Against the ministerial majorities the Opposition fought in vain; and so disgusted were the Rockingham Whigs at their want of success, that after the rejection on November 6th of Lord John Cavendish's motion for the revisal of all laws by which the Americans thought themselves aggrieved, they broke from the agreement they had made with Grafton in the previous year, and ceased to attend in the House of Commons. In this course Shelburne refused to join, and followed by his friends warmly opposed the Bill for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act in the Colonies, which the Ministry were at this moment engaged in passing. Nor was the resistance useless, for Dunning succeeded in carrying a number "of alterations, clauses, and softenings,"[1] which materially diminished the obnoxious character of the measure. Shelburne also strongly opposed the payment of the arrears of the Civil List, for which the King was again applying, condemning the extravagance of the Court, the careless manner in which it appeared from the papers laid before the House that the accounts were kept, and the unconstitutional character of the doctrine advanced by the King's friends, that he had an absolute right, independent of Parliament, to the Civil List, and that consequently Parliament had no right to interfere with the application and expenditure of it.[2]
The history of the extension of the control exercised by Parliament over the Civil List affords an interesting study of the growth of the power of the two Houses. It was still urged in the middle of the last century by the King's friends, that as the Civil List had been given to the King for life, in exchange for the cession of the Ordinary Revenue, the House had no right to meddle with it in any way during his lifetime, unless with his previous consent; in other words, that what applied to the Ordinary Revenue of the Crown applied also to the money given in exchange for it. Historically the argument was unanswerable, and Rigby used it in 1780 in an unsuccessful attempt to thwart the reforming zeal of Burke and Dunning in the
