The Whig party, which stood for constitutional privilege, was utterly disorganized. Some Whigs had followed Chatham to the end, despite his uncertain temper, his failing health, his perverse treatment of his friends; some had followed, rather, the Marquis of Rockingham, whose brief tenure of power, in 1766, had been but long enough to effect the repeal of the odious Stamp Act; but nothing could hold the divergent personal elements of the party together, and there was no place for a party of principle and independence in an unrepresentative Parliament packed with the “King’s friends.” Ministries rose or fell according to the King’s pleasure, and were Whig or Tory as he directed, without change of majority in the Commons. “Not only did he direct the minister” whom the House nominally obeyed “in all matters of foreign and domestic policy, but he instructed him as to the management of debates in Parliament, suggested what motions should be made or opposed, and how measures should be carried.” The Houses were his to command; and when Chatham was gone, no man could withstand him. Persons not of the ministry at all, but the private and irresponsible advisers of the King, became the real rulers of the country. The Duke of Grafton, who became the nominal head of the government in 1768, was not his own master in what he did or proposed; and Lord North, who succeeded him in 1770, was little more than the King’s mouthpiece. Thoughtful men in England saw what all this meant, and deemed the liberties of England as much jeoparded as the liberties of America. And the very men who saw to the heart of the ominous situation in England were, significantly enough, the men who spoke most fearlessly and passionately in Parliament in defence of America,—statesmen like Chatham and Burke, frank soldiers like Colonel Barré, political free lances like the reckless John Wilkes, and all the growing company of agitators in London and elsewhere whom the government busied itself to crush. It was the group gathered about Wilkes in London who formed, under Horne Tooke’s leadership, the famous “Society for supporting the Bill of Rights,” with which Samuel Adams proposed, in his letter to Arthur Lee in 1771, that similar societies, to be formed in the several colonies in America, should put themselves in active coöperation by correspondence. Those who attacked the prerogative in England were as roundly denounced as traitors as those who resisted Parliament in America. Wilkes was expelled from the House of Commons; the choice of the Westminster electors who had chosen him was arbitrarily set aside and annulled; those who protested with too much hardihood were thrown into prison or fined. But each arbitrary step taken seemed only to increase the rising sense of uneasiness in the country. The London mob was raised; rioting spread through the country, till there seemed to be chronic disorder; writers like “Junius” sprang