The old Whig party, as it had lived and ruled so long, had practically ceased to exist. So much the King had accomplished. Saint George of Hanover had struck at the dragon only to find that, like the monster in the classical fable, it took new form and fresh vitality beneath his strokes. There was a Whig party that was not essentially the party of Pitt, a party which was recruiting its ranks with earnest, thoughtful, high-minded, honorable men to whom the principles or want of principles which permitted the old Whig dominion were as intolerable as they appear to a statesman of to-day. At the head of this new development of Whig activity was the man to whom Cumberland now turned in the hour of the King's trial, Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquis of Rockingham. {94} Lord Rockingham was one of those ornaments of the English senate for the benefit of whose biographers the adjective amiable seems especially to have been invented. Although the master of a large fortune, while he was still a boy of twenty he was deservedly noted for the gravity and stillness of his youth, and during a political career of one-and-thirty years, if he showed neither commanding eloquence nor commanding statesmanship, he did honor to the Whig party by his sincere patriotism and irreproachable uprightness of character. If heaven had denied Rockingham the resplendent gifts that immortalize a Chatham, it had given him in full measure of the virtues of patriotism, honesty, integrity, and zeal. The purity of his life, the probity of his actions, and the excellence of all his public purposes, commended him to the affectionate regard of all who held that morality was more essential to a statesman than eloquence, and that it was better to fail with such a man than to succeed with those to whom, for the most part, the successes of that day were given. Two years before, in 1763, his dislike for the policy of Lord Bute had driven him to resign his small office as Lord of the Bedchamber, and he carried his scrupulousness so far as to resign at the same time his Lord-Lieutenantcy of Yorkshire.