The first king of the Hanover line, George I, was seated on his throne through a successful piece of Whig politics, so admirably described by Thackeray in Henry Esmond, and his government was conducted by a Whig minister, Robert Walpole, assisted by a Whig cabinet. The power remained in the hands of a few families, and this condition, which amounted to an aristocratic rule of "Old Whigs," lasted down to the accession of George III, in 1760. The new king, who was destined to be the last king in America, was not like his father and grandfather, a German-speaking prince who knew nothing of England and her people, but one who gloried in the name Briton. Brought up by his mother with the fixed idea he should never forget that he was king, his ambition was to restore the autocratic power of William I. or Henry II. To attain this end he set himself to overthrow the Whig party and so recall to favor the Tories, who had by this time given up their dreams of "Bonnie Prince Charlie" and Stuart restorations.
This misguided monarch, who was a model of Christian character in private life, but who in the words of a great English historian, wrought more lasting evil to his country than any other man in its history, determined first to overthrow William Pitt, the elder, the greatest statesman that the English speaking race has ever produced--that man who sat in his room in London and planned campaigns in the snow covered mountains of Silesia and the impassable swamps of Prussia, on the banks of the Hugli in India and on the Plain of Abraham in Canada, in the spicy islands of the East Indies and the stormy waters of the Atlantic, who brought England from the depths of lowest dejection to a point where the gifted Horace Walpole could say in 1759, "We must inquire each morning what new victory we should celebrate." This great man was overthrown by the king in 1761, and there came into power the extreme Tory wing, known as the "king's friends," whose only rule of political guidance was the royal wish. These men, led by the Earl of Bute, followed the king on one of the wildest, maddest courses that English partisan politics has known.
At this point we must pause and examine the constitution of the British Empire. England, Scotland, and Wales were governed by their own Parliament, but so defective was the method of representation that villages which had formerly flourished but had now fallen into decay or even like Old Sarum, were buried under the waves of the North Sea, still returned their two members to Parliament, while important cities like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham, which had grown up in the last hundred years, were entirely unrepresented. The Whigs in England, as least the New Whigs, the progressive element, were contending for the same principle of representation that inspired the Americans. In addition to the home-land, England ruled, as colonies, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, sea fortresses, such as Gibraltar and Malta, Asiatic possessions, including in India an empire twenty times as populous as the ruling country, Canada, Jamaica, the Barbadoes, the Thirteen Colonies, etc. Our own thirteen colonies, which were not united among themselves and which were not different in the eyes of an Englishman from any other of the colonies, formed a small part geographically of the empire and had for their peculiar distinction only the larger proportion of English residents.