Complete Works of Edmund Burke

by Edmund Burke

  It is the undoubted prerogative of the crown to dissolve Parliament; but we beg leave to lay before his Majesty, that it is, of all the trusts vested in his Majesty, the most critical and delicate, and that in which this House has the most reason to require, not only the good faith, but the favor of the crown. His Commons are not always upon a par with his ministers in an application to popular judgment; it is not in the power of the members of this House to go to their election at the moment the most favorable for them. It is in the power of the crown to choose a time for their dissolution whilst great and arduous matters of state and legislation are depending, which may be easily misunderstood, and which cannot be fully explained before that misunderstanding may prove fatal to the honor that belongs and to the consideration that is due to members of Parliament.

  With his Majesty is the gift of all the rewards, the honors, distinctions, favors, and graces of the state; with his Majesty is the mitigation of all the rigors of the law: and we rejoice to see the crown possessed of trusts calculated to obtain good-will, and charged with duties which are popular and pleasing. Our trusts are of a different kind. Our duties are harsh and invidious in their nature; and justice and safety is all we can expect in the exercise of them. We are to offer salutary, which is not always pleasing counsel: we are to inquire and to accuse; and the objects of our inquiry and charge will be for the most part persons of wealth, power, and extensive connections: we are to make rigid laws for the preservation of revenue, which of necessity more or less confine some action or restrain some function which before was free: what is the most critical and invidious of all, the whole body of the public impositions originate from us, and the hand of the House of Commons is seen and felt in every burden that presses on the people. Whilst ultimately we are serving them, and in the first instance whilst we are serving his Majesty, it will be hard indeed, if we should see a House of Commons the victim of its zeal and fidelity, sacrificed by his ministers to those very popular discontents which shall be excited by our dutiful endeavors for the security and greatness of his throne. No other consequence can result from such an example, but that, in future, the House of Commons, consulting its safety at the expense of its duties, and suffering the whole energy of the state to be relaxed, will shrink from every service which, however necessary, is of a great and arduous nature, — or that, willing to provide for the public necessities, and at the same time to secure the means of performing that task, they will exchange independence for protection, and will court a subservient existence through the favor of those ministers of state or those secret advisers who ought themselves to stand in awe of the Commons of this realm.

  A House of Commons respected by his ministers is essential to his Majesty’s service: it is fit that they should yield to Parliament, and not that Parliament should be new-modelled until it is fitted to their purposes. If our authority is only to be held up when we coincide in opinion with his Majesty’s advisers, but is to be set at nought the moment it differs from them, the House of Commons will sink into a mere appendage of administration, and will lose that independent character which, inseparably connecting the honor and reputation with the acts of this House, enables us to afford a real, effective, and substantial support to his government. It is the deference shown to our opinion, when we dissent from the servants of the crown, which alone can give authority to the proceedings of this House, when it concurs with their measures.

  That authority once lost, the credit of his Majesty’s crown will be impaired in the eyes of all nations. Foreign powers, who may yet wish to revive a friendly intercourse with this nation, will look in vain for that hold which gave a connection with Great Britain the preference to an affiance with any other state. A House of Commons of which ministers were known to stand in awe, where everything was necessarily discussed on principles fit to be openly and publicly avowed, and which could not be retracted or varied without danger, furnished a ground of confidence in the public faith which the engagement of no state dependent on the fluctuation of personal favor and private advice can ever pretend to. If faith with the House of Commons, the grand security for the national faith itself, can be broken with impunity, a wound is given to the political importance of Great Britain which will not easily be healed.

  That there was a great variance between the late House of Commons and certain persons, whom his Majesty has been advised to make and continue as ministers, in defiance of the advice of that House, is notorious to the world. That House did not confide in those ministers; and they withheld their confidence from them for reasons for which posterity will honor and respect the names of those who composed that House of Commons, distinguished for its independence. They could not confide in persons who have shown a disposition to dark and dangerous intrigues. By these intrigues they have weakened, if not destroyed, the clear assurance which his Majesty’s people, and which all nations, ought to have of what are and what are not the real acts of his government.

  If it should be seen that his ministers may continue in their offices without any signification to them of his Majesty’s displeasure at any of their measures, whilst persons considerable for their rank, and known to have had access to his Majesty’s sacred person, can with impunity abuse that advantage, and employ his Majesty’s name to disavow and counteract the proceedings of his official servants, nothing but distrust, discord, debility, contempt of all authority, and general confusion, can prevail in his government.

  This we lay before his Majesty, with humility and concern, as the inevitable effect of a spirit of intrigue in his executive government: an evil which we have but too much reason to be persuaded exists and increases. During the course of the last session it broke out in a manner the most alarming. This evil was infinitely aggravated by the unauthorized, but not disavowed, use which has been made of his Majesty’s name, for the purpose of the most unconstitutional, corrupt, and dishonorable influence on the minds of the members of Parliament that ever was practised in this kingdom. No attention even to exterior decorum, in the practice of corruption and intimidation employed on peers, was observed: several peers were obliged under menaces to retract their declarations and to recall their proxies.

  The Commons have the deepest interest in the purity and integrity of the Peerage. The Peers dispose of all the property in the kingdom, in the last resort; and they dispose of it on their honor, and not on their oaths, as all the members of every other tribunal in the kingdom must do, — though in them the proceeding is not conclusive. We have, therefore, a right to demand that no application shall be made to peers of such a nature as may give room to call in question, much less to attaint, our sole security for all that we possess. This corrupt proceeding appeared to the House of Commons, who are the natural guardians of the purity of Parliament, and of the purity of every branch of judicature, a most reprehensible and dangerous practice, tending to shake the very foundation of the authority of the House of Peers; and they branded it as such by their resolution.

  The House had not sufficient evidence to enable them legally to punish this practice, but they had enough to caution them against all confidence in the authors and abettors of it. They performed their duty in humbly advising his Majesty against the employment of such ministers; but his Majesty was advised to keep those ministers, and to dissolve that Parliament. The House, aware of the importance and urgency of its duty with regard to the British interests in India, which were and are in the utmost disorder, and in the utmost peril, most humbly requested his Majesty not to dissolve the Parliament during the course of their very critical proceedings on that subject. His Majesty’s gracious condescension to that request was conveyed in the royal faith, pledged to a House of Parliament, and solemnly delivered from the throne. It was but a very few days after a committee had been, with the consent and concurrence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, appointed for an inquiry into certain accounts delivered to the House by the Court of Directors, and then actually engaged in that inquiry, that the ministers, regardless of the assuran
ce given from the crown to a House of Commons, did dissolve that Parliament. We most humbly submit to his Majesty’s consideration the consequences of this their breach of public faith.

  Whilst the members of the House of Commons, under that security, were engaged in his Majesty’s and the national business, endeavors were industriously used to calumniate those whom it was found impracticable to corrupt. The reputation of the members, and the reputation of the House itself, was undermined in every part of the kingdom.

  In the speech from the throne relative to India, we are cautioned by the ministers “not to lose sight of the effect any measure may have on the Constitution of our country.” We are apprehensive that a calumnious report, spread abroad, of an attack upon his Majesty’s prerogative by the late House of Commons, may have made an impression on his royal mind, and have given occasion to this unusual admonition to the present. This attack is charged to have been made in the late Parliament by a bill which passed the House of Commons, in the late session of that Parliament, for the regulation of the affairs, for the preservation of the commerce, and for the amendment of the government of this nation, in the East Indies.

  That his Majesty and his people may have an opportunity of entering into the ground of this injurious charge, we beg leave humbly to acquaint his Majesty, that, far from having made any infringement whatsoever on any part of his royal prerogative, that bill did, for a limited time, give to his Majesty certain powers never before possessed by the crown; and for this his present ministers (who, rather than fall short in the number of their calumnies, employ some that are contradictory) have slandered this House, as aiming at the extension of an unconstitutional influence in his Majesty’s crown. This pretended attempt to increase the influence of the crown they were weak enough to endeavor to persuade his Majesty’s people was amongst the causes which excited his Majesty’s resentment against his late ministers.

  Further, to remove the impressions of this calumny concerning an attempt in the House of Commons against his prerogative, it is proper to inform his Majesty, that the territorial possessions in the East Indies never have been declared by any public judgment, act, or instrument, or any resolution of Parliament whatsoever, to be the subject matter of his Majesty’s prerogative; nor have they ever been understood as belonging to his ordinary administration, or to be annexed or united to his crown; but that they are acquisitions of a new and peculiar description, unknown to the ancient executive constitution of this country.

  From time to time, therefore, Parliament provided for their government according to its discretion, and to its opinion of what was required by the public necessities. We do not know that his Majesty was entitled, by prerogative, to exercise any act of authority whatsoever in the Company’s affairs, or that, in effect, such authority has ever been exercised. His Majesty’s patronage was not taken away by that bill; because it is notorious that his Majesty never originally had the appointment of a single officer, civil or military, in the Company’s establishment in India: nor has the least degree of patronage ever been acquired to the crown in any other manner or measure than as the power was thought expedient to be granted by act of Parliament, — that is, by the very same authority by which the offices were disposed of and regulated in the bill which his Majesty’s servants have falsely and injuriously represented as infringing upon the prerogative of the crown.

  Before the year 1773 the whole administration of India, and the whole patronage to office there, was in the hands of the East India Company. The East India Company is not a branch of his Majesty’s prerogative administration, nor does that body exercise any species of authority under it, nor indeed from any British title that does not derive all its legal validity from acts of Parliament.

  When a claim was asserted to the India territorial possessions in the occupation of the Company, these possessions were not claimed as parcel of his Majesty’s patrimonial estate, or as a fruit of the ancient inheritance of his crown: they were claimed for the public. And when agreements were made with the East India Company concerning any composition for the holding, or any participation of the profits, of those territories, the agreement was made with the public; and the preambles of the several acts have uniformly so stated it. These agreements were not made (even nominally) with his Majesty, but with Parliament: and the bills making and establishing such agreements always originated in this House; which appropriated the money to await the disposition of Parliament, without the ceremony of previous consent from the crown even so much as suggested by any of his ministers: which previous consent is an observance of decorum, not indeed of strict right, but generally paid, when a new appropriation takes place in any part of his Majesty’s prerogative revenues.

  In pursuance of a right thus uniformly recognized and uniformly acted on, when Parliament undertook the reformation of the East India Company in 1773, a commission was appointed, as the commission in the late bill was appointed; and it was made to continue for a term of years, as the commission in the late bill was to continue; all the commissioners were named in Parliament, as in the late bill they were named. As they received, so they held their offices, wholly independent of the crown; they held them for a fixed term; they were not removable by an address of either House or even of both Houses of Parliament, a precaution observed in the late bill relative to the commissioners proposed therein; nor were they bound by the strict rules of proceeding which regulated and restrained the late commissioners against all possible abuse of a power which could not fail of being diligently and zealously watched by the ministers of the crown, and the proprietors of the stock, as well as by Parliament. Their proceedings were, in that bill, directed to be of such a nature as easily to subject them to the strictest revision of both, in case of any malversation.

  In the year 1780, an act of Parliament again made provision for the government of those territories for another four years, without any sort of reference to prerogative; nor was the least objection taken at the second, more than at the first of those periods, as if an infringement had been made upon the rights of the crown: yet his Majesty’s ministers have thought fit to represent the late commission as an entire innovation on the Constitution, and the setting up a new order and estate in the nation, tending to the subversion of the monarchy itself.

  If the government of the East Indies, other than by his Majesty’s prerogative, be in effect a fourth order in the commonwealth, this order has long existed; because the East India Company has for many years enjoyed it in the fullest extent, and does at this day enjoy the whole administration of those provinces, and the patronage to offices throughout that great empire, except as it is controlled by act of Parliament.

  It was the ill condition and ill administration of the Company’s affairs which induced this House (merely as a temporary establishment) to vest the same powers which the Company did before possess, (and no other,) for a limited time, and under very strict directions, in proper hands, until they could be restored, or farther provision made concerning them. It was therefore no creation whatever of a new power, but the removal of an old power, long since created, and then existing, from the management of those persons who had manifestly and dangerously abused their trust. This House, which well knows the Parliamentary origin of all the Company’s powers and privileges, and is not ignorant or negligent of the authority which may vest those powers and privileges in others, if justice and the public safety so require, is conscious to itself that it no more creates a new order in the state, by making occasional trustees for the direction of the Company, than it originally did in giving a much more permanent trust to the Directors or to the General Court of that body. The monopoly of the East India Company was a derogation from the general freedom of trade belonging to his Majesty’s people. The powers of government, and of peace and war, are parts of prerogative of the highest order. Of our competence to restrain the rights of all his subjects by act of Parliament, and to vest those high and eminent prerogatives even in a particular company of merchants, there h
as been no question. We beg leave most humbly to claim as our right, and as a right which this House has always used, to frame such bills for the regulation of that commerce, and of the territories held by the East India Company, and everything relating to them, as to our discretion shall seem fit; and we assert and maintain that therein we follow, and do not innovate on, the Constitution.

  That his Majesty’s ministers, misled by their ambition, have endeavored, if possible, to form a faction in the country against the popular part of the Constitution; and have therefore thought proper to add to their slanderous accusation against a House of Parliament, relative to his Majesty’s prerogative, another of a different nature, calculated for the purpose of raising fears and jealousies among the corporate bodies of the kingdom, and of persuading uninformed persons belonging to those corporations to look to and to make addresses to them, as protectors of their rights, under their several charters, from the designs which they, without any ground, charged the then House of Commons to have formed against charters in general. For this purpose they have not scrupled to assert that the exertion of his Majesty’s prerogative in the late precipitate change in his administration, and the dissolution of the late Parliament, were measures adopted in order to rescue the people and their rights out of the hands of the House of Commons, their representatives.

  We trust that his Majesty’s subjects are not yet so far deluded as to believe that the charters, or that any other of their local or general privileges, can have a solid security in any place but where that security has always been looked for, and always found, — in the House of Commons. Miserable and precarious indeed would be the state of their franchises, if they were to find no defence but from that quarter from whence they have always been attacked! But the late House of Commons, in passing that bill, made no attack upon any powers or privileges, except such as a House of Commons has frequently attacked, and will attack, (and they trust, in the end, with their wonted success,) — that is, upon those which are corruptly and oppressively administered; and this House do faithfully assure his Majesty, that we will correct, and, if necessary for the purpose, as far as in us lies, will wholly destroy, every species of power and authority exercised by British subjects to the oppression, wrong, and detriment of the people, and to the impoverishment and desolation of the countries subject to it.