An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  On hearing the news of the Gaspée incident, Lord North had to face a very uncomfortable truth. It was rapidly becoming impossible to collect any of the taxes the colonists were obliged to pay. Of course, the British might choose to return to the old system, the one that existed prior to Grenville, when the customs duties from America were paltry and the colonial assemblies voted their own taxes to pay the judges and the governors. But this was unacceptable too, since North and his colleagues wanted the judges and the governors in America to be salaried from revenues belonging to the British Crown. Only if that were so could they act as wise, impartial representatives of royal authority, unbeholden to the whims of malcontents in places like Boston and Rhode Island.

  From the destruction of the Gaspée, it should have been clear that New England as a whole was drifting away toward independence, and not only the Providence of the Browns. At this moment, therefore, the British government should have acted firmly and decisively. In the best of all possible worlds, it would have thought again about every aspect of the colonial system, abolishing futile customs duties and laws of trade that could not be enforced. Failing that, the British cabinet might have opted for the other extreme. Send more warships to Boston, blockade the coast from Cape Cod to Connecticut, and revoke the charter of Rhode Island: this would have been the hard-line alternative. Such a strategy would have been expensive, controversial, and fraught with risk, but it might have worked. Faced with a display of force and resolution, Americans inclined to disobey might have beaten a hasty retreat.

  In the relationship between Great Britain and America, a choice always had to be made between the liberal policy and the authoritarian. But in the summer of 1772, Lord North and his colleagues showed themselves incapable of making any clear choices at all. At that very moment they were thrown into turmoil by a quarrel among themselves, centering on the minister whose brief it was to supervise the colonies.

  An Ulsterman from county Down, with a great estate close to the scene of the recent rebellion, the colonial secretary Lord Hillsborough had seen sedition and disorder many times. Everyone knew that he favored coercion. This was the minister who had sent the army to occupy Boston; it was due to him that the navy had made the town its headquarters, in a vain effort to put a stop to smuggling; and Hillsborough called for the revocation of the charters in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Although his colleagues and the king were reluctant to take such a drastic step, word of Hillsborough’s intentions leaked out in America, where he became an object of hatred and contempt.14

  According to Benjamin Franklin, he was obstinate, conceited, and wrongheaded, but the most brutal verdict on Lord Hillsborough came from the patriots of Boston. When they wished to punish a lackey of the British, they smeared the man’s doors and windows with feces and urine, a mixture to which they gave the name “Hillsborough paint.” But even somebody so widely disliked may have a few qualities, and Hillsborough displayed at least the virtue of consistency. Compared with his colleagues, who so often vacillated, the colonial secretary shone out as a beacon of resolution. In response to the Gaspée incident, he demanded stern reprisals, but he did so without a hope of putting them into effect. Two days after the news arrived from Rhode Island, he told Lord North that he wished to resign.

  Hillsborough fell victim to a rift within the cabinet, an unseemly fracas of a kind that was all too common. At this period, every government of Britain was a coalition, a loose alliance drawn from rival factions, and Lord North’s was no exception. At a time when the nation needed clarity of purpose, he was obliged to keep the peace within his own ranks. As it happened, the dispute arose from another American problem: the fate of the Ohio valley, which Hillsborough and General Gage wished to surrender to the Indians.

  North called the quarrel about the frontier an “unlucky business,” but it was more than just a little local difficulty. The controversy drove a deep wedge between Lord Hillsborough and his cabinet colleagues, who connived against him until he had to go. At their best, they were shrewd, hardworking patriots of their own kind, committed to the service of the kingdom. But the row about the wilderness revealed the British cabinet at its worst, and it made a swift, decisive response to the Gaspée raid impossible to achieve.15

  A RULING CLASS

  The cabinet resembled a pack of willful hounds. Point them in the right direction, at a common enemy such as John Wilkes or the king of France, and they would work together to take the fox. The rest of the time they were equally likely to run around in circles, snapping at each other’s heels. Toss them a bone in the shape of some chance of financial gain, and they would squabble over it, even at the risk of damaging the national interest in which they all believed.

  Apart from Hillsborough and North himself, there were four ministers who really counted.*1 All of them were peers of the realm, members of the aristocracy with a seat in the House of the Lords. Each one had his own obsessions and his own agenda. All four remained in office throughout the American crisis and shared in the errors that were made. In the diversity of their interests, each one also represented a different facet of the elite.

  At fifty-four, William Zuylestein, the fourth Earl of Rochford, belonged to the older generation of British politicians, men with a view of the world shaped by the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, when the nation had stood on the brink of catastrophe. When the Young Pretender came within a week of taking London, Rochford and his friend Lord Sandwich were already in their late twenties. During their adult lives, Great Britain had also fought two long wars with France. Both men saw the defense of the realm as their overriding responsibility, and in their different ways they devoted their careers to it.

  For Lord Rochford, the secret of national security lay in the balance of power. A fine linguist, he served as ambassador in Turin, Madrid, and Paris. Weak in some respects, in others he was indispensable. The French called him “un homme de plaisir,” and so he was. Fond of the theater, and even more of actresses, Rochford made a habit of adultery and spent a fortune he did not possess. Prone to ill health, he would sometimes choose a moment of emergency to take a rural holiday, but his colleagues and the king could not do without him for long. His knowledge of European politics was unrivaled.

  On a single sheet of paper, Rochford could distill the most complex problem of foreign policy into simple language. In the cabinet of Lord North, he served as the senior of two secretaries of state. Cheerful, lively, and often indiscreet, given to what another Frenchman called “petites vivacités,” Rochford watched over domestic affairs, which chiefly meant law and order, but he also dealt with Britain’s strained relationship with France and Spain, the most sensitive task a minister could undertake.

  In 1772, one issue occupied the forefront of his mind. Deeply suspicious of the French, Rochford knew that Britain needed allies on the Continent to deter the Bourbon powers from making war again, but none were available. Austria was aligned with France, and the king of Prussia did not trust the king of England. Logically, the British should have forged an alliance with the Russian empress, Catherine the Great, whose army was so much larger than their own. Efforts were made to reach an agreement, but they came to nothing. The empress required a subsidy, paid in sterling, and help in dismembering Poland and the Ottoman Empire. The British would rather have no deal at all than a pact concluded on Russian terms so callous and expensive, and so the empress turned to her distant cousin Frederick the Great. On the eve of the American Revolution, Great Britain found itself isolated, a situation that filled Lord Rochford with alarm. “We have not a single friendly power,” he told his colleagues, in an anxious note written that autumn.16

  Nobody felt more respect for Rochford than his friend John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, the minister who presided over the fleet. Equally wary of the French, he took the same pleasure in women and the stage. A keen gambler, always in debt, he gave his name to the sandwiches we eat today, because, or so the story goes, he needed a way to dine without leaving the gaming table.
At fifty-three, Sandwich retained all the vigor of early manhood but also some of its clumsiness. Tall but ungainly, he was apt to break the porcelain on entering a lady’s drawing room. Only one man in London, it was said, could walk down two sides of the street at the same time, and that was Montagu. Apart from his mistress, a pretty young soprano, Lord Sandwich had three great passions: cricket, the Royal Navy, and the oratorios of Handel. The greatest of these was the navy.

  Isolated as it was, the kingdom relied all the more on the fleet. By itself the navy might act as deterrence enough to keep the French at bay, but only if the service was kept in fighting readiness. The minute book of the Admiralty Board survives, with every page showing Lord Sandwich intent on the task, trying to build and repair ships more quickly, with greater firepower, copper hulls, and crews protected by the latest cure for scurvy. The letters that passed between him and Lord North are equally important for what they reveal about Great Britain’s situation. Keen to preserve the nation’s financial standing so that in wartime it could borrow freely, North favored strict economy in each department. Sandwich, on the other hand, tried his best to defend the navy and squeeze more resources from a parsimonious Treasury.17

  While Rochford worried about foreign policy, and Sandwich toiled at his desk or toured the dockyards, their colleague the second Earl of Gower chiefly looked after himself. The richest member of the cabinet, aged fifty-one, fluent in speech and dignified in manner, in order of precedence Gower ranked next to North, serving as Lord President of the Privy Council. His name rarely appears in official papers, because Granville Leveson-Gower performed no executive role. He sat in the cabinet not because of what he did but because of who he was. In the old, unreformed parliamentary system, where boroughs could be bought and sold, the king needed the support of plutocrats like Gower, ready to use their resources to keep the government in power.

  After selling their stock in the South Sea Company just before it failed, the Leveson-Gowers had bought a great swathe of their home county of Staffordshire. Investing in coal and canals, they made themselves the leaders of their region. And while six members of the House of Commons owed their election directly to the Gowers, his lordship had also formed close ties with the even more opulent Duke of Bedford. Known as the Bloomsbury gang, the faction they led spoke for another thirty seats. If North were to form a lasting administration, he could not do without their loyalty. Their help had been essential in the task of seeing off John Wilkes. But Lord Gower always wanted a great deal in return: a voice in key decisions and endless favors for the Bloomsburyites, commissions in the army, and posts on the Treasury payroll. If North failed to deliver, Gower would plot behind his back until he found another premier who could.

  The youngest member of the cabinet was only thirty-three. Genial, modest, and impeccably polite, Henry Howard, twelfth Earl of Suffolk, took on the post of the junior secretary of state with deep misgivings, worrying about his poor command of French, the language of diplomacy. Serving as deputy to Rochford, he oversaw Britain’s dealings with the Baltic powers and Russia; and to his own surprise, Suffolk impressed foreign envoys with the speed with which he learned their trade. So crippled with disease that he could barely hold a pen—his ailment was said to be gout, but his symptoms suggest that his heart was weak—he enjoyed the king’s friendship and his colleagues liked and trusted him. Just before the American war, Suffolk wrote them a poem in the style of Pope, making fun of the rebels; but however flippant he might be, Suffolk worked as hard as Sandwich. He would be dead before he was forty.18

  How did the cabinet, besides composing satires in verse, treat the American question? To a man—though Rochford sometimes had second thoughts—they were hard-liners. In their eyes, the king and his Parliament were legally supreme over each and every colony. Using his prerogative, the king had chosen to delegate some functions to provincial assemblies or to local officials, but if any dispute arose, of whatever sort, then Parliament at Westminster had the final word. Gower, Sandwich, and Suffolk never wavered from this principle, and neither did Lord North.

  There had been a moment, six years before the Gaspée incident, when they had made their views entirely plain. It had occurred early in 1766, during the debates on the repeal of the Stamp Act. In the House of Lords, more than thirty peers had fought a dogged campaign against repeal. Sandwich and Suffolk led the fight, and they nailed their colors so firmly to the mast that they could never change their stance without appearing foolish or dishonest. The same applied to Gower, who voted with them, opposing even the smallest concession to America.*2

  They saw the repeal of the Stamp Act as a betrayal of everything they cherished. By doing away with the tax, Great Britain had raised a white flag in the face of treachery and riot. Worse still, the repeal of the act endangered the twin pillars of the British constitution: the sovereignty of Parliament and the rule of law. It was the duty of the House of Lords, they believed, to stand up against the mob and to resist democracy wherever it appeared. Only the peers who sat in the upper chamber, highminded patriarchs who never faced the voters, could be trusted to act in the nation’s best interests. In their opinion, the public was inherently capricious, easily misled by troublemakers such as Wilkes or his counterparts in Boston. Abolish the Stamp Act, and you would give them victory. The outcome would be anarchy and the end of empire.

  In the future, anyone who did not like a tax would refuse to pay it. According to Suffolk, Americans were “an unfortunate people, misled by factious judges and seditious lawyers.” From New England to Georgia, the provincial assemblies had become nurseries of disobedience, openly demanding equality with London. Hand the Americans one concession, and they would ask for more until they won autonomy.19

  Six years on, this remained the creed in which North and his colleagues believed. After giving voice to it so clearly, they could not abandon it, and they never did. But a creed is what it was: not a practical agenda or a plan of action, but a statement of dogma, rigid and doctrinaire. It was all too tempting to deal in abstract ideas about the sovereignty of Parliament, forgetting that authority and power were two very different things. It was easy to proclaim, as they did, that the king and Parliament possessed an “ancient, unalienable right of supreme jurisdiction.” It was far harder to make the decisions required if the British were to give this abstract notion any substance. The dispute about the Ohio country made this very plain.20

  THE HILLSBOROUGH MEMORANDUM

  The quarrel in the summer of 1772 that spelled the end of Lord Hillsborough had been nearly four years in the making. It could trace its origins to 1768 and a deal between British emissaries and the six nations of the Iroquois. After a conference at Fort Stanwix, the Iroquois sold their rights to an immense territory west of the Appalachians, between the mountains and the Ohio River. Under the Stanwix treaty it became a possession of King George, to be divided between aspiring settlers from Pennsylvania and Virginia, where investors formed syndicates to make bids for the land.

  The news reached London, where it horrified Lord Hillsborough. He inherited the treaty from his predecessor, Lord Shelburne, whose views about the wilderness differed entirely from his own. Shelburne had believed that money might be made by asking the settlers to pay rent to the king, but for Hillsborough the risks involved in westward expansion far outweighed any likely reward. He advanced the same old arguments: allow the colonists to cross the mountains, and they would throw off their allegiance to the king. Another great Indian war would break out, of exactly the kind that he wished to forestall. For the next three years, Hillsborough used every tactic of delay to prevent any grants being made.

  Gradually, however, he found himself outflanked by rivals more powerful than he. One group of investors had come to the fore: the Grand Ohio Company, run from Philadelphia. With Benjamin Franklin on their side, they hatched the most ambitious scheme of all, offering to buy two million acres in the wilderness we now call West Virginia. Unable to obtain Lord Hillsborough’s consent, the
investors began a lobbying campaign in London with the aim of circumventing him.

  At a time when the business climate was so wildly optimistic, the company soon found backers from the world of finance. As the price of real estate rose steeply in Great Britain and the West Indies, speculators found virgin land in the Ohio valley an irresistible alternative. With cynical good sense, the company also made a direct appeal to Hillsborough’s cabinet colleagues. They recruited first Lord Suffolk’s father-in-law and then a string of senior officials at the Treasury. They gave free shares to Lord Rochford, who always needed money, and to Lord Gower, who did not refuse. His support was essential because, whatever Hillsborough might say, the final decision lay with the Privy Council, where Gower sat in the chair.21

  By the spring of 1772, Lord Hillsborough was isolated and almost as unpopular in Whitehall as he was in Boston. For all his rank in Ireland he had no following in London, where his opponents were so influential. It was rumored that Gower wanted to have him dismissed, as a prelude to getting rid of Lord North as well. Even the king dropped hints that Hillsborough was behaving foolishly. At the end of April, Hillsborough decided to bring matters to a head. He sent Gower a long memorandum, firmly rejecting any western settlements at all: the only memorandum, as it happens, that survives from the early 1770s to give us a full account of colonial policy from a cabinet minister’s point of view. Filled with long, pessimistic extracts from the letters of General Gage, the document was clear and logically consistent. As plainly as could be, Hillsborough set out the orthodox British conception of the future of America, but in doing so he revealed just how narrow that perspective was.22