The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

The Queen's Powers

In theory, the power of the British monarch is extensive. She appoints ministers, public officials, military officers, judges, ambassadors, bishops and other senior public officials. She summons and dissolves Parliaments, assents to bills, issues orders, charters, patents and other official instruments, declares war, and is the authority by which many other acts of state are performed. She is the head of the executive and judiciary, part of the legislature, and head of the armed forces. In theory, she is more powerful in her realm than the President of the United States is in his republic.

The reality, however, is very different. Elizabeth II is a constitutional monarch. She reigns but does not rule, and the great powers nominally vested in her are exercised in her name by others. Although she still signs papers, presides over councils, and goes through the motions of being the head of the nation, her real opportunities to act on her own discretion are very limited. In the words of the nineteenth-century economist and constitutional writer, Walter Bagehot, she has the right to be consulted (by her ministers), to advise and to warn, but there is no obligation on her ministers to take her advice or heed her warnings. It is they, and particularly the Prime Minister, who decide on the orders, appointments and other executive acts to which the Queen puts her signature.

The power of the Crown has been gradually declining for centuries, but perhaps the most decisive events were the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, and the accession of the German George I. In the first, parliamentarians deposed one monarch and installed another; in the second, Britain acquired a monarch who spoke very little English and so left much of everyday government to his ministers, who were answerable to Parliament as well as the King. The Hanoverian kings continued to exercise some influence, but as party politics developed, their room for manoeuvre decreased. Because they were backed by the House of Commons, which had primary control of taxation, Prime Ministers had a stronger power base than monarchs could hope for.

The inability of monarchs to finance and run an expanding government was reflected in George III's agreement to surrender the income of Crown Estates, and with it the responsibility for bankrolling much of everyday government. In return the monarch received a personal income voted by Parliament, the Civil List. Public officials, previously paid for by the king, were now, in effect, the servants of Parliament, even though their nominal head was, and still is, the sovereign.

By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne, the crown's power had declined so much that the Queen found that she couldn't even choose her own ladies of the bedchamber. They were ministerial appointments, and when the ministry changed, so did they. The Queen still had influence, though. The story goes that the reason lesbianism wasn't outlawed by statute at the same time as homosexuality was that Queen Victoria refused to believe that such a thing could exist. If the government and Parliament had insisted on putting it in the bill, though, she would have had to assent to it. No monarch since Queen Anne had vetoed a bill, and the last time a veto was used (to reject a Scottish Militia Bill) it was at the request of the government, because changing circumstances had made it redundant.

Despite having declined over the previous two centuries, on occasion monarchical political influence could still be significant at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1904 Edward VII initiated the Entente Cordiale with France over the heads of the Foreign Office, although ministers were subsequently happy to share the credit. Shortly after coming to the throne, George V was faced with the prospect of creating hundreds of new peers in order to overcome Lords opposition to a government finance bill. He was loathe to do so, because he felt it would debase the peerage. If matters hadn't been resolved by other means and he had stood his ground, a constitutional crisis might have ensued.

His son, George VI, was instrumental in appointing Winston Churchill as Prime Minister in 1940, when many expected Viscount Halifax to get the job. It is claimed that in 1945 the King persuaded the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, to change his mind about a couple of Cabinet appointments. Attlee had intended to appoint Ernest Bevin as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Britain's minister of finance) and Hugh Dalton as Foreign Secretary, but ended up swapping them around.

When she came to the throne, Elizabeth II could have had an influence on the choice of Prime Minister, particularly in mid-Parliament when a Conservative government was in power, since that party had no mechanism for electing its own leader until 1965. She appointed Anthony Eden on Churchill's resignation in 1955, Harold Macmillan to replace Eden in 1957, and, most controversially, Sir Alec Douglas-Home to replace Macmillan in 1963 (many had expected R.A.B. Butler, sometimes called "the best Prime Minister we never had"). However, in practice, the appointments followed consultations amongst the grandees of the Conservative Party, after which the outgoing Prime Minister recommended a successor to the Queen.

In modern Britain, all political parties elect their leaders, and the Queen has no real choice but to appoint the governing party's chosen leader as Prime Minister, and then to appoint his nominees to other ministerial posts. There is no law which requires her to do so - it is dictated by "convention", and the convention is a consequence of the political realities of Britain's unwritten constitution: no government can function without revenue, and revenue is granted by the House of Commons. If the Queen were to appoint a Prime Minister who was not the chosen leader of the majority party, the party in the Commons could simply deny him the means to govern, by denying him funds and rejecting his proposed legislation. So despite her nominal status as "sovereign leige lady", Parliament, not the Queen, is sovereign in the United Kingdom.

Parliament itself is summoned, opened, prorogued and dissolved by the Queen. Before the seventeenth century, it was possible for monarchs to rule for long periods without a Parliament, but the last attempt to do so (Charles I from 1629-40) contributed to the onset of Civil War and the overthrow of the monarchy, partly because of the controversy over Charles's attempts to raise revenue by non-Parliamentary means. After he was compelled by circumstances to call a Parliament in 1640, he was forced to assent to the first Triennial Act in 1641, which required Parliament to meet at least once every three years. This was repealed after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, but following the Glorious Revolution a second Triennial Act was passed (in 1694) which required that Parliament met annually and that elections for new Parliaments were held at least once every three years. The three year period was increased to seven years in 1716, and reduced to five by the Parliament Act 1911.

Even within the constraints dictated by law, the Queen has little power to exercise discretion in deciding when Parliaments shall be elected and summoned. As long as there is a Prime Minister with a majority in the Commons, she is obliged by convention to accept his advice on the timing of elections. Only in circumstances where the Prime Minister is trying to act while not possessing the necessary Parliamentary support might the Queen herself have a decisive part to play in these decisions. Such a situation has not arisen in recent British history, although it has occurred with her representatives, the Governor Generals, in Canada in 1926 (when a Prime Minister's request for a dissolution of Parliament was refused) and Australia in 1975 (when a Prime Minister was dismissed when he couldn't obtain Senate support for his budget). Except in such extraordinary constitutional circumstances, the Queen's real authority is only what the elected politicians will allow her. The maintenance of her appearance of power hides the reality, that the United Kingdom is a crowned republic, with a government of the people, by the people and for the people. The Queen retains a largely ceremonial and symbolic role because those people, through their representatives, choose to allow it, in preference to an explicitly republican regime.

- Paul James