the first two Georges, added all the patronage and influence of the Crown
to their social and constitutional weight in the country. The domestic
history of England since the accession of George III. had turned chiefly
upon the obstinate struggle of this monarch to deliver himself from all
dependence upon party. The divisions of the Whigs, their jealousies, but,
above all, their real alienation from the mass of the people whose rights
they professed to defend, ultimately gave the King the victory, when, after
twenty years of errors, be found in the younger Pitt a Minister capable of
uniting the interests of the Crown with the ablest and most patriotic
liberal statesmanship. Bribes, threats, and every species of base influence
had been employed by King George to break up the great Coalition of 1783,
which united all sections of the Whigs against him under the Ministry of
Fox and North; but the real support of Pitt, whom the King placed in office
with a minority in the House of Commons, was the temper of the nation
itself, wearied with the exclusiveness, the corruption, and the
party-spirit of the Whigs, and willing to believe that a popular Minister,
even if he had entered upon power unconstitutionally, might do more for the
country than the constitutional proprietors of the rotten boroughs.

[Pitt Minister, 1783.]

[Effect of French Revolution on English Parties.]

From 1783 down to the outbreak of the French Revolution, Pitt, as a Tory
Minister confronted by a Whig Opposition, governed England on more liberal
principles than any statesman who had held power during the eighteenth
century. These years were the last of the party-system of England in its
original form. The French Revolution made an end of that old distinction in
which the Tory was known as the upholder of Crown-prerogative and the Whig
as the supporter of a constitutional oligarchy of great families. It