The British Parliament 129
acy was their distinctive doctrine, the dogma handed down from 1689, the buckler
of liberty, and the barrier against despotism. The Americans in claiming to be
under the King but not under Parliament were in fact a species of Tories, certainly
more “Tory” than George III. Only the emerging handful of radicals in England,
and the handful of followers of Pitt, who was beginning in some ways to agree
with the radicals, believed that Parliament should not even claim the right to tax
the Americans. The formula of the Rockingham Whigs for the Americans was
that Parliament should make clear its power to tax them, but, from expediency,
refrain from using it. After North repealed the Townshend duties, this was pretty
much the formula of North and the King.
Burke’s famous Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, written in 1770,
was the classic statement of Old Whiggery at the moment. There was, according to
Burke, a profound discontent abroad in the land, nor was it caused by a “few puny
libellers.” It was a true groundswell of opposition. “When popular discontents have
been very prevalent, it may well be affirmed and supported that there has been
something found amiss in the constitution or in the conduct of government.” And
he added, like Rousseau: “The people have no interest in disorder. When they do
wrong, it is their error, not their crime.” The error to which the people were liable
was in failing to see that the trouble lay with the King. It was not that the King
threatened Parliament itself, like the Stuarts in times gone by, but that he threat-
ened parliamentary independence. “The power of the crown, almost dead and rot-
ten as Prerogative, has grown up anew under the name of Influence.” It was a
popular error, too, to favor structural changes in the Parliament. To have more
voters, or more frequent elections, said Burke, would make matters worse by creat-
ing new opportunities for corruption. Our government, remarked Burke, is in any
case too complicated for us to know how to reform it. Parliament should remain as
it is. But it should resist the crown and its ministers.
Burke presented the issue as a clash between a kind of equalitarian despotism
on the one hand and a responsible and vigorous aristocracy on the other. The court
faction, he declared, wished to get rid of all “intermediate and independent impor-
tance” (one is reminded of Montesquieu), to teach “a total indifference to the per-
sons, rank, influence, abilities, connections and character of the ministers of the
crown” (one is reminded of Saint- Simon). “Points of honor and precedence were
no more to be regarded... than in a Turkish army. It was to be avowed, as a con-
stitutional maxim, that the King might appoint one of his footmen, or one of your
footmen, for minister.” This was Burke’s way of saying that George III would not
call the great Whig peers into the government.
The true remedy, according to Burke, must be found in Parliament itself. It lay
in a good, strong legitimate sense of party—that is, of party within parliamentary
circles, and in particular the party of the Rockingham Whigs. If the people would
feel confidence in these natural leaders, and if the Lords and Commons would
cease to give their votes passively to the ministers, whoever they might be and
whatever they might do, and instead would frankly form a party to criticize the
actions of government, then the dignity and independence of Parliament would be
preserved. Burke’s doctrine of party was to be praised by later generations. At the
time, his eloquence failed to move his colleagues in Parliament, most of whom