On the 22nd of February, General Conway moved an Address to the King, imploring His Majesty to abandon the war. After a protracted debate, which lasted till two o'clock in the morning, the Ministers found themselves in an alarming majority of 1. But they persevered in the face of these disasters, and, sustained in office by the tenacity of the King, refused to submit to the constitutional warning of Parliament. Three months before, the Duke of Richmond, writing to Lord Rockingham, anticipated the obstinacy of the Cabinet, expressing his conviction, that "no essential change of measures was meant, and none of men if it could be avoided. When I say the Ministry," he added, "I mean the King; for his servants are the merest servants that ever were."
Nor was it only by protecting an unpopular Ministry that His Majesty showed his resolution to exercise his prerogative in direct opposition to public opinion. It was in the midst of these accumulating defeats and strong expressions of popular feeling, that His Majesty raised Lord George Germain to the peerage with the title of Viscount Sackville, in open indifference to the fact that his Lordship had been dismissed from the army by the sentence of a court-martial, and declared incapable of serving His Majesty in any military capacity, in consequence of his conduct at the battle of Minden. To such proceedings as these Walpole refers, when he observes at this time that "the power of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished; and it is diminished a good deal indeed." The diminution of its power, however, was visible only in the spirited resistance of Parliament, in the motion of Lord Carmarthen in the Upper House, that it was derogatory to the honour of the House of the Lords, that any person labouring under so heavy a sentence of a court-martial should be recommended to the Crown as worthy of a peerage, and in the successive motions which were brought forward in the Commons to force the Ministry to resign.
General Conway renewed his motion on the war on the 27th, and achieved a complete triumph, his minority of 1 being converted in five days into a majority of 19. But Lord North still clung to office, and it was not till the 6th of March, when he was beaten by a majority of 16 on the subject of the taxes, that he began to betray symptoms of a retreat. On the 8th the motion on the war was renewed, when Ministers, collecting the whole force of placemen and contractors, obtained a majority of 10, which was reduced afterwards to 9 on a vote of confidence. The crisis had now arrived. The Earl of Surrey had given notice in the Lords of a motion to the effect that Ministers no longer possessed the confidence of the country, when Lord North entered the House, and informed their Lordships that His Majesty had come to a determination to make an entire change of Administration.
This was on the 19th of March. But so far back as the 11th His Majesty had been in negotiation with the Marquis of Rockingham, through the agency of Lord Chancellor Thurlow, who detained his Lordship in the House for an hour and a half after it had adjourned to converse with him, by His Majesty's desire, upon the practicability of forming an Administration "on a broad bottom." The negotiation with Thurlow spread over an entire week, and entirely failed on the plan proposed by His Majesty, who wished to limit Lord Rockingham in the first instance to the nomination of a Cabinet whose policy should lie over for future consideration. "I must confess," observes Lord Rockingham, in one of his letters to the Lord Chancellor, "that I do not think it an advisable measure, first to attempt to form a Ministry by arrangement of office—afterwards to decide upon what principles or measures they are to act."
The day this letter was written Lord North resigned; and in two days afterwards His Majesty renewed the negotiation with Lord Rockingham, finally agreeing to the whole of his propositions, and reserving only the household in his own hands. While these negotiations were in progress, Lord Temple wrote to Lord Rockingham, expressing his earnest hope that the "cards should be dealt only into those hands where he so much wished them, from every motive of public and private regard." Before the end of the month the cards were dealt into the hands in which Lord Temple wished to see them, and the new Ministry was completed, with Lord Rockingham as First Lord of the Treasury; Lord Shelburne and Mr. Fox as Secretaries of State; Lord John Cavendish, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Admiral Keppel, at the head of the Admiralty; General Conway (much to the King's dissatisfaction), at the Horse Guards; with the additional strength of the Dukes of Richmond and Grafton, and Lords Camden and Ashburton, Burke, Sheridan, and Colonel Barré, in other offices; Thurlow (the only Tory in the Cabinet) still continuing as Lord Chancellor.
One of the earliest measures of the new Government was to negotiate a peace with America; and Mr. Thomas Grenville was appointed upon a mission for that purpose to Paris, to meet Dr. Franklin. The history of that mission is contained in a series of deeply interesting letters, which, independently of the flood of light they throw upon the American business, possess a permanent value as illustrations of the personal characters of the writers (especially those of Sheridan, to whose rashness Mr. Grenville makes express allusion), and as showing that, even in office, the Whigs were not united amongst themselves. The materials of which the Cabinet was formed, being composed of the Rockingham, and the Chatham, or Shelburne Whigs—two sections of that party which had never cordially coalesced—was not calculated to work together; but it could not have been anticipated that their personal jealousies would have taken a shape so dangerous as these letters disclose.
It is clear, from the singular facts revealed in this Correspondence, that, while an ostensible Minister was dispatched to Paris by the general action of the Government, with the sanction of the King, to negotiate terms with the American Minister, Lord Shelburne had taken upon himself to appoint another negotiator, who was not only not to act in concert with Mr. Grenville, but whose clandestine mission seems to have been expressly intended to thwart and embarrass him, and whose appointment was without the approval, or even the knowledge, of the Cabinet. How far the King may have secretly supported Lord Shelburne in this breach of faith with his colleagues, we are left to conjecture; but the intriguing character ascribed to His Majesty by Lord Shelburne himself, justifies, to some extent, the suspicion that a proceeding so bold and so full of hazard to the Whig Administration, was not adopted upon the sole responsibility of the Minister. Lord Shelburne said of the King, that he "possessed one art beyond any man he had ever known; for that by the familiarity of his intercourse he obtained your confidence, procured from you your opinion of different public characters, and then availed himself of this knowledge to sow dissensions." (Nicholl's Recollections and Reflections during the reign of George III.) This opinion, just or unjust (and there is no great reason to doubt its justice), was founded upon extensive personal experiences, of which this sinister attempt to break up the union of the Cabinet may have been one.
MR. SHERIDAN TO MR. THOMAS GRENVILLE.
St. James's, May 21st, 1782.
Dear Grenville,