In his extremity, he looked wistfully towards that Whig connection, once
the object of his dread and hatred. The Duke of Devonshire, who had been
treated with such unjustifiable harshness, had lately died, and had been
succeeded by his son, who was still a boy. The King condescended to
express his regret for what had passed, and to invite the young Duke to
court. The noble youth came, attended by his uncles, and was received
with marked graciousness.
This and many other symptoms of the same kind irritated the ministers.
They had still in store for their sovereign an insult which would have
provoked his grandfather to kick them out of the room. Grenville and
Bedford demanded an audience of him, and read him a remonstrance of many
pages, which they had drawn up with great care. His Majesty was accused
of breaking his word, and of treating his advisers with gross
unfairness. The Princess was mentioned in language by no means
eulogistic. Hints were thrown out that Bute's head was in danger. The
King was plainly told that he must not continue to show, as he had done,
that he disliked the situation in which he was placed, that he must
frown upon the opposition, that he must carry it fair towards his
ministers in public. He several times interrupted the reading, by
declaring that he had ceased to hold any communication with Bute. But
the ministers, disregarding his denial, went on; and the King listened
in silence, almost choked by rage. When they ceased to read, he merely
made a gesture expressive of his wish to be left alone. He afterwards
owned that he thought he should have gone into a fit.
Driven to despair, he again had recourse to the Duke of Cumberland; and
the Duke of Cumberland again had recourse to Pitt. Pitt was really
desirous to undertake the direction of affairs, and owned, with many
dutiful expressions, that the terms offered by the King were all that
any subject could desire. But Temple was impracticable; and Pitt, with
great regret, declared that he could not, without the concurrence of his
brother-in-law, undertake the administration.
The Duke now saw only one way of delivering his nephew. An
administration must be formed of the Whigs in opposition, without Pitt's
help. The difficulties seemed almost insuperable. Death and desertion
had grievously thinned the ranks of the party lately supreme in the
state. Those among whom the Duke's choice lay might be divided into two
classes,--men too old for important offices, and men who had never been
in any important office before. The cabinet must be composed of broken
invalids or of raw recruits.
This was an evil, yet not an unmixed evil. If the new Whig statesmen had
little experience in business and debate, they were, on the other hand,
pure from the taint of that political immorality which had deeply
infected their predecessors. Long prosperity had corrupted that great
party which had expelled the Stuarts, limited the prerogatives of the
Crown, and curbed the intolerance of the Hierarchy. Adversity had
already produced a salutary effect. On the day of the accession of
George the Third, the ascendency of the Whig party terminated; and on
that day the purification of the Whig party began. The rising chiefs of
that party were men of a very different sort from Sandys and Winnington,
from Sir William Yonge and Henry Fox. They were men worthy to have
charged by the side of Hampden at Chalgrove, or to have exchanged the
last embrace with Russell on the scaffold in Lincoln's Inn Fields. They
carried into politics the same high principles of virtue which regulated
their private dealings, nor would they stoop to promote even the noblest
and most salutary ends by means which honor and probity condemn. Such
men were Lord John Cavendish, Sir George Savile, and others whom we hold
in honor as the second founders of the Whig party, as the restorers of
its pristine health and energy after half a century of degeneracy.
The chief of this respectable band was the Marquess of Rockingham, a man
of splendid fortune, excellent sense, and stainless character. He was
indeed nervous to such a degree that, to the very close of his life, he
never rose without great reluctance and embarrassment to address the
House of Lords. But, though not a great orator, he had in a high degree
some of the qualities of a statesman. He chose his friends well; and he
had, in an extraordinary degree, the art of attaching them to him by
ties of the most honorable kind. The cheerful fidelity with which they
adhered to him through many years of almost hopeless opposition was less
admirable than the disinterestedness and delicacy which they showed when
he rose to power.
We are inclined to think that the use and the abuse of party cannot be
better illustrated than by a parallel between two powerful connections
of that time, the Rockinghams and the Bedfords. The Rockingham party
was, in our view, exactly what a party should be. It consisted of men
bound together by common opinions, by common public objects, by mutual
esteem. That they desired to obtain, by honest and constitutional
means, the direction of affairs they openly avowed. But, though often
invited to accept the honors and emoluments of office, they steadily
refused to do so on any conditions inconsistent with their principles.
The Bedford party, as a party, had, as far as we can discover, no
principle whatever. Rigby and Sandwich wanted public money, and thought
that they should fetch a higher price jointly than singly. They
therefore acted in concert, and prevailed on a much more important and a
much better man than themselves to act with them.
It was to Rockingham that the Duke of Cumberland now had recourse. The
Marquess consented to take the treasury. Newcastle, so long the
recognized chief of the Whigs, could not well be excluded from the
ministry. He was appointed keeper of the privy seal. A very honest
clear-headed country gentleman, of the name of Dowdeswell, became
Chancellor of the Exchequer. General Conway, who had served under the
Duke of Cumberland, and was strongly attached to his royal highness, was
made Secretary of State, with the lead in the House of Commons. A great
Whig nobleman, in the prime of manhood, from whom much was at that time
expected, Augustus, Duke of Grafton, was the other Secretary.
The oldest man living could remember no government so weak in oratorical
talents and in official experience. The general opinion was, that the
ministers might hold office during the recess, but that the first day of
debate in Parliament would be the last day of their power. Charles
Townshend was asked what he thought of the new administration. "It is,"
said he, "mere lutestring; pretty summer wear. It will never do for the
winter."
At this conjuncture Lord Rockingham had the wisdom to discern the value,
and secure the aid, of an ally, who, to eloquence surpassing the
eloquence of Pitt, and to industry which shamed the industry of
Grenville, united an amplitude of comprehension to which neither Pitt
nor Grenville could lay claim. A young Irishman had, some time before,
come over to push his fortune in London. He had written much for the
booksellers; but he was best known by a little treatise, in which the
style and reasoning of Bolingbroke were mimicked with exquisite skill,
and by a theory, of more ingenuity than soundness, touching the
pleasures which we receive from the objects of taste. He had also
attained a high reputation as a talker, and was regarded by the men of
letters who supped together at the Turk's Head as the only match in
conversation for Dr. Johnson. He now became private secretary to Lord
Rockingham, and was brought into Parliament by his patron's influence.
These arrangements, indeed, were not made without some difficulty. The
Duke of Newcastle, who was always meddling and chattering, adjured the
first lord of the treasury to be on his guard against this adventurer,
whose real name was O'Bourke, and whom his Grace knew to be a wild
Irishman, a Jacobite, a Papist, a concealed Jesuit. Lord Rockingham
treated the calumny as it deserved; and the Whig party was strengthened
and adorned by the accession of Edmund Burke.
The party, indeed, stood in need of accessions; for it sustained about
this time an almost irreparable loss. The Duke of Cumberland had formed
the government, and was its main support. His exalted rank and great
name in some degree balanced the fame of Pitt. As mediator between the
Whigs and the Court, he held a place which no other person could fill.
The strength of his character supplied that which was the chief defect
of the new ministry. Conway, in particular, who, with excellent
intentions and respectable talents, was the most dependent and
irresolute of human beings, drew from the counsels of that masculine
mind a determination not his own. Before the meeting of Parliament the
Duke suddenly died. His death was generally regarded as the signal of
great troubles, and on this account, as well as from respect for his
personal qualities, was greatly lamented. It was remarked that the
mourning in London was the most general ever known, and was both deeper
and longer than the Gazette had prescribed.
In the meantime, every mail from America brought alarming tidings. The
crop which Grenville had sown his successors had now to reap. The
colonies were in a state bordering on rebellion. The stamps were burned.
The revenue officers were tarred and feathered. All traffic between the
discontented provinces and the mother country was interrupted. The
Exchange of London was in dismay. Half the firms of Bristol and
Liverpool were threatened with bankruptcy. In Leeds, Manchester,
Nottingham it was said that three artisans out of every ten had been
turned adrift. Civil war seemed to be at hand; and it could not be
doubted that, if once the British nation were divided against itself,
France and Spain would soon take part in the quarrel.
Three courses were open to the ministers. The first was to enforce the
Stamp Act by the sword. This was the course on which the King and
Grenville, whom the King hated beyond all living men, were alike bent.
The natures of both were arbitrary and stubborn. They resembled each
other so much that they could never be friends; but they resembled each
other also so much that they saw almost all important practical
questions in the same point of view. Neither of them would bear to be
governed by the other; but they were perfectly agreed as to the best way
of governing the people.
Another course was that which Pitt recommended. He held that the British
Parliament was not constitutionally competent to pass a law for taxing
the colonies. He therefore considered the Stamp Act as a nullity, as a
document of no more validity than Charles's writ of ship-money, or
James's proclamation dispensing with the penal laws. This doctrine seems
to us, we must own, to be altogether untenable.
Between these extreme courses lay a third way. The opinion of the most
judicious and temperate statesmen of those times was that the British
constitution had set no limit whatever to the legislative power of the
British King, Lords, and Commons, over the whole British Empire.
Parliament, they held, was legally competent to tax America, as
Parliament was legally competent to commit any other act of folly or
wickedness, to confiscate the property of all the merchants in Lombard
Street, or to attaint any man in the kingdom of high treason, without
examining witnesses against him, or hearing him in his own defence. The
most atrocious act of confiscation or of attainder is just as valid an
act as the Toleration Act or the Habeas Corpus Act. But from acts of
confiscation and acts of attainder lawgivers are bound, by every
obligation of morality, systematically to refrain. In the same manner
ought the British legislature to refrain from taxing the American
colonies. The Stamp Act was indefensible, not because it was beyond the
constitutional competence of Parliament, but because it was unjust and
impolitic, sterile of revenue, and fertile of discontents. These sound
doctrines were adopted by Lord Rockingham and his colleagues, and were,
during a long course of years, inculcated by Burke, in orations, some of
which will last as long as the English language.
The winter came; the Parliament met; and the state of the colonies
instantly became the subject of fierce contention. Pitt, whose health
had been somewhat restored by the waters of Bath, reappeared in the
House of Commons, and, with ardent and pathetic eloquence, not only
condemned the Stamp Act, but applauded the resistance of Massachusetts
and Virginia, and vehemently maintained, in defiance, we must say, of
all reason and of all authority, that, according to the British
constitution, the supreme legislative power does not include the power
to tax. The language of Grenville, on the other hand, was such as
Strafford might have used at the council table of Charles the First,
when news came of the resistance to the liturgy at Edinburgh. The
colonists were traitors; those who excused them were little better.
Frigates, mortars, bayonets, sabres, were the proper remedies for such
distempers.
The ministers occupied an intermediate position; they proposed to
declare that the legislative authority of the British Parliament over
the whole Empire was in all cases supreme; and they proposed, at the
same time, to repeal the Stamp Act. To the former measure Pitt objected;
but it was carried with scarcely a dissentient voice. The repeal of the
Stamp Act Pitt strongly supported; but against the government was
arrayed a formidable assemblage of opponents. Grenville and the Bedfords
were furious. Temple, who had now allied himself closely with his
brother, and separated himself from Pitt, was no despicable enemy. This,
however, was not the worst. The ministry was without its natural
strength. It had to struggle, not only against its avowed enemies, but
against the insidious hostility of the King, and of a set of persons
who, about this time, began to be designated as the King's friends.
The character of this faction has been drawn by Burke with even more
than his usual force and vivacity. Those who know how strongly, through
his whole life, his judgment was biassed by his passions, may not
unnaturally suspect that he has left us rather a caricature than a
likeness; and yet there is scarcely, in the whole portrait, a single
touch of which the fidelity is not proved by facts of unquestionable
authenticity.
The public generally regarded the King's friends as a body of which Bute
was the directing soul. It was to no purpose that the Earl professed to
have done with politics, that he absented himself year after year from
the levee and the drawing-room, that he went to the north, that he went
to Rome. The notion that, in some inexplicable manner, he dictated all
the measures of the court was fixed in the minds, not only of the
multitude, but of some who had good opportunities of obtaining
information, and who ought to have been superior to vulgar prejudices.
Our own belief is that these suspicions were unfounded, and that he
ceased to have any communication with the King on political matters some
time before the dismissal of George Grenville. The supposition of Bute's
influence is, indeed, by no means necessary to explain the phenomena.
The King, in 1765, was no longer the ignorant and inexperienced boy who
had, in 1760, been managed by his mother and his Groom of the Stole. He
had, during several years, observed the struggles of parties, and
conferred daily on high questions of state with able and experienced
politicians. His way of life had developed his understanding and
character. He was now no longer a puppet, but had very decided opinions
both of men and things. Nothing could be more natural than that he
should have high notions of his own prerogatives, should be impatient of
opposition, and should wish all public men to be detached from each
other and dependent on himself alone; nor could anything be more natural
than that, in the state in which the political world then was, he should
find instruments fit for his purposes.
Thus sprang into existence and into note a reptile species of
politicians never before and never since known in our country. These men
disclaimed all political ties, except those which bound them to the
throne. They were willing to coalesce with any party, to abandon any
party, to undermine any party, to assault any party, at a moment's
notice. To them all administrations, and all oppositions were the same.
They regarded Bute, Grenville, Rockingham, Pitt, without one sentiment
either of predilection or of aversion. They were the King's friends. It
is to be observed that this friendship implied no personal intimacy.
These people had never lived with their master, as Dodington at one time
lived with his father, or as Sheridan afterwards lived with his son.
They never hunted with him in the morning, or played cards with him in
the evening, never shared his mutton or walked with him among his
turnips. Only one or two of them ever saw his face except on public
days. The whole band, however, always had early and accurate information
as to his personal inclinations. These people were never high in the
administration. They were generally to be found in places of much
emolument, little labor, and no responsibility; and these places they
continued to occupy securely while the cabinet was six or seven times
reconstructed. Their peculiar business was not to support the ministry
against the opposition, but to support the King against the ministry.
Whenever his Majesty was induced to give a reluctant assent to the
introduction of some bill which his constitutional advisers regarded as
necessary, his friends in the House of Commons were sure to speak
against it, to vote against it, to throw in its way every obstruction
compatible with the forms of Parliament. If his Majesty found it
necessary to admit into his closet a Secretary of State or a First Lord
of the Treasury whom he disliked, his friends were sure to miss no
opportunity of thwarting and humbling the obnoxious minister. In return
for these services, the King covered them with his protection. It was to
no purpose that his responsible servants complained to him that they
were daily betrayed and impeded by men who were eating the bread of the
government. He sometimes justified the offenders, sometimes excused
them, sometimes owned that they were to blame, but said that he must
take time to consider whether he could part with them. He never would
turn them out; and, while everything else in the state was constantly
changing, these sycophants seemed to have a life estate in their
offices.
It was well known to the King's friends that, though his Majesty had
consented to the repeal of the Stamp Act, he had consented with a very
bad grace, and that, though he had eagerly welcomed the Whigs, when, in
his extreme need and at his earnest entreaty, they had undertaken to
free him from an insupportable yoke, he had by no means got over his
early prejudices against his deliverers. The ministers soon found that,
while they were encountered in front by the whole force of a strong
opposition, their rear was assailed by a large body of those whom they
had regarded as auxiliaries.
Nevertheless, Lord Rockingham and his adherents went on resolutely with
the bill for repealing the Stamp Act. They had on their side all the
manufacturing and commercial interests of the realm. In the debates the
government was powerfully supported. Two great orators and statesmen,
belonging to two different generations, repeatedly put forth all their
powers in defence of the bill. The House of Commons heard Pitt for the
last time, and Burke for the first time, and was in doubt to which of
them the palm of eloquence should be assigned. It was indeed a splendid
sunset and a splendid dawn.
For a time the event seemed doubtful. In several divisions the ministers
were hard pressed. On one occasion not less than twelve of the King's
friends, all men in office, voted against the government. It was to no
purpose that Lord Rockingham remonstrated with the King. His Majesty
confessed that there was ground for complaint, but hoped that gentle
means would bring the mutineers to a better mind. If they persisted in
their misconduct, he would dismiss them.
At length the decisive day arrived. The gallery, the lobby, the Court of
Requests, the staircases, were crowded with merchants from all the great
ports of the island. The debate lasted till long after midnight. On the
division, the ministers had a great majority. The dread of civil war,
and the outcry of all the trading towns of the kingdom, had been too
strong for the combined strength of the court and the opposition.
It was in the first dim twilight of a February morning that the doors
were thrown open, and that the chiefs of the hostile parties showed
themselves to the multitude. Conway was received with loud applause.
But, when Pitt appeared, all eyes were fixed on him alone. All hats were
in the air. Loud and long huzzas accompanied him to his chair, and a
train of admirers escorted him all the way to his home. Then came forth
Grenville. As soon as he was recognized, a storm of hisses and curses
broke forth. He turned fiercely on the crowd, and caught one man by the
throat. The bystanders were in great alarm. If a scuffle began, none
could say how it might end. Fortunately the person who had been collared
only said, "If I may not hiss, sir, I hope I may laugh," and laughed in
Grenville's face.
The majority had been so decisive that all the opponents of the
ministry, save one, were disposed to let the bill pass without any
further contention. But solicitation and expostulation were thrown away
on Grenville. His indomitable spirit rose up stronger and stronger under
the load of public hatred. He fought out the battle obstinately to the
end. On the last reading he had a sharp altercation with his
brother-in-law, the last of their many sharp altercations. Pitt
thundered in his loftiest tones against the man who had wished to dip
the ermine of a British King in the blood of the British people.
Grenville replied with his wonted intrepidity and asperity. "If the
tax," he said, "were still to be laid on, I would lay it on. For the
evils which it may produce my accuser is answerable. His profusion made
it necessary. His declarations against the constitutional powers of
King, Lords, and Commons, have made it doubly necessary. I do not envy
him the huzza. I glory in the hiss. If it were to be done again, I would
do it."
The repeal of the Stamp Act was the chief measure of Lord Rockingham's
government. But that government is entitled to the praise of having put
a stop to two oppressive practices, which, in Wilkes's case, had
attracted the notice and excited the just indignation of the public.
The House of Commons was induced by the ministers to pass a resolution
condemning the use of general warrants, and another resolution
condemning the seizure of papers in cases of libel.
It must be added, to the lasting honor of Lord Rockingham, that his
administration was the first which, during a long course of years, had
the courage and the virtue to refrain from bribing members of
Parliament. His enemies accused him and his friends of weakness, of
haughtiness, of party spirit; but calumny itself never dared to couple
his name with corruption.
Unhappily his government, though one of the best that has ever existed
in our country, was also one of the weakest. The King's friends assailed
and obstructed the ministers at every turn. To appeal to the King was
only to draw forth new promises and new evasions. His Majesty was sure
that there must be some misunderstanding. Lord Rockingham had better
speak to the gentlemen. They should be dismissed on the next fault. The
next fault was soon committed, and his Majesty still continued to
shuffle. It was too bad. It was quite abominable; but it mattered less
as the prorogation was at hand. He would give the delinquents one more
chance. If they did not alter their conduct next session, he should not
have one word to say for them. He had already resolved that, long before
the commencement of the next session, Lord Rockingham should cease to be
minister.