coalition with Lord
North), and both alike professed to be struggling for the constitution
alone, for some fundamental principle which each charged his antagonist
with violating; Fox on one occasion even going so far as, in some
degree, to involve the King himself in his censures, declaring not only
that "the struggle was, in fact, one between Pitt himself and the
constitution," but that it was also one "between liberty and the
influence of the crown," and "between prerogative and the constitution;"
and that "Pitt had been brought into power by means absolutely
subversive of the constitution."[96] But no act of which he thus accused
the minister or the King showed such a disregard of the fundamental
principle of the constitution of Parliament as was exhibited by Fox
himself when, in the very first debate after the Christmas recess, he
called in question that most undoubted prerogative of the crown to
dissolve the Parliament, and, drawing a distinction which had certainly
never been heard of before, declared that, though the King had an
incontestable right to dissolve the Parliament after the close of a
session, "many great lawyers" doubted whether he had such a right in the
middle of a session, a dissolution at such a period being "a penal" one.
Professing to believe that an immediate dissolution was intended, he
even threatened to propose to the House of Commons "measures to guard
against a step so inimical to the true interests of the country," and
made a more direct attack than ever on the King himself, by the
assertion of a probability that, even if Pitt did not contemplate a
dissolution, his royal master might employ "secret influence" to
overrule him, and might dissolve in spite of him,[97] an imputation
which Lord North, with a strange departure from his customary
good-humor, condescended to endorse.[98] There could be no doubt that
both the doubt and the menace were of themselves distinct attacks on the
constitution; and they were, moreover, singularly impolitic and
inconsistent with others of the speaker's arguments, since, if the
nation at large approved of his views and conduct, a dissolution--which
would have placed the decision in its hands--would have been the very
thing he should most have desired. On another evening, though he
admitted as a principle that the sovereign had the prerogative of
choosing his ministers, he not only sought to narrow the effect of that
admission by the assertion that "to exerci