Justice & Law Quote by Robert Walpole

Walpole’s sentence is a political judo throw: he pretends to shrink himself out of the frame so the Crown can loom larger. “For the sake of my master, without any regard for my own” is staged humility, a ritual declaration of loyalty meant to disinfect whatever self-interest clings to the position he’s defending. In early Hanoverian Britain, “master” is both personal and constitutional. Walpole is reassuring Parliament that the minister is merely the Crown’s instrument, even as he was effectively inventing modern prime-ministerial power.

The real work happens in the way “constitution” is yoked to “the rights and prerogatives of the crown.” He isn’t arguing that royal prerogative is compatible with constitutional government; he’s arguing it is the precondition for it. That’s a clever inversion aimed at a chamber allergic to absolutism: you can oppose the Crown’s tools and still claim you’re a patriot, but Walpole insists you’re actually sawing through the beam that holds up the whole house. The phrase “without which our constitution can not be preserved” is less legal analysis than emotional blackmail, designed to make the motion at hand smell like sedition.

The subtext is coalition management. Walpole is calling in the respectable people in the room - “all those that have a due regard” - and quietly casting dissenters as reckless, unserious, maybe even disloyal. It’s an early example of how British politics learned to wrap power in the language of stability: not “give us more,” but “don’t break what works.”