Twice already since George Grenville had taken the reins of power, the king, soon wearied of his arrogant rule, had asked Pitt to free him from it. The new reason for disagreement had just increased the bitterness between George III. and his minister. The monarch, suffering and ill, had felt the first attacks of that malady which was at recurrent intervals to cloud his faculties, and which at last plunged him into an insanity that only ended with his life. Barely recovered, the young king, with touching firmness and resignation, himself proposed to his ministers the question of a regency. The Prince of Wales was not yet three years old. The act prepared by George Grenville and his colleagues excluded the princess dowager from the regency on the ground that she was not of the royal family. {268} The hatred and jealousy inspired by Lord Bute, which always operated strongly upon both mother and son, had suggested the singular interpretation of the legal text. For a moment the king agreed with a melancholy sweetness; but the insult offered his mother soon wounded him, and he resolved to escape at last from the tyranny which weighed upon him. Formerly he feared the junta of the great Whig lords. It appeared to him less formidable than George Grenville and the Duke of Bedford. The Duke of Cumberland, in the king's name, visited Mr. Pitt, who was sick and detained in the country. Pitt refused to assume the direction of affairs without the assistance of Lord Temple. The latter was particularly hostile to Lord Bute, and personally compromised in relation to the king. George III. would not submit. Negotiations resulted finally in the formation of a Whig cabinet, which was really honest and dull. The Marquis of Rockingham was its chief. It was in his service and as his private secretary that Edmund Burke for the first time took part in public affairs and entered Parliament. The only important act of Lord Rockingham's ministry was the repeal of the Stamp Act, accompanied by a contradictory declarative clause which proclaimed the right of Parliament to bind by its decrees the colonies under any circumstances whatever. This fruitful seed of new dissensions passed unperceived in the first outburst of American joy and of the triumph of the friends of liberty in England. Mr. Pitt was already on the threshold of power. Lord Rockingham, involved with a new party, which was known under the name of the king's friends, saw his authority rendered powerless and his honest intentions feebly fulfilled. {269} The king desired to get rid of the Whigs at any price, without being obliged to submit again to George Grenville. Pitt once more agreed to become prime minister, but to the great astonishment and universal regret of his friends he abandoned at the same time the supreme empire which he had exercised in the House of Commons and entered the House of Lords with the title of Lord Chatham.