of royal power, had earned such hatred that he could not move from his door without a bodyguard of boxers; at the famous Guildhall banquet of 1761 the young king himself passed almost unnoticed in the procession, while the mob hugged the footmen and kissed the horses of Pitt's coach.

A decade later things seemed much the same. Popular enthusiasm rejoiced in the venom of Wilkes and the vitriol of Junius, because they seemed the only effective protest against the strong-willed young ruler who had put Parliament and Cabinet beneath his feet, and had brought to nought the independence of Grenville, the pride of Rockingham, the majesty of Chatham. When in 1770 Lord North became Premier, his name and his character were a visible sign that the Sovereign was king indeed. Point of Honour and precedence were no more to be regarded in Parliamentary decorum than in a Turkish army. It was to be avowed, as a constitutional maxim, that the King might appoint one of his footmen, or one of your footmen, for Minister!' So wrote the author of the Present Discontents'; and even those who despised Wilkes and hated Junius were ready to listen to Burke.

Though an avowedly servile Premier, Lord North retained office and power for a dozen years, in the teeth of a formidable parliamentary opposition headed by the terrible Chatham himself in the Lords and by Fox and Burke in the Commons, The fact is interesting, and the cause lies deeper than royal influence and parliamentary corruption, explanations which satisfied the Whigs but must not deceive the historian. No 18th-century government lasted long without popular support; the mob had caused the withdrawal of bills and the fall or elevation of ministers, in 1720, 1733, 1754, 1756. In 1768-9 popular hostility had most seriously injured the last Government, and seemed about to bring this one to its fall. If that fall was averted, it was because Lord North was able to endow Toryism with some intellectual meaning, and to make clear that George stood not only for himself but for the nation. Toryism became a philosophy and George a national ruler directly his sway was challenged not by party-opponents in England but by rude farmers, Puritan preachers, and democratic smugglers across the water.

In the years after 1770 this menace became real; and it seemed to the majority of the nation that colonial independence meant national disgrace to England. Hence Toryism prospered, and the King's friends' ceased to be the nation's enemies.

6

North was by no means ill-fitted for his task. He had, as Gibbon said, 'incomparable felicity of temper,' a good business knowledge of finance, great readiness and wit. Perhaps the most shameless trafficker in parliamentary places, loans, lotteries and bribes that the 18th century knew, he was none the less personally disinterested. He knew better even than Walpole how to 'smile without art and win without a bribe'; and the independent members often followed the easy genial Premier where they might have deserted the cold Grenville or the haughty Pitt. His most serious defect was a weakness of moral fibre, which seems to have been due to constitutional indolence. His refusal to answer letters and his neglect to control subordinates were responsible both for misunderstanding and disaster. He was not deficient in homely common-sense, but he lacked driving power and energy, and was unable to inspire his ministers or his parliamentary following with zeal and enthusiasm in defeat. With him not to be defeated was a kind of victory.' The King's letters to Lord North during the dark days of the war show high courage and inflexible purpose; North's explanations to the Commons are often disingenuous or half-hearted. He lied about the danger from France at the end of 1777; he lied about the state of the Navy both in peace and in war; he talked in the Commons sometimes of conciliation and sometimes of despair; he met Fox's assault one night in 1779 with a burst of tears. But, if he could not inspire or control, he could certainly debate; and the Whig phalanx was often repelled by his imperturbable good-humour, his subtle innuendoes, his merciless analysis, his calm repetition of commonplaces. He could always bring home to his audience the reality of the dangers and disgraces which threatened England, and convince them that a steady support of the pilot might enable the ship to weather the storm. His debating skill concealed his

* Lucas, i, 70; ii, 28, 49, 77-80.

real faults; the energy of the King mitigated some of his worst errors; and thus for long the nation thought that he and his sovereign fought for the national honour. In this belief popular opinion swung round after 1770 and supported the Government for half-a-dozen years. It was only when difficulty and danger rose high and when France and Spain threatened to intervene that the nation began to think that peace with the Colonies was better than war with the world.

During this period the whole Whig philosophy underwent a great change; and the cautious conservative qualified revolutionism of Locke was extended into a general system by the hot imagination of Burke, quickened by the revolutionary fervour which blazed in New England. How vast was the revolution accomplished may be seen from the doctrines of Hardwicke, whose active political life began in the thirties and ended in the early sixties before the American movement had seemed dangerous. He was therefore nurtured on the purest milk of Whig philosophy; and in his whole policy a mild unaffected conservatism of fact alternates amusingly with a revolutionary fervour of theory. Thus he declared the revolutionary settlement and the Hanoverian crown to rest upon the consent of the people, but wrote contemptuously of that great reasoner the mob.'* He did not shrink from instructing the King in his duties as a constitutional sovereign, and even from suggesting some improvement in the royal manners. When George II retorted, 'I was forced-I was threatened. . . . Ministers are the King in this country,' the Chancellor took up the charge with moderation and firmness, and repeated the counsel that Ministers must receive undivided royal confidence and that government could not go on without Parliamentary support. On another occasion we find him declaiming vigorously against Argyll's proposal to place the army under military control. How soon. might such outrages be expected from an army formed after the model of the noble Duke, released from the common obligations of society, disunited from the bulk of the nation, directed solely by their own officers.'† There is a real ring of fervour here, as of the true Whig

* Yorke, iii, 34.

† Ib. i, 1989,

who hated militarism and loved the Common Law. He concluded his speech with a note of unconscious humour, warning the peers against doctrinaire theories. What, however, could be a more doctrinaire theory than that liberty was threatened by military efficiency and that the increase of the army would destroy the country, a theory proclaimed when armed Highlanders reached Derby and French troops were concentrated within twenty miles of the coast of Kent?

Though Hardwicke was a rebuker of kings, and denounced the active political interference of either army or people, he was a sturdy upholder of authority. In orthodox religion and the Church he seems genuinely to have believed, and in this respect differed from most of his educated contemporaries, like Bolingbroke, Chesterfield, Walpole or Granville. Religion was that great basis of civil government and liberty,' and government was no more than public order which is morality.' Morality was promulgated by the Church, and morality produced order. The clergy formed, as it were, a spiritual police for securing public tranquillity; and God was a Divine Lord Chancellor who administered a sublimated Common Law. To a man with a great legal intellect the doctrines of rewards and punishments thus implied had a real meaning and direct connexion with public life. In this view the Law of England and the Law of Sinai, Magna Carta and the New Testament, differed rather in degree than in kind, and aided one another in securing the happiness of mankind in this world and in the next.

Hardwicke's eulogies on the Constitution and the Law, delivered to Grand Juries and to Peers, show a feeling of mundane reverence. Thus :

"'tis the great advantage and happiness of us of this Nation to live under a Government the best constituted of any in the world-administered over us and secured to us by the best body of Laws that human wisdom can frame.' . . . ''Tis the particular excellence of these Laws that they have not been made by the arbitrary will of one man, nor by the human ambition and private designs of a few, who have had the fortune to obtain power over their countrymen. But they are Laws established by the tacit concurrence of the whole Nation, who have experienced such usages to be just and good,

or else compiled by the joint deliberation and consent of the representative body of the people in full and free Parliament.'*

One thinks of cruel laws against sheep-stealers and pickpockets, and of debtors' prisons, and wonders if these were shown to be just and good by experience and the 'watchful care of our ancestors over the lives and liberties of Englishmen,' or were decided on by 'the full and free Parliament,' half of which the Chancellor knew that his friend Newcastle bribed. Yet there seems no conscious hypocrisy; corruption cannot be altogether avoided under so blessed a government. Some fermentation is inevitable in the Constitution, but it is the rarest of wines, mellowed in the cask by ages, and superior to every other vintage in the world.

As a constitutional authority Hardwicke is Walpole intellectualised; and quieta non movere is the maxim by which he stands. His attitude towards the Colonies embodies that homely wisdom and is thus far apart from the violent assertiveness of the mother-country in the days of George III. So far back as 1724, Hardwicke, then Sir Philip Yorke, as Attorney-General, was asked by the Government his opinion as to the taxing of Jamaica. His answer was:

'That will depend upon the question whether Jamaica is now to be considered merely as a colony of British subjects, or as a conquered country. If as a colony of English subjects, we apprehend they cannot be taxed but by the Parliament of Great Britain or by and with the consent of some representative body of the people of the Island, properly assembled by the authority of the Crown.'†

The legal principle that Parliament is legislatively supreme over the Colonies is here clearly enunciated. It was practically applied in 1735, when the Jamaican Assembly was forced to pass a measure by the threat that the British Parliament would otherwise intervene. The principle was confirmed by the calm judgment of Mansfield in 1744, and asserted in its most defined form by Blackstone in his famous Commentaries in 1765.