THE SOVEREIGN/MONARCH/CROWN

We may think of the Queen as being very important but we do not think of her as being very powerful. We tend to see her as the figurehead of power, and a natural focus of loyalty. To an extent that is true, but the position of the monarch or Crown in our constitution is extremely important. Halsbury describes it as follows:

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The Head of State, and the supreme executive officer in the State;... the titular head of the Church of England, the Law, the Navy, the Army and the Air Force, and the source of all justice and titles of honour, distinctions and dignities; foreign affairs are conducted, declarations of war and peace made, and the law executed and administered, solely in her name, although the monarch acts in such matters only on the advice of her ministers.

Referring to the numbers in Figure 4.1, we should therefore understand that:

2. Legislature. The Queen is a part of the legislature—here she is known as 'the Queen in Parliament'. It is the Queen who opens and dissolves (closes) Parliament. Laws passed by Parliament can become laws of the land only when she signs her assent to them. The last occasion on which Royal Assent was refused by a monarch was 300 years ago (see next chapter). It is now a feature of the constitution that the monarch always gives Royal Assent to laws passed in Parliament—it is her 'constitutional duty' to do so.

3. Executive. The Queen is head of the executive. Government operates in her name. It is the Queen who invites a new Prime Minister to form a Government. The Government Ministers are chosen by the Prime Minister, but they are formally granted their 'seals of office' by the Queen, and are called 'Ministers of the Crown'. Even the leader of the largest 'minority' party, which opposes the Government in Parliament, is called 'Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition', and is paid a special salary for holding this office.

4. Judiciary. It is in the 'name of the Queen' that our system of justice is administered. The sovereign is the 'fountain of justice and mercy'. The actual power of doing justice in the courts has been placed in the hands of the judges but they are all called 'Her Majesty's Judges'; they receive their 'Warrants of Appointment' from the Queen and all courts display the Royal Coat of Arms to show that they do their work in the name of the Queen. All criminal prosecutions are brought in the name of the Queen. The cases are called R v Smith, or Jones or whatever the defendant is called. Here 'R v' means 'Rex versus' or 'Regina versus'—'The King against' or 'The Queen against'—depending on whether we have a king or queen on the throne. Even the prisons are 'HM [Her Majesty's] prisons'. We saw earlier how hundreds of years ago the king would sit in court to hear cases. Today, however, the Queen does not actually sit in court, for all justice is administered 'in her name'.

Only one other person in our constitution has held a position that has straddled the legislature, executive, and judiciary. He is the Lord Chancellor, but his active role as a party politician and Minister in charge of a large department, Speaker of the House

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of Lords, and Head of the Judiciary is no longer considered acceptable in a modern democracy, because it breaches the principle of 'separation of powers'. In this it differs from the Queen's ceremonial role in presiding over all three arms of the State. We will be looking more closely at the Lord Chancellor's functions, and their recent development in the next chapter and Chapter 13.

Therefore, although the Queen's position in the constitution may be a largely ceremonial one, its great importance is that she is uniquely placed to bind together the most powerful bodies in the country under a vow of loyalty to her. They must work together in the Crown's best interests. These are always considered to be the best interests of the nation as a whole, rather than of the Queen as an individual. At the same time the position of the Crown helps to divide up their powers, and keep them separate. In this way, in theory, no one can acquire too much power. This is the constitutional role of the monarch, a job that kings and queens have now done for centuries.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries our island story featured a succession of battles between the Crown and the executive. Each resented the other for having and wanting too much power; and each fought for more power—quite literally in the Civil War (1642-8) between Charles I’s Royalists and Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentarians. This war ended with perhaps the most famous trial in our history, and one which was to become a great constitutional landmark.

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 923