to fashion, and some wealthy gentlemen clearly 'slumming it'. We notice two such specimens at a nearby table- their suits are expensive, but there is nothing inherently different about them than the rest- the waistcoats, the frocks, the hats are all the same. They are drinking, eating and laughing with a woman who is wearing a strange mixture of a cheap dress with some truly extravagant mineral displays. The bill comes through.
The older gentleman is rummaging through his pockets (he has many of them- all laced and gilded, as is the fashion), but comes short. He calls to his brother for help ("Jamie, wouldn't you have some of those Dutch guilders?") But to no avail. The custodian reproaches him ("Your majesty, I am afraid your royal highnesses had outdrank your credit") which the gentleman answers with a witty comment ("ah, you must forgive us, master Brewster,we have our thirst from our late father, while our funds - from Parliament!"). Finally our lady of questionable appearances and morals loses her patience, throws her purse on the table and pays, exclaiming: "God's blood gentlemen! But this is the poorest company I ever supped with!" (apart from this last quote, all the others in this paragraph are pure fiction).
Let us now imagine the trio leaving the little tavern. The king kisses Mistress Gwynne on the hand and leave her in the street followed by his great pack of spaniels. He climbs his sedan chair and knock to his porters ("Adieu Jefferies! Milady the Queen expects us for dinner!" he tells the Duke of York). The chair moves through the crowded streets of London after the Great Fire - merchants, urchins, street preachers and women of ill-repute cheer, jeer and make way to the royal traveler. He answer some of the cheers, some of the rebukes in his self-deprecating way ("I have always admired virtue, but could never imitate her").
Outwards, out of the maddening crowd the porters take the merry monarch into the Court of St. James. There, after refreshing himself, the king retires to his private garden. There is a telescope there, the best in the world, and next to it a wax-bound book in which the King juts down his observations (he is an amateur astronomer).
Two gentlemen stand there, the renowned Dr. Robert Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren. They present Charles with a new watch, built with an improved, more accurate mechanism, which the Monarch delights in as if it was a new battleship or mistress. His discourse with them is learned and engaged, but he does them the courtesy of showing astonishment at the erudition of the two gentlemen ("'Od's fish!"). After excusing himself, he retires to his own apartments.
After dinner with the long suffering queen, Catherine de Braganca, one of maybe three people which truly know him, he pulls out a stack of papers from a discreet place - secret treaties with Louis XIV of France, secret correspondence with members of Parliament, promising bribes, titles, appointments, secret correspondence with his nephew in law, William of Orange and with the Emperor and half the princes of the Holy Roman Empire. Secrets, secrets secrets, the greying monarch (he had removed his jet-black wig for the night) is drowning in secrets.
He knows all his correspondents intimately and personally - he had not spent his years of "travel" (as he called them) in idleness- and he plays all these men - each and every single one of them consider him a fool, a cipher and a traitor to his own country, an image that he worked hard his entire life to maintain - with the skill and elegance of a first rate politician and diplomat. Yes, he promised Louis to convert to Catholicism in secret in exchange for a subsidy that would allow him to be independent of Parliament - what of it? he is a crypto-Catholic since his youth, and he intends to stay this way.
He knew the money would not be coming - Louis is rich, but not rich enough to bankroll two governments at the same time! ("Ah, mon cher cousin, you seek to buy us with a trifle pension? ha! Parliament thought they could buy me with my father's throne -they still think so!") The value of the entire exchange (beyond the little gold that Louis does send, imagining himself a master of intrigue and diplomacy) is to keep the French on friendly terms - an invaluable asset in an age when Louis seems determined to attack all his neighbors - Protestant and Catholic alike. He knows Louis and the limits to his ambition - somewhere in the vicinity of the Moon.
Charles did not have legitimate children of his own - a horde of bastards, the elder of which he made Duke of Monmouth, a bright, devout protestant beau and a soldier, who had inherited his father's conviviality and intelligence - so he married off his two nieces - quiet, shy Marry, to Louis XIV's greatest enemy - the bright and tenacious William of Orange in 1677, mere 3 years after the last time Charles had barely extricated himself from Louis' latest scrap with the United Provinces.
His own reputation and political power in England suffered greatly in that war, the gains to the Crown of England were meager (some remote port in North America, New Rotterdam hellish like that- he allowed his brother to rename it New York to satisfy his vanity- a few war indemnities that were mostly canceled out against English debts). He liked William, and was in correspondence with him almost from the moment of peace. Yes, this is a good solid man to have as a partner on the Continent - much preferable to the arrogant yoke of Louis! (Master of Europe- God's bowels! If only James could have half the sense of his son-in-law!).
Eventually, Charles would succeed where his father had failed - he could call Parliament when he needed them, and could dismiss them. He ruled without them for prolonged periods of time - towards the end of his life he won the greatest prize - he had established personal rule, without Parliament, and ruled as he pleased. The People of England loved Charles and were skeptical of Parliament - didn't so many Parliamentarians had come and gone, protesting the power of the King merely to meekly succumb to his influence, to take position in the government, to do nothing when Parliament was prorogued? Who knows where would Charles II had taken his strong executive government, if it were not for his untimely death, just 54 years of age?
Like all truly great politicians, Charles II was both a tremendous blessing to the faction which he led and a disaster. His style, his intelligence and discretion had bent and reshaped High-Toryism around his personality. Upon his death, when his aloof, haughty and phlegmatic brother ("no man in England would assassinate me to make you king, Jamie") ascended the Throne, both the ideology and faction had shattered. The uprising of Charles' illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth and James' cruel punishment of the insurrectionists in the Great Assizes were one of the contributing factor for the Glorious Revolution. Protestant England had stomached a crypto-Catholic king, it could have swallowed an openly Catholic one. But a king capable of abusing the Law, imposing harsh and hitherto dormant punishment, selling Englishmen (even guilty ones!) to Slavery in the West Indies (without even the graceful cover of indentured servitude!) have proven too much to bear, to intimidating a personality to allow to strike roots in the Presence Chamber. John Locke, the advocate of the natural and inalienable rights and liberties of all men - and all Englishmen in particular - came home to England in the same boat that carried William and Mary to replace James on the Throne.
The Split: New Whigs, New Tories
One should take into consideration that the Whigs that have ruled England during the reign of William and Mary were not direct spiritual heirs to the Parliamentarians of old.
True, the cause of the Commonwealth had survived in some corners of the Three Kingdoms- a certain 18th century Radical would recall the "Cromwell Chair" being still a cherished possession of the Non-Conformist church of his childhood- but it had no role in high politics.
The new Whigs- distinguished from those of Charles II's reign by the reflections imposed by the Glorious Revolution- were partially former Tories. They have not rejected monarchy. No one believed government was possible under a Commonwealth. William and Mary swore an oath to uphold the Laws and Liberties of England- an oath which, while binding the dual monarchs, also implicitly confirmed their power to act- no oath would have been needed if the Crown had no intrinsic power to do what the oath forbade.
The closeness of Whig ideology to that of the Tories is evidenced by their split between two factions - the Junto Whigs, founded by Lord Sunderland and connected directly to William and Mary since before the Revolution, and the Country Whigs, which had split from them due to their too-intimate relationship with the Court. Eventually, the latter had found themselves drawn to the Tory opposition until the two factions had merged, moderating the Tories further towards Whiggish principles and leaving the Whigs as a decidedly Junto organization.
Indeed the periodic attacks which James II and his exiled line would launch for the next three generations, funded by the French Crown and increasingly reliant on fostering rebellion in the Scottish Highlands and in Ireland, would erode any support for their cause in England or even amongst in the Scottish Lowlands. In the novel "The History of Tom Jones- a Foundling", published 1749 (three years after the final humiliation of the Jacobites at Culloden) Jacobitism is a belief only a simple living anachronism such as Squire Western can hold, and it fits well with his comic character.
A Short Respite: The Reign of Anne
The reign of Queen Anne, after the death of William, offered a short return for the Moderate Tories.
In a way, this was the most glorious period of the English Court after the age of the Tudors. For the first time since the reign of Elizabeth I, an English (soon- Britannic!) Prince had a Parliament that was not only cooperative, but outright acquiescent.
It was at this time that the Duke of Marlborough- that willy old protégé of James II who had turned upon him during the Revolution- had gained his fame and shown his incredible talent on the field of glory against Louis XIV's armies. Parliament was ill-disposed towards the French, and therefore supported every gift and prize Anne had lavished upon her general, the husband of her dear Sarah.
How can we describe the Tory position then? It was not one of Absolutism, since Anne had ruled by the consent of Parliament- indeed due to an act of Parliament which have excluded her father and half-brother from the Throne! - and she and her ministers was busy employing every penny and Brown Bess voted to them by Parliament to pommel and pulverize the greatest champion of the Divine Right- Louis XIV and to counter le dernier argument des rois- that is, the great machine of the Royal French Army, as the motto emblazoned upon their cannons proclaimed.
No, the theory of the Divine Right,that is enforced by military might, for kings to rule not under the Law but as his embodiment and masters was rejected, even by the Tories.
Instead what came to be is a new understanding of the cause of the omnipresence and omnipotence of the Law.
While the early Liberals labored to construct a universalist principle under which it could be shown that the Law, written large, is supreme to all rulers everywhere and in all ages, it was sufficient to say that the Law of England was Supreme in England.
It requires no justification, no elaboration of the possible origins of the Law in the abstract, to state what the Law is and what it says. And since English Law - as lawyers - that is, the entire politically active class of England- could show - was supreme even to the very acts of the Crown in Parliament, that was the glory and the legacy of England. All loyal Englishmen should therefore support the queen since she was the lawful occupant of the throne.
The Hanoverians and the Tory Collapse
As Anne drew her last breaths - as she have waited with no small degree of patience to do since her husband and the last of her children preceded her to the afterlife - Parliament had urgently met and enacted a bill to exclude all Catholics from the inheritance of the Throne forever.
This was an essential act, as Anne's closest heir at that time have been her half-brother across the channel- the puppet of the very French monarchy which her entire reign was dedicated to counter. By an accident of nature, not only the Glorious Revolution, but the original Revolution against Anne's grandfather, the Reformation enacted by Elizabeth I and 156 years of English assertion of its right to determine the course of its own reformation movement and national church.
It was also quite illegal.
By the Tories own lights, the Crown in Parliament could not enact a bill which is contrary to Common Law. As the great Elizabethan jurist Sir Edward Coke had put it:
The common law will controul (sic.) Acts of Parliament, and sometimes adjudge them to be utterly void: for when an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law will controul it, and adjudge such Act to be void.
Parliament could therefore not deprived James Francis Edward Stuart - The Old Pretender - of his right to ascend the Throne, a right that was never refused to any monarch, Catholic or Protestant. In the case of depriving his father from his throne, Parliament could feign James II's flight as an implicit abdication- but not him.
Thus, the legal basis to the ascension of the Hanoverian line was based purely on Whig/Liberal notion of the Law, as a fundamental principle who govern a free society, which created the monarchy for its own benefit- and therefore could govern its passing down as is necessary to protect the liberty of that society.
The Hanoverians themselves were not taken in by the humane principles of Locke- unlike William of Orange, they have been accustomed to rule an imperial principality in the usual mix of an iron fist gloved in the vagaries of Imperial Law, rather than a regal republic with an independent legislature and institutions- but their claim to England and all its riches (their main point of interest) was based on Whig power. So the Whigs had the government of England for the next two generations of German kings.
The rule of the early Hanoverians was a blessing to Britain.
The presence of kings who had no interest in upsetting the Constitutional Settlement was a welcome change. George I incapability to transact business directly in English, long absences in his Hanover home and general disinterest in England meant he and his son had had to rely on the talents of Parliamentarian and government luminaries such as Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of Great Britain. While politicians are often untalented and venal, the new need for British politicians to climb the greasy pole of politics without relying on the caprice and favor of the monarch did wonders to rationalize British government. Another great step towards Modern Government was achieved.
Farmer George and Lord Bute - the Return of Toryism
From the beginning, the alliance between the Hanoverians and the Whigs have been tenuous and fraught.
The Hanoverians have been dependent on the Whigs who sent the Stuarts packing, but they were not content in this situation. Not only were the Hanoverians weary of the security of their position under the Whigs, the Whigs were becoming fractious and chaotic in the absence of a serious Tory challenge. The last Tory ministry was in fact headed by a Whig- Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford and Mortimer. No one could question the Whig bona fides of this man who was fighting the Tories up and down during the Glorious Revolution, but as Queen Anne lay dying, he had found himself leader of the "Country Whigs" which, as we said above, opposed the "Junto Whig" exercising power in the reign of William and Mary.
The Country Whigs would not be the last faction to oppose the mainstream of the party and going so far as to join forces with the Tories in opposition to them, nor could even Whig governing factions keep themselves from fracturing and yielding a fresh crop of new factions in every ministry.
George I, who made an honest attempt at studying the English people and their language (he was more successful in the former than the latter), had determined that England could never, regrettably, be ruled as a larger scale Hanover. However, one of the peculiar features of the House of Hanover had always been intergenerational hostility, a relic of the pettiness of German princely court politics. Thus, George II was unreceptive to the advise of his father. George I, which had himself experienced a similar hardship in the relationship with his father the Great Elector, had chosen instead to tend to the education of his grandson Frederick.
While Frederick would never occupy the British throne due to his early death in the reign of his father, his instructions towards the education of his son, the future George III, were decisive:
Instruction for my son George, Drawn by Myself, for His Good, that of my family and for that of His People, According to the Ideas of my Grandfather and Best Friend George I:
To my son George:
As I always have had the tenderest paternal affection for you, I cannot give you a stronger proof of it than in leaving this paper for you...
I shall have no regret never to have wore the crown if you do but fill it worthily. Convince this nation that you are not only an Englishman born and bred, but that you are also this by inclination, and that as you will love your younger children next to the elder born, so you will love all your other countries".
(Quoted from "The Last King of America", Andre Roberts. Viking, 2021. PP. 10-11)
This, if you will, was the essence of the political strategy George III and the new Tory party would adopt: the King shall exercise his rightful role within the Constitution using the soft power methods of "influence" and fortify his position by tying himself to the People- by showing himself not merely a fully integrated Englishman, but as the ideal Englishman.
In essence, this was the startegy of Charles II, adopted for a new age. The second Carolinian era was aristocratic, corrupt and tired of the moralist strictures of the Cromwellian regime, which demanded the King, to make himself amicable, show off his convivial brand of corruption, easy-going aristocracy (the kind shown by a high-class rogue) and hedonism.
The Georgian era, on the other hand, was one in which the middle class was rising economically and politically for nearly 60 years, in which rigorist religious sects such as the Methodists and their precursors were not only rising, but becoming respectable, and which grew tired and suspicious of high class rakishness, which it widely associated woth the hated Stuarts.
Therefore, George III, "Farmer George", would show direct and intense interest in the lives and livelihoods of his subjects. He knew everything about the raising of pigs, sheep and oxen. He was a veritable encyclopedia of maritime and commercial knowledge. He knew the countryside as the back of his hand. He worked long and hard, rising early in the morning and going to sleep late, keeping a schedule thar could have made every farmer or Counting House clerk look indolent and absent minded.
In terms of court pleasures and entertainments, he had funded and attended enough of them to not cast a shaddow of misery on his court and to keep up the prestige of Great Britain in Europe, but he had no great appetite for lavish or performative ceremony or hedonism. Lord Melbourne would later relate to his granddaughter, Queen Victoria:
He dined with great rapidity, was very temperate and hardly ate anything
Ibid, PP 82
He also usually took his meals alone or with his queen, which he was extremely fond of and, unlike almost every British (and English) monarch before, was entirely faithfull to. A lewd proposition by a certain lady when he was preparing for his wedding (shortly after his accession) offended and enraged him to no end:
Many who flatter themselves to make their way through some mistress to me, seeing themselves entirely disappointed by that attachment I have for her to whom I am wedded, out of rage and despair spread sich reports because they will rather snarl when not in their power to bite; but I despise that malice... the voice of detraction and envy"
Ibid, PP. 70
George III was determined to influence, but not to be influenced.
"Influence" in this sense meant all the sundry methods which an 18th century British monarch still possessed to advance aspiring politicos up the political, economic and social ladder. The King had plenary power to distribute honors and titles of nobility. He had considerable income from crownlands, which went directly to him (as England's greatest landlord) and which he coukd dispose off at his discretion (for instance, by tilting elections in rotten boroughs on behalf of accomodating MPs). He could, constitutionally, appoint and sack his ministers and every government official at his pleasure, and as long as Parliament have not voted a motion of no-confidence in the resulting government, or impeached an appointed minister, these appointments stood. He could prorogue and call a Parliament into session, which was a weapon for emergencies, but ut existed and meant George could destroy legislation way before it reached his desk for official assent.
Of course, all these methods were perfectly legal, but they carried the danger of a Parliament becoming weary of the King's power. But George's well cultivated popularity have shielded him. Besides, George didn't seek absolute or even direct power or the elimination of the opposition. Rather, he sought to have a say in the government of his country, as was his duty under his coronation oaths.
The power King George enjoyed, which was soft, polite, yet insidious and prevasive, was acceped and lauded. The Whigs alone complained of the diminishing independence of Parliament, and not all of them- recall that the New Tories were, for the large part, an amalgamation of anti-administrative Whigs and moderate Tories, reconciled to the rule of the Hanoverians.
Even that old Tory firebrand, Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, had joined the pro-Hanoverian chorus in his 1738 pamphlet "A vision of a Patriotic King" in which he outright rejected the Divine Right of Kings, at last acceding to that old principle of the Whigs, of the King as an hereditary officer of the Crown, and calling for that officer to exercise his rightful power allotted to him in the Constitution, out of deep identification with the Country and its essence.
The intellectual power in the Home Islands have been on the side of George and the Tories. The most celebrated man of letters, Dr. Samuel Johnsonn had defined in his dictionary:
Tory: One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a Whig.
Whig: The name of a faction.
But while the Tories were having their day in the Sun- and it was a glorious day, following the brilliant victories of ththe Seven Years War, adorned with prosperity and Imperial splendor, in a country which was not merely the most powerful, but (as both its home population and its colonists abroad intonated) the freest in the World- across the water, in a faraway continent, another spirit stirred.
II: The State of the British Government before the American Revolution:
To recapitulate, the British government between 1760 and 1774 seems to have found a happy medium between the Absolutist Monarchies of the Continent, with their domineering royal Executives, and the petty concerns that govern legislatures.
The British Monarch served a dual function:
First, as the Sovereign chief officer of the Crown, all acts of the government were legitimized by his assent. This goverment, headed by the Prime Minister, was responsible towards a Parliament that alone could pass laws, raise taxes, declare war and impeach offending officers of the government. This prevented the worse abuses and maladies of an Executive State. The British Government was well capable at removing deadwood (when it was so inclined), controlling expenditures and focusing on multiple tasks at the same time.
Second, the Monarch was indirectly influencing Parliament- either by pressure (positive or negative) on individual members through the promise of emoluments, offices, titles and support, or more indirectly by leveraging the popularity and prestige of King George towards a given policy.
The masses have been brought into the political world through the successful vehicle of Ideology- that is, they felt invested, even proud in the government of their country. King George was not merely "loved" in the traditional, Continental way of the subject's duty to express his loyalty to the monarch. He was loved because he was a glorious, effective, present, liberal-minded monarch, heavily concerned and interested in the welfare of his people. Submission, as Burke would put it, was indeed sweet, obedience voluntary, even if he had missaplied what was actually a description of the reign of George III to that of Louis XVI of France. George III set out to win the love of his people and he have been largely successful. He became the precursor of the 19th Century's "Working Monarchs", eschewing the profligate model of the "Leveé Monarchy".
Even those factions officially opposed to the Tory Ideology, the Whigs, who believed in the all-importance of an administrative State controlled by Parliament as a representor of the People, had largely reconciled themselves to this style of government. Even those who have not outright joined the Tories (out of belief that at the very least, the King was capable of restraining the government), had never openly called for the removal of a popular king who had not exceeded the limits of his coronation oaths.
That this balanced government would have offended our modern sensibilities is no wonder, since we all belong to a different tradition of government- that of the Whigs, but neither the Country Whigs, the Patriot Whigs or even the Government Whigs of the Home Islands.
Rather, modern politics should look for its roots in a different branch of Whig ideology, one at the periphery of the Empire- that of American Whiggery.
III: The Case for Whiggery:
If wars were won by feasting Or victory by song,
Or safety found in sleeping sound, How England would be strong!
But honour and dominion, Are not maintained so.
They're only got by sword and shot, and this the Dutchmen know!
The moneys that should feed us,
You spend on your delight,
How can you then have sailor-men
To aid you in your fight?
Our fish and cheese are rotten,
Which makes the scurvy grow -
We cannot serve you if we starve,
And this the Dutchmen know!
Our ships in every harbour
Be neither whole nor sound,
And, when we seek to mend a leak,
No oakum can be found;
Or, if it is, the caulkers,
And carpenters also,
For lack of pay have gone away,
And this the Dutchmen know!
Mere powder, guns, and bullets,
We scarce can get at all;
Their price was spent in merriment
And revel at Whitehall,
While we in tattered doublets
From ship to ship must row,
Beseeching friends for odds and ends -
And this the Dutchmen know!
No King will heed our warnings,
No Court will pay our claims -
Our King and Court for their disport
Do sell the very Thames!
For, now De Ruyter's topsails Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
(Rudyad Kipling, The Dutch in the Medway)
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