Empire

by Edward Cline

  Jones consulted his own watch, hastily opened his notebook, and scribbled some notes. Then he rose, collected his things, and donned his cloak. With one last glance at the tread wheel, he left the Purgatory Tavern for the House of Commons.

  Of course, he knew exactly what the remonstrance from the House of Burgesses said; both he and Garnet Kenrick had received copies of it from Hugh Kenrick, who was now a member of that body. He had also sent transcriptions of the memorial to Lords and the address to the king. It pleased Jones that the young man had decided to enter politics; they shared the same passions and their correspondence had doubled. As Jones had sent Hugh Kenrick transcriptions of his own and other members’ speeches, Hugh had reciprocated by sending one of his maiden speech, together with an insightful synopsis of the deliberations of the burgesses on the documents.

  The remonstrance, Jones was certain, was not likely to be acknowledged by the Commons, nor even be allowed to be introduced by sympathetic members in Committee; the rules conveniently forbade it. Mr. Grenville had seen to that. Lords in all likelihood would emulate the Commons by the same rule and ignore the memorial. And His Majesty would not know what to think of the Virginians’ address, not unless the Privy Council advised him what to think.

  “What? What?” mused Jones out loud as he entered the House lobby, mimicking in derisive amusement the king’s well-known habitual style of soliciting reassurance on a matter, whether it was tea-time, literature, or policy. Although he was deep in thought, he noticed the Serjeant-at-Arms scowling furiously at him as he pronounced the words, and guessed the reason for the man’s offended expression. He paused long enough to grin, cup a hand over one ear, shake his head, and remark in passing, “Hearing impediment, sir! I was sure you’d said something!”

  Chapter 11: The Committee of Ways and Means

  George Grenville, First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and author-errant of the American Revolution, was the king’s first minister because William Pitt was not. His tenure in that office was largely a consequence of the interminable tug-of-war between the king, Lord Bute, the Duke of Newcastle, and Pitt over who should rule the country with whose coterie in the cabinet. Because the differences between the contending parties were acrid and irreconcilable, and because the country needed a first minister, Grenville was a compromise choice. Appointed in April 1763, he enjoyed the king’s confidence and support, until these steadily waned, for he attempted to exercise a determination and will in his legislative program that required the character of a Robert Walpole or a Pitt, which he lacked. Also, he forgot that he was a compromise choice, a relatively inoffensive occupant of the nation’s highest office after the king. His political career, until now, had been a succession of lucrative, influence-secured appointments in the second echelon of government posts, only one of whose titles was preceded by “first,” and dependent on the ambition and fortunes of men more energetic and imaginative than he. George Grenville filled a temporary vacuum of power and was not expected to last as long as he did, which was barely two years. If it had not been for George the Third’s animosity for John Wilkes, he would have lasted barely one.

  Early in the afternoon of that February 6th, 1765, the Commons resolved itself into a Committee of Ways and Means to hear and debate the particulars of Grenville’s long-anticipated stamp tax bill. Formal introduction of the bill in Parliament the previous year had been postponed until now, ostensively to allow its sponsor to collect information from the colonies on which documents could be taxed, and also to solicit alternatives to the tax from colonial legislatures.

  Because no colonial legislature offered any alternative other than the conventional but unsatisfactory requisitions scheme, Grenville and his advisors presumed an implied acceptance of a stamp tax in lieu of a more effective method of defraying the costs of maintaining an army in the colonies, which was the proposed tax’s stated purpose. Grenville perceived the requisitions scheme as unsatisfactory and inefficient because it gave those legislatures a measure of autonomy in the ways and means of raising revenue, an action which, too often in the past, they could not or would not perform to the Crown’s satisfaction. The independence of these bodies, especially in fiscal matters, was regarded by many critics of the colonies, Grenville among them, as an intolerable abrogation of Parliamentary authority and prerogative. The first minister had followed Lord Mansfield’s advice and investigated the language of the royal charters and proprietary grants of the colonies; he saw nothing in them that stipulated exemption from a stamp or any other kind of internal tax, nor anything that expressly insulated the colonies from Parliamentary authority. He had been amused when he heard that Benjamin Franklin had journeyed from Pennsylvania on a variety of errands, among them to protest the stamp tax bill and to petition the Crown to change Pennsylvania from a proprietary to a Crown colony.

  The stamp tax bill, however, was not the main business of the Committee, nor even of the Parliamentary session of 1765. Grenville, who had instituted legal action against John Wilkes, and led the campaign to censure and expel him, was still struggling to persuade the House to approve the policy of general warrants, the instruments with which the government had attempted to silence and punish Wilkes. He also saw a crisis looming in the king’s periodic spells of madness, and knew that he would become embroiled, as first minister, in the creation and passage of a regency bill that would settle the question of who would act as sovereign in the event the king died or was incapacitated by illness: the Duke of York, the king’s younger brother, or his mother, the Princess Dowager, with whom was associated the detested and distrusted Lord Bute. Bute was out of power but still maintained a kind of paternal hold on the king, and still lurked behind the scenes and in the minds of Grenville’s friends and enemies. Also pacing in the wings was William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland and the king’s uncle, who was now acting as an unobtrusive figurehead of the opposition. There was Charles Pratt, Lord Justice of the Common Pleas, who had ruled general warrants unconstitutional in direct contradiction to the opinion of Lord Mansfield of the King’s Bench and in defiance of the government’s need of them. And, of course, there was always Grenville’s half-brother, Richard Temple Grenville, Viscount Cobham, the actual leader of the opposition, whose efforts to frustrate him were ceaseless and untiring.

  Grenville, one of whose faults was his belief that an absence of tact was a sign of strength, knew that he was certain to incur the king’s further displeasure over a regency bill, no matter how deftly he handled it. Also, he thought it unfair and unreasonable of the king to express annoyance with his justifiable complaints, discreetly voiced, that it was the king’s favorites, and not his own, who were reaping the choicest places and preferments. These and other minor developments contributed to a growing mutual mistrust and a frosty relationship between king and first minister. Grenville saw a conspiracy to alienate and remove him from the king’s sanction, or at least a desire to provoke him to remove himself and resign; George the Third, whose insular mind, public role, and inability to form his own judgment made him insecure and unpredictable, saw a conspiracy by Grenville and his party to control him.

  Still, Grenville viewed his stamp tax bill as the vital centerpiece of his administration. He wished to be remembered, come what may, as the minister who saved the nation from insolvency by asserting Parliament’s sovereignty over the colonies. To him, passage of his bill, an event of which he was inordinately confident, was not an issue of power versus British liberty. After all, he must have observed, Englishmen paid that same tax and many others in Britain, and still retained their liberties. Liberty and power were demonstrably compatible. So there was no moral, political, or even legal reason why the colonials should not submit to it, too.

  * * *

  Dogmael Jones took his seat on the benches that faced the Treasury benches across the aisle. Over there he saw Henoch Pannell and his friends sitting almost directly behind Grenville, his secretary Thomas Whately, and most of the bill party. He
thought it ironic that he would eventually be called to address that phalanx of implacable, stubborn men; it was his own party that needed his persuasion. He glanced up at the gallery over the Treasury benches, and nodded to Baron Garnet Kenrick and his wife, Effney; they had come up to London at his urging, for he suspected that this first debate in committee would be the key debate. What was said here today would determine what was said in future debates until the bill was either abandoned or presented as a complete bill to be voted on in a regular House session.

  At the other end of the gallery he saw Benjamin Franklin sitting with several other colonial agents. He had met Franklin briefly early in January at John Sargent’s house, and startled the famous Pennsylvanian, after they had been introduced, by saying, “I have read your treatise on electricity, esteemed sir. In the coming session, I intend to emulate you with my own daring experiments, by attempting to electrify a somnolent House over the perils to British liberty that threaten us all.”

  Franklin had smiled and replied, “Thank you, Sir Dogmael. But take care not to burn yourself in the effort. The government here can boast of an over-quantity of electrical fire. It propelled Mr. Wilkes clear across the Channel!”

  When the nearly three hundred members had assembled, the House resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole. Speaker John Cust left his thronelike chair on a motion by a member that he do so, and retired to a bench as simply the member for Grantham. A clerk removed the mace from the table in front of the chair and put it underneath. The committee chairman, Thomas Hunter, member for Winchelsea and a member of the Treasury Board, took his seat at the head of that table. A low murmur, as usual, was to be heard in the chamber, together with the restless shifting of cramped bodies on the uncomfortable seats of the benches and the impatient tapping of canes and shoes on the floors.

  As these rituals were being observed, Dogmael Jones felt a cold fear creep up in him, the same uneasiness he felt when he first appeared before Sir Bevill Grainger at the beginning of the Pippin trial years ago. He glanced around at his colleagues, many of whom were as determined as he to speak against the resolutions. He wondered, though, if the electrical fire that might burn him would instead come from these men.

  When the House of Commons went into committee, the rules of a formal session, governed by the Speaker, were relaxed and governed by the committee chairman, not necessarily the same person. A member who rose to speak could address the whole House, and not just the Chair. He could speak more than once on the same subject, with relatively fewer limitations on his references, and engage others in genuine argument. He could take notes, and read from prepared texts and notes. Sometimes the gallery was cleared of “strangers” if a member objected to their presence, at other times not; in this instance, the galleries on both sides of the House and facing the Chair were nearly filled to capacity. In them were the usual ladies and gentlemen of leisure, but there was today a large contingent of merchants from around the country, many of whom had signed petitions to the House expressing concern for the consequences of a colonial stamp tax.

  George Grenville, aged fifty-one and still in possession of the handsomeness of his youth, rose and in a clear voice introduced his preliminary resolutions in a speech that lasted nearly two hours. His address was largely an explication of the necessity of a stamp tax for the colonies and of Parliament’s indisputable authority to impose one.

  One after another, the first minister demolished every objection he had heard and read against his bill, speaking unhurriedly and without concern. He based Parliament’s authority to impose the tax on the Constitution, and on the precedents of several past acts of Parliament, most notably the Revenue Act of the previous year; none of these had been challenged on constitutional grounds, and therefore were presumed by all to be just and proper. He reviewed the costs of the army and navy, and argued that since the increased costs of maintaining those forces were a direct result of policing and protecting the colonies, it was only logical that the colonies “contribute their proper share” of those costs. He assured the House that enforcement and collection of the tax would probably require fewer personnel than did enforcement and collection of the customs duties, chiefly because the tax would be intimately linked to the legality of any document that required a stamp, whether it was a contract, license, or university degree. He took time to address the subject of colonial distinctions between internal and external taxes, and denied that any existed, as far as Parliamentary authority was concerned. He asserted that a close examination of royal colonial charters revealed no clause or hint of colonial exemption from Parliamentary regulation and taxation.

  In point of fact, he stressed — casting an insouciant glance up at the gallery and at Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met some days ago during a conference with colonial agents — the proprietary charter of Pennsylvania explicitly mentioned the right of Parliament to impose taxes on and within that particular “plantation.” He asked the House what might happen in England if every county had leave to make distinctions and claims similar to those made by the colonies. He averred that non-representation was not a valid claim to exemption from Parliament’s authority, and so neither was an absence of consent. The colonists, Grenville warned, “had in many instances encroached and claimed powers and privileges inconsistent with their situation as colonies. If they were not subject to this burden of tax, then America is at once a kingdom of itself, and they are not entitled to the privileges of Englishmen.”

  He ended his speech with the observation that the colonies had not proposed an alternative to the stamp tax, which in itself was an implicit admission of Parliamentary sovereignty, and that the “law is founded on that great maxim, that protection is due from the governor, and support and obedience on the part of the governed.”

  The first minister then bowed courteously to the Chair, and strode calmly back to his seat on the Treasury bench.

  Dogmael Jones grimaced and muttered to himself, “And who, dear sir, will protect us from you, and what privileges might an Englishman’s be?”

  Thomas Hunter then opened the Committee to debate. Several members on Jones’s side rose in unison for recognition. Jones tapped his pencil on a new blank page — his stenographic skills, honed by years as a barrister before the King’s Bench, had allowed him to take down all of Grenville’s speech — and forced himself to wait.

  Hunter acknowledged William Beckford, member for London, who immediately inveighed against Grenville’s arguments. “The North Americans,” he said, “do not think an internal and external duty the same.” He moved that Hunter leave the Chair, so that more information could be had from the colonials on which to base a proper decision, and also because he wanted to delay a vote on the resolutions. Colonel Isaac Barré, member for Chipping Wycombe, seconded the motion, warning the House that “the tax intended is odious to all your colonies and they tremble at it.” Thomas Townshend, member for Whitchurch, and one of three Townshend family members in the House (a fourth had recently entered Lords as viscount), spoke against the stamp tax resolutions, as did Sir William Meredith, member for Liverpool, who pointed out that passage of such a bill would obviate all the colonial assemblies and in effect abolish them.

  “There’s a fly fellow,” remarked Grenville in a low voice to Whately. “I had not expected anyone to think that far ahead of the matter.”

  Whately nodded and shrugged. “I am afraid, sir, that we shall hear much brilliant novelty today.”

  Frederick “Lord” North, member for Banbury and Lord of the Treasury, rose to emphasize that no colony had entered a specific objection to the proposed tax, while Robert Nugent, member for Bristol, said that no one, neither colonial nor member of the House, had contested the principle behind the tax. Charles Garth, member for Devizes and agent for South Carolina and Georgia, secured a promise from Grenville that colonial petitions against the tax could be submitted after passage of the act, as petitions against any proposed tax in the Commons were not permitted. Charles Townshend
, member for Harwich and current president of the Board of Trade, rose to endorse without reservation both the tax and Grenville’s reasoning for it, and referred with mock bitterness to the colonies as “planted with so much tenderness, governed with so much affection, and established with so much care and attention, nourished up by our indulgence, and protected by our arms. And now they begrudge us the pittance we ask from them to help relieve us of a heavy burden! Well, sirs, I am certain that every parent has experienced the same dearth of gratitude!”

  Much of the House chuckled at this deprecatory delivery. Dogmael Jones winced in contempt at the laughter. George Grenville smiled blandly. Thomas Townshend, nephew of that speaker, pursed his lips in hard thought for a reply. But even before the president of the Board of Trade could resume his seat, the towering, massive figure of Colonel Barré shot up in anger and began speaking before Chairman Hunter could recognize him. Hunter’s first instinct was to motion him down, but the wild look in the man’s eyes, the fierceness of his words, and the musket ball that was still lodged in one of his cheeks, both frightened and fascinated him.

  “They planted by your care?” bellowed the man who was at General Wolfe’s side when he died at Quebec. “No! Your oppressions planted them in America! They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and inhospitable country…. They nourished by your indulgence? They grew up by your neglect of them! And as soon as you began to care about them, that care was exercised in sending persons to rule over them, sent to spy out their liberty, to misrepresent their actions and to prey upon them, men whose behavior on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them!…. They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defense, have exerted a valor amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defense of a country whose frontier and interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument…. Remember I this day told you so, that spirit of freedom which actuated these people at first will accompany them still…. However superior to me in general knowledge and experience the reputable body of this House may be, yet I claim to know more of America than most of you, having seen and been conversant in that country. The people I believe are as truly loyal as any subjects the king has, but a people jealous of their liberties and who will vindicate them if ever they should be violated…. ”