"entering his service in any office." "I am afraid," he added, and it was the king himself who repeated the remark, "I foresee more misfortunes in your majesty's reign than in any former period of history." Deserted in this wise by the connection in whom he had trusted, Pitt repaired to the king, who accepted his excuses, and “parted from him very civilly." Thus passed what seemed to him the most difficult and painful crisis of his life. "All is now over with me," said he, despondingly, "and by a fatality I did not expect;" with grief and disappointment in his heart, he retired into Somersetshire. "Let us see," said the ministers, "if the Duke of Cumberland will be desperate enough to form an administration without Pitt and Temple." Northington assured them that they might remain in office, if they chose. The most wary gave in their adhesion; even Charles Yorke went to Grenville and declared his support, and Gilbert Elliott did the like. "Our cause is in your hands," said the Bedfords to Grenville, "and you will do it justice." This was the moment of his greatest pride and political importance; he was at the head of the treasury; he had defeated his sovereign's efforts to change the ministry; he was looked up to and owned by the Bedfords as their savior and protector. His ambition, his vanity, and his self-will were gratified. 1765. July. The king had been complaining in strong terms of the little business done, and especially of "the neglect of the colonies and new conquests;" and the indefatigable Grenville applied himself earnestly to American measures. Bishops were to be engrafted on a plan which he favored for an ecclesiastical establishment in Canada. On the fourth of July, he proposed a reform in the courts of admiralty; in the following days, he, with Lord North, settled the emoluments of the officers charged with carrying into execution the American stamp act; made an enumeration of the several districts for inspection; provided for supplying vacant places among the stamp distributors; and on the ninth, his last day in office, consulted about removing incidental objections to the measure, in which he gloried as his own. 1765. July. Meantime, Cumberland had succeeded in forming an administration out of the remnants of the old whig aristocracy and their successors; and, on the tenth, Grenville was summoned to St. James's to surrender the seals of his office. "I beseech your majesty," he said, " as you value your own safety, not to suffer any one to advise you to separate or draw the line between your British and American dominions. Your colonies are the richest jewel of your crown. If any man should venture to defeat the regula tions laid down for the colonies, by a slackness in the execution, I shall look upon him as a criminal and the betrayer of his country." The conditions on which the new ministry came into power were agreed upon at the house of the Duke of Newcastle, and did not extend beyond the disposal of offices. They introduced no projects of reform; they gave no pledges in behalf of liberty, except such as might be found in the traditions of their party and their own personal characters. The old Duke of Newcastle was the type of the administration, though he took only the post of privy seal, with the patronage of the church. The law adviser of its choice, as attorney-general, was Charles Yorke, whose opinions coincided with those of Mansfield. Its mediator with the king was the Duke of Cumberland, who had a seat in the cabinet as its protector. The post of head of the treasury was assigned to the Marquis of Rockingham. He was an inexperienced man of five-and-thirty, possessing no great natural abilities, of a feeble constitution, and a nervous timidity which made him almost incapable of speaking in public; acquainted with race-courses, and the pedigree of horses; unskilled in the finances of his country, and never before proposed for high office. But he had clear and sagacious sense and good feeling, unshaken fortitude, integrity, kindness of nature, and an honest and hearty attachment to moderated liberty. His virtues were his arts, and they were his talents also. Had he been untitled and less opulent, he never would have been heard of; but, being high in rank, of vast wealth, and generous without wastefulness, he was selected, at the moment 1765. July. when the power of the oligarchy was passing its culmination, to lead its more liberal branch; and such was his own ambition of being first in place, such his sincerity, such his fidelity to his political connections, that from this time till the day of his death he remained their standard-bearer. His deficiencies in knowledge and in rhetoric, the minister compensated by selecting as his secretary and intimate friend Edmund Burke, who had recently left the service of one of the opposite party, and renounced a pension bestowed by Halifax. It was characteristic of that period for a man like Rockingham to hold for life a retainer like Edmund Burke; and never did a true-hearted, kindly, and generous patron find one more faithful. He brought to his employer, and gave up to his party, all that he had boundless stores of knowledge, especially respecting the colonies; wit, philosophy, imagination, gorgeous eloquence, unwearied industry, mastery of the English tongue; and, as some think, the most accomplished intellect which the nation had produced for centuries. His ambition was fervid, yet content with the applause of the aristocracy. His political training had brought him in contact with the board of trade, and afterwards with the government of Ireland, the country of his birth. His writings are a brilliant picture of the British constitution, as it existed in the best days of the eighteenth century; and his genius threw lustre over the decline of the party which he served. No man had a better heart, or more thoroughly hated oppression; but he possessed neither experience in affairs, nor tranquil judgment, nor the rule over his own spirit: so that his genius, under the impulse of bewildering passions, wrought much evil to his country and to Europe, even while he rendered noble service to the cause of commercial freedom, to Ireland, and to America. The seals of the northern department of state were conferred on the Duke of Grafton, a young man of respectable abilities, yet impaired by fondness for pleasure, a ready speaker, honest and upright, naturally inclining to the liberal side. He had little sagacity, but he meant well; and, in after years, preferred himself to record and to ex plain his errors of judgment rather than to leave in doubt the sincerity of his character. This is he to whom the poet Gray, in verses splendid but not venal, flung praise as to one who kept the steady course of honor on the wild waves of public life. In his college vacations, he had seen Pitt at Stowe, and been fascinated by his powers; he took office in the hope that the ministry might adopt the great commoner as its chief. 1765. July. Conway, who had been arbitrarily dismissed from military office, was suggested as Grafton's associate. But "thinking men foresaw "peril to the stamp act, in "intrusting its execution to one of the very few persons who had opposed the passing of it;" and the king wished to consign that office to Charles Townshend, by whom it had so long been coveted. Who can tell how America would have fared under him, in an administration whose patron and adviser was the victor at Culloden? But though the king, in person, used every argument to prevail with him, yet he declined to join in a system which he compared to "lutestring, fit only for summer wear." Even so late as on the ninth of July, the king, who had reserved the place of secretary at war for Conway, renewed his entreaties; but the persistent refusal of Townshend, who held fast to his lucrative office of paymaster, threw the seals of the southern department and America, at the very last moment, into the hands of Conway. The new secretary, like Shelburne and Edmund Burke, was an Irishman, and therefore disposed to have "very just notions" of the colonies. His temper was mild and moderate; in his inquiries he was reasonable and accurate; and it was his desire to unite both countries in affection as well as interest. But he was diffident and hesitating. He seemed to be inflexibly proud, and was not firm; to be candid, and was only scrupulous. His honesty, instead of nerving his will, kept him for ever a skeptic. He would in battle walk up to the cannon's mouth with imperturbable courage; but, in the cabinet, his mind was in a perpetual seesaw, balancing arguments, and never reaching fixed conclusions, unless his sense of honor was touched, or his gentle disposition was invigorated by his humanity. The necessity of immediate action was sure to find him still wavering. He was so fond of doing right that the time for doing it passed before he could settle what it was; and the man who was now appointed to guide the mind of the house of commons, never could make up his own. 1765. July. The ministry would have restored Shelburne to the presi dency of the board of trade; but he excused himself, because Rockingham, on taking office, had given no pledges but as to "men." "Measures, not men, will be the rule of my conduct," said Shelburne, in concurrence with Pitt; and thus the two branches of the liberal aristocracy gained their watchwords. The one was bound to provide for its connection, the other to promote reform. There could be no progress of liberty in England but from the union of the aristocratic power of the one with the popular principle of the other. The refusal of Shelburne left the important office to the young and inexperienced Earl of Dartmouth, whom the poet Cowper described as "the one who wears a coronet and prays." A peerage was conferred on Pratt, who took the name of Camden; though Rockingham was averse to his advancement. But it was through Rockingham himself that Lord George Sackville, who had been degraded while Pitt was minister, was restored to a seat at the council board, and raised to one of the lucrative vice-treasurerships of Ireland. Thus was an administration, whose policy had been sanctioned by large and increasing majorities in parliament, and by the most cordial approbation of the king, avowedly turned out, to gratify his personal disgust at its exercising its constitutional right to control him in the use of the court favor. The new cabinet did not include one man of commanding ability, nor had it a single measure to propose to the crown, to the nation, or to the colonies; and, in parliament, its want of debating talent stamped its character with weakness. Grenville sullenly predicted that every day would produce difficulties in the colonies and with foreign powers. "Within the last twelve years," wrote Voltaire at that |