England with her American Colonies was finally broken. The surrender of
Cornwallis at Yorktown on October 19th impressed the Government with
the futility of a contest which the country had already realised, and
which would have at once caused a change of administration if the House
of Commons had been truly representative of the opinion of the country;
"a sense of past error," wrote the Duke of Grafton in his
autobiography, "and a conviction that the American war might terminate
in further destruction to our armies, began from this time rapidly to
insinuate itself into the minds of men. Their discourse was quite
changed, though the majorities in Parliament were still ready to
support the American war, while all the world was representing it to be
the height of madness and folly."(146) But though the country was
oppressed by taxation, and disgusted at the want of success of its
armies, society in St. James's Street took the national disasters with
perfect composure. It troubled itself more about the nightly losses of
money at the card-tables of Brooks's than of soldiers on the Delaware.
It lived in the same kind of fatalism as the House of Commons and the
King, who, with characteristic obstinacy, refused to bow to the force
of events, and kept in office, but not in power, a minister who did not
believe in the policy which he was compelled to support in Parliament.
From contemporaries the cardinal events of history are obscured by the
course of their ordinary social or political life. To us, who can see
them so large and momentous, it appears strange that they do not fill a
greater place in the public mind of the period. Selwyn constantly
hearing of the course of the vital conflict between England and her
Colonies, fills his correspondence with details of the day, mingling
remarks on facts which have become historical with the latest story of
the clubs.