As “Mr. Speaker” does not speak in the debates, the title of the President of the House of Commons appears, at first sight, paradoxical. The original function of the office was to sum up, like the Judge at a trial, the arguments of both sides at the close of a debate. “If any doubt arise upon a Bill,” says an Order passed in 1604, “the Speaker to explain, but not to sway the House with argument or dispute.” Mr. Speaker had also to “speak” the views of the House in its contentions with the Crown, about supplies and taxes, before the Revolution of 1688.
The duties of the Speaker to-day are not so anxious or troublesome. The occasions on which he conveys the views or desires of the Commons to the Sovereign, or his representatives, the Lords Commissioners in the House of Lords, are rare, and always formal or ceremonious. He has been relieved long since of the invidious task of summing up a debate in which the contending parties had argued out their differences. His duties are now more appropriate to his office, as controller and guide of a deliberative Assembly. He keeps the talk strictly to the subject of discussion. He decides points of order. He interprets the rules of the House. He is ever ready to assist Members in doubt or difficulty about a question, a motion or a Bill. He guards with jealous care the authority, honour and dignity of the House. He is most concerned with the maintenance of its great traditions of good order, decorum, and freedom of opinion.
Above all, Mr. Speaker must be scrupulously fair, absolutely just, in rulings which may affect any of the politicalsections of the Assembly. For the most precious attribute of the Chair of the House of Commons is impartiality. The Speaker, like the King, is supposed to have no politics. That has become almost a recognized constitutional principle. Of course, he is returned to the House originally as a supporter of one or other of the political parties. It follows also that on his first appointment to the Chair he is necessarily the choice, or the nominee, of the political Party which at the time is supreme. The Chair of the House of Commons, when vacated by resignation or death, has always been considered the legitimate prize of the Party then in office or in power. Accordingly the Speaker has invariably been chosen from the ranks of the Ministerialists. All the Speakers of the nineteenth century—Sir Henry Addington, Sir John Freeman-Mitford, Charles Abbot, Charles Manners-Sutton, James Abercromby, Charles Shaw-Lefevre, John Evelyn Denison, Henry Bouverie Brand, Arthur Wellesley Peel and William Court Gully—were so chosen and appointed, and so was James William Lowther, the first Speaker elected in the twentieth century. But whether the Speaker is first designated by the Government, or, in case of a division, is carried by the majority of the Government, when he is being conducted by his proposer and seconder from his place on the benches to the Chair, he, as it were, doffs his Party colours, be they buff or blue, and wears, instead, the white flower of a neutral political life; and, once in the Chair, he is regarded as the choice of the whole House, from which his authority is derived and of which, to use the ancient phrase, he is “the mouth.” Henceforth he sits above all Parties. As Speaker he has no political opinions. So he remains Speaker—being re-elected unanimously at the first meeting of each new Parliament—until he decides to resign or is removed by death. This concurrence of both sides in the appointment of Mr. Speaker adds immensely to his judicial independence in presiding over the Party conflicts which are waged on the floor of the House of Commons.
Once only has a Speaker been dismissed on the assembling of a new Parliament because he was supposed to be hostile to the Party which came back from the country in a majority. This was Charles Manners-Sutton. A Tory himself, he wasthe nominee of the Tory Administration in office at the resignation of Charles Abbot in 1817. The moderate Conservatives and Whigs put forward Charles William Wynn. His brother, Sir Watkin Wynn, who was also in the House, and he were known as “Bubble and Squeak,” on account of the peculiarity of their voices. Indeed, Canning thought the only objection to Wynn as a candidate for the Chair was that Members might be tempted to address him as “Mr. Squeaker.” However, Manners-Sutton was elected by the large majority of 160; and in accordance with precedent he was reappointed to the position after General Elections in 1819, 1820, 1826, 1830 and 1831. In July 1832, during the struggle over the great Reform Bill, he intimated his wish to retire at the close of the Parliament. A vote of thanks for his services was unanimously passed, on the motion of Lord Althorp, the Whig Leader of the House, an annuity of £4,000 was granted to him, and one of £3,000, after his death, to his heir male. But the Whig Ministers, returned again to power at the General Election which followed the passing of the Reform Act, were apprehensive that a new and inexperienced Speaker would be unable to control the first reformed Parliament in which, it was feared, there might be discordant and unruly elements, and they induced Manners-Sutton to consent to occupy the Chair for some time longer. The Radicals, however, decided to oppose his re-election. Accordingly, at the meeting of the new Parliament on January 29, 1833, after Manners-Sutton had been proposed by Lord Morpeth and seconded by Sir Francis Burdett, both Whigs, Edward John Littleton was put up in opposition to him by Joseph Hume and Daniel O’Connell. A division was taken, and Littleton was rejected by 241 votes to 31, or the enormous majority of 210. Thereupon Charles Manners-Sutton was declared elected Speaker unanimously.
When a new Parliament next assembled, on February 19, 1835, the Tories were in office, the Whigs having been summarily dismissed by William IV; but, as the result of the General Election which followed, a majority of Whigs confronted Sir Robert Peel, Prime Minister, in the House of Commons, determined to fight him on every issue.Charles Manners-Sutton was again nominated for the Chair, this time his proposer and seconder being Tories. That he was a staunch Tory everybody was well aware. But he was charged with overt acts of partisanship, in breach of the principle that as Speaker he was bound to be absolutely impartial. It was said that he had been concerned in the Tory opposition to the reform of Parliament, and had, in fact, tried to constitute an anti-Reform Administration himself. It was further said that he had helped in the overthrow of the late Whig Government, and that, had the Tories been successful at the polls, he would have been appointed to high office in Peel’s Cabinet. Though he denied these charges, the Whigs as a Party opposed his re-election to the Chair; and their nominee, James Abercromby, was carried in a most exciting contest by the narrow majority of 10, or by 316 votes to 306. “Such a division was never known before in the House of Commons,” writes Charles Greville in hisMemoirs. “Much money was won and lost. Everybody betted. I won £55.”
Lord John Russell, speaking in the 1835 debate, said the House of Commons was under no obligation in a new Parliament to re-elect the Speaker, unless he had won for himself the confidence and esteem not of his own Party alone, but of the general body of Members. Even so, no attempt has since been made to depose a Speaker on Party grounds, even when a General Election has upset the balance of Parties in the House of Commons. On the retirement of Abercromby in May 1839, the Whigs, being still in office, nominated Charles Shaw-Lefevre; the Tories ran Henry Goulburn, and the former was elected by a majority of 18, or by 317 votes against 299. The General Election of 1841 resulted in a change of Government. The Melbourne Administration, which elected Shaw-Lefevre to the Chair, was overthrown at the polls, and the Tories came back with a large majority. Many of the victors in the electoral contest were disposed to follow the example set by their opponents in 1835, and make a Party question of theSpeakership of the new Parliament. But their leader and Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, refused to countenance this line of action. “I do not think it necessary,” said he, in a speech supporting the re-election of Shaw-Lefevre in August 1841, “that the person elected to the Chair, who has ably and conscientiously performed his duty, should be displaced because his political opinions are not consonant with those of the majority of the House.” The re-election of Shaw-Lefevre was, accordingly, unanimous. Peel’s wise view of the Speakership has since prevailed. The continuity of the office has not been broken since the dismissal of Manners-Sutton in 1835. John Evelyn Denison was unanimously chosen to succeed Shaw-Lefevre in 1857, Henry Bouverie Brand to succeed Denison in 1872, and Arthur Wellesley Peel to succeed Brand in 1884. The Whigs, or Liberals, were in office on each occasion that the Speakership became vacant by resignation in those years. And the Conservatives, on their return to power, reappointed Denison in 1866, Brand in 1874, and Peel in 1886.
The circumstances attending the election of William Court Gully as Speaker gave both to the principle that the Chair is above the strife and the prejudices of Party, and the precedent of its occupant’s continuity of office, an accession of strength which perhaps makes them stable and decisive for all time. Gully had sat in the House as a Liberal for ten years when, on the retirement of Peel in May 1895, he was nominated for the Chair by the Liberal Government. The Unionist Opposition proposed Sir Matthew White Ridley, a highly respected member of their Party, and a man of long and varied experience in parliamentary affairs. On a division Gully was elected by the narrow majority of 11. The voting was: Gully, 285; White Ridley, 274. It was publicly declared at the time that, as the Unionists had disapproved the candidature of Gully, they held themselves free to put a nominee of their own in the Chair should they have a majority in the next new Parliament. A few weeks later the Liberal Government was defeated in the House of Commons, and a dissolution followed. It is the custom to allow the Speaker a walk-over in his constituency at the General Election. But Gully’s seat atCarlisle was on this occasion contested, and his Unionist opponent received from Arthur Balfour, then Leader of the Unionist Party, a letter warmly endorsing his candidature and wishing him success. In his address to the constituents Gully made no reference to politics. As Speaker of the House of Commons, he could have nothing to say to Party controversy. Like his predecessors, he recognized that a Speaker cannot descend into the rough strife of the electoral battle, not even to canvass the electors, without impairing the independence and the dignity of the Chair of the House of Commons. The contest ended in his re-election by a substantial majority.
The Unionists came back triumphant from the country. There was still a feeling in the Party, though not, indeed, prevailing to any wide extent, that the Speaker of the new Parliament should be chosen from its ranks. It was pointed out that for sixty years there had not been a Conservative Speaker—Manners-Sutton having been the last—and, apart altogether from the legitimate ambition of the Conservatives to have a Speaker of their own way of thinking, it was argued that in building up the body of precedents which guide, if they do not control, the duties of the Chair, Conservative opinion ought to have its proper share, if these precedents are truly to reflect the sense of the House generally. But tradition and practice in the House of Commons were too powerful to be overborne. At the meeting of the new Parliament, in August 1895, Gully was unanimously re-elected to the Chair. The aloofness and supremacy of the Speakership has one fine effect. It gives to the House, despite its Party divisions, an ennobling sense of national unity.
The Speaker forfeits—actually, though perhaps not theoretically—his rights as the representative of a constituency in the House. He is disqualified from speaking in the debates and voting in the divisions. The constituency which he represents is, therefore, in a sense disfranchised. But there is no record of a constituency ever having objected to its representative being made Speaker. No doubt itappreciates the distinction. Formerly it was customary for the Speaker to join in the debates and divisions when the House was in Committee, he having left the Chair, and the proceedings being presided over by the Chairman. In Committee on the Bill for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, Mr. Speaker Addington, on February 12, 1799, declared that, while he was in favour of the plan, he was strongly opposed to Catholic emancipation with which Pitt was disposed to accompany it. If it were a question, he said, between the re-enactment of all the Popery laws for the repression of Ireland, or the Union, coupled with Catholic emancipation, for the pacification of Ireland, he would prefer the former. Again, during the Committee stage of the Bill introduced by Henry Grattan, in 1813, to qualify Roman Catholics for election as Members of Parliament, an amendment to omit the vital words, “to sit and vote in either House of Parliament,” was moved by Mr. Speaker Abbot (strongly opposed, like Addington, to the removal of the Catholic disabilities), and having been carried by a majority, though only a small one of four votes, proved fatal to the measure. Manners-Sutton also exercised his right to speak in Committee three times on such highly controversial questions as Catholic emancipation and the claims of Dissenters to be admitted to the Universities, to both of which he, like his predecessors in the Chair, answered an uncompromising “No.”
But so high has the Chair of the House of Commons been since lifted above the conflicts of politics, that partisanship so aggressive would not now be tolerated in the Speaker. On the last two occasions that a Speaker interested himself in proceedings in Committee, the questions at issue had no relation whatever to Party politics. In 1856 Shaw-Lefevre spoke in defence of the Board of Trustees of the British Museum, of which he was a member. In 1870 Evelyn Denison voted to exempt horses employed on farms from a licence duty which was proposed in the Budget. This was the last occasion that a Speaker in wig and gown passed through the division lobby to record his vote, and it is probable that never again will a Speaker speak or vote in Committee. Indeed, Mr. Speaker Gully directed that hisname should be removed from the printed lists supplied to the clerks in the division lobbies for the purpose of recording how members voted. The only vote which a Speaker now gives is a casting vote, should the numbers on each side in a division be equal. It is the custom for the Speaker to give his casting vote in such a way as to avoid making the decision final—thus giving the House another opportunity of considering the question—and to state his reasons, which are entered in theJournals.
Occasions for the Speaker’s casting vote rarely arise. Peel was called upon to give it but once during his eleven years of office; that was on the Marriages Confirmation (Antwerp) Bill in July, 1887. The object of the measure was to confirm marriages solemnized at Antwerp by a Dr. Potts, chaplain to a British and American chapel from 1880 to 1884, the invalidity of which was caused by a technicality. The tie was a motion to adjourn the debate, and Mr. Speaker Peel gave his casting vote for the adjournment. Gully’s experience in this respect was singular. On the sole occasion he was called upon to give his casting vote no tie really existed. It was on May 11, 1899, in connection with the second reading of the Vehicles (Lights) Bill. “The tellers for the Ayes and the Noes came up to the Table almost at the same time,” said Gully, describing the incident. “One of the tellers gave his number as forty, and the teller for the Ayes was then turned to and asked his number. In point of fact the teller for the Ayes had succeeded by a majority of three. His number should have been forty-three, but he was so elated at hearing of a victory which he had not expected that at the moment he only repeated what the other Member had said, and he said ‘forty,’ whereupon there was a tie. I then gave my vote for the Ayes, doing that which a Speaker always did on such occasions, although I do not think I had formed any opinion at all upon the Bill. Still, in doing what I did I pursued the proper course, because it gave the opportunity on the third reading for the expression of a decided opinion on the Bill.”