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

‘ [101] despotism of a ministry.’¹ While still but half

Chap. III.} 1775.

recovered from a long, painful, and complicated sickness, he explained the processes of his mind when others thought him dying:

The more I reflect on the measures of the British government, the more they appear to me arbitrary and despotic. The British constitution itself seems to authorize resistance. That the court has provoked its colonies to withstand its measures, nobody can doubt. It invents new taxes; it wishes by its own authority to impose them on its colonies in manifest breach of their privileges: the colonies do not refuse their former taxes, and demand only with regard to new ones to be placed on the same footing with England; but the government will not accord to them the right to tax themselves. This is, in short, the whole history of these disturbances.

During my illness, in which I have passed many moments doing nothing, these are the ideas that occupied my mind; and it seems to me that they could not escape any reasonable Englishman who is naturally much more interested than I. Everything which is taking place in America can be to me very indifferent in the main; and I have no cause to embarrass myself either about the form of government that will be established there, or the degree of influence of the party of Bute in the mother country. But every patriotic Englishman must deplore the turn which the affairs of his country are taking under the present administration, and the odious perspective which it opens before him.

Frederic to Maltzan, 13 Nov., 1775.