Lord North Prime Minister.
Accordingly, the nation was surprised by the news that George had made Lord North prime minister. North was a parliamentary jobber of the same type as Newcastle. He was a good-natured, indolent man, of limited intelligence, but shrewd and business-like. He made his bargain with the king, and undertook to carry out his policy. He was the tool, George the hand that guided it.
Impotence of the Whigs in Parliament.
For the next twelve years (1770-82) George ruled the nation according to his own ideas, and led it into the most slippery paths. His compact body of "King's Friends," aided by mercenary helpers from among the Whigs, preserved a constant majority in Parliament under the astute management of North. The old Whig clans raged in impotent wrath, but could not shake the ministry. Their expulsion from power had one good effect—it taught them to put some reality into their old assertion that they were the people's friends and the guardians of constitutional liberty. In their day of adversity they began to advocate real reforms, though in fifty years of power they had executed none. The younger men among them, such as the eloquent Edmund Burke, began to stir the questions of constitutional reform which were to be brought into play later on, as the new principles of the Whig party. They denounced parliamentary corruption, ministerial jobbing, and attacks on the liberty of the press, or the rights of the constituencies. Hints were dropped that the old rotten boroughs might be abolished, and more members given to the populous counties and cities.
The tea duties.—Further riots in Boston.
But while the Whigs were talking of reforms, North and his master were actually engaged in bringing a much more exciting topic to the front. In four years they succeeded in plunging England into a desperate war with her Transatlantic colonies. The new ministry was determined to persevere with the old scheme of the Grenville and Grafton cabinets for taxing America. North, under his master's orders, remitted the taxes on paper and glass, but insisted on retaining that on tea. His persistence led to open violence in America. In 1773, a mob disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded the tea-ships in Boston harbour, and cast the chests into the sea. The local authorities pretended that they could not discover the rioters. In high wrath, the Government resolved to punish the whole city of Boston. North produced a bill for closing its harbour to all commerce, and compelling the ships that had been wont to trade with it to go to the neighbouring port of Salem.
The Massachusetts Government Act.
This unwise and arbitrary bill was followed by another yet more high-handed, which annulled the charter of the State of Massachusetts, depriving it of its house of representatives, and making it a crown colony, to be administered by government officials and judges sent out from England. This punishment far exceeded anything that the people of Boston had earned by their rioting, and made all the other colonies tremble for their own liberties.
The Congress at Philadelphia.
The Massachusetts Government Act was the last straw which broke down the patience of the Americans. The representative bodies of all the colonies passed votes of sympathy with the people of Boston, and ordered a general fast. Soon after, they all resolved to send deputies to a "General Congress" at Philadelphia, in order to concert common measures for their defence against arbitrary government. This body, which had no legal status in the eye of the law, proceeded to act as if it were the central authority in North America. It issued a "Declaration of Rights," which set forth the points in which the liberties of the colonies were supposed to have been infringed. But it also took the strong step of declaring a kind of blockade against English commerce, by forbidding Americans to purchase any goods imported from the mother-country.