With the fall of Lord North’s government, king George III found himself obliged to submit to the authority of parliament and appoint a government led by the Marquess of Rockingham, a man he deeply disliked and distrusted. His resentment was all the deeper because Rockingham, almost certainly at the urging of his secretary the remarkable Edmund Burke, laid down conditions for the formation of the government, and in particular the staggering words, “The king must not give a veto to the Independence of America.” A subject telling the king what he must not do? That was a small revolution.

Rockingham’s was the first of three short-lived governments whose most important achievement was the granting of US independence, the end of the war in America, and the end of the wider, world war to which it had led.

Illustration: The Treaty of Paris, by Benjamin West, 1783. The painting is unfinished because the British delegation to the treaty negotiations refused to pose for it.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License