[p. 124]
|124| budget, there nevertheless remained a form of monarchical influence, though subject to the ministerial council, on this small part of the annual British state expenditure. Through the separation recently ordained by Parliament of a part, which is placed at the disposal of the King for himself and his family, and the handing over of the other part, already hitherto applied to purposes of state, to parliamentary disposition, this remnant also of royal-monarchical disposition is abolished. It cannot be overlooked here that the majority which was significant enough against a monarchical element to induce the Wellington ministry to resign was, on the second reading of the Reform Bill, which is directed against aristocratic prerogatives, as is well known, only of one vote.
As characteristic of the position of the monarchical element may be regarded the reproach made to the ministry, as with the Catholic Emancipation Bill so also in the proceedings on the Reform Bill, namely that it let the King’s approval given to this measure become public. What is at issue here is not the exercise of a monarchical plenitude of power {or of a so-called coup d’état}; what is found improper is only the authority or the influence which the personal view of the King might exert. As much as on the one hand a delicacy is thereby asserted, of not wishing to be placed, in the proceedings on the Bill, in the embarrassment of contradicting the will of the monarch, so much does it lie in it that Parliament, also with regard to the initiative which belongs to the monarchical element, the crown, wants to have to do only with a ministry dependent on it and incorporated in it, and actually only with its own members, since the ministers can make the proposal of a Bill only in this quality, just as indeed also the right of confirmation or rejection of a Bill adopted by both Houses, which belongs to the King as the third branch of the
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