Perceval, however, with Pitt's example before him, had no doubt of the course which it was his duty to pursue; and the Opposition also, for the most part, followed the tactics of 1789; the line of argument now adopted by each party being so nearly identical with that employed on the former occasion, that it is needless to recapitulate the topics on which the different speakers insisted; though it is worth remarking that Lord Holland, who, as the nephew of Fox, thought it incumbent on him to follow his uncle's guidance, did on one point practically depart from it. As his uncle had done, he denied the right of the Houses to impose any restrictions on the Prince's exercise of the royal authority; but, at the same time, he consented to put what may be called a moral limitation on that exercise, by adding to an amendment which he proposed to the resolution proposed by the minister an expression of "the farther opinion of the House that it will be expedient to abstain from the exercise of all such powers as the immediate exigencies of the state shall not call into action, until Parliament shall have passed a bill or bills for the future care of his Majesty's royal person during his Majesty's present indisposition."
It is remarkable that the leaders of the Opposition were in a great degree stimulated in the line they took by the very same hopes which had animated Fox and his followers in 1789-the expectation that the Regent's first act would be to discard the existing ministry, and to place them in office. But again they were disappointed in their anticipations, of the realization of which they had made so sure that they had taken no pains to keep them secret. They even betrayed their mortification to the world when the Prince's intentions on the subject of the administration became known by the violence of their language in Parliament, some of their party denouncing the employment of the Great Seal to give the royal assent to the bill as "fraud and forgery." Nor, indeed, could the Regent himself, even while expressing his intention to make no change in the administration, lest "any act of his might in the smallest degree have the effect of interfering with the progress of his sovereign's recovery," suppress an expression of dissatisfaction at the recent arrangements, which he considered had placed him in "a situation of unexampled embarrassment," and had created "a state of affairs ill calculated, as he feared, to sustain the interests of the United Kingdom in this awful and perilous crisis, and most difficult to be reconciled to the general principles of the British constitution."[166] There were at this time general and apparently well-founded hopes of the King's recovery. For at intervals during the whole of January the Prime-minister had interviews with his Majesty; and, on the very day on which the bill became law, the King himself mentioned it to Lord Eldon, the Chancellor, and said that he acquiesced in it from perfect confidence in the advice of his physicians, and on the sound judgment and personal attachment of his ministers.
For the present, therefore, no change was made in the administration; but when, in the spring of the following year, Mr. Perceval was murdered, the necessity for a new arrangement which this strange and calamitous atrocity forced upon the Regent-who by this time had come into possession of his full authority-led to his making offers of the conduct of affairs to more than one prominent statesman, all of them, as is somewhat remarkable, being peers. And, though the proposals eventually came to nothing, and the negotiations terminated in the re-establishment of the former ministry, with Lord Liverpool at its head, yet some of the causes to which their failure was publicly or generally attributed seem desirable to be recorded, because the first, and that most openly avowed, bears a not very distant resemblance to the complication which baffled Sir Robert Peel's endeavors to form an administration in 1839; and another corresponds precisely to a proposal which, in 1827, the Regent-then King George IV.-did himself make to the Duke of Wellington. It is unnecessary to dwell on the singular manner in which the Regent first professed to give his confidence to Lord Wellesley, then transferred it to Lord Moira,[167] and then to a certain extent included Lord Grey and Lord Grenville in it. Nor would it be profitable to discuss the correctness or incorrectness of the suspicion expressed by Mr. Moore, in his "Life of Sheridan"-who was evidently at this time as fully in the Regent's confidence as any one else-that "at the bottom of all these evolutions of negotiation there was anything but a sincere wish, that the object to which they related should be accomplished."[168] The reason avowed by Lord Grey and Lord Grenville for refusing a share in the projected administration was the refusal of Lord Moira, who had been employed by the Prince to treat with them on the subject, to allow them to make a power of removing the officers at present filling "the great offices of the household"[169] an express condition of their acceptance of ministerial office. They affirmed that a "liberty to make new appointments" to these offices had usually been given on every change of administration. But Lord Moira, while admitting that "the Prince had laid no restriction on him in that respect," declared that "it would be impossible for him to concur in making the exercise of this power positive and indispensable in the formation of the administration, because he should deem it on public grounds peculiarly objectionable." Such an answer certainly gives a great color to Moore's suspicion, since it is hardly possible to conceive that Lord Moira took on himself the responsibility of giving it without a previous knowledge that it would be approved by his royal master. In a constitutional point of view, there can, it will probably be felt, be no doubt that the two lords had a right to the liberty they required. And the very men concerned, the great officers of the household, were evidently of the same opinion, since the chief, Lord Yarmouth, informed Sheridan that they intended to resign, in order that he might communicate that intention to Lord Grey; and Sheridan, who concealed the intelligence from Lord Grey, can hardly be supposed, any more than Lord Moira, to have acted in a manner which he did not expect to be agreeable to the Prince. But, in Canning's opinion, this question of the household was only the ostensible pretext, and not the real cause, of those two lords rejecting the Regent's offers; the real cause being, as he believed, that the Prince himself had already named Lord Wellesley as Prime-minister, and that they were resolved to insist on the right of the Whig party to dictate on that point to the Regent,[170] just as, in 1782, Fox had endeavored to force the Duke of Portland on the King, when his Majesty preferred Lord Shelburne. As has been intimated in a former page, it will be seen hereafter that in 1839 a similar claim to be allowed to remove some of the ladies of the royal household, and the rejection of that claim by the sovereign, prevented Sir R. Peel from forming an administration. And, as that transaction was discussed at some length in Parliament, it will afford a better opportunity for examining the principle on which the claim and practice (for of the practice there is no doubt) rest. For the present it is sufficient to point out the resemblance between the cases.
But it is remarkable that, unwarrantable as the pretension of the Whig leaders was to dictate to the Regent to whom he should confide the lead of the government (if, indeed, Canning be correct in his opinion), yet it was not one to which the Regent felt any repugnance, since, in 1827, when Lord Liverpool's illness again left the Treasury vacant, he, being then on the throne as George IV., proposed to the Duke of Wellington to desire the remaining members of the administration themselves to select a chief under whom they would be willing to continue in his service; but the Duke told him that the plan of allowing them to choose their own leader would be most derogatory to his position; that the choice of the Prime-minister was an act which ought to be entirely his own, for that, in fact under the British constitution, it was the only personal act of government which the King of Great Britain had to perform.[171] Though not generally a great authority on constitutional points, we apprehend that the Duke was clearly correct in this view, which, indeed, has been so invariably carried out in practice, that the King's suggestion would not have deserved mention had it not been a king's. So far from it belonging to any individual subject or to any party to name the Prime-minister, to do so is even beyond the province of the Parliament. Parliament decides whether it will give its confidence to an administration of one party or the other; but not only has no vote ever been given on the question whether one member of the dominant party be fitter or not than another to be its head, but we do not remember a single instance of any member of either House expressing an opinion on the subject in his place in Parliament. To do so would be felt by every member of experience to be an infringement on the prerogative of his sovereign; and it may be added that a contrary practice would certainly open the door to intrigue, or, what would be equally bad, a suspicion of intrigue, and would thus inevitably diminish the weight which even the Opposition desire to see a Prime-minister possess both in Parliament and in the country.