On the 17th happened another very warm debate, occasioned by Mr. Dowdeswell’s moving to discharge the order for printing the American papers, the Speaker having declared that it was impossible to omit proper names and preserve the sense. The Opposition called this inconsistency, and threw all the ridicule they could on the Ministers, for what they termed variation and unsettled conduct. Wedderburne, in particular, a very fluent, acute, and bitter speaker, imputed these changes to the orders of Mr. Pitt. “The oracle has appeared, the oracle has spoken,” said he; “those gentlemen have prostrated themselves before it; but I tremble to think what will become of them for their inconsistencies. How will they expiate their crime? how atone for it? I would advise them to make pilgrimages to Hayes. Perhaps he may require human sacrifices.” Beckford and Conway reproached him for not having ventured to attack Mr. Pitt when he was present. Rigby turned his artillery on Conway, who had dropped that he had been forced into his present situation. “I have heard,” said Rigby, “of a médecin malgré lui, never of a Minister malgré lui; nor am I apt to think that people who do not like their situations, exert all their abilities—they do not do their best: I dare say the honourable gentleman does not do his best. I look upon timidity in a Minister to be as bad as cowardice in a General.” Lord George Sackville said, “May we ever have such a Minister malgré lui, who is ready to serve his country and rescue the dignity of the Sovereign from being insulted!”
Conway, roused by the brutality of Rigby, yet too apt to bear public abuse with phlegmatic patience, both from conscious intrepidity, and from knowing that such public jarrings are always hindered from coming to private decision, replied with uncommon ability and applause. “The gentleman had talked,” he said, “of timidity in a Minister and cowardice in a General;—as to timidity on the present measure, the House would judge whether his conduct had been timid. Cowardice he was sure the honourable gentleman did not mean to apply to him;” said he, “I know him too well; he would scarcely have taken an improper occasion to call me coward; I have a better opinion of his courage than that comes to. The other gentleman, who had talked of the oracle, had better have said that on the last debate—but why had he said it at all? Was it not known that those gentlemen had courted and idolized the idol, and had been rejected?” The debate was at length closed by Mr. Vane,[245] who told a story of Sir Robert Walpole and Mr. Pulteney, in the Administration of the former. Mr. Pulteney had made a motion for papers, and Sir Robert granted them; but immediately went to Mr. Pulteney and told him that what he had done would be the occasion of many persons losing their lives, besides the mischief he would entail on future Ministers. Mr. Pulteney was struck, and withdrew his motion. In like manner the order for printing was now set aside without a division.
CHAPTER XIV.
Lord Bute humiliates the Duke of Bedford and Mr. Grenville.—General Conway moves the Repeal of the Stamp Act.—Obtains leave to bring in a Bill.—Excited State of the Country.—Recommitment moved and rejected.—Desultory Opposition.—Final Debate.—The Repeal passed by a large Majority.—Conduct of Lord Rockingham.
While the House of Commons was busied in continuing to read American papers, and in other necessary affairs of the year, various attempts were carrying on for cementing that union between Lord Bute and the Opposition in reality, which seemed to exist, and in their votes did exist between them in Parliament. I have said that the Favourite every now and then hung out, by the intervention of his creatures, hopes of his pardon and protection to the late Ministers—with little sincerity, as the event showed. Partly, I believe, his conduct was actuated by a view of aweing the new Ministers into more deference for him; partly to prevent the diminution of the Crown’s authority, by relaxation towards the Americans. Certain it is, that Colonel Graeme, the Queen’s Secretary and much a confident, had indirectly and by an oblique channel opened a kind of negotiation. George Grenville, the most untractable of men, and the most unforgiving, recoiled at the proposal; and, even to save his darling Act, could scarce be brought to bow the knee again to the Favourite. It was with difficulty that he would hear of any other terms but a dismission of the Ministers before the fatal repeal should be passed. At length, the severe attacks made on him in the House of Commons, and threats of impeachments for having suppressed material notices, relative to the dangerous situation and humour of the Colonies, even from the year 1764, which Lord Halifax had been ordered by the King to lay before Parliament and had stifled, wrought on his stubborn temper; to which were added the despotic command of his imperious and intriguing elder brother, who, however, had the address to wriggle himself out of open genuflexion to the Favourite. By the intervention of the Duke of York, Lord Temple prevailed to have a meeting, of himself, his brother, and the Duke of Bedford, with the Favourite, at the house of Lord Eglinton, a Scotch emissary, alternately devoted to the Duke of York, to the Favourite, and to Lord Temple; at the same time Lord of the Bedchamber to the King. Towards the middle of January this extraordinary congress was settled and brought to bear; though, at the hour of meeting, Lord Temple excused himself from attending it. The Favourite, however, had the triumph of beholding the Duke of Bedford and George Grenville prostrate before him, suing for pardon, reconciliation, and support. After enjoying this spectacle of their humiliation for some minutes, the lofty Earl, scarce deigning to bestow upon them above half a score monosyllables, stiffly refused to enter into connection with them; on which the Duke of Bedford said, hastily, “he hoped, however, that what had passed would remain a profound secret.” “A secret!” replied the Favourite, “I have done nothing I am ashamed of,—has your Grace?”—and quitted the room. As if Lord Bute’s refusal of secrecy made it prudent to expose even more than Lord Bute could tell, the Duke went home, and at dinner, with sixteen persons, and before all the servants, he related what had passed; and then said to the Duchess and his court, “I was against taking this step, but you would make me.” Not nine months had intervened between the dismission of his brother Mackenzie by that faction, and their abject application to the Favourite for protection. What a trade is the politician’s, when it can so debase the human mind! Comfort yourself, ye poor, ye necessitous; what is the servility of your lot compared to this of titles and riches?
On the 21st of February the House of Commons came at last to the great question of the repeal of the Stamp Act. The Opposition endeavoured to fight it off by pretending fresh accounts were that very morning arrived of a disposition in some of the Colonies, particularly New York, to submit to the Act; from whence was inferred the inutility of repealing it. But this was properly treated as the lie of the day; and had no effect. General Conway moved for leave to bring in a bill to repeal that Act; and drew an affecting and alarming picture of the mischiefs it had occasioned and threatened. All orders for goods from this country were stopped: the North Americans would neither take any more, nor pay for what they had had. Eight merchants, who had received orders to the amount of 400,000l., had received counter-orders. The debt to those merchants amounted to 950,000l. Antigua was near ruined by famine. The tax fell chiefly on the poor, particularly on the poor of Georgia. At home, the situation of our manufacturers was most calamitous. Nottingham had dismissed a thousand hands: Leicester, Leeds, and other towns in proportion. Three in ten of the labourers of Manchester were discharged. The trade of England was not only stopped, but in danger of being lost. If trade suffered, land would suffer in its turn. Petitions would have been sent from every trading town in England, but that they apprehended that the very hearing of their petitions would delay the repeal. Every part of the Act breathed oppression. It annihilated juries: and the Admiralty courts might drag a man three hundred miles from his habitation. The fisheries were in equal danger. The right of taxation he did not doubt would be given for us in Westminster Hall; but the conflict would ruin both countries. We had but five thousand men in three thousand miles of territory: the Americans an hundred and fifty thousand fighting men. If we did not repeal the Act, he did not doubt but France and Spain would declare war, and protect the Americans. As the Colonies would not take our manufactures, they would set up of their own. He had a piece of cloth, he said, in his pocket, made at Philadelphia, as cheap as in England. Would the House risk the whole for so trifling an object as this Act modified?
I will not detail the rest of the debate, the essence of which had been so much anticipated. The great, and no trifling argument on the other side, was the danger from being beaten out of an Act of Parliament, because disagreeable to those on whom it fell; and the high probability that the Americans would not stop there; but, presuming on their own strength, and the timidity of the English Government, would proceed to extort a repeal of the Act of Navigation. Grenville particularly exposed the futility of declaring a right which the Government would not dare to exert: and he pushed the Ministers home with giving up the brightest jewel of the Crown, the right of taxation. How would they justify it to his Majesty?—how to future Administrations? Mr. Pitt, who acknowledged his perplexity in making an option between two such ineligible alternatives, pronounced, however, for the repeal, as due to the liberty of unrepresented subjects, and in gratitude to their having supported England through three wars. He begged to stand a feeble isthmus between English partiality and American violence. He would give the latter satisfaction in this point only. If America afterwards should dare to resist, he would second a resolution of the most vigorous nature to compel her with every man and every ship in this country.
At half an hour past one in the morning the committee divided, and the motion was carried by 275 to 167. This majority, though the question was but a prelude to the repeal, decided the fate of that great political contest. And though Lord Rockingham with childish arrogance and indiscretion vaunted in the palace itself that he had carried the repeal against the King, Queen, Princess-dowager, Duke of York, Lord Bute, the Tories, the Scotch, and the Opposition, (and it was true he had,) yet in reality it was the clamour of trade, of the merchants, and of the manufacturing towns, that had borne down all opposition.[246] A general insurrection was apprehended as the immediate consequence of upholding the bill; the revolt of America, and the destruction of trade, was the prospect in future. A nod from the Ministers would have let loose all the manufacturers of Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, and such populous and discontented towns, who threatened to send hosts to Westminster to back their demand of repeal. As it was, the lobby of the House, the Court of Requests, and the avenues were beset with American merchants. As Mr. Conway went away they huzzaed him thrice, stopped him to thank and compliment him, and made a lane for his passage. When Mr. Pitt appeared, the whole crowd pulled off their hats, huzzaed, and many followed his chair home with shouts and benedictions. The scene changed on the sight of Grenville. The crowd pressed on him with scorn and hisses. He, swelling with rage and mortification, seized the nearest man to him by the collar. Providentially the fellow had more humour than spleen—“Well, if I may not hiss,” said he, “at least I may laugh,”—and laughed in his face. The jest caught—had the fellow been surly and resisted, a tragedy had probably ensued.
On the following Monday, when the report was to be made from the committee, Grenville’s friends, seeing the inutility of their struggles, laboured to persuade him to contest the matter no farther; but it was too much to give up his favourite bill and his favourite occupation, talking, both at once. The last debate, too, had been much abridged by the impatience of the committee, worn out by so many successive discussions of the same subject. Many speakers had not been attended to; others forced to sit down without being heard. Something of this was imputed to the partiality of Rose Fuller, the Chairman; and, before he could make his report, Mr. Shifner ironically proposed to thank him for his great impartiality;[247] Onslow defended, and moved to thank him seriously. This provoked so much, that Fuller was accused of not doing his duty by suppressing the riots and insults offered to several members who had voted against the repeal. The indignities heaped on George Grenville were particularized; and he himself said that both England and America were now governed by the mob. Conway quieted the dispute by declaring the pains taken by the Administration to prevent far greater tumults and extensive petitioning.