The March of Folly

by Barbara Tuchman

  In the meantime the Peace Treaty of 1763 was divisive and fiercely opposed as too yielding by William Pitt, architect and national hero of Britain’s victories in the war. Under the celebrated thunders of his scorn, the House of Commons shook and ministers blanched, but nevertheless voted for the Peace Treaty by a majority of five to one, chiefly out of desire to return to peacetime expenditures and a reduced land tax. That proved illusory. Instead, Lord Bute, George Ill’s choice to replace Pitt, who had haughtily removed himself when overruled on the war issue, levied an excise tax in Britain on cider with calamitous effect. Like the Writs in America, the act empowered inspectors to visit premises, even live with owners of cider mills to keep count of the number of gallons produced. So loud was the English cry of tyranny at this invasion and so violent the protest that troops had to be called out in apple country, while at Westminster Pitt was inspired to his immortal statement of principle: “The poorest man in his cottage may bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!” This was the voice that but for tragic flaws in the man might have prevented all the wrong turnings.

  No one having calculated the expected return from the cider tax, it was not clear how much of the deficit it could make up before resentment would bring down the Government. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was a prominent rake, Sir Francis Dashwood, shortly to succeed as 15th Baron Le Despencer. A founder of the notorious Hellfire Club, which was given to exercises of debauchery in a reconstructed monastery, he was not a competent financier: his knowledge of accounts, said a contemporary, “was confined to the reckoning of tavern bills,” and a sum of five figures was to him “an impenetrable secret.” He seems to have discerned that the cider tax would not bring him glory. “People will point at me,” he said, “and cry, ‘There goes the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever appeared!’ ”

  Consciousness of their inadequacy for the work of government commonly afflicted the noble lords who filled the offices, not least when rank was their only qualification. The extra importance of high rank was accepted by all classes in the 18th-century world from yeoman to King; the enlightenment of the age did not extend to egalitarianism. George III made it quite clear: “Lord North cannot seriously think that a private gentleman like Mr. Penton is to stand in the way of the eldest son of an Earl, undoubtedly if that idea holds good it is diametrically opposed to what I have known all my life.”

  As a qualification for office, however, rank did not necessarily confer self-confidence. Regard for rank and riches propelled the Marquess of Rockingham and the Duke of Grafton to the premiership and the Duke of Richmond to office as Secretary of State in the 1760s. Rockingham, even when First Minister (the title Premier, though describing the office in fact, was not used), had the greatest difficulty in speaking on his feet, and Grafton complained regularly of feeling unequal to his task. The Duke of Newcastle, who inherited estates in twelve counties and an income of £40,000 a year, who served several times as First Minister and controlled political patronage for forty years, was timorous, anxious, jealous and probably the only Duke on record who went about always expecting to be snubbed. Lord North, who headed the government throughout the crucial decade of the 1770s protesting most of the way, and George III himself bemoaned their responsibilities as being beyond their capacities.

  The cider tax provided the final tumult in unseating the hated Earl of Bute, who was suspected of subverting the King by Tory advocacy of the royal “prerogative.” He resigned in 1763, to be succeeded by Pitt’s brother-in-law, George Grenville. Although the cider tax had clearly failed and was repealed within two years, the Government in its search for revenue was to attempt the same method of taxation in America.

  George Grenville, when he assumed the first office at 51, was a serious man, industrious among dilettantes, inflexibly honest among the venal, narrow-minded, self-righteous and pedantic. An economist by temperament, he made it a rule to live on his income and save his salary. Though ambitious, he lacked the graces that oil the way for ambition. Horace Walpole, the ultimate insider, considered him the “ablest man of business in the House of Commons.” Though not a peer or heir to a peerage, Grenville, through his background and family, was connected with the Whig ruling families who monopolized government office. His mother was a Temple, through whom his elder brother Richard inherited a title as Lord Temple; his maternal uncle Viscount Cobham was proprietor of Stowe, one of the most superb estates of the era. George followed the classic path through Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, studied law at the Inner Temple and was admitted to the Bar at 23, entered Parliament at 29 in 1741 for a family borough, which he represented until his death, pursued ministerial rank with the unusual intention of earning it by mastery of the business, served in most of the important offices under the aegis of Pitt, who had married his sister, while he himself had not neglected to marry a sister of the Earl of Egremont, a principal Secretary of State.

  This was the pattern of the British minister. They came from some 200 families inclusive of 174 peerages in 1760, knew each other from school and university, were related through chains of cousins, in-laws, stepparents and siblings of second and third marriages, married each other’s sisters, daughters and widows and consistently exchanged mistresses (a Mrs. Armstead served in that role to Lord George Germain, to his nephew the Duke of Dorset, to Lord Derby, to the Prince of Wales and to Charles James Fox, whom she eventually married), appointed each other to office and secured for each other places and pensions. Of some 27 persons who filled high office in the period 1760–80, twenty had attended either Eton or Westminster, went on either to Christ Church or Trinity College at Oxford or to Trinity or Kings at Cambridge, followed in most cases by the Grand Tour in Europe. Two of the 27 were dukes, two marquises, ten earls, one a Scottish and one an Irish peer; six were younger sons of peers and only five were commoners, among them Pitt, the outstanding statesman of the time, and three who through the avenue of the law became Lords Chancellor. As the only professional education open to peers’ younger sons and gentlemen-commoners (the army and clergy could be entered without training) law was the path for the ambitious.

  Peers and other landowners of comfortable estate enjoyed annual incomes of £15,000 or more from the rent-rolls, mines and resources of their properties. They managed great households, farms, stables, kennels, parks and gardens, entertained endless guests, employed armies of servants, grooms, gamekeepers, gardeners, field laborers, artisans. The Marquess of Rockingham, the wealthiest to hold high office in this period except for the dukes, received an income of about £20,000 a year from properties in Yorkshire, Northamptonshire and Ireland, lived in one of the largest homes of England, married an heiress, disposed of three parliamentary boroughs, 23 clerical livings and five chaplaincies, served locally as Lord-Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire and of the city of York.

  Why did possessors of wealth, privilege and great estate enter government? Partly because they felt government was their province and responsibility. Noblesse oblige had roots in the feudal obligation that originally obliged nobles to serve in the King’s council, and they had long governed as landlords and Justices of the Peace in their home counties. Governing went with territorial title; it was the employment of gentlemen, the duty of landed nobility. In the election of 1761, 23 eldest sons of peers entered the House of Commons at their first opportunity after reaching 21, all but two of them under the age of 26.

  For another thing, high office offered the means of support for dependent relatives. Because estates were entailed by primogeniture on the eldest son, private wealth was rarely enough to support younger sons, nephews, poor cousins and deserving retainers. “Place” was necessary because these dependents had no other means of support. Except for law, there were no professions for which the gentry were trained. Through patronage an
d connections at court, a minister could take care of his own. Salaried sinecures of rather misty duties were limitlessly available. Sir Robert Walpole, dominant minister of the previous reign, distributed among his three sons, including Horace, the post of Auditor of the Exchange, Usher of the Exchange, and Clerk of the Pells, while two of the sons shared a Collectorship of Customs. George Selwyn, a fashionable libertine and connoisseur of public hangings, was appointed and served as Registrar to the Court of Chancery in Barbados without his ever gracing the island by his presence. One reason for the meager returns from American customs was that appointees to the Collectorships often remained comfortably at home in England, leaving their duties to poorly paid and easily bribed substitutes.

  More than patronage, the lure of power and status has bewitched men of all times and conditions, in comfortable circumstances no less than in needy. The Earl of Shelburne, one of the more intelligent ministers of the time, stated it plainly: “The only pleasure I propose by employment is not the profit, but to act a part suitable to my rank and capacity, such as it is.” The aristocracy of 18th-century England succumbed to the lure like other men; even the Duke of Newcastle’s fear of office was surmounted, says Horace Walpole, by “his passion for the front rank of power.” They entered young, were rarely prepared or trained for the tasks, could become restless or bored under difficulties and usually retreated for half the year to the charms of their country homes, their racing stables, hunting fields and adventures in landscaping. Individual temperaments and capabilities differed as much as in any group: some were conscientious, some casual about their duties, some liberal in thought, some reactionary, some spoiled by gambling and drink, some more thoughtful, able, better educated than others, but on the whole, their attitude toward government was less than professional. Indeed the profession of government did not exist; the idea would have shocked those who practiced it. Social pleasures tended to come first; office was attended to in the time remaining. Cabinet meetings, unscheduled and haphazard affairs, were generally held at dinner in the First Minister’s London residence. Sense of commitment was not always strong. Lord Shelburne, in whom it was strong, once commiserated with a colleague on how provoking it was to have Lord Camden and the Duke of Grafton “come down [to London] with their lounging opinions to outvote you in the Cabinet.”

  When gambling was the craze of the fashionable world, when ladies filled their homes with card parties which they advertised in the papers and men sat up until dawn at Brooks’ betting huge sums on the turn of a card or in meaningless wagers about tomorrow’s rain or next week’s opera singer, when fortunes were easily lost and debt was a normal condition, how did such men, as ministers, adapt themselves to the unforgiving figures of supply bills and tax rates and national debt?

  Noble circumstances did not nurture realism in government. At home, a word or a nod to servitors accomplished any desired end. At the fiat of Capability Brown or another landscape designer, rolling contours were fashioned from level land; lakes, vistas, groves of trees created; sweeps of curving lawn laid from lake to house. When the village of Stowe interfered with the designer’s planned view, all the inhabitants were moved to new houses two miles away and the old village razed, plowed over and planted with trees. Lord George Germain, the minister responsible for conducting the military operations of the American Revolution, was born a Sackville and brought up at Knole, a family domain so extensive, with its seven courtyards and multiple roofs of different heights, that it looked from a distance like a town. In his boyhood his father planted in one grand sweep the seedlings of 200 pear trees, 300 crabapple, 200 cherry, 500 holly, 700 hazel, another 1000 holly to screen the kitchen garden and 2000 beeches for the park.

  Tastes were not in all cases confined to the outdoors and the clubs. Education at school and university was supposed to have provided a respectable acquaintance with the Latin classics and some Greek, and the continental Grand Tour some acquaintance with the arts, embellished by the purchase of paintings and casts of classical sculpture to bring home. The Tour usually included Rome, which seems not to have greatly changed since the times of the Renaissance popes. Its government was “the worst possible,” wrote an English visitor. “Of the population a quarter are priests, a quarter are statues, a quarter are people who do nothing.”

  Counsel from outside their narrow class was available to British rulers, if they wished, through the employment of outstanding intellectuals in advisory capacities. Rockingham, when thrust into the chief office following Grenville, and perhaps conscious of his shortcomings, had the wit to select the brilliant young Irish lawyer Edmund Burke as his private secretary. Lord Shelburne employed the scientist Joseph Priestley as his librarian and literary companion with a house for himself and an annuity for life. General Henry Seymour Conway, Secretary of State and a future Commander-in-Chief, appointed the political philosopher David Hume as his departmental under-secretary and, on Hume’s plea, secured a pension of £100 a year for Jean Jacques Rousseau, then in England. Conway himself, as an occasional author, wrote a comedy adapted from the French and produced at Drury Lane. The Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State in the ministry of his stepbrother Lord North, was principal benefactor of Eleazar Wheelock’s school for Indians, which became Dartmouth College. He sat for eighteen portraits, including one by Romney, and was a devoted patron of the poet William Cowper, whom he provided with a sinecure and a quiet home to shelter him in his bouts of insanity.

  For all their cultivated tastes, the upper crust of the governing class produced during this period few of outstanding mind. Dr. Johnson declared he knew “but two men who had risen considerably above the common standard”: William Pitt and Edmund Burke, neither wholly of the upper crust. Pitt suggested a factor, doubtless subjective, in his remark that he hardly knew a boy “who was not cowed for life at Eton.” He kept his own children at home to be educated privately. The general state of mind was better understood by William Murray, the Scottish lawyer and, as Earl of Mansfield, future Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor. He had tried without much success to direct a course of study in history, oratory and the classics for his nephew, the future Marquis of Rockingham, and wrote to him when he turned 21, “You could not entertain me with a more uncommon sight than a man of your age, surrounded by all the baits and instruments of folly, daring to be wise; in a season of dissatisfaction, daring to think.” That was the condition of the period 1760–80; daring to be wise, daring to think was not its forte. But then, how often has it ever been of any period?

  The young monarch presiding over this establishment was not widely admired in these years. On George Ill’s accession to the throne in 1760 at the age of 21, Horace Walpole found him tall, florid, dignified and “amiable,” but the amiability was painfully assumed. Fatherless since the age of twelve, George had been brought up in an atmosphere of the harshest rancor between his grandfather George II and his father, Frederick, Prince of Wales. While common among royalty, the paternal-filial hatred in this case was extreme, leaving young George inimical to all who had served his grandfather and persuaded that the world whose rule he inherited was deeply wicked and its moral improvement his duty. In the narrow family circle at Leicester House, he was poorly educated with no contacts with the outside world and grew up obstinate, limited, troubled and unsure of himself. He liked to retire to his study, reported his tutor, Lord Waldegrave, “to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill humor.” He would seldom do wrong, “except when he mistakes wrong for right” and, when this happens, “it will be difficult to undeceive him because he is uncommonly indolent and has strong prejudices.”

  Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so. In a boyhood essay on King Alfred, George wrote that when Alfred came to the throne, “there was scarce a man in office that was not totally unfit for it and generally extremely corrupt in the execution of it.” Removing the incorrigibles, “reclaiming” the others, Alfred had “raise
d the glory and happiness of his country” with the help of the Almighty Power that “wrecks the cunning of proud, ambitious and deceitful men.” Such was George’s view of his ministers and such his own program. He must clean out the system, restore righteous rule—his own—and carry out his mother’s injunction, “George, be a King.” His efforts from the first day of his reign to unseat the Whig grandees who complacently ruled through a pervasive distribution of patronage, by acquiring control of the patronage in his own hands, not unnaturally convinced many of his intention to restore the royal absolutism defeated at such cost in the previous century.

  In need of a father substitute, George had fixed on the Earl of Bute with a neurotic adoration that was bound to—and did—end in disillusion. Thereafter, until he found the comfortable Lord North, he either disliked or despised every First Minister, or swung over into dependence, and since he had power to appoint and dismiss within certain limits, his swings kept government unstable. Because Pitt had left the Prince of Wales’ circle to serve under George II, George called him “the blackest of hearts” and a “true snake in the grass,” and vowed to make other ministers “smart for their ingratitude.” Often confessing to Bute the torture of his self-distrust and irresolution, he was convinced at the same time of his own righteousness, which had as its basic assumption that because he wished nothing but good, everyone who did not agree with him was a scoundrel. This was not a sovereign likely to understand or try to understand insubordinate colonials.

  A weakness of England’s government was lack of cohesion or of a concept of collective responsibility. Ministers were appointed by the Crown as individuals and pursued their own ideas of policy often without consulting their colleagues. Because government derived from the Crown, aspirants to office had to find favor and work in partnership with the King, which proved a more ticklish job under George III than it had been under the thick-witted, foreign-born first Hanoverians. The sovereign was, within limits, chief of the executive with the right to choose his own ministers although not on the basis of royal favor alone. The First Minister and his associates had to have the support of the electorate in the sense that, even without a political party, they had to muster a majority of Parliament and rely on it to enact and approve their policies. Even when this was achieved, George Ill’s erratic and emotional exercise of his right of choice made for extreme uncertainty of governments in his first decade, the brewing years of the American conflict, besides fostering personal rancor in the struggle of factions for favor and power.