chap. IX.} 1764. Mar. |
This text is part of:
[180]
whig, he regarded the parliament of England as
in all cases supreme; he knew ‘no other law, no other rule.’1
The later reports of the military commanders2 in America, accused the colonies of reluctance to furnish the men and money which the commanderin-chief had required.3 The free exercise of deli berative powers by the colonial assemblies, seemed to show a tendency for self-direction and legislative independence, which might even reach the Acts of Navigation.
Forged letters of Montcalm, too, were exhibited to Grenville,4 in which American independence at an early day was predicted as the consequence of the conquest of Canada.
Lord Mansfield, who believed the letters genuine,5 was persuaded, as were others, that the dependence of the colonies was endangered.
Further: Grenville had been ‘made to believe’ that the Americans were able to contribute to the revenue, and he had little reason to think them so stubborn as to refuse the payment of a tax. There was not the least disposition in the agents of the colonies to oppose it;6 and the agent of Massachusetts made a merit of his submission.7 The Secretary of
1 George Grenville, in Cavendish i. 496.
2 Letters of Amherst and his subordinates.
3 Calvert to Lieutenant-Governor Sharpe, February 29 to April 3.
4 That these letters, of which I have a copy, were shown to Grenville, is averred by Allon, Biographical Anecdotes, II. 99. On matters which were known to Lord Temple, Almon's evidence merits consideration. That they are forgeries, appears from their style, from their exaggeration, from their want of all authentication, from the comparison, freely and repeatedly allowed by successive ministries in France, of all the papers relating to the conquest of Canada, or to Montcalm. The fabrication and sale of political papers and secrets was, in the last century, quite a traffic.
5 Debate in the house of Lords.
6 J. Mauduit, 11 February, 1764.
7 Jasper Mauduit's letter to the Speaker of the louse of Representatives of the province of Massachusetts Bay. London, 11 Feb. 1764.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1860.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.