George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 5, 13th edition.

But yet ‘this matter,’ observed Calvert, ‘may be obstructed under a Scotch premier minister, the Earl of Bute, against whom a strong party is forming.’ The ministry itself was crumbling. The king was Bute's friend; but his majority in ‘the king's parliament’ was broken and unmanageable. The city of London, the old aristocracy, the House of Lords, the mass of the House of Commons, the people of Eng land, the people of the colonies, the cabinet, all disliked him; the politicians, whose friendship he thought to have secured by favor, gave him no hearty support; nearly every member of the cabinet which he himself had formed was secretly or openly against him. ‘The ground I tread upon,’ said he, ‘is hollow;’² he might well be ‘afraid of falling;’ and if he persisted, of injuring the king by his fall. Charles Townshend made haste to retire from the cabinet; and his bill for raising a revenue in the plantations was, on the twenty-ninth of March,³ postponed.

Had Bute continued longer at the head of affairs, the government must soon have been at the mercy of a successful opposition:⁴ had he made way unreservedly for a sole minister in his stead, the aristocratic party might have recovered and long retained the entire control of the administration.⁵ By his instances to retire, made a half a year before, the king had been so troubled, that he frequently sat for hours together