112 Chapter VI
come, for themselves, their sons, their dependents, or their “friends,” or men who
had local influence in the counties, or who owned or controlled a few borough
seats in return for which they expected favors. Emoluments of government, as
Professor Pares puts it, played much the same part for these people as life insur-
ance, retirement plans, or educating one’s children for a profession in our own
time; they were a means of securing family status. The smaller and active class,
within the larger, consisted of men who had a real interest in the operation of gov-
ernment, who enjoyed the work, and made a career of dealing with real adminis-
trative and political problems. From this class came many ministers and most per-
manent public servants. For ministers, the problem was to be agreeable to the King
while also satisfying a sufficient number of the passive political class. The King was
the one man in the system who could not resign, or retire to his country estate.
Obliged somehow always to carry on, he had to work through ministers acceptable
to the two Houses, or provide them with means by which majorities in the two
Houses could be obtained.
The methods by which King and ministry secured a Parliament that would
work with them were summed up in the word “influence.” It was this “influence”
that made possible the effective functioning of government under a constitution
characterized by separation of powers.^8 Influence meant primarily patronage, the
award of honors, titles, promotions, pensions, and sinecures, as well as functioning
offices in the church, the armed forces, the colonial administration, and the home
government. By the distribution of such favors among borough owners and others
in a position to determine elections, the government was usually able to get a suf-
ficiency of cooperative knights and burgesses sent up to the House of Commons.
By promise of similar favors to sitting members of both Houses, or threat of their
termination, the government was usually able to get the votes without which it
could not proceed. Since the matter was essential, it was very systematically han-
dled. There are, for example, in the papers of John Robinson, the political manager
for Lord North and George III, certain lists drawn up in preparation for the elec-
tion of 1774, showing all offices “tenable with seats in Lords and Commons.”^9 It is
a curious array of appointments of all kinds, honorific and remunerative, nominal
and real: thirteen lords and eleven grooms of the Bedchamber, the Master of the
Jewel Office, the Clerk of the Venison Warrants, Admirals and Captains of the
Navy, the Master of the Hanaper, three Secretaries of State, the Secretary at War,
thirty- three Governors of garrisons, the Commander- in- Chief in Great Britain,
the Attorney General, the Constable of the Tower, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,
the Clerk of the Pells, and so on in great numbers. The exchange of their political
influence, or of their votes, in return for these emoluments was, of course, entirely
agreeable to the political class. Indeed, it was virtually the essence of political life,
except when some overwhelming crisis within the state divided men on matters of
policy. There was no such crisis sufficiently momentous until the trouble with
8 W. S. Holdsworth, “The Conventions of the 18th Century Constitution,” in Iowa Law Review,
XVIII, 2 (1932), 161–80.
9 W. T. Laprade, Parliamentary Papers of John Robinson: Camden Society, 3rd series, vol. 33 (Lon-
don, 1922). See also the lists of proposed appointments in J. Fortescue, Correspondence of King George
III (London, 1927), I, 124–55.