114 Chapter VI
archs were acting at the time. He had, of course, no such intention. He would try
to take control from the magnates, but trouble with the church or the landowners
was far from his thoughts.
For George III was himself a Whig. He, too, gloried in the Glorious Revolu-
tion. He, too, was awed by the British constitution; he would simply restore that
balance of King, Lords, and Commons which all experts declared to be its essence.
He, too, would uphold Parliament against all who questioned its rights. He would,
however, himself supervise the use of that influence by which Parliament was kept
in step with executive programs, and which the Duke of Newcastle had so adeptly
managed before him. He antagonized important groups in the parliamentary lead-
ership, and that was enough to produce a crisis. But he did not antagonize Parlia-
ment itself; the back- benchers mostly supported him, content to be called friends
of the King rather than friends of this or that private leader. In the years that fol-
lowed, the King had a parliamentary majority, nor was it due solely to influence.
King and Parliament stood together. The consequences were not happy, for some
of their policies provoked opposition, and the bond between them, the trading in
pensions and offices, was open to serious reprehension. There were men in both
Britain and America who came to distrust both King and Parliament.
The First American Crisis: The Stamp Act
The expense of the Seven Years’ War, and heavy indebtedness which it created for
the belligerent governments, led ministers in various countries to seek untapped
sources of revenue. Old tax structures, favorable to the taxpayers, existed in many
places, fortified by what amounted to class privileges, as in France, or by the au-
tonomy and regional liberty of particular provinces. In the attempt to increase
revenue governments were led to call such privileges and liberties into question.
Financial pressure brought pressure for constitutional change. Louis XV abol-
ished the French parlements, in part because they stood in the way of increased
taxation; his ministers then proceeded to bring assessed land values up to date,
and so to raise the yield of the vingtième. Maria Theresa began to restrain the au-
tonomous bodies of Lombardy. Having come “to know people” in her financial
disputes with the Hungarian diet of 1764, she went on to rule without summon-
ing the diet at all.
The problem of the British government was not dissimilar. The national debt
had risen from £75,000,000 to £147,000,000 because of the war. British subjects
in America paid less in taxes than in Britain. They enjoyed regional or provincial
privileges in this respect, confirmed by charters or by history or by custom, some-
what like Brittany and Hungary within the Bourbon and Hapsburg empires. It
seemed reasonable to King George, to Parliament, and to the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, George Grenville, to distribute the tax burden by tapping sources of
wealth hitherto largely exempted. There were some, like Governor Bernard of
Massachusetts, who thought that a general governmental reorganization in Amer-
ica should precede the raising of direct taxes. Grenville decided to avoid so rash a
course, and to levy a stamp tax at once; but in America as elsewhere fiscal innova-