result of the expeditions, but at once reopened peace negotiations with
France. Left to himself, he would have taken no account of the last
great conquests. Councillors less anxious for peace succeeded in getting
them exchanged for Florida. In November the peace was signed. The
conditions were much the same as those of the preceding year. America
passed wholly to the English, the French keeping the rights of fishing
round Newfoundland. England kept Tobago, Dominica, St. Vincent, and
Granada, but restored Martinique and St. Lucia. Minorca and Belleisle
were to be exchanged. The French evacuated their conquests in Germany,
but on the other hand--and this was a concession Pitt had refused--Goree
was restored to France, and the English army was withdrawn from Germany.
In India the French were to have no military establishment, but their
factories were restored. All claims on the part of Spain were entirely
rejected. On the whole, the peace, though it did not destroy the House
of Bourbon, as Pitt would have wished, probably gave England as much as
she had a right to expect. The conclusion of the treaty was rendered
easier by Frederick's continued successes in Germany. Although the
Czarina Catherine, who had succeeded Peter, had reverted to the old
policy of Russia, and withdrawn her troops from Frederick's assistance,
he had been able to retain his superiority throughout the campaign.
Prince Ferdinand had gained fresh successes in Westphalia, and had taken
Cassel from the French; while Prince Henry, the King's brother, had won
a victory at Freiberg, which closed the Seven Years' War.
[Sidenote: Attack on the Whigs. Feb. 10, 1763.]
[Sidenote: Bute resigns. April 8, 1763.]
[Sidenote: He names Grenville as his successor.]
Bute, while thus obtaining peace, though in a way so irritating to our
German friends that England stood henceforward absolutely without
allies, had been carrying on his vindictive attack upon the Whigs. The
opportunity selected for this purpose was the passage of the peace
through Parliament. Grenville, a man of firmness, but without commanding
abilities, and deficient in tact, had taken Pitt's place as Leader of
the House of Commons. But he was not regarded as strong enough to make
head against the opposition which was expected, for the Whigs of all
sections, conscious of Bute's designs against them, were beginning to
combine. Bute selected a man of greater powers to assist him. He
bargained with Fox (whose conscience was not scrupulous when money was
to be made) to assume the lead of the House. It was hoped that he might
bring some Whigs with him. This he found himself unable to do, and with
consummate audacity set to work to purchase a majority. The Paymaster's
office became in fact a shop for the purchase of votes, £200 being the
least price given. Against such a majority all efforts were of course
useless, and the peace received the approbation of Parliament. After
this victory vengeance began. The Duke of Devonshire, the head of the
great Whig house of Cavendish, for declining to attend a Cabinet
Council, was rudely deprived of the office of Chamberlain, and the King
with his own hand scratched his name off the list of Privy Councillors.
All placemen who had voted against the peace were dismissed. Newcastle
and Rockingham were removed from their Lord Lieutenancies, and even the
meanest officers of the administration--tax-gatherers and customhouse
officers, who owed their places to Whig patronage, were removed. Bute
appeared triumphant. Even the cider tax, a ridiculously unfair excise
suggested by the ignorance of Dashwood, his Chancellor of the Exchequer,
was carried by a large majority in his venal House. Suddenly Bute
resigned. It is difficult to explain why. Perhaps it was because he was
conscious of the unpopularity he had incurred. His Peace of Paris was
distasteful to the nation; he had driven from office Pitt, the favourite
of the people; he was a Scotchman; the voice of scandal constantly
coupled his name with that of the Princess Dowager of Wales, and the
odious name of favourite was indissolubly attached to him. Whether well
or ill founded, his unpopularity had reached such a pitch, that he was
afraid to leave his house without a bodyguard of prize-fighters. Perhaps
experience had taught him his unfitness to conduct the Government.
Perhaps, and this was the general belief of the time, he preferred the
irresponsible power of the favourite to the dangers and responsibility
of the minister. He named Grenville for his successor, and as he had
always used him as his creature, he probably still hoped to find him a
pliant tool. In this he was disappointed; and though for a few years he
doubtless had much private influence with the King, this part of his
career has been much exaggerated, and he himself complained bitterly of
the King's ingratitude.
[Sidenote: The Triumvirate ministry. 1763.]
[Sidenote: Bedford joins the ministry.]
With Grenville the Secretaries of State, Lord Egremont and Lord Halifax,
were regarded as holding the direction of public affairs. This ministry
has therefore been sometimes called The Triumvirate. Bute found them by
no means ready to accept his interference, and soon began to intrigue
against them. Grenville more than once complained to the King of his
want of confidence. The sudden death of Lord Egremont gave an
opportunity for a change in the ministry, and Bute so far changed his
former policy as to recommend the King to send for Pitt. A long
interview with the King, in which Pitt stated the necessity of bringing
back some of the Whig connection to power, left him with the impression
that he was to be minister, and he wrote to the Whig chiefs accordingly.
But two days after, on a second interview, he found matters changed. The
King wished the Earl of Northumberland, Bute's intended son-in-law, to
be Prime Minister, and desired several of the present ministry to be
retained. This Pitt would not hear of, designating Temple, Devonshire,
and others who had just fallen under the King's displeasure, as his
colleagues. The negotiation was broken off. Probably on the day which
intervened between the two interviews Bute had changed his mind. In
carrying through the peace negotiations he had been assisted by that
section of the Whigs which was under the influence of the Duke of
Bedford. It is to this section that Fox belonged. The Duke, though of a
retiring character, was now induced to accept office by a false rumour,
that Pitt had expressly declared that he would not admit him to any
Government of which he was the chief. A mixed ministry of the followers
of Grenville and Bedford was formed, and is generally known by the name
of the Bedford Ministry. The Secretaries of State were Halifax and Lord
Sandwich, a man of mean character and licentious morals.
[Sidenote: The trial of Wilkes. 1763.]
The new ministry met Parliament on the 15th of November, and both Houses
were at once occupied with questions with regard to Wilkes. The
unpopularity of Bute had found expression in numerous pamphlets. Among
the Opposition writers was Wilkes, member for Aylesbury, who, in
conjunction with an author of the name of Churchill, had established a
paper, _The North Briton_, in which the favourite and his Government had
been very roughly handled, and which won popularity by unreasoning
general assaults upon the Scotch nation. He had so far exceeded the
usual practice of pamphleteers of the time as to write the names of his
opponents at full length, instead of employing initials. When the King
had prorogued Parliament (April 23rd) on Bute's resignation, he had
spoken of the peace as honourable to his crown and beneficial to the
people. This produced an attack in the famous No. 45 of _The North
Briton_. Grenville had at once proceeded against the author. A general
warrant (that is, a warrant in which no individual names are mentioned)
was issued against the authors, printers, and publishers of the paper,
and under it Wilkes was apprehended, his house and papers being also
ransacked. He at once became a political martyr. The chiefs of the
Opposition, Temple and Grafton, visited him in his prison, and he
proceeded to try the validity of his arrest. Chief Justice Pratt, before
whom the case came, held that Wilkes was exempted from arrest by his
privilege as a member; for a member of Parliament is free from arrest on
all charges except those of treason, felony, and breach of the peace,
and a libel, he said, could not be construed as a breach of the peace.
But though the law had failed to punish him, he was pursued by the
vengeance of the Government; he was deprived of his commission in the
militia, and his supporter, Temple, was removed from the Lord
Lieutenancy of Buckinghamshire. The result of the trial was received
with public rejoicings in all corners of England. This dispute between
Government and a scurrilous writer, of most licentious morals, would be
scarcely worth mentioning, although it occupied nearly the whole
session, were it not one of the proofs of the want of harmony existing
between Parliament and those whom Parliament was held to represent. It
was one of several incidents which showed that the venal House of
Commons, consisting of nominees of the Court or great families, was
rapidly ceasing to command the obedience of the people, and that the
machinery of the Constitution was thereby becoming dislocated.
[Sidenote: Wilkes is expelled by the Lower House.]
The question at once came before both Houses. In the House of Lords it
assumed a personal form. Lord Sandwich, a former friend of Wilkes, and
his associate in his greatest debauchery, but now Secretary of State,
did not think it unbecoming to produce an obscene parody on Pope's
"Essay on Man," of which Wilkes was the author, and demand his
punishment. The book had never been published; fourteen copies had been
privately printed; it had come into Sandwich's possession when Wilkes's
house was ransacked, and afterwards by tampering with Wilkes's printer.
Sandwich complained of it as a breach of privilege, for it was addressed
to him. "Awake, my Sandwich!" it began, instead of "Awake, my St. John!"
of Pope's Essay, and ridiculous notes were added, attributed to
Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, who had annotated Pope's work. In the
House of Commons Wilkes rose and complained of his imprisonment as a
breach of privilege, but he met with little sympathy. By a large
majority No. 45 was voted to be a seditious libel, and ordered to be
burnt by the common hangman. A dangerous riot was the consequence, nor
was the operation completed till a jackboot and petticoat, the popular
emblems of the Princess of Wales and Lord Bute, were committed to the
flames to share the fate of the obnoxious publication. Further
proceedings against Wilkes were postponed by a duel in which he was
engaged with a Mr. Martin, who had grossly insulted him, and in which he
was wounded; but he was eventually expelled from his place in the House.
On the two constitutional questions which were involved in this
quarrel--the construction to be given to the privilege of members and
the legality of general warrants--the popular party was defeated, in
spite of the powerful support of Pitt. In opposition to the Courts of
Law, Parliament held that privilege could not cover a seditious libel;
and Grenville and his majority contrived to shelve a resolution which
was introduced declaring the illegality of general warrants. The whole
question excited the intensest interest; the House is said to have once
sat for seventeen hours. Wilkes, unable to withstand all the assaults
upon him, had, in spite of his popularity, been obliged to withdraw to
France.
Grenville and his ministry had hardly completed this quarrel, in which
they had wantonly embroiled Parliament and people, when they took a
fresh step which, though well intentioned, was destined, from the way in
which it was carried out, to lose England the best of her colonies.
[Sidenote: Origin of the American provinces.]
The thirteen American provinces owed their origin to many different
causes, and were very distinct both in their character and laws. There
was, in the first place, the group of New England provinces,
Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire (which included what is now
called Vermont), and Rhode Island; these owed their origin to the
Pilgrim Fathers, and though the first zeal of their Puritan religion had
died away, much of the stern character of their original founders
remained among the population: their capital was Boston, almost
surrounded by the sea, and already a port of very considerable
importance and wealth; the Hudson formed their boundary towards the
west. Then there came a group of provinces originally belonging to the
Dutch, and known as the New Netherlands. These had come into the hands
of England during the war between Holland and England in the reign of
Charles II., and had been granted to the Duke of York. New Amsterdam
became New York, and Fort Orange, higher up the stream, Albany. Another
part of the same grant was New Jersey, lying between the Hudson and the
Delaware. This had been given for payment by the Duke of York to Lord
Berkeley and Sir George Carteret; the western part had been subsequently
parted with by Berkeley to the Quakers, and the whole province, which
was surrendered to the Crown in the reign of Queen Anne, was therefore
known commonly as the Jerseys, and was peopled almost exclusively by
Quakers, Presbyterians and Anabaptists. Spreading from their colony in
New Jersey, the Quakers, under their great leader William Penn, had
occupied the large province of Pennsylvania, with its capital
Philadelphia lying inland to the west. One other province belongs to
this group, Maryland, which was regarded as a sort of appendage to
Pennsylvania, but had a separate assembly of its own; the governor
however was generally the same as the Pennsylvanian governor. Below
these two groups were three great colonies, owing their origin to less
easily defined sources. Virginia, south of the Potomac, originally
founded by Raleigh, had then (by a grant of King James I.) passed into
the hands of merchant adventurers. Behaving badly, and quarrelling with
their colonists, they were deprived of their rights, and in 1624 the
colony became a Crown colony. It had been peopled principally by Church
of England men and by men of good English birth. As the oldest colony it
was the best peopled, while the birth and character of its proprietors,
who resembled English gentlemen, caused them to be regarded as the
aristocracy of the colonies. The two Carolinas had been granted to a
number of proprietors in the reign of Charles II., but, as in most other
cases, the original proprietors had quarrelled with the people, and sold
their rights to the Crown. Below these Carolinas was Georgia, founded
for philanthropic purposes as a refuge for insolvent debtors and
persecuted Germans by General Oglethorpe, the originator of the inquiry
into the English prisons in 1728. The only power not English now in
North America was that of Spain, which had received a portion of
Louisiana from the French in exchange for Florida, which they had been
obliged to cede to the English. French influence had disappeared after
the Peace of Paris.
[Sidenote: Constitution of the provinces.]
There was an infinite variety of religion, law and government in these
provinces, but in all a certain assimilation to the English
Constitution; a house of assembly, an upper house or council, sometimes
elected, sometimes nominated by the governor, and the governor himself
in the Crown colonies nominated by the King and the proprietors in
conjunction. The population appears to have been about two and a half
millions.
[Sidenote: Restrictions on colonial trade.]
[Sidenote: General suppression of smuggling.]
The old view of the use of colonies was that they should be employed
entirely for the advantage of the mother country. It was held that, by
the mere fact of their existence, and for the protection they received,
they were bound by a debt of gratitude. They were thus the constant
subject of mercantile legislation in favour of the mother country, and
by the existing navigation laws very close restrictions were laid upon
their trade. By those laws the colonies were prohibited from procuring a
large number of articles--those, namely, which formed the chief
manufactures of England--anywhere except from the mother country. They
thus became naturally one of our principal purchasers. Although their
imports into England were considerable, the balance of trade was
constantly against them--that is, taken as a whole, they constantly owed
large sums of money to England. This balance had, of course, from time
to time to be made up by payments in actual money, which was chiefly
procured by the colonies by means of illicit trade, carried on partly
with the West India Islands, but chiefly with the Spanish colonies of
America, and was illicit chiefly in that it broke the customhouse
regulations of Spain. The colonial illicit or free trade, as it was
called, was regarded in point of morality as something quite different
from European smuggling. It was carried on openly and systematically by
the best colonial merchants, and enabled the colonies to get rid of
their timber and those wooden products known under the name of lumber,
and also of a considerable quantity of their farm produce which would
otherwise have been wasted. A wise minister would not have thought of
meddling with such a business, which was in fact the only means by which
the colonists were enabled to carry on conveniently their trade with
England. But Grenville, with his narrow and legal turn of mind, could
see no difference between colonial smuggling and smuggling in England.
This he was determined to put down, and not content with the ordinary
means of repression, English men-of-war were employed in all directions
as customhouse vessels, and naval officers, people said, were degraded
into customhouse officers of the King of Spain. The effect was a
crushing blow to the trade of America. And, as if to render the position
of the colonists still more distressing, in 1764 a series of enactments
were made, laying duties upon various articles for the benefit of
England,--at the same time declaring for the first time the right of
England to raise a revenue from her colonies; and while the quantity of
money in America had been considerably diminished by the stoppage of the
free trade, the present Act was rendered more irksome by ordering all
the duties imposed to be paid in hard cash into the English Exchequer.
It was coupled, too, with another Act stopping the use of paper money in
America. Taken together, this series of arrangements had therefore
produced the following effects--a large branch of commerce, the chief
source of ready money, was destroyed; at the same time more ready money
was demanded by England; and the colonists saw themselves prevented even
from carrying on their domestic trade in the ordinary channels.
[Sidenote: The Stamp Act.]
These measures had produced retaliation from the Americans; it had been
determined that as little trade as possible should be carried on with
England. Lamb was not to be eaten, and lambs were not killed, in order
to increase the stock of sheep for the supply of the wool which was
England's great manufacture; and in all other possible ways men denied
themselves European luxuries. It has been said that the preamble of the
Act for the new duties stated the necessity for raising a revenue from
the English colonies, and at the same time Grenville had proposed a
Stamp Act as one of the means of raising such revenue. With singular
want of wisdom, though with kindly feeling, he put off bringing in a
Bill for the establishment of this tax, which would be an article of
excise or inland duty, till the assemblies of the different colonies had
stated their views with regard to it. The Americans, though probably
without any real legal grounds, drew a line between the levying of
customs and the imposing of an inland tax. It is probable that by the
strict letter of the law they were liable to both, for even the Long
Parliament had only granted temporary exemptions from taxation. But when
their attention was drawn to the intentions and claims of the English
Parliament, and when a tax, new in fact though perhaps not in principle,
was suggested to them, and a year given them to talk it over, it was
natural that their opposition should be roused. Five colonies sent
petitions against the new measures, but they were wholly disregarded,
and the Stamp Act passed without much opposition in Parliament.
[Sidenote: The King's illness.]
[Sidenote: The Regency Bill. 1755.]
The ministry seemed unusually strong--it had triumphed over Wilkes; and
its financial policy, though ruinous, had been accepted--when suddenly
the King became alarmingly ill, suffering from that loss of intellect
which afterwards incapacitated him from reigning. In alarm at this
illness, on his recovery he desired a Regency Bill to be passed. The
natural person to have appointed Regent would have been the Queen. The
King had been hastily married in the first year of his reign (1761) to
the Princess Sophia of Mecklenburg, a marriage which, as it was
contracted chiefly by the influence of the Princess Dowager and Lord
Bute, and without the will of the King, for the purpose of withdrawing
him from his dangerous love for Lady Sarah Lennox, might have been
expected to turn out ill, but which became in fact a happy life-long
union. The King however, instead of suggesting, as was natural, that his
wife should be Regent, desired to keep the appointment in his own hands.
The Government objected to this, without limitations, and suggested that
the King's choice should lie among the Queen and the members of the
Royal Family resident in England. When this Bill was brought forward it
was pertinently asked who the Royal Family were? and it became evident
that the ministry did not themselves know how to define it. They
ultimately concluded, however, that the Princess Dowager was not a
relation of her own son. In making this ridiculous assertion, and
insulting the Princess by excluding her name, they were probably
instigated by the dread of a Bute ministry in case anything should
happen to the King. In pursuance of this policy, Halifax hurried to the
King, and persuaded him that the unpopularity of the Princess Dowager
was such that the introduction of her name in the Bill would infallibly
be followed by its omission on the demand of the Commons, and the
Princess thus exposed to public insult. The King, taken off his guard,
and naturally wishing to spare his mother so public a mark of
disrespect, consented to the omission of her name. The Bill was brought
into the House of Lords and passed, limiting the regency to the Queen
and the descendants of the late King and Queen resident in England. When
the Lord Chancellor--an honest man--explained to the King what he had
done, he was much disturbed, but no entreaties of his could move
Grenville to change the Bill. Upon its introduction into the Lower House
the absence of the name of the Princess was at once remarked, and a
large majority voted for its introduction; thus making obvious to the
King the shameless trick of which he had been the victim. For this he
could not forgive Grenville and Bedford, and at once began arrangements
for getting rid of them.
[Sidenote: Negotiations for a change of ministry.]
[Sidenote: Pitt retires into private life.]