ABSTRACT
Parliamentary inconsistency and instability have often been pointed to as causes of the subsequent revolution. To say that Parliament was inconsistent because it changed policies—passing the Stamp Act, then repealing it; implementing the Townshend duties, then dropping all of them except the duty on tea—is a half truth. A handful of men in Parliament—most notably, perhaps, William Pitt—did not think that Parliament, though supreme over the empire, had theconstitutional authority to tax the colonists. The vast majority in Parliament operated on the belief that parliamentary supremacy meant that there could be no limit to Parliament’s authority over the colonies: the authority to legislate ipso facto included the authority to tax. Where they differed was how to go about doing it. The Rockingham ministry had pushed for repeal of the Stamp Act because it had been the wrong tax; Rockingham differed from Grenville and North on timing and tactics, not on the issue of overall authority.
