the old-line Whigs under the lead of the Marquis of Rockingham.
In all the negotiations which ended in this unpromising
arrangement of the King's business, the Stamp Act had apparently
not been once mentioned; except that Mr. Grenville, upon
retiring, had ventured to say to His Majesty, as a kind of
abbreviated parting homily, that if "any man ventured to defeat
the regulations laid down for the colonies, by a slackness in the
execution, he [Mr. Grenville] should look upon him as a criminal
and the betrayer of his country."

The Marquis of Rockingham and his friends had no intention of
betraying their country. They had, perhaps, when they were thus
accidentally lifted to power, no very definite intentions of any
sort. Respecting the Stamp Act, as most alarming reports began to
come in from America, His Majesty's Opposition, backed by the
landed interest and led by Mr. Grenville and the Duke of Bedford,
knew its mind much sooner than ministers knew theirs. America was
in open rebellion, they said, and so far from doing anything
about it ministers were not even prepared, four months after
disturbances began, to lay necessary information before the
House. Under pressure of such talk, the Marquis of Rockingham had
to make up his mind. It would be odd and contrary to
well-established precedent for ministers to adopt a policy already
outlined by Opposition; and in view of the facts that good Whig
tradition, even if somewhat obscured in latter days, committed
them to some kind of liberalism, that the City and the mercantile
interest thought Mr. Grenville's measures disastrous to trade,
and that they were much in need of Mr. Pitt's eloquence to carry
them through, ministers at last, in January, 1766, declared for
the repeal.