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Updated: June 22, 2025
A peer or great squire who could return the members for a borough took a worthy pride in the abilities and reputation of those whom he thus sent to Parliament; especially the leaders of the two parties sought out promising young men for their seats; and it has often been pointed out that, of the men who in the House of Commons had risen to eminence in the country before the Reform Bill, there was scarcely one who had not owed his introduction to Parliament to the patron of one of those boroughs which were now wholly or partially disfranchised; while on one or two occasions these "rotten boroughs," as, since Lord Chatham's time, they were often derisively called, had proved equally useful in providing seats for distinguished statesmen who, for some reason or other, had lost the confidence of their former constituents.
It appears in a passage of one of Chatham's speeches, in 1775: "This universal opposition to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen. It was obvious from the nature of things, and from the nature of man, and, above all, from the confirmed habits of thinking, from the spirit of Whiggism flourishing in America.
Peace was at hand, however: all the belligerents were tired of the strife; the Marquis of Rockingham was dead; his ministry, after being broken up, had re-formed with less lustre under the leadership of Lord Shelburne. William Pitt, Lord Chatham's second son, at that time twenty-two years of age, had a seat in the cabinet.
For dealing with America, the Earl of Shelburne, because of his sympathetic understanding of colonial matters, had been brought into the ministry to formulate a comprehensive and conciliatory plan; as for the revenue, always the least part of Lord Chatham's difficulties as it was the chief of Mr.
Those of his adherents who still clung to it, Lord Camden, the Chancellor, Lord Granby, the Commander-in-Chief, Dunning, the Solicitor-General, resigned their posts. In a few days they were followed by the Duke of Grafton, who since Chatham's resignation had been nominally the head of the administration.
Nevertheless the pressure was so great that, but for Chatham's untimely death, the king would probably have been obliged to yield. If Chatham had lived a year longer, the war might have ended with the surrender of Burgoyne instead of continuing until the surrender of Cornwallis.
Much to the astonishment of every one and most of all to that of his colleagues in the ministry, he supported Mr. Grenville's resolution, declaring himself now in favor of the Stamp Act which he had voted to repeal, treating "Lord Chatham's distinction between internal and external taxation as contemptuously as Mr.
In the ordinance and preservation of the great universal system one sees the Divine Artificer, but our intellects are too bounded to comprehend anything more. Lord Temple is dead by an accident. I never had any esteem for his abilities or character. He had grown up in the bask of Lord Chatham's glory, and had the folly to mistake half the rays for his own.
We need not stop to examine how far the praises which he bestows on Lord Chatham's talents as a planner of military operations are deserved; but it may very fairly be contended that the disparaging views of Pitt's military policy which he has advanced are founded solely on what is in this as well as in many other instances a most delusive criterion, success.
When we consider, however, that even Jefferson, the most extreme of the states rights party in the Continental Congress, has recorded his belief that the whole issue of the Revolution could have been settled if Great Britain had adopted the principle of Lord Chatham's bill, and if that bill on the one side and the Fourth Resolution on the other had been taken as the basis of settlement, it is at least not unreasonable to conclude that the extreme states rights theory was put forward more in order that the Americans might have something to concede in a bargain with Great Britain than from any belief in the justness of it, and that the real belief of the Americans was that the Colonies had always been free states, but not independent until they so declared themselves, and that their political connection with the State of Great Britain was under the law of nature and of nations, and not by implied treaty with the State of Great Britain.
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