But Grenville had no mind to be a puppet either of the king or of Bute. Narrow and pedantic as he was, severed by sheer jealousy and ambition from his kinsman Pitt and the bulk of the Whigs, his temper was too proud to stoop to the position which George designed for him. The conflicts between the king and his minister soon became so bitter that in August 1763 George appealed in despair to Pitt to form a ministry. Never had Pitt shown a nobler patriotism or a grander self-command than in the reception he gave to this appeal. He set aside all resentment at his own expulsion from office by Newcastle and the Whigs, and made the return to office of the whole party, with the exception of Bedford, a condition of his own. His aim, in other words, was to restore constitutional government by a reconstruction of the ministry which had won the triumphs of the Seven Years' War. But it was the destruction of this ministry and the erection of a kingly government in its place on which George prided himself most. To restore it was, in his belief, to restore the tyranny under which the Whigs had so long held the Crown. "Rather than submit," he cried, "to the terms proposed by Mr. Pitt, I would die in the room I now stand in." The result left Grenville as powerful as he had been weak. Bute retired into the country and ceased to exercise any political influence. Shelburne, the one statesman in the ministry, and who had borne a chief part in the negotiations for the formation of a new Cabinet, resigned to follow Pitt. On the other hand, Bedford, irritated by Pitt's exclusion of him from his proposed ministry, joined Grenville with his whole party, and the ministry thus became strong and compact.
Grenville and Wilkes.
Grenville himself was ploddingly industrious and not without financial ability. But his mind was narrow and pedantic in its tone; and, honest as was his belief in his own Whig creed, he saw nothing beyond legal forms. He was resolute to withstand the people as he had withstood the Crown. His one standard of conduct was the approval of Parliament; his one aim to enforce the supremacy of Parliament over subject as over king. With such an aim as this, it was inevitable that Grenville should strike fiercely at the new force of opinion which had just shown its power in the fall of Bute. He was resolved to see public opinion only in the voice of Parliament; and his resolve led at once to a contest with Wilkes as with the press. It was in the press that the nation was finding a court of appeal from the Houses of Parliament. The popularity of the North-Briton made Wilkes the representative of the new journalism, as he was the representative of that mass of general sentiment of which it was beginning to be the mouthpiece; and the fall of Bute had shown how real a power lay behind the agitator's diatribes. But Grenville was of stouter stuff than the court favourite, and his administration was hardly reformed when he struck at the growing opposition to Parliament by a blow at its leader. In "Number 45" of the North-Briton Wilkes had censured the speech from the throne at the opening of Parliament, and a "general warrant" by the Secretary of State was issued against the "authors, printers, and publishers of this seditious libel." Under this warrant forty-nine persons were seized for a time; and in spite of his privilege as a member of Parliament Wilkes himself was sent to the Tower. The arrest however was so utterly illegal that he was at once released by the Court of Common Pleas; but he was immediately prosecuted for libel. The national indignation at the harshness of these proceedings passed into graver disapproval when Parliament took advantage of the case to set itself up as a judicial tribunal for the trial of its own assailant. While the paper which formed the subject for prosecution was still before the courts of justice it was condemned by the House of Commons as a "false, scandalous, and seditious libel." The House of Lords at the same time voted a pamphlet found among Wilkes's papers to be blasphemous, and advised a prosecution. Though Pitt at once denounced the course of the two Houses as unconstitutional, his protest, like that of Shelburne in the Lords, proved utterly ineffectual; and Wilkes, who fled in terror to France, was expelled at the opening of 1764 from the House of Commons. Rapid and successful blows such as these seem to have shown to how frivolous an assailant Bute had yielded. But if Wilkes fled over the Channel, Grenville found he had still England to deal with. The assumption of an arbitrary judicial power by both Houses, and the system of terror which the Minister put in force against the Press by issuing two hundred injunctions against different journals, roused a storm of indignation throughout the country. Every street resounded with cries of "Wilkes and Liberty!" Every shutter through the town was chalked with "No. 45"; the old bonfires and tumults broke out with fresh violence: and the Common Council of London refused to thank the sheriffs for dispersing the mob. It was soon clear that opinion had been embittered rather than silenced by the blow at Wilkes.
Grenville and the Colonies.
The same narrowness of view, the same honesty of purpose, the same obstinacy of temper, were shown by Grenville in a yet more important struggle, a struggle with the American Colonies. The plans of Bute for their taxation and restraint had fallen to the ground on his retirement and that of Townshend from office. Lord Shelburne succeeded Townshend at the Board of Trade, and young as he was, Shelburne was too sound a statesman to suffer these plans to be revived. But the resignation of Shelburne in 1763, after the failure of Pitt to form a united ministry, again reopened the question. Grenville had fully concurred in a part at least of Bute's designs; and now that he found himself at the head of a strong administration he again turned his attention to the Colonies. On one important side his policy wholly differed from that of Townshend or Bute. With Bute as with the king the question of deriving a revenue from America was chiefly important as one which would bring the claims of independent taxation and legislation put forward by the colonies to an issue, and in the end—as it was hoped—bring about a reconstruction of their democratic institutions and a closer union of the colonies under British rule. Grenville's aim was strictly financial. His conservative and constitutional temper made him averse from any sweeping changes in the institutions of the Colonies. He put aside as roughly as Shelburne the projects which had been suggested for the suppression of colonial charters, the giving power in the Colonies to military officers, or the payment of Crown officers in America by the English treasury. All he desired was that the colonies should contribute what he looked on as their just share towards the relief of the burthens left by the war; and it was with a view to this that he proceeded to carry out the financial plans which had been devised for the purpose of raising both an external and an internal revenue from America.
The Colonies and the Stamp Act.
If such a policy was more honest, it was at the same time more absurd than that of Bute. Bute had at any rate aimed at a great revolution in the whole system of colonial government. Grenville aimed simply at collecting a couple of hundred thousand pounds, and he knew that even this wretched sum must be immensely lessened unless his plans were cordially accepted by the colonists. He knew too that there was small hope of such an acceptance. On the contrary, they at once met with a dogged opposition; and though the shape which that opposition took was a legal and technical one, it really opened up the whole question of the relation of the Colonies to the mother country. Proud as England was of her imperial position, she had as yet failed to grasp the difference between an empire and a nation. A nation is an aggregate of individual citizens, bound together in a common and equal relation to the state which they form. An empire is an aggregate of political bodies, bound together by a common relation to a central state, but whose relations to it may vary from the closest dependency to the loosest adhesion. To Grenville and the bulk of his fellow-countrymen the Colonies were as completely English soil as England itself, nor did they see any difference in political rights or in their relation to the Imperial legislature between an Englishman of Massachusetts and a man of Kent. What rights their charters gave the Colonies they looked on as not strictly political but municipal rights; they were not states but corporations; and, as corporate bodies, whatever privileges might have been given them, they were as completely the creatures and subjects of the English Crown as the corporate body of a borough or of a trading company. Their very existence in fact rested in a like way on the will of the Crown; on a breach of the conditions under which they were granted their charters were revocable and their privileges ceased, their legislatures and the rights of their legislatures came to an end as completely as the common council of a borough that had forfeited its franchise or the rights of that common council. It was true that save in matters of trade and navigation the Imperial Parliament or the Imperial Crown had as yet left them mainly to their own self-government; above all that it had not subjected them to the burthen of taxation which was borne by other Englishmen at home. But it had more than once asserted its right to tax the colonies; it had again and again refused assent to acts of their legislatures which denied such a right; and from the very nature of things they held it impossible that such a right could exist. No bounds could be fixed for the supremacy of the king in Parliament over every subject of the Crown, and the colonist of America was as absolutely a subject as the ordinary Englishman. On mere grounds of law Grenville was undoubtedly right in his assertion of such a view as this; for the law had grown up under purely national conditions, and without a consciousness of the new political world to which it was now to be applied. What the colonists had to urge against it was really the fact of such a world. They were Englishmen, but they were Englishmen parted from England by three thousand miles of sea. They could not, if they would, share the common political life of men at home; nature had imposed on them their own political life; what charters had done was not to create but to recognize a state of things which sprang from the very circumstances under which the Colonies had originated and grown into being. Nor could any cancelling of charters cancel those circumstances. No Act of Parliament could annihilate the Atlantic. The political status of the man of Massachusetts could not be identical with that of the man of Kent, because that of the Kentish man rested on his right of being represented in Parliament and thus sharing in the work of self-government, while the other from sheer distance could not exercise such a right. The pretence of equality was in effect the assertion of inequality; for it was to subject the colonist to the burthens of Englishmen without giving him any effective share in the right of self-government which Englishmen purchased by supporting those burthens. But the wrong was even greater than this. The Kentish man really took his share in governing through his representative in Parliament the Empire to which the colonist belonged. If the colonist had no such share he became the subject of the Kentish man. The pretence of political identity had ended in the establishment not only of serfdom but of the most odious form of serfdom, a subjection to one's fellow-subjects.
The theory of the colonists.
The only alternative for so impossible a relation was the recognition of such relations as actually existed. While its laws remained national, England had grown from a nation into an empire. Whatever theorists might allege, the Colonies were in fact political bodies with a distinct life of their own, whose connexion with the mother country had in the last hundred years taken a definite and peculiar form. Their administration in its higher parts was in the hands of the mother country. Their legislation on all internal affairs, though lightly supervised by the mother country, was practically in their own hands. They exercised without interference the right of self-taxation, while the mother country exercised with as little interference the right of monopolizing their trade. Against this monopoly of their trade not a voice was as yet raised among the colonists. They justly looked on it as an enormous contribution to the wealth of Britain, which might fairly be taken in place of any direct supplies, and which while it asserted the sovereignty of the mother country, left their local freedom untouched. The harshness of such a monopoly had indeed been somewhat mitigated by a system of contraband trade which had grown up between American ports and the adjacent Spanish islands, a trade so necessary for the Colonies, and in the end so beneficial to British commerce itself, that statesmen like Walpole had winked at its developement. The pedantry of Grenville however saw in it only an infringement of British monopoly; and one of his first steps was to suppress this contraband trade by a rigid enforcement of the navigation laws. Harsh and unwise as these measures seemed, the colonists owned their legality; and their resentment only showed itself in a pledge to use no British manufactures till the restrictions were relaxed. But such a stroke was a mere measure of retaliation, whose pressure was pretty sure in the end to effect its aim; and even in their moment of irritation the colonists uttered no protest against the monopoly of their trade. Their position indeed was strictly conservative; what they claimed was a continuance of the existing connexion; and had their claim been admitted, they would probably have drifted quietly into such a relation to the crown as that of our actual colonies in Canada and Australasia.
The Stamp Act passed.