1761 to 1765 the King had ruled through Bute and Grenville. He had forced the peace of Paris on the country by means of unprecedented bribery, and had asserted his authority with a temerity that did not stop short of dismissing soldiers from their places because they disapproved of the peace. For one year (July 1765 to 1766) the Government had been conducted on other principles. Rockingham had been made Prime Minister, because the King was piqued by Grenville and Pitt had refused to form a Ministry without Temple who was himself pledged to Grenville. The first Rockingham Ministry did three important things in spite of the King. It carried a condemnation of general warrants; it restored the officials who had been dismissed on account of their opposition to the peace; and it repealed the Stamp Act. The last great measure was unfortunately accompanied by the Declaratory Act, asserting the right of England to tax America, a concession to English opinion which Mr. Lecky considers was indispensable.

It was

The Rockingham Ministry in the circumstances of its birth, its life, and its death was merely a concrete illustration of the strength of the King's system. Its great weakness from the first was the absence of Pitt. the supreme necessity of the moment that Pitt should join the Ministry, and yet the most lavish concessions left him aloof and constrained. He agreed with the policy of the Government; he could have held any position he liked, and he rejected all overtures with an unconcealed and irritable suspicion.1 Rockingham never forgave him, and Pitt's conduct in that crisis is probably the explanation of Burke's lasting dislike. This great public catastrophe may be explained on various grounds. If individuals have no virtues, said Junius, their vices may be of use to us. No master of intrigue ever excelled George in the art of marshalling even the virtues of public men in the great army of public vices

1 "Confidence," he said, "is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom ; youth is the season of credulity."

that rallied to his banner. Pitt had no taste for the smaller booties, and the tiny pomps, by which George won and kept his faithful servants, but his gorgeous vanity revelling in the buoyant consciousness of his importance was betrayed by a natural and just contempt for the whole system of family connections into a fatal allegiance to the King's plan. The cry of the dissolution of parties was the common cry of the King and of Pitt. To the King it meant ministries eclectic, incoherent, and docile: to Pitt it meant the overthrow of the domination of a few proud, selfish houses, and the rule of sheer talent and popularity. When Burke was busy making straight lines in politics, separating men and forces by the definite distinction of opinion, Pitt saw nothing but the faint and dingy boundaries of family selfishness, and the disappointment of crestfallen factions. A miraculous combination of tact and good luck had thrown into the King's arms the one man who could really have destroyed him, the man whom he dreaded, as he afterwards came to dread Fox.

In its career no less than in this misfortune that blighted its origin, the Rockingham Ministry reflects the influence of the King's policy. The most powerful statesman was kept out of the Ministry by the lustre of the new cry against the government of great families. The Ministry itself was overthrown by agents whose services were enlisted by a glamour of a very different kind. George, who did everything that flattery and a prodigal distribution of patronage could do, to make office a bed of roses for his favourites, spared no pains to make it a bed of brambles for Ministers he disliked. He refused to create peers; he encouraged insubordination in the Ministry; and he brought into the field against his own Ministers all the energies of the King's friends. He allowed Lord Strange to spread the report that he was opposed to the repeal of the Stamp Act; the Chancellor and the Secretary of War, besides twelve of the King's household voted against that repeal, and the actual dismissal of the Ministry had been pre

ceded by the open revolt of the Chancellor. The King's behaviour to Rockingham's second Ministry, and to the Coalition was a mere revival of the arts he had employed against Rockingham's first Government.

The Government that succeeded was a Government after the King's own heart. It included men from all parties. The King's friends held several strongholds; Conway left the Rockingham party to join it; Grafton, who became Minister of War, had already revolted from that party; Shelburne and Barré were closely attached to Pitt; Camden, who had taken the popular side in the Wilkes case, and opposed the coercion of America, sat side by side with North, who was a brilliant advocate of the Court; Pitt became Chatham, and soon learnt from bitter experience that there are ties more stifling than those of party, and that to make a Government miscellaneous is not necessarily to make it independent.1 If the King had ruled the elements, his enterprises could not have prospered more steadily. Chatham, stripped of most of Pitt's popularity, lost his health, the vigour if not the sanity of his judgment, and all but the semblance of control, and his colleagues, who had opposed him whilst he was still active, used the periods of an inscrutable silence, which began in a theatrical and morbid mystery, and ended in mortal paralysis, to do and to tolerate everything that Chatham himself would most strenuously have resisted. A Minister who had made his name dreaded on the heroic stage of the conflicts of Europe, was now reduced to a scramble for power with his own mediocre colleagues. In Chatham's Government all Pitt's qualities became diminutive, and his giant authority something tottering and fragile. Prussia rejected his overtures for an alliance; France forgot her terrors and annexed Corsica; with Pitt still nominally a King's Minister, Townshend carried his Act for taxing America, and the House of Commons declared its vote could exclude Wilkes per

1 Burke might have had a seat in the Board of Trade, but he remained faithful to Rockingham.

manently from Parliament. In his wildest moments the King would never have hoped that under the ægis and fading glory of Pitt's name he could accomplish all the projects that Pitt had so valiantly obstructed.

Chatham only recovered his health to resign, and by one method or another, the Whig element in the Ministry was reduced, and the Court influence strengthened. Shelburne and other friends of Chatham disappeared to make way for the recognised champions of the Court, and when Grafton retired in 1770 he was succeeded by North, an adroit and skilful defender of everything that was precious to George. Chatham was by this time disillusioned, and had taken into active opposition what credit still clung to the memories of Pitt; the calamities of the nation were growing; there was a palpable decay of national credit and power abroad, at home there was acute dissatisfaction in the country, in Parliament a fiery attack, in the Cabinet not a single commanding name, and yet the Court maintained its ascendency for the next twelve years. That fact alone is the best measure of the strength and tenacity of the system which the Rockingham party meant to destroy.

The vicious supremacy of the Court which George had gradually built up, using all the materials at his disposal, the venality of one man, the social vanity of another, the pride or the public spirit of a third, was not the only obstacle to the success of the Rockingham party. The walled city was strong and powerful. The forces available for attack were not united. There were certain differences between Chatham, even the disillusioned Chatham, and the Rockingham Whigs. Chatham's daydream of a sublime patriotism dissolving all the lesser attachments and allegiances of politics and creating a powerful and independent Ministry was become something of a nightmare to a man who had served for two years in Grafton's Government, and had known that the dissolution of parties meant the consolidation of Court power. But neither party could bestow on the other an unequivocal confidence. To the Rockinghams, though Burke

had transformed the Whig creed and illuminated it with the radiant colours of a new public spirit, brushing out all the mere emblems of patrician houses, family connections were still an important and respectable part of the constitution; the old musty alliances were not abolished, but they were transfigured into an association for great public ends; to Chatham they were at the best what Voltaire- said of the French land laws, the rubbish of a Gothic building fallen to ruins. A demagogue in the true and best sense of the word, Chatham was never on terms of a cordial alliance with the Rockinghams, whose sympathy with democracy was very limited.1 He was much more public spirited than the Rockinghams over the Irish Absentee Tax. He despised their reliance on high-born hegemonies in politics; he rebelled against their moderation of tone and tactics, and in spite of the mortifications he had suffered in the Government in which the King like Dædalus had constructed an inextricable labyrinth to bewilder his energies and dissipate his popularity, he never accepted their central doctrine of a strict discipline of party, designed to overawe the Court.

It can easily be understood that the fastidious Rockinghams, on their side, felt some qualms about the noisy rhetoricians who rubbed shoulders with Chatham, and some diffidence, in the crusade against the Crown, about the sincerity of a statesman who had deserted the Whigs in the great crisis of 1765. Chatham as a leader had as many uncertain humours as Pompey, and the letters of Rockingham show how difficult it was to concert measures with a statesman of his imperious moods, his whimsical and sudden temper, his massive and lonely arrogance. Born to win battles rather than campaigns Chatham had enough 1 In 1770 Chatham had urged Rockingham to aim at strengthening the democratic element in the Constitution (Lecky, vol. iii. p. 381).

* "The Marquess," he wrote, "is an honest and honourable man, but moderation moderation is the burden of the song among the body. For myself I am resolved to be in earnest for the public and shall be a scarecrow of violence to the gentle warblers of the grove, the moderate Whigs, and temperate statesmen."