On Government by the Queen, and Attempted Government from the People

On Government by the Queen, and Attempted Government from the People is a political pamphlet by Henry Drummond, published in the middle of the nineteenth century. There are two different writers named Henry Drummond in this period, one a Member of Parliament and political writer who lived from 1786 to 1860, and the other a Scottish evangelical biologist who lived from 1851 to 1897. This pamphlet belongs to the earlier Drummond, the MP, who was a substantial political figure in the 1840s and 1850s and a friend and patron of Edward Irving’s Catholic Apostolic Church.

The pamphlet is a contribution to the running constitutional debates of the mid Victorian period about the proper relations between the Crown, Parliament, and the popular will as expressed through the Reform Act electorate. Drummond’s position is conservative in the older High Tory sense. He defends the prerogative of the Crown against what he sees as the slow encroachment of parliamentary and ministerial power, and he is sceptical about democratic theories that would shift further authority toward the elected House of Commons.

The writing is direct and pamphlet brisk, in the manner of mid Victorian political polemic. Drummond is good at presenting his case as common sense rather than as theory, and he draws on historical examples from English constitutional history to make the point that royal government has worked better in practice than the various forms of popular government attempted in modern Europe, particularly the various French revolutions of his lifetime. The pamphlet was part of a wider High Tory and church reformist conversation that included the Tractarians and various early Christian socialist writers.

The pamphlet is short, perhaps eighty pages, and is mostly of interest now to readers of nineteenth century political and constitutional history. For readers tracing the long English argument about monarchy and parliament, it sits alongside Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution as a counter view from an earlier generation. It also pairs with Drummond’s other political and religious writings, where his combination of constitutional conservatism and unusual religious enthusiasm produced one of the more idiosyncratic public careers of the period.