The duke of Grafton was its nominal head, but party ties had been broken,
the political connexions of the ministers were dissolved, and, in truth,
the king was now at last a king indeed, who not only reigned but governed.
The revival of high doctrines of prerogative in the crown was accompanied
by a revival of high doctrines of privilege in the House of Commons, and
the ministry was so smitten with weakness and confusion as to be unable to
resist the current of arbitrary policy, and not many of them were even
willing to resist it. The unconstitutional prosecution of Wilkes was
followed by the fatal recourse to new plans for raising taxes in the
American colonies. These two points made the rallying ground of the new
Whig opposition. Burke helped to smooth matters for a practical union
between the Rockingham party and the powerful triumvirate, composed of
Chatham, whose understanding had recovered from its late disorder, and of
his brothers-in-law, Lord Temple and George Grenville. He was active in
urging petitions from the freeholders of the counties, protesting against
the unconstitutional invasion of the right of election. And he added a
durable masterpiece to political literature in a pamphlet which he called
_Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents_ (1770). The immediate
object of this excellent piece was to hold up the court scheme of weak,
divided and dependent administrations in the light of its real purpose and
design; to describe the distempers which had been engendered in parliament
by the growth of royal influence and the faction of the king's friends; to
show that the newly formed Whig party had combined for truly public ends,
and was no mere family knot like the Grenvilles and the Bedfords; and,
finally, to press for the hearty concurrence both of public men and of the
nation at large in combining against "a faction ruling by the private
instructions of a court against the general sense of the people." The
pamphlet was disliked by Chatham on the one hand, on no reasonable grounds
that we can discover; it was denounced by the extreme popular party of the
Bill of Rights, on the other hand, for its moderation and conservatism. In
truth, there is as strong a vein of conservative feeling in the pamphlet of
1770 as in the more resplendent pamphlet of 1790. "Our constitution," he
said, "stands on a nice equipoise, with steep precipices and deep waters
upon all sides of it. In removing it from a dangerous leani