This web site doesn't display advertising. Please consider making a donation.

Free texts and images.

Written and Published in 1944; Never Produced. PD (1)

PRACTICALLY nobody in these islands understands the Party System. Britons do not know its history. They believe that it is founded in human nature and therefore indestructible and eternal. When I point out that it does not exist in our municipalities they think that I am ignorant or crazy, and assure me that there are Conservative parties and Progressive parties in the municipal councils and corporations "just the same as" in Parliament, and always will be by the immutable law of political human nature.

What are the facts? Let me put them in the form of a little historical drama, as that comes easiest to me and is the most amusing.—GBS

Scene: Althorp, the residence of the Spencers, Earls of Sunderland. Present King William the Third, aged 45, of glorious, pious and immortal memory, and his host Robert Spencer, the second Earl, ten years older, famous even at the courts of Charles II and James II for his complete unscrupulousness and political ingenuity. Period 1695.

ROBERT. Your Majesty has done me a tremendous honor in visiting my humble residence. As I cannot pretend to have deserved it I apprehend that there is some way in which I can be of service to your Majesty.

WILLIAM. There is. I am at my wits' end. I want advice. I am expected to save the Protestant religion in Europe from the Scarlet Woman of Rome. I am expected to save your country and my own country from the Bourbons. I am expected to do everything for everybody. And I am expected to do it all without money and without a standing army. I cannot plan my campaigns for a year ahead because this damnable British Parliament, which is elected to govern England, only wants what all English- men want: that is, not to be governed at all. It may leave me at any moment without a penny and without a soldier. France's best general, who has won all her battles for her, has just died and left King Louis in the hollow of my hand. And this is the moment your parliament chooses to threaten me with a peace. It is intolerable. Damn your parliament! I will go back to Amsterdam: better be a real Stadtholder than a sham king. They want liberty, these pig-headed squires and knights of the shire. Well, let them have their liberty: liberty to be broken on the wheel to please the Pope, liberty to be the vassals of France, liberty to go to the devil their own way and not be interfered with by any king or council. I shall fling the crown in their faces and shake the dust of England off my feet unless you can shew me a way of making Parliament do what I tell it to do.

ROBERT. I cannot do that; but I can shew you a way to prevent Parliament from doing anything at all except vote supplies and stave off the next election as long as it can.

WILLIAM. Can you? The only supplies I care about are supplies of men and money to save the Protestant north from that fat Bourbon bigot. If I cannot have them your crown is no use to me. You can have James back again. You know where to find him: in Louis' pocket. I daresay you ' are in correspondence with him, double-faced schemer that ; you are.

ROBERT. I am what the times have made me; and I keep in correspondence with everybody: one never knows what will happen next. But I wish I could get your Majesty's mind off the Protestant north and the army for a moment. I wish I could convince you that what you have to fight here is not King Louis, but the British Parliament.

WILLIAM. Well, do I not know it? Am I not telling you so?

ROBERT. Keep to that, your Majesty. Is it agreed, too, that I am a schemer?

WILLIAM. Oh, it is: it is: by God it is!

ROBERT. Would your Majesty condescend so far as to say a fairly successful schemer?

WILLIAM. A devilishly subtle one, I should say. What then?

ROBERT. I have a scheme for dealing with Parliament, though I have never yet found a king subtle enough to understand it.

WILLIAM. Try me.

ROBERT. You, sir, are the last king on earth to understand it. But I will lay it at your royal feet. Just now you choose your ministers on their merits and capacities without regard to their parties, a Whig here, a Tory there, each in his department which you call his Cabinet, and the assembly of them forming your council, which may be called your Cabinet.

WILLIAM. Just so. What fault have you to find with that?

ROBERT. My advice to your Majesty is that in future you choose all your ministers from the same party, and that this party shall always be the party which has a majority in the House of Commons.

WILLIAM. You are mad. Who ever heard of such a thing?

ROBERT. All things must have a beginning, sir. Think it over.

WILLIAM. I am thinking it over. And I remember what you have forgotten.

ROBERT. What is that, your Majesty?

WILLIAM. That the majority in the House of Commons at present is a Whig majority.

ROBERT. I have not forgotten it, sir. You must at once get rid of all your Tory ministers and replace them by Whigs.

WILLIAM. But, man alive, I am a Tory. Are you out of your senses?

ROBERT. Some day the Tories will have a majority and will defeat the Whig government on some measure. You will then immediately dissolve Parliament; and when the Torres come back from the general election with a majority you will choose Tory ministers only.

WILLIAM. But what is the purpose of this absurdity? You talk as coolly as if you were talking sense. Why are you talking nonsense?

ROBERT. If your Majesty will only deign to do what I advise, I pledge my word—

WILLIAM [sceptically] Hmm!

ROBERT. Pardon: I should have said I pledge my reputation as a schemer. Well, I pledge it that from the moment when your Majesty adopts this plan no member of the House of Commons will ever again vote according to his principles or his convictions or his judgment or his religion or any other of his fancies. The people will think that he is voting on toleration, on peace or war, on whether the crown shall go to the elector of Hanover if your sister-in-law s children continue to die, on the enclosure of commons or billeting or the window tax or what not; but the real question on which he will always be voting is whether or no his party shall remain in office or he himself have to spend half his property on another election with the chance ot losing his seat if his opponent has a few thousand pounds more to spend than he.

WILLIAM. Dont be a fool, Robert. I should be the slave of the majority no matter how they voted. And what has all this to do with the army and the money to pay for it?

ROBERT. There would be only one way of voting about the war or about anything; and you could always count on it. No majority, Whig or Tory, dare vote for surrender to our natural enemies the French, or to the Pope.

WILLIAM. The Pope is on my side.

ROBERT. Fortunately only a few of us know that curious fact. Your best card in England is always No Popery

WILLIAM. You are laying a trap for me. You want to make the majority in the Commons the real ruler and make the monarch a puppet. And as the majority is always led by the nose by some ambitious schemer with the gift of the gab like yourself, he would be able to dictate to me as if he were the king and I a nobody.

ROBERT. I shall never be a dictator while you live, because you, sir, will never be a nobody. But I give you this further pledge. That if you do as I advise, you will have nothing to fear from the boldest and ablest adventurer, were he Cromwell himself, or Lilburne the Leveller. He will spend half his life and most of his means in getting into Parliament; and when he at last arrives there he will have no time to think of anything but how to get into your Majesty's Cabinet. When he intrigues his way to the top of that, he will be a master of the Party game and of nothing else. He will feed out of your Majesty's hand. And the people will imagine they are free because they have a parliament. Then you can fight all Europe all the time to your heart's content.

WILLIAM. I dont understand it and dont believe it. But as I cannot go on as at present, not knowing where my next regiment or my next penny is to come from, I will try your plan until I have driven Louis back to his pigstye. And if the plan fails I will have your head off by hook or crook.

ROBERT. You shall, sir. It has been on my weary shoulders too long.

Twenty five years elapse. William and Sunderland, having died in the same year, have been eighteen years in their coffins. Queen Anne is dead; and George the First is King. Sunderland's son Charles, aged 45, is a member of the Whig Government. Robert Walpole, aged 44, though a notable Whig Parliamentarian, leads the Opposition to the Peerage Bill. As it happens, they meet one morning in St. James's Park, where they are taking the air. Walpole is inclined to pass on with a wave of the hand; but Sunderland is determined to engage him in conversation and

Will not be shaken off. After the usual commonplaces he comes to his point.

SUNDERLAND. I wish I could have your support for this Peerage Bill of mine. Frankly, I fear you will defeat me if you oppose it. Why not come to my aid? It is not a Party question: we are all Whigs, and all equally interested in it.

WALPOLE. How do you make that out?

SUNDERLAND. Well, is it not as plain as a pikestaff? We Whigs are above all Parliament men: to us British liberty means the supremacy of Parliament. Parliament has two rival powers to fear: the king and the voting mob. My sainted father, a grain or two of whose political genius I may claim to have inherited, rescued us from the tyranny of the mob by the Party System. He made you what you are: the greatest Party leader in the world: you owe your eminence to his invention.

WALPOLE. It costs a lot of money. Every man has his price.

SUNDERLAND. All the more reason for making sure of the cash for us, and not for the mob. But what about Parliament's other rival, the King?

WALPOLE. The king question was settled seventyone years ago.

SUNDERLAND. Nay, my dear Walpole, you cannot kill kingship with a single chop of the axe in Whitehall. The Restoration brought back the House of Lords, and the King's power to pack it by making as many new peers as he pleased at any moment. The sole purpose of the Peerage Bill is to destroy that power. It will make it Impossible for the king ever to make a single peer in excess of thepresent number. Surely you agree.

WALPOLE. Do I? I think not. Your sainted father persuaded King William that the Party System would give him the control of Parliament. But it really gave the parliamentary majority the control of the king. That ought to suit you very well, because you have the control of the majority until I get it back again, as I shall do when I defeat your Bill.

SUNDERLAND. But why defeat us on this Bill, which is as much in your interest as in mine? You can choose some other issue.

WALPOLE. It is not as much in my interest as in yours. You are a peer: I am a commoner. You want to make the Lords supreme by breaking the king's power over them. I want the king to keep his power over the Lords, and the Commons to keep its power over the King. I can see through and through your game. I have English brains, not Dutch ones.

SUNDERLAND. You are too clever for me, I see. But consider. You are a Commoner; but you will not always be a Commoner. You will soon be one of us. You know there is an earldom waiting for you to stretch out your hand and take it.

WALPOLE. Yes, provided the King keeps his power to make me an earl. Your Bill might deprive him of that power.

SUNDERLAND. Pooh! There is always a vacancy.

WALPOLE. Even so, an earldom would be the end of me. I do not look forward to being kicked upstairs. The House of Lords is the springboard from which you plunged into politics at 21. For me it is the shelf on which I shall be laid by at three score and ten.

SUNDERLAND. That may be so in your personal case. But take the larger view. Consider the interests of the country. The Upper House, with all its faults, stands between England and the mob of rich commercial upstarts who want to make money out of her: money, money and still more money. You are not an upstart: you are a country gentleman.

WALPOLE. Yes; and you are up to the neck in this commercial South Sea madness. It will be your ruin. I warn you: it will be the end of you politically within a year from now. SUNDERLAND. You are impossible. [Brusquely] Good morning. [He walks quickly away, leaving Walpole to finish his walk alone.]