The North American colonies—or, as they were commonly called, plantations—labored in those days, in their relation with the home-country, under the inconveniences of a system of dual government. The Board of Trade was the working colonial office, framed instructions to the governors, gave information and advice, and carried on the every-day colonial business generally; but the secretary of state for the southern department, whose sphere of supervision embraced all the colonies wherever situate, had always a permanent right to interfere in and control the conduct of colonial affairs. It was in virtue of this right that in May, 1763, Secretary Lord Egremont took the initiative in setting the Board of Trade to work to solve the problem of how best to arrange for the administration of the wide area of North American territory that the peace had transferred from French to British rule. His instructions were short and pointed. "The questions (he wrote) which relate to North America in general are—1st, What new governments should be established there? what form should be adopted for such a government? and where the capital or residence of each governor should be fixed? 2dly, What military establishment will be sufficient? what new forts should be erected? and which, if any, may it be expedient to demolish? 3dly, In what way, least burdensome and most palatable to the colonies, can they contribute toward the support of the additional expense which must attend their civil and military establishments upon the arrangement which your lordships shall propose?" Mark the "3dly." It is interesting, as illustrating the ideas and circumstances which led to the famous Stamp Act, to see how completely Lord Egremont's question assumes not only the right of the mother-country to tax her colonies, but the probable expediency of her actually exercising that right. In his reply, Shelburne, while admitting the revenue question to be a "point of the highest importance," practically evaded it on the plea of the inability of the board to form a satisfactory opinion without further materials. With regard to the new territory, his advice, which was followed, was, in effect, not to attempt to annex the whole of the north-western acquisitions, but to form a new colony of Canada, limited by definite geographical boundaries.
"American historians," remarks Lord Shelburne's biographer, "have seen in the policy thus pursued a deliberate intention of closing the West against further emigration, from the fear that remote colonies would claim the independence which their position would favor. The statesmen of the eighteenth century have follies enough to answer for without charging them with this in addition. However impossible it was in practice to dam up the ever-advancing tide of the English race, it was equally impossible in theory openly to avow the intention of dispossessing the still powerful savage nations, which were bound to England by numerous conventions, and were regarded for the most part as subjects of George III., equally entitled with the inhabitants of Boston, or even of London, to the protection of his government. To adjust the relations between savage and civilized man during the period of the struggle which can have but one result is a task as difficult as it is thankless, but American Presidents have not been accused of attempting to prevent further colonization of their continent because they have from time to time issued proclamations ascertaining and attempting to protect the ever-retiring bounds of the Indian reservations."
But the march of events was soon to take the responsibility of the "settlement" (save the mark!) of American affairs out of the hands of Shelburne. He had joined the ministry more because of the insistance of his friend, Bute, the potent cabinet-maker, than from any general sympathy with the views of the men with whom he had to act; and every week put him more and more out of touch with them. He protested formally to Egremont against the dual government of the colonies, and when the latter tried to shelve the question by professing fatigue, curtly told him—what was true enough—that he must expect more if the affairs of America were to be put in order. He questioned the legality of the action of his colleagues, the Triumvirate (Grenville, Halifax and Egremont), in ordering the arrest of Wilkes of North Briton fame. But, oddly enough, considerations of a wholly different character appear to have influenced his actual resignation of office. Bute, nominally in retirement, but really playing the rôle of ministerial wirepuller-in-ordinary, had a surprising fancy for devising unlikely combinations; and now he was minded to conjure with the still potent name of Pitt. Once more, and, as it happened, for the last time, he sought the service of Shelburne as negotiator, and once more Shelburne, undeterred by past experiences, undertook the difficult position. Pitt nibbled, and for a time seemed about to bite, but in the end he drew off unhooked; whereupon (at the beginning of September, 1763) Shelburne immediately resigned the Board of Trade. What his real motive in taking this step was, his own letters do not at all clearly show. Doubtless he felt his uncordial relations with his colleagues irksome, but we can also hardly doubt that the attraction Pitt was beginning to exercise over him formed a material factor in his resolve. Freed from the trammels of office, Shelburne boldly stood forward as an opponent of the arbitrary and fatuous course which the Grenville ministry, all subservience to the king's wishes, adopted in the miserable business of Wilkes. Jeremy Bentham has said of Shelburne that he was the only statesman he ever heard of who did not fear the people. Certainly, Shelburne on this occasion showed, with an unmistakableness that simply infuriated George III., that he did not fear the court. The king made no secret of his displeasure. He dismissed the ex-minister even from his post of royal aide-de-camp, and when he appeared at court snubbed him pointedly by pretending not to notice his presence. Bute followed suit, and from this time all intercourse between him and Shelburne ceased.
For upward of a year after these events Shelburne kept entirely aloof from the world of politics, busying himself with the management of his estates in the country, collecting a vast number of historical documents (which are now in the British Museum), and every now and then coming up to London to enjoy the society of the "young orators" (as Walpole calls them) who frequented his house in Hill street, and the non-political clubs of littérateurs. Benjamin Franklin was among his visitors at this time, and the two, as Shelburne in a letter to Franklin nineteen years afterward reminds him, "talked upon the means of promoting the happiness of mankind."
But it was not in nature that a man of Shelburne's energetic and practical temperament should long be content to remain in his tent when a Grenville was afield with such (to say the least) debatable measures as the taxation of the colonies and the Regency Bill inscribed upon his banner. His marriage happening to occur just at the time when the famous Stamp Act was in the House of Lords kept Shelburne away from the debates on that measure, to which we may be sure he would, if present, have offered a persistent and uncompromising opposition; but at the end of April, 1765, he appeared in his place in Parliament to deliver a vigorous speech against the Regency Bill, and showed the courage of his opinions by leading a minority of eight into the lobby. To Rockingham, now at the head of the ministry, it was obvious that Shelburne, despite his years—he was barely eight-and-twenty—was a personage whose support was worth conciliating, and in July he offered to replace him in the Board of Trade. The offer was declined, and not unnaturally. Shelburne had always, with Pitt, protested against the policy of the Stamp Act, and could hardly have sat in a cabinet which, domineered over by the king, was preparing to carry it into execution. We may surmise, too, that he was not unalive to the advantages of a waiting game, and that, closely allied with Pitt as he had now become, and heartily believing in him, he was unwilling to take office on any other than what we may call the Pitt platform. Indeed, he himself says as much in writing to Pitt, a few months afterward, apropos of the Rockingham overtures: "My answer was very short and very frank—that, independent of my connection, I was convinced, from my opinion of the state of the court, as well as the state of affairs everywhere; no system could be formed, durable and respectable, if Mr. Pitt could not be prevailed on to direct and head it." In the same letter—the date is about December, 1765—he tells Pitt, "'Tis you, sir, alone, in everybody's opinion, can put an end to this anarchy, if anything can. I am satisfied your own judgment will best point out the time when you can do it with most effect. You will excuse me, I am sure, when I hazard my thoughts to you, as it depends greatly upon you whether they become opinions, but, by all I find from some authentic letters from America, nothing can be more serious than its present state; and though it is my private opinion it would be well for this country to be back where it was a year ago, I even despair of a repeal [of the Stamp Act] effecting that if it is not accompanied with some circumstances of a firm conduct, and some system immediately following such a concession."
Whatever the faults and weaknesses of the Rockingham administration of 1765-66—and they were many—their moral courage in proposing and carrying through the repeal of the Stamp Act ought to stand weightily to their credit. The king was well known to be vehemently averse to the slightest tampering with the act; and it is difficult for any body of statesmen, even where—which here was anything but the case—public opinion unanimously admits that a false step has been taken, to face the obloquy and sneers sure to attend upon any proposal to retrace it. However, the repealing measure was proposed and carried, Shelburne supporting the ministers with all his might, though, doubting as he did even the abstract right of England to tax her colonies, he with only four other peers divided the House against them on the question of the well-known declaratory resolution. Sic vos non vobis. Though the Rockingham administration repealed the Stamp Act, it was the popular belief that Pitt had been the real moving cause in the matter. Pitt, and none other, was demanded by the national voice. The king reluctantly yielded. Pitt marched into the royal closet with words of profoundest deference upon his tongue and the stern triumph of a conqueror in his heart, and proceeded to form an administration in which there was not even the offer of a place for Rockingham. For Shelburne, on the other hand, he immediately sent, and offered him the seals of secretary of state. Such an appointment must have been a bitter pill indeed to George III., but Pitt stood firm, and the king had to swallow his dislike as best he might. What Choiseul, the French minister, thought of the new arrangement appears from an interesting letter from him to Guerchy in London, which Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice quotes from a copy at Lansdowne House. His conclusion is: "Alors le ministère d'Angleterre aura une certaine consistance; sans cela, avec l'opposition de my Lord Temple, l'ineptie de M. Conway, la jeunesse et peut-être l'étourderie de my Lord Shelburne quoique gouverné par M. Pitt, il ne sera pas plus fort qu'il ne l'étoit ci-devant. My Lord Chatham à pris une charge trop forte d'être le gouverneur de tout le monde et le protecteur de tous." At this critical point, the mosaic administration (as Burke felicitously nicknamed it) just formed, Pitt entering the House of Lords as earl of Chatham, to the annoyed surprise of the multitude to whom he had so long been distinctively the Great Commoner, Shelburne at nine-and-twenty essaying the grave responsibilities of a secretaryship of state, the first volume of the biography before us comes, most tantalizingly, to a close. We stand on the threshold of the ever-memorable events of the war of independence, and our appetite is keenly whetted for the feast of freshly interesting details which, though Mr. Bancroft has enjoyed most liberal access to the papers at Lansdowne House, may confidently be expected to be brought to light by one possessed of the opportunities, and, as the volume before, us abundantly shows, the diligence and judgment of Lord Shelburne's present biographer. The main outlines of Shelburne's career throughout the war are familiar, doubtless, to most American readers. How he dissented from his colleagues' treatment of the American difficulty, and was driven, in consequence, to resign his office; how, in opposition, he struggled with all the energy of his character against the policy of North; how, when that policy received its deathblow in the surrender of Cornwallis, he had the quiet triumph of seeing the king come over to the views which he had so long vainly advocated; how, placed at the head of affairs, he arranged and got the king's consent to preliminaries of peace; and how, before he had time to finish his work, he was overthrown by the most disgraceful coalition that British parliamentary government has seen;—are not all these things written in a hundred history books? But pending the detailed and authentic narrative of these things that we shall look for in a future volume of this new life of Shelburne, we have here, by anticipation, a most powerful sketch, by Shelburne's own hand, of one of the principal—we cannot add famous—actors in the conduct of the war; we mean the notorious Lord George Sackville, who, after being cashiered for cowardice at Minden, was whitewashed by the first Rockingham ministry, and thenceforward so boldly held up his head again, and traded on his plausible gravity of manner and family connections, that in the heat of the war the court actually got him appointed to the peculiarly responsible post of American secretary. Shelburne is terribly severe upon his conduct. "He sent out (writes Shelburne) the greatest force which this country ever assembled, both of land and sea forces, which together perhaps exceeded the greatest effort ever made by any nation, considering the distance and all other circumstances, but was totally unable to combine the operations of the war, much less to form any general plan for bringing about a reconciliation. The best plan which was formed in the office was one which was given in by General Arnold. The inconsistent orders given to Generals Howe and Burgoyne could not be accounted for except in a way which it must be difficult for any person who is not conversant with the negligence of office to comprehend. Among many singularities he had a particular aversion to being put out of his way on any occasion. He had fixed to go into Kent or Northamptonshire at a particular hour, and to call on his way at his office to sign the despatches, all of which had been settled, to both these generals. By some mistake, those to General Howe were not fair copied, and, upon his growing impatient at it, the office, which was a very idle one, promised to send it to the country after him, while they despatched the others to General Burgoyne, expecting that the others could be expedited before the packet sailed with the first, which, however, by some mistake, sailed without them, and the wind detained the vessel which was ordered to carry the rest. Hence came General Burgoyne's defeat, the French declaration, and the loss of thirteen colonies." What, indeed, could have been, even a priori, greater fatuity than to entrust the direction of a war to a man who years before, on the continent of Europe, had over and over again proved himself to be utterly destitute of every military quality—of whose general repute the following lines, quoted by Shelburne (from a newspaper of the time of the Seven Years' War), with the caustic commentary, "It is feared there was too much foundation for what is insinuated, and more need not be said," are a sufficiently suggestive indication?—
All pale and trembling on the Gallic shore,
His lordship gave the word, but could no more:
Too small the corps, too few the numbers were,
Of such a general to demand the care.
To some mean chief, some major or a brig.,[D]
He left his charge that night, nor cared a fig.
'Twixt life and scandal, honor and the grave,
Quickly deciding which was best to save,
Back to the ships he ploughed the swelling wave.
Our view of Shelburne would be but a one-sided one if it regarded him solely and wholly as a public character, and took no count of the domestic and private side of him. We are proportionately grateful for some extracts from a diary kept at the time by his wife, Lady Shelburne, which her great-grandson has been able to lay before us. They picture to us a quietly-ordered, rather serious home, pretty constantly frequented, however, by company, as one would expect from the many interests and associations of its busy-minded master. He seems to have been in the habit of treating his wife, in private, to solid readings in history, politics and theology. One morning breakfast is followed by some chapters of Thucydides, the next by part of one of Abernethy's sermons, another day "Lord Shelburne read to us a paper concerning the Stamp Act in America;" while on a fourth occasion Lady Shelburne, after dining at the French ambassador's and going to a couple of gossipy assemblies afterward, comes home to her lord, who very appropriately reads to her "a sermon out of Barrow against judging others—a very necessary lesson delivered in very persuasive and pleasing terms." More of Lord Shelburne's private life we shall no doubt learn in the second volume of his biography, in which we are promised "a picture of the society of which Bowood [Lord Shelburne's country-seat in Wiltshire] was the centre during the latter part of the century." Here, for the present, we conclude by registering once more our cordial appreciation of the service that is rendered to history by the publication of such biographies of leading men as that treated of in this paper. Documentary evidence carefully collected, besides correcting the hasty and generally biased assertions of irresponsible contemporary chroniclers, forms the only trustworthy foundation for the judgment of the impartial historian.
W. D. R.