How the British Monarchy Lost Its Power

And what Edmund Burke, that titan of conservative thought, had to do with it.

F or much of the turbulent 60-year reign of George III — including the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars — the monarchy was an important branch of the British government. By the reign of Queen Victoria, who took the throne 17 years after George III died, it had become almost entirely ceremonial and symbolic. How and when did that change? This is a surprisingly elusive question, and the lessons we can learn from it are unexpectedly contemporary. Near the center of the story is one of the towering figures of conservative thought: Edmund Burke.

In America, shifts in the power of branches of government can be marked out in changes to the written Constitution, or to its interpretation by the courts. In nations such as France or Russia, those shifts can be measured in violent revolutions. The end of the British monarchy’s power, by contrast, has no single date or event. It is, in classic British fashion, a gradual story, full of smaller decisions that often had unintended consequences.

English Tradition
The essential nature of British government is that it has always been traditional rather than constitutional — governed by habit and practice rather than by a written set of limitations adopted by the people and binding upon the government. While Parliament has sometimes passed particular reforms after contesting them at elections — such as electoral reform in 1830–32 or reduction of the powers of the House of Lords in 1909–11 — the people of the British Isles were not directly consulted on their form of government until a 1975 referendum on the European common market. The Brexit referendum of 2016 was, arguably, the first time their opinions actually compelled the governing class to alter how and by whom the people were governed. What was known by the 18th century as the “British constitution” was therefore something of a misnomer: a collection of written and unwritten traditions grown and modified incrementally over time, rather than incorporated in a single written instrument. British thinkers from Burke in the 1790s to Walter Bagehot in the 1860s defended its idiosyncrasies on the grounds that the system worked.

Long English tradition produced a less absolute monarchy than in France or Spain. The king was compelled by the aristocracy to sign a recognition of their rights in the Magna Carta as far back as 1215. The calling of periodic Parliaments, with members representing all the geographic constituencies of the realm, began later in the 13th century. The 1640s ran Britain through many of the stages later followed in the French Revolution: a bloody civil war, beheading the king, a somewhat utopian republic, a descent into dictatorship, and ultimately a restoration of the monarchy.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 ended with the new king accepting the crown from Parliament, in exchange for a Bill of Rights that included guarantees that no king could dispense with Parliament. That settlement established the theory of limited monarchy: that royal power depended at the source upon recognition by Parliament, rather than making Parliament a royal dispensation. Since William of Orange became William III in 1689, the line of royal succession has never been broken, no British government has been changed by force, and no new constitutional settlement has been ordered. Yet 1689 left many questions unanswered about the allocation of power between the crown and Parliament. The men of 1689 assumed that the king would still run the government, or else they would not have gone to such trouble to import as their king an energetic executive who launched them almost immediately into a lengthy foreign war.

Royal power in Britain, both before and after 1689, was in constant flux, not the ancient rock that it appeared from afar. The accession of the Hanoverian branch of the family after 1714 diminished the role of the monarchy, as George I and George II were essentially foreigners who never mastered the informal levers of power in British politics, and were never comfortable speaking the English language. George III, a strong personality taking the throne in 1760 at age 22, was determined to change that dynamic, and he did.

The Crown’s Influence
George III set himself to three related tasks: restoring royal prerogatives held by William III, breaking the influence of the Whig aristocracy, and eliminating party politics. These were initially popular moves. Two informal factions, the pro-monarchy Tories and the pro-aristocracy Whigs, had formed in the tumult of the 1680s. The introduction of regular sittings of Parliament after 1689 had enabled these factions to become more continuous, starting the process of coalescing into political parties. The Whigs were ascendant under George II, and were widely associated with the corruption that typically surrounds a long-uninterrupted governing faction.

Formally, the king had two primary sources of power in domestic politics: He could select cabinet ministers and other executive officials, and he could veto laws passed by Parliament. The former was limited in practice by the difficulty of ministers governing if they were not supported by a majority of the House of Commons. The latter was used for the last time in 1708. George III could do very little on his own, without Parliament, except spend his own money.

In order to regain influence, and particularly in order to control his selection of ministers, George III set out to use his money to buy power in Parliament. This was mostly not done through outright cash bribery, but the effect was the same. Before the 1780s, there was no real effort to separate public property from royal property; there was not even a generally accepted theory that distinguished the two. Besides the pool of funds backing the “civil list,” which was in theory dedicated to various employments and pensions, the crown’s revenues came from various hereditary revenue streams (certain taxes and fees, escheats, and revenues from Lancaster, Cornwall, Scotland, and Ireland).

The powers of royal patronage were many and varied, but most originated with these revenues. Jobs and pensions could be handed out, including both real jobs and sinecures with no duties that need be done by the officeholder. One early effort to streamline the royal household famously ran aground because the salary for being turnspit of the king’s kitchen was held by a member of Parliament. Royal contracts were not open to bidding, but could be distributed as favors. Lending money to the government could be lucrative, and court favorites were given insider access to those investments. Royal lands were leased on favorable terms to dozens of MPs in both the Lords and the Commons, making them dependent upon royal favor. When all else failed, the crown could deliver titles and peerages.

Whig theorists defended royal patronage under George II as an essential check and balance to prevent the crown from being swamped by the growing power of Parliament. This was partly because the Whigs were its beneficiaries, and partly because they failed to foresee the scale and sophistication that George III would bring to using patronage to dominate Parliament. As David Hume, who was sympathetic to this view, wrote in 1741:

The Crown has so many offices at its disposal that, when assisted by the honest and disinterested part of the house, it will always command the resolutions of the whole so far, at least, as to preserve the an[c]ient constitution from danger. We may . . . give to this influence what name we please; we may call it by the invidious appellations of corruption and dependence; but some degree and some kind of it are inseparable from the very nature of the constitution, and necessary to the preservation of our mixed government.

Hume’s reference to the “honest and disinterested part of the house” captures another part of this system: Many members of Parliament did not belong to a political party. Indeed, given the revolutionary upheavals of the 17th century, belonging to a “faction” was still held in somewhat bad odor, a bit like how modern Americans would look at people who said they belonged to a militia or a commune. Parties themselves were still informal enough that their leaders frequently lacked accurate or consistent lists of which members belonged to them. As a result, it was more effective to control a parliamentary majority by dispensing patronage, rather than by maintaining a party. While he preferred Tories, George III saw parties as obstacles. He wrote early in his tenure that he meant “to rout out the present methods of parties banding together” and that he was “thoroughly resolved to encounter any difficulty rather than yield to faction.” Between 1762 and 1782, all but one short-lived ministry had Tory elements and royal support — and that one exception was toppled largely by the king’s support for its opponents making it impossible for the Whigs to govern.

Edmund Burke’s DiscontentsBy 1770, there was rising dissatisfaction with Parliament and its dominance by George III. The cause of reforming the situation was given voice by Edmund Burke, then a 41-year-old Whig MP, in a pamphlet entitled, “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.” Given Burke’s modern reputation for prudent conservatism, conservation of the organic institutions of society, and opposition to revolution, it is easy to forget that he spent a large proportion of his parliamentary career as a crusading reformer. In this case, what Burke was setting in motion would have unintended long-term consequences.

Burke couched his critique in traditionalist terms, arguing that the growth of royal influence was new and dangerous to the proper balance of the branches of government, and that the threat of too much royal influence was now more “imminent” than the threat of too much aristocracy:

The power of the Crown, almost dead . . . as Prerogative, has grown up anew, with much more strength, and far less odium, under the name of Influence. . . . [It has] proceeded gradually, but not slowly, to destroy everything of strength which did not derive its principal nourishment from the immediate pleasure of the Court. . . . Any new powers exercised in the House of Lords, or in the House of Commons, or by the Crown, ought certainly to excite the vigilant and anxious jealousy of a free people. . . .The circumstances are in a great measure new. We have hardly any landmarks from the wisdom of our ancestors to guide us.

Burke observed that the people had no way of knowing how the crown’s “unlimited fund of money” — a huge sum in 1770, “not much short of a million [pounds] annually”– was being spent. He denounced Parliament for having, in 1769, paid off George III’s open accounts without asking in advance for an accounting of how the money was spent, casting it as “prima facie, a criminal act” for ministers to spend money beyond what Parliament had previously appropriated for the crown’s use. The problem was that nobody was held accountable, and the money was used to control the very body that was supposed to hold them accountable. Reforms were required: “Where there is a regular scheme of operations carried on, it is the system, and not any individual person who acts in it, that is truly dangerous.”

Burke advanced a sophisticated two-pronged vision of the proper form of British government, and his appeals to restoring balance masked the extent to which his philosophy was a relatively novel one in 1770. Structurally, while Burke argued for freeing Parliament from the influence of the crown, he disclaimed any intention to marginalize the monarchy and establish sole parliamentary government. Instead, he advocated something more like the strict separation of powers that would be considered and eventually adopted by American constitution-writers over the next two decades. Parliament, in Burke’s view, should assert its independent powers of impeachment, inquiry, and rejection of unfit characters for ministry, but should not itself govern: “Whenever Parliament is persuaded to assume the offices of executive Government, it will lose all the confidence, love, and veneration which it has ever enjoyed, whilst it was supposed the corrective and control of the acting powers of the State.” Instead,

the discretionary powers which are necessarily vested in the Monarch . . . should all be exercised upon public principles and national grounds, and not on the likings or prejudices, the intrigues or policies of a Court. . . . The laws reach but a very little way. Constitute Government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of the powers which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of Ministers of State. . . . It had always, until of late, been held the first duty of Parliament to refuse to support Government, until power was in the hands of persons who were acceptable to the people.

There was, in Burke’s view, no substitute for insisting upon ministers of proven experience and character:

Before men are put forward into the great trusts of the State, they ought by their conduct to have obtained such a degree of estimation in their country as may be some sort of pledge and security to the public that they will not abuse those trusts . . . some better reason, in a free country and a free Parliament, for supporting the Ministers of the Crown, than that short one, that the King has thought proper to appoint them.

Words we would be wise to heed today, and which the monarchy would live to regret disregarding. Burke sought to promote this public-spirited government, staffed by upright ministers, by a means previously greeted with skepticism: Parliament should properly be organized around political parties of men united by common philosophies rather than via patronage. Burke spent a good deal of the pamphlet defending the “honourable connection” of principled parties. He expected that parties would restore accountability — perhaps a view influenced by the fact that the Whigs had a vested interest in opposition due to their being largely frozen out of royal favor.

In Burke’s view, government by a “cabal” of court favorites was unstable and irresolute, with men rising and falling unpredictably by royal whim rather than pursuing policies that were consistent and principled:

[This scheme of government] benumbs and stupefies the whole executive power, rendering Government in all its grand operations languid, uncertain, ineffective, making Ministers fearful of attempting, and incapable of executing, any useful plan of domestic arrangement, or of foreign politics. It tends to produce neither the security of a free Government, nor the energy of a Monarchy that is absolute. Accordingly, the Crown has dwindled away in proportion to the unnatural and turgid growth of this excrescence on the Court.

Burke would later blame George III’s inconsistent and ultimately failed American policy in part on this instability of his ministries. Government by personal favoritism and patronage, rather than principle, produced a revolving door of ministers. And each was ultimately left weak and insecure:

While the Ministers of the day appear in all the pomp and pride of power, while they have all their canvas spread out to the wind, and every sail filled with the fair and prosperous gale of Royal favour, in a short time they find, they know not how, a current, which sets directly against them; which prevents all progress, and even drives them backwards. They grow ashamed and mortified in a situation, which, by its vicinity to power, only serves to remind them the more strongly of their insignificance. . . . With the loss of their dignity, they lose their temper. In their turn they grow troublesome to that Cabal, which, whether it supports or opposes, equally disgraces and equally betrays them. It is soon found necessary to get rid of the heads of Administration. . . . By this means the party goes out much thinner than it came in; and is only reduced in strength by its temporary possession of power.

On the other hand, the system still depended upon the people it bought, and so had to wink at their failings so long as they remained in favor: “It is a law of nature, that whoever is necessary to what we have made our object, is sure, in some way, or in some time or other, to become our master.” This process of burning through, discarding, and alienating the king’s appointees should sound familiar to anyone who witnessed how Donald Trump treated the people he employed. So, too, should Burke’s observation of how the court’s favorites were disposed of when they fell out of favor:

The Cabal seldom appear in the work themselves. They find out some person of whom the party entertains a high opinion. . . . They teach him first to distrust, and then to quarrel with his friends; among whom, by the same arts, they excite a similar diffidence of him; so that in this mutual fear and distrust, he may suffer himself to be employed as the instrument in the change which is brought about. Afterwards they are sure to destroy him in his turn; by setting up in his place some person in whom he had himself reposed the greatest confidence, and who serves to carry on a considerable part of his adherents.

Even the king himself could not expect to depend upon the lasting loyalty of such people, who stood by him only for the favors he could deliver:

These King’s friends . . . are only known to their Sovereign by kissing his hand, for the offices, pensions, and grants into which they have deceived his benignity. May no storm ever come, which will put the firmness of their attachment to the proof; and which, in the midst of confusions and terrors, and sufferings, may demonstrate the eternal difference between a true and severe friend to the Monarchy, and a slippery sycophant of the Court.

The point of the system, Burke warned, was to demonstrate that servile loyalty was the only path to advancement — which he contrasted with Parliament’s recent expulsion of John Wilkes, a journalist critical of the king:

The point to be gained by the Cabal was this: that a precedent should be established, tending to show, that the favour of the people was not so sure a road as the favour of the Court even to popular honours and popular trusts. . . . Example, the only argument of effect in civil life, demonstrates the truth of my proposition. Nothing can alter my opinion concerning the pernicious tendency of this example, until I see some man for his indiscretion in the support of power, for his violent and intemperate servility, rendered incapable of sitting in parliament. For as it now stands, the fault of . . . asserting popular privileges, has led to disqualification; the opposite fault never has produced the slightest punishment. Resistance to power has shut the door of the House of Commons to one man; obsequiousness and servility, to none.

Let us suppose a person unconnected with the Court, and in opposition to its system. For his own person, no office, or emolument, or title; no promotion ecclesiastical, or civil, or military, or naval, for children, or brothers, or kindred. . . . His court rival has them all. . . . If once Members of Parliament can be practically convinced that they do not depend on the affection or opinion of the people for their political being, they will give themselves over, without even an appearance of reserve, to the influence of the Court.

Worst of all, in Burke’s view, government of this nature leads to failing trust in institutions and civil disorder, yet lacks the strength to quell it:

The Court party resolve the whole into faction. . . . When men imagine that their food is only a cover for poison, and when they neither love nor trust the hand that serves it. . . . A sullen gloom, and furious disorder, prevail by fits. . . . Unable to rule the multitude, they endeavour to raise divisions amongst them. One mob is hired to destroy another; a procedure which at once encourages the boldness of the populace, and justly increases their discontent. Men become pensioners of state on account of their abilities in the array of riot, and the discipline of confusion.

It was, Burke concluded, unnecessary to expand voting rights to make Parliament more democratic, or to give in wholly to following popular opinion; when the people lost trust in institutions, the solution was not to do away with them, but to reform them to better hold bad men accountable and govern by principle rather than by personal favor:

I am not one of those who think that the people are never in the wrong. They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But I do say that in all disputes between them and their rulers the presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people. . . . When popular discontents have been very prevalent, it may well be affirmed and supported that there has been generally something found amiss in the constitution or in the conduct of Government. The people have no interest in disorder. When they do wrong, it is their error, and not their crime. But with the governing part of the State it is far otherwise. . . . It is more easy to change an Administration than to reform a people.

As political scientist William Selinger has argued, Burke’s indictment of the British system in 1770 prefigured, in many ways, his critiques of the French National Assembly 20 years later in Reflections on the Revolution in France. This included both the corruptibility of an assembly by patronage opportunities and the dangers of an assembly exercising executive and judicial powers rather than acting as an independent body holding the executive to account. The difference was that the British were able to reform their system before it was too late.

Follow the Money
By 1780, a decade after Present Discontents, Burke was ready to try more direct means of stemming royal influence than urging the development of principled political parties. This time, he went straight after the money. The impetus for this move had its roots in a bad deal made by George III.

Under George II, the crown had paid the civil list — one of the central props of the patronage system — directly out of certain dedicated revenue streams consisting of customs and excise fees and taxes. While prior kings had surrendered surpluses, George II had a good deal with Parliament, which would pay deficits in the civil list but allow him to keep surpluses. Upon taking the throne, George III agreed to instead accept from Parliament £800,000 per year to pay the civil list. This turned out not only to be an underestimate of what those revenue streams were producing in 1760, but a vast underestimate of their potential: Historian E. A. Reitan estimates that the civil list revenue streams grew to £1 million per year by 1777, and £1.8 million per year by 1798.

Because he was spending so much money on patronage and influence on a fixed income, George III was compelled to go crown in hand to Parliament to pay off his civil list deficits in 1769, and again in 1777. Anger at the latter request, accentuated by the burdens of the American war, fed into a second round of public meetings and agitation in 1779. In February 1780, Burke seized the moment to propose “A Plan for The Better Security of the Independence of Parliament, and the Economical Reformation of the Civil and Other Establishments.” Burke cited petitions asking, “Before any new burdens are laid upon this country, effectual measures be taken by this House to inquire into and correct the gross abuses in the expenditure of public money.”

Inquiry into how the king spent money was a prerogative claimed by Parliament for the first time in 1780. Later that spring, Burke supported a resolution that passed the House of Commons, declaring “that it is competent to this house to examine into and to correct abuses in the expenditure of the civil list revenues, as well as in every other branch of the public revenue, whenever it shall seem expedient to the wisdom of this house to do so.” Another such resolution declared “that the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.”

Burke’s proposals included eliminating redundant and unproductive offices. Besides sinecures in the royal household, two of his targets were the East India Company and the Board of Trade, as he was concerned that the multiplication of offices in India and other colonies would be additional sources of royal patronage. His later Ahab-like battle to impeach Warren Hastings, the former governor-general of India, is best understood against this backdrop. But in spite of his promotion of ministerial virtue and his championing of impeachments, Burke was ready to argue for systemic reform as well, warning his audience: “Where there is an abuse in office, the first thing that occurs in heat is to censure the officer. Our natural disposition leads all our inquiries rather to persons than to things.”

Burke argued for his reforms in part on the ground that he was eliminating waste, promoting accountability by uniting job titles with the actual jobs, and allowing commerce to be promoted by private enterprise rather than bureaucracy. But he did not shy away from emphasizing that “what, I confess, was uppermost with me, what I bent the whole force of my mind to, was the reduction of that corrupt influence which is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality and of all disorder” and promoting “the capital end we have in view — the independence of Parliament.” And whatever Burke’s historical reputation as an adherent of tradition, he was unsparing to those who blindly defended the status quo:

If there is any one eminent criterion which above all the rest distinguishes a wise government from an administration weak and improvident, it is this: “Well to know the best time and manner of yielding what it is impossible to keep.” . . . It is enough for them to justify their adherence to a pernicious system, that it is not of their contrivance — that it is an inheritance of absurdity, derived to them from their ancestors — that they can make out a long and unbroken pedigree of mismanagers that have gone before them. They are proud of the antiquity of their house; and they defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance, afraid of derogating from their nobility, and carefully avoiding a sort of blot in their scutcheon, which they think would degrade them forever.

It was thus that the unfortunate Charles the First defended himself on the practice of the Stuart who went before him, and of all the Tudors. His partisans might have gone to the Plantagenets. They might have found bad examples enough, both abroad and at home, that could have shown an ancient and illustrious descent. But there is a time when men will not suffer bad things because their ancestors have suffered worse. There is a time when the hoary head of inveterate abuse will neither draw reverence nor obtain protection.

Burke was similarly caustic toward opponents who resisted reform as impractical:

I am sure that I lay before you a scheme easy and practicable in all its parts. I know it is common at once to applaud and to reject all attempts of this nature. I know it is common for men to say, that such and such things are perfectly right, very desirable — but that, unfortunately, they are not practicable. Oh, no, Sir! no! Those things which are not practicable are not desirable. There is nothing in the world really beneficial that does not lie within the reach of an informed understanding and a well-directed pursuit. There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world. If we cry, like children, for the moon, like children we must cry on.

Nonetheless, Burke disavowed any intention to strip the king of all power to grant favors and pensions as rewards:

I would . . . leave to the crown the possibility of conferring some favors, which, whilst they are received as a reward, do not operate as corruption. When men receive obligations from the crown, through the pious hands of fathers . . . the dependences which arise from thence are the obligations of gratitude, and not the fetters of servility.

He also cautioned that paying government officers for their labors was more honest than hiring people who took no salary, but would find other ways to profit from power:

If men were willing to serve in such situations without salary, they ought not to be permitted to do it. Ordinary service must be secured by the motives to ordinary integrity . . . that state which lays its foundation in rare and heroic virtues will be sure to have its superstructure in the basest profligacy and corruption. An honorable and fair profit is the best security against avarice and rapacity. . . . For as wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other; and when men are left no way of ascertaining their profits but by their means of obtaining them, those means will be increased to infinity.

The Struggle of the Eighties
George III did not take this well; by 1781, he was musing about preparing the royal yacht to sail back to Hanover and forget about ruling Britain. The military disaster at Yorktown brought down the long-serving ministry of Lord North, and brought in the Whig ministry of the Marquess of Rockingham. Newly empowered, the king’s critics passed Burke’s Civil List Act in 1782, the first of a number of bills in the 1780s that imposed parliamentary supervision over royal revenues and expenses. Various rules limited the ability of royal contractors and other beneficiaries from sitting in Parliament or voting.

By 1783, George III determined to mount a test of strength against the Whigs — now in coalition with a disillusioned Lord North — over an India-reform bill backed by Burke and Charles James Fox. Lord Temple, an ally of the throne, went about Parliament handing out a card reading, “His Majesty allows Earl Temple to say that whoever voted for the India Bill, was not only not his friend, but would be considered by him as an enemy.” For years, George III had been carefully tracking not only who voted for or against measures, but who spoke and who was silent. He brooded on his resentment of those who crossed him. This time, Parliament struck back. In December, 1783, by a lopsided 153–80 vote, the House of Commons passed a resolution designating it a “high crime and misdemeanor” to report to any member what the king’s opinion was on any matter before Parliament “with a view to influence the votes of the members.” When there was concern that George III might dissolve the current Parliament, a second resolution passed, declaring that “this House will consider as an enemy to his country” anyone who advised the king to take any step to prevent consideration of the bill. Fox passed an additional resolution declaring it a high crime and misdemeanor to issue any money not appropriated by Parliament if the king dissolved it.

The king won that round. The Tories loyal to the crown were down to a remnant, but one of that remnant was the 25-year-old William Pitt the Younger, who formed a new ministry and ran it nearly alone. The king let it be known that anyone opposing Pitt would be the king’s enemy. Pitt rallied his side to defeat the India Bill, and ended up winning a new majority at the next election. Burke believed that the 1784 election had been swung by the corrupt influence of the East India Company, setting him on a collision course with Hastings.

The victory, however, was a Pyrrhic one. Pitt, increasingly secure in his own power and understanding the need for financial modernization, continued Burke’s reformist direction. Hundreds of sinecure offices were abolished in successive reforms in 1783, 1789, and 1798, or else were designated to expire on the death of their holders. Revenues were redirected toward explicit, accountable public purposes. Pitt began publishing notices of government loans, ending the practice of using access as a form of favor. Military lords-lieutenant were no longer cashiered for their parliamentary votes. The exigencies of the Napoleonic Wars would give Pitt and other reformers a stronger hand in chipping away, one by one, at the levers of royal patronage in the name of efficiency and economy.

As historian Archibald Foord has detailed, the drying up of all the sources of patronage was observed by many political figures at the time to have effectively neutered the monarchy’s influence by 1809, with the leasing of crown lands and the dispensation of titles the last holdouts. The 1830 election saw the Duke of Wellington’s ministry as the first since 1714 to lose election despite the support of the throne. Queen Victoria, ironically, would be the first monarch in a long time to be financially independent — her remaining lands produced booming revenues with the onset of the Industrial Revolution — but by the time she took the throne in 1837, the political use of that independence was decades in the past.

Vigor and Virtue
Fiscal reform may have been the tool that brought an end to the power of the monarchy, but it was not the sole cause. Personalities and character were also a factor. While George III prospered for his first two decades on the throne, his increasing petulance, personal vindictiveness, and unwillingness to listen to reason stiffened the spines of Parliament. Then, disaster struck: Beginning in 1788, he started suffering bouts of madness that left Parliament and the cabinet no choice but to handle the business of government without him. By 1810, his son had to be appointed as Prince Regent to govern in his stead. But George IV was no improvement: A womanizing playboy, besotted to excess of food, drink, and eventually drugs and a spendthrift gambler, he lacked his father’s personal rectitude or interest in public business. George IV was loathed by the public, and Parliament resented having to appropriate money to bail out his gambling debts as Prince of Wales while the country groaned under the fiscal burden of a quarter-century of war against France. By his death in 1830, bad leadership and personal vice had squandered the monarchy’s influence.

Lessons Learned
The American system is quite different from that of 18th-century Britain. So, for that matter, are the modern systems of Britain and other parliamentary democracies. But we can still take some lessons from this history, which unfolded alongside that of our own Founding Fathers.

For George III’s part, there is more to the government of a free people than the raw struggle for power. Character matters, and so does principle. Loyalty built on the whim of those who dispense favors and threaten punishments is no substitute for the enduring ties of common philosophy and the deeper roots of respect. In time, by alienating even the crusty and long-suffering Lord North, George III managed to unite his internal foes and inspire them to assert their long-dormant sense of their own independence — much the same dynamic he inspired in his American colonists. He came away much diminished.

As American conservatives reflect on the legacy of Donald Trump, there are many parallels to George III’s errors and what they eventually cost him. Trump ruled his party through an endless procession of carrots and sticks, compiling enemies lists and cowing his targets. All the while, he ignored the accumulation of his foes and their grievances. What remains to him today? Not respect, not trust, not gratitude, not a shared sense of mission, but only the lingering fear of his displeasure.

For Burke’s part, the positive lesson is the value of persistence and principle. Burke spent a lonely decade decrying the king’s governance by patronage before the public and Parliament moved his way. But there is also the ever-present law of unintended consequences. Burke did not set out to eliminate the king as a coequal branch of the British constitution, yet the forces he — as much as anyone — set in motion ended up accomplishing just that. The conservatives of Burke’s own day might, with some justice, have asked what exactly he conserved, given how his reforms contributed to the destruction of the monarchy as an independent power center and the unsettling of the “mixed and balanced constitution” of the 18th-century in favor of parliamentary hegemony. Cabinet government became the very unity of Parliament with executive power that Burke dreaded. After 1830, it would also lead to the expanded franchise that Burke resisted.

Yet Burke was wisely far ahead of his time in grasping that his country’s future lay with the “honourable connection” of party politics rather than court favoritism, and prescient in warning that the best way to steer Britain away from either royal tyranny or popular revolution was to reform the system. As an older man, his experience in that fight led him to reflect on those dangers as they lay across the English Channel. Modern conservatism owes Burke much for his reverence for prudence and tradition, but these cannot be severed from his dedication to reform and his devotion to principled partisanship.