In the atmosphere of the Enlightenment they prided themselves more than ever on being the keepers of the flame of freedom, as true heirs to the Revolutionary Settlement. And they kept up the Whig reputation for being in contact with advanced thought. Just as Locke had been doctor to the first Whig Lord Shaftesbury, the scientist and dissenter who discovered oxygen Joseph Priestley was Lord Shelburne’s librarian, responsible for much advanced rationalist thought percolating into Whig ruling circles. The stage of George III’s reign was thus set for repeated confrontation.
George III remained under the influence not only of his mother Augusta, Princess of Wales, but also of his former tutor Lord Bute, a tall, vain Scotsman, said to be her lover, who was known for priding himself on his good legs. Bute was loathed by most people, partly because he was Scots (the Scots were still very unpopular) and partly because of his passion for intrigue and secret plots. But he did have the sensible idea of getting the new king off to a good start by emphasizing how English he was compared to his great-grandfather and grandfather, George I and George II. George III made a famous speech from the throne in the perfect English accent derived from a childhood spent at Kew, which began, ‘Born and bred in this country I glory in the name of Briton.’ Nevertheless, though he might be regarded with sentimental enthusiasm after such a start, by the easily moved public, to the political classes (that is, the great Whig network spread so effectively throughout the country) George seemed a dangerous new phenomenon.
Emotional and affectionate, the young George III put his faith in those he loved, chief of whom was the Tory Bute, who had been his tutor ever since his father, Poor Fred, died when George was twelve. The pompous Bute was appointed secretary of state by the king and thrust into Pitt’s administration. George did not appreciate that Pitt should be given free rein, while Pitt himself, as a consummate autocrat–Horace Walpole said that he wanted the crown and sceptre and nothing less–was furious that the Cabinet had to have Bute on board representing the king and putting obstacles in his path. Pitt was insulted when Bute wanted George III in his coronation speech to call the war ‘bloody and expensive’ he insisted that it be changed to ‘just and necessary’. Undermined in his own Cabinet and prevented from declaring pre-emptive war on Spain, France’s ally, Pitt resigned in October 1761. Bute was left to face renewed hostilities with Spain in December (though it brought Britain Hanava and Manila) and to manage the peace which all sides were wearily coming to believe was necessary.
The Treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, brought to an end the Seven Years War, but despite Pitt’s entreaties no mention was made by Bute of Britain’s magnificent ally Frederick the Great, who had fought so bravely on her behalf. Bute followed up this ungrateful behaviour by withdrawing without warning the subsidy Frederick had come to depend on. In a sad turnaround the King of Prussia, who had helped to win the war which had left Britain the world’s top trading nation, became her implacable enemy.
Pitt denounced the peace, which he said was ‘as stained as Utrecht’, but just as at Utrecht the gains to Britain from the Seven Years War were immense. Bute’s offensive behaviour certainly left Britain most ominously without a friend in Europe, with Prussia feeling as betrayed as Austria had been, but the British part of North America now extended to the Mississippi. What had become the only French colony in North America, Louisiana, was now worth so little to France that she soon sold it to Spain, in 1762. As a result of giving Havana and Manila back to Spain in return for Florida, the whole of the American eastern seaboard was now in the hands of British colonists, as of course was the vast formerly French settlement of Canada. In addition all the French and Spanish American possessions in the southern part of North America to the east of the Mississippi, with the exception of the town and island of New Orleans, became British too.
Minorca was given back to Britain. In the West Indies Britain kept Grenada and the Grenadines, Tobago, St Vincent and Dominica, but restored Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia to the French. In India all the gains made since 1748 were confirmed. In west Africa the French were handed back Goree, while Britain kept Senegal. In central America Britain obtained the right to cut and trade in Honduras logwood, which would eventually result in protectorate status. Though the French lost Cape Breton by the Peace of Paris, they were still allowed to use the great fisheries round Newfoundland which they had traditionally shared with the British for over a hundred years.
Meanwhile, within Great Britain, the king was starting as he meant to go on. When continuous disagreements with Bute had forced the other pillar of the government, the chief of the great Whig connection the Duke of Newcastle, to resign in May 1762, George III seized the opportunity to dismiss all his followers and dependants. Not only was any Whig who had voted against the treaty in the Houses of Parliament thrown out, so also were Newcastle’s most modest clients such as excisemen. With a quill pen the king personally ran through the name of the Duke of Devonshire on the list of members of the Privy Council, while three of the greatest magnates of the Whig party, Newcastle, Rockingham and the Duke of Grafton, were dismissed as lords lieutenant.
This wholesale sacking of the Whigs was known to their sarcastic contemporaries as ‘the massacre of the Pelhamite Innocents’. The Whigs were truly amazed by the speed and venom with which the young king had struck. As a result the great Whig connection, or ‘old corps’ Whigs, for the first time in two generations broke up into small rival groups, of which the most important were those headed by Pitt and Rockingham. But, just as the king desired, some Whigs began to desert their party and move towards the idea of becoming King’s Friends.
The elegant Bute soon found the rough and tumble of politics too much for him. He preferred, as he put it, to be ‘a private man at the side of the King’, so he retired while nevertheless continuing to make trouble by advising George informally–or from behind the curtain, as was said at the time. Yet the country still had to be governed. Since George III was only at the beginning of his drive to dispose of the Whigs, he was forced to call upon the competent but unimaginative Whig George Grenville, who headed one of the smaller Whig factions, to lead the government. Grenville, who was Pitt’s brother-in-law (though he had quarrelled with him), had few manners and was constantly rude to the king. He was also immediately faced by trouble. At home, the increasingly outrageous newspaper put out by the daring MP John Wilkes, and its insulting criticisms of the king, had to be suppressed once and for all. In America, when Grenville asked the colonists to help pay for the enormously expensive war by a new levy, the stamp tax, to be imposed on every legal document, his request was met by rioting.
Grenville saw no reason why the burden of the colonies’ defence should fall on the English taxpayer alone. And perhaps if they had been asked to consider the request in their assemblies the Americans would have returned a favourable answer. The problem was the peremptory way in which the tax was demanded. The American colonists had a very proud parliamentary tradition of their own in their assemblies. Following the example of their English cousins in the seventeenth century, they held to the belief that they could not be taxed without their consent. Since they were not represented in the British Parliament as they had elected none of its members, the British Parliament had no right to tax them. The passing of the Stamp Act in 1765 in the Parliament at Westminster, but not in their own parliaments and state assemblies, resulted in uproar and riots driven by a slogan which seventeenth-century Englishmen would have understood: ‘No taxation without representation’. Six of the thirteen colonies’ governments made formal protests.
As a patriotic duty Americans refused to accept the stamped paper sent over from England, and boycotted British manufactures. British manufacturers who relied on the vast American trade started to go bankrupt, and amid the chaos, alarmed by such fury, Grenville resigned. The Stamp Act was repealed in 1766 by Grenville’s successor, the Marquis of Rockingham. Grenville had been no less thoroughly defeated at home by the antics of the libertarian Wilkes
, a member of the debauched Hell-Fire Club.
Ever since the accession of George III, Wilkes’s newspaper the North Briton–so-called in mock-honour of Bute’s antecedents–had specialized in attacking the king’s rule. The removal of the ‘old corps’ Whigs (with secret encouragement from his confrères) had been portrayed as another royal attack on liberty. Wilkes and his paper already had a reputation for scurrility, but in issue No. 45 of April 1763, he went too far when he alleged that the king’s speech to Parliament included a lie. Grenville, who was a lawyer himself, was determined that the recalcitrant Wilkes should feel the full force of the law. He had Wilkes and the printers of the North Briton tried and imprisoned for having had anything to do with the production of the paper, through the unspecific catch-all mechanism known as the general warrant. But Grenville was made to look foolish by an unsympathetic judiciary. On appeal, Chief Justice Charles Pratt released Wilkes by ruling general warrants illegal.
The squinting, licentious Wilkes was already a popular hero among high-spirited and sophisticated Londoners who themselves had long enjoyed a reputation for disliking restraint of all kinds. Wilkes’s imprisonment was worked up into the issue of the right of the citizen to publish the truth and Pratt’s judgement was represented as a blow for liberty. Wilkes sued the government for his arrest and was given damages by the ecstatically partisan London jury. The House of Commons nevertheless expelled him, and because he risked arrest once more for an obscene poem, he was forced to flee for France. But this was only the beginning of his career as the self-appointed gadfly of the state. Often on the run Wilkes had enough of the popular vote behind him to be re-elected to Parliament, to be made an alderman of the City of London and finally to become mayor. He began to campaign for freedom of all kinds, but particularly for press freedom and American rights–a campaign which for the next ten years convulsed the colonies with violence.
For the sake of some governmental stability, George had asked Lord Rockingham to take office as prime minister because he had assumed the leadership of the largest Whig faction, which contained many of the ‘old corps’ Whigs–that is, the old Newcastle or Pelhamite Whig connection. Rockingham (whose secretary, the Irishman Edmund Burke, was to become the supreme thinker of the Whig party) had a great deal more common sense than Grenville. But thanks to the king’s activities behind the scenes, and those of the King’s Friends whom he imposed upon the ministry, the Rockingham government could not last. Though the Duke of Newcastle was a member of the government as lord privy seal, he was too old and unwell to be of much use, while Pitt–who was temperamentally unsuited to playing a supporting role–refused to shore up the ministry. It was thus to Pitt once more and his small band of followers that George III turned to form a government in 1766, in hopes of a smoother time ahead since Pitt himself had now professed contempt for the party system.
In theory Pitt might have ameliorated the continuing poor relations with America. He had persuaded Rockingham to repeal the stamp tax by pointing out how foolish it was to threaten the trade with the American colonies, worth £2 million a year, for the peppercorn rate of stamp duty, which might bring in one-tenth of that revenue. In his view Britain might have a moral right to tax the colonies, but she had no legal right. However, Pitt now fell ill and was obliged to take a prolonged leave of absence, while refusing to resign as prime minister. This left his rash chancellor Charles Townshend to rush into more taxation of the American colonies, since the problem of the unresolved war debts had not gone away. Townshend hoped he had found a way round the dispute by imposing customs duties, which after all were indirect taxes on tea, glass, paper and other essentials, but the Americans saw through this. Their response was more rioting.
Moreover, even before Pitt had what seems to have been some kind of a nervous breakdown, his government was not at all the same as his old ministry. In his pride and grandeur he had accepted the earldom of Chatham. In effect, though, this was the equivalent of being ‘kicked upstairs’. As he now had to sit in the House of Lords, he could no longer employ his formidable powers of rhetoric to control the House of Commons. And since he would not have one party, the Chatham administration was made up of an unworkable ragbag of men of opposing views. Edmund Burke would memorably describe it as ‘such a piece of mosaic, such a tessellated pavement without cement, patriots and courtiers, king’s friends and republicans, Whigs and Tories, that it was indeed a curious show, but unsafe to touch and unsure to walk on’. Chatham was far too grand to try and wield this mass of warring factions into a workable whole, and it became beset by internal problems when Townshend died unexpectedly. The severity of Chatham’s illness at last compelled him to resign in October 1768.
Then Wilkes returned to London from abroad to make mischief. Despite being imprisoned once more on the outstanding charge of his obscene poetry, he got himself elected MP for Middlesex where his depiction of the corruption in Parliament gained him a willing audience. Chatham’s first lord of the Treasury, the Duke of Grafton, now took over as prime minister, and his government made the House of Commons refuse to accept Wilkes’s election and keep him in prison. Wilkes decried this as further evidence of a conspiracy against liberty, and rioting began outside his prison in Southwark in 1768. The following year he was re-elected and expelled three times. Re-elected one more time, his seat went to his defeated opponent.
By 1770 Grafton had had enough. He had battled against attacks in the House of Lords by a revived Chatham, roused by the imprisonment of Wilkes, which he too saw as an issue of liberty, but he was soon defeated, resigning after two years under the stress of it all. Since all the Whig factions were by now in a profound state of disarray and disagreement with one another, Grafton’s ministry gave way to one consisting entirely of the King’s Friends under Lord North. The son of the Jacobite Earl of Guildford, North was a witty, cherubic and deceptively sleepy-looking man with the sort of emollient skills needed to hold a government together. At last the king had triumphed. Though North was the first Tory to hold office in two generations, the real point about him was that he had risen to power as a King’s Friend. For twelve years Britain got ministerial stability under this affable man, who understood that his hold on power depended on his accepting that the real chief minister was the king.
Unfortunately these years coincided with increasing restiveness in America. English goods were being simultaneously boycotted by all the colonies, while mobs roamed the streets of Massachusetts led by masked men called the Sons of Liberty, who tarred and feathered anyone not in agreement with them. The Massachusetts Parliament debated what form a protest to the British government should take which would deny Britain’s right to make laws for or to tax the colonies. This was a revolt fast developing into revolution.
There were now 10,000 British soldiers in Massachusetts, for Grafton had sent out 2,000 more to Boston, and every day the Boston mob spent hours taunting the troops; tempers were at breaking point. On 2 March 1770, seven British soldiers separated from the rest of their regiment were backed into a corner by an enraged mob advancing down one of Boston’s boulevards, hurling abuse and stones. Fearing for their lives, the soldiers fired into the crowd and killed five men. This was immediately seized on by American agitators as a ‘massacre’ and they demanded nothing less than that all British soldiers should leave the colonies.
George III could not view the colonists’ actions with tolerance; it was not in his nature. They were rebellious subjects whose ideas should not even be listened to, but must be destroyed. Yet the people whose views the king had no patience for were highly sophisticated men and women with their own political traditions who, just as much as their cousins across the Atlantic, had been profoundly influenced by the ideas of John Locke, especially in his sanctioning of rebellion against unjust rulers. In the years since the founding of the American colonies (in the case of Virginia and New England, well over a hundred years before), their own institutions had grown up which were completely independent of and far more real
to them than what went on 3,000 miles away at Westminster. Many of the colonists were as practised in debating in their own assemblies as any MP. Well educated at their excellent new universities of Harvard and Yale, they were growing ever more impatient with the mother country. By a strange irony of history, the supreme sacrifice Pitt had demanded of the Americans, the propaganda he had bombarded them with in order to make the colonies see the French as their enemy, had given the thirteen colonies much more of a sense of common destiny than ever before.
But ever since George III had come to the throne and started taking his kingdom in hand there had been other more immediate reasons for friction. The mercantile system, under which the colonies were to import British manufactures but make nothing themselves, infuriated the Americans. They wished to build up their home manufacturing base, but were forbidden to do so by law. Under the old Whigs the colonies had been pretty much left to themselves to run things, but George III had insisted on a much more rigorous observance of the mercantile system. The illegal trade with other parts of Europe and other colonies to which everyone had turned a blind eye was curbed, and customs duties at colonial ports were raised.
At first North tried to be conciliatory to the colonists. He repealed all the taxes except for the one on tea, which was only three pence per pound, and removed the soldiers from Boston. He promised that the British government would not try and raise any more taxes in America, but at the same time, because the king insisted, he weakly said that the tax on tea would nevertheless remain as a matter of principle. The 298 chests of British tea that arrived in Boston Harbour in December 1773 provided too good a symbol of British oppression for an increasingly important circle of American agitators to miss. In what has become known to history as the Boston Tea Party, a group of patriotic young Americans dressed as Mohawk Indians climbed aboard ships in the harbour and emptied all the tea into the water. All patriotic Americans from then on refused to drink tea.
The Story of Britain Page 55