Even before the entrance into the war of Britain’s Catholic enemies, fears grew that the war would not remain confined to American shores forever. The entrance of France and Spain into the conflict, however, drew forth from the collective memory of Britain historic fears of invasion and armada. Despite Britain being an island fastness, its history was shot through with foreign invasions: the Romans in 55 and 43 BC; the Angles and Saxons in sixth and seventh centuries; the Viking scourge in the eighth century; the Normans in 1066. Even the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the foundational moment for Patriots on both sides of the Atlantic, was in many ways a foreign invasion. More recently, France and Spain had been at the center of Britain’s nightmares of invasion. The Spanish had tried their hand at invasion before in 1588, only to have their infamous armada blown away by a fortuitous Protestant wind. The French had repeatedly allied with the Scots (the so-called “auld alliance”) against the English, supporting the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, and had even plotted an amphibious assault on Britain in 1759 during the Seven Years’ War.
With such grim historical precedents lodged firmly in their minds, it is little wonder that the British greeted the entrance of France and Spain into the war with alarm at the prospect of a new invasion. The effects were felt almost immediately. In April 1778, the daring raids of the American privateer John Paul Jones commenced with an assault on Whitehaven on the north-west coast of England, sending shockwaves through a still-complacent British public. While at the opera in May 1778, Lord North received a desperate message reporting that the French had landed in Sussex and that the inhabitants had refused to join the militia billeted to oppose the landing. It was a false alarm—the French were merely sailing down the Channel in search of the British fleet—but the panic did not subside. The movements of the French fleet were closely watched by the British public for signs of a pending invasion. In July 1778, notices describing the activities of the French fleet posted at Lloyd’s Coffee House in London (the precursor to the insurance giant Lloyd’s of London) caused stocks to fall as fears of invasion mounted. So great was the terror of France “laying waste and burning houses on our long line of defenceless coasts” that some, like Mr. Coke, a Member of Parliament for Norfolk who possessed land on the vulnerable coasts, demanded that Parliament disavow General Henry Clinton’s “Manifesto and Proclamation to the Members of Congress.” In a last desperate attempt to negotiate peace, in May 1778 Clinton had offered an amnesty to any and all American rebels willing to come to terms with Britain. In offering the amnesty, however, Clinton had also warned that the colonies’ recent alliance with France had changed the nature of the war. By “mortgaging her self and her resources to our enemies,” he declared, the Americans could expect no mercy if they continued a war that now seemed designed to ruin Britain and benefit France. For men like Mr. Coke, terrified at the prospect of French invasion, Clinton’s proclamation was dangerously provocative.1 The administration attempted to assuage such concerns by claiming that the English had “resisted Danish invasion, Norman usurpation, and Scottish inroads,” and that the people of England were more than up to the task of opposing the French should they indeed arrive on English soil. “Even the ladies would cast away their feathers, and show how they despised Frenchmen,” Lord Shelburne claimed to the derision of many.2
English concerns quickly proved to be more than justified. Shortly after Spain’s declaration of war, plans were developed for a joint Franco-Spanish invasion of Britain. The poor performance of the British fleet at the Battle of Ushant in 1778 had convinced the French of the weakness of Britain’s hold on the English Channel. With Britain’s fleet stretched thin across the Atlantic, the time seemed ripe for an attack on vulnerable British shores. In July 1779, a French fleet of thirty ships under Admiral d’Orvillers and a Spanish fleet of thirty-six ships under Don Luis de Córdova began to assemble near the Sisarga Islands off the north-west coast of Spain. At the same time, an invasion force of 40,000 troops and 400 transport ships began to gather on the Breton coast. The plan was for the combined fleet to decimate the British Channel fleet, estimated at only forty ships, allowing the transports to land the invasion force on the Isle of Wight to establish a beachhead before moving on to the capture of the vital naval base at Portsmouth.
Though already weakened by disease and delayed by unfavorable winds, the armada began to lurch into action at the end of July 1779. A diversionary squadron of French ships bearing American colors and led by the already notorious John Paul Jones was sent toward Ireland, long feared to be Britain’s vulnerable underbelly. By August 14 coastal Britons began to spot the armada, spreading alarm throughout the country. Once more, however, the winds seemed to be on Britain’s side. On July 18 a gale swept the Franco-Spanish fleet out of the Channel and into the Atlantic. The setback allowed the British fleet time to slip past the armada and into Portsmouth, strengthening its defenses. In the Franco-Spanish fleet, disagreements and confusion over the designated landing point, combined with still-rampant disease, the lateness of the season, and the newly entrenched British fleet convinced the leadership to abandon the invasion and disperse.
For France and Spain the aborted armada was a disaster they could ill afford. It was ruinously expensive and diverted resources from other theaters of the war, compromising France’s drive against Britain in the West and East Indies and undermining Spain’s preeminent war aim, the recovery of Gibraltar. For the British, despite yet another miraculous meteorological deliverance, what had been a distant conflict now seemed to many to have arrived with all its horrors on their own shores. The mood of the time is viscerally captured by Ignatius Sancho. In August 1779, with the Franco-Spanish fleet sailing menacingly toward Britain, he recorded:
I awake to fears of invasion, to noise, faction, drums, soldiers, and care: the whole town has now but two employments, the learning of French, and the exercise of arms . . . What’s to become of us? We are ruined and sold, is the exclamation of every mouth, the monied man trembles for his funds, the landowner for his acres, the married men for their families, old maids and old fusty bachelors for themselves.
At this crucial juncture, when Catholic powers threatened to invade Britain itself, it is hardly surprising that many agreed wholeheartedly with the bigoted sentiment of An Appeal from the Protestant Association to the People of Great Britain, that “Popery has long been chained in Britain: the consequences of unchaining it will be dreadful to posterity . . . to tolerate Popery, is to encourage what by Toleration itself we mean to destroy, a spirit of persecution and bigotry of the most notorious kind.”3
With the prospect of Catholic invasion plaguing the minds of Britons there was thus every reason to fear that this gathering in St. George’s Field might well turn violent. As one witness caustically quipped, “What! Summon 40,000 fanatics to meet together, and expect them to be orderly! What is it but to invite hungry wretches to a banquet, and at the same time to enjoin them not to eat?” The country, and London in particular, had long been divided over the American War. When the war began in 1775, perhaps one in three members of the voting public opposed the government’s bellicose American policy, and though support for America decreased as the war dragged on and France, Spain, and the Netherlands entered the fray, dissatisfaction with the government’s management of the war only increased. London itself was a hotbed of pro-American, anti-government opposition. In this divisive and divided context, violence had already broken out at several junctures.4
If the violent disturbances and “desperate conspiracies” of the day had been confined to the distant shores of North America, residents of London might have slept easily enough, concerned but not afraid. As it transpired, however, one of the sparks that had helped to ignite the fire of independence in America was a British journalist, politician, and sometime mayor of London, John Wilkes. Instantly recognizable by his cross-eyed visage, rakish attire, and outrageous manners, Wilkes was in politics an opposition Whig, a vocal enemy of the ministries of George III, and
a tireless advocate for greater popular representation in government.
What made Wilkes particularly worrisome for the ministry was that he had the support of the London mob. Riot had long been an accepted if oftbemoaned tactic of British popular politics, with crowds using violence or its threat to voice its displeasure or show its support for a politician or political cause. Property and other symbols were generally the prime targets, and a favored tactic was to demand householders put lights in their windows in support of a particular person or cause. Those who refused to join would have their windows smashed in protest. Many a politician sought to harness the power of the mob for their own ends—election riots were common throughout the eighteenth century—but few with the sustained success of Wilkes. Wilkes intentionally and expertly cultivated the support of London crowds, seeing in them a wellspring of power. In 1763 a crowd chanting “Wilkes and Liberty” had attacked officials tasked with ceremonially burning his libelous issue no. 45 of The North Briton. In 1768, when Wilkes was elected as Member of Parliament for Middlesex, a celebratory riot targeted his political opponents. Cries of “Wilkes and Liberty” rang out once more when he was arrested and prevented from taking his seat in Parliament, ultimately leading to the mob’s suppression by government troops that left at least six people dead in what would come to be branded the St. George’s Field Massacre.5
By 1776 the “Wilkes and Liberty Riots” had largely tailed off. The threat of the mob, however, very much remained. Wilkes was no mere rabble-rouser. His radical Whig politics and his advocacy for American liberties made him a hugely popular and influential figure in Britain and America. Many Americans viewed his battles with the government of George III as evidence of the fundamentally corrupt nature of British politics and the need for greater rights of representation. The chant of “Wilkes and Liberty” echoed on both sides of the Atlantic in the years leading up to revolution, and many public demonstrations of fellow feeling were made. In 1768, as a gesture of support, Maryland voted to send a symbolic forty-five hogsheads of tobacco to the embattled Wilkes in celebration of issue no. 45. The Sons of Liberty of Boston sent a letter signed by luminaries such as Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Josiah Quincy, and John Adams that encapsulated American opinions of Wilkes in these years. “May you convince Great Britain and Ireland in Europe, the British Colonies, islands and plantations in America,” the letter began, “that you are one of those incorruptibly honest men reserved by heaven to bless and perhaps save a tottering Empire.” A few years later, at a celebratory dinner Connecticut militia officers drank a toast to “the Lord Mayor [Wilkes] and the worthy citizens of London.” In the eyes of the government, such a toast may well have been to “Wilkes and his Mob.”6
In June 1776, with America on the point of declaring its independence, Ignatius Sancho reported that all of London was abuzz with talk of Wilkes. But Wilkes was not the only influential figure to speak out against Britain’s policy in America. In 1776, the nonconformist philosopher Richard Price’s pamphlet lambasting the government’s American policy, and especially the Declaratory Act that stipulated Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies, sold tens of thousands of copies and garnered him the friendship of Benjamin Franklin, the freedom of the City of London, and an offer to advise America on its financial structure. In 1777, John Horne Tooke, another member of England’s radical opposition inspired by John Wilkes, was imprisoned for a year for his role in a public petition seeking donations for the families of Americans “murdered by the king’s troops at Lexington and Concord.” Both men won popular acclaim and the support of London crowds for their daring critiques of the administration. In the febrile, divisive atmosphere of the 1770s, the existence in England of vocal supporters of the American cause with real political power and backed by the threat of popular political violence was enough to put the government on high alert. America had many friends in England and none of them could be trusted.7
During the previous wars of the eighteenth century Britons had been comforted and unified by common political ideals, religious antagonisms, and commercial interest, but the American War, a civil war against fellow Protestants, British subjects no less, provided few of the usual inducements to loyalty. Instead of rallying around the ministry, the monarchy, and the empire as before, in 1775 Britons were deeply divided over the emerging conflict with the American colonies. From across Britain officially encouraged and loudly trumpeted statements of loyalty poured in from towns and corporate bodies that supported the war. At the same time, however, peace petitions proliferated calling for conciliation, appeasement, and peace.
Ignatius Sancho found himself equally ambivalent. On the one hand as a loyal British subject, indeed a property owner, he greeted the birth of Princess Sophia in November of 1777 with toasts to “the defeat of Washintub’s army,” “thirteen counties return[ed] to their allegiance,” and the hope that “this cursed carnage of the human species may end, commerce revive, sweet social peace be extended throughout the globe and the British empire strongly knit in never-ending bands of sacred friendship and brotherly love!” On the other hand, he could also be moved to strike a less triumphant more admonitory note. “War in all its horrid arrangements,” he wrote to a friend, is “the bitterest curse that can fall upon a people; and this American one, as one of the very worst, of worst things,” was divine judgment brought upon Britain by its “stoneblind” rulers. Like many Britons, Sancho’s business had been hit hard by the dislocations of the war, and while he was no friend of the American rebels, he was deeply frustrated by his own government’s conduct of the war. “How can you expect business in these hard times?” he complained. Trade could only flourish and prosperity return if both sides regained their senses, when “things shall take a better turn in America, when the conviction of their madness shall make them court peace, and the same conviction of our cruelty and injustice induce use to settle all points in equity.” For many Britons there was plenty of blame to go around.8
The Declaration of Independence—viewed by many Britons as secession rather than national self-determination, a violent sundering of the familiar British world—the defeat at Saratoga in 1777, and the entry of Catholic France into the war in 1778 began to shift public perception. As losses mounted and enemies multiplied the war began to seem more hopeless, the British more isolated, but in that hopeless isolation, and the fears it engendered, were the seeds of British unity. As recently as April 1777, the well-connected Whig Horace Walpole, son of Britain’s first prime minister and sharp critic of the present one, had written to his friend Horace Mann of the “inveteracy” and “unnatural enmity” that had been “sown” between Britain and her American brethren by a government that “have preferred the empty name of sovereignty to that of alliance, and forced subsidies to the golden ocean of commerce!” The declaration of war with France, however, blunted even Walpole’s waspish wit and transformed him into a reluctant champion of his country. “War proclaim!” he informed William Mason in July 1778, “and I am near sixty-one. Shall I ever live to see peace again? and what peace!” “I condem my countrymen,” he continued, “but I cannot, would not divest myself of my love to my country . . . I cannot blame the French whom we have tempted to ruin us: yet to be ruined by France!—there the Englishman in me feels again . . . I wish for nothing but victory and then peace.” “Two years ago I meditated leaving England if it was enslaved.” Walpole concluded, “I have no such thought now. I will steal into its bosom whem my hour comes, and love it to the last.”9
Ignatius Sancho might likewise dejectedly write of “a detestable Brothers war, where the right hand is hacking and hewing the left, whilst Angels weep at our madness and the Devils rejoice at the ruinous prospect,” of newspaper coverage full of “mistakes, blood, taxes, misery, murder, the obstinacy of a few and the madness and villainy of a many,” but he also publicly called for British landowners to donate their plate to help fund the war against France. In such times, the proximity and omnipresence of threats to Britain i
tself convinced many that whatever the merits of the war, or the failings of the ministry, the world had become too dangerous to tolerate open dissent and division. Henceforth, radical opponents of the American War came to be seen not just as critics of British imperial policy, but as traitors. Proof of their potential treachery was not long in coming.10
In 1775, before America had even declared its independence, Stephen Sayre, an American merchant, adventurer, and friend of Wilkes, was accused of plotting to kidnap King George III. Most observers on both sides of the Atlantic agreed the plot was absurd, and many took Sayre’s arrest as evidence of British tyranny, but the authorities took the accusation seriously and many in the public began to worry about the implications of the American troubles for Britain. However, as shocking and daring as they seem in retrospect, the tactics allegedly proposed by Sayre and his fellow conspirators were, if anything, highly traditional. Seizing the body of the monarch as a means of forcing political change was a common enough ploy throughout English history. Even the assassination of political figures was not unexpected. The tensions of imperial civil war, however, led to the rise of a wholly new form of violent political action, a form of action that would come to shape international conflict in the modern world. One man chose as his target not the heart of government, but the birthing ground of the British war machine, harnessing the primordial power of fire to undermine the war effort and terrorize the nation.11
To Begin the World Over Again Page 6