An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  William Legge, second Earl of Dartmouth, painted in 1769 by Thomas Gainsborough. The Dartmouth Heirloom Trustees

  When Dartmouth joined the cabinet in 1772, a few opponents of Lord North grumbled about nepotism, but most observers welcomed the choice. The newspapers liked the new colonial secretary, but they described him in generalities of little value. As one writer put it, Dartmouth was “universally acknowledged to be possessed of good abilities, and the firmest integrity.” Sent across the ocean, bland phrases such as these created expectations that he could not meet.17

  In America it was widely known that he had helped to fund a new missionary school at Hanover, New Hampshire, which later became Dartmouth College. Americans also recalled his spell as a junior minister, with some responsibility for the colonies, in the short-lived government led by the Marquess of Rockingham, which did away with the Stamp Act. Since Lord Dartmouth had voted for repeal, many Americans took him for a sympathetic friend. They simply did not know the man, and because few scholars have looked at him closely, the same mistake has often been repeated. Dartmouth’s horizons were very narrow. He could no more devise a lasting way to keep America than he could give away all he possessed and live as a hermit in a cave. Like so many British statesmen down the ages, from all points on the political spectrum, Dartmouth confused the New Testament’s teachings with those of his own social class or party.

  His most obvious flaw was unworldliness. His father had died very young, and so Dartmouth became a peer in his late teens, inheriting the title from his grandfather. He never endured the salutary rough-and-tumble of the House of Commons. After his marriage in 1755, he spent a decade in seclusion with his wife until his brief period as a minister under Rockingham. That only lasted thirteen months before he retired for another six years until North invited him to join the cabinet. A reluctant statesman, Dartmouth rarely spoke in the House of Lords, and when he did, he made a poor impression: “ill-delivered and formal” was the verdict of one listener. When the storm broke in America, even if he wished to make a case for peace he could not compete with confident hawks like Lord Sandwich.18

  Another source of weakness was this: the bond of affection that tied Lord Dartmouth so firmly to his stepbrother. Boyhood friends, born just a year apart, William Legge and Frederick North always remained close. At Oxford they composed Latin hexameters beneath the same tutor. They traveled together to Europe to finish their education, and after that they saw each other frequently.*2 They exchanged a host of messages, worrying about their children and their wives, about toothache, smallpox, and miscarriages. When Lord North married his Somerset heiress, Dartmouth acted as a trustee of the marriage settlement, and he did the same again when Brownlow North found his lady from the Caribbean.

  Neither Lord North nor Lord Dartmouth was crudely self-seeking: both had ideals, especially William Legge. Every friendship between men of their rank, however, amounted to a kind of military alliance in pursuit of influence and status. Aristocrats by birth and by vocation—nobility was a career at which men and women had to work—they spent their lives trying to make their families secure at the apex of the social pyramid. Lord Dartmouth and Lord North did so more gracefully than most of their contemporaries, but even so it was still their primary aim. They could never afford to be controversial, because within the hierarchy of the peerage they ranked only in the second or third quartile. Far from being ancient feudal dynasties, the Legges and the Norths had acquired their titles less than a century earlier. In the 1680s North’s great-grandfather had made a fortune as a brilliant lawyer and a judge under Charles II, becoming the first Lord Guilford. His son soon lost the family money by living beyond his means and failing in business ventures overseas. By the time he died in 1729, all the North estates were financially embarrassed, not only their principal seat at Wroxton, but other estates they had acquired by marriage. It took another sixty years to clear all the family debts: a long source of worry to Lord North and his father.

  As for the Legges, their claim to nobility dated from the same era, a reward for devoted service in the Stuart navy. James II made Admiral Legge a baron, an honor that proved inconvenient when the king fled into exile. The new king William III confined the first Lord Dartmouth to the Tower of London, where he died of an apoplectic fit. Thereafter the Legges chose to keep to themselves, making only brief, inoffensive forays into politics. They owned property in Staffordshire and close to London, at Blackheath and Kentish Town, but they did not figure among the nation’s greatest proprietors.

  And so when they came home from their European tour in 1754, the two young noblemen had to think very carefully about the future. To rise within the aristocracy, first they had to find partners, but although they married well, they did not marry brilliantly. Anne Speke, the future Lady North, brought with her a gentleman’s estate, but rents were low in Somerset, and before the wedding, the pliable Lord North agreed to pay his father a subsidy of more than £2,000 each year, to help fund the family liabilities. With such a burden to support, he was often desperate for cash, obliged at times to scour the streets of London in search of a money lender. Meanwhile, Lord Dartmouth had married Miss Frances Gunter Nicholl, an heiress from Yorkshire, but her fortune was smaller than it seemed. Remote and in need of repair, when combined with his own her estates produced an annual income of only £4,000: comfortable but modest compared with the rent roll of a duke.19

  As any reader of Jane Austen knows, vexatious matters such as these lay uppermost in the minds of Georgian men and women. A peer might have his title, but without an endowment of wealth he could not hope to thrive. Both North and Dartmouth had to make the best of what they had. North turned to public life, where he strove hard to succeed, not only for the salary he might earn—something he urgently required—but also for the prestige his success might confer. For lack of resources, the Norths could afford to bribe the voters of only one Oxfordshire borough, the parliamentary seat at Banbury, close to Wroxton. Banbury always sent Lord North to the House of Commons without an opponent daring to stand against him; but once elected, he had to learn the deeper art of politics and how to climb the greasy pole without the support of money.

  For his part, Lord Dartmouth retired to his estates, which he began to nurse back to health, and here he enjoyed a piece of luck. His country seat was at Sandwell, very close to Birmingham, a town swiftly becoming a hub of industry. As the years passed, Dartmouth made friends with the manufacturers, including Matthew Boulton, using his influence to help them win patents for their inventions. Dartmouth was never an entrepreneur, but he did well enough. As Birmingham and London grew, the price of land around them rose as well, enriching families like the Legges who owned estates nearby.

  For both men, however, the arrival of George III on the throne in 1760 proved to be an even greater stroke of good fortune. As children North and the king had played together, at a time when Lord Guilford was close to Frederick, Prince of Wales, who was George’s father. In itself, this did not count for much: deeply committed to protocol, George III would not promote a politician simply because of boyhood affection. But for a host of reasons, Dartmouth and North gradually became essential members of the royal entourage. Bright and lively, the young king and queen needed friends like themselves. They preferred the company of well-bred men and women of a particular type. They had to be deferential but not dull, funny but never undignified, and clever but not arrogant, with a deep interest, like the royal couple’s, in theater, music, and the visual arts.

  Among his closest confidants, the king counted his master of the robes, James Brudenell, a courtier with exactly those qualifications. A close friend and neighbor of the Norths’, and brother of the Earl of Cardigan, Jemmy Brudenell came from one of the wealthiest families in England. In 1760, he married Anne Legge, Lord Dartmouth’s sister: a splendid match, which drew the Dartmouths and the Norths into the inner circle of the court. Their own social skills and happy marriages made them all the more acceptable to a sovereign
keen to uphold morality as well as taste.20

  By 1772 their ties to the royal family were very close indeed, with North’s political talents making them all the deeper. And in the eyes of George III, both he and his stepbrother possessed another crucial asset. They were faithful sons of Oxford University, which meant that they were equally devoted to the Church of England. A pious man, the king worried endlessly about the danger posed to orthodox religion by freethinkers, skeptics, Unitarians, and Baptists. In Lord Dartmouth and Lord North, he found two allies in the cause of the established church. Deeply grateful, the king did what he could to reward them. While North’s two Treasury salaries, as chancellor of the exchequer and First Lord, totaled £5,600 a year, transforming his financial position and making him all the more determined to remain in office, his half brother Brownlow became a prince among bishops, promoted by the king to one fat diocese after another. And when Dartmouth’s younger sister married a Mr. Keene, who was short of funds, the king gave the couple rooms in Windsor Castle. Soon after the Gaspée incident, the family achieved another great mark of distinction. At Oxford, the university chose Lord North as chancellor, knowing that he enjoyed the full support of George III.

  In London, the Keenes, Legges, Brudenells, and Norths were inseparable friends. Their social world was small and held together by mutual esteem and by their loyalty to a monarch who did so much to help them. In a milieu such as this, it would be difficult for anyone to develop original ideas, and especially so for Lord Dartmouth because of the kind of Christian faith he held. It colored every facet of his life, including the decisions he took about America. His religion was sincere and even admirable; but it left him blind to the meanings other people might give to freedom.

  What did he believe? Commentators often called him a Methodist, and for a while in his youth that was a fair description. As newlyweds, Lord and Lady Dartmouth fell deeply under the influence of John Wesley’s friend and rival, the great evangelist George Whitefield. From Whitefield they acquired two things: an emotional faith in Jesus Christ, intense and highly charged, but also a theology steeped in obedience to the powers that were.21

  Today, if we remember Whitefield at all, we do so because of his mission to America in the 1740s. Young and dynamic, he traveled up and down the eastern seaboard helping to lead the gospel revival known as the Great Awakening. Later, at home in England, Whitefield began a project to evangelize the nation from above by winning over members of the aristocracy. With Wesley beside him he roamed the salons of London, looking for enthusiastic converts. Their message mostly fell on stony ground, but not with the Dartmouths, who ranked among Whitefield’s most devout adherents. Flouting convention, in 1757 they invited him to their summer home at Cheltenham, where, to the outrage of the local parson, the Dartmouths held their own awakening. From the countryside the crowds flocked in, sobbing, fainting, and hysterical. When the parson locked the door of the parish church, Whitefield jumped up on a tombstone to preach from the book of Isaiah.

  Technically, this kind of thing probably broke the law; and so despite his sympathy for Methodism, Lord Dartmouth gradually returned to the formal structures of religion. By 1772 he had become the sponsor of a small group of clergymen who formed a new evangelical wing inside the Church of England. With Sunday schools, prayer meetings, and mission work with soldiers and the poor, they built a wide following. With names like Henry Venn, William Romaine, and Martin Madan, these Anglican ministers were regarded as some of the finest preachers of their day. When American visitors came to London, they would hurry down to St. Ann Blackfriars to hear the word of God from Mr. Romaine.

  Lord Dartmouth never wavered from the creed these pastors taught. Like his mentor Whitefield, the new evangelicals were Calvinists. In their eyes, human beings were sinful and degenerate, and the English were a nation on the brink of doom. “Beware of the general corruption of the times,” wrote a young chaplain, Madan’s assistant, who was one of Dartmouth’s protégés. Beset by greed and atheism, the kingdom lay abject at the feet of Satan. For Dartmouth, the evidence was plain to see in the whores who thronged the streets of London. Every week he attended the chapel at an institution known as the Lock Hospital. Located near Hyde Park Corner, it cared for prostitutes afflicted by venereal disease, and for child victims of rape. It was an unpopular charity, but Lord Dartmouth sat on the hospital’s board of patrons. From the pulpit of the chapel, the clergymen he chose proclaimed the urgent need for a rebirth of the spirit. In his letters to his son, William Legge expressed the very same beliefs. “Your acquaintance with mankind will serve to show you the depravity into which we are fallen,” he wrote. Only one thing could rescue the sinner: redemption by the saving power of Jesus.22

  Long before the phrase came into use, the Dartmouths were born-again Christians. For them, the defining moment in their lives came like a thunderclap when all at once they felt the overwhelming love of God and knew that they were saved. As the years flowed by, so the English upper classes became increasingly receptive to theology of such a kind. By the time Lord Dartmouth died at the turn of the century, the evangelical movement had ceased to be marginal. Instead, it became a powerful force within the Church of England, with William Legge among the men and women who did the most to bring this about.

  At its best, the movement could produce a hero like William Wilberforce, the antislavery campaigner. A fellow traveler with Dartmouth, he also knelt in prayer at the chapel of the Lock. At its worst, the evangelical revival merely reinforced a harsh social order based on inequality and coercion. In the eyes of the new evangelicals, men and women sinned the most when they disobeyed the rulers whom God placed above them. Believing as he did that human beings were depraved, Dartmouth stood not only for charity, but also for law and order and the severest retribution for sinners who were unredeemed. Apart from Lord North, his closest friend among the laity was a hanging judge called Baron Smythe, another patron of the hospital for whores. When Smythe sent a thief to the gallows, said the minister who preached his eulogy, he would accompany the sentence with “pious and pathetic exhortations.” From the bench, he would remind the felon of the “only Refuge and Hope for a guilty Creature: the blood of Christ.”23

  And so in William Legge we see a complicated Christian full of the contradictions that Christianity so often entails. While Dartmouth believed in humility, and acted accordingly in his personal life, he also enjoyed the benefits of privilege and power. Although he preached a gospel of love, he issued the instructions that began a war. Dartmouth spoke about the majesty of God while enjoying the earthly favor of King George. Deeply committed to Lord North, he could not break with him or with his colleagues. An earl committed to the king’s authority, how could he understand a colonial farmer, a Virginian with a rifle and a Bible of his own? From Lord Dartmouth’s point of view, Americans who questioned British rule were human souls tainted by the sin of pride. And so, for all his goodness, the ambiguous faith of William Legge helped to shape his disastrous policy toward the colonies.

  A moment would come, early in 1775, when Benjamin Franklin suddenly realized that Dartmouth could do nothing more for America. Franklin had been slow to understand the minister, but when at last he saw things as they were, the scientist knew that revolution was inevitable. At that point he left for Philadelphia. But in the autumn of 1772 nobody in London foresaw an American crisis so deep that it would end in bloodshed. Other matters filled the pages of the press and Lord North’s agenda.

  In November the cabinet’s old enemy John Wilkes came close to winning the annual poll to choose a lord mayor: another warning of the dangers of democracy. Meanwhile, the plight of the East India Company cast a still longer shadow. As the company slid toward a precipice, the government was obliged to intervene in its affairs. At the time George III felt that Lord North handled it all rather well.

  * * *

  *1 In his Summary View of the Rights of British America, written in August 1774. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson made
the same point even more forcibly, accusing George III of “depriving us … of the benefits of Trial by Jury … transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.”

  *2 For convenience the two men were usually referred to as stepbrothers, but their relationship was a little more complicated than usual. Dartmouth’s father died in 1732, leaving a widow, Elizabeth Legge, Lady Lewisham. Then Lord North’s father, Lord Guilford, became a widower when his first wife (North’s mother) died in 1734. Two years after that, Guilford became Lord Dartmouth’s stepfather, when he married Lady Lewisham. The marriage ended with her death in 1745.

  Part Two

  THE SENDING

  OF THE TEA

  Chapter Six

  THE EAST INDIA CRISIS

  Money was never so scarce in the metropolis as at this moment.

  —A LONDON NEWSPAPER, OCTOBER 17721

  For a generation, men and women would recall the long, dry summer of 1772, but at last in late August the weather broke. Torrents of rain began to fall at the worst possible moment, when the crops still stood high in the fields. On the night of September 24 a tempest swept in from the sea across the south of England, breaking roofs and ravaging the orchards filled with apples. Lord North had taken a family holiday at his little country house at Dillington, near Ilminster, but he remained in Somerset for only two weeks before he was recalled to the capital.

  It was the custom at the time for Parliament to reassemble in November to begin the new session with the annual vote on the budget for the armed forces. Without any imminent threat of war, North had hoped he might postpone the sitting until after Christmas. By the time he reached Downing Street in the first week of October, he knew that so long a delay would be very unwise. From every side, urgent matters required a response, but they also offered opportunities to steal a march on his political enemies, which North was keen to do. He might be indecisive as regards grand strategy, but no one surpassed him in the art of maneuver. He arrived in London ready to put his skills to work.2