George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 5, 13th edition.

Immediately, the protest which Lyttelton had prepared against committing the bill, was produced, and signed by thirty-three peers, with Bedford at their head. Against the total repeal of the Stamp Act, they maintained that such a strange and unheard of submission of King, Lords, and Commons to a successful insurrection of the colonies would make the authority of Great Britain contemptible; that the reason assigned for their disobeying the Stamp Act, extended to all other laws, and, if admitted, must set them absolutely free from obedience to the power of the British legislature; that any endeavor to enforce it hereafter, against the will of the colonies, would bring on the contest for their total independence, rendered, perhaps, more dangerous and formidable from the circumstances of the other powers of Europe; that the power of taxation to be impartially exercised must extend to all the members of the state; that the North American colonies, ‘our colonies,’ as they were called by the discontented lords, were able to share the expenses of the army, now maintained in them at the vast expense of almost a shilling in the pound land tax, annually remitted from England for their special protection; that parliament was the only supreme legislature and common council empowered to act for all; that its laying a general tax on the American colonies was not only right but expedient and necessary; that it was ‘a most indispensable duty to ease the gentry and people of this kingdom, as much as possible, by the due ’