The first charge upon that revenue was to be the civil list, that all the royal officers in America, the judges in every court not less than the executive, might be superior to the assemblies, and dependent on the king's pleasure alone for their appointment to office, their continuance in it, and the amount and payment of their emoluments; so that the corps of persons in the public employ might be a civil garrison, set to sustain the authority of Great Britain. 1763. Feb. The charters were obstacles, which, in the opinion of Charles Townshend, should give way to one uniform system of government. The little republics of Connecticut and Rhode Island, which Clarendon had cherished, and every ministry of Charles II. had spared, were no longer safe. By a new territorial arrangement of provinces, Massachusetts was to be curtailed, as well as made more dependent on the king. This arbitrary policy required an American standing army, to be maintained by those whom it was to oppress. To complete the system, the navigation acts were to be strictly enforced. These most eventful measures were entered upon without any observation on the part of the historians and writers of memoirs of the hour. The ministry itself was not aware of what it was doing. The first opposition proceeded from the general assembly of New York. In the spirit of loyalty and the language of reverence, they pleaded with the king concerning the colonial court of judicature, which exercised the ample authorities of the two great courts of king's bench and common pleas, and also of the barons of the exchequer. They represented that this plenitude of uncontrolled power in persons who could not be impeached in the colony, and who, holding their offices during pleasure, were subject to the influence of governors, was to them an object of terror; and, from tenderness to the security of their lives, rights, and liberties, as well as fortunes, they prayed anxiously for leave to establish by law the independence and support of so important a tribunal. They produced, as an irrefragable argument, the example given in England after the accession of King William III.; and they quoted the declaration of the present king himself, that he "looked upon the independency and uprightness of the judges as essential to the impartial administration of justice, one of the best securities to the rights and liberties of the subject, and as most conducive to the honor of the crown;" and they expressed confidence in his undiscriminating liberality to all his good subjects, whether at home or abroad. But the treasury board, at which Lord North had a seat, decided not only that the commission of the chief justice of New York should be at the king's pleasure, but the amount and payment of his salary also. The system introduced into New York was to be universally extended, and the judiciary of a continent to be placed for political purposes in dependence on the crown. 1763. March. While the allowance of a salary to the chief justice of New York was passing through the forms of office, Welbore Ellis, the successor of Charles Townshend as secretary at war, brought forward the army estimates for the year, including the proposition of twenty regiments for America. The country members would have grudged the expense; but Charles Townshend explained that these regiments were, for the first year only, to be supported by England, and ever after by the colonies themselves. With Edmund Burke in the gallery for one of his hearers, he dazzled country gentlemen by playing before their eyes the image of a revenue to be raised in America. The house of commons listened with complacency to a scheme which, at the expense of the colonies, would give twenty new places of colonels, that might be filled by members of their own body. On the report to the house, Pitt wished that.more troops had been retained in service; and he called "the peace hollow and insecure, a mere armed truce for ten years." His support prevented opposition to the estimates. Two days after, on the ninth day of March, 1763, Charles Townshend, from a committee of which Lord North was a member, brought forward a part of the scheme for raising a revenue in America by act of parliament. The existing duty on the trade of the continental colonies with the French and Spanish islands was prohibitory, and had been regularly evaded by a treaty of connivance between the merchants on the one side, and the custom-house officers and their English patrons on the other; for the customhouse officers were "quartered upon" by those through whom they gained their places. The system of making for revenue offices in America sinecure places had led to such abuses that an American annual revenue of less than two thousand pounds cost the establishment of the customs in Great Britain between seven and eight thousand pounds a year. The house was impatient for reform; the minister proposed to reduce the duty and enforce its collection. "Short as the term was, it seemed probable that he would carry it through before the rising of parliament." A stamp act and other taxes were to follow. At the same time, the usual "compensation for the expenses of the several provinces," according to their "active vigor and strenuous efforts," was voted without curtailment and amounted to more than seven hundred thousand dollars. The appropriation was the most formal recognition that, even in the last year of the war, when it was carried on beyond their bounds, the colonies had contributed to the common cause more than their equitable proportion. 1763. Just then the people of Boston held their first town meeting in 1763. "We in America," said Otis, on be- March. ing chosen its moderator, "have abundant reason to rejoice. The heathen are driven out and the Canadians conquered. The British dominion now extends from sea to sea, and from the great rivers to the ends of the earth. Liberty and knowledge, civil and religious, will be co-extended, improved, and preserved to the latest posterity. No constitution of government has appeared in the world so admirably adapted to these great purposes as that of Great Britain. Every British subject in America is, of common right, by act of parliament, and by the laws of God and nature, entitled to all the essential privileges of Britons. By particular charters, particular privileges are justly granted, in consideration of undertaking to begin so glorious an empire as British America. Some weak and wicked minds have endeavored to infuse jealousies with regard to the colonies; the true interests of Great Britain and her plantations are mutual; and what God in his providence has united let no man dare attempt to pull asunder." 1763. March. Meantime, George Grenville would not be outdone by Charles Townshend in zeal for British interests. He worshipped the navigation act as the palladium of his country's greatness; and regarded connivance at the breaches of it by the overflowing commerce of the colonies "with an exquisite jealousy." Placed at the head of the admiralty, he united his official influence, his knowledge of the law, and his place as a leader in the house of commons, to restrain American intercourse by grants of new powers to vice-admiralty courts, and by a curiously devised system, which should bribe the whole navy of England to make war on colonial trade. March had not ended, when a bill was brought in giving authority to employ the ships, seamen, and officers of the navy as custom-house officers and informers. The measure was Grenville's own, and it was rapidly carried through; so that in three weeks it became lawful, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to Cape Florida, for each commander of an armed vessel to stop and examine, and, in case of suspicion, to seize every merchant ship approaching the colonies; while avarice was stimulated, by hope of large emoluments, to make as many seizures and gain in the vice-admiralty courts the condemnation of as many vessels as possible. It was Grenville who introduced a more than Spanish sea-guard of British America; it was he who first undertook to enforce rigidly the navigation acts. The supplies voted for the first year of peace amounted to seventy millions of dollars; the public charges pressed heavily on the lands and the industry of England, and additional sources of revenue were required. The ministry proposed and carried an excise on cider and perry, by its nature affecting only the few counties where the apple was much cultivated. Pitt opposed the tax as "intolerable," and brought ridicule upon Grenville; the cider counties were in a flame; the city of London, proceeding beyond all prece 1763. March. dent, petitioned commons, lords, and king against the measure; the cities of Exeter and Worcester instructed their members to oppose it; the house of lords divided upon it; and two protests against it appeared on their journals. An English tax, which came afterwards to be regarded as proper, met with turbulent resistance; no one uttered a word for America. The bill for raising a revenue there was quietly read twice, and committed; but on the twentyninth of March it was postponed; for Charles Townshend, seeing that the ministry was crumbling, made a timely retreat from the cabinet. A strong party was forming against the Earl of Bute, whose majority in "the king's parliament" was broken and unmanageable. The politicians, whose friendship he thought to have secured by favor, gave him no hearty support; nearly every member of the cabinet which he himself had formed was secretly or openly against him. "The ground I tread upon," said he, "is hollow;" and he might well be "afraid of falling." By his instances to retire, made a half year before, the king had been so troubled that he frequently sat for hours together leaning his head upon his arm without speaking; and at last, when he consented to a change, it was on condition that in the new administration there should be no chief minister. For a moment, Grenville, to whom the treasury and the exchequer were offered, affected to be coy; and then gratefully accepted the "high and important situation" destined for him by the goodness of his sovereign and Lord Bute's friendship, promising not "to put any negative" upon those whom the king might approve as his colleagues in the ministry. 66 وو Bute next turned to Bedford, announcing the king's abiding determination never, upon any account, to suffer those ministers of the late reign, who had attempted to fetter and enslave him, to come into his service while he lived to hold the sceptre." "Shall titles and estates," he continued, "and names like a Pitt, that impose on an ignorant populace, give this prince the law?" And he solicited Bedford to accept the post of president of the council, promising, in that case, the privy seal to Bedford's brother-in-law, Lord Gower. |