CHAPTER IV.

Lord Bute Prime Minister.-Policy of the Favourite.-John Wilkes.-Lord Bute resigns. -George Grenville's Ministry.-"North Briton," No. 45.-Arrest of Wilkes.— Negotiations for Mr. Pitt's return to power.-The king's desire to govern.-The Wilkite agitation.-Hogarth, Wilkes, and Churchill.-Wilkes ordered to be prose cuted.-Expelled the House of Commons.-Great Debates on General Warrants.Officers dismissed for votes in Parliament.-Restrictions on the American Colonies.→ Grenville's Resolutions on American Taxation.-The Stamp Act passed.-Resist ance in America.-Motives for passing the Stamp Act.

THE influence of Pitt upon the action of the government was at an end, when the war which he had directed, and to which he continued to lend his spirit, came to an end. The policy in the conduct of the internal affairs of Great Britain, which now commenced its development, provoked an opposition, resulting in a conflict, in some respects the most lamentable, if not the most disgraceful, which had been witnessed in previous antagonism of the authority of government and the popular sentiment. The earl of Bute became ostensibly, as he had been for some time in reality, the prime minister, when the duke of Newcastle resigned his office of first lord of the Treasury. There might have been surprise that a Scottish peer, of no marked ability, known only as the favourite of the king's mother, and the chief officer of the household of the young sovereign when he was prince of Wales, should become the supreme director of affairs, and receive the highest honours, such as that of the Garter. But the temper of the nation would not have been blown into a flame, had not the constitutional guardians of public opinion shut up the safety valves which allow that mighty power of a free state harmlessly to exert its irresistible influence. The House of Commons quickly became unpopular; and that unpopularity left the throne open to the rude assaults of a headlong force, which threatened to destroy its claims to respect and obedience. In attempting to restore the influence of prerogative by weakening the power of the oligarchical dispensers of patronage, Bute endangered the success of a scheme in some respects desirable, by failing to cultivate the support of the people. Party contests had been utterly suspended during the triumphant administration of Pitt. When his power was at an end they were renewed with a virulence which it would be difficult perfectly to understand,

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if we did not see in this change a natural result of a more deepseated change in the social organization. From the Revolution of 1688 to the Rebellion of 1745, the contest was between the adherents to the Bill of Rights and to the Act of Settlement, and the gradually decreasing partizans of the Stuarts; and, coincident with the existence with these factions, a perpetual struggle between High Church and Low Church, between Orthodoxy and Dissent. The Crown during the whole period from the Revolution to the death of George II., had, with the exception of the short ministry of Harley and Bolingbroke, chiefly looked for its support to the great Whig party, and their successive phases of administration the popular element necessarily preponderated. There had been at many seasons a fierce struggle for supremacy; but at no period were the notions of prerogative advanced as the principle upon which the monarchy was to be upheld. It was not attempted to be disguised that the new minister of George III., who had supplanted, or was endeavouring to supplant, the old family influences, had resolved to place the power of the Crown upon a border basis -to bring back something of the old ascendency of prerogative. He had shown his disposition to contend against the force of public opinion, by displacing the popular minister. The portion of history which we have now to trace has been justly described as "equally anomalous and disagreeable."

Upon the resignation of the duke of Newcastle in June, 1762, -on the alleged plea of his difference with the Cabinet on the question of continuing a subsidy to the king of Prussia, but more probably from his perception that the parliamentary foundation of his power was to be cut from under his feet,-the earl of Bute left his office of Secretary of State to become the head of the Treasury. George Grenville then became Secretary of State; and sir Francis Dashwood Chancellor of the Exchequer. But whatever were the minor arrangements, the real power of the governement was centred in Bute; and upon him fell that storm of popular indignation which Wilkes and Churchill embodied in the bitterest of personal attacks. In June, 1762, the first number appeared of “The North Briton." This paper, which afterwards acquired such a dangerous celebrity, was set up by John Wilkes, with the assistance of Charles Churchill. It was marked by no great display of talent; but it was daring in its personality. "The North Briton" did not ob serve the old decorum of giving names by initials. The king was not softened into the K-, nor was Bute pointed to as B. The minister's name was not disguised as "The Jack-boot," nor as the

Dr. Arnold-" Lectures on History," p. 263.

"Thane," as the caricatures exhibited him, More paltry than the assaults upon the favourite's political character was the attempt to lower him in the estimation of the English as a Scot. Wilkes did this coarsely. Churchill with extraordinary skill, in his "Prophecy of Famine," which appeared in January 1763. We can read this production as we read Dryden's “Absalom and Achitophel," utterly forgetting the partizan to admire the poet. Lord Temple, the friend of Wilkes, deprecated the system pursued in "The North Briton" of "attacking at once the whole nation of Scotland, by wholesale and retail, in so very invidious a manner.”* He shrunk also from having "Lord B.'s name at full length." Much of the odium that fell upon this minister is to be ascribed rather to the belief that he was a favourite, than to his actions as a statesman. It was to the suspicious circumstances which made him the ruler of Leicester House that the people attributed the confidence placed in him by the young king. The common parallel of the libellers was Mortimer and queen Isabel. That a minion should have displaced such a minister as Pitt, was sufficient to make his name execrable without any very odious acts of power. His precipitation in concluding the peace without obtaining the full advantage of the war, would have been quickly forgotten. But his rash dismissal of three of the greatest amongst the peers from the Lord-Lieutenancies of their counties, for their presumption in offering objections to the conditions of the Peace, indicated a temper in which thinking men saw something like an attempt to go back to arbitrary power. The dislike of Bute became so intense, that in many plaçes a jackboot and a petticoat were publicly burnt, as types of the favourite and his patroness. When a Bill, for laying a tax upon cider was passed amidst great opposition, the popular clamour reached its height; and at last the unhappy minister was afraid to apear in the streets without the escort of a gang of bruisers. Suddenly, on the 8th of April, 1763, lord Bute resigned all his official employments. It would seem, from a correspondence between him and George Grenville, that Bute had the sole power of forming a new ministry, previous to his resignation. Upon offering the great post of First Lord of the Treasury to George Grenville, he made use of the phrase "the king's friends," in recommending Grenville cordially to take the assistance of those who came under this designation. Grenville became the head of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer; lord Egremont and lord Halifax the two Secretaries of State. Upon the retirement of Bute, Fox was raised sto the peerage as lord Holland.. Although he ceased to take any "Grenville Papers," vol. i. p. 457.

NORTH BRITION, NO. 45.

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part in public affairs, he clung to the great sinecure of his office of Paymaster; and had the gratification of still receiving those vast irregular emoluments which Pitt despised. The voice of public execration might scarcely reach him amidst the fantastic buildings which he raised at Kingsgate, near Margate; where, though

"Old, and abandon'd by each venal friend,"

he might hug himself in the satisfaction that he had done as much as any man in his time to play the great game of politics solely with reference to his own private advantage; and had won by his talents and perseverance the real prize of statesmanship, whilst his eloquent rival had only the barren fame.

On the 19th of April, eleven days after the resignation of lord Bute, the king closed the session of Parliament. His majesty dwelt upon the conditions of the definitive treaty of peace, as advantageous to his own subjects; and he then added, “My expectations have been fully answered, by the happy effects which the several allies of my crown have derived from this salutary measure. The powers at war with my good brother, the king of Prussia, have been induced to agree to such terms of accommodation as that great prince has approved; and the success which has attended my negotiation has necessarily, and immediately, diffused the blessing of peace through every part of Europe." On the 23rd of April came out No. 45 of "The North Briton," in which the comment of Wilkes upon this passage was considered by some, to use Walpole's expression, as giving "a flat lie to the king himself." Wilkes used these words: "The infamous fallacy of this whole sentence is apparent to all mankind; for it is known that the king of Prussia did not barely approve, but absolutely dictated as conqueror, every article of the terms of peace. No advantage of any kind has accrued to that magnanimous prince from our negotiation; but he was basely deserted by the Scottish Prime Minister of England." In this famous "North Briton" Wilkes cautiously abstained from giving the lie to the king himself. It was, he said, "the minister's speech," ‚”—an imposition as great upon the sovereign, as upon the nation: the sanction of the king's name was given to the most unjustifiable public doctrines. The proceedings of the Government against Wilkes not only made the witty profligate the most famous man in England; but rendered him the centre of a constitutional resistance to the Prerogative of the Crown and the Privilege of Parliament which mixed up as it was with the cause of a man in many respects worthless, eventually placed the liberties of the peo

* Gray-" Impromptu on Kingsgate."

ple upon a firmer foundation of legal right than had previously been acknowledged. On the 30th of April a "General Warrant" was issued against the authors, printers, and publishers of a seditious and treasonable paper entitled "The North Briton," No. 45, &c. By a "General Warrant " is understood an authority to apprehend any person supposed to be implicated in a particular charge. Balfe, the printer, and Kearsley, the publisher, were taken at once. The king's messengers entered the house of Wilkes at midnight on the 29th, but he protested against their intrusion at such an hour; and they quitted him, to return in the morning. He was carried before the two Secretaries of State, and was by them committed to the Tower; his papers being seized and examined. At first he was closely confined, and was debarred all intercourse with his friends, or the use of pen and paper. When these severe restrictions were laid aside, he was visited by earl Temple and the duke of Grafton. On the 3rd of May, he was brought to the Court of Common Pleas, upon a writ of habeas corpus granted by sir Charles Pratt, the Lord Chief Justice. Serjeant Glynn argued the case, and Wilkes spoke himself with that boldness approaching to effrontery, which was one of his characteristics. The court postponed its decision till the 6th. The crown lawyers had contrived not to have the question then raised of the legality of a General Warrant; but the Chief Justice, speaking in the name of himself and his fellow judges, determined that his privilege as a member of parliament protected Wilkes from arrest. That privilege, Pratt said, held good in all cases except treason, felony, and an actual breach of the peace. A libel was not a breach of the peace, but only tended to such breach. "Let Mr. Wilkes be discharged from his imprisonment." The next day earl Temple was dismissed from the Lord-Lieutenancy of Buckinghamshire, and his name was struck off the list of Privy Councillors. Wilkes was deprived of his commission as a colonel of the Buckinghamshire militia. For seven years did the battle go on-a battle in which every supposed victory of the Government was a real defeat. Of this extraordinary contest, in its various aspects, we shall have to take up the narrative from time to time as we proceed. At every step it will be impossible not to see the weakness and folly of the Ministry and the Parliament; and, however we may despise the reckless audacity of the demagogue over whom public opinion threw its shield, we cannot but rejoice that the eternal principles of justice were asserted from the judgment seat, and that the majesty of the law was not sullied by any such subserviency to power as had disgraced earlier periods of our history.