Ben Griffin
Girton College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
In the eighteenth century, kings expected to govern as well as to reign – to be active participants in the business of government and policymaking. By the early twentieth century, this had changed profoundly: monarchs were expected to stay out of politics and leave governing to their Cabinet, led by the prime minister. This essay examines how this transformation took place, tracing the development of the office of prime minister, the rise of Cabinet government, and the complicated processes that gradually limited the power of the monarchy.
Introduction
The single most important fact about the British constitution in the long nineteenth century is that Britain became a democracy without shedding forms of government that had developed to serve a monarchy. As Britain stumbled towards democracy, the powers of the crown were not abolished: even in the twenty-first century, it is the British monarch who formally summons and dissolves parliament, makes treaties with other nations, controls the judiciary and armed forces, and declares when the nation is at war. Royal power in these matters is now a fiction –no one doubts that it is the elected government that makes decisions – but it remains a powerful fiction. The illusion of continuity conceals the strains produced by trying to contain new kinds of politics within older institutional forms. This essay will examine how politicians coped with these problems, creating the tangle of ad hoc solutions and improvisations that Britain has instead of a written constitution. What were the limits of royal power? What kinds of authority did a prime minister or a Cabinet possess? To what extent were they bound by the will of the people? In what follows, this essay will examine the answers that elite political actors developed to these questions.
The king’s servants
In December 1783, King George III did something remarkable: he sabotaged his own government. In doing so, he was defending what he saw as the proper privileges of the crown. Less than two years before, the Marquis of Rockingham had forced his way into office as prime minister, demanding that the king agree to measures designed to reduce royal influence; now Rockingham’s followers, led by Charles James Fox in coalition with Lord North, were trying to repeat the manoeuvre, insisting that they should be able to appoint junior ministers without the king’s approval. Resenting both the men and their measures, the king let it be known that any member of the House of Lords who voted for the ministry’s bill reforming the government of India would be considered the king’s enemy. The bill was defeated, and the government fell.
What is most striking about this episode is the widespread belief that the ministers had overstepped the bounds of constitutional propriety. As far as George III and his supporters were concerned, ministers were appointed by the king and were responsible to him, not to parliament: their proper function was to carry out the government of the country on his behalf, not to challenge his wishes. The king did not believe that his will ought always to triumph over those of his ministers, but he thought that he ought to be able to set the general direction of policy, and he expected to be an equal partner in policy discussions. (Jupp 2006, 120).
One consequence of this constitutional vision was that, while criticism of particular measures might be legitimate, systematic opposition to the king’s chosen ministers seemed disloyal (Dickinson 1977, 152–3, 178–81). Politicians could try to justify their opposition by insisting that the problem lay with the king’s advisors, who ought to be replaced. Alternatively, they could ally themselves with the heir to the throne in the hope that they would reap the benefits when the new reign came. This is why when George III exhibited his first signs of mental illness in 1788, the Foxite Whigs tried (unsuccessfully) to transfer the powers of the monarch to their friend the Prince of Wales. The difficulty involved in reconciling loyalty to the king with opposition to his government made it hard to justify the existence of political parties. The first references to ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ in 1826 therefore signalled an important change in this regard: people were increasingly differentiating between the wishes of the king and the actions of the government.
There were limits to royal authority: the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 had established that the sovereign should govern through parliament. The king might appoint whom he wished to political offices, but he could not pass laws, raise an army, or levy taxes without the assent of both the landed aristocracy in the House of Lords and the representatives of the propertied public in the House of Commons. Eighteenth-century politics was frequently animated by fears that this delicate balance between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy was under threat. Some believed that the crown needed strengthening against aristocratic faction, while others (like Fox) feared that the crown was encroaching on the liberties of the people and needed to be checked by parliament (Dickinson 1977, 142–59). But almost all agreed that the king had a legitimate place at the heart of government, and most critics of the monarchy sought its reform rather than its abolition (Williams 1997; Craig 2003, Pickering 2003; Parry 2007). Within this context, George III’s expectations of his ministers did not seem unreasonable to many. Early nineteenth-century ministers habitually referred to themselves as the king’s servants, and were well aware that they served at his pleasure.
The prime minister
The king’s foremost servant was his prime minister. The office developed in response to a practical problem created by the Glorious Revolution: how was the king’s business in parliament to be managed? In the first half of the eighteenth century, Sir Robert Walpole made himself the preeminent politician of his age by becoming an effective intermediary between the legislature and the executive, explaining parliament’s views to the king and explaining the king’s wishes to parliament (Owen 1957, 38–9). The role was not an official one, however, and the very idea that there might be a prime minister was considered by many to be unconstitutional. In time, the position came to be associated with the title of First Lord of the Treasury, but in many eighteenth-century governments the First Lord was less influential than one of his colleagues and, in the late nineteenth century, Lord Salisbury refused the title in two of his three ministries (Le May 1979, 118). As the historian Richard Pares put it, the history of the office of prime minister is ‘like that of the Cheshire Cat: sometimes there is almost a whole cat, sometimes no more than a grin’ (Pares 1953, 176). By the middle of the nineteenth century, the term ‘prime minister’ had become commonplace, although the office was not officially recognised until 1905, and was not awarded a salary until 1937.
The modern conception of the role of prime minister developed largely in response to the unprecedented financial and administrative demands placed on the state by the American War of Independence (1775–83) and the wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1793–1815). Under these conditions, effective government required someone who could persuade the House of Commons to pay for the war effort, and someone to coordinate the actions of government departments. For nearly 20 years, the responsibility fell to William Pitt the Younger – the man who did the most to set nineteenth-century expectations of what being prime minister involved. In 1803, he told Lord Melville that ‘there should be an avowed and real Minister, possessing the chief weight in the council, and the principal place in the confidence of the King’. ‘That power’, he said, ‘must rest in the person generally called the First Minister’, and where Cabinet colleagues disagreed, ‘the sentiments of the Minister must be allowed and understood to prevail’ (Williams 1970, 132–3).
One reason for Pitt’s dominance was that, in the early years of his ministry, he was the only member of the Cabinet in the House of Commons and therefore had to handle a huge amount of parliamentary business himself. It was vital to be able to manage the Commons because it controlled government finances, but this created a problem when prime ministers frequently sat in the House of Lords. In the eighteenth century, governments presided over by commoners tended to last far longer than those led by peers, and until the end of the nineteenth century, a recurrent problem for aristocratic prime ministers was the need to find reliable lieutenants who could manage the House of Commons effectively. That is why Lord Liverpool fought so hard to persuade the king to accept George Canning as leader of the House of Commons in 1820, and why the Conservative Party led by Lord Derby in the Lords became so reliant on Benjamin Disraeli in the 1850s. Since Lord Salisbury retired in 1902, all British prime ministers have sat in the House of Commons, reflecting the growing authority of the elected parts of the constitution over the unelected.
The Cabinet
Like the prime minister, the Cabinet had emerged as a significant institution by the middle of the eighteenth century but was not formally recognised until the twentieth century. Initially, it had been little more than a collection of the king’s advisors who were individually responsible to him and to parliament for the discharge of their departmental duties. The obstacles in the way of concerted action were considerable, but in the 1740s and 1750s, when George II was repeatedly absent abroad, concern that the king might make decisions without the input of those in London increasingly led his ministers to agree a position, in the hope that their collective voice would carry more weight (Thompson 2011, 214–9). The practice stuck, and the Cabinet increasingly drafted minutes setting out their collective view – something that only the most foolhardy king would ignore (Ehrman 1969, 182). In short, the Cabinet emerged as a site in which politicians could challenge the wishes of the monarch who had appointed them.
Although Walter Bagehot famously described the Cabinet as ‘the efficient secret’ of the constitution in 1867, it was in fact often a chaotic institution (Aspinall 1952). Eighteenth-century complaints that there was haphazard attendance, no advance warning of what was to be discussed, and no recording of decisions were still being repeated in the early twentieth century (Hanham 1969, 83). Frequently, there was confusion about what had been decided in a meeting because formal minutes only began to be kept in 1916. Moreover, for much of this period, the Cabinet was often marginal to the main political action. Foreign policy decisions, for instance, were often made without consulting the Cabinet: the secret treaty between Britain, France, and Austria in 1815, for example, was signed by the foreign secretary ‘without the approval of his Cabinet, let alone Parliament’ (Bew 2011, 386). Lord Liverpool, like Pitt, tried to keep policymaking outside the Cabinet, but this became increasingly difficult to sustain in the 1820s (Hilton 2006, 280–6). Henceforth, the Cabinet became more important as a site of policy discussion and decision but, as late as the 1880s, Gladstone was still able to develop a major initiative such as home rule without consulting the Cabinet. A prime minister’s influence in Cabinet depended enormously on the personalities and circumstances of the moment. Even strong prime ministers like William Pitt and Robert Peel sometimes failed to persuade their colleagues to adopt favoured policies, and Gladstone was regularly overruled by his colleagues in the 1880s.
The idea of collective responsibility – i.e. that ministers were responsible for the actions of the government as a whole and not merely their own departments – developed slowly, but it was clearly in place by the first decade of the nineteenth century. This was important in defining the executive, not as a body of separate individuals appointed by the king but a body with a collective will of its own which might be asserted against the wishes of the king. In 1807, for example, Lord Grenville’s Cabinet resigned en masse when the king opposed their plans to relax the legal disabilities affecting Roman Catholics. There were some holdouts whose loyalty to the king remained far stronger than their loyalty to their colleagues (successive Lord Chancellors, for example), but by the 1830s this had become insupportable (Aspinall 1952, 231–5). By then, the expectation had developed that ministers who disagreed with the collective line should ignore their own views or resign. The doctrine also spread beyond the Cabinet, so that when the Duke of Wellington’s government collapsed in 1830, the junior ministers resigned with their senior colleagues. However, exceptions could always be made to the trend – as when, in 1884, Gladstone decided not to dismiss three ministers whose support for women’s suffrage had led them to abstain on the government’s Franchise Bill.
The growing discipline of the Cabinet changed the balance of power between the king and his servants. Matters were exacerbated by the massive increase in public business occasioned by the wars with France, and George III’s fragile health, which meant that more and more decisions were being made without consulting the king (Hilton 2006, 95). Whereas it had been customary to ask for his permission before discussing any matter of significance in Cabinet, by the end of the eighteenth century it had become common to consider matters without first seeking royal approval (Pares 1953, 154). It was George III’s anger upon hearing that the Cabinet had been discussing Catholic emancipation (i.e. allowing Catholics to hold public office) without consulting him that led to Pitt’s fall from office in 1801 (Willis 1971, 243–4).
The fundamental point at issue was whether ministers might differ from the king in their assessment of what was in his interest as they conducted his business. George IV regularly found himself in conflict with Lord Liverpool’s government over issues as major as diplomatic recognition of new Latin American republics, or as minor as his plans to grant ecclesiastical preferment to his mistress’s sons’ tutor – a move which the prime minister ‘deprecated as embarrassing to the King’s service and best interests’ (Aspinall 1938, ii: 914). When the Cabinet was united, and there was no viable alternative government, then the ministers could usually get their way. Matters came to a head in 1829 when, faced with the threat of civil unrest in Ireland, the Duke of Wellington decided to support Catholic emancipation – a measure that George IV thought was in violation of his coronation oath to uphold the Church of England. The king’s passionate but weak resistance to this massive constitutional change did not withstand concerted Cabinet pressure and a majority for the measure in the House of Commons: he complained to Lord Eldon that ‘he had been treated as a man, whose consent had been asked with a pistol pointed to his breast’ (Twiss 1844, iii: 84). This was a startling demonstration of the erosion of royal power, and it was compounded in 1832 when William IV was similarly forced into conceding the passage of the Reform Act against his better judgement. The old political order was changing, and the pace was about to accelerate.
The Reform Act and the rise of party
The 1832 Reform Act transformed politics in many ways, but for our purposes two stand out: it disrupted the eighteenth-century ideal of the balanced constitution, and it accelerated the development of political parties. The Reform Act was intended to restore the authority of government by producing a House of Commons that would be more genuinely representative of public opinion than before (Parry 1993, 72–94). This necessarily diminished the authority of the House of Lords and the monarchy: how could they resist the will of the House of Commons if it truly spoke for the nation? The change was made visible in 1834, when William IV tried to dismiss Lord Melbourne’s Whig government. In many respects, this was a repeat of what George III had done in 1783, but this time the outcome was very different. Although the king insisted that ‘the confidence, the countenance, and the support of the Sovereign are indispensable to the existence and maintenance of the Government’ (Parker 1899, ii: 287), the new ministry that he installed did not command the confidence of the House of Commons and the king had to suffer the return of a government that he disliked. This was the last time that a monarch tried to replace a ministry that possessed a majority in the House of Commons. Melbourne now demanded the government should have a free hand over appointments to the Cabinet and even the Royal Household; he also insisted that the king should support the government’s controversial policy to reform the Irish Church (Le May 1979, 40). This was a stark demonstration of how the changes wrought by the Reform Act undermined royal prerogatives. The change was underlined when the Conservatives won the 1841 general election and Queen Victoria summoned Sir Robert Peel to form a government, even though she would have preferred to keep Melbourne. This was the first time that an incumbent ministry was replaced as a result of a general election: the basis of political authority was shifting from the monarch to the electorate, and this only intensified after the major extensions of the franchise in 1867 and 1884.
The second major change prompted by the Reform Act was the growth of party. While the Foxite Whigs had considered themselves a party, the majority of MPs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had disavowed party labels (Fraser 1983; Hilton 2006, 195–209). This changed as a result of the polarising struggles over the Reform Act and the subsequent need to organise in order to mobilise the new electorate. From 1831, the opponents of parliamentary reform began to identify themselves as the Conservative Party, while the coalition of Whigs, Radicals, and Reformers that had supported the Reform Act were identifying themselves as the Liberal Party by 1847 (Coohill 2011). The growth of party fundamentally changed the relationship between the king and his ministers. When the majority of MPs acknowledged a pull of loyalty not just towards the king but also towards the leader of their party, then the only way to get the business of government through parliament was to select the leader of the largest party as prime minister. Victoria’s distrust of Peel in 1841 and loathing of Gladstone in 1892 could not outweigh this basic fact. It had been important for eighteenth-century politicians to be seen to have the support of the king: George III’s refusal to create peerages for the Fox–North coalition, for example, weakened the government by making visible his want of confidence in them (Lowe 1992). But Peel was the last prime minister who insisted on that kind of demonstration when, in 1839, he refused to form a government unless the queen changed the party complexion of her Ladies of the Bedchamber. In the age of party, it was swiftly recognised that a prime minister at the head of a party had sufficient authority to govern regardless of whether he enjoyed the confidence of the monarch.
The growth of political parties also changed the relationship between prime ministers and the crown by allowing the former to claim authority for policy programmes endorsed by the electorate. Although Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto of 1834 is often cited as the first party manifesto, it was careful to avoid committing him to any particular course; it was the Whig pledge to reform the Corn Laws if elected in 1841 that marked the beginning of parties entering into such contracts with the electorate. Henceforth, the old model of ministers transacting the king’s business, subject to royal approval of their policies, lost its purchase. In 1894, when Queen Victoria objected to Liberal plans for Welsh and Scottish church disestablishment, Lord Rosebery responded by pointing out that both had been in the party’s manifesto at the previous general election (Le May 1979, 94). Increasingly, politicians saw their duty as implementing the wishes of the electorate, not the sovereign.
The development of a modern party system transformed the way that Britain was governed, but it was not a smooth or linear process. This is important because henceforth the influence of the monarchy would be inversely proportional to the strength of the party system. The system that developed after 1832 was unstable, not least because it took time for politicians to learn what it meant to act as a party. What, for example, should the proper relationship between a party leader and his party be? Peel clung to the view that his authority derived from being appointed by the queen; consequently, he denied that he was bound by any obligation to defer to his party’s wishes. Such claims were greeted with incredulity by backbench Conservatives who insisted that Peel owed his position in part to the efforts of his party, and that he ought not to ignore their views on policy (Hawkins 1989, 654–5). The arguments over the Corn Laws in 1845–46 exposed this tension and split the Conservative Party for a generation. The Liberals also proved unstable in the 1850s, not least because the new parties lacked clear mechanisms for selecting their leaders, or for imposing internal discipline – issues that were not addressed until the twentieth century (Gurowich 1984). When the leadership of parties was uncertain, the monarchy once again emerged as the arbiter of who would be prime minister. The queen and Prince Albert played an active part in the formation of both Lord Aberdeen’s coalition government in 1852 and Lord Palmerston’s government in 1855; it was the queen who determined that it was to be Lord Salisbury, not Sir Stafford Northcote, who formed a Conservative government in 1885, and who selected Lord Rosebery as prime minister in 1894 in preference to his rivals within the Liberal Party.
The age of Victoria
It will be clear from these examples that Queen Victoria remained a very significant political figure. Walter Bagehot’s famous portrait of Britain as a ‘disguised republic’ – in which the queen’s powers vis-à-vis her ministers had been reduced to the right to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn – does not survive the most casual encounter with her correspondence, in which we can see her hectoring her ministers, vetoing Cabinet appointments, demanding to see diplomatic correspondence, and lobbying for specific policies (Bagehot 1867; Le May 1979). She continued to view ministers as her servants, appointed to conduct the business of the realm in her name; and she continued to regard party politics as a regrettable development (Cannadine 1989).
Prince Albert encouraged the queen to think in these terms. In 1850, he wrote:
I had often heard it stated as the nature of the English constitution and the Royal Prerogatives, that the Sovereign could not interfere with the Government or the management of Parliament which are left to the sole control of the responsible Ministers, but that he was absolutely free in the choice of his Minister. Now I differed completely from that doctrine. I held the Sovereign to have an immense moral responsibility upon his shoulders with regard to his government and the duty to watch and control it[.]
Inevitably, this generated friction, which manifested in the breakdown of the relationship between the court and the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, who insisted on pursuing his own policy without consulting the queen and the prince consort: he was forced to resign in 1851. It remains an open question whether Albert’s death in 1861 prevented a greater constitutional clash: certainly, his claim to be ‘besides the husband of the Queen […] her permanent minister’ threatened trouble, because he was not accountable to parliament and could not be dismissed (Le May 1979, 64–5). Probably, the role he carved out for himself as an active participant in government was only possible in a period when the party system was so disrupted.
After Albert’s death, the queen withdrew from many of her public commitments, but not from politics. She continued to exercise close scrutiny over foreign policy and exploited Cabinet divisions to shape policy during the Schleswig-Holstein crisis of 1863–64, overruling her prime minister and foreign secretary in the process (Sandiford 1973). At a time when religious struggles were central to British politics, she took her role as head of the Church of England very seriously; she quarrelled with her governments over ecclesiastical patronage and initiated the controversial Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874 (Ledger-Lomas 2021). She was also mindful of the fact that she was commander-in-chief of the armed forces and took a keen interest in military matters (Arnstein 1998). Imperial matters were close to her heart, and she played a vital role in shaping the settlement that followed the 1857 rebellion in India. Indeed, in many respects the queen can be said to have increased her authority in the empire at the same time that it was being challenged at home (Taylor 2018). All of this meant that ministers had to devote an immense amount of time to dealing with her questions, objections, and suggestions (Bentley 2007). Disraeli was famously good at managing the queen, and Salisbury deflected her meddling in foreign policy with skill, but her relationship with Gladstone became almost impossible, and his ministries governed in the face of continuous hostility from the court.
Victoria’s partisanship posed a constitutional problem. The rise of party politics meant that participating in politics would now require the monarch to take sides in a party struggle, but that would reduce the monarch to a mere partisan, whose claim to authority was weaker than the claims of elected representatives. Why, then, was there was no major constitutional battle between the court and the Cabinet in the second half of the nineteenth century? Three answers suggest themselves. The first is simply that the queen was sensible enough not to push her prerogatives too far. In 1879, she raged that she ‘never could take Mr Gladstone […] as my Minister again’ (Buckle 1928, iii: 48). But following the 1880 general election, she did reluctantly made him prime minister once more. When she was faced with a united Cabinet, a determined prime minister, or a clear result in a general election, she backed down. Gender is important here. Victorian constructions of respectable femininity expected women to defer to men, especially in matters of politics, so contemporaries expected her to yield to her male advisors. Arianne Chernock has persuasively argued that the idea of a constitutional monarch who reigns, but does not govern, gained ground as a way of dealing with the threat to gender norms posed by having a woman on the throne (Chernock 2019). In this context, a major constraint on the queen’s ability to challenge her governments was that the public would not have accepted as legitimate a more publicly assertive queen.
The second reason is that courtiers and politicians worked to avoid a crisis by pre-empting problems and defusing situations. In 1851, for example, Russell persuaded Palmerston to resign as foreign secretary so that the queen would not have to dismiss him. Similarly, when the queen wanted to deny Gladstone a general election in 1886, Lord Salisbury talked her out of it, just as he talked her out of dissolving parliament to thwart Gladstone in 1893 (Le May 1979, 58–60). Although a determined prime minister would eventually get his own way, policy was sometimes influenced by a consideration that it would not be worth the time and effort to wear down the queen’s resistance (Le May 1979, 83).
Finally, another factor working to minimise conflict was the growth of the state. While Victoria jealously guarded royal prerogatives on issues where the monarchy had traditionally had an interest, such as the army and the Church, there were no precedents for the monarchy’s involvement in the new areas with which the state began to concern itself from the 1830s: matters such as education, public health, and labour relations. In the first decades of the twentieth century, these social issues became central to party conflict, and consequently the monarchy became more distant from party politics.
The result of these three factors was that royal prerogatives were not asserted, and over time they came to appear obsolete. The monarch’s right to veto legislation has never been formally abolished, for example, but as it has not been used since 1708, it is not clear that the right can still be said to exist. In a state with an unwritten constitution, precedents are vital to establishing claims to power, and during Victoria’s long reign, the precedents justifying the use of those powers became ever more distant.
Conclusion
By the start of the twentieth century, the task of government was no longer to do the bidding of the king as his servants: it was to do the bidding of the electorate (who consisted of around 60 per cent of the adult male population). Their wishes were to be interpreted by the Cabinet, bound by collective responsibility, and led by a prime minister whose authority derived not from the crown but from leadership of a political party. But this radically new vision of government was to be enacted within older monarchical structures. Although Victoria protested that she ‘cannot and will not be the Queen of a democratic monarchy’, that is exactly what she had become (Buckle 1928, iii: 166).
The resulting system, arrived at through accident, was riddled with ambiguities that left the constitution open to interpretation on the eve of the First World War. For example, in 1913, desperate Unionists urged George V to veto the Home Rule Bill – invoking a power that had lain dormant for 200 years. Similarly, the king’s reluctance to help the government break the deadlock with the House of Lords in 1910 indicates the tendentiousness of Asquith’s claim that ‘the accumulated traditions and the unbroken practice of more than seventy years’ made it his duty ‘to act upon the advice of Ministers who […] possess the confidence of the House of Commons’ (Hanham 1969, 40). When the king agreed to his ministers’ demands, Asquith was greeted in the House of Commons with cries of ‘Who killed the King?’ (Searle 2004, 422). An important feature of these two crises, however, is that it was considered regrettable that the king should be entangled in politics, and politicians were expected to try to keep him out of it. This would have made no sense to George III, but politics now meant party politics, and the king’s servants were expected to practise it without his interference.
Bibliography
Arnstein, Walter (1998) ‘The Warrior Queen: Reflections on Victoria and Her World’, Albion 30: 1–28.
Aspinall, Arthur (1938, 3 vols) The Letters of King George IV, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aspinall, Arthur (1952) The Cabinet Council, 1783–1835, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bagehot, Walter (1867) The English Constitution [2001 edn, ed. Paul Smith], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bentley, Michael (2007) ‘Power and Authority in the Late Victorian and Edwardian Court’, in Andrzej Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1870 to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 163–87.
Bew, John (2011) Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny, London: Quercus.
Buckle, G. E., ed. (1928, 3 vols) The Letters of Queen Victoria: Second Series, London: John Murray.
Cannadine, David (1989) ‘The Last Hanoverian Sovereign? The Victorian Monarchy in Historical Perspective, 1688–1988’, in Beir, A. L., Cannadine, D., & Rosenheim, J., eds, The First Modern Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 127–66.
Chernock, Arianne (2019) The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women’s Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coohill, Joseph (2011) The Ideas of the Liberal Party: Perceptions, Agendas and Liberal Politics in the House of Commons, 1832–52, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Craig, David M. (2011). ‘The crowned republic? Monarchy and anti-monarchy in Britain, 1760-1901’, Historical Journal 46: 167-85.
Dickinson, H. T. (1977) Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain, London: Methuen.
Ehrman, John (1969) The Younger Pitt: The Years of Acclaim, London: Constable.
Fraser, Peter (1983) ‘Party Voting in the House of Commons, 1812–1827’, English Historical Review 98: 763–84.
Gurowich, Paul (1984) ‘The Continuation of War by Other Means: Party and Politics, 1855–65’, Historical Journal 27: 603–31.
Hanham, H. J. (1969) The Nineteenth Century Constitution: Documents and Commentary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hawkins, Angus (1989) ‘“Parliamentary Government” and Victorian Political Parties, c.1830–c.1880’, English Historical Review 104: 638–69.
Hay, William Anthony (2018) Lord Liverpool: A Political Life, Woodbridge: Boydell.
Hilton, Boyd (2006) A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jupp, Peter (2006) The Governing of Britain, 1688–1848: The Executive, Parliament and the People, Abingdon: Routledge.
Ledger-Lomas, Michael (2021) Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Le May, G. H. L. (1979) The Victorian Constitution, London: Duckworth.
Lowe, W. C. (1992) ‘George III, Peerage Creations and Politics, 1760–84’, Historical Journal 35: 587–609.
Owen, J. B. (1957) The Rise of the Pelhams, London: Methuen.
Pares, Richard (1953) George III and the Politicians, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parker, C. S. (1899, 3 vols) Sir Robert Peel from his Private Papers, London: John Murray.
Parry, Jonathan (1993) The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Parry, Jonathan (2007) ‘Whig Monarchy, Whig Nation: Crown, Politics and Representativeness, 1800–2000’, in Olechnowicz, Andrzej, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1870 to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 47–75.
Pickering, Paul A. (2003), ‘“Hearts of the Millions”: Chartism and Popular Monarchism in the 1840s’, History 88: 227-48.
Sandiford, Keith (1973) ‘The British Cabinet and the Schleswig-Holstein Crisis, 1863–1864’, History 58: 360–83.
Searle, G. R. (2004) A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, Miles (2018) Empress: Queen Victoria and India, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Thompson, Andrew C. (2011) George II, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Twiss, Horace (1844.), The public and private life of Lord Chancellor Eldon, 3 vols , London: John Murray.
Williams, E. N. (1970) The Eighteenth Century Constitution, 1688–1815: Documents and Commentary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, Richard (1997) The Contentious Crown: Public Discussion of the Monarchy in the Reign of Queen Victoria, London: Routledge.
Willis, Richard (1971) ‘Pitt’s resignation in 1801: Re-examination and Document’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 44: 239-57.