I left England in August, and did not return till the April following. A very interesting scene passed in the interval, on which, as I was not an eye-witness, I shall be more brief than ordinary; but as I corresponded with Mr. Conway, was consulted by him, and received other information from very good authority, I shall set down nothing but what I know to be truth; and that will be sufficient not to leave any material break in the thread of my narration.
The new Ministers had scarce taken possession of their places, before they were alarmed with accounts of the mutinous behaviour of the Colonies, on the attempt to carry into execution the new Stamp Act. The Americans were determined not to submit to it; and great pains had been taken in order to bring about a general union of all the provinces, in order to oppose the admission of the tax. To all it was disagreeable; yet some Colonies accepted it. Virginia and New England were the most refractory, and precipitated themselves into great violences. In some parts, the ships that brought over the stamps were seized and the stamps burned. The officers of the new revenue were not suffered to land, or were cruelly treated, their houses forced and pillaged, and their persons menaced. The governors themselves were not secure, and trembled lest their few strongholds should be seized by the hand of rebellion. In the most mutinous towns there was no possibility of executing the Act. But the weapon with which the Colonies armed themselves to most advantage, was the refusal of paying the debts they owed to our merchants at home, for goods and wares exported to the American provinces. These debts involved the merchants of London, Liverpool, Manchester, and other great trading towns, in a common cause with the Americans, who forswore all traffic with us, unless the obnoxious Stamp Act was repealed. Nothing could be more delicate to the new Ministers than such a crisis. They themselves had opposed the Act. Should they enforce the execution, which could only be done by the sword, it would be tyrannizing against their consciences, and supporting a bad or weak act of their antagonists. They would risk lighting up a rebellion in the Colonies, would ruin the mutual intercourse and trade between the mother-country and the outlying provinces; would endanger those distant dominions flinging themselves into the arms of France or Spain, at least receiving succours thence; while they were threatened at the same time with insurrections in the trading towns at home, who loudly demanded a repeal of the bill, on which depended the payment of what was due to them, and the hopes of re-establishing so beneficial a commerce.
On the other hand, to repeal a revenue-bill, because it was distasted by those obnoxious to it, was setting a precedent of the most fatal complexion. What country, what town, what profession, what order of men, would submit to the most legal impositions, if Government once showed itself afraid, and recoiled, as soon as force was used to reject the duty? In the present case the insult was unparalleled and accompanied with every kind of aggravating circumstance. Not only payment of the duty was refused, but the very authority called in question by which it was enjoined. The Parliament of Great Britain, said the Colonists, had no right to impose internal taxes on them: they were not represented there; they would tax themselves. This was striking at the very vitals of the Constitution, for however the Colonies affected to distinguish between the King and the Parliament, the Act had been the act of the whole Legislature, and the Constitution knows not the King in a legislative capacity distinct from the two other branches of the Legislature. Here was disobedience to the law, and rebellion against the principle of all our laws. Nor was this speculative view the sole object to weigh in the decision the Ministers were to make. Should they embrace the measure of repeal, were they sure they could carry it? The Act had passed by a great majority in both Houses, and with the royal assent. Was it probable that such majorities could be induced to revoke their opinion in compliment to mutinous associations that flew in the face of their ordinance, and denied their authority? Was it likely that the King would approve of, or consent to, such diminution of his Majesty, before an attempt had been made to enforce it? When do princes bend but after a defeat? There could be no doubt but force would easily reduce the Colonies to obedience. They had no strongholds, were ill-armed, a disjointed body, not yet engaged in a common cause, nor so compact a corps as easily to be put in motion together; and from being distinct governments, habituated to different usages, and actuated by different interests, easily to be separated from a joint plan, and more likely to obstruct than to promote one general system of operations. To temporize in favour of resisting subjects would be speaking that language of Whiggism so distasteful to the Court, so dissonant from the tone of the present reign, and so much objected to the new Ministers during the late opposition. It would be opening a door to the flattery of their antagonists, who, instead of setting out by obstructing the measures of the Crown, would have an opportunity of paying their court at the expense of the Ministers themselves.
These were deep and weighty considerations, and, with this precipice on either hand, were young, artless, inexperienced men to date their career. Grenville, the parent of the Bill, and even fond of it beyond the love of a politician, was not a man to overlook so sudden a prospect of recovering the ground he had lost. Though he would have revelled in an opportunity of glutting his vengeance and enforcing obedience to his law, he could not but enjoy the distress to which the crisis reduced his adversaries. It suited his proud spirit to call for assertion of the Crown’s and Parliament’s dignity; and his revengeful spirit, to drive the Ministers on measures so repugnant to their principles and opinions, and, rather than not see the Colonies punished, he wished to have the punishment inflicted even by his adversaries. He toiled to obtain the most circumstantial evidence of the mutiny; he exaggerated every instance, and called aloud on the hand of power to vindicate the honour of the Legislature.
As the accounts from America grew every day worse, the Ministers, who at first were inclined to repeal the Act, were borne down by the flagrancy of the provocation. But being temperate men in themselves, fixed in their principles, forseeing not only more extensive but more immediate evils from violence, (for the danger from the clamours of the merchants and trading towns increased in proportion,) and possibly indignant at the attempts made by their antagonists to drive them to extremities, they coolly and firmly resolved to remove the grievance, rather than involve their country and outlying brethren in a series of calamities more destructive of the common good than the wound given to the authority of Government. Whoever will reflect on the state of the dangers they were to encounter, and which I have specified above, must own that their conduct was virtuous, honest, prudent, humane, and brave: it will be difficult, I believe, to discover that it could be interested.
This determination of the Ministers to attempt the repeal of the Stamp Act was putting their power to the test at once; and was the more adventurous, as they certainly had not taken any steps to secure the previous favour of the Crown. If on one hand they increased by this measure the animosity of Grenville and his party, and held out to him the means of making his cause common with that of the Legislature; on the other, they afforded an opportunity to Lord Bute and his faction of returning their hostilities, and of veiling his grievances under the mantle of the King’s and Parliament’s dignity. The Colonies, however pleased, could lend no support to their protectors, who, in truth, could stand on no ground at home, but on the popularity they had already acquired with the people, and should acquire with the mercantile part of the kingdom. In this exigence they lost the only real pillar of their Administration at Court.
Notwithstanding the services he had rendered, it is not probable that the Duke of Cumberland had made any progress in his Majesty’s or the Princess’s affections. He had driven out obnoxious Ministers, it is true, and furnished the King with a new set when no others would venture to enlist. But were not these new men more attached to his Royal Highness than to the person of the King? and had not the Duke promoted his own views in forming an Administration for his nephew? Had his Royal Highness interested himself to obtain any terms for the Favourite? Was not the latter in a manner proscribed by the friends of his Royal Highness? Had not the most select of those friends been as offensive to the Princess as the late Ministers themselves? Undoubtedly; and yet the personal character of his Royal Highness was in such estimation, his behaviour was so full of dignity, he was so attached to the Crown, and understood the Court so much better than the Ministers, and could dare to hazard language in the closet which their want of authority and favour forbad them to use, that he could have interposed in their behalf, or could have bent them to necessary submission to the Crown, which no other man in England was capable of doing. But of this mediator the Ministers were soon deprived.
On the 30th of October his Royal Highness was playing at picquet with General Hodgson.[176] He grew confused, and mistook the cards. The next day he was recovered enough to appear at Court; but after dinner was seized with a suffocation, and ordered the window to be opened. One of his valets-de-chambre, who was accustomed to bleed him, was called, and prepared to tie up his arm; but the Duke said, “It is too late!—it is all over!”—and expired.
I have spoken so much of his Royal Highness’s character in the beginning and in various parts of these Memoirs,[177] that little addition is necessary. His haughtiness and severity had made him most obnoxious in the early parts of his life. His profound understanding had taught him to profit of his mortifications; and though he never condescended to make himself amiable but to very few, he became as much respected, though deprived of power, as if his heroism had been victorious. Whether his good sense would have resisted prosperity with equal temper, I much doubt. He would have made a great King, but probably too great a King for so corrupt a Country. His indifference to death, which he had so long and so frequently had in prospect in the last years of his life, and which he seemed to invite, was, I believe, less owing to the solidity of his courage, which was intrepid, than to the unhappiness of his situation. His bodily infirmities,[178] though borne without complaint or impatience, were grievous. His mind had been more sensibly afflicted. Born with a martial spirit and fond of command, he had not only been unsuccessful in every battle, except that of Culloden; but had been forced by cruel circumstances from the favourite profession of his soul; in civil life he was kept, by the temper of his father and the aversion of the Princess Dowager, in a state of neglect and disgrace. Fox, who he had a right to expect should stickle for his power, had betrayed and abandoned him; Pitt had made it a point to bar him from all influence; and the two Pelhams, after leaning on him for a while, had sacrificed him to the Princess and to their own ambition or jealousy of credit. His mind had not been formed for idleness, and could ill digest an exclusion from all military and all civil councils; and was too lofty and too unpliant to feed on trifling amusements. It had the great, but none of the little, powers of philosophy; could bear misfortune, but could not compensate to itself for the want of its object. He used books rather than liked or valued them, and cared for none of the arts. His principles restrained him from going any considerable lengths against the Crown; nor could he stoop to bestow those caresses that are necessary to form extensive connections. He dealt his smiles to those who followed him, like a King that rewards, not like the head of a party, who has farther to go. The dignity of his conduct and behaviour gave his Court the air of a dethroned monarch’s, but had nothing of a Prince whom his nephew’s Court had suspected of having views on the Crown.
The King, at his Royal Highness’s request, had promised the first vacant garter to the Earl of Albemarle,[179] and now with great propriety bestowed on him that of his master. The Ministers, too, were assured by his Majesty that the Duke’s death should make no alteration in the present system.