The March of Folly

by Barbara Tuchman

  A tragedy was the result. When Charles Yorke, former Attorney-General and son of a former Lord Chancellor, was offered the post that was his life’s ambition in a government that he and his family and friends opposed, and was strongly pressed by the King with promise of a peerage, he accepted against his conscience. That evening, reproached by associates and tortured by ambivalence, he committed suicide. As the man who had offered Yorke the post, Grafton, shaken by the death and dispirited by inability to control policy, resigned, followed by the two generals, Conway and Granby.

  The new First Minister, forever to be associated with the American Revolution, was the amiable Lord North, who during his years of increasingly distracted office was to gain a clear idea of what a chief minister’s qualifications should be—and was sure he did not have them. In one of his periodic letters to the King begging to be allowed to resign, he wrote that the office should be held by “a man of great abilities, and who is confident of his abilities, who can choose decisively, and carry his determination authoritatively into execution … and be capable of forming wise plans and of combining and connecting the whole force and operations of government.” It was an excellent prescription and it concluded, “I am certainly not such a man.”

  Nevertheless, as the King’s personal choice, North was to last, however unwillingly, for twelve critical years in the office that had had five occupants in the last decade. Fat-cheeked and corpulent, with bulging eyes, he bore a startling resemblance to George III, which was often made the subject of ribald suggestion, referring to the close connection of North’s parents with the household of Frederick, Prince of Wales, father of George III. At the time of North’s birth his father, the Earl of Guilford, served the Prince as Lord of the Bedchamber. North was christened Frederick for the Prince, who was his godfather, if nothing closer. In addition to physical resemblance, both North and George III suffered blindness in their last years.

  In temperament, Lord North happily escaped resemblance to the King, being known, in Gibbon’s words, for “the felicity of his incomparable temper.” It was said that only one man, a drunken stupid groom, had ever been known to make him angry; unimproved and always forgiven, the man died still in North’s service. Elected from the family-controlled pocket borough of Banbury with thirteen voters, North entered the House of Commons at 22 and represented the same borough for the rest of his life. When appointed chief minister, he was 38, awkward in movement with weak eyesight and a tongue too large for his mouth “which rendered his articulation somewhat thick though not at all indistinct.” One who profited from education at Eton, at Oxford and on a three-year Grand Tour, he was proficient in Greek and Latin, spoke French, German and Italian, and when wide enough awake, sprinkled his speeches with classical allusions, foreign phrases and flashes of wit and genial humor.

  If he could not hide from the harassments of office, he took refuge from them by sleeping on the front bench during debates. Asking to be wakened when Grenville in the course of a ponderous and long-winded discourse should reach modern times, and nudged when the speaker was citing a precedent of 1688, he opened an eye, muttered “a hundred years too soon” and relapsed into somnolence. He carried the habit to Cabinet meetings, where, according to Charles James Fox, who later served with him, “he was so far from leading the opinions of other ministers that he seldom gave his own and generally slept the greater part of the time he was with them.” This did not conduce to firm collective policy.

  If seldom voiced, North’s opinions were firmly on the Right. He voted for the cider tax, for the expulsion of Wilkes, for the Stamp Act and against its repeal. Although against compromise with America, he was in practice ready to proceed by conciliation toward a possible middle ground, and “heartily wished to repeal the whole of the [Townshend] law” if he could have done it without giving up “that just right which I shall ever wish the mother country to possess, the right of taxing the Americans.” Though not a member of the Bedford clique, he was acceptable to them or he could not have been named First Minister. His chief disability lay in the extended and tight-fisted life of his father, who lived to be 86, depriving his son of the inheritance of a considerable fortune until he was old and blind and within two years of his own death. The result was that with a large family to support and an important position to keep up, North was in financial straits throughout his political life, dependent on office and obligated to the King, who, however kindly and tactfully, gave his First Minister £ 20,000 to pay his debts. Under such circumstances, independence of mind or action was less than likely.

  When debate was renewed from March to May 1770, opposition speakers unsparingly depicted the Government’s record in America since the Townshend Act as a series of infirm policies, contradictory measures, irresolute and in some cases unconstitutional action and judgments contrary to Britain’s interest—in short, as folly. The terrible Colonel Barré excoriated the Cabinet for taking it upon itself to inform the Americans of its intention to repeal the duties before Parliament had acted, thus inspiring them “with a most contemptible idea of the measures of Parliament and the imbecility of those by whom lawful government is administered.” He scolded them further for reviving the statute from “the tyrannical reign of Henry VIII” and yet, “with weakness no less conspicuous than their wickedness … they had not the resolution to execute it.”

  Pownall explained that it was the preamble to the Act “which gives the offence and raises the alarm in America”; in order to remove it, the whole Townshend Act must be repealed and exclude tea, and he so moved. Grenville, acknowledging himself the originator of the controversy with America, offered the unhelpful opinion that partial repeal would not satisfy the colonies while total repeal would not “sufficiently provide for the dignity of the nation,” and therefore he would abstain from voting. An independent member, Sir William Meredith, found the Government “so perversely, so inflexibly persisting in error on every occasion” as to cause surprise, in Dryden’s phrase, “that ‘they never deviate into sense’ nor stumble upon propriety by downright accident.” Since the tea duty, he added, would never pay for the cost of collecting it and the deficiency would have to be made up from the “coffers of this kingdom,” the result would merely be “to plunder ourselves.” Although Government majority prevailed over common sense, defeating Pownall’s motion by 204 to 142, common sense made an impression, for the yeas were almost twice the regular number of pro-American votes.

  Again Pownall returned to the offensive when the debate turned to American policy as a whole. He showed that the real apprehension of the colonies, apart from taxation, was of a British “design to alter their civil constitution.” They found it confirmed in Hillsborough’s order dissolving their assemblies and in the Townshend Act preamble, which they feared would “render all their assemblies useless.” By this time news had reached England of the so-called Boston Massacre, which had raised local emotions to such a pitch that to prevent further incident, the redcoats who had been sent to cow Boston had to be removed, with less than glory to British arms, to the safety of Castle William in Boston Harbor. The withdrawal gave opportunity for the “infinite wit and raillery” of Mr. Edmund Burke, who of all the speakers of his time is the best known to posterity.

  Burke’s ideas had the great advantage of being housed in mastery and felicity of language. Had his ideas been fuzzy, verbal beauties would not have helped, but his political thinking was acute and incisive. Though often prolix and overstated, his remarks became epigrams because they were so well phrased. He had a way of “winding into his subject like a serpent,” said Oliver Goldsmith, who thought him in conversation the equal of Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson agreed. “Burke talks because his mind is full.… No man of sense could meet Mr. Burke by accident under a gateway to avoid a shower without being convinced that he was the first man in England.” He often talked at such length as to empty the House and so vehemently that his friends had to hold him down by the skirts of his coat to restrain his passion, but his wi
t and intelligence prevailed. The bite of his speeches on America, wrote Horace Walpole, excited “continual bursts of laughter even from Lord North and the Ministers themselves.” His pathos “drew iron tears from Barré’s cheek”; his scorn would have excited strangers, if they had not been excluded from a certain debate, “to tear ministers to pieces as they went out of the House.”

  Burke had no difficulty in making the Government look foolish with his list of its infirm chastisements of the colonies: how the Massachusetts Assembly, after being ordered to rescind its seditious resolution or suffer dissolution, was permitted to sit again without rescinding; how the other assemblies under the same threat defied the penalty and “treated the Secretary of State’s letter with contempt”; how the pains of the Henry VIII statute “never were, as it was known they never would be, carried into execution”; how a fleet and army sent to Boston to control the situation “are now withdrawn out of the town”; how in sum “the malignity of your will is abhorred and the debility of your power is condemned,” which has ever been the case of “government without wisdom.”

  The majority, of course, defeated Burke’s eight resolutions of censure, and the same fate met a similar censure moved in the House of Lords by the young Duke of Richmond, a new and important, if rather too independent, recruit to the American cause who was to become an eminent opponent of Government policy.

  Richmond was a glittering personage who personified in many ways the unreality of 18th-century English government. He was so heavily weighted with fortune’s goods that they hampered his thorough performance of any one task. A great-grandson of Charles II by his mistress Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, a brother of the lovely Lady Sarah Lennox, whom George III wanted to marry, he was dignified, courteous, strikingly handsome and together with his wife, also of a ducal family, made “the prettiest couple in England.” Duke at fifteen, colonel of his regiment at 23, Ambassador to France and briefly Secretary of State under Rockingham at 31, he had youth, beauty, great riches, highest rank, military valor, intelligence and capacity for hard work, a network of political connections and “all the blood of kings from Bruce to Charles II.” Not surprisingly, with these attributes, he was tactless, hot-tempered, unable to bend to other men or to political necessities, intolerant of inadequacies in others and given to quarreling with family, friends, subordinates and with the King in the first year of his reign so that he resigned from a post in the royal household and was pursued by royal animosity thereafter.

  Intent on exposing abuses, Richmond harassed Army, Admiralty and Treasury with his searching questions, which did not make him popular. He could arrive in town on the morning of a debate, master the issues in a quick study and speak on them effectively the same afternoon. Defeat of his aims and purposes, however, turned him quickly sour, causing repeated threats to retire from politics altogether. He suffered periods of depression, one in 1769 of which he wrote to Rockingham, “I must for some time at least indulge myself in my present disposition which I will give no name to.” At home in Sussex he spent vast sums on new wings to Goodwood House, on dog kennels and race track, yacht, hunting and the local militia and, after inheriting a great estate worth £68,000 with an additional annual income of £20,000 from coal duties, found himself £95,000 in debt forty years later. His interest in government, like that of others of his kind, often slipped below other matters. It was unreasonable of Burke, Richmond once wrote to him, to want him to come down to London before Parliament convened. His opinion carried “little weight,” therefore for him to confer with political associates had no purpose. “No, let me enjoy myself here till the meeting, and then at your desire I will go to town and look about me for a few days.”

  Unrestrained in the 1770 debate, he described ministerial conduct in America as that of either “artful knave or incorrigible fool” and either way, “the ministers are a disgrace to the very name of government.” He proposed eighteen resolutions of censure covering all acts and measures since 1768 and concluding that “these many and ill-judged proceedings have been a principal cause of the aforesaid disorders.” Goaded to reply, Hillsborough made the usual defense of the need to establish authority, and added a charge that “our patriots” of the opposition were stimulating colonial protest and “continually throwing obstacles in the way of reconciliation” out of “the patriotic wish of getting into place.… In fact, my lords, their whole patriotism is a despicable avarice of employment … so they can succeed to office.”

  While obviously underrating the colonies’ native resistance, Hillsborough had a point about the motives of the opposition. Their “avarice” for office, however, was not as strong as their inertia of political organization. They were ineffectual because, owing to feuds and differences, they could not find common ground to form a solid front. “Dowdeswell [former Chancellor of the Exchequer under Rockingham] was devilish sulky at Lord Chatham,” wrote Richmond to Rockingham at this time, “and Burke is all combustible.” Burke could not take Chatham’s arrogance and Chatham could not endure a strong-minded intellectual equal as an ally. Although Rockingham tried to bring Chatham into a team that would work together under his captaincy, Chatham would accept only on conditions establishing his own dominion. Shelburne, disgusted with the helplessness of being in a perpetual minority, went abroad with Barré in 1771. Richmond and Rockingham were lured by their country acres and, as a contemporary satire put it,

  With hound and horn her truant schoolboys roam

  And for a fox-hunt quit St. Stephen’s dome*

  In America, no heightened protest followed Parliament’s maintenance of the Townshend preamble and tea duty. As often happens, the logical course of events suffered quirks and diversions. Among the colonial propertied class, fear of mobs and social upheaval had begun to erode their support of the “patriotic” movement. Its impetus dwindled. Wearying of Non-Importation, New York proposed a conference of the northern seaports to decide on a common policy. Merchants of Boston and Philadelphia, also eager to resume trade, were prevented by the agitators. When the proposed conference fell through, New York, rather than be cheated while “starving on the slender Meals of patriotism,” abandoned Non-Importation and opened its port in 1772. Separately, at different times, the other colonies followed, agitation subsided and the absence of unity confirmed Britain in the assumption that the colonies would never join in a common front and that loyalist sentiment and economic self-interest would prevail over seditious impulse.

  With feelings intense in Parliament over the Wilkes issue, Lord North’s policy was to keep American affairs out of the House of Commons, and for two years, owing to the lull in the colonies, he succeeded. This could have been a period of compromise and possible reunion if a positive effort had been made. The colonies were bent on redress of grievances and autonomy in their own affairs, not on independence. On the contrary, the Stamp Act Congress had asserted that they “most ardently” desired “perpetual continuance” of the ancient tie with Britain. Even the Massachusetts Assembly, the most aggressive in sentiment, had disavowed in 1768 “the most distant thought of independence,” claiming that the colonies “would refuse it if offered to them and would deem it the greatest misfortune to be obliged to accept it.” George III, Lord North, Hillsborough and the Bedfords, however, were not equipped for positive effort or creative government. In the lull, the sails of folly were furled for the moment—until the affair of the Gaspée in 1772.

  4. “Remember Rehoboam!”: 1772–76

  The Gaspée was a British customs schooner under a bellicose commander, Lieutenant Dudington, who pursued his task as if he carried a personal warrant from the King to stamp out smuggling in the thousand isles and inlets of Narragansett Bay. Boarding and examining every ship he met, threatening to blow recalcitrant skippers out of the water, he aroused a lust for revenge in the Rhode Islanders that found its moment when his schooner ran aground below Providence. Within hours local seafarers organized eight boatloads of men who attacked the ship, wounded L
ieutenant Dudington, put him and his crew ashore and burned the Gaspée.

  As so often, Britain’s response started out sternly and ended feebly. The Attorney-General and Solicitor-General decided that the attack on the Gaspée was an act of war on the King and as such was treasonable, requiring the culprits to be sent to England for trial. First they had to be discovered. A Royal Proclamation offered a £500 reward and the King’s pardon to informants, and an imposing Commission of Inquiry consisting of the Governor of Rhode Island and the chief justices of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts and of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Boston was appointed to indict the suspects. This announcement revived every slumbering suspicion of a conspiracy against liberty. Rhode Island, together with Massachusetts the most intractable of the colonies, shook with cries of “Tyranny!” and “Slavery!” “Ten thousand deaths by the haltar and the ax” proclaimed the Newport Mercury in outraged italics, were preferable “to a miserable life of slavery in chains under a pack of worse than Egyptian tyrants.” No informants came forward; no suspects could be found although every neighbor knew who they were. After several hollow sessions in Newport, the Court of Inquiry in all their wigs and scarlet sheepishly adjourned, never to reconvene. One more chastisement went unexecuted, confirming the perception of Britain as both despotic in intent and ineffectual in execution.