The immediate outcome of the inquiry was in great measure the exoneration of the execu tive from the suspicion of financial dishonesty. But the immediate result is insignificant by the side of the ultimate results. On the one hand it furnished a 'now unchallengeable precedent for appropriation of supply and for audit of ac counts; and once the right of auditing accounts should be fully conceded, the further right of questioning the conduct and policy of the ex ecutive was bound to follow. Once that conse quence was fully established the gulf which sundered • the (king's) executive from the (people's) Parliament was narrowing and a bridge was being built over it. The Parliament was coming to identify its interests with those of the executive instead of maintaining an atti tude of permanent aloofness or even hostility. Of the two parties to this conversion the Par liament itself was slower of comprehension and more unwilling of movement than the Crown. For to identity itself with the administration was to forfeit all the vantage ground of com plaint and agitation on which it had stood in the past. Accordingly the chance did not actually accomplish itself in Charles Il's time. For the rest of his reign the parliamentary opposition was swayed by motives which were merely and purely factious. But as the century drew to a close the gul,f was in great measure bridged over, and in the course of the 18th century the new structure was perfected. The executive ceased to be the personal property, appanage, officialdom of the king. It became identified with the parliamentary system through the de vice of parliamentary departmental heads; and the practice of annual estimates took the respon sibility for the financial administration of the country from the shoulders of the king, and laid it upon the broader shoulders of the Parlia ment. From that moment the development of English constitutional and political life has been smooth and harmonious.
But these ultimate results lay unfolded in the bosom of the future. To Charles II the Commission of Accounts taught another and quite different lesson. It taught him the art of parliamentary management, not merely how to buy off the opposition, but also how to organize his own friends in the House. Danby's corrupt leadership of the Parliament, and the various devices employed to influence the constituencies on the one hand, and Sir William Temple's scheme of a reorganization of the Privy Council on the other, are but manifestations of this side of Charles' statecraft. Thanks to this statecraft of parliamentary management, Charles remained easily master of the situation for the rest of his reign, and when he died he left to his brother a prerogative as unimpaired as that which James I had wielded—complete control of the executive at home, complete control of the forces, complete control of the foreign policy of the nation. .
From the point of view which has been thus expounded, what was the historical significance of the Revolution of 1688? In a sentence it lies not so much in the direct challenging of pre rogative as in the quiet, undefined, unobserved usurpation of it by the Parliament. In the first
place the Parliament voted a standing revenue of 11,200,000 for the support of the Crown in the time of peace. This was exactly the sum which the Restoration Parliament had granted Charles II in 1660. But whereas in 1660 that sum was meant to cover the complete national expenditure, civil and military alike, the details and management of which were left absolutely unchallenged in Charles' hands, the vote in 1689 was intended only for the civil establish ment in time of peace. Immediately after this vote the Parliament proceeded to consider the question of separate supply for the army, navy and ordance, and in order thereto detailed esti mates of the charge of the army and navy were laid before the House.
Herein lies the Great Revolution—not in the clauses of the Bill of Rights. For the mo ment the Parliament realized that the provision for and regulation of the army and navy was its province it had assumed to itself half the domain of that kingly prerogative which had endured through Tudor and Stuart times. It had stepped over the gulf which had hitherto divided the domain of the executive from that of the legislative. Once this first step had been taken, there remained only the problem of evolving the machinery by which the participa tion of the Parliament in the executive should be expressed and regulated. The course of the evolution of that machinery— the selection by the Crown of its advisers and administrative de partmental heads from the chiefs of the parties in the Parliament — was determined by the mere force of circumstance, that is, by the situation in which William III, and again, a generation later, George I, each found himself as the im ported ruler of a strange country. The gradual development of the party system of government afforded the key to the solution of the problem of which the 17th century had been so long in labor. For when once the obvious step had been taken of selecting the party chiefs as the heads of the various executive departments, the development of the system of Cabinet govern ment was bound to follow sooner or later. But even so, generations had still to elapse before this new parliamentary executive fully grasped the control of that last and most highly prized flower of the kingly prerogative, the direction of the foreign policy of the country.
So far as these results depended upon the mere accidents of the Revolution of 1688 and of the Hanoverian Succession they maybe re garded as, in a sense, fortuitous. If it is true that England has blundered into an empire, much more true is it that she has blundered into a Constitution.
If the ordinarily accepted view of the con stitutional importance of our 17th century his tory is wide of the mark and distorted, much more truly may this be said of the ordinary view as to the religious history of that period.