The Challenge of Parliamentary Supremacy
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American colonies and to increase revenue. These reforms, altering the
constitutional relationship between Great Britain and the colonies and
weakening the political rights of the colonists, led directly to the American
Revolution. The King, the King’s friends, and some Whigs must share the
blame with the Tories, however, in causing the colonial rebellion.
There were many British who joined with the Americans and agreed
with colonial leaders that Parliament had overstepped its bounds. Though
a monarchist, the great English jurist and legal scholar Sir William Blackstone sided with the Americans in the great constitutional debate between
the mother country and the colonies. So too did a number of Whigs in the
House of Commons, especially the Irish statesman Edmund Burke, who
became the most ardent champion of the American cause. Burke’s eloquent speeches were widely read in the American colonies, and his constitutional views had a powerful impact on the American mind. So popular was Burke in America that in 1771 the New York Assembly hired
him to represent the colony and defend its interests as its London agent.
As a result of his leadership in opposing the doctrines of the French Revolution, Burke would later become the principal architect of the conservative political tradition that came into being in the next century, and the
founder of a political movement in Great Britain that led eventually to a
major party realignment in which the Whigs and Tories were supplanted
by the Liberal and Conservative parties.
In his celebrated Speech on American Taxation (1774), Burke assailed the
repressive tax measures enacted by Parliament in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party. The King’s ministers, he charged, had taken the principle
of legislative supremacy beyond its constitutional limits. ‘‘Revert to your
old principles,’’ he said, and seek peace with the Americans. ‘‘Leave
America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself.’’ If parliamentary
sovereignty is not reconciled with freedom, he warned, the Americans
‘‘will cast your sovereignty in your face. Nobody will be argued into
slavery.’’
More powerful yet was Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies
(1775), in which he pleaded for moderation and restraint and warned his
colleagues that they had seriously underestimated the Americans’ love
of liberty. ‘‘This fierce spirit of liberty,’’ he observed, ‘‘is stronger in the
English colonies . . . than in any other people of the earth. . . . They are