assertion of the royal prerogative, so that the king might be able to control the House of Commons and the government through it in the best interests of the nation, which, it was believed, were easily ascertainable. From politicians, such as Pitt himself, George had learned the evils of the Newcastle faction and its control of the Whig party, and had been led to see the desirability of destroying that faction and its power. All these phenomena made for a determination on George's part to alter the system of ministerial government as it had developed since Walpole's time, and to go back to the situation as it had been in the reign of William III. George had no wish to be an absolute monarch, but he wished to recover powers which his grandfather and great-grandfather had lost; and instead of being the servant of a ministry drawn from one party, he wished to be his own chief minister, served by the best men in all parties or factions. To do this he must destroy the Whig domination The King was enabled to make a beginning in his plans by the fact that about one hundred and fifty members of the House of Commons were practically royal appointees. Some of these were office holders who held their appointments from the crown as long as they voted as the crown desired. Others were representatives of boroughs where the voters were all treasury officers and holders of government sinecures, who voted as they were instructed for members guaranteed to take orders. Ordinarily these members, called Treasury members and placemen, were placed at the disposal of the ministry in power to strengthen their majority, but the king could assert himself and take control of the group himself. This George III did, and presently the Treasury members and placemen formed a party in the House of Commons, known as the King's Friends. The King's Friends were, of course, only a minority of the members of the House; and, as long as the Whigs in Parliament stood solidly behind the ministry, the King could accomplish nothing. The Whig party, however, was not solidly behind Pitt and Newcastle. It had become badly divided into bitterly opposed factions. The bulk of the party, led by Newcastle, was called the Old Connection, or the Old Whigs. They represented the Walpolean tradition. Then there were the Grenville Whigs, led by George Grenville and the Earl of Temple; the Blooms. Rest bury gang, the rapacious followers of the Duke of Bedford; the following of William Pitt; and others. These factions had split off from the Old Connection on the rock of greed for power and spoils, and they were willing to make any alliance to secure revenge on the Old Connection and admission to office for themselves. With the nucleus of his own friends, George, III now turned to the Whig factional leaders, to make terms, with them against Newcastle and Pitt. They needed his help, but he needed them worse, and he found them hard bargainers. They consented to aid him to carry on the sort of government he envisaged, but only after such concessions as gave them the practical control of the policies of the state. In 1761 Pitt was forced to resign because of a disagreement between him and the King over his war policy. Newcastle soon followed him into retirement. George made his own tutor, the Earl of Bute, Prime Minister with the backing of his own party, the King's Friends. The Earl of Bute was personally unpopular because he was a Scotsman; and he won general disfavor by his anxiety for peace and his failure, when making the treaty of Paris of 1763, to take everything for the empire that had been won by Pitt's genius. In the face of this already great popular disapproval, the Chancellor of the Exchequer introduced a new tax on cider and perry in the budget of 1763. Bute had no desire to increase taxation for its own sake, but he was faced by the necessity of meeting the charges on a national debt, which had been increased by the war from £72,,000,000 to £132,000,000. The interest alone was almost as great as the whole government expenditure in 1755, and new taxation was absolutely essential. The cider and perry taxes were carried, but shortly afterward Bute resigned. The King then came to terms with George Grenville, the brother of the Earl of Temple; and a few months later the Duke of Bedford was also induced to enter the ministry. The Old Connection had been "Little Englanders," satisfied with the empire as it was, and not particularly interested in colonies, as long as they could cultivate wealth at home by battening on the state. The Grenvilleites and Bedfordites, on the other hand, were imperialists of a very marked sort. They were interested in land speculation in the colonies; they were closely in touch with the powerful lobbies of the sugar planters, the British East India Company, and the Scottish tobacco importers. They hoped the colonies would provide more and ever more jobs for their needy followers, but their most pressing problem after they came into office was the service of the war debt. In view of the popular hostility to further taxes at home, Grenville and Bedford looked to the colonies for help in solving the pressing fiscal difficulty which confronted Great Britain. It is in terms of these revenue problems, which were accentuated by the imperial ambitions of Bedford and Grenville, that the history of the next decade with its failures in the colonial world must be studied. THE CABINET. SUGGESTED BOOKS FOR CHAPTER XVII M. T. Blauvelt, The Development of Cabinet Government. ECONOMIC HISTORY. N. A. Brisco, The Economic Policy of Robert Walpole. W. R. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of the English, Scottish, and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720. BIOGRAPHY. A. Ballantyne, Lord Carteret. E. Charteris, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. W. Coxe, Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole. W. H. Craig, Life of Lord Chesterfield. W. E. Manners, John Manners, Marquis of Granby. J. Morley, Sir Robert Walpole. Earl of Ilchester, Henry Fox. T. W. Riker, Henry Fox, First Lord Holland. Lord Rosebery, Lord Chatham, His Early Life and Connections to 1756. G. O. Trevelyan, The Early History of Charles James Fox. P. C. Yorke, The Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke, Lord Hardwicke. W. H. Wilkins, Caroline the Illustrious. CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS. J. Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of George II to the Death of Queen Caroline. H. Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George II. CHAPTER XVIII REVOLUTION IN THE EMPIRE The governments which held office in Great Britain from 1760 to 1785 were the ministries of Duke of Newcastle and William Pitt, (1757)-1762 Earl of Bute, 1762-1763 George Grenville, 1763-1765 Marquis of Rockingham, 1765-1766 Earl of Chatham (William Pitt), 1766-1767 Duke of Grafton, 1767-1770 Lord North, 1770-1782 Marquis of Rockingham, (March-July) 1782 Earl of Shelburne, 1782-1783 tion Duke of Portland (Fox-North Coalition), (April-Dec.) 1783 The Duke of Newcastle carried on the tradition of Walpole, with the help of William Pitt, until 1762. Upon his resignation, the Earl of Bute formed a government of the King's Friends, but soon resigned in favor of a coalition of factions headed by George Grenville. For the next 20 years Great Britain was governed by coalitions of factions, in which the King's Friends were joined with other groups to form a government. In the Grenville ministry the Grenville faction had the leading place, joined within a few months by the Bedfordites; in the Rockingham ministry the Old Connection (Newcastle Whigs) controlled the government; in the Chatham and Grafton ministries all factions were represented-Pitt and his friends, the Grenvilleites and Bedfordites, the King's Friends, and the Newcastle Whigs. In the North ministry the King's Friends were more dominant, but Bedfordite elements were important. The return of the Marquis of Rockingham represented the momentary recovery of the Old Connection and the Chathamites, and on Rockingham's death, his place was taken by the Earl of Shelburne, the Chathamite leader. The Portland ministry was an "Infamous coalition" between the King's Friends and a part of the Old Connection led by Charles James Fox, and the ministry of William Pitt represented the King's Friends with certain new elements. In 1793 Pitt's followers were joined by the Portland Whigs to form the new Tory party. Mercantilist policy was intended to keep the colonies in a "firmer dependence" upon the mother country and to render them more "beneficial and advantageous unto it." The interests of the colonials were subordinated to the interests of business men at home, and whenever any conflict of interest between them arose, the decision of the government was nearly always in favor of the home interest. It was inevitable that the colonists should resent their treatment. The suppression and restriction of their industry, particularly of the iron industry in Pennsylvania; the attempt to compel the New Englander to produce masts and ship stores from his forests for export to England, rather than the more profitable timber and barrel staves for building purposes and the West India trade; the compulsion to trade only with Great Britain and British possessions created irritation in the colonies long before the first half of the eighteenth century had ended. In 1748 Kalm, a distinguished Swedish botanist, visited the colonies. He was so struck by their discontent with British rule, that he predicted their independence within thirty years. As long as the French controlled Canada and the Mississippi Valley, there was no danger of colonial independence. As long as France threatened the colonies from the north and west, they would maintain their connection with Great Britain. The importance of French control of Canada as a bond of union between the North Atlantic colonies and Great Britain was pointed out in pamphlets during the course of the Seven Years' War, and the colonial agents urged the restoration of Canada to France on this ground during their campaign to secure the annexation of Guadeloupe instead of Canada in 1763. It must be remembered, moreover, that the Atlantic colonies were not a single homogeneous area with identical interests. No single grievance had the same weight in every colony, or in all parts of the same colony, and common action to secure independence was chimerical in the middle of the century. It was even extremely difficult to get them to take any kind of united action in the case of the Seven Years' War, when France threatened them all. Just when the removal of the fear of France through the annexation of Canada in 1763 made the thought of independence possible, the policy of the Grenville ministry created new grievances. As soon as the peace of Paris had been signed in 1763, many colonial speculators looked forward to operations in the Ohio Valley on an extended scale. It was no part of the policy of the government to close the valley permanently, but it was believed that France would make an effort to recover what she had lost in 1763, and that, to checkmate her, the Indians west |