Volume Vii Part 10 (1/2)

[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.]