r
claims. It needed the bitter stress of necessity to induce the English
Parliament to follow Rockingham's counsels, but the need was too urgent
to suffer their rejection. The Houses therefore abandoned by a formal
statute the judicial and legislative supremacy they had till then
asserted over the Parliament of Ireland; and from this moment England
and Ireland were simply held together by the fact that the sovereign of
the one island was also the sovereign of the other. The grant of
independence to the one great dependency made it easier to recognise the
freedom of the other. Rockingham in fact took office with the purpose of
winning peace by a full acknowledgement of the independence of the
United States, and negotiations were soon entered into for that purpose.

[Sidenote: The Peace.]

But America was bound by its league with the Bourbon Courts to make no
peace save one common to its allies, and from its allies peace was hard
to win without concessions which would have stripped from England all
that remained of her older greatness. With the revolt of Ireland and the
surrender of Cornwallis the hopes of her enemies rose high. Spain
refused to suspend hostilities at any other price than the surrender of
Gibraltar; while France proposed that England should give up all her
Indian conquests save Bengal. The triumph of the Bourbons indeed seemed
secure. If terms like these were accepted the world-empire of Britain
was at an end. Stripped of her Colonies in America, stripped of her rule
in India, matched on the very ocean by rival fleets, England sank back
into a European State, into the England of the first Georges. And yet
there seemed little chance of her holding out against the demands of
such a league as fronted her at a moment when her military power was
paralysed by the attitude of Ireland. But the true basis of her
world-power lay on the sea. It was by her command of the sea that such
an empire could alone be possible; nor was it possible so long as she
commanded the sea for all the armies of the Bourbon powers to rob her of
it. And at this moment the command of the seas again became her own. On
the 16th of January 1780 Admiral Rodney, the greatest of English seamen
save Nelson and Blake, encountered the Spanish fleet off Cape St.
Vincent, and only four of its vessels escaped to Cadiz. At the opening
of 1782 the triumphs of the French admiral De Grasse called him to the
West Indies; and on the 12th of April a manoeu