1764] THE AMERICAN PROVINCES 1045 Grenville and his ministry had hardly completed this quarrel, in which they had wantonly embroiled Parliament and people, when they took a fresh step which, though well intentioned, was destined, from the way in which it was carried out, to lose England the best of her colonies. Origin of the provinces. The thirteen American provinces owed their origin to many different causes, and were very distinct both in their character and laws. There was, in the first place, the American group of New England provinces, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire (which included what is now called Vermont), and Rhode Island; these owed their origin to the Pilgrim Fathers, and though the first zeal of their Puritan religion had died away, much of the stern character of their original founders remained among the population: their capital was Boston, almost surrounded by the sea, and already a port of very considerable importance and wealth; the Hudson formed their boundary towards the west. Then there came a group of provinces originally belonging to the Dutch, and known as the New Netherlands. These had come into the hands of England during the war between Holland and England in the reign of Charles II., and had been granted to the Duke of York. New Amsterdam became New York, and Fort Orange, higher up the stream, Albany. Another part of the same grant was New Jersey, lying between the Hudson and the Delaware. This had been given for payment by the Duke of York to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret; the western part had been subsequently parted with by Berkeley to the Quakers, and the whole province, which was surrendered to the Crown in the reign of Queen Anne, was therefore known commonly as the Jerseys, and was peopled almost exclusively by Quakers, Presbyterians and Anabaptists. Spreading from their colony in New Jersey, the Quakers, under their great leader William Penn, had occupied the large province of Pennsylvania, with its capital Philadelphia lying inland to the west. One other province belongs to this group, Maryland, which was regarded as a sort of appendage to Pennsylvania, but had a separate assembly of its own; the governor however was generally the same as the Pennsylvanian governor. Below these two groups were three great colonies, owing their origin to less easily defined sources. Virginia, south of the Potomac, originally founded by Raleigh, had then (by a grant of King James I.) passed into the hands of merchant adventurers. Behaving badly, and quarrelling with their colonists, they were deprived of their rights, and in 1624 the colony became a Crown CON. MON. [Q] colony. It had been peopled principally by Church of England men and by men of good English birth. As the oldest colony it was the best peopled, while the birth and character of its proprietors, who resembled English gentlemen, caused them to be regarded as the aristocracy of the colonies. The two Carolinas had been granted to a number of proprietors in the reign of Charles II., but, as in most other cases, the original proprietors had quarrelled with the people, and sold their rights to the Crown. Below these Carolinas was Georgia, founded for philanthropic purposes as a refuge for insolvent debtors and persecuted Germans by General Oglethorpe, the originator of the inquiry into the English prisons in 1728. The only power not English now in North America was that of Spain, which had received a portion of Louisiana from the French in exchange for Florida, which they had been obliged to cede to the English. French influence had disappeared after the Peace of Paris. Restrictions on colonial trade. There was an infinite variety of religion, law and government Constitution of in these provinces, but in all a certain assimilation the provinces. to the English Constitution; a house of assembly, an upper house or council, sometimes elected, sometimes nominated by the governor, and the governor himself in the Crown colonies nominated by the King and the proprietors in conjunction. The population appears to have been about two and a half millions. The old view of the use of colonies was that they should be employed entirely for the advantage of the mother country. It was held that, by the mere fact of their existence, and for the protection they received, they were bound by a debt of gratitude. They were thus the constant subject of mercantile legislation in favour of the mother country, and by the existing navigation laws very close restrictions were laid upon their trade. By those laws the colonies were prohibited from procuring a large number of articles-those, namely, which formed the chief manufactures of England-anywhere except from the mother country. They thus became naturally one of our principal purchasers. Although their imports into England were considerable, the balance of trade was constantly against them—that is, taken as a whole, they constantly owed large sums of money to England. This balance had, of course, from time to time to be made up by payments in actual money, which was chiefly procured by the colonies by means of illicit trade, carried on partly with the West India Islands, but chiefly with the Spanish colonies of America, and was illicit chiefly in that it broke the customhouse regulations of Spain. The 1764] THE STAMP ACT 1047 colonial illicit or free trade, as it was called, was regarded in point of morality as something quite different from European smuggling. It was carried on openly and systematically by the best colonial merchants, and enabled the colonies to get rid of their timber and those wooden products known under the name of lumber, and also of a considerable quantity of their farm produce which would otherwise have been wasted. A wise minister would not have thought of meddling with such a business, which was in fact the only means by which the colonists were enabled to carry on conveniently their trade with England. But Grenville, with his narrow and legal turn of mind, could see no difference between colonial smug- General supgling and smuggling in England. This he was deter- pression of smuggling. mined to put down, and not content with the ordinary means of repression, English men-of-war were employed in all directions as customhouse vessels, and naval officers, people said, were degraded into customhouse officers of the King of Spain. The effect was a crushing blow to the trade of America. And, as if to render the position of the colonists still more distressing, in 1764 a series of enactments were made, laying duties upon various articles for the benefit of England,—at the same time declaring for the first time the right of England to raise a revenue from her colonies; and while the quantity of money in America had been considerably diminished by the stoppage of the free trade, the present Act was rendered more irksome by ordering all the duties imposed to be paid in hard cash into the English Exchequer. It was coupled, too, with another Act stopping the use of paper money in America. Taken together, this series of arrangements had therefore produced the following effects—a large branch of commerce, the chief source of ready money, was destroyed; at the same time more ready money was demanded by England; and the colonists saw themselves prevented even from carrying on their domestic trade in the ordinary channels. These measures had produced retaliation from the Americans; it had been determined that as little trade as possible should be carried on with England. Lamb was not to be eaten, and lambs were not killed, in order to increase the stock of sheep for the supply of the wool which was England's great manufacture; and in all other possible ways men denied themselves European luxuries. It has been said that the preamble of the Act for the new duties stated the necessity for raising a revenue from the English colonies, The Stamp and at the same time Grenville had proposed a Stamp Act. Act as one of the means of raising such revenue. With singular want of wisdom, though with kindly feeling, he put off bringing in a Bill for the establishment of this tax, which would be an article of excise or inland duty, till the assemblies of the different colonies had stated their views with regard to it. The Americans, though probably without any real legal grounds, drew a line between the levying of customs and the imposing of an inland tax. It is probable that by the strict letter of the law they were liable to both, for even the Long Parliament had only granted temporary exemptions from taxation. But when their attention was drawn to the intentions and claims of the English Parliament, and when a tax, new in fact though perhaps not in principle, was suggested to them, and a year given them to talk it over, it was natural that their opposition should be roused. Five colonies sent petitions against the new measures, but they were wholly disregarded, and the Stamp Act passed without much opposition in Parliament. The King's illness. The ministry seemed unusually strong-it had triumphed over Wilkes; and its financial policy, though ruinous, had been accepted-when suddenly the King became alarmingly ill, suffering from that loss of intellect which afterwards incapacitated him from reigning. In alarm at this illness, on his recovery he desired a Regency Bill to be passed. The natural person to have appointed Regent would have been the Queen. The King had been hastily married in the first year of his reign (1761) to the Princess Sophia of Mecklenburg, a marriage which, as it was contracted chiefly by the influence of the Princess Dowager and Lord Bute, and without the will of the King, for the purpose of withdrawing him from his dangerous love for Lady Sarah Lennox, might have been expected to turn out ill, but which became in fact a happy lifelong union. The King however, instead of suggesting, as was natural, that his wife should be Regent, desired to keep the appointment in The Regency his own hands. The Government objected to this, without limitations, and suggested that the King's choice should lie among the Queen and the members of the Royal Family resident in England. When this Bill was brought forward it was pertinently asked who the Royal Family were? and it became evident that the ministry did not themselves know how to define it. They ultimately concluded, however, that the Princess Dowager was not a relation of her own son. In making this ridicu lous assertion, and insulting the Princess by excluding her name, they were probably instigated by the dread of a Bute ministry in 1765] THE REGENCY BILL 1049 case anything should happen to the King. In pursuance of this policy, Halifax hurried to the King, and persuaded him that the unpopularity of the Princess Dowager was such that the introduction of her name in the Bill would infallibly be followed by its omission on the demand of the Commons, and the Princess thus exposed to public insult. The King, taken off his guard, and naturally wishing to spare his mother so public a mark of disrespect, consented to the omission of her name. The Bill was brought into the House of Lords and passed, limiting the regency to the Queen and the descendants of the late King and Queen resident in England. When the Lord Chancellor an honest man-explained to the King what he had done, he was much disturbed, but no entreaties of his could move Grenville to change the Bill. Upon its introduction into the Lower House the absence of the name of the Princess was at once remarked, and a large majority voted for its introduction; thus making obvious to the King the shameless trick of which he had been the victim. For this he could not forgive Grenville and Bedford, and at once began arrangements for getting rid of them. Negotiations for ministry. For this purpose he called in the assistance and experience of his uncle the Duke of Cumberland, whose upright and consistent conduct had given him an authority and importance which he had not sought. He was a firm Whig, and a change of had of late years regarded Pitt as the real head of that great party. To him therefore the Duke now applied. In a long interview Pitt explained his views and stated his terms. He demanded that an alliance with the Protestant powers of Europe should be entered into, to balance the Family Compact, that general warrants should henceforward be declared illegal, and that officers dismissed for political reasons should be restored. Everything seemed to promise success, but Pitt wished to see Temple, to whom he was bound by ties of relationship, party, personal friendship, and even pecuniary assistance. After his interview with Temple it was evident that some obstacle had arisen, and the negotiation was broken off. The fact is, that Temple, infinitely Pitt's inferior, had come to terms with George Grenville, and was planning a family Grenville ministry; and Pitt's lofty view of his obligations to his brother-in-law prevented him from breaking with him. The King was thus thrown back, bound hand and foot, into the hands of his old ministry. They would consent to remain in their places if the King would pledge himself to dismiss Bute from his friendship, to get rid of Fox, now Lord Holland, from the Paymastership, turn Mr. Stuart |