Peace was voted notwithstanding. Lord Bute had felt the need of support in the House of Commons against the thundering eloquence of Pitt. He had called Henry Fox, who lacked neither adroit eloquence nor insidious manipulations. His personal experience had taught him to judge men severely. The aged Lord Grey was asked in our time who was the last English minister susceptible of being corrupted. He unhesitatingly answered, "Lord Holland."
England had achieved a glorious peace. She was fatigued from her long efforts, and resolved henceforward to leave to the continental powers the care of settling their own quarrels. Austria and Prussia alone were left, the first to enter the lists, the only nations which retained a serious interest in the questions in dispute. Frederick the Great had based new hopes on the young czar, and a caprice of fortune had robbed him of his support. Catherine II., Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, was on bad terms with her husband. She took advantage of the indiscretions of Peter III. to excite a military insurrection against him. He was deposed, and shortly after died in his prison. Catherine was proclaimed sovereign in his place. The new sovereign was bold, ambitious, and as unscrupulous in her greed for power as in her private life. She remained neutral between Prussia and Austria. The states were at the end of their resources, the population decimated. In ten years Berlin had lost a tenth of her population, and thirty thousand of her inhabitants owed their subsistence to public charity. The two sovereigns agreed to an interchange of conquests. All this disturbance and all this suffering ended for Germany in the maintenance of the statu quo. France was exhausted, deprived of her most flourishing colonies, degraded in her own eyes as well as in those of Europe. She had dragged Spain along in her misfortune. England alone emerged triumphant and aggrandized with booty. She had gained forever the Empire of India, and for some years at least almost the whole of civilized America obeyed her laws. She had gained what we had lost, not by the superiority of her arms, nor even of her generals, but by the natural and innate force of a free people skillfully and nobly governed.
The peace had been accepted by the nation as well as by the Houses, but ill-will existed against Lord Bute, a Scotchman and favorite, who was attacked on all sides, both in pamphlets and in Parliament. More jealous of his influence with the royal family than he was of power, Lord Bute resolved to resign. He had written to one of his friends: "Isolated in a cabinet which I have formed, having no one to support me in the House of Lords but two peers, who are friends of mine, with my two secretaries of state maintaining silence, and the Lord Chancellor, whom I placed in his position, voting and speaking against me, I find myself upon ground which is undermined beneath me, and which makes me dread not only to fall myself, but to drag my royal master with me in my fall. It is time that I should retire." George Grenville succeeded him in power, and Fox passed to the House of Lords with the title of Lord Holland.
A brother-in-law of Pitt, who had never submitted to his domination, George Grenville was bold, presumptuous, and short-sighted, violent in his methods and methodical in his administration. The defects of his temper and character caused serious embarrassments to the government which he directed, and drew down great mishaps upon England. He pursued with obstinacy John Wilkes, the pamphleteer, and proposed to apply the stamp tax to the American colonies.
John Wilkes, born in London in 1727, Member of Parliament for Aylesbury, blustering, ruined, corrupt, hideous in personal appearance, and given over to the most unbridled licentiousness of life, had sought a means of re-establishing his fortunes by founding a skillfully and audaciously edited journal, which he called The North Briton. Lord Bute had already been violently attacked by Wilkes, who was secretly encouraged, it is said, by Lord Temple; but no prosecution had been directed against him. In proroguing Parliament at the end of April, 1763, the king congratulated himself on the happy termination of the war; "so honorable," he said, "for my crown, and so happy for my people." Wilkes' journal attacked the speech in his forty-fifth number, dated April 23d. Eight days after, in spite of his parliamentary privilege, Wilkes was arrested at his own house and conducted to the Tower, where he remained some days in secret. In passing under the gloomy gate, Wilkes ironically asked to be lodged in the room which had formerly been occupied by the father of Lord Egremont, one of the ministers who had signed the order for his arrest. As soon as his friends received permission to visit him, Lord Temple and the Duke of Grafton hastened to see him. The public feeling overcame the dislike which the character of the accused generally inspired, and transports of joy broke out in the crowd when the Chief Justice, Sir Charles Pratt, firmly pronounced his acquittal. "We are all of the opinion," he said, "that a libel does not amount to a breach of the public peace. The most that can be said is that it tends to it, without being in consequence subject to the penalties of the law. I order that Mr. Wilkes be released."
For seven years to come, under different phases—sometimes in France, under pretext of obtaining cure for a wound received in a duel; sometimes in London as candidate for the House of Commons; outlawed by the Middlesex magistrates for his indecent pamphlets; chosen by the city as one of its representatives—John Wilkes was almost constantly before the public, sustained by the most diverse partisans, honest or corrupt; absorbed in those public liberties which they considered outraged in his person, or sympathetically interested in the audacious impiety which bore without blushing the banner of moral or political license. It was the error and the fault of the government to have alienated public opinion by imprudent prosecutions, thus assuring to Wilkes a popularity in no way deserved. When at last he died, in 1797, the venal and debauched pamphleteer had for a long time fallen into the obscurity and contempt from which he should never have emerged.
The Stamp Act has left its date and its ineradicable trace on the history of England, and of the world. Already for a long time under the influence of the rapid development of their prosperity and resources, the American colonies proudly defended their privileges, resenting the offensive investigations of the revenue officers, while admitting the right of the mother-country to that monopoly of commerce which they succeeded in violating by an active contraband trade. Submitting without trouble to the external taxes intended to regulate the commerce, the Americans claimed entire independence as regarded other duties. In 1692 the General Court of Massachusetts resolved that no tax could be imposed upon his Majesty's colonial subjects without the consent of the governor, the council, and the representatives assembled in General Court. It was this fundamental principle of the liberties of Great Britain, as well as of her colonies—that an English subject could not be taxed without his consent—that was openly violated in 1765 by the proposition of Mr. George Grenville. This financial expedient had been previously suggested to Sir Robert Walpole, but he answered with his usual good sense, "I have Old England already on my hands; do you suppose I wish to encumber myself in addition with New England? He will be a bolder minister than I who will assume that."