An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  * * *

  *1 It seems that the Ayr Bank also dabbled in money laundering. Speaking in the House of Commons in 1774, the poet and politician Richard Glover alleged that its initial capital included £28,000 subscribed by what he called “noted smuggling societies.”

  *2 As the eldest son of a peer, the Earl of Guilford, he was known as Lord North as a courtesy title. North became a peer in his own right only when his father died in 1790. Until then, he sat in the House of Commons as member of Parliament for the family borough of Banbury.

  Chapter Four

  THE UNHAPPINESS

  OF LORD NORTH

  It must always be my wish to be released from a station which is too great for my abilities.

  —LORD NORTH, WRITING TO HIS FATHER, MAY 17721

  While the winter had been long and bleak, the early weeks of summer were superb. Almost from the moment Fordyce disappeared, the sun began to shine as if to celebrate his downfall. By the end of July nearly two months had passed with barely a cloud in the sky.

  To the west of London, at a place called Bushy Park, Lord North had been given the use of a country house, another token of gratitude from his benevolent king. At this time of year North was always exhausted, after many months of arduous work at Westminster. As a way to relax, he laid out a skittle ground for games with his eldest boys, down from Eton College for the long vacation. In the brilliant weather he could reflect on a parliamentary session that, despite its length, had gone extremely well.2

  George III had every reason to reward his prime minister. Two years earlier, when Lord North first took office, few observers had expected him to survive for long. At that time one great and vexatious issue dominated the politics of Great Britain. In the county of Middlesex, at four separate elections in 1768 and 1769 the voters chose the radical John Wilkes to represent them in the House of Commons. Each time the king and his ministers had to use their majority in Parliament to stop Wilkes taking his seat, on the grounds that he was a convict, incarcerated in the King’s Bench Prison on two charges of seditious libel.

  But each time the Commons chose to exclude Wilkes from its ranks, public opinion swung a little further in favor of the Wilkesites, and at Westminster the government found its majority ebbing away. If Lord North were to remain in office, he would have to settle the matter once and for all. To everyone’s surprise he succeeded. A shrewd tactician, he won over a decisive bloc of voters in the Commons, the landed gentry from the English counties who prided themselves on what they thought of as their independence. With them behind him, Lord North defeated the supporters of John Wilkes and went on to form what seemed to be a strong and lasting administration. For this and for much else, the king was deeply grateful.

  By the middle of 1772, North appeared to be invincible. In March, despite more trouble in Parliament, he secured the passage of the Royal Marriage Act, that controversial law, still in force today, by which royal sons and daughters cannot marry without the monarch’s prior consent. In one debate his majority had dwindled to as few as eighteen votes. Even so he won the battle, earning the king’s thanks once again.

  Then, in the spring, North emerged triumphant from his annual ordeal, the presentation of his budget to the House of Commons. For the sixth year in a row, he expected to achieve a surplus, and this time it amounted to more than £1 million. Even the king of Prussia commented on his skill with finance; and since Frederick the Great despised the British, for their duplicity, pride, and hopeless lack of rigor, praise from him was praise indeed.3

  And so, at the age of forty, Lord North stood at the very summit of ambition. With six children, a circle of close friends, and a wife whom he loved deeply, he seemed to possess every blessing his age could bestow. The only thing missing was money. His father owned a fine estate in Oxfordshire at a place called Wroxton, but much of his property was mortgaged or held in trust for distant relatives, and the family rarely had funds to spare. It was a common predicament among the aristocracy, but North made up for it with intellect and charm. During his own years at Eton his aptitude for Latin took him to the top of his class. In adult life, despite his debts he acquired a reputation for generosity. When a neighbor was down on his luck, North gave him five guineas as they passed each other in the street. Below stairs his servants dined on beef and oysters, while in the drawing room, said Edward Gibbon, Lord North was “one of the best companions in the kingdom.”4

  He turned even his strange appearance to good use. Clumsy and often disheveled, North was plump or even corpulent and so myopic that he could barely see the opposing side in the debating chamber. His lips were thick, and his tongue seemed too big for his mouth. His eyes had a disconcerting habit of rolling around in all directions. But North made a virtue out of features such as these, with quick, self-deprecating wit that increased his popularity in Parliament. One evening at a party a stranger pointed at a lady and asked, “Who is that ugly woman?” “It is my wife,” Lord North replied, “and we are reckoned the ugliest couple in London.” Since she adored her husband too, we can safely assume that Lady North did not object.

  Frederick, Lord North in 1773 or 1774, from the portrait by Nathaniel Dance. Crown Copyright: U.K. Government Art Collection

  King George III in military uniform in 1771, from Johann Zoffany’s oil painting. Crown Copyright: U.K. Government Art Collection

  As for his voice, it was deep, loud, and unmelodious, and he spoke with “a blustering kind of elocution,” said a fellow member of Parliament. But when the need arose, North could be devastating, with a rare ability to crush an opponent with a well-timed put-down. On one famous occasion, a member of the opposition giving a long and tedious speech remarked that Lord North was asleep. His lordship opened one eye and said, “I wish to God I were.”

  There were hostile critics who accused him of relying on repartee and jokes at the expense of substance. But during his early period in office, North possessed the great advantage of sheer stamina. In an era when many of his rivals were disabled by alcohol, gout, or promiscuity, North stood out as a political athlete who rose early for breakfast meetings with the king and carefully mastered his brief. During his first four years as leader of the government, he gave eight hundred speeches: a remarkable feat at a time when most members of Parliament, including Gibbon, never uttered a word in debate.5

  So here we have Lord North at the very peak of his career. He should have been happy, but he was not. His private letters show that even now he was anxious and prone to melancholy. Throughout his working life he would swing back and forth between moods of euphoria and depression. Even in 1772 he often spoke about resigning. That year, after his triumphant budget speech, North wrote a typical letter to his father, filled with a sense of inadequacy. Before the speech, he had suffered cruelly from what he called “distress and agitation.” When it was over, all he wanted was an opportunity to leave office before, as he put it, “I have entirely forfeited the little reputation I have gained.” Much later, during the war with America, these fits of melancholy became habitual. He fell asleep in meetings, his memory began to fail, and letters went unanswered, leaving his colleagues in despair.6

  Was Lord North a neurotic? Sometimes historians use that phrase to describe him, but in itself it tells us nothing. His tragedy was this: for all the talents that he possessed, his were not the gifts required to solve the deeper problems of the empire. In Lord North the king had found a master of maneuver and debate, with the personal charm to manage the House of Commons. But immersed in the minutiae of politics, North could never rise above them to acquire a wider view of the future of his nation at a time when this was urgently required. To his credit, he seems to have known that this was so, and he felt personally to blame.

  Even in 1772, at the height of his success, North believed that he had failed. A deeply conservative man, by temperament but also as the outcome of his education, he never wished to be a visionary. But he knew that around him the world was changing and that Britain needed new
solutions to the challenges it faced. He simply had no idea what they might be. This was what the king of Prussia had in mind when he accused the British of a lack of systematic thought. Publicly, Lord North would deny that this was so, but in private he felt like a swimmer out of his depth. Even the summer weather reminded him of the forces he could not control, as the heat wave ceased to be glorious and became another source of anxiety.

  In England it was rare to see a thick haze of dust hanging over the fields, but this was such a year. Beneath a blazing sun, the soil was ground to powder, and peas and barley withered in the furrows. “No rain; everything burnt up; no grass for anything to eat,” wrote a society lady in July after an evening on horseback at Notting Hill. For many miles around the capital, gardeners saw great swarms of bees and forecast a bumper yield of strawberries and honey, but as each day went by, the drought grew more alarming. Streams and ponds dried up, while the men who cut the hay went idle.

  Before the holidays, the fashionable world assembled for one last extravagance, a great display of fireworks over the Thames at Chelsea, and then they left for the country, only to encounter signs of deep distress. For many years, the harvest had been disappointing, not only in Great Britain, but across the rest of northern Europe too. After a late and chilly spring, the price of food was already rising steeply. Everyone could see that if the drought continued, something close to famine lay ahead.7

  With more than two centuries of hindsight, we might think that America should have been the chief concern of British politicians, but in fact the harvest often pushed the colonies to the back of their minds. Eighteen months had passed since Parliament last debated colonial affairs. During the whole of 1772, Parliament never discussed America at all. Even the Gaspée raid went without comment on the floor. Until the beginning of 1774, when news arrived of the Boston Tea Party, other issues far more pressing commanded the attention of Lord North. As always, foreign policy came first, with the British cabinet following the ups and downs of politics in Europe, every intrigue and conspiracy, not from idle curiosity but because the consequence might be another war with France. As the months wore on, the financial crisis and the plight of the East India Company came to the fore, but so did the soaring price of bread and meat, a question not only of economics; but also of law and order, which worried the king and his ministers quite as much.

  In eighteenth-century England the price of corn swung up and down from year to year, depending on the climate, but from the middle of the 1760s a worrying new trend appeared, as the cost of living rose and went on rising. Every time the price of bread spiked upward, it reached a new peak, so that even in years when prices fell they never returned to the levels men and women remembered from the past. By now, every town of any size had a weekly newspaper, and in the spring of 1772 they ran scores of stories about the scarcity of food. From Worcester, one writer warned the nation that it faced “a real Famine,” caused by “Money-loving Landowners.” Signing himself “an old-fashioned farmer,” he called for an end to enclosing cornfields to rear sheep. In Exeter, according to another correspondent, “the deplorable Condition of the Poor” was “beyond Description; our Markets are kept so thin of all sorts of Provisions, and every Article of Life is so excessive dear.”8

  The politicians could not fail to see the evidence of hardship. Because all the king’s ministers owned estates in one county or another, they knew firsthand the effect of rising prices. Unable to measure the speed with which the population was starting to grow—the first national census was three decades into the future—they could not explain why food was becoming so expensive; but in the rural landscape where they spent the holidays, they saw the results. In April, the first signs of unrest appeared in Essex and Suffolk, where the price of a four-pound loaf of bread and a pint of beer cost ten pennies, compared with sixpence a decade earlier. Crowds began to gather, breaking into mills and granaries and seizing meat from butchers. Locally, the leading dignitary was North’s colleague the diplomat Lord Rochford, Britain’s greatest expert on the international scene. As Lord Lieutenant of Essex, he took personal charge of the situation, rallying the local justices at a country inn and calling out the militia and the cavalry.

  Soon afterward, trouble spread to the west country, where it reached the very doorstep of Lord North. His wife came from Somerset, where the family home lay next to the little town of Ilminster. By virtue of his marriage North held the title of lord of the manor, and so he chaired the board that paid relief to the poor. The previous year, to cope with a rising number of claimants, they had set up a workhouse with North as trustee of the funds, but clearly the initiative came too late, because in June, as the Gaspée was approaching her end, the laborers began to riot in Ilminster’s marketplace. Roaming far and wide, they hijacked cartloads of butter and plundered bakers’ shops for flour.9

  If times were hard in southern England, in Scotland and Ireland they were even worse. Touring both countries twelve months earlier, Benjamin Franklin saw destitution of a kind that even he, a man of long experience, found deeply shocking; he sent his friends bitter descriptions of hungry men and women in rags. In Ulster, despite the harsh winter the landlords demanded a steep increase in their rents. In the spring of 1772, rebels called the Hearts of Steel began an insurrection near Belfast, so violent that five regiments of soldiers were required to put it down. When the uprising was over, a surge in emigration followed. Each year as many as ten thousand migrants left for America, mostly Irish or from the Scottish Highlands, and this diaspora across the ocean reached its peak at precisely this moment.10

  It was against this background of distress at home that Lord North and his colleagues made their mistakes about the colonies. From all sides, items of bad news would arrive about a crisis in the markets, riots in the countryside, strikes in London, or a spate of highway robberies. Taken in isolation, no single incident of mayhem would cause the government to panic, because the forces of authority were simply far too powerful. Even so, local episodes of disorder fostered a climate of unease among the leaders of a nation given to protest, disaffection, and unbridled free speech, not to mention drink and immorality. Was the nation impossible to govern? So it often seemed. All around them, the king and his ministers saw evidence of men and women flouting the rule of law; and so they looked for remedies. Besides the war with America, the 1770s witnessed the first serious efforts in England to create a uniform national system of workhouses, and even some early steps toward creating a modern police force. On both sides of the Atlantic, the British authorities saw a rising tide of crime and disorder. This colored their perception of the Gaspée raid, the Boston Tea Party, and the events that followed.

  On July 28, with the capital emptying fast for the vacation, at last Admiral Montagu’s dispatch about the Gaspée reached the desk of Lord North. Once or twice a week, North convened the small but powerful committee that supervised the kingdom’s finances. To underline its seniority, the Treasury Board assembled in a lofty chamber above Horse Guards Parade. Lord North would always chair the meeting from the head of a vast mahogany table, its massive legs carved to resemble the paws of a British lion.

  Because the session on the twenty-eighth was the last before the summer break, it was unusually long, and all the more tedious because the news was grim. Since the start of the year, the correspondence received by the board had been filled with reports of illegality that posed an urgent danger to the kingdom’s revenue. From Dunkirk, news had arrived of smuggling vessels bound for Ireland, armed with cannon and filled with tea and gin. In April, excise officers complained about gangs of smugglers in Kent, ruffians so numerous that Lord North considered calling in the dragoons. In crews of fifty men at a time, the smugglers carried tea and brandy in convoy through the suburbs of south London. In Scotland, meanwhile, the shore was simply too long and too wild to patrol. “All the troops in Britain are not sufficient to prevent smuggling on a coast so universally accessible,” said a dismal letter from Edinburgh.11

/>   There was nothing entirely new about smuggling, any more than there was about riots for bread or rural unrest in Ireland. But, as we saw, the early 1770s marked a cyclical peak of illegal traffic in the British Isles, alarming not only for the volume of the trade but also because of the violence that went with it. And as far as the Treasury could tell, exactly the same thing was occurring in America. In previous years, sometimes many months went by without the board seeing an item of colonial correspondence. When the general in New York overspent his budget, the board would sign a draft to ensure that his soldiers were paid, but apart from that American business was trivial and infrequent. But in 1772 bad news from the west came thick and fast.

  Since the previous November, not a penny had arrived from America by way of revenue. So the Treasury wrote to the cashier for the colonies, demanding an explanation. And when the board assembled in late July, the papers spread out on the table painted a picture of willful disobedience. Word had arrived from Falmouth, Maine, about a customs officer held up at gunpoint and forced to reveal the names of his informants. Near Philadelphia, a mob had seized a customs launch, and so the news went on. Another letter told the board that in many of the colonies the local judges flatly refused to issue search warrants for smuggled goods.

  The fate of the Gaspée fell into the same appalling pattern. On the coast of North America, the rule of law seemed to be breaking down entirely. From the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich sent over a copy of Montagu’s letter, which said exactly that. According to the navy, the men and women of Rhode Island were “a set of piratical people, whose whole business is defrauding the king.”12

  From the official point of view in Whitehall, the situation was entirely unacceptable. Although the British had retreated from their most ambitious plan to raise new revenues in America, Grenville’s Stamp Act, the Treasury had never abandoned his basic principle: that the colonies had to make a reasonable contribution to the cost of their administration and defense. Nobody in authority in London realistically expected that the Americans should foot the entire bill. Even Grenville and his advisers had never proposed to raise more than about £200,000, half of the colonial budget, by way of the Stamp Act and his other taxes. However, no British government could tolerate a situation where, because of civil disobedience, America paid next to nothing.13