History of the English People Volume Vii Part 10

[Sidenote: George and the Parliament.]

We have already seen how mighty a change in the aspect of the world, and above all in the aspect of Britain, was marked by this momentous treaty.

But no sense of its great issues influenced the young king in pressing for its conclusion. His eye was fixed not so much on Europe or the British Empire as on the petty game of politics which he was playing with the Whigs. The anxiety which he showed for peace abroad sprang mainly from his belief that peace was needful for success in his struggle for power at home. So long as the war lasted Pitt's return to office and the union of the Whigs under his guidance was an hourly danger. But with peace the king's hands were free. He could count on the dissensions of the Whigs, on the new-born loyalty of the Tories, on the influence of the Crown patronage which he had taken into his own hands.

But what he counted on most of all was the character of the House of Commons. So long as matters went quietly, so long as no gust of popular pa.s.sion or enthusiasm forced its members to bow for a while to outer opinion, he saw that "management" could make the House a mere organ of his will. George had discovered--to use Lord Bute's words--"that the forms of a free and the ends of an arbitrary government were things not altogether incompatible." At a time when it had become all-powerful in the State, the House of Commons had ceased in any real and effective sense to be a representative body at all; and its isolation from the general opinion of the country left it at ordinary moments amenable only to selfish influences. The Whigs had managed it by bribery and borough-jobbing, and George in his turn seized bribery and borough-jobbing as a base of the power he proposed to give to the Crown. The royal revenue was employed to buy seats and to buy votes.

Day by day the young sovereign scrutinized the voting-list of the two Houses, and distributed rewards and punishments as members voted according to his will or no. Promotion in the civil service, preferment in the Church, rank in the army, were reserved for "the king's friends."

Pensions and court places were used to influence debates. Bribery was employed on a scale never known before. Under Bute's ministry an office was opened at the Treasury for the purchase of members, and twenty-five thousand pounds are said to have been spent in a single day.

[Sidenote: George III. and America.]

The result of these measures was soon seen in the tone of the Parliament. Till now it had bowed beneath the greatness of Pitt; but in the teeth of his denunciation the provisions of the Peace of Paris were approved by a majority of five to one. It was seen still more in the vigour with which George and his minister prepared to carry out the plans over which they had brooded for the regulation of America. The American question was indeed forced on them, as they pleaded, by the state of the revenue. Pitt had waged war with characteristic profusion, and he had defrayed the cost of the war by enormous loans. The public debt now stood at a hundred and forty millions. The first need therefore which met Bute after the conclusion of the Peace of Paris was that of making provision for the new burthens which the nation had incurred, and as these had been partly incurred in the defence of the American Colonies it was the general opinion of Englishmen that the Colonies should bear a share of them. In this opinion Bute and the king concurred. But their plans went further than mere taxation. The amount indeed which was expected to be raised as revenue by these changes, at most two hundred thousand pounds, was far too small to give much relief to the financial pressure at home. But this revenue furnished an easy pretext for wider changes. Plans for the regulation of the government of the Colonies had been suggested from time to time by subordinate ministers, but they had been set aside alike by the prudence of Walpole and the generosity of Pitt. The appointment of Charles Townshend to the Presidency of the Board of Trade however was a sign that Bute had adopted a policy not only of taxation, but of restraint. The new minister declared himself resolved on a rigorous execution of the Navigation laws, laws by which a monopoly of American trade was secured to the mother country, on the raising of a revenue within the Colonies for the discharge of the debt, and above all on impressing upon the colonists a sense of their dependence upon Britain. The direct trade between America and the French or Spanish West Indian Islands had hitherto been fettered by prohibitory duties, but these had been easily evaded by a general system of smuggling. The duties were now reduced, but the reduced duties were rigorously exacted, and a considerable naval force was despatched to the American coast by Grenville, who stood at the head of the Admiralty Board, with a view of suppressing the clandestine trade with the foreigner. The revenue which was expected from this measure was to be supplemented by an internal Stamp Tax, a tax on all legal doc.u.ments issued within the Colonies, the plan of which seems to have originated with Bute's secretary, Jenkinson, afterwards the first Lord Liverpool. That resistance was expected was seen in a significant step which was taken by the ministry at the end of the war.

Though the defeat of the French had left the Colonies without an enemy save the Indians, a force of ten thousand men was still kept quartered on their inhabitants, and a scheme was broached for an extension of the province of Canada over the district round the Lakes, which would have turned the western lands into a military settlement, governed at the will of the Crown, and have furnished a base of warlike operations, if such were needed, against the settled Colonies on the Atlantic.

Had Bute's power lasted it is probable that these measures would have brought about the struggle between England and America long before it actually began. Fortunately for the two countries the minister found himself from the first the object of a sudden and universal hatred. The great majority which had rejected Pitt's motion against the Peace had filled the court with exultation. "Now indeed," cried the Princess Dowager, "my son is king." But the victory was hardly won when king and minister found themselves battling with a storm of popular ill-will such as never since the overthrow of the Stuarts a.s.sailed the throne. Violent and reckless as it was, the storm only marked a fresh advance in the reawakening of public opinion. The bulk of the higher cla.s.ses who had till now stood apart from government were coming gradually in to the side of the Crown. But the ma.s.s of the people was only puzzled and galled by the turn of events. It felt itself called again to political activity, but it saw nothing to change its hatred and distrust of Parliament and the Crown. On the contrary it saw them in greater union than of old. The House of Commons was more corrupt than ever, and it was the slave of the king. The king still called himself a Whig, yet he was reviving a system of absolutism which Whiggism, to do it justice, had long made impossible. His minister was a mere favourite and in Englishmen's eyes a foreigner. The ma.s.ses saw all this, but they saw no way of mending it. They knew little of their own strength, and they had no means of influencing the Government they hated save by sheer violence. They came therefore to the front with their old national and religious bigotry, their long-nursed dislike of the Hanoverian Court, their long-nursed habits of violence and faction, their long-nursed hatred of Parliament, but with no means of expressing them save riot and uproar.

[Sidenote: Wilkes.]

It was this temper of the ma.s.ses which was seized and turned to his purpose by John Wilkes. Wilkes was a worthless profligate; but he had a remarkable faculty of enlisting popular sympathy on his side; and by a singular irony of fortune he became in the end the chief instrument in bringing about three of the greatest advances which our Const.i.tution has made. He woke the nation to a sense of the need for Parliamentary reform by his defence of the rights of const.i.tuencies against the despotism of the House of Commons. He took the lead in a struggle which put an end to the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings. He was the first to establish the right of the press to discuss public affairs. But in his attack upon the Ministry of Lord Bute he served simply as an organ of the general excitement and discontent. The bulk of the Tories were on fire to gratify their old grudge against the Crown and its Ministers. The body of the Whigs, and the commercial cla.s.ses who backed them, were startled and angered by the dismissal of Pitt, and by the revolt of the Crown against the Whig system. The nation as a whole was uneasy and alarmed at the sudden break-up of political tranquillity, and by the sense of a coming struggle between opponents of whom as yet neither had fully its sympathies. There were mobs, riots, bonfires in the streets, and disturbances which culminated--in a rough spirit of punning upon the name of the minister--in the solemn burning of a jack-boot. The journals, which were now becoming numerous, made themselves organs for this outburst of popular hatred; and it was in the _North-Briton_ that Wilkes took a lead in the movement by denouncing the Cabinet and the peace with peculiar bitterness, by playing on the popular jealousy of foreigners and Scotchmen, and by venturing to denounce the hated minister by name.

[Sidenote: Bute's fall.]

Ignorant and brutal as was the movement which Wilkes headed, it was a revival of public opinion; and though the time was to come when the influence of opinion would be exercised more wisely, even now it told for good. It was the attack of Wilkes which more than all else determined Bute to withdraw from office in 1763 as a means of allaying the storm of popular indignation. But the king was made of more stubborn stuff than his minister. If he suffered his favourite to resign he still regarded him as the real head of administration; for the ministry which Bute left behind him consisted simply of the more courtly of his colleagues, and was in fact formed under his direction. George Grenville was its nominal chief, but the measures of the Cabinet were still secretly dictated by the favourite. The formation of the Grenville ministry indeed was laughed at as a joke. Charles Townshend and the Duke of Bedford, the two ablest of the Whigs who had remained with Bute after Newcastle's dismissal, refused to join it; and its one man of ability was Lord Shelburne, a young Irishman, who had served with credit at Minden, and had been rewarded by a post at Court which brought him into terms of intimacy with the young sovereign and Bute. Dislike of the Whig oligarchy and of the war had thrown Shelburne strongly into the opposition to Pitt, and his diplomatic talents were of service in securing recruits for his party, as his eloquence had been useful in advocating the peace; but it was not till he himself retired from office that Bute obtained for his supporter the Presidency of the Board of Trade. As yet however Shelburne's powers were little known, and he added nothing to the strength of the ministry. It was in fact only the disunion of its opponents which allowed it to hold its ground. Townshend and Bedford remained apart from the main body of the Whigs, and both sections held aloof from Pitt. George had counted on the divisions of the opposition in forming such a ministry; and he counted on the weakness of the ministry to make it the creature of his will.

[Sidenote: George Grenville.]

But Grenville had no mind to be a puppet either of the king or of Bute.

Narrow and pedantic as he was, severed by sheer jealousy and ambition from his kinsman Pitt and the bulk of the Whigs, his temper was too proud to stoop to the position which George designed for him. The conflicts between the king and his minister soon became so bitter that in August 1763 George appealed in despair to Pitt to form a ministry.

Never had Pitt shown a n.o.bler patriotism or a grander self-command than in the reception he gave to this appeal. He set aside all resentment at his own expulsion from office by Newcastle and the Whigs, and made the return to office of the whole party, with the exception of Bedford, a condition of his own. His aim, in other words, was to restore const.i.tutional government by a reconstruction of the ministry which had won the triumphs of the Seven Years' War. But it was the destruction of this ministry and the erection of a kingly government in its place on which George prided himself most. To restore it was, in his belief, to restore the tyranny under which the Whigs had so long held the Crown.

"Rather than submit," he cried, "to the terms proposed by Mr. Pitt, I would die in the room I now stand in." The result left Grenville as powerful as he had been weak. Bute retired into the country and ceased to exercise any political influence. Shelburne, the one statesman in the ministry, and who had borne a chief part in the negotiations for the formation of a new Cabinet, resigned to follow Pitt. On the other hand, Bedford, irritated by Pitt's exclusion of him from his proposed ministry, joined Grenville with his whole party, and the ministry thus became strong and compact.

[Sidenote: Grenville and Wilkes.]

Grenville himself was ploddingly industrious and not without financial ability. But his mind was narrow and pedantic in its tone; and, honest as was his belief in his own Whig creed, he saw nothing beyond legal forms. He was resolute to withstand the people as he had withstood the Crown. His one standard of conduct was the approval of Parliament; his one aim to enforce the supremacy of Parliament over subject as over king. With such an aim as this, it was inevitable that Grenville should strike fiercely at the new force of opinion which had just shown its power in the fall of Bute. He was resolved to see public opinion only in the voice of Parliament; and his resolve led at once to a contest with Wilkes as with the press. It was in the press that the nation was finding a court of appeal from the Houses of Parliament. The popularity of the _North-Briton_ made Wilkes the representative of the new journalism, as he was the representative of that ma.s.s of general sentiment of which it was beginning to be the mouthpiece; and the fall of Bute had shown how real a power lay behind the agitator's diatribes.

But Grenville was of stouter stuff than the court favourite, and his administration was hardly reformed when he struck at the growing opposition to Parliament by a blow at its leader. In "Number 45" of the _North-Briton_ Wilkes had censured the speech from the throne at the opening of Parliament, and a "general warrant" by the Secretary of State was issued against the "authors, printers, and publishers of this seditious libel." Under this warrant forty-nine persons were seized for a time; and in spite of his privilege as a member of Parliament Wilkes himself was sent to the Tower. The arrest however was so utterly illegal that he was at once released by the Court of Common Pleas; but he was immediately prosecuted for libel. The national indignation at the harshness of these proceedings pa.s.sed into graver disapproval when Parliament took advantage of the case to set itself up as a judicial tribunal for the trial of its own a.s.sailant. While the paper which formed the subject for prosecution was still before the courts of justice it was condemned by the House of Commons as a "false, scandalous, and seditious libel." The House of Lords at the same time voted a pamphlet found among Wilkes's papers to be blasphemous, and advised a prosecution. Though Pitt at once denounced the course of the two Houses as unconst.i.tutional, his protest, like that of Shelburne in the Lords, proved utterly ineffectual; and Wilkes, who fled in terror to France, was expelled at the opening of 1764 from the House of Commons.

Rapid and successful blows such as these seem to have shown to how frivolous an a.s.sailant Bute had yielded. But if Wilkes fled over the Channel, Grenville found he had still England to deal with. The a.s.sumption of an arbitrary judicial power by both Houses, and the system of terror which the Minister put in force against the Press by issuing two hundred injunctions against different journals, roused a storm of indignation throughout the country. Every street resounded with cries of "Wilkes and Liberty!" Every shutter through the town was chalked with "No. 45"; the old bonfires and tumults broke out with fresh violence: and the Common Council of London refused to thank the sheriffs for dispersing the mob. It was soon clear that opinion had been embittered rather than silenced by the blow at Wilkes.

[Sidenote: Grenville and the Colonies.]

The same narrowness of view, the same honesty of purpose, the same obstinacy of temper, were shown by Grenville in a yet more important struggle, a struggle with the American Colonies. The plans of Bute for their taxation and restraint had fallen to the ground on his retirement and that of Townshend from office. Lord Shelburne succeeded Townshend at the Board of Trade, and young as he was, Shelburne was too sound a statesman to suffer these plans to be revived. But the resignation of Shelburne in 1763, after the failure of Pitt to form a united ministry, again reopened the question. Grenville had fully concurred in a part at least of Bute's designs; and now that he found himself at the head of a strong administration he again turned his attention to the Colonies. On one important side his policy wholly differed from that of Townshend or Bute. With Bute as with the king the question of deriving a revenue from America was chiefly important as one which would bring the claims of independent taxation and legislation put forward by the colonies to an issue, and in the end--as it was hoped--bring about a reconstruction of their democratic inst.i.tutions and a closer union of the colonies under British rule. Grenville's aim was strictly financial. His conservative and const.i.tutional temper made him averse from any sweeping changes in the inst.i.tutions of the Colonies. He put aside as roughly as Shelburne the projects which had been suggested for the suppression of colonial charters, the giving power in the Colonies to military officers, or the payment of Crown officers in America by the English treasury. All he desired was that the colonies should contribute what he looked on as their just share towards the relief of the burthens left by the war; and it was with a view to this that he proceeded to carry out the financial plans which had been devised for the purpose of raising both an external and an internal revenue from America.

[Sidenote: The Colonies and the Stamp Act.]

If such a policy was more honest, it was at the same time more absurd than that of Bute. Bute had at any rate aimed at a great revolution in the whole system of colonial government. Grenville aimed simply at collecting a couple of hundred thousand pounds, and he knew that even this wretched sum must be immensely lessened unless his plans were cordially accepted by the colonists. He knew too that there was small hope of such an acceptance. On the contrary, they at once met with a dogged opposition; and though the shape which that opposition took was a legal and technical one, it really opened up the whole question of the relation of the Colonies to the mother country. Proud as England was of her imperial position, she had as yet failed to grasp the difference between an empire and a nation. A nation is an aggregate of individual citizens, bound together in a common and equal relation to the state which they form. An empire is an aggregate of political bodies, bound together by a common relation to a central state, but whose relations to it may vary from the closest dependency to the loosest adhesion. To Grenville and the bulk of his fellow-countrymen the Colonies were as completely English soil as England itself, nor did they see any difference in political rights or in their relation to the Imperial legislature between an Englishman of Ma.s.sachusetts and a man of Kent.

What rights their charters gave the Colonies they looked on as not strictly political but munic.i.p.al rights; they were not states but corporations; and, as corporate bodies, whatever privileges might have been given them, they were as completely the creatures and subjects of the English Crown as the corporate body of a borough or of a trading company. Their very existence in fact rested in a like way on the will of the Crown; on a breach of the conditions under which they were granted their charters were revocable and their privileges ceased, their legislatures and the rights of their legislatures came to an end as completely as the common council of a borough that had forfeited its franchise or the rights of that common council. It was true that save in matters of trade and navigation the Imperial Parliament or the Imperial Crown had as yet left them mainly to their own self-government; above all that it had not subjected them to the burthen of taxation which was borne by other Englishmen at home. But it had more than once a.s.serted its right to tax the colonies; it had again and again refused a.s.sent to acts of their legislatures which denied such a right; and from the very nature of things they held it impossible that such a right could exist.

No bounds could be fixed for the supremacy of the king in Parliament over every subject of the Crown, and the colonist of America was as absolutely a subject as the ordinary Englishman. On mere grounds of law Grenville was undoubtedly right in his a.s.sertion of such a view as this; for the law had grown up under purely national conditions, and without a consciousness of the new political world to which it was now to be applied. What the colonists had to urge against it was really the fact of such a world. They were Englishmen, but they were Englishmen parted from England by three thousand miles of sea. They could not, if they would, share the common political life of men at home; nature had imposed on them their own political life; what charters had done was not to create but to recognize a state of things which sprang from the very circ.u.mstances under which the Colonies had originated and grown into being. Nor could any cancelling of charters cancel those circ.u.mstances.

No Act of Parliament could annihilate the Atlantic. The political status of the man of Ma.s.sachusetts could not be identical with that of the man of Kent, because that of the Kentish man rested on his right of being represented in Parliament and thus sharing in the work of self-government, while the other from sheer distance could not exercise such a right. The pretence of equality was in effect the a.s.sertion of inequality; for it was to subject the colonist to the burthens of Englishmen without giving him any effective share in the right of self-government which Englishmen purchased by supporting those burthens.

But the wrong was even greater than this. The Kentish man really took his share in governing through his representative in Parliament the Empire to which the colonist belonged. If the colonist had no such share he became the subject of the Kentish man. The pretence of political ident.i.ty had ended in the establishment not only of serfdom but of the most odious form of serfdom, a subjection to one's fellow-subjects.

[Sidenote: The theory of the colonists.]

The only alternative for so impossible a relation was the recognition of such relations as actually existed. While its laws remained national, England had grown from a nation into an empire. Whatever theorists might allege, the Colonies were in fact political bodies with a distinct life of their own, whose connexion with the mother country had in the last hundred years taken a definite and peculiar form. Their administration in its higher parts was in the hands of the mother country. Their legislation on all internal affairs, though lightly supervised by the mother country, was practically in their own hands. They exercised without interference the right of self-taxation, while the mother country exercised with as little interference the right of monopolizing their trade. Against this monopoly of their trade not a voice was as yet raised among the colonists. They justly looked on it as an enormous contribution to the wealth of Britain, which might fairly be taken in place of any direct supplies, and which while it a.s.serted the sovereignty of the mother country, left their local freedom untouched.

The harshness of such a monopoly had indeed been somewhat mitigated by a system of contraband trade which had grown up between American ports and the adjacent Spanish islands, a trade so necessary for the Colonies, and in the end so beneficial to British commerce itself, that statesmen like Walpole had winked at its developement. The pedantry of Grenville however saw in it only an infringement of British monopoly; and one of his first steps was to suppress this contraband trade by a rigid enforcement of the navigation laws. Harsh and unwise as these measures seemed, the colonists owned their legality; and their resentment only showed itself in a pledge to use no British manufactures till the restrictions were relaxed. But such a stroke was a mere measure of retaliation, whose pressure was pretty sure in the end to effect its aim; and even in their moment of irritation the colonists uttered no protest against the monopoly of their trade. Their position indeed was strictly conservative; what they claimed was a continuance of the existing connexion; and had their claim been admitted, they would probably have drifted quietly into such a relation to the crown as that of our actual colonies in Canada and Australasia.

[Sidenote: The Stamp Act pa.s.sed.]

What the issue of such a policy might have been as America grew to a population and wealth beyond those of the mother country, it is hard to guess. But no such policy was to be tried. The next scheme of the Minister--his proposal to introduce internal taxation within the bounds of the Colonies themselves by reviving the project of an excise or stamp duty, which Walpole's good sense had rejected--was of another order from his schemes for suppressing the contraband traffic. Unlike the system of the Navigation Acts, it was a gigantic change in the whole actual relations of England and its colonies. They met it therefore in another spirit. Taxation and representation, they a.s.serted, went hand in hand.

America had no representatives in the British Parliament. The representatives of the colonists met in their own colonial a.s.semblies, and these were willing to grant supplies of a larger amount than a stamp-tax would produce. Ma.s.sachusetts--first as ever in her protest--marked accurately the position she took. "Prohibitions of trade are neither equitable nor just; but the power of taxing is the grand banner of British liberty. If that is once broken down, all is lost."

The distinction was accepted by the a.s.sembly of every colony; and it was with their protest and offer that they despatched Benjamin Franklin, who had risen from his position of a working printer in Philadelphia to high repute among scientific discoverers, as their agent to England. In England Franklin found few who recognized the distinction which the colonists had drawn; it was indeed incompatible with the universal belief in the omnipotence of the Imperial Parliament. But there were many who held that such taxation was unadvisable, that the control of trade was what a country really gained from its colonies, that it was no work of a statesman to introduce radical changes into relations so delicate as those of a mother country and its dependencies, and that, boundless as was the power of Parliament in theory, "it should voluntarily set bounds to the exercise of its power." It had the right to tax Ireland but it never used it. The same self-restraint might be extended to America, and the more that the colonists were in the main willing to tax themselves for the general defence. Unluckily Franklin could give no a.s.surance as to a union for the purpose of such taxation, and without such an a.s.surance Grenville had no mind to change his plans.

In February 1765 the Stamp Act was pa.s.sed through both Houses with less opposition than a turnpike bill.

At this critical moment Pitt was absent from the House of Commons. "When the resolution was taken to tax America, I was ill and in bed," he said a few months later. "If I could have endured to be carried in my bed, so great was the agitation of my mind for the consequences, I would have solicited some kind hand to have laid me down on this floor, to have borne my testimony against it." He was soon however called to a position where his protest might have been turned to action. The Stamp Act was hardly pa.s.sed when an insult offered to the Princess Dowager, by the exclusion of her name from a Regency Act, brought to a head the quarrel which had long been growing between the ministry and the king. George again offered power to William Pitt, and so great was his anxiety to free himself from Grenville's dictation that he consented absolutely to Pitt's terms. He waived his objection to that general return of the whole Whig party to office which Pitt had laid down in 1763 as a condition of his own. He consented to his demands for a change of policy in America, for the abolition of general warrants, and the formation of a Protestant system of German alliances as a means of counteracting the family compact of the house of Bourbon. The formation of the new ministry seemed secured, when the refusal of Earl Temple to join it brought Pitt's efforts abruptly to an end. Temple was Pitt's brother-in-law, and Pitt was not only bound to him by strong family ties, but he found in him his only Parliamentary support. The Great Commoner had not a single follower of his own in the House of Commons, nor a single seat in it at his disposal. What following he seemed to have was simply that of the Grenvilles; and it was the support of his brothers-in-law, Lord Temple and George Grenville, which had enabled him in great part to hold his own against the Whig connexion in the Ministry of 1757. But George Grenville had parted from him at its close, and now Lord Temple drew to his brother rather than to Pitt. His refusal to join the Cabinet left Pitt absolutely alone so far as Parliamentary strength went, and he felt himself too weak, when thus deserted, to hold his ground in any ministerial combination with the Whigs. Disappointed in two successive efforts to form a ministry by the same obstacle, he returned to his seat in Somersetshire, while the king turned for help to the main body of the Whigs.

[Sidenote: The Rockingham Ministry.]

The age and incapacity of the Duke of Newcastle had placed the Marquis of Rockingham at the head of this section of the party, after it had been driven from office to make way for the supremacy of Bute. Thinned as it was by the desertion of Grenville and Townshend, as well as of the Bedford faction, it still claimed an exclusive right to the name of the Whigs. Rockingham was honest of purpose, he was free from all taint of the corruption of men like Newcastle, and he was inclined to a pure and lofty view of the nature and end of government. But he was young, timid, and of small abilities, and he shared to the full the dislike of the great Whig n.o.bles to Pitt and the popular sympathies on which Pitt's power rested. The weakness of the ministry which he formed in July 1765 was seen in its slowness to deal with American affairs. Rockingham looked on the Stamp Act as inexpedient; but he held firmly against Pitt and Shelburne the right of Parliament to tax and legislate for the Colonies, and it was probably through this difference of sentiment that Pitt refused to join his ministry on its formation. For six months he made no effort to repeal the obnoxious Acts, and in fact suffered preparations to go on for enforcing them. News however soon came from America which made this att.i.tude impossible. Vigorously as he had struggled against the Acts, Franklin had seen no other course for the Colonies, when they were pa.s.sed, but that of submission. But submission was the last thing the colonists dreamed of. Everywhere through New England riots broke out on the news of the arrival of the stamped paper; and the frightened collectors resigned their posts. Northern and Southern States were drawn together by the new danger. "Virginia," it was proudly said afterwards, "rang the alarm bell"; its a.s.sembly was the first to formally deny the right of the British Parliament to meddle with internal taxation, and to demand the repeal of the Acts.

Ma.s.sachusetts not only adopted the denial and the demand as its own, but proposed a Congress of delegates from all the colonial a.s.semblies to provide for common and united action; and in October 1765 this Congress met to repeat the protest and pet.i.tion of Virginia.

[Sidenote: Pitt and America.]

The Congress was the beginning of American union. "There ought to be no New Englandman, no New Yorker known on this continent," said one of its members, "but all of us Americans." The news of its a.s.sembly reached England at the end of the year and perplexed the ministry, two of whose members now declared themselves in favour of repealing the Acts. But Rockingham would promise at most no more than suspension; and when the Houses met in the spring of 1766 no voice but Shelburne's was raised in the Peers for repeal. In the Commons however the news at once called Pitt to the front. As a minister he had long since rejected a similar scheme for taxing the Colonies. He had been ill and absent from Parliament when the Stamp Act was pa.s.sed. But he adopted to the full the const.i.tutional claim of America. He gloried in a resistance, which was denounced in Parliament as rebellion. "In my opinion," he said, "this kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the Colonies.... America is obstinate! America is almost in open rebellion! Sir, I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest." "He spoke," said a looker-on, "like a man inspired," and he ended by a demand for the absolute, total, and immediate repeal of the Acts. It is from this moment that the bitter hatred of George the Third to Pitt may be dated.

In an outburst of resentment the king called him a trumpet of sedition, and openly wished for his death. But the general desire that he should return to office was quickened by the sense of power which spoke in his words, and now that the first bitterness of finding himself alone had pa.s.sed away, Pitt was willing to join the Whigs. Negotiations were opened for this purpose; but they at once broke down. Weak as they felt themselves, Rockingham and his colleagues now shrank from Pitt, as on the formation of their ministry Pitt had shrunk from them. Personal feeling no doubt played its part; for in any united administration Pitt must necessarily take the lead, and Rockingham was in no mood to give up his supremacy. But graver political reasons, as we have seen, co-operated with this jealousy and distrust; and the blind sense which the Whigs had long had of a radical difference between their policy and that of Pitt was now defined for them by the keenest political thinker of the day.

[Sidenote: Edmund Burke.]

At this moment Rockingham was in great measure guided by the counsels of his secretary, Edmund Burke. Burke had come to London in 1750 as a poor and unknown Irish adventurer. But the learning which at once won him the friendship of Johnson, and the imaginative power which enabled him to give his learning a living shape, soon promised him a philosophical and literary career. Instinct however drew Burke not to literature but to politics. He became secretary to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered Parliament under his patronage. His speech on the repeal of the Stamp Acts at once lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker-like figure, the scratch wig, the round spectacles, the c.u.mbrous roll of paper which loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a great orator and less of the characteristics of his oratory--its pa.s.sionate ardour, its poetic fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; the dazzling succession in which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant word-pictures, the coolest argument followed each other. It was an eloquence indeed of a wholly new order in English experience. Walpole's clearness of statement, Pitt's appeals to emotion, were exchanged for the impa.s.sioned expression of a distinct philosophy of politics. "I have learned more from him than from all the books I ever read," Fox cried at a later time, with a burst of generous admiration. The philosophical cast of Burke's reasoning was unaccompanied by any philosophical coldness of tone or phrase. The groundwork indeed of his nature was poetic. His ideas, if conceived by the reason, took shape and colour from the splendour and fire of his imagination. A nation was to him a great living society, so complex in its relations, and whose inst.i.tutions were so interwoven with glorious events in the past, that to touch it rudely was a sacrilege. Its const.i.tution was no artificial scheme of government, but an exquisite balance of social forces which was in itself a natural outcome of its history and developement. His temper was in this way conservative, but his conservatism sprang not from a love of inaction but from a sense of the value of social order, and from an imaginative reverence for all that existed. Every inst.i.tution was hallowed to him by the clear insight with which he discerned its relations to the past and its subtle connexion with the social fabric around it. To touch even an anomaly seemed to Burke to be risking the ruin of a complex structure of national order which it had cost centuries to build up. "The equilibrium of the const.i.tution," he said, "has something so delicate about it, that the least displacement may destroy it." "It is a difficult and dangerous matter even to touch so complicated a machine."

[Sidenote: Burke and politics.]

Perhaps the readiest refutation of such a theory was to be found in its influence on Burke's practical dealing with politics. In the great question indeed which fronted him as he entered Parliament, it served him well. No man has ever seen with deeper insight the working of those natural forces which build up communities, or which group communities into empires; and in the actual state of the American Colonies, in their actual relation to the mother country, he saw a result of such forces which only madmen and pedants would disturb. To enter upon "grounds of Government," to remodel this great structure of empire on a theoretical basis, seemed to him a work for "metaphysicians," and not for statesmen. What statesmen had to do was to take this structure as it was, and by cautious and delicate adjustment to accommodate from time to time its general shape and the relations of its various parts to the varying circ.u.mstances of their natural developement. Nothing, in other words, could be truer than Burke's political philosophy when the actual state of things was good in itself, and its preservation a recognition of the harmony of political inst.i.tutions with political facts. But nothing could be more unwise than his philosophy when he applied it to a state of things which in itself was evil, and which was in fact a defiance of the natural growth and adjustment of political power. It was thus that he applied it to politics at home. He looked on the Revolution of 1688 as the final establishment of English inst.i.tutions. His aim was to keep England as the Revolution had left it, and under the rule of the great n.o.bles who were faithful to the Revolution. Such a conviction left him hostile to all movement whatever. He gave his pa.s.sionate adhesion to the inaction of the Whigs. He made an idol of Lord Rockingham, an honest man, but the weakest of party leaders. He strove to check the corruption of Parliament by a bill for civil retrenchment, but he took the lead in defeating all plans for its reform. Though he was one of the few men in England who understood the value of free industry, he struggled bitterly against all proposals to give freedom to Irish trade, and against the Commercial Treaty which the younger Pitt concluded with France. His work seemed to be that of investing with a gorgeous poetry the policy of timid content which the Whigs believed they inherited from Sir Robert Walpole; and the very intensity of his trust in the natural developement of a people rendered him incapable of understanding the good that might come from particular or from special reforms.

It was this temper of Burke's mind which estranged him from Pitt. His political sagacity had discerned that the true basis of the Whig party must henceforth be formed in a combination of that "power drawn from popularity" which was embodied in Pitt with the power which the Whig families drew from political "connexion." But with Pitt's popular tendencies Burke had no real sympathy. He looked on his eloquence as mere rant; he believed his character to be hollow, selfish, and insincere. Above all he saw in him with a true foreboding the representative of forces before which the actual method of government must go down. The popularity of Pitt in face of his Parliamentary isolation was a sign that the House of Commons was no real representative of the English people. Burke foresaw that Pitt was drifting inevitably to a demand for a reform of the House which should make it representative in fact as in name. The full issues of such a reform, the changes which it would bring with it, the displacement of political power which it would involve, Burke alone of the men of his day understood. But he understood them only to shrink from them with horror, and to shrink with almost as great a horror from the man who was leading England on in the path of change.

[Sidenote: Repeal of the Stamp Act.]

At this crisis then the temper of Burke squared with the temper of the Whig party and of Rockingham; and the difference between Pitt's tendencies and their own came to the front on the question of dealing with the troubles in America. Pitt was not only for a repeal of the Stamp Acts, but for an open and ungrudging acknowledgement of the claim to a partial independence which had been made by the colonists. His genius saw that, whatever were the legal rights of the mother country, the time had come when the union between England and its children across the Atlantic must rest rather on sentiment than on law. Such a view was wholly unintelligible to the ma.s.s of the Whigs or the ministry. They were willing, rather than heighten American discontent, to repeal the Stamp Acts; but they looked on the supremacy of England and of the English Parliament over all English dependencies as a principle absolutely beyond question. From the union, therefore, which Pitt offered Rockingham and his fellow-ministers stood aloof. They were driven, whether they would or no, to a practical acknowledgement of the policy which he demanded; but they resolved that the repeal of the Stamp Acts should be accompanied by a formal repudiation of the principles of colonial freedom which Pitt had laid down. A declaratory act was first brought in, which a.s.serted the supreme power of Parliament over the Colonies "in all cases whatsoever." The declaration was intended no doubt to rea.s.sure the followers of the ministry as well as their opponents, for in the a.s.sertion of the omnipotence of the two Houses to which they belonged Whig and Tory were at one. But it served also as a public declaration of the difference which severed the Whigs from the Great Commoner. In a full house Pitt found but two supporters in his fierce attack upon the declaratory bill, which was supported by Burke in a speech which at once gave him rank as an orator; while Pitt's lieutenant, Shelburne, found but four supporters in a similar attack in the Lords. The pa.s.sing of the declaratory act was followed by the introduction of a bill for the repeal of the Stamp Acts; and in spite of the resistance of the king's friends, a resistance instigated by George himself, the bill was carried in February 1766 by a large majority.

[Sidenote: The Chatham Ministry.]

As the members left the House of Commons, George Grenville, whose resistance had been fierce and dogged, was hooted by the crowd which waited to learn the issue without. Before Pitt the mult.i.tude reverently uncovered their heads and followed him home with blessings. It was the n.o.blest hour of his life. For the moment indeed he had "saved England"

more truly than even at the crisis of the Seven Years' War. His voice had forced on the ministry and the king a measure which averted, though but for a while, the fatal struggle between England and her Colonies.

Lonely as he was, the ministry which had rejected his offers of aid found itself unable to stand against the general sense that the first man in the country should be its ruler; and bitter as was the king's hatred of him, Rockingham's resignation in the summer of 1766 forced George to call Pitt into office. His acceptance of the king's call and the measures which he took to construct a ministry showed a new resolve in the great statesman. He had determined to break finally with the political tradition which hampered him, and to set aside even the dread of Parliamentary weakness which had fettered him three years before.

Temple's refusal of aid, save on terms of equality which were wholly inadmissible, was pa.s.sed by, though it left Pitt without a party in the House of Commons. In the same temper he set at defiance the merely Parliamentary organization of the Whigs by excluding Newcastle, while he showed his wish to unite the party as a whole by his offer of posts to nearly all the members of the late administration. Though Rockingham stood coldly aside, some of his fellow-ministers accepted Pitt's offers, and they were reinforced by Lords Shelburne and Camden, the young Duke of Grafton, and the few friends who still clung to the Great Commoner. Such a ministry however rested for power not on Parliament but on public opinion. It was in effect an appeal from Parliament to the people; and it was an appeal which made such a reform in Parliament as would bring it into unison with public opinion a mere question of time.

Whatever may have been Pitt's ultimate designs, however, no word of such a reform was uttered by any one. On the contrary, Pitt stooped to strengthen his Parliamentary support by admitting some even of the "king's friends" to a share in the administration. But its life lay really in Pitt himself, in his immense popularity, and in the command which his eloquence gave him over the House of Commons. His popularity indeed was soon roughly shaken; for the ministry was hardly formed when it was announced that its leader had accepted the earldom of Chatham.

The step removed him to the House of Lords, and for a while ruined the public confidence which his reputation for unselfishness had aided him to win. But it was from no vulgar ambition that Pitt laid down his t.i.tle of the Great Commoner. The nervous disorganization which had shown itself three years before in his despair upon Temple's desertion had never ceased to hang around him, and it had been only at rare intervals that he had forced himself from his retirement to appear in the House of Commons. It was the consciousness of coming weakness that made him shun the storms of debate. But in the Cabinet he showed all his old energy.

The most jealous of his fellow-ministers owned his supremacy. At the close of one of his earliest councils Charles Townshend acknowledged to a colleague "Lord Chatham has just shown to us what inferior animals we are!" Plans were at once set on foot for the better government of Ireland, for the transfer of India from the Company to the Crown, and for the formation of an alliance with Prussia and Russia to balance the Family Compact of the House of Bourbon. The alliance was foiled for the moment by the coldness of Frederick of Prussia. The first steps towards Indian reform were only taken by the ministry under severe pressure from Pitt. Petty jealousies, too, brought about the withdrawal of some of the Whigs, and the hostility of Rockingham was shown by the fierce attacks of Burke in the House of Commons. But secession and invective had little effect on the ministry. "The session," wrote Horace Walpole to a friend at the close of 1766, "has ended triumphantly for the Great Earl"; and when Chatham withdrew to Bath to mature his plans for the coming year his power remained unshaken.

END OF VOL. VII.