The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  Indeed, recent research has gone some way towards exculpating the North ministry from many of the charges levelled against it by earlier historians looking for a scapegoat for the loss of the colonies.11 North himself was not an inspired leader but he had many excellent qualities, not all of them unsuited to the conduct of the American war. He was a born conciliator, a man of peace, a politician who believed in political solutions achieved through negotiation, although he was inclined to play for time if no immediate solution to a problem was in sight. He was a skilful politician, combining influence in the closet with (until the later stages of the war) unrivalled parliamentary supremacy. Like Newcastle between 1757 and 1762, he was successful in raising the loans on which the prosecution of the war depended. His great weakness was his inability to breathe energy and unity into the imperial cause, to exploit the collective abilities of ministers to the benefit of the war effort as the Elder Pitt had done during the Seven Years’ War. Most damaging of all, he lacked the personal resources to respond positively to military defeat. His collapse of morale after Saratoga was striking: he yearned to resign and dreamed of ministerial reshuffles.12 He was not capable either of remedying the deficiencies or of exploiting the abilities of his colleagues. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, is now credited with considerable ability and drive.13 Between 1770 and 1779 he increased the size of the fleet from 15 to 100. But for the government’s penny-pinching stringency in the middle of the decade he might have raised it still further. Even so, his building programme was prodigious and it bore fruit at the Battle of the Saints. His problem was that the navy was hopelessly overstretched; it had to defend the English Channel, the West Indies and the North American coast as well as sustaining active service in the Mediterranean, Africa and India. Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for the Colonies, had energy and spirit but less talent than Sandwich.14 He suffered from two serious weaknesses. He exaggerated the fund of loyalist support that existed in America and he quarrelled with almost every commander-in-chief of the army in America. He disliked Carleton and, significantly, both Burgoyne and Howe blamed him for their military failures. Although the commanders and cabinet ministers had their individual faults it has to be admitted that the entire command system which was at fault.

  Consequently it was one of the tragedies of the American War of Independence that Lord North was unable to impose himself on the ministers and the commanders. Had he been able to do so, a more decisive strategy might have been devised. Furthermore, there were at least two serious errors in the strategy that was pursued. The British failed to coordinate their tactics on a number of occasions. Their failure to do so before Saratoga was an error of epic proportions. They failed, moreover, to draw Washington’s army into open battle. Consequently it survived, and with it the American cause, long enough to profit from favourable, if contingent, circumstances. Of these, the most important was unquestionably the entry of the Bourbon powers into the war. Once Britain was faced with the prospect of fighting a global war the likelihood of defeating the American rebels was sharply reduced. Even then, however, we should not lose sight of the (very respectable) British military successes in the war. Every American invasion of Canada was repulsed; Philadelphia and Charleston were captured; New York was held; the Battle of the Saints was a historic victory. The war was far from being a series of unmitigated failures.

  In the end, it is unjust to place the responsibility for the loss of the American colonies solely upon the government of Lord North. The problems of distance are impossible to imagine, the logistics of timing, transport and supply almost insoluble. It was certainly not the fault of the North administration that Britain was diplomatically isolated in these years. The damage had been done much earlier. During the Chatham administration (1766–8), in fact, Britain had tried and failed to entice Prussia back into an alliance. Like Russia and Austria, Prussia had no interest in an alliance with Britain, which was left to look to its own destiny against France and Spain. Spain might have been conciliated by the surrender of Gibraltar, but it is doubtful if British public opinion would have tolerated such a concession. In the end the loss of the American colonies was a British national responsibility. The monarch, both Houses of Parliament and the great bulk of public opinion adhered until a late date to a belief in parliamentary sovereignty on which it was not possible to find common ground with the American colonists. If there was a considerable body of opinion in Britain opposed to the war, there was a powerful and persistent majority in its favour. The Church of England gave its support to the government throughout while the twin causes of Atlantic empire and colonial protection were powerful causes to profess. The only compromises which the British monarch, government and Parliament would have accepted were those which would not have commended themselves to the Americans. Once the war had begun, it was always likely to be a war to the finish.

  As Professor Colley has noted, Britain learned at least one lesson from the war: the need for a less permissive, more centralized imperial structure.15 The conflict had arisen out of ambiguous views of what was, and what was not, constitutionally legal and legitimate. The war had arisen not, as the Americans argued, from a settled plan to establish tyranny but, on the contrary, after successive sets of concessions made by ministers of the crown following on from continued demonstrations of their reluctance to use military force. More certainty and a more settled basis to imperial affairs was to be preferred in the future. It is surely no accident that the loss of the American colonies was followed by the India Act of 1784, the Canada Act of 1791 and the Act of Union with Ireland (1800), which, in their different ways, redefined a closer relationship between Britain and her colonies.16 On the whole, moreover, the empire’s centre of gravity in the future was to lie in the east rather than in the west, with peoples who were not Christian and the vast majority of whom did not speak English. Yet the casual, imperial pride which had been evident in earlier decades was shortly to be undermined by a number of concerns: about the horrors of the slave trade which were revealed in the 1770s, about the reported behaviour of the East India Company and its employees in India, about the injustices suffered by Roman Catholics at the hands of Protestants in Ireland and about the fabulous fortunes achieved by individual entrepreneurs in India and elsewhere. The road to imperial regeneration was to be a long and difficult one.

  If the American War of Independence was a negative event in the history of the British Empire, there are grounds for treating it as a rather more positive event in the emergence of Britain as a political and cultural unit. The Scots had identified themselves closely with the colonies since the early eighteenth century, as another provincial people within the empire; such identification had been strengthened by commerce, by their common Presbyterianism, by cultural interchange and by emigration. In the 1760s, however, the Scots appeared to be even more determined than the English to maintain British parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies. The American war served as an ideal opportunity for Scotland to affirm its loyalty to the Union and many Scotsmen flooded into the British armed services. Like the Scots, the Irish became a source of manpower throughout the years of war, in spite of the fact that these soldiers were to fight against the Catholic Bourbon powers of France and Spain. In 1780–2 no fewer than 60,000 volunteered to protect the country from a French invasion. The war thus marks an important stage in the continued incorporation of Scotland and Ireland into Britain. In this empire the Scots and the Irish were to play a role – in its conquest, settlement and government – out of all proportion to their demographic and economic significance at home. Indeed, the cultural pretensions of England, Scotland and Ireland must be placed within an Atlantic context because of the geography of the war, because of the Atlantic and Caribbean interests of the protagonists and, not least, because of the people who fought in it, including Spaniards, slaves and North American colonists. Furthermore, it is difficult to argue that the revolution was the projection of a version of British patriotism with its origin
s in Britain and Europe. The national spirit of the Americans was a consequence of the American Revolution, an event which was to continue to reverberate throughout the Atlantic world and the war, an event that was to restructure the whole Atlantic world in the following decades, culminating in the ability of the Spanish colonies to seek, and to win, their independence in the early nineteenth century.

  NOTES

  1.D. Baugh, ‘Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of a “Grand Marine Empire”’, in L. Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (1994), pp. 185–214.

  2.P. O’Brien, Power with Profit: The State and the Economy, 1688–1815 (1991), p. 12.

  3.The best guide to, and critique of, the myth-laden historical writing on Pitt is M. Peters, ‘The Myth of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, Great Imperialist: Parts 1 and 2’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 21(1) (January 1993), pp. 31–74; 22(3) (September 1994), pp. 393–431.

  4.See above, pp. 100–1.

  5.On 1 December 1740 Frederick the Great invaded the rich Austrian province of Silesia, and after years of warfare retained it at the Peace of Paris in 1763. The acquisition of Silesia marked the rise of Prussia to great power status in Europe. More immediately, it provoked the War of the Austrian Succession.

  6.P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (1989), p. 334.

  7.R. Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt–Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–62 (1985), p. 196.

  8.Lord George Anson (1697–1762), one of the most experienced and most successful admirals in the British navy since the closing years of the War of the Spanish Succession. Anson became a celebrated hero with his voyage around the world in1744. He was Vice-Admiral of the Channel Fleet in 1746 and was made a peer after his victory against the French off Finisterre in 1747. He was First Lord of the Admiralty in 1751–6 and 1757–62.

  9.R. Browning, The Duke of Newcastle (1975), p. 261.

  10.K. Wilson, ‘Empire of Virtue: The Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture, c. 1720-1785’, in L. Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (1994), p. 130; D. Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture (2004); G. Newman: The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830 (1987); L. Colley, Forging the Nation, pp. 201, 218, 223, 233; J. Lucas, England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry (1990).

  11.See P. D. G. Thomas, Lord North (1976); K. Perry, British Politics and the American Revolution (1990); J. Derry, English Politics and the American Revolution (1976).

  12.On 6 May 1778 he wrote to the king: ‘Every hour convinces me more of the necessity your Majesty is under of putting some other person than myself at the Head of your affairs ... a man of great abilities, who can chuse decisively, one capable of forming wise plans, and of combining and connecting the whole force and operations of government.’

  13.John, 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718–92). First Lord of the Admiralty after 1771 and usually blamed for the navy’s unreadiness at the start of the war in 1775. In reality, his lengthy experience of naval affairs stretched back to the 1740s.

  14.Lord George Germain (1716–85), 1st Viscount Sackville and until 1770 known as Lord George Sackville. Wounded and captured at Fontenoy in 1745, he was dismissed from service for his failure to lead the British forces in pursuit of the French at Minden in 1759. He was restored to favour by George III. He was Secretary of State for the Colonies between 1775 and 1782.

  15.L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992), p. 145.

  16.For this legislation, see below pp. 335–8.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Age of George III, 1760–1789

  GEORGE III AND THE POLITICIANS, 1760–1770

  After the long reign of King George II, the accession of George III was awaited with keen anticipation. The new king did not disappoint those who expected great changes. One of his first actions was to signify to the Tories that their exclusion from office, which had hitherto maintained their rather limited sense of victimized unity, was at an end. Although the number who received office was small – six Bedchamber appointments in the immediate aftermath of the accession – it was nevertheless a symbolic political move and one that weakened what was left of the cohesion of the party. It was not long before Tories returned in some numbers to the county benches. Furthermore, the disappearance of the threat of Jacobitism enabled Tories to resume what may be regarded as normal political activity. The old Whig–Tory polarity had been weakening for nearly two decades. Now it was shattered. In the absence of the Whig–Tory framework which had given shape to politics for so many decades, politics became factionalized. While the Tory Party disintegrated the texture of the Whig Party loosened, leaving effective political control of Whig MPs in the hands of a group of great political leaders – Bute, Pitt, Bedford, Grenville and, not least, Newcastle, who in 1765 allowed the leadership of his connection to pass to the Marquis of Rockingham. This was not all. A further familiar landmark of the last two reigns was missing. There was no heir apparent. The king was only twenty-two years old, and was not to have an heir to the throne who might meddle in politics for over two decades. Politicians in opposition could no longer look to Leicester House for their social unity and their political direction. The king to come was now on the throne. Furthermore, the steady disappearance from this scene by death or by ill health of many of the stalwarts of the old party battles – George II, Newcastle and Hardwicke, amongst others – and the appearance of a new generation of political leaders, including Bute, Rockingham and Grenville, lends a fresh and in many ways uncertain appearance to the politics of the 1760s. Clearly, the new king was to enjoy rather more freedom of manoeuvre than his grandfather had normally experienced, and much would therefore depend upon his personal preference for one set of politicians over others. Whether this would lead to stable government or to short-lived, unstable ministries, however, could not be predicted. Much would depend on the king’s choice of minister and the ability of that minister to earn the confidence of Parliament. Finally, the prominence of a new set of political issues, those arising from the conquests of the Seven Years’ War and others concerning the status of Parliament and the role of public opinion, were to create serious divisions in the body politic. Now that criticism of and opposition to the regime could by no stretch of the imagination be dismissed as treasonable, these divisions would reverberate beyond Parliament.

  George III came to the throne smarting from the isolation which he had experienced and the neglect he had suffered at the hands of the leading politicians of the age. Since 1757 the union of Pitt, Newcastle and most of the other political leaders had left him powerless and resentful. Only the prince’s ‘dearest friend’, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, had stood by him during these dark years. In 1754 Bute had become the heir’s most trusted adviser, and in 1756 his tutor. Bute was in many ways an ideal courtier, dignified, loyal and accomplished. Yet as a politician he was distant and unapproachable, his judgement was faulty and he lacked the courage of his convictions. These faults would not have mattered had he remained on the political sidelines; but in the person of the friend and adviser of a young and inexperienced king they had damaging consequences. There is no evidence that Bute infected the future king with authoritarian, still less unconstitutional, intentions. By the time he came to the throne, however, George III, under Bute’s influence, had formulated a number of objectives for the new reign which were, to say the least, singular. His primary objective was to free the monarchy from what he imagined to be its humiliating subjection to the great Whig ministers. By 1760 the new king was thoroughly convinced of the evil intent of Pitt, Newcastle and the old corps. In his view, their use of patronage and corruption had enslaved the monarchy and threatened the constitution. Far from planning to reduce the powers of Parliament, George III actually wished to protect the constitution from the Whigs and the corruption which he imagined that they employed to maintain the
ir power. In one of his first public announcements he ‘gloried in the name of Briton’, a signal that he intended to be a ‘Patriot King’, by which he meant that it was time to admit men of talent to office whatever their earlier party loyalties. Finally, he wanted to bring to an end the dangerously expensive war in which the ministers had entrammelled the country. None of this was unconstitutional; some of it, such as his concern to negotiate peace, was likely to be popular; all of it was bound to be controversial in execution and, quite possibly, disruptive in its consequences. As we shall see, within little more than eighteen months Pitt and Newcastle were out of office, a gloriously triumphant war was being wound up and Lord Bute had attained the highest office in the land. There can be no doubt that a change in the role of the monarch in politics was intended in 1760 and, to a considerable extent, achieved, even if there was no intention of establishing an unconstitutional and arbitrary monarchy.1