The British Parliament 109
charge of the government. The first edition of the collected Letters of Junius, pub-
lished in 1772, contains in its preface a quotation from Delolme’s Constitution of
England, using the exact wording of the translation not published until three years
later. Delolme clearly had made Whig acquaintances in London; someone in 1772
was engaged in translating his work. Not much more is known of Delolme, except
that he stayed in England until 1800.
Yet Delolme did not become wholly a Whig, nor did he wholly give up what he
had believed at Geneva. There is a unifying thought in all his political writings, one
incidentally which was to appeal strongly to John Adams. It was an intense dislike
of government by oligarchy, coterie, or self- perpetuating aristocracy. Hence, in the
politics of Geneva he was a democrat. In the politics of Sweden his sympathies
were monarchist. In 1772, immediately after the coup d ’état of Gustavus III, he
published (it was his first work published in English) A Parallel between the English
Government and the Former Government of Sweden. He expressed here his admira-
tion for Gustavus III, and his antipathy to the Freedom Era in Sweden, during
which, he said, the nobility monopolized public life to the disadvantage of every-
one else. He thought that the difference between Sweden after 1719 and England
after 1689 was that in England the King remained strong, so that England had not
become an aristocracy in the manner of Sweden—or of Geneva.
Delolme in fact put great emphasis on the historic role of the English crown,
in a way sufficient to distinguish him from Montesquieu, of whom he is often
said to be merely the popularizer, or from most of the Anglo- American Whigs
and even radicals, who usually saw liberty as something won by age- long struggle
against royal tyrants, and placed its beginnings in primitive Saxon times. The
English constitution, says Delolme in quite modern vein, really dates from the
Norman Conquest. By the conquest the monarchy imposed a strong and central-
ized feudalism and built a unified kingdom, unlike France; later on there was only
one Parliament for the King to resort to, unlike the many assemblies with which
the King of France might deal. The great power of the King fortunately overshad-
owed the greatest nobles, so that, as the generations passed, nobles and common-
ers were obliged to join forces to maintain their freedom. Delolme was impressed
by the continuing authority of the British King, whom he thought to be really
stronger than the King of France. As he put it, thinking of events of his own day,
the King of France took care upon approaching the Parlement of Paris to overawe
it with a display of “military apparatus”; the King of England at a dissolution,
simply spoke a few words, telling the Parliament they were no longer a Parlia-
ment, and they were not. Such was the magic of the force of law. The King en-
joyed the confidence of the people as much as Parliament did. It was “from the
Nation itself,” said Delolme, that the Executive in England drew its authority—
from the “affection,” the “consent,” and the “voluntary passions of those who are
subject to it.”^5
Delolme’s idea of the “balance of powers” in the British constitution was thus
significantly different from Montesquieu’s. For Montesquieu, as for Burke, in a
proper balance the role of nobility as a check upon monarchy was to be empha-
5 Constitution of England (London, 1775), 409.