in proposing and
carrying through the repeal of the Stamp Act ought to stand weightily to
their credit. The king was well known to be vehemently averse to the
slightest tampering with the act; and it is difficult for any body of
statesmen, even where--which here was anything but the case--public
opinion unanimously admits that a false step has been taken, to face the
obloquy and sneers sure to attend upon any proposal to retrace it.
However, the repealing measure was proposed and carried, Shelburne
supporting the ministers with all his might, though, doubting as he did
even the abstract right of England to tax her colonies, he with only
four other peers divided the House against them on the question of the
well-known declaratory resolution. _Sic vos non vobis._ Though the
Rockingham administration repealed the Stamp Act, it was the popular
belief that Pitt had been the real moving cause in the matter. Pitt, and
none other, was demanded by the national voice. The king reluctantly
yielded. Pitt marched into the royal closet with words of profoundest
deference upon his tongue and the stern triumph of a conqueror in his
heart, and proceeded to form an administration in which there was not
even the offer of a place for Rockingham. For Shelburne, on the other
hand, he immediately sent, and offered him the seals of secretary of
state. Such an appointment must have been a bitter pill indeed to George
III., but Pitt stood firm, and the king had to swallow his dislike as
best he might. What Choiseul, the French minister, thought of the new
arrangement appears from an interesting letter from him to Guerchy in
London, which Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice quotes from a copy at Lansdowne
House. His conclusion is: "Alors le ministere d'Angleterre aura une
certaine consistance; sans cela, avec l'opposition de my Lord Temple,
l'ineptie de M. Conway, la jeunesse et peut-etre l'etourderie de my Lord
Shelburne quoique gouverne par M. Pitt, il ne sera pas plus fort qu'il
ne l'etoit ci-devant. My Lord Chatham a pris une charge trop forte
d'etre le gouverneur de tout le monde et le protecteur de tous." At this
critical point, the mosaic administration (as Burke felicitously
nicknamed it) just formed, Pitt entering the House of Lords as earl of
Chatham, to the annoyed surprise of the multitude to whom he had so long
been distinctively the Great Commoner, Shelburne at nine-and-twenty
essaying the grave responsibilities of a secretaryship of state, the