A history of England

by Charles Oman

To succeed the Earl of Bute, George made choice of the Whig leader whom he thought least objectionable, a narrow-minded statesman named George Grenville, who had hitherto shown himself fairly amenable to the royal influence. But the king had made a mistake; Grenville was as obstinate as himself, and when he found his master interfering in his patronage and intriguing with his followers, he allied himself with one of the great Whig clans, that headed by the Duke of Bedford—a faction which was jocosely called the "Bloomsbury Gang," because it centred at the duke's residence, Bedford House, Bloomsbury.

The "North Briton."—General warrants declared illegal.

The Grenville-Bedford ministry only lasted two years (1763-1765), and was overthrown by another Whig alliance, whose principal leaders were the Duke of Grafton and the Marquis of Rockingham. But short though its tenure of office was, it left its mark on history. In England itself the act of this cabinet which made most noise was the prosecution of Wilkes. John Wilkes was a member of Parliament, a party journalist of gross scurrility and a man of scandalous private life, but he had the good fortune to be made twice in his life a martyr to oppressive government. He had grossly libelled Lord Bute in his newspaper, the North Briton, but his chief offence in the eyes of Grenville was that he had, in No. 45 of that publication, made abusive comments on the royal speech at the end of the session of 1763. For this he was illegally seized and imprisoned, under a "general warrant," a document issued by Grenville, not against him by name, but against "the authors, printers, and publishers of No. 45 of the North Briton." He was acquitted when put on his trial, under the plea that he had been illegally arrested. "A general warrant is no warrant, because it names no one," was the decision of Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice; and so this dangerous and tyrannical form of arrest was declared illegal. Wilkes posed as a victim of arbitrary government, and obtained great popularity in spite of his infamous character. But Grenville then prosecuted him for publishing a blasphemous and obscene poem. Feeling sure that he would be condemned, Wilkes absconded to France, and lived there four years; he was accounted by many a victim of malicious political persecution, and never lost his favour with the mob of London.

But while raising this storm in a teacup about the worthless Wilkes, George Grenville was committing another and a very different mistake in a matter of the highest importance. It is to him that we must attribute the first beginnings of the quarrel between England and her North-American colonies.

The Stamp Act.

The Seven Years' War had left behind it a heavy burden of debt and taxation, and George Grenville, while searching around for new sources of revenue, was struck with the bright idea that he might tax the colonies. Accordingly, he brought forward in 1764, and passed in 1765, a bill which asserted the right of Parliament to lay imposts on our possessions over-seas, and proceeded to prescribe that certain stamp duties on legal documents were in future to be paid by our American colonies. The proceeds were to go to maintain the British troops quartered among them.

The North American colonies.

The Stamp Act was bitterly resented by the inhabitants of America. It was the first circumstance that really taught the thirteen colonies, which lay scattered along the coast from Massachusetts to Georgia, to combine in a common movement. Hitherto they had been without any formal bond of union between themselves. Legally, New York had no more to do with Virginia than in our own day Jamaica has with Tasmania. Each was administered as a separate unity depending immediately on the English crown. Their origins and the character of their population were very different. The Puritan farmers and seamen of Massachusetts, the slave-owning planters of Virginia, the Anglo-Dutch of New York, and the Quakers of Pennsylvania had few sympathies in common. Hitherto they had been jealous of each other; colony quarrelled fiercely with colony, and the chief tie that had kept them together was the common dread which all felt, of the aggression of the enterprising French governors at Quebec. It was this fear of the French which had enabled William Pitt to induce them to join loyally in his great scheme for the conquest of Canada.

They unite to resist the Stamp Act.

Now that the restraining influence of their dread of France was removed, the colonies were no longer compelled to lean so closely on England. They were rapidly growing in population, wealth, and national spirit. It only required some common provocation to make them forget their petty local jealousies and turn fiercely to defend what they believed to be their rights. This provocation the pedantic George Grenville now proceeded to supply.