onial exasperation of the
English King and of ministers like North and Hillsborough. North
thought whatever {153} the King wished him to think. Hillsborough
still believed that the Americans were only to be listened to when they
came with halters around their necks. King George was convinced that
the New England mutineers would speedily prove to be lambs when England
chose to play the lion. At this moment of extreme tension something
happened which still further strained the relations between the two
countries.

[Sidenote: 1767--The letters of Hutchinson and Oliver]

In the year 1767, Hutchinson, who was then Governor-General of
Massachusetts, and Oliver, the Lieutenant-Governor of the colony, wrote
certain letters to Whately, who was private secretary to George
Grenville. These were private letters, confidential letters. Neither
of the writers dreamed that they would ever become public possessions.
They were intended to inform and to advise a minister's secretary and
the minister himself. In these letters Hutchinson and Oliver set forth
very fully and frankly their views as to the condition of the colonies
and the better way of dealing with them. Hutchinson and Oliver had
suffered much at the hands of the people of Boston. It was chance
rather than clemency which allowed them to escape with their lives on
that wild August day of 1765. It is probable that their opinion of the
popular party in Massachusetts was colored if not prejudiced by
memories of the Stamp Act riots. Hutchinson and Oliver were all for
strong measures of repression and coercion. To their minds the
colonies were allowed a great deal too much liberty; their people and
their leaders were not nearly so sensible of the advantage of British
supremacy as they ought to be; they were forever asserting their own
rights and privileges in a spirit that could only be properly met by a
prompt and comprehensive curtailment of those rights and privileges.
The colonists were too free, too proud of their charters and
constitutions. Hutchinson and Oliver, with that fine superiority to
charters and constitutions which characterized so many a royal
governor, insisted that very considerable changes of government, all in
the direction of coercion, were necessary, in order to make the
conceited colonists know their place and to keep {154} them in it.
These letters no doubt made their due impression upon Whately and upon
Grenville. Letters like them were alwa