However, Kings and Queens have always ruled with the help of advisers, who administer the various departments of the public service. In earlier English history they had titles like Justiciar, Chancellor and various "First Lords of" [various administrative areas], but these days we call most of them Ministers (though the English still call their Treasurer the Chancellor of the Exchequer and persist with some really quaint titles like Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal). At least from the early seventeenth century, the group of senior advisers had been known as the "cabinet council" - those who met in a "cabinet", a small private room - and by 1700 or so this was commonly abbreviated to "the cabinet". In the century-and-a-half after the Glorious Revolution, the real executive power - the power to make policy and direct the activities of the public servants - was transferred from the monarch to the Ministers meeting in Cabinet. By 1867 Walter Bagehot could write, in The English Constitution, that the Queen had no more than "the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn" (see the pdf version, page 85). England, Bagehot said, had adopted government by "cabinet" - ie, by a committee of Ministers, all members of the Parliament.
The principle of cabinet government as it developed in England can be broken, conceptually, into four distinct rules:
Conceptually, one or more of these rules could exist without the others - you could have, for instance, a system whereby the Queen must choose Ministers who are supported by the Commons, but where they would not all have to be MPs, and where Her Majesty still had the predominant influence in policy-making - if the Commons would tolerate this system. But that was not the way things developed in England, and, at least seen in retrospect, it was probably unlikely to develop that way. The most important of the above rules is the first rule - for it has a legal source and legal force - and during the century-and-a-half after the Glorious Revolution, the way it was put into practice drove the development of the other rules.
[The interaction of the parliamentary control of finance and the fact that England was almost constantly fighting the French also caused a phenomenon that readers of English history will have noticed - the preoccupation with the size of the National Debt. The government might get Parliamentary approval for military spending, but Parliament also had to approve laws for the raising of the money in the first place - ie for imposing taxation - and the landed classes who dominated Parliament until the mid-nineteenth century were reluctant to pass tax laws. So the government raised money by borrowing. To give greater security to the lenders, both the Bank of England and the South Sea Company were set up to act as guarantors and brokers of the National Debt. This worked out well enough in the case of the Bank, financially and politically - it gave the merchant class a means of leverage over the government that partly offset the landed gentry's greater power in Parliament. In the case of the Company, it led to financial disaster but had a fortuitous political benefit - as we will see below, the collapse of the Company was one of the things that helped shift power from King to a Parliamentary executive.]
During the reigns of William and Mary (1689-1694) and William III by himself (1694-1702), William kept trying to avoid government by one party and to create a "court party" - but without real success. Often he managed to put together a government that was not entirely Whig or entirely Tory, but always he was reminded that his power was not absolute - in the end he needed the consent of a majority of both Houses of Parliament to be able implement his policies. [And this was in a time when the monarch could stack the House of Lords by appointing new Lords, buy politicians by appointing them to sinecures (jobs with good pay and few duties) in the Royal household - "placemen", they were called - and put pressure on the House of Commons by threatening to dissolve it. At the same time the Lords could control many votes in the Commons because of the number of members who represented a "rotten borough" controlled by a Lord. This could work for or against the monarch depending on which Lord "owned" the member.]
Right from the start, William was obstructed by Parliament from time to time. It would generally not vote him a "Civil List" (the special appropriation for the royal household and the King's directly-appointed officers) as large as he wished, which ensured that when he really wanted more he would have to summon Parliament and ask for more. Even as he maintained war against the French, it would do things like voting to reduce the size of his army - the King of England had to haggle with mere Members of Parliament as to whether he could have an army of 10000 or 7000! And when he distributed land seized from Irish rebels to his own favourites, Parliament passed a Resumption Act to distribute it more fairly - giving the lie to the feudal theory that all land belongs ultimately to the King and that he is logically the one with power to "resume" it when its ownership falls vacant.
When the King kept a Whig Ministry in power for a while in 1696 despite its inability to control the Commons, an outside observer (the Dutch "Resident") expressed surprise because, he observed, it was "a sufficiently common practice that the dominant party should be in charge". The problem was overcome in the next month when the Tories were implicated in an assassination plot and lost support, but three years later when the "opposing party" (mainly Tories) kept demonstrating its strength by rejecting Bills in the Commons he was forced to adjust the membership of the cabinet - even if he was theoretically free to appoint ministers, there was a limit to the number of defeats that a ministry could withstand. When he tried, in 1701, to insist on balance in the cabinet by keeping some Whig Ministers, the Tories - whose core policy when they were first identified as a party, only 20 years earlier, had been support for the prerogatives of the King - lectured him on the limited power of an English King. Lord Rochester was reported to have told him, face to face, that "princes must not only hear good advice, but take it", and Sir Humphrey Mackworth published A Vindication of the Rights of the Commons of England in which he insisted that ministers were not responsible to the King but to Parliament - the first published justification of "cabinet" or "responsible" government.
Queen Anne (1702-14) also tried to maintain a "court party" and to keep the more extreme Whigs or Tories out of her cabinet. Though fighting a constant battle with illness, she attended Cabinet meetings, sometimes getting her own way (sometimes by crying, the history books tell us!), and sometimes not getting her own way - a ruler, but, like William, far from an absolute ruler. Although the history of her reign reads, perhaps even more than that of other times, simply as a history of personal alliances, feuds and Machiavellian deal-making and deal-breaking between the leading politicians, two developments of constitutional significance did occur. The Act of Union with Scotland was passed in 1707 - largely as a device to ensure a Protestant succession to the throne - so it is from this time that we should refer to the government and Parliament of Great Britain, not just of England. [Though after the Union both government and Parliament often acted purely in England's interests and overlooked the Scots (which is my excuse for sometimes saying "England" when technically I should say "Britain").] And in 1710 the Tories created the South Sea Company, as a device to "farm out" the national debt and to make a lot of money for the nation and for themselves. By itself this would have been of only minor constitutional significance, but the collapse of the Company ten years later had a deep effect on the relation between King and Parliament, as we will see in the next paragraph but one.
Anne was succeeded, as the Parliament had specified in the Act of Settlement, by the descendants of Sophia, the Electress of Hanover - the first four Georges and then William IV. The increased power of Cabinet, and the invention of the office of Prime Minister, is generally dated to the reigns of the first two Georges. It is commonly said that they left decision-making to Cabinet because they did not speak English and, being rulers of Hanover as well as England, were not as interested in English affairs as in German power-struggles, but the story is a little more complicated than that.
George I (1714-27) did indeed speak no English, but he could communicate quite well with most of his English Ministers, in French (though Trevelyan, oddly, says that he and Walpole could only discuss matters in "a kind of dog-Latin"). However, he certainly gave up attending Cabinet meetings (partly to avoid seeing his son and heir, whom he detested - an apparently-hereditary Hanoverian characteristic) and preferred to discuss policy more privately with his chief adviser, Sir Robert Walpole. After Walpole saved George from disgrace in the aftermath of the collapse of the South Sea Company (see South Sea Bubble), George was happy to leave an increasing amount of power with Walpole, and to help maintain Walpole's control of Parliament by giving royal favours to Walpole's nominees. Walpole is now known as the first "Prime Minister" (though he was uncomfortable with the title, because it was then a term used disparagingly), and started the tradition of the Prime Minister occupying 10 Downing Street. If power was not being transferred collectively to Cabinet, it had certainly moved to the Prime Minister and his favourites.
For some time George II (1727-60) also left power in Walpole's hands. However, later in the reign he tried to assert his own power more directly, but was reminded that ultimate control of power was really vested in the House of Commons - the King could not always influence the composition of a ministry. After Walpole lost popular support and was forced from office in 1742, there were two occasions - in 1746 and 1757 - when the King tried to encourage the formation of ministries which excluded William Pitt (the elder), who had angered the King by his complaint that government policy was designed to assist the King's interests in Germany rather than the interests of England. On both occasions it proved impossible, after days (in 1746) or weeks (in 1757) with no government in office, to form a ministry that would be supported by the Parliament, and the King had to give in and accept a ministry that included the hated Pitt. [And it was in the year after the 1746 crisis that Montesquieu's description of the celebrated English system of government, that protected the subject's liberty by dividing powers, was published. He said that the executive government was vested in one man "because this branch of government, having need of despatch, is better administered by one than by many" - just as the English MPs were demonstrating that they were prepared to endure a little inefficiency and lack of "despatch", rather than tolerate one-man rule.]
George III (1760-1820) started his long reign by re-establishing the power of the King to rule. He dismissed Pitt and appointed the Earl of Bute as Prime Minister. For twenty years he managed to dictate policy himself, solving the problem of needing parliamentary support by using his agent Henry Fox to give favours and bribes to members, and to make sure that as many minor government officials as possible voted in favour of his preferred candidates in elections. Eventually this rebounded upon him in two ways. First, his appointment of Bute and Bute's negotiation of terms to end the Seven Years War provoked savage criticism by John Wilkes and others, and the government's use of general warrants in their prosecution of the publishers gave the courts the opportunity to remind them, in Entick v Carrington, that governments had limited powers.
Secondly, the King's personal control of American affairs meant that in the end he took the blame for first provoking the colonists into rebellion and then mismanaging the military response to their Revolution. Edmund Burke had already written his Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (1770) in which he argued that Ministers should not be appointed on the basis of the King's likes and dislikes but on the basis of public approval, as shown by their Parliamentary support. [He also provided the first, and possibly best yet, reasoned justification of political parties, suggesting that "a body of men united on public principle" could best provide consistency and strength in government, and principled criticism in opposition.] After the English army surrendered to the Americans in 1781 (see Battle of Yorktown), the King's prestige was so reduced that Parliament was able to re-established its dominance over him. In 1782 the Parliament, with Lord Rockingham as Prime Minister, enacted a string of Acts (many of them drafted or influenced by Burke) that limited the King's ability to control elections and distribute favours. The most well-known is the Economic Reform Act 1782, which abolished many of the well-paid but useless posts that Bute and the King had given out as favours (such as the Principal Officers of the Great Wardrobe and the Six Clerks of the Board of Green Cloth!) and more generally regulated the expenditure of the royal household, but there were others that deprived customs and other officers of the right to vote, tightened up the prohibition in the Act of Settlement on members of parliament having contracts with the Crown, and stopped the practice whereby someone would accept a lucrative judicial appointment to a colony and then send a substitute in their place, keeping part of the salary. [This latter Act is usually cited as "Burke's Act" in the former colonies, while that name seems to be used more often for the Economic Reform Act in English writings.]
From that year on, the King generally had to accept Ministers chosen by the majority of the Commons, whether he liked them or not - and he disliked some and hated others! This did not mean that he instantly stopped trying to influence the formation of parliamentary majorities and the results of elections - in 1783 he first accepted the Fox-North ministry and then managed to sabotage it - but if Pitt (the younger) had not won a majority at the next election he would have had to accept Fox or one of his allies again. Parliamentary control of Cabinet membership was further strengthened in George III's later years as he displayed symptoms of madness (perhaps a reflection of the physical pain caused by the hereditary metabolic disorder porphyria, or perhaps part of a more purely-mental illness). For the last ten years of his father's life, the Prince of Wales acted as regent. When he took the throne as George IV (1820-27) he had, in S R Gardiner's words, "neither the firmness nor the moral weight to hold the reins which his father had grasped". On a couple of occasions he also tried to resist the inclusion of someone he disliked - George Canning, in this case - in a ministry, but gave in quickly, and his resistance to the introduction of the Catholic Relief Bill in 1829 was just as short-lived.
The next and last Hanoverian, William IV, also received two reminders of the limits on his power to choose his advisers. When the Reform Bill of 1832 was blocked by the House of Lords, the King (who had hinted earlier that he might be willing to create more peers to get the Bill through) refused Earl Grey's request to create peers. Grey resigned, and the King asked the Duke of Wellington to form a government. The Iron Duke had to report to the King that this was impossible, and the King was forced to put Grey back into office, and to promise Grey that he would create peers if necessary. (The threat was enough - the Lords let the Bill through rather than suffer upstarts to join them in their noble House!)
Only two years later, King William struck again - he dismissed Lord Melbourne in November 1834 over the Prime Minister's plans for reform of the Church of England (one of my sources says that Melbourne "resigned", but all the others say that the King dismissed him - it was at the very least a forced resignation). The King first appointed an extraordinary three-man, aristocrats-only, ministry led by the Duke of Wellington, with two other Lords as Lord Chancellor and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and then a full cabinet led by Sir Robert Peel - but neither had any chance of getting majority support in the Commons, so in April 1835 the King realised that he had to ask Melbourne to form a government again.
When Queen Victoria (1827-1901) came to the throne, she, unlike her uncle the late King, greatly favoured Lord Melbourne (she later confessed that she had had some "rather foolish" feelings for him), but Melbourne himself, when he could see he was likely to lose the election in 1841, played a part in educating her to accept that she must accept Peel as Prime Minister. From that time on there was never any question that the Queen or King would automatically appoint the leader of the party with the majority in the House of Commons as Prime Minister, and accept the Prime Minister's nominees as the other Ministers. I originally wrote this under the heading "the evolution of Cabinet government", but actually the doctrine that the monarch must appoint ministers who are supported by a majority in parliament, regardless of his or her personal preference, had a history rather like the principle that the powers of the executive are subject to law (see Chapter 2). After being a doctrine advocated by parliamentarians but resisted by Kings and Queens for quite some time, its "solidification" into an agreed rule occurred quite suddenly - what William IV had done in 1834 had become unthinkable in 1841 or at any time since then. [Even Sir John Kerr's dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975 is only a partial exception - he did, after all, only appoint a "caretaker" government until an election could be held.]
Since the Glorious Revolution, practically every official senior enough to be thought of, in retrospect, as a "Minister" was a member of Parliament - Parliament would not have approved finance if the King had looked outside its ranks for too many of his advisers, and after all it was easy enough to give a favourite a seat in Parliament if he didn't have one already. These days it would simply be "unthinkable" that a non-member should become a Minister - if the government wants advice from someone who is not in Parliament they appoint the person to a Board or Commission, or engage a consultant, but the formal decision-making is kept within the cabinet, and all of its members are MPs or Lords.
As to the withdrawal of the monarch from the real decision-making role, for some time after 1841 Queen Victoria tried to play a particular part in foreign affairs - after all, she and Albert knew most of the other monarchs of Europe very well - they had them as house guests and stayed with them as their house guests - and were related to half or more of them. When the Queen clashed with Lord Palmerston over foreign affairs in 1851, the Prime Minister (Lord Russell) supported her by dismissing Palmerston - but gradually it became understood that even in foreign affairs the monarch's role was limited.
Victoria did try to influence the formation of governments for some time. Like the earlier Kings, she seems to have wished that everyone could just stop arguing and form a non-party government, and actively promoted the formation of a coalition (under the Earl of Aberdeen) in 1852. However, her participation was limited to a mediating role - her personal preference for Disraeli over Gladstone as they alternated in office in the 1870s was well known, but she could not keep Gladstone out of office when he had a majority. Eventually she wrote in her Letters that she had adopted "the obvious but up to that time much neglected doctrine that it is the paramount duty of a constitutional monarch to maintain a position of neutrality towards the leaders of party on both sides". Though some of the Kings and Queens since then have also try to play a mediator's role - George V helped in the negotiation of another coalition government in 1931 - they have all been careful to maintain that position of neutrality. The Prime Minister and other Ministers govern; the King or Queen appoints them with an eye on the numbers in the House of Commons. [Until late last century the Conservative Party rather sabotaged the appearance of monarchical neutrality by letting the monarch play some part in choosing the Party's leader (you'll see an example 3 paragraphs down), whereas the Labour Party always elected its leader and made it clear that, if it won government, that was the person who was to be commissioned as Prime Minister.]
It would still be possible in theory for the Queen to take her place in a Cabinet meeting and take a part in the decisions, and if you read Chapter II of the Commonwealth Constitution literally the same would apply to the Governor-General here. However, in practice there are two stumbling blocks. The first is that the majority of members of the House of Commons, or House of Representatives, would have to approve the practice. Otherwise, they could show their disapproval by cutting government funding - again we see that all of these conventions are backed up by the legal rule that the executive cannot spend money without parliamentary approval. And the need for parliamentary approval means that unless the Queen (or Governor-General) had a particularly dominant personality - dominant enough to influence not only the majority of Cabinet, but the majority of the "lower" house, and eventually the majority of the people - she or he would have to be prepared to go along with the majority decisions in Cabinet, whether the government was formed by a conservative party or a Labour/Labor Party - and that would require a particularly neutral, not to say other-directed or self-effacing, personality and intellect. If the interaction of law and convention forces a neutral role upon you, it is really better to accept that you are simply the appointing authority, and to be seen as the guardian of the conventions that in fact limit your power, than to try to share in the real exercise of power. For a Queen or Governor-General to depart from the conventions of cabinet government is not literally unthinkable - but you only have to think about it briefly to see what problems it would cause, because - I say for the third time - the conventions are backed up by a powerful rule of law about that powerful thing called money.
The final sub-rule - that the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer must be members of the House of Commons - is, at least partly, another reflection of the fact that the dominant rule here is that the parliament controls the government's access to money. Tax laws had long been seen as the special responsibility of the House of Commons, on the theory that tax is a "gift" from the people to the "Crown" - a "voluntary" payment, at least in the sense that the representatives of the people have voted to grant it. Therefore taxation laws had originated in the Commons and some conventions had developed that limited the powers of the Lords over "money bills" (ie, both tax and appropriations for government spending). Though a First Lord of the Treasury sat, often, in the Lords, the Chancellor of the Exchequer usually sat in the Commons and took responsibility for the passage of money Bills through that House. (For more details, see History of the Treasury.)
Although the first "Prime Minister", Walpole, was a commoner (he was made a Lord when he retired), many of the later Prime Ministers sat in the House of Lords. [For some time "Prime Minister" remained an unofficial title and their official title was First Lord of the Treasury, but this appointment did not make a commoner a Lord.] However, the last of these lordly Prime Ministers was the Marquess of Salisbury who was PM three times between 1885 and 1902. As elections for the Commons became more democratic it acquired proportionally greater prestige, and with the passage of the Parliament Act 1911 it acquired power to overrule the Lords. Also, with the rise of the Labour Party, the real centre of party conflict was now in the Commons. So when Bonar Law retired as PM in 1923, though most Conservatives expected Lord Curzon to succeed him, the King, George V, pointed out that it was now inappropriate for a PM to sit in the Lords and appointed Stanley Baldwin, a member of the Commons, instead. Since then, the Prime Minister has always been a member of the commons (and if the Conservatives turn to a Lord as their next leader, as they did with the then Earl of Home in 1963, he has had to renounce a peerage and contest a by-election to find a seat in the Commons).
There is no statute law that prescribes that the PM must sit in the Commons, and no law that directly says that the Chancellor of the Exchequer must - though, since the Parliament Act provides that the Commons can pass money bills without the Lords' consent, the Lords would be a very odd place for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to sit. Even now that the House of Lords has been half-reformed (only 92 hereditary Lords sit with the appointed life peers - see the House of Lords Act 1999), if some Lord or Lady had such charisma that the members of the Commons would accept her or him as the nation's leader, the convention could be overturned - but this is most unlikely. Here the "conventions" of cabinet government are backed up by the fact that the executive is subject to the law (and that Parliament could change the law to impose even more restrictions on the executive if necessary), and again specifically by the fact that Parliament can limit the executive's effective power by "throttling" its money supply, with the real power in money matters vested in the Commons.
Public servants (known as "civil servants" in Britain) do not have "On the Cabinet's Service" or "In the Service of the Public" on their letterhead - it says "On Her Majesty's Service". Though the Parliament has the power to control everything the executive does (see Chapters 2 and 4), when it does so its Acts are also drafted to reflect the polite fiction that the Queen is The Boss. Acts authorising major administrative decisions - like the Ministers of the Crown Act 1975, which lets the government re-allocate functions between Ministers and departments - use phrases like "Her Majesty may [provide for X, or direct that Y] by Order in Council" . A Martian, or even an ignorant Earthling, might think that it is Her Majesty Herself who decides whether, for example, river pollution is handled by the Minister for Science or the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but of course the Cabinet makes the decision (or perhaps the Prime Minister tells them!) and her Majesty signs the Order as requested. The Navy and Air Force are the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force (no country being stated, we're supposed to just know that they're British!), and officers in the services, like Judges, receive a commission from the Queen - though everyone who understands the system knows the real orders to the services come from the Defence Minister or the Minister for the Armed Forces, and the real choice of judges is made by the Lord Chancellor. The monarchy surrendered the power but retained the glory.
This phenomenon - that the formal documents say one thing and the reality is otherwise - was classically described in 1867 by a journalist - a rather superior journalist with a University Medal in philosophy - named Walter Bagehot (pronounced BAJ'et), in a book called The English Constitution. (Actually, by that time, it was the British Constitution, but, as I said above, the English still tended to think of the Queen as Queen of England and the constitution as the English constitution). The book is on the web in pdf form at Rod Hay's Archive for the History of Economic Thought. [Since it's a pdf file, I can't link to specific pages but you can find the page number by scrolling in the file.]
The central theme of the book (pp 44-7) was that the "English" (British!) system of government had a "dignified part" and an "efficient part". The dignified part was the monarchy. Bagehot takes it for granted that we know about the legal aspects of the dignified part mentioned in the previous paragraph - the official documents like Orders in Council and Letters Patent, the references to the Royal Navy, Her Majesty's servants and so on - and barely mentions them , though he does mention the pomp and ceremony of royal weddings (p 64). The efficient part was government by cabinet, which Bagehot described as "a committee of Parliament" (pp 24, 48-50). The main function of the House of Commons was to be an electoral chamber, in which the Prime Minister and cabinet were approved, and legislation was only fifth on the list of functions! (Pp 117-20.) The Queen was only at the head of the dignified part of the Constitution, while the Prime Minister was at the head of the efficient part, and was just as much an "elective first magistrate" as the President of the USA (p 48). Bagehot claimed that the "efficient secret" of the constitution was that instead of the separation of powers that Montesquieu had claimed to observe, there was a "nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers" (p 48) - but it is more broadly implied in the book that the whole "efficient part" of the constitution was something of an "efficient secret", masked by all of the monarchical language in which the business of government was described.
To anyone in the 1860s who followed the workings of politics none of this was actually a revelation, but Bagehot discussed it all with much insight and many lovely quotable phrases. It has been suggested that what he wrote was out-of-date as soon as he wrote it, because he wrote it in very year that the Second Reform Act changed the nature of the House of Commons and led to much stronger party discipline. After that, critics say, the executive controlled Parliament rather than Parliament controlling the executive - but even if this is right much of the time (and it's wrong when independents have a balance of power or when an issue arises that threatens to split a party) much of what Bagehot said is still true. A Republic had "insinuated itself beneath the folds of a Monarchy" (p 70) - England, under its monarchical form, had become a "disguised republic"* where the people elect the MPs and the real government must be supported by majority of the MPs, and the notion that Ministers were, "in any political sense, the Queen's servants" was a fiction (p 49).
[The phrase "disguised republic" appears only in the footnote at the very end of the book (p 214). You will notice there that it's in quotes - I think this means that Bagehot inserted it in the second edition, and is quoting someone else's summary of the thesis of the first edition.]
This makes the reliance on Bagehot by monarchists in their anti-republican propaganda rather curious. I wonder if they have read so little of Bagehot that they fail to realise what a snob he was, or if they blithely share his attitude to the dopey lower orders, who ought to be kept in a state of deference by being fed the nice simple constitutional myth of one-person rule?
When the 13 central-North-American colonies rebelled in 1776, they copied and codified the English system as it was then understood, and as it had been explained by Montesquieu. Each "State" (as the colonies renamed themselves) drafted a constitution in which laws were made by a bicameral (two-house) legislature and executive power was separated from the legislature and vested in one person, the Governor - who, of course, was now elected rather than appointed by the King. When delegates from the States drafted a federal constitution, they followed that precedent, though the head of the executive - effectively a King, elected for a 4-year term - was styled "President". However, the colonies that became self-governing or independent at later dates adopted the later understanding of the English system, as explained by Bagehot. They adopted cabinet government - though the term they used when negotiating for self-government was "responsible government".
However, the colonists did not show a proper appreciation of this treatment. In the mid-1820s some started to campaign for a republic, while the more moderate reformers argued that at least they should be allowed to have "responsible government". I have the impression that the English officials found this term rather strange, but they quickly worked out that the Canadians were referring to the system that operated in England (only most of the time, at that stage - the crises of 1832 and 1834 still had to be endured), where the ministers were picked from, and responsible to, an elected legislature.
In 1837 rebellions broke out in both "Upper" and "Lower" Canada (Ontario and Quebec). Though they were quickly suppressed, they did prompt the British government to send Lord Durham to investigate the causes of discontent. In the Durham Report he recommended the union of Upper and Lower Canada, and that the colonists should be allowed to have responsible government. The British Parliament accepted the first recommendation and passed an Act of Union in 1840 (only to separate Ontario and Quebec again in 1867). The second recommendation was ignored for a few years, but the elected politicians still wanted responsible government and managed to make things difficult for the Governors by refusing to cooperate with appointed members of the Executive Council. By late 1846 the British government was starting to realise that they might more effectively keep the colonies loyal by giving them more independence rather than less, so the Governor-General and provincial Governors were instructed to appoint governments supported by the majority party in the "lower" house, whether they liked their policies or not, and from 1848 onwards - without any formal change in any constitutional document - that became the practice. [For some more detail, see these essays on the Canadiana or Canadian Heritage sites.]
As soon as New South Wales had a partly-elected Legislative Council, its members started to campaign for the right to control the government - in 1846 it passed a Bill which would have disqualified the Governor's paid advisors from sitting in the Council, and an Audit Bill which would have let the Council scrutinise the executive's accounts. Both were refused the royal assent, but after the concession made to the Canadians in the same year, the British government seemed to realise that the Australian colonists would soon have to have representative and responsible government.
The drafting of Constitutions for the colonies that would implement responsible government was left by the British Parliament to the colonists themselves. The Australian Constitutions Act 1850 made no mention of responsible government, but provided (towards the end, after many sections about the separation of Victoria from New South Wales, so that it looked like a less-important afterthought) that once each colony had a Legislative Council, the Council could enact a law to add a "House of Representatives" to itself as part of the legislature. It seems to have been taken for granted in England, and certainly was in the colonies, that when that happened the doctrine of responsible government was to be part of the new constitution. And that was what happened - the Constitution Act 1855 not only gave New South Wales a fully-elected Legislative Assembly but also responsible government, though it refers to it very indirectly, as noted below. From 1856 onwards, after the election of the first Legislative Assembly, the Governors' role was simply to appoint (and sometimes controversially dismiss) Ministers according to the British conventions of cabinet government, and the Premiers of New South Wales became the real leaders of government. As the other colonies became self-governing, they followed suit.
By the time of federation, it was taken for granted that the new federal government would operate under the principles of responsible government (though some people thought the combination of responsible government with American-style federalism was odd). The new Constitution provided for it (somewhat indirectly and quite misleadingly, as noted below), and from the moment of federation it has been taken for granted that the real leader of the government is the Prime Minister rather than the Queen or Governor-General.
One hint is in section 37 - when the Governor appoints people to ordinary "public offices" he is to take the advice of the Executive Council, but the power to appoint "Officers liable to retire from Office on political Grounds" is vested in the Governor alone. This obscure language signals that responsible government has arrived. The power to appoint judges, ordinary public servants, and so on is henceforth really vested in the Cabinet - the Governor's taking "advice" from the Council is code for the fact that the Council rubber-stamps what the Cabinet has already decided. And the "officers liable to retire on political grounds"? These are the Ministers themselves, who are liable to retire when they lose the support of Parliament. Though the Governor appears to have complete discretion in appointing them, he is also expected to pay attention to the "political grounds" and to only appoint those who have the "confidence" (support) of the majority of the Legislative Assembly.
Just in case the Governor misunderstood this and thought he still had real power, section 53 provided that (apart from a "Civil List" and some pension payments specifically mentioned in sections 49-52) the Consolidated Revenue was "subject to be appropriated to specific purposes" by the legislature. This was the key to all the other coded language - just as the parliamentary control of finance had transferred real power from the monarch to the Cabinet in Britain, so this section made it clear that government could only be carried out by those who had the confidence of Parliament. Just as in Britain, the dignified niceties were preserved - the Governor would continue to preside over meetings of the Executive Council and proclamations would be issued in his name. If Bagehot, writing twelve years later, exaggerated the secrecy of the "efficient secret", the words of the Constitution Act certainly weren't designed to expose the secret to an uninformed reader. But anyone who knew the secret could decode the Constitution Act and understand that the real business would be carried out by the "efficient part" of the constitution.
The New South Wales sections were copied with only minor variations when the other colonies achieved representative government, though South Australia added the requirement that certain officers - the Ministers - could not hold office for more than 3 months without being, or becoming, members of parliament. Details will be mentioned in Chapter 8. As some States have redrafted their Constitution Acts in recent decades, some of the unstated assumptions have been spelled out in a little more detail, but none of the Constitution Acts yet tell the full story about executive power - as we will see in Chapter 11.
Unlike the case of the States, the Governor-General's office did not already exist before the Constitution was drafted. So we have sections that create the office and formally vest executive power in the holder. Section 2 says that the Governor-General is appointed by the Queen and shall have (subject to the Constitution) such powers and functions of the Queen as Her Majesty may be pleased to assign to him, and section 61 says that the executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen, and exercisable by the Governor-General as her representative. What the State Constitution Acts leave vague, the Commonwealth Constitution addresses directly, but the use of the traditional language means that it mis-states the situation. Then the later sections obliquely mention the real wielders of power - section 63 says that there shall be a Federal Executive Council to "advise" the Governor-General, and that the members (Councillors) shall hold office during his pleasure, and section 64 says that at least some of these members shall be the Ministers who administer the various departments of State.
Of course, these sections were never meant to be read at face value. Right from 1901, they were intended to be read against a knowledge of the principles of cabinet government. It is absolutely taken for granted that the real decisions will be made, and the real power exercised, by the Ministers, and that the Governor-General will appoint Ministers who have the "confidence" (ie, support) of the majority of the House of Representatives. One of the rules that is unwritten in Britain is actually spelled out here - the third paragraph of section 64, based on the South Australian precedent, says that the Ministers must be members of Parliament, or at least that a Minister cannot continue in office for more than 3 months without becoming a member. And just as in Britain, and just as in the States, the "conventions" of responsible government are something more than conventions, or at least they are backed up by something that is not convention but solid law - Parliament controls the raising and spending of money. In this case the rule is stated in section 83 - "no money shall be drawn from the Treasury of the Commonwealth except under appropriation made by law". Just as the Kings of England found in 1746, 1757, through George III's reign after 1782, and in 1832 and 1834, that they could not appoint Ministers without the support of Parliament and therefore could not dictate policy themselves, so would a Governor-General (or, for that matter, a President under a minimally-amended Constitution). The power of the purse rules, and power over the purse is given to the members of parliament, not to the nominal head of the executive.
The sections have actually become more misleading since the Constitution commenced in 1901. Originally, the monarch did spell out, in the "Letters Patent" relating to the Governor-General, which powers and functions were granted under section 2 to the Governor-General. But since the nations of the Commonwealth became independent and equal (see the full story in Chapter 9), the High Court has accepted that, under section 61, the Governor-General has, without need of express "assignment" by the Queen, all of the prerogative powers that the Queen has in Britain (at least, those that are relevant to the federal executive within a federation) - see Barton v The Commonwealth, especially para 20 of Mason J's judgment. So section 2 is outdated - the words have never been amended but they have become misleading. And of course the doctrine of responsible government means that most of these powers are exercised on the "advice" of the Cabinet or the relevant Minister.
Another change resulting from Australia's independent status relates to the appointment of a Governor-General. Originally the British government had the final say in this, though the Australian government was consulted. Since the Balfour Declaration in 1926 (see Chapter 9) it has been accepted that the appointment of the Governor-General is made on the advice of the Prime Minister. This provides an additional reason why the Governor-General could never succeed in interpreting section 61 literally - if he or she tried to be the real chief executive, the Prime Minister could have him or her dismissed pretty promptly. But this is only a secondary reason - the fundamental reason remains the Parliament's stranglehold on the expenditure of money. That, after all, is why Her Majesty accepts her British Ministers' advice, and why she would accept the advice of an Australian Prime Minister about a dismissal of a Governor-General.
When we look at the original version of the State Constitution Acts in Chapter 9, and the current versions in Chapter 12, it will be worth remembering that they can also be better understood if they are supplemented by some sentences very like those suggested above (with the substitution of Premier for Prime Minister, Governor for Governor-General, and State for Commonwealth).