George III: King and politicians 1760–1770

George III

George III

King and politicians

1760–1770

Peter D. G. Thomas

Copyright © Peter D. G. Thomas 2002

The right of Peter D. G. Thomas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 6428 9

First published 2002

10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset in Sabon

by Northern Phototypesetting Co. Ltd, Bolton

Printed in Great Britain

by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton

Contents

Preface

1 The parameters of politics

2 The political scenario in 1760

3 Pitt and Newcastle (1760–1762): war and peace

4 The Bute ministry (1762–1763): peace and cider

5 The Grenville ministry (1763–1765): Wilkes and America

6 The first Rockingham ministry (1765–1766): the Stamp Act Crisis

7 The Chatham ministry I. The year of Charles Townshend (1766–1767): India and America

8 The Chatham ministry II. Grafton as caretaker (1767–1768): political re-alignments

9 The Grafton ministry (1768–1770): the Middlesex Election and the Townshend Duties Crisis

10 George III, Lord North and the defeat of ‘faction’ (1770)

11 Conclusion: factions or parties?

Bibliography

Index

Preface

The eighteenth century was long deemed ‘the classical age of the constitution’ in Britain, with cabinet government based on a two-party system of Whigs and Tories in Parliament, and a monarchy whose powers had been emasculated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. This simple picture was destroyed in 1929 when Sir Lewis Namier published his The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III. He demonstrated that no such party system existed; that the monarchy was not a cypher; and that the correct political analysis of Parliament was of an administration side comprising factions of politicians currently in office, a Court Party of office-holders, and supportive independents, and an opposition side of other political factions and independent MPs. Namier reached this conclusion by a methodology that revolutionised the writing of political history. He broadened it to discuss not merely the leading politicians but also the rank and file, the so-called counting of heads; and he deepened it by the use of such techniques as prosopography, the study of social and family connections.

Namier, who became Professor of Modern History at the University of Manchester in 1931, was one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century, for imitators and disciples sought to apply his interpretation of how political history should be written to earlier and later periods of British history, and to foreign countries. ‘We are almost all Namierites now’, wrote his most recent biographer (Linda Colley, Namier (1989), p. 101). In due course there was a reaction against the enthusiastic application of his methodology. Critics were rightly convinced that ideas and ideals formed part of political history, but wrongly claimed that the counting of heads necessarily implied the discounting of such considerations. The illogicality of that contention has been demonstrated by much recent scholarship.

Namier’s conclusions as to the absence of party politics in eighteenth-century Britain have been modified, though not refuted, by historians studying the beginning and end of the century, but his perception of the political system of mid-eighteenth-century Britain has retained general acceptance. The structure he depicted is the essential framework for a proper understanding of power politics and policy-making. This book, by Namier’s last research student, is an attempt to apply that interpretation to the political story of the first decade of George III’s reign, Namier’s home territory. Factional politics was at its height in the 1760s, a circumstance that gave the King much more freedom of manoeuvre than if a party system had existed.

The role of George III has been the subject of frequent and ongoing debates among historians. This book provides detailed information from which readers may well draw conflicting conclusions, according to their prejudices. Much of it has come to light since a mid-twentieth-century controversy over interpretations of George III’s political behaviour. There can be no doubt now that the King closely concerned himself with ministerial appointments. How far he was involved in policy decisions is less clear, for much of any such participation would have been in verbal discussions of which little record survives. Whether his behaviour was unconstitutional is, at bottom, a matter of interpretation. One factor can be subtracted from any argument about the King. Nothing is said here of the King’s alleged insanity, the one ‘fact’ most people know about George III: for his illness of porphyria, which it really was, did not surface at this time.

This book is primarily a study of high politics, for the power structure was centred on the Crown and Parliament. One pioneer of the currently fashionable study of popular politics, John Brewer, in 1976 highlighted this decade as one of an alternative structure of politics to that depicted by Namier (Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III). His book, however, discussed not the events of the period but the wider political environment, drawing attention to the growing importance of public opinion, and especially to the press in its various manifestations. There can be no doubt that political matters were extensively discussed in newspapers, taverns, and coffee-houses. Demagogue John Wilkes did make a notable impact on the political scene, in the press and on the streets, as this author’s biography of him has shown (John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (1996)). But when the furore had died down, the political world was still dominated by the King and the Parliamentary factions.

In the writing of this book I have, as ever, incurred many obligations. Above all I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for an Emeritus Fellowship that has made possible the research for and production of it. I thank Thomas Bartlett for the loan long ago of manuscript transcripts, and Karl Schweizer for the elucidation of some points concerning foreign policy. It is particularly pleasing to acknowledge the benefit I have derived from the published and unpublished work of twelve of my former research students: Huw Bowen, Heather Breeze, Nicola Davies, Margaret Escott, Dylan Jones, the late Philip Lawson, Jonathan Nicholas, Martyn Powell, David Prior, Anita Rees, Sian Rees, and Dale Williams.

For permission to use manuscripts I am indebted to the Duke of Grafton; the Marquess of Bute; the Earl of Malmesbury; the William L. Clements Library; and the Henry E. Huntingdon Library. I have received valuable assistance from the staff of the National Library of Wales; the British Library; the Public Record Office; the Institute of Historical Research; and the Library of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Mrs Dorothy Evans has patiently converted my manuscript into a text fit for the printer. I am grateful for the guidance and help of the staff of Manchester University Press in the final stage of production.

1

The parameters of politics

Britain has never had a written constitution. The closest approximation was the Revolution Settlement of William III’s reign, as embodied especially in the 1689 Bill of Rights and the 1701 Act of Settlement. But the provisions were essentially negative, stipulating what the monarch could not do. The sovereign could not override the law of the land, and, in practice, for financial and other reasons, could not govern without an annual meeting of Parliament. By ‘the Revolution’, as it was denoted in the eighteenth century, politicians in Britain prevented the evolution of an autocratic monarchy. Yet the sovereign retained the executive power, and William III certainly exercised it; but under his successors the functions of policy-making and patronage fell increasingly into the hands of ministers who were Parliamentary politicians. Twice, moreover, in 1742 and 1744, George II was compelled by the politicians who controlled Parliament to part with Premiers he wished to retain: and for long historians were accustomed to portray him as a king held ‘in chains’ by his ministers.

How far the balance of power in the British constitution had already tilted from the Crown to the House of Commons was the issue underlying the controversy over the behaviour of George III when he inherited the throne in 1760. For the active role played by that new young monarch seemed to many contemporaries accustomed to envisaging Parliament as the power centre of their political world to be a reversion to pre-1689 practice. Was he subverting the constitution, as portrayed by the traditional interpretation long held by Whig or liberal historians? That view stemmed from the circumstance that the Hanoverian Succession of 1714 effectively deprived the monarchy of a choice between the two parties of Whig and Tory. All ministries between 1714 and 1760 were Whig, albeit opposed often by malcontent Whigs as well as a dwindling number of Tories. This seemingly permanent political alignment, with Sir Robert Walpole, Henry Pelham and his brother the Duke of Newcastle successive leaders of the dominant ‘old Whig corps’, gave rise to terminology appropriate to the ‘court versus country’ situation that had evolved. That most commonly used in mid-century Parliamentary debate was ‘administration’ and ‘opposition’, and by 1770 the even more frank designations of ‘the majority’ and ‘the minority’, previously deemed irregular, had become ‘the constant language’.¹

This political dominance of ‘the Whig oligarchy’ led to the assumption, both contemporary and historical, that the reign of George II witnessed a significant loss of power by the Crown. Recent reassessments of the role of that monarch have largely undermined that interpretation, which forms the premiss for the consequent charge that George III was somehow seeking to turn back the constitutional clock.² George II certainly did make the famous complaint in 1744 that ‘ministers are the Kings in this country’.³ But his remark was less a description of the British scene than an implicit comparison with his own autocratic role in Hanover and that of monarchs in continental Europe. George II was no William III, in that he did not initiate policies, but in the making of ministries the King played a positive role even during his old age in the 1750s;⁴ and the able but detested William Pitt was kept out of cabinet office until the crisis of the Seven Years War. His ministers had to pay heed to his wishes in every aspect of politics. Foreign policy was distorted by the King’s insistence on the need to safeguard his beloved Electorate of Hanover. At election times George II took an active part in approving the choice of candidates and authorising royal expenditure. As for patronage, he exerted more control over posts in the army and at Court than did George III, and he kept a close eye on the bestowal of bishoprics, peerages, and honours generally. Incessant complaints by the Duke of Newcastle bear ample testimony to this royal influence, and in 1755 George II even told the Duke, then head of the ministry, that there was no first minister in Britain, and that his control over appointments was confined to the Treasury.⁵ In a reversal of historical tradition, George II, in the exercise of a whole range of royal powers, compared favourably with his grandson.

If there was scant loss of royal power under George II for his successor to recover after 1760, the old idea of Whig mythology that George III had ambitions of autocratic monarchy is complete nonsense. The myth that his mother Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, urged her son, ‘George, be a King’, with the implication that she meant a monarch in the German tradition, has long been exploded. Historian Sir Lewis Namier joked that she was referring to his table manners. His mother’s successful endeavour was to instil in her eldest son, though not his brothers, the virtues of religion and morality.⁶ George III’s concept of himself as an honest and moral man contributed to his strength of character, but that was the sole political consequence of his maternal upbringing. His tutor Lord Bute taught the young Prince to revere the constitution as established by the Revolution Settlement. Political liberty in Britain, that phenomenon so widely admired in Europe, was the result of a system of checks and balances between the executive, headed by the monarch, and the legislature, embodied in the two Houses of Parliament, with the added safeguard of an independent judicature.⁷ By 1760 the Prince had began to think for himself, and perceived two royal threats to the balance of the constitution, the unfettered power of the Crown to create peers, and the existence of an army under royal control. That in an essay on the British constitution, written only a few months before his accession, George III privately showed this concern about the potential danger to liberty from the monarchy is an ironic contrast to much contemporary and historical portrayal of his behaviour as King.⁸

Bute’s sound constitutional indoctrination of the future King was marred by prejudices he instilled about the contemporary political scene. The young Prince of Wales was led to condemn the Hanoverian propensities of his grandfather George II; to deplore the division into parties that prevented government by a coalition of the best men; and generally to regard the governing politicians in Britain and Ireland as corrupt and selfish. On 4 May 1760 he wrote to Bute, ‘I look upon the majority of politicians as intent on their own private interests instead of that of the public’.⁹ The consequence of all this was not only that the new young King would, with the naive idea of cleansing the political system, assert the Crown’s power of appointing ministers, a right so lapsed that many Parliamentarians were to regard it as improper; but that he formulated the logical conclusion that Bute himself must be his political saviour. That had not been the intention of Bute, a man more suited to scholarship than to politics. But, hoist with his own petard, he was willing to forsake a quiet private life to become Prime Minister, a task he performed conscientiously and creditably, but quit within a year.

Although George III then had to fall back on Parliamentary politicians, men not always to his liking, he maintained the practice of allowing his ministers to govern. For, contrary to much historical interpretation, it was never his intention to impose measures as well as choose ministers. Often, as early on over America and India, he had no opinion on matters of policy. When he did, he often made his views known to individual ministers. But there was never any question of the King enforcing his opinions by the threat of removing recalcitrant ministers from office, except for one brief occasion in 1762 when Bute was encountering resistance over the peace terms. Horace Walpole understood from his friend Henry Conway, Secretary of State 1765–68, that ‘whether hating or liking the persons he employed, he seemed to resign himself entirely to their conduct for the time’.¹⁰ George III’s practice was recalled in 1775 by Lord Hills-borough, who had sat in cabinet from 1768 to 1772 as American Secretary. ‘The King … always will leave his sentiments, and conform to his Ministers, though he will argue with them, and very sensibly; but if they adhere to their own opinion, he will say, Well. Do you choose it should be so? Then let it be.’¹¹ It was the cabinet, albeit often influenced by royal opinions, that made decisions on policy

‘There is in our constitution no such thing as a cabinet’, MP Charles Jenkinson reminded the House of Commons on 12 February 1770, and the usual designation in government papers was ‘meeting of the King’s servants’.¹² But MP James Harris put matters in a practical perspective when he made this comment after similar assertions in Parliament a week earlier. ‘Strange! As if all matters political were not to be discussed in the cabinet, and the ministers to come down to either House without knowing each other’s minds.’¹³ The cabinet may have been unofficial, but its existence was accepted in newspapers, correspondence and Parliamentary debate. Its informality was reflected in irregularity of meetings and variation of composition. It met as need arose, usually at least once a week save in the summer recess of Parliament, and almost always at the private houses of ministers, any one of whom might summon a meeting. The size of the cabinet varied considerably, but the first decade of George III’s reign saw the final evolution of a small, efficient cabinet, a development not approved by the sovereign, who perceived therein a curtailment of his own political role.

At the head of the cabinet was the Prime Minister, not yet a term much in vogue nor one favoured by Lord North, who held the post for twelve years from 1770. Press references were often to ‘the Premier’, those in Parliament simply to ‘the Minister’. George Grenville, who held the post from 1763 to 1765, later referred to having been ‘First Minister’.¹⁴ The post was usually but not invariably equated with the office of First Lord of the Treasury, for it was desirable for the Premier to control the main fount of patronage. If he was an MP and not a peer, though only two Premiers, Grenville and North, were during this period, the Prime Minister would also be Chancellor of the Exchequer, for the good reason that finance constituted the main government business in the Commons. Otherwise the Chancellor of the Exchequer did not sit regularly in cabinet until Charles Townshend secured that status late in 1766.¹⁵ The other major executive officers were the two Secretaries of State, equal in rank. In theory each could handle any matter that arose, and in emergency might do so, but in practice they had a clear division of responsibility. The Southern Secretaryship was now deemed the more important, and Northern Secretaries sometimes moved to take a vacancy there, as in 1763 and 1768.¹⁶ The Southern Secretary handled diplomatic relations with France, Spain, Portugal, and the Mediterranean countries: but he was also responsible for the American and other colonies, Ireland, and acted as unofficial Home Secretary. The Northern Secretary was concerned with the German states, Holland, Scandinavia, and Russia, and seemingly also with Scotland. In 1768 a third Secretaryship of State was created, for America, though its claim to equality of status was sometimes disputed by holders of the senior Secretaryships. If these busy executive posts constituted the heart of the cabinet, membership also included the three traditional great offices of state: the Lord Chancellor, head of the legal profession, who presided over the House of Lords; the Lord President of the Privy Council, that increasingly formal institution numbering around a hundred, that constituted the official advisory body for the Crown; and the Lord Privy Seal, responsible for the official signing of state documents. In 1768 this last post, when held by a political nonentity, was excluded from the cabinet in order to reduce its size, but soon afterwards was restored to membership. The other customary cabinet post was First Lord of the Admiralty, a tacit acknowledgement of the importance of the navy. The army was represented in wartime, but not always in peace, by the Commander-in-Chief or the Master-General of the Ordnance, never by the civilian Secretary at War. The President of the Board of Trade and Plantations was not a member, but always attended on American business until the creation of the American Department. The Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland took a seat when over in Britain, but that claim was to fade with his permanent residence in Dublin from 1767.

In 1760 membership of the cabinet was not confined to leading office-holders. It then included two political allies of Prime Minister Newcastle, in the Duke of Devonshire and the Earl of Hardwicke, Lord Chancellor from 1737 to 1756, now without office but Newcastle’s prop and confidant. Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of King’s Bench, continued to sit through three ministries until the autumn of 1763. Bute sought to emulate Newcastle’s practice by bringing in some of his friends when he took the Treasury in May 1762. Lord Melcombe attended only briefly, dying in July, and Lord Waldegrave refused, but another Bute man, Lord Egmont, though only Postmaster-General, sat in cabinet even before he took the Admiralty in September 1763. Lord Gower, holding merely the Royal Household post of Master of the Wardrobe, attended cabinet during the second half of Bute’s ministry, October 1762 to April 1763, to represent his brother-in-law the Duke of Bedford, Lord Privy Seal but absent negotiating peace in Paris. So too then did Henry Fox, only Paymaster of the Forces but now also Leader of the Commons.

This anachronistic situation must have been anathema to the tidy mind of George Grenville. Soon after he became Prime Minister in 1763 the cabinet was virtually reduced to a small group of officeholders, although he did accept Lord Marchmont as a replacement lawyer for Lord Mansfield. Thereafter the cabinet had no more than a dozen members, and sometimes as few as six. Grenville also effectively put an end to what George III called ‘the common cabinet’ to distinguish it from ‘the ministerial cabinet’.¹⁷ This body, comprising numerous politicians, household officers, and such dignitaries as the Archbishop of Canterbury, and called by some historians ‘the Nominal Cabinet’, had been expanded beyond the limit of efficiency. Horace Walpole commented in 1761 that the rank of ‘cabinet counsellor will soon become indistinct from Privy Counsellor by growing as numerous’.¹⁸ It met occasionally in the early years of George III’s reign, as to ratify the peace terms finally signed in 1763, but thereafter its political role was formal, notably the approval of royal speeches prior to their presentation to Parliament.

The cabinet proper was by contrast the genuine centre of decision-making, where the Prime Minister, though he presided, did not always get his way: Grenville was overruled on the American land settlement of 1763, and Grafton defeated over the American tea duty in 1769. The usual practice was for each item of business to be introduced by an appropriate departmental minister, with ensuing discussions customarily being commenced by the newer members, so that they would not be overawed by their seniors. If consensus could not be achieved, decisions were taken by majority votes. Policy disagreements seldom led to resignations. Those usually occurred only if a minister had been overruled in a matter concerning his own department, as when Southern Secretary Weymouth resigned in 1770 over the Falkland Islands Crisis, and American Secretary Hillsborough in 1772 over a proposed Ohio colony. Rather was acceptance of a majority decision the norm: of the three MPs who argued in cabinet on 13 January 1769 against the expulsion of John Wilkes from the House of Commons, two voted for expulsion and the other abstained when that business came before the House on 3 February. Cabinet decisions were recorded in minutes, which were, so Southern Secretary Shelburne wrote in 1767, ‘according to the indispensable custom of those meetings, read over to the Lords present, to know whether it expressed their sentiments as they wished them to be laid before His Majesty’.¹⁹ They were respectfully tendered to the King in form only as ‘advice’, and also formed a security for those ministers executing the decisions taken.²⁰ George III, often having put in his word beforehand, would accept the decisions of his ‘ministerial cabinet’: but they often also needed endorsement by Parliament.

There was by now a set pattern to the annual Parliamentary session. The important business would usually be done between the Christmas and Easter recesses, for attendance was otherwise poor. The session began in both Houses of Lords and Commons with the voting of an Address in reply to the King’s Speech, which had stated the ministry’s opinions and intentions. The ensuing debates set the political tone of the new session, and a failure of opposition to force a vote over an amendment usually betokened a quiet time for the administration. Taxation was routine and seldom controversial, though administrations were discomforted over a cider tax in 1763 and a window tax in 1766, and actually defeated in 1767 over the rate of land tax to be imposed. Levied on estate rents, that was the sole direct tax on income, but by now more revenue accrued from customs and excise duties. All measures of home policy, financial and otherwise, were enacted by legislation. This was now standardised into some dozen stages in each House, of which the second reading, to debate the principle, and the committee, to discuss the details, were the most significant. All MPs and peers were free at any time to propose motions and initiate legislation. Government might seek approval of policy measures. Opposition motions often took the form of requests for papers on current political issues or general resolutions of principle critical of ministerial behaviour. By now administration had an array of obstructive devices to block direct votes on awkward topics, often generically described as ‘the previous question’, which specifically was a counter that the motion be not put. Adjournments and amendments served the same purpose of avoiding embarrassment. Such were the weapons of Parliamentary warfare, deployed in the political arena of Westminster.²¹

Parliament, in the context of the political battle for power, meant the House of Commons. Contemporaries knew that contests between administration and opposition over policies and for office were decided there. The House of Lords as a political institution enjoyed prestige rather than power, and setbacks for ministers there were merely inconvenient and annoying. No ministry would be overthrown by defeat in the Lords, and its chief role was that of a political sounding-board. It did contain the bulk of the nation’s political leadership, a majority of the cabinet and the heads of most opposition factions. Its debates were often of high quality, and widely reported in the press during the 1770s. Yet all this was rather a sham. At best the Lords was a forum for propaganda, as opposition peer Lord Temple acknowledged when in 1770 he announced he would not attend merely to ‘talk to tapestry’ after the Lords, to counter the onset of Parliamentary reporting, decided to prohibit public attendance.²²

It was not merely that the Lords lacked a significant role in the body politic. There was in any case also the circumstance of a permanent majority for government there. That this ministerial hold on the Lords rested on a triple foundation of bishops, Scots, and courtiers was stated by radical journalist John Almon in 1770, when in the monthly London Museum he described ‘the Court Lords’ as ‘consisting of the Scotch Lords, the Bishops, the Placed-Lords, etc.’, and has long been received historical wisdom.²³ All the twenty-six bishops of England and Wales owed their appointment to a minister, and since their promotion and patronage prospects depended on support of the current administration most of them transferred their allegiance on any change of ministry. Newcastle, long responsible for ecclesiastical appointments under George II, was the first fallen minister of the new reign to suffer such desertions, with his famous joke that even the bishops forgot their Maker. The sixteen Scottish representative peers were chosen at the time of each general election, when the Scottish peerage, meeting in Edinburgh, tended to vote almost en bloc the government list sent from London. The third component of a government majority was a Court Party, comprising peers who held offices of honour or profit, often in the Royal Household itself, and about a dozen impecunious peers who had pensions. In 1774 Treasury Secretary John Robinson listed sixty-five English and ten Scottish peers as holding office.²⁴ George III’s youthful fear about the power of the Crown to create peers was irrelevant to the Parliamentary scene, but it was reflected in his reluctance to make new peers, until a logjam of promises was broken by ten creations on the same day, 20 May 1776. Ministerial control of the Lords was buttressed by a procedural device peculiar to that House, that of proxy voting, whereby peers expecting to be absent could entrust their votes to other peers. Since it was more respectable to support the King’s government than to demonstrate hostility to it, ministers found it easier to collect proxies than their opponents. But proxies were not an essential weapon. When called for they served to increase a ministerial majority, but never in this period did they reverse a decision made by the peers actually present.

Since the membership of the House of Lords remained constant at around two hundred, the combined size of these groups of government supporters would appear to guarantee a safe majority for any ministry, and that was almost invariably the case. But in the 1760s two developments disrupted the customary pattern of political behaviour. The factionalisation of politics in that decade meant that about half the House of Lords owed allegiance to various political leaders and at some time voted against the King’s government. This circumstance did not in itself threaten ministerial control of the Lords, for one or more of the factions were always with administration. But the Court Party was disrupted by the American question, as many peers deemed the policies of the Rockingham and Chatham ministries too conciliatory towards the colonies. Courtiers, Scottish peers and bishops all voted in some numbers over America against the Rockingham ministry, which in 1766 actually suffered two Lords defeats on relevant issues, by 63 to 60 and by 59 to 55, on 4 and 6 February respectively. They could rebel in safety because the King’s favourite Lord Bute was at their head. Prime Minister Rockingham then put pressure on George III, and the key measure of repeal of the Stamp Act was carried by 73 votes to 61, the majority being raised by proxies to 105 to 71. That total of 176 was the largest at any Lords division during the century. This near-success of a challenge to ministerial policy was exceptional. The opposition attacks in the Lords during 1767 ran the Chatham ministry close, down to a majority of only three, 65 to 62, on 26 May; but they threatened only embarrassment over opposition motions, not defeat of government policy, and the conflict was different, comprising an alliance of factions against a court party whose unity was much tighter than in 1766. Nor, despite George III’s belief in ‘an intention to storm my closet’,²⁵ did the opposition hope to bring down the ministry by defeat in the Lords: and the sole consequence was to frighten the cabinet into abortive coalition negotiations during the recess.²⁶

Too much should not be read into these ministerial difficulties in the House of Lords during the mid-1760s. The Grafton and North ministries had no problems there as normality returned from 1768, and Chatham, on his return to opposition in 1770, found that his peerage had politically emasculated him, since the House of Lords lacked the significant body of independent opinion that as William Pitt he had made his power base in the Commons. In the four sessions from 1771 to 1774 the opposition did not even force a Lords vote on the Address, and the Rockinghamite party made the best of a bad job by exploiting the procedural device of printed Protests against Lords decisions, using them as a vehicle for press portrayals of opposition viewpoints. The House of Lords was again a mere sounding-board.

The contrasting independence of the House of Commons stemmed from the electoral system. The electorate was beyond the control of government, and not merely because of