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

[181] Maryland had for years watched the ripening of the

chap. IX.} 1764. Mar.

measure, and could not conceal his joy at its adoption.¹ Thomas Pownall, ‘the fribble,’² who had been Governor of Massachusetts, and is remembered as one who grew more and more liberal as he grew old, openly contended for an American revenue to ‘be raised by customs on trade, a stamp-duty, a moderate land-tax in lieu of quit rents, and an excise.’³

But on the other hand, Jackson, Grenville's able secretary, so well acquainted with the colonies, would never himself be privy to any measures taken with respect to the Stamp-Act, after having formally declined giving any other advice on the subject, excepting that which he had always given, to lay the project aside.⁴ Lord Hillsborough,⁵ too, then first Lord of the Board of Trade, as yet retained enough of the spirit of an Irishman to disapprove a direct taxation of a dependency of the British empire by a British Act of Parliament. He gave his advice against the stamp-tax, and to the last withheld from it his support; so that Grenville, in proposing it, was sustained neither by the civil office-holders in America, who had been and were still so clamorous for parliamentary interference, nor by the Board of Trade, which was the very author of the system.

The traditions of the whig party, too, whose principles Grenville claimed to represent, retained the