3 - The Paradox of the Constitution

Summary

It seems a necessary, though perhaps a melancholy truth, that, in every government, the magistrate must either possess a large revenue and a military force, or enjoy some discretionary powers, in order to execute the laws, and support his own authority.

Hume, The History of Great Britain, under the House of Stuart: containing the Reign of James I and Charles I, 1754

Financial administration was central to Hume's narrative of the transformation of English government in the seventeenth century. He described this transformation as a process by which the Tudor monarchy changed into a political system with a clear division of power between Crown and Parliament. In his view, this process originated in a burgeoning of commercial activity from the Stuart accession onwards. The progress of commerce had placed a greater financial strain on royal finance, which, in turn, had made it possible for a variety of social groups to make legitimate political claims upon the state. While he acknowledged that a central goal of the constitution was to defend individual freedom against royal prerogatives, he contended that such freedom depended on the state's ability to maintain peace and security. Hume's preoccupation with public finance was not merely an extension of previous debates about how and on what basis taxes could be levied, or how the boundaries between monarchical authority and parliamentary liberty should be drawn. Rather, this preoccupation stemmed from his engagement with contemporary debates about the ways in which despotism could be restrained institutionally. For Hume, the constitutional struggle over public finance in the seventeenth century served as a context in which to view contemporary demands to revise the tax system and abolish the system of deficit finance. The difficulties in executing this task deepened his own concern about the security of the British mixed government. He feared that Britain would fall victim to despotism if the people's obsession with ‘the perfection of civil society’ persisted. In this way, Hume's Stuart History addressed the growing difficulty of maintaining ‘so extremely delicate and uncertain’ a balance between Crown and Parliament.In his own time, the enlarging Civil List, together with Walpole's single-party dominance, raised new challenges and created new opportunities for the Hanoverian monarchy. It also led to a precarious balance between Crown and Parliament. Hume observed that, notwithstanding the stability of Walpole's government, it had become increasingly difficult to maintain a balanced constitution.