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234 hordes of Washington. But on another discontented country, Ireland, his majesty was explicit. The discontents there, too, were so clamorous under this most deplorable reign, that rebellion was also menaced, unless some relaxation of the selfish policy of England was conceded, and George informed them that he had ordered the necessary papers to be laid before the commons, to enable them to decide what should be done.

The marquis of Rockingham, in moving an amendment on the address in the lords, was extremely severe. He described every part of our government, the management at home, our diplomacy abroad, the war everywhere, as conducted with an unexampled imbecility.



He declared that lord Stormont had been most grossly duped by France, and lord Grantham by Spain. He referred to the expression in the address, of the happiness of having under his majesty's benign government, and declared that really it was insulting the common sense of the house; for that all our blessings, by the management of the kings government, had been converted into curses, and that security and honour were driven from the kingdom. He remembered, he said, the glory and lustre of the nation, when his majesty ascended the throne; but, since then, there had been a constant declension. The most pernicious counsels—the most unconstitutional tyranny—had prevailed. Never had this people, once so great, recently so great, fallen into such utter degradation. He expressed his astonishment that the ministers should dare to remain in office, after they had reduced the country to so deplorable a condition, and especially the lord at the head of the admiralty, lord Sandwich, when he had seen the oldest of our naval officers driven from the public service. He very justly upbraided them with the free license which Paul Jones had had to ravage and terrify our coasts. If he turned his gaze towards Ireland, nothing but discontent, excited by the grossest folly and the moot absolute bad faith, met him. If he extended the survey to America, there he beheld the fruits of the same folly, the same tyranny, the same bad faith, ready to fall in rottenness and ruin. He especially condemned the menace of a new and terrible kind of warfare held out in the mischievous proclamation of the commissioners before leaving, which, he contended, had converted the contest there into one marked by every feature that was bloody, malignant, and diabolical. He concluded this bitter, but only too well deserved censure, by moving that every part of the address, except the title, should be expunged, and that, instead of what then stood, to insert a prayer, that his majesty would reflect on the extent of territory which marked the opening of his reign, the opulence and power, the reputation abroad, the concord at home, to which he had succeeded, and now on the endangered, impoverished, enfeebled, distracted, and even dismembered, state of the whole, after the enormous grants of his successive parliaments, and calling on him, as the only remedy of impending ruin, to dismiss his present evil councilors, and summoned new and more auspicious ones.

The language was crushing, but it derived its force from its undeniable truth. Lord John Cavendish moved a similar amendment in the commons; and the opposition declared that it was well that his majesty's speech expressed trust on Divine Providence, for Providence was the only friend that his government had now left; that our arms, both on sea and land, were paralysed by the scandalous practice of putting at the head of the army and navy mere court favourites and aristocratic blockheads, and by the