Grenville was naturally bold, as Cardinal de Retz said of Anne of Austria, because he was neither prudent nor far-sighted. He was at once absolute and without tact. The extension to the colonies of the stamp tax had been voted almost without opposition. Mr. Pitt himself had not protested. Thoughtlessly, and in consequence of the financial embarrassment brought on by the war, the English government, without systematic scheme, and without arrière pensée, had committed itself to a fatal line of policy in which the national pride was to sustain it too long. The taxes were light and could not entail any suffering on the colonists. They were the first to recognize this themselves. "What is the matter, and what are we disputing about?" said Washington in 1766. "Is it about the payment of a tax of threepence a pound on tea being too burdensome? No, it is the principle alone which we contest."
A general and speedily riotous protestation was made in 1765, in New England, in the name of the rights of the colonies, unjustly violated by the pretensions of the metropolis. At Boston the people arose and broke into the house of the distributors of stamped paper. The ships which happened to be in port lowered their flags to half-mast, in token of mourning, and the church bells sounded the funeral toll. At Philadelphia the inhabitants spiked the cannons on the ramparts. At Williamsburg the House of Burgesses of Virginia resounded with the most violent menaces, and in the midst of the discussion of the Stamp Act, Patrick Henry, who was still very young, uttered these words: "Caesar found his Brutus, Charles I. his Cromwell, and George III. … !" "Treason! treason!" cried the royalists. "And George III. will doubtless profit from their example," retorted the young orator. The remonstrance which he had proposed was voted.
The attitude of the American people and the numerous petitions which revealed it had warned Pitt of the danger. He openly attacked the cabinet and called for the repeal of the Stamp Act. "The colonists," said he, "are subjects of this kingdom, entitled equally with yourselves to the special privileges of Englishmen. They are bound by English laws, and to the same extent as we. They have a right to the liberties of this country. The Americans are the sons, and not the bastards, of England. When we agree in this House to the subsidies to his Majesty, we dispose of that which belongs to ourselves; but when we impose a tax on the Americans, what are we doing? We, the Commons of England, give what to his Majesty? Our personal property? No. We give the property of the Commons of America. It is a contradiction of terms. I demand that the Stamp Act be repealed, absolutely, completely, immediately; that the reason of the repeal shall be proclaimed. The principle on which the act was based was false. At the same time let the supreme authority of this country over her colonies be clearly affirmed in the most decided terms that can be imagined. We can bind their commerce, restrain their manufactures, and exercise our power under every form. We cannot, we should not, take the money in their pockets without their consent."
The honor of obtaining from the English Parliament the repeal of an unjust measure was reserved for a new and more moderate minister. George Grenville, beaten and overthrown, remained obstinately attached to the cause on which he had entered. "If the tax were still to impose, I should impose it," said he; "the enormous expenses that were caused by the German war have made it necessary. The eloquence which the author of this proposal brings to bear to-day against the constitutional authority of Parliament renders it indispensable. I do not envy him his applause. I take pride in your hisses. If the thing were still to do, I should begin again."
Twice already since George Grenville had taken the reins of power, the king, soon wearied of his arrogant rule, had asked Pitt to free him from it. The new reason for disagreement had just increased the bitterness between George III. and his minister. The monarch, suffering and ill, had felt the first attacks of that malady which was at recurrent intervals to cloud his faculties, and which at last plunged him into an insanity that only ended with his life. Barely recovered, the young king, with touching firmness and resignation, himself proposed to his ministers the question of a regency. The Prince of Wales was not yet three years old. The act prepared by George Grenville and his colleagues excluded the princess dowager from the regency on the ground that she was not of the royal family. The hatred and jealousy inspired by Lord Bute, which always operated strongly upon both mother and son, had suggested the singular interpretation of the legal text. For a moment the king agreed with a melancholy sweetness; but the insult offered his mother soon wounded him, and he resolved to escape at last from the tyranny which weighed upon him. Formerly he feared the junta of the great Whig lords. It appeared to him less formidable than George Grenville and the Duke of Bedford. The Duke of Cumberland, in the king's name, visited Mr. Pitt, who was sick and detained in the country. Pitt refused to assume the direction of affairs without the assistance of Lord Temple. The latter was particularly hostile to Lord Bute, and personally compromised in relation to the king. George III. would not submit. Negotiations resulted finally in the formation of a Whig cabinet, which was really honest and dull. The Marquis of Rockingham was its chief. It was in his service and as his private secretary that Edmund Burke for the first time took part in public affairs and entered Parliament.
The only important act of Lord Rockingham's ministry was the repeal of the Stamp Act, accompanied by a contradictory declarative clause which proclaimed the right of Parliament to bind by its decrees the colonies under any circumstances whatever. This fruitful seed of new dissensions passed unperceived in the first outburst of American joy and of the triumph of the friends of liberty in England. Mr. Pitt was already on the threshold of power. Lord Rockingham, involved with a new party, which was known under the name of the king's friends, saw his authority rendered powerless and his honest intentions feebly fulfilled. The king desired to get rid of the Whigs at any price, without being obliged to submit again to George Grenville. Pitt once more agreed to become prime minister, but to the great astonishment and universal regret of his friends he abandoned at the same time the supreme empire which he had exercised in the House of Commons and entered the House of Lords with the title of Lord Chatham.
The cabinet which the new earl had formed was composed of diverse and contradictory elements. His powerful hand alone could preserve unity. "Lord Chatham," said Burke, "has composed a ministry so odd and hybrid, he has put together a checker-board so curiously divided and combined, he has constructed so strange a mosaic of patriots and conservatives, of the king's friends and of republicans, of Whigs and Tories, of perfidious friends and avowed enemies, that, strange as the sight may be, he is not sure of where he can put down his foot, and is unable to keep it there."
Lord Chatham found this out himself. In spite of the haughtiness of his character, he felt that the wind of popularity did not bear him as in the past upon its powerful wings. He was sick, defiant, and jealous of his colleagues, and ill at ease at the bottom of his heart in the new atmosphere of the House of Lords. He had conceived large projects for the reform of the administration in India. He caused an investigation to be proposed in the House of Commons, and the proposition came from Alderman Beckford, who did not form part of the administration. Soon after he withdrew to the country. Strange rumors spread abroad as to his state of mind. Lady Chatham refused absolutely to allow any of his colleagues to have access to him. The discords within the cabinet increased, and the feebleness and the hitches of the government became more striking. Charles Townshend, a brilliant orator, witty and clever, had just died at the age of forty-three. Intrigues multiplied in the Houses and at court. The king renewed his entreaties to Lord Chatham. "I am ready," said he, "to go find you, if it is impossible for you to come to see me." Gout had again attacked the prime minister, replacing, we are assured, a more cruel malady. Lord Chatham finally consented to receive the Duke of Grafton. "I expected to find him very sick," writes the duke in his memoirs, "but his condition exceeded all that I had imagined. The sight of this great intellect, overwhelmed and weakened by suffering, would have profoundly affected me, even if I had not been for a long time sincerely attached to his person and his character." As a matter of fact and practically, the Duke of Grafton had become prime minister many months before Lord Chatham finally resolved, in October, 1768, to send in his resignation. Sir Charles Pratt, now Lord Camden, and the honor of the bench as well from the purity of his character as from his oratorical talent, still held up the tottering ministry. The importance of Lord North, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, continued to increase from day to day.
Melancholy is the spectacle of a great light which is going out, and of a power once supreme losing its influence over men. Lord Chatham had the good fortune to cast a final gleam before falling forever. After two years of a mysterious retreat, he reappeared in public life in 1769, and the Duke of Grafton's ministry could not withstand his attacks. Lord North, still young, and without high political ambition, of an amiable character, and personally agreeable to the king, had just accepted the heavy burden of power (January, 1770). Lord Chatham pretended to see in this new combination that persistent influence of Lord Bute which was a favorite theme for the attacks of the pamphleteers, whether it was a question of John Wilkes, or of that mysterious writer, still hidden after more than a hundred years, under the name of Junius. "Who does not know," he cried, "that Mazarin, though absent from France, was always there; and do we not know an analogous case? When I was recently called to public service, I hastened upon the wings of my zeal. I agreed to preserve a peace which I detested—a peace which I should not have made, but which I was resolved to maintain because it had been made. I was credulous, I admit, but I was taken in; I was deceived; the same mysterious influence still existed. My cruel experience has at length painfully convinced me that behind the throne there is hidden something greater than the throne itself."