horoughly
corrupt and interested in power primarily for personal gain.
Consequently, the king could not find anyone whom he could trust who
could also provide leadership and hold together a coalition capable of
doing his business in the House of Commons. He tried Whigs George
Grenville (1763-1765), Lord Rockingham (1765-1766), Lord Chatham, the
former William Pitt (1766-1768), and the Duke of Grafton (1768-1770).
Finally, in 1770, he turned to Lord North and the Tories. North held on
until 1782.

What these frequent changes suggest is that at the height of the
American crisis in the 1760's, when the real seeds of the Revolution
were being sown, the instability of the British parliamentary
government precluded a consistent and rational approach to American
problems. Lacking internal cohesion, the English government could not
meet the threat of external division. It also means that the colonists,
especially the Virginians, saw parliament as being thoroughly corrupt
and the king surrounded by what even the mild-mannered Edmund Pendleton
called "a rotten, wicked administration". Not until the eve of
independence in 1776 were Virginians to think of George as a tyrant and
despot. In fact, he was neither. He was a dedicated man of limited
abilities in an age demanding greatness if the separation of the
American colonies from the empire was to have been prevented. Perhaps
even greatness could not have prevented what some have come to believe
was inevitable. (For a sympathetic study, see King George III, by John
Brooke, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1972).

Leadership also changed dramatically in Virginia in the 1760's. This
was partially due to changing economic conditions. Prosperity did not
return as rapidly as expected. The long war probably masked a basic
flaw in the Virginia economy which Virginians believed they had
solved--they were too reliant on tobacco. The great Virginia fortunes
of the mid-18th Century were built on extensive credit from Britain,
the efficient operation of the mercantile system, the initiative and
enterprise of Scots merchants who had succeeded in marketing in Europe
nearly all the tobacco produced by the new planters in the Piedmont and
Northern Neck, and by the prudence of the planters themselves.

Such a favorable balance of economic factors did not exist in the
1760's. The European market could not absorb continued annual increases
in the good, cheap tobacco Virginia produced. Prices fell. With an