1782.

On the 22nd of February, General Conway moved an Address to the King,
imploring His Majesty to abandon the war. After a protracted debate,
which lasted till two o'clock in the morning, the Ministers found
themselves in an alarming majority of 1. But they persevered in the face
of these disasters, and, sustained in office by the tenacity of the
King, refused to submit to the constitutional warning of Parliament.
Three months before, the Duke of Richmond, writing to Lord Rockingham,
anticipated the obstinacy of the Cabinet, expressing his conviction,
that "no essential change of measures was meant, and none of men if it
could be avoided. When I say the Ministry," he added, "I mean the King;
for his servants are the merest servants that ever were."

Nor was it only by protecting an unpopular Ministry that His Majesty
showed his resolution to exercise his prerogative in direct opposition
to public opinion. It was in the midst of these accumulating defeats and
strong expressions of popular feeling, that His Majesty raised Lord
George Germain to the peerage with the title of Viscount Sackville, in
open indifference to the fact that his Lordship had been dismissed from
the army by the sentence of a court-martial, and declared incapable of
serving His Majesty in any military capacity, in consequence of his
conduct at the battle of Minden. To such proceedings as these Walpole
refers, when he observes at this time that "the power of the Crown has
increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished; and it is
diminished a good deal indeed." The diminution of its power, however,
was visible only in the spirited resistance of Parliament, in the motion
of Lord Carmarthen in the Upper House, that it was derogatory to the
honour of the House of the Lords, that any person labouring under so
heavy a sentence of a court-martial should be recommended to the Crown
as worthy of a peerage, and in the successive motions which were brought
forward in the Commons to force the Ministry to resign.

General Conway renewed his motion on the war on the 27th, and achieved a
complete triumph, his minority of 1 being converted in five days into a
majority of 19. But Lord North still clung to office, and it was not
till the 6th of March, when he was beaten by a majority of 16 on the
subject of the taxes, that he began to betray symptoms of a retreat. On
the 8th the motion on the war was renewed, when Ministers, collecting
the whole force of p