Ordnance used to have a seat in the Cabinet, and the duke of Wellington sat there for a short time as Commander-in- Chief. Of late years there has been no military officer in the Cabinet, a thing much to be regretted. In a few in stances privy councillors of very high standing, as the duke of Wellington, Lord Sid mouth the marquis of Lans- downe, and Lord Russell, have been summoned to the Cabinet without office. There is no constitutional objec tion to summoning any privy councillor to the Cabinet by
command of the sovereign.The word " Cabinet," or " Cabinet Council," was originally employed as a term of reproach. Thus Lord Bacon says, in his essay Of Counsel (xx.), " The doctrine of Italy and practice of France, in some kings times, hath introduced Cabinet Councils a remedy worse than the disease ; " and, again, " As for Cabinet Councils, it may be their motto Plenus rimarum sum." Lord Clarendon after stating that, in 1640, when the great Council of Peers was convened by the king at York, the burden of affairs rested principally on Laud, Strafford, and Cottington, with five or six others added to them on account of their official position and ability adds, " These persons made up the Committee of State, which was reproachfully after called the Juncto, and enviously then in Court the Cabinet Council." And in the Second Remonstrance in January 1642, Parliament complained "of the managing of the great affairs of the realm in Cabinet Councils, by men unknown and not publicly trusted." But this use of the term, though historically curious, has in truth nothing in common with the modern application of it. It meant, at that time, the employment of a select body of favourites by the king, who were supposed to possess a larger share of his confidence than the Privy Council at large.[1] Under the Tudors, at least from the later years of Henry VIII., and under the Stuarts, the Privy Council was the Council of State or Government. During the Common-wealth it assumed that name.
The Cabinet Council; properly so called, dates from the reign of William III. and from the year 1693, for it was not until some years after the Revolution that the king discovered and adopted the two fundamental principles of a constitutional Executive Government, namely, that a ministry should consist of statesmen holding the same politi cal principles and identified with each other ; and, secondly, that the ministry should stand upon a parliamentary basis, that is, that it must command and retain the majority of votes in the Legislature. It was long before these principles were thoroughly worked out and understood, and the perfection to which they have been brought in modern times is the result of time, experience, and, in part, of accident. But the result is that the Cabinet Council for the time being is the Government of Great Britain ; that all the powers vested in the sovereign (with one or two exceptions) are practically exercised by the members of this body ; that all the members of the Cabinet are jointly and severally responsible for all its measures, for if differences of opinion arise their existence is unknown as long as the Cabinet lasts, when publicly manifested the Cabinet is at an end ; and lastly, that the Cabinet, being responsible to the sovereign for the conduct of executive business, is also collectively responsible to Parliament both for its executive conduct and for its legislative measures, the same men being as members of the Cabinet the servants of the Crown, and as Members of Parliament and leaders of the majority responsible to those who support them by their votes and may challenge in debate every one of their actions. In this latter sense the Cabinet has sometimes been described as a Standing Committee of both Houses of Parliament.
This in reality is the form to which the active governing machinery of the British Constitution has now been brought. It has been ingeniously argued by Mr Bagehot, in his Essays on the Constitution, that " the Cabinet is a board of control, chosen by the Legislature, out of the persons whom it trusts and knows, to rule the nation," and that the choice of the Crown and of the Prime Minister, who frames the list of Cabinet Ministers to be laid before the sovereign, is in fact circumscribed and predetermined by the position which a small number of men in each party have acquired in Parliament. No man can long remain a Cabinet Minister who is not in Parlia ment ; and of those who sit in either House of Parliament, but a small proportion have attained to the rank or influ ence that fits a man to be a Cabinet Minister. This is especially the case in the House of Commons, largely composed of men engaged in various professions ; for it is easier to find men of high senatorial rank and experience in the House of Peers than in the other House, because in England members of the Peerage are frequently trained and educated from early life for high office and the public service. The Cabinet, therefore, really originates in the Legislature, though its functions are the functions of executive government, and although it disposes on behalf of the Crown of a vast amount of power, patronage, honours, &c., to which the authority of the Legislature does not extend. The Cabinet has, moreover, one most important power, which it derives entirely from the Crown, namely, that of dissolving the Legislature to which it owes its own existence though this is in fact no more than an appeal to the nation at large, whose representative the Legisla ture is. The power of dissolving Parliament is one usually, though not always unreservedly, entrusted by the sovereign to the Prime Minister ; but if withheld when solicited, the minister would resign.
Instances are not wanting in our history in which the direct action of the sovereign has overthrown a Cabinet, or prevented a Cabinet from being formed. In 1784 George III. dismissed the Coalition Ministry. In 1807 the king also dismissed Lord Grenville s Cabinet, in the teeth of Lord Erckine s declaration of the high Whig doctrine, that the king had handed over every power of government, and even his own conscience, to his responsible advisers. In these instances the Crown succeeded, and the new Parliament ratified the change. Not so in 1834 when William IT. dismissed Lord Melbourne s Cabinet, placed the duke of Wellington for some weeks in sole possession of all the Cabinet offices, and called Sir Robert Peel to power. In 1812 Lord Moira was defeated in the attempt to form a Cabinet by the refusal of the regent to consent to a change in the household; and in 1839 a similar reason was alleged by Queen Victoria to prevent the accession to office of Sir Robert Peel. But though this step was defended and sanctioned by a minute of the Whig Cabinet of the day, it is now generally regarded as unconstitutional, and the objection was never repeated.
Cabinet with the Legislature is that it is desirable to divide the strength of the ministry between the two Houses of Parliament. Mr Pitt s Cabinet of 1783 consisted of him self in the House of Commons and seven peers. But so aristocratic a Government would now be impracticable. In Mr Gladstone s large Cabinet of 1868, eight, and afterwards nine, ministers were in the House of Commons and six in
the House of Peers. Great efforts were made to strengthen- ↑ Thus, under Charles II., in 1671, the king s confidential advisers were Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. The initial letters of their names spell the word " Cabal ; " and Lord Macaulay affirms that the word cabal was popularly used as synony mous with cabinet. But the word cabal certainly never was applied to any other cabinet ; and the cabal itself was not in truth a cabinet ;it all.
