Prime Minister Lord Rockingham.
The Declaratory Act, formally the American Colonies Act 1766, was an act of the Parliament of Great Britain that was signed by King George III on 18 March 1766. The Declaratory Act accompanied the repeal of the Stamp Act, and was meant to justify the repeal and save face.
The Stamp Act of 1765 had been designed specifically to raise revenue in the American colonies, and was the first direct tax ever levied on the colonies. The result was the Stamp Act Crisis, a wave of sometimes-violent protests that swept the colonies in the spring and summer of 1765, culminating in the meeting of the Stamp Act Congress in October. Passage of the Stamp Act solidified opinion in the American colonies that under the British Constitution, Parliament had no right to impose taxes on the colonies, since only elected representatives had the power to do so and the colonists had no representation in Parliament.
An embargo of British goods by the colonists threatened the profits of British merchants, and their influence was able to bring about the fall of the government of George Grenville, who had conceived and gained passage of the Stamp Act in July 1765. Grenville's successor, Lord Rockingham, had opposed the Stamp Act, and by January 1766 he had begun working for its repeal. However, the colonial protests, and in particular the attack on the right of Parliamentary taxation, had the effect of strengthening Parliament's resolve to maintain its claimed right to do so. Rockingham's Secretary of State for the Southern Department, General Henry Conway, introduced the Declaratory Act, which proclaimed that Parliament "had hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America ... in all cases whatsoever". The phrasing of the act was intentionally unambiguous. In other words, the Declaratory Act of 1766 asserted that Parliament had the absolute power to make laws and changes to the colonial government, "in all cases whatsoever", even though the colonists were not represented in the Parliament.
Although many in Parliament felt that taxes were implied in this clause, other members of Parliament and many of the colonists -— who were busy celebrating what they saw as their political victory -— did not. Other colonists, however, were outraged because the Declaratory Act hinted that more acts would be coming. This Declaratory Act was copied almost word for word from the Irish Declaratory Act of 1719, an Act which had placed Ireland in a position of bondage to the Crown, implying that the same fate would come to the American colonies. However, the colonists never explicitly called for its repeal, and would seek reconciliation with the Crown up until the final outbreak of the North American Rebellion in April 1775.