hig party that was not essentially the party of
Pitt, a party which was recruiting its ranks with earnest, thoughtful,
high-minded, honorable men to whom the principles or want of principles
which permitted the old Whig dominion were as intolerable as they
appear to a statesman of to-day. At the head of this new development
of Whig activity was the man to whom Cumberland now turned in the hour
of the King's trial, Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquis of Rockingham.

{94}

Lord Rockingham was one of those ornaments of the English senate for
the benefit of whose biographers the adjective amiable seems especially
to have been invented. Although the master of a large fortune, while
he was still a boy of twenty he was deservedly noted for the gravity
and stillness of his youth, and during a political career of
one-and-thirty years, if he showed neither commanding eloquence nor
commanding statesmanship, he did honor to the Whig party by his sincere
patriotism and irreproachable uprightness of character. If heaven had
denied Rockingham the resplendent gifts that immortalize a Chatham, it
had given him in full measure of the virtues of patriotism, honesty,
integrity, and zeal. The purity of his life, the probity of his
actions, and the excellence of all his public purposes, commended him
to the affectionate regard of all who held that morality was more
essential to a statesman than eloquence, and that it was better to fail
with such a man than to succeed with those to whom, for the most part,
the successes of that day were given. Two years before, in 1763, his
dislike for the policy of Lord Bute had driven him to resign his small
office as Lord of the Bedchamber, and he carried his scrupulousness so
far as to resign at the same time his Lord-Lieutenantcy of Yorkshire.

To the delight of the Duke of Cumberland, and to the delight of the
King, Rockingham consented to form a Ministry. With the best will in
the world Rockingham could not make his Ministry very commanding. It
was but a makeshift, and not a very brilliant makeshift, but at least
it served to get rid of Grenville and of Grenville's harangues. So
long as Grenville was unable to terrorize the royal closet with
reproaches and reproofs addressed to the King, and with menaces aimed
at Bute, George was quite willing to see Newcastle intrusted with the
Privy Seal, and Conway made Secretary of State for one department, and
the Duke of Grafton for the other. But the Mi