little consequence they were. He expressed his determination to rout out the present method of parties banding together, which could only be done by engaging able men, let their connections be what they might. Accordingly, the Gazette speedily announced, as those who filled the vacant places-Sir Edward Hawke, as first lord of the admiralty; Mr. Jenkinson, afterwards lord Liverpool, and Sir Piercy Brett, junior lords. Lord le Despencer was made postmaster general; lord Cornwallis, chief-justice in eyre; earl of Hertford, lord chamberlain; Mr. Hans Stanley, cofferer; Mr. Nugent was created lord Clare of Ireland, and made head of the board of trade. These noblemen and gentlemen still, however, were friends and partisans, many of them of the Bedfords, of Newcastle, and of Bute, so that there was conciliation as well as defiance.

forward a motion for inquiring into the affairs of the East India Company at a future day, in a committee of the whole house. This motion was, in reality, made at the instigation of Chatham. He had long dwelt on this project, but he deemed it would come before the public in a more favourable manner if introduced as an independent motion, and afterwards taken up on its own merits by the government. He therefore engaged Beckford, who was a man of strong sense and upright nature, though of somewhat defective education, to propose the inquiry. Beckford had not only long been of the highest influence in the City, but had acquired a good standing in the house from his bold and independent character.

The subject was of the very greatest importance. The East India Company, holding only a charter to maintain a

In one particular Chatham showed a determined and, as it proved, mischievous obstinacy. It was intimated to him by a friend that Edmund Burke was not averse to take office under him, declaring him to be "the readiest man in the house, perhaps, on all points, and one on whom the most thorough dependence might be placed, where he once owned an obligation." Chatham rejected the proposal haughtily, assigning as a reason that the maxims and notions of trade held by Mr. Burke were irreconcilable to his own. By this conduct-could it be dictated by jealousy of the rising genius ?-Chatham made a steady enemy of Burke.

On the 25th of November alderman Beckford brought

few trading factories on the coasts and up the rivers of India, had begun a system of conquest which had already extended their dominion over a great part of Bengal, Bahar, Orissa, and the Carnatic, and was likely to extend it over all India in time. The question was of the highest moment, in whom was to reside the sovereignty of these magnificent territories? The crown of Great Britain, or in this mercantile company? The British troops and fleets had effected these conquests, and had been paid chiefly out of the spoils of the conquered. Neither on that ground not any ground of imperial subordination could these vast states be suffered to remain in the hands of mere subjects. The company

derived its right to be in India at all from the charter obtained from the imperial government. It could not be permitted to a mere trading company to establish a right of sovereignty independent of their own government. But Chatham saw that the sooner this question was determined, the easier and the better. It was necessary for the authority of England, as well as for the protection of the nations, that the rights of the crown should be asserted. The accounts which were continually arriving from India were of the most unbounded rapacity and oppression of the company's servants; the honour of England was concerned to take the unhappy Hindoos out of the hands of a tribe of greedy and vulgar factors, who had no regard to anything but extortion and the amassing guilty wealth.

The motion of Beckford was opposed by Grenville and Charles Yorke. What is singular, Burke, destined in after years to expose the long train of horrors and crimes which the constant sway of the company had produced, at this time opposed the motion for inquiry with all his eloquence, and with all the revived resentment to Chatham which had just received its birth. He made no doubt of the question originating with Chatham; and, in no obscure language, intimated that he had kept his views on this great topic from both Townshend and Conway. He described Chatham as a person so sublimely and immeasurably high, that the greatest abilities and the most amiable dispositions amongst his colleagues could not gain access to him-a being before whom thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, and powers, "waving his hand over the whole treasury bench behind him," all veil their faces with their wings!

It was true that Chatham had not let Townshend or Conway into the full knowledge of his plans regarding the India question, but they were aware of the general nature of it, and were secretly opposed to it. The motion for inquiry was carried, and the company, at a full court, passed an unanimous vote recommending the directors, instead of opposing government, to endeavour to treat with them for terms.

In the Christmas recess Chatham hastened to Bath, to improve his health for the campaign of the ensuing session; but when parliament met again, in the middle of January, 1767, ministers were in consternation at his not reappearing. His cabinet was such a medley, composed of so many materials, drawn from the quarters of his enemies, that his best friends despaired of its working without his presence. Tidings came that he was suffering from a severe attack of his old tormentor, the gout; and weeks passed on, and he still was absent. At length they were greatly relieved by hearing that, though still in a bad condition, he was on the

way.

The good news quickly changed. He had reached the Castle Inn, at Marlborough, where he lay for a fortnight, in such a state that he was utterly incapacitated for business. The duke of Grafton and Beckford, who were his most devoted adherents, were thunder-struck. They found it impossible to keep in order the heterogeneous elements of the cabinet. All the hostile qualities, which would have lain still under the hand of the great magician, bristled up, and came boldly out. The spirit of Bedford, of Newcastle, and of Rockingham, was active in their partisans, and gathered courage to do mischief. Lord Shelburne and the

duke of Grafton became estranged; Charles Townshend, who had as much ambition and eccentricity as talent, began to show airs, and aim at supremacy. Grafton implored Chatham to come to town if possible, and when that was declared impracticable, to allow him to go down, and consult with him in his sick chamber. But he was informed that the minister was equally unable to move or to consult. Under these unfortunate circumstances, Charles Townshend, as chancellor of the exchequer, proposed the annual rate for the land-tax. He called for the amount of four shillings in the pound, the rate at which it had stood during the war; but he promised next year to reduce it to three. The country gentlemen grumbled, representing that in years of peace it was commonly reduced to three and sometimes to two. Grenville saw his advantage-his great opponent away-the landholders ready to rebel, and he moved an amendment that, instead of next year, the reduction should take place immediately. Dowdeswell supported him, and the amendment was carried by two hundred and six votes against a hundred and eighty-eight. The opposition was astonished at its own success, and yet it need not; they who had to vote were chiefly land-owners, and men who did not like taxing themselves. As lord Chesterfield observed, "All the landed gentlemen had bribed themselves with this shilling in the pound."

The opposition was in ecstacies: it was the first defeat of ministers on a financial question since the days of Walpole, and in our time, the chancellor would have resigned. The blow seemed to rouse Chatham. Three days after this event, on the 2nd of March, he arrived in town, though swathed in flannel, and scarcely able to move hand or foot. He was in the highest state of indignation against Townshend, not only as regarded the land-tax, by which half a million was struck from the revenue of the year, but because he had been listening to overtures from the directors of the India House, calculated to damage the great scheme of Indian administration which Chatham was contemplating. He declared that the chancellor of the exchequer and himself could not hold office together. A few days, and Townshend would have been dismissed from office, and the country might have escaped one of its greatest shocks; but, unfortunately, the malady of Chatham returned with redoubled violence, and in a new and more terrible form. He was obliged to refuse seeing any one on state affairs. For a time his colleagues and the king were urgent for some communication with him, supposing that his illness was merely his old enemy, the gout, and there was much dissatisfaction amongst his friends, and exultation amongst his enemies at what was deemed his crotchety humour in so entirely shutting himself up under such critical circumstances, when his own fame, his own great plans, and the welfare of the state, were all at stake. But, in time, it came to be understood that this refusal to see any one, or to comply with the repeated and earnest desires of the king, expressed in letters to him, to admit Grafton, as one of his best friends, or to examine important papers, was no voluntary matter, but the melancholy result of his ailment. It seems to have been the fact, that anxious, when at Marlborough, to get to town and resume the reins of business, his physician, Dr. Addington, had given him some strong medicines to disperse

and a half per cent. There was a danger of another jobbing mania, like that of the South Sea Bubble, and government was obliged to step in, and, by a bill, restrained the annual dividends to ten per cent.

This was bad enough; but the proceedings with regard to America were far worse, and put the finish to the mad policy of Grenville. Grenville, in fact, was again the instigator of the fresh sins. He proposed that, notwithstanding the resistance of the Americans, they should be compelled to maintain the troops employed there, and that taxes of some kind should be levied on them to the amount of four hundred thousand pounds per annum. Wise men would, at all events, have let the subject rest till the irritation occasioned by the stamp act had subsided, and until the best mode of proceeding could have had full and mature consideration. The temper of the Americans still continued most excited and antagonistic. They still refused to find the vinegar, salt, &c., required by the mutiny act, and the assembly of New York had set aside the act altogether, by a decree of its own. Even Chatham had been roused from his lethargy by the accounts of the spirit of the colonists to condemn their conduct in the severest terms. In reply to their continued remonstrances against the mutiny act, he declared that they would, by their violence and ingratitude, bring destruction on their heads. His friend Beckford protested that the devil possessed the minds of the Americans; that Grenville's act had raised the foul fiend, and that only a prudent firmness would lay him for ever.

To such prudence Townshend was a stranger. He had lost half a million from the revenue by the reduction of the land tax, and he pledged himself to the house to recover it from the Americans. He declared that he fully agreed with George Grenville, even in the principle of the stamp act, and ridiculed the distinction set up by Chatham, and admitted by Franklin, of the difference betwixt internal and external taxation. This was language calculated to enrage Chatham, could anything at that moment have touched him; it was more calculated to fire the already heated minds of the colonists, who, the more they reflected on Chatham's lofty language on the supreme authority of the mother country in the declaratory act, the more firmly they repudiated it.

The speech of Townshend, and his proposition to lay his new taxes in the shape of import duties, which Franklin had declared were quite allowable, and could not be objected to by his constituents the Americans, greatly alarmed lord Shelburne, who, as one of the secretaries of state, was daily receiving news of the ominous state of public feeling in the colonies. He declared that he could not understand the conduct and language of Townshend. To lay import duties on glass, paper, painters' colours, and tea, which would produce only thirty-five thousand or forty thousand pounds a year, was certainly to endanger a fierce excitement for a most paltry profit. He considered the language in which this was proposed the most unlikely to make the impost go down with the Americans.

But Gerard Hamilton, best known as "single-speech" Hamilton, who knew the colonies well, warned the ministers of the mine they were rushing upon in strong terms. "There

are," he said, "two hundred thousand men in these colonies fit not only to bear arms, but, having arms in their possession, unrestrained by the game laws. In Massachusetts there is an express law, by which every man is obliged to have a musket, a pound of powder, and a pound of bullets, always by him; so there is nothing wanting but a knapsack, or old stocking, which will do as well, to equip an army for marching, and nothing more than a Sartorius or a Spartacus at their head, requisite to beat your troops and your custom-house officers out of the country, and set your laws at defiance. There is no saying what their leaders may put them upon; but, if they are active, clever people, and love mischief as well as I do peace and quiet, they will furnish matter of consideration to the wisest amongst you, and perhaps dictate their own terms at last, as the Roman people formerly did in their famous secession upon the Sacred Mount. For my own part, I think you have no right to tax them, and that every measure built upon the supposed right stands upon a rotten foundation, and must consequently tumble down, perhaps upon the heads of the workmen."

This was clear, sound sense, and completely prophetic in its soundness. There was another imminent danger which lord Shelburne glanced at-that France and Spain, eager for avenging themselves of the disgrace and losses which Chatham had piled upon them, would be likely to step in, should there be a breach with America, and assist to foil us. But so little did these dangers present themselves to men generally, so little did they, even the greatest of them, Chatham and Burke, see clearly what Hamilton saw-that we had no right to tax them, but through their own representatives-that this bill passed with the utmost indifference, and was immediately followed by two others, one putting these and all other duties and customs that might be laid on the American colonies, under the management of the king's resident commissioners; and the other prohibiting the legislature of New York from passing any act, for any purpose whatever, until the mutiny act should be complied with. This last act was the only one complied with by the colonists, whilst, at the same time, it no doubt strengthened their opposition to the rest.

The session was closed with the voting of annuities of eight thousand pounds a-year each to the king's brothers, the duke of York, who soon after died, as supposed, in consequence of excess, at Modena, in Italy, and the dukes of Gloucester and Cumberland; and parliament was prorogued on the 2nd of July.

But through the whole of this session the opposition, encouraged by the absence of Chatham, had kept up a continual system of annoyance, and rendered the ministry without a head anything but a bed of roses. General Conway was heartily disgusted with his position, and anxious to resign. He declared that no life could be so unsupportable as a ministerial one at that moment, and that it was impossible for any one, who had not gone through the ordeal, to form any conception of the mancu vres, intrigues, and cabals, that prevailed; that there wer so many great men in the world, and so many little ones belonging to them, that it was impossible to do the country business properly. So far had the opposition prevaile