George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 10

The outgoing ministry was the worst which England had known since parliament had been supreme. ‘Such a bunch of imbecility,’ said the author of ‘Taxation no Tyranny,’ and he might have added, of corruption, ‘never disgraced the country;’ and he has left on record that he ‘prayed and gave thanks’ when it was dissolved. Posterity has been towards Lord North more lenient and less just. America gained, through his mismanagement, independence, and could bear him no grudge. In England, no party claimed him as their representative, or saw fit to bring him to judgment; so that his scholarship, his unruffled temper, the purity of his private life, and good words from Burns, from Gibbon, and more than all from Macaulay, have retained for him among his countrymen a better repute as minister than he deserved.

The people were not yet known in parliament as a power; and outside of them three groups only could contribute members to an administration. The new tory or conservative party, toward which the part of the whigs represented by Portland and Burke were gravitating, had at that time for its most conspicuous and least scrupulous defender the chancellor, Lord Thurlow. The followers of Lord Chatham, of whom it was the cardinal principle that the British constitution recognises a king and a people, no less than a hereditary aristocracy, and that to prevent the overbearing weight of that aristocracy the king should sustain the liberties of the people, owned Lord Shelburne as their standard-bearer. In point of years, experience, philosophic culture, and superiority