"The Prime Minister," Lord North, it is said, "received the tidings as he would have taken a ball in his breast. He threw his arms apart. He paced wildly up and down the room, exclaiming, from time to time, 'Oh God! it is all over.'"
All England now was clamoring against the war. Thousands of persons had perished in the campaigns, and financial embarrassments had come to nearly all her institutions of industry. The English government made vigorous endeavors, offering great bribes, to induce the American envoys at Paris to abandon their French allies, and make a separate peace. Franklin wrote to Mr. Hartley, through whom he received these proposals,
"I believe there is not a man in America, a few _English Tories_ excepted, that would not spurn the thought of deserting a noble and generous friend, for the sake of a truce with an unjust and cruel enemy."
British diplomacy tried all its arts of intrigue to separate America from France in the negotiations for peace, but all in vain. The British minister, Mr. Grenville, in an interview with Mr. Franklin, ridiculed the idea that America owed France any gratitude, urging that France sought only her own selfish interests.
"I told him," Franklin writes, "that I was so strongly impressed with the kind assistance afforded us by France, in our distress, and the generous and noble manner in which it was granted, without exacting or stipulating for a single privilege, or particular advantage to herself in our commerce or otherwise, that I could never suffer myself to think of such reasonings for lessening the obligation."
On the 28th of February, 1782, General Conway, one of the leaders of the Opposition, the same who had moved the repeal of the stamp act, seventeen years before, presented a resolution in the House of Commons that,
"THE REDUCTION OF THE COLONIES BY FORCE OF ARMS IS IMPRACTICABLE."
A violent, even fierce debate ensued, which was continued until one o'clock in the morning. Then the cry of _question_ became general. The vote was carried by a majority of nineteen. This terminated the American war. The people of England had decided against it. "Acclamations," writes Wraxall, "pierced the roof, and might have been heard in Westminster Hall."