an age
when Anglican divines--men like Archbishop Markham, Dr. Nowell or
Dr. Porteus--had revived the base precepts of passive obedience and
non-resistance, and when such a man as Lord Mansfield encouraged them.
And these were the kind of foundations which Burke had been laying,
while Fox was yet a Tory, while Sheridan was writing farces, and while
Grey was a schoolboy.

[Footnote 1: "To the Chairman of the Buckinghamshire Meeting," 1780.]

It is, however, almost demonstrably certain that the vindication of
the supremacy of popular interests over all other considerations would
have been bootless toil, and that the great constitutional struggle
from 1760 to 1783 would have ended otherwise than it did, but for
the failure of the war against the insurgent colonies, and the final
establishment of American Independence. It was this portentous
transaction which finally routed the arbitrary and despotic
pretensions of the House of Commons over the people, and which put an
end to the hopes entertained by the sovereign of making his personal
will supreme in the Chambers. Fox might well talk of an early Loyalist
victory in the war, as the terrible news from Long Island. The
struggle which began unsuccessfully at Brentford in Middlesex, was
continued at Boston in Massachusetts. The scene had changed, but the
conflicting principles were the same. The war of Independence was
virtually a second English civil war. The ruin of the American cause
would have been also the ruin of the constitutional cause in England;
and a patriotic Englishman may revere the memory of Patrick Henry and
George Washington not less justly than the patriotic American. Burke's
attitude in this great contest is that part of his history about the
majestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute.

CHAPTER IV

THE ROCKINGHAM PARTY--PARIS--ELECTION AT BRISTOL--THE AMERICAN WAR

The war with the American colonies was preceded by an interval of
stupor. The violent ferment which had been stirred in the nation by
the affairs of Wilkes and the Middlesex election, was followed, as
Burke said, by as remarkable a deadness and vapidity. In 1770 the
distracted ministry of the Duke of Grafton came to an end, and was
succeeded by that of Lord North. The king had at last triumphed. He
had secured an administration of which the fundamental principle was
that the sovereign was to be the virtual head of it, and the real
director of its counsels. Lord No