by Nick Bunker
None of this should have come as a surprise, and yet it did. Two weeks before Christmas, Lord Dartmouth had received another bundle of papers from Thomas Hutchinson, reporting the first of the riots against the consignees. But it was holiday time: the minister sat on the letter for nearly a month before merely telling the governor to keep his nerve. In the new year, the company alerted Dartmouth to warnings it had received from its agents in America, but again he did not share them with his colleagues. Parliament knew nothing when it met in the middle of January.
And then, suddenly, the news was out, and the press instantly saw how serious it was. In a city where the papers fought each other so hard for readers, the Tea Party became the biggest story after years of indifference when few people cared about the colonies. By the end of the month, parts of the press were claiming that six regiments were already on the way to Massachusetts. This was false—it took several more weeks before the cabinet decided to send military reinforcements to Boston—but it set a pattern that would endure throughout the crisis.
Usually ahead of the politicians, with the facts as well as with speculation, Fleet Street began to whip up something close to war fever. As the editorials soon pointed out, the Tea Party had amounted to a repudiation of Parliament’s right to rule the colonies. The press swiftly divided between papers of a Wilkesite tendency, which supported America, others that bayed for revenge, and some chiefly concerned with the implications for politics at home.
They posed an obvious question: Would Lord North survive a crisis for which he appeared at least partly responsible? After four years as chief minister, he had already served a longer term than anyone else since the Seven Years’ War. His cabinet contained rivals who would not hesitate to oust him if he showed signs of weakness. As the weeks went by, this became a constant theme. “A correspondent is of the opinion,” said the Morning Chronicle, as early as January 22, “that if some vigorous measures are not immediately resolved upon respecting the rioters at Boston, that the men in power will be held in almost equal detestation with the wretched gang who repealed the stamp act.” Perhaps the columnist had been speaking to Gower or Sandwich, the cabinet’s most hawkish members. The journalists were often so well-informed that they must have been receiving tip-offs from men in high places. In an atmosphere suddenly electric, and with Parliament standing by impatiently, Lord North had to be seen to act with speed and firmness.
At first, however, the cabinet floundered for lack of an official account of the Tea Party from Hutchinson or Admiral Montagu. Caught off guard, Dartmouth hesitated until, on the twenty-fourth, it occurred to him or his officials to invite James Scott, the skipper of the Hayley, to tell them what had happened at Griffin’s Wharf. The next day Scott gave them the details, trying not to implicate John Hancock. But even while Dartmouth listened, another individual far less Christian was preparing his own form of revenge. Before the cabinet met for a full discussion of the issues, the hawks struck first against the American target closest to hand.
In the wake of the duel between John Temple and William Whately, the Privy Council had summoned Benjamin Franklin to explain his role in the disclosure of Hutchinson’s private letters. One hearing had already taken place, and another was due at the end of the month. The proceedings would be led by the Crown’s lawyer Alexander Wedderburn. With an eye to the press, he launched an attack on Franklin so personal and scathing that Englishmen who were present remembered it vividly thirty years later. When reports of the encounter reached the colonies at the end of March, they would cause justifiable outrage at the insult meted out to America’s most famous son. This could only deepen the rift with Great Britain, even before the colonists knew the details of the hard line that Lord North was bound to take.
WEDDERBURN’S TIRADE
Arrogant by nature, Alexander Wedderburn plied a trade where in the eighteenth century conceit was almost mandatory. In his early years as a barrister, he displayed a courtroom manner so sarcastic that he had to quit his home city of Edinburgh as a result. In 1757, when he was twenty-four, a judge dismissed him as a presumptuous boy, and Wedderburn replied by calling him a cuckold to his face. Told to apologize, he took off his gown, bowed, strode out of court, and rode for London that night.
Once there, he hoped to conquer the English bar, where the pickings were far richer than at home. Likely to face resentment as a Scotsman, he erased his accent by taking lessons in elocution from an actor, Charles Macklin, the greatest Shylock of his age. Small in stature, with a thin but handsome face and a long, aquiline nose, Wedderburn spoke in a deep bass voice, with perfect timing and dramatic gestures. It was said that he practiced his lines in front of a mirror.
Alexander Wedderburn as lord chancellor in 1785, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Bridgeman Art Library
At first he did only averagely well south of the border. A fine scholar of Greek in his youth, as he grew older Wedderburn lost his taste for hard work with legal precedents culled from the books in his library. Nor did he master the art of cross-examination that a barrister needed to win a case in the criminal courts. “That damned Scotchman has the gift of the gab—but he is no lawyer,” said his colleague Edward Thurlow, an advocate of a very different sort.2
Instead, Wedderburn made his name in chancery practice, dealing with wills and trusts, the field British barristers choose when they seek an affluent career unencumbered by the scrutiny of jurors. There he earned a fortune from clients who included Clive of India. It was also the custom for a rising barrister to enter politics, which he did, attaching himself to Lord Bute, the premier in 1763, and then to George Grenville, his successor. Entering Parliament for a distant Scottish borough that Bute and his friends controlled, Wedderburn acquired a reputation not only for the brilliance of his speeches but also for his cunning and duplicity. Even the king used those words about him.
For several years, Wedderburn championed John Wilkes in the Commons, but when Lord North took office, he chose to leave the opposition and accept the post of solicitor general. Members who crossed the floor were never popular, especially when they came from Scotland. His enemies liked to repeat some lines of verse that summed him up to perfection: “a pert prim lawyer of the northern race—guilt in his heart, and famine in his face.” But jeer as they might, Wedderburn inspired fear as well as mockery. Nobody knew better how to crush an opponent with cold but cruel invective. And that was the stance he took toward Franklin on January 29, when at last the Privy Council met, with Lord Gower in the chair.
In those days, a slightly shabby range of old brick buildings stood on the western side of Whitehall, left over from the palace of the Tudors. Known as the Cockpit, because they had once included a space for fighting birds, they contained offices for the government and an audience chamber for Gower and his colleagues.*1 The room was hot, lit by a blazing fire. Arriving late, Edmund Burke had to elbow his way in and found thirty-five members of the council already in session. With Sandwich, Suffolk, and Rochford among them, it was the largest assembly of the kind that Burke had ever seen. By now, the official dispatches had arrived, with a full account of the destruction of the tea. It was also known that in Philadelphia the tea ship Polly had been forced to sail back to England with her cargo after the townspeople refused to let it land.3
With spectators filling every spare inch of space, Gower sat at the center of the council table with the archbishop of Canterbury pondering nearby. They made Franklin stand in a recess behind them and to one side. Throughout the meeting, the American remained as still as a rock, said one eyewitness, his chin resting on his left hand.
According to its official agenda, the meeting was merely due to hear the petition from the General Court of Massachusetts, dating from the previous June, for the removal of Governor Hutchinson. In fact, Alexander Wedderburn launched a fierce attack on Franklin, sending out a clear signal that Boston could expect stern retribution for the destruction of the tea. Franklin had brought along his own barrister, John Dunning, a man with pro-Ame
rican views, a fine lawyer who at his best would have been more than a match for any opponent. But that winter, Dunning was suffering from a lung infection. His voice was almost too hoarse to be heard.
So the meeting belonged to the Scotsman. Each sentence Wedderburn spoke was carefully shaped for rhythm and clarity. From time to time he would pause to allow the full weight of his irony to take effect. He spoke for an hour, with what one newspaper called “all the licensed scurrility of the bar,” drawing gales of laughter from Gower and the rest. He began by tearing to shreds the case against the governor. With the private letters to Whately as its only evidence, the General Court had called Hutchinson an evil man, conspiring to deceive the government. It was Hutchinson’s purpose, the assembly said, to drive a wedge between Westminster and the colony in the hope that Great Britain would revoke its charter and install a new, authoritarian regime. But according to Wedderburn, the facts told a very different story. Ever since the Stamp Act, Hutchinson had behaved with calm moderation, and even the General Court had admitted as much in the past. “The governor’s character stands fair and unimpeached,” he said, and then he turned to Franklin.4
The letters were stolen, Franklin was to blame, and if anyone led a conspiracy of evil, it was he. “I hope, my lords, you will mark and brand the man,” Wedderburn continued. “Men will watch him with a jealous eye; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up the escritoires.” Devious, malign, and utterly vindictive, Franklin had acted in league with the very worst elements in New England: a secret cabal, bent on independence. “They wish to erect themselves into a tyranny greater than the Roman,” he said, “and get even a virtuous governor dragged from his seat, and made the sport of a Boston mob.”
The solicitor general had carefully studied the papers from Massachusetts and found sedition everywhere. One place troubled Wedderburn most of all: the little town of Petersham, out in Worcester County. In response to the Boston pamphlet, the people there had openly spoken of using force to resist the new arrangements for the judges’ salaries. The evidence was plain: Franklin and his allies hoped to raise a storm of disobedience, there and in the other colonies, and only Hutchinson had tried to stop them. As he drew to a close, Wedderburn dwelled briefly on the Tea Party and the Gaspée incident, warning the people of New England that they had set foot on a path to self-destruction. Wedderburn finished, and Dunning replied in a feeble voice. All the while, Franklin stood motionless, “with all the unchangeable features of philosophy,” one journalist said. “The fire seemed to have been extracted from his frame.”5
At last the Privy Council retired to consider its verdict. Some accounts say that the spectators cheered and clapped Wedderburn and tossed their hats in the air. Outside in the anteroom, he lingered for a while amid an admiring circle of friends. Franklin hurried away arm in arm with a supporter, having said barely a word. A few days later, he was fired from his position as deputy postmaster in the colonies. In the meantime, the Privy Council had issued its opinion, rejecting the petition and calling it false and vexatious.
During Wedderburn’s speech, one privy councillor had remained aloof, unable to share in the laughter. Another latecomer, Lord North stood quietly at the back, as well he might. His role in the weeks ahead would require statesmanship of a sort for which his training had been irrelevant. It was all very well to heap insults on Benjamin Franklin, but rhetoric alone could not resolve the imperial crisis that the Tea Party had crystallized. At last Great Britain would have to be decisive, but first it had to define the problem with which it was confronted.
The reports from America still left some scope for doubt. Conceivably, the events in Boston might have been primarily a local affair, arising from a feud between rival factions, with the arrival of the tea used simply as a pretext for a riot. That was possible, but the protests in the other colonies made it seem unlikely. Had disobedience become endemic in the colonies? If so, it would be futile to take reprisals against Massachusetts alone. Sooner or later, another Gaspée would be sunk, for some other reason in some other place, and one by one every colony would become ungovernable.
In the winter of 1774, the British badly needed a new and grander strategy, one that could strike at the root of sedition wherever it might be found. But what sort of strategy might it be? The hawks would call for far tighter control, a larger army, and a stronger fleet. That might have been a way to save the empire, though as we know it failed. Alternatively, the British might have made more concessions to address the specific grievances of which the colonies complained, having to do with paper money, the customs service, boundary disputes, and the western wilderness. The wisest strategy would have combined the two approaches, offering carrots and sticks in the hope of detaching American moderates from their radical brethren. Given time, an approach of that kind might have been successful.
In the best of all possible worlds, the British cabinet would have paused for breath, making up for years of failure with a careful reappraisal of the empire and its future. But the political climate did not permit it to do so. Time was a luxury that Lord North did not possess.
THE WHOLE TALK OF THE TOWN
As so often in British politics, the prime minister had more to fear from his friends than from his enemies. His opponents, the Whigs, found themselves in utter disarray. Again the Marquess of Rockingham dallied up in Yorkshire with his hounds, while those of his friends who had come to London offered no ideas of their own. “The American business engrosses the whole talk of the town,” wrote one of them, Lord John Cavendish, to whom the news of the Tea Party had come as something worse than a surprise. Eight years earlier, the Rockinghams had repealed the Stamp Act, and now they found themselves vilified as men guilty of a policy of appeasement that had failed.
Clearly, the destruction of the tea had been a crime: “indefensible,” Cavendish told the marquess. But they dare not offer excuses for Boston, for fear of being castigated as weaklings. Nor could they support Lord North if he pursued a hard line that, in their opinion, was likely to end disastrously. In the circumstances, Cavendish felt obliged to hold his tongue. For his part, Edmund Burke lacked the rank and authority needed to make policy for his party while the marquess was away. In any event, he was equally flabbergasted by the news from Massachusetts. And so, in these crucial early days of the crisis, the Rockingham Whigs said next to nothing.6
In the newspapers, the Wilkesites rallied in defense of Dr. Franklin, calling Wedderburn “a witling, a punster and a prig” and accusing him of trying to stir up a civil war; but these were merely words. In the city of London, the radicals now reigned supreme, with a Wilkesite as lord mayor, not Wilkes himself, but a close friend, a tea merchant called Frederick Bull. In Parliament, however, where the real battle would be waged, they were too few to make a difference. In fact Lord North came under much heavier pressure from his right. By the time of the session at the Cockpit, the hawks against America had already seized the initiative.7
They included Lord Buckinghamshire, an old comrade of Gower and the Bloomsbury gang. “Are we to be free, or slaves to our colonies?” he asked his colleagues in the House of Lords. With the aim of pushing the government into action, he put down a motion calling for the release of all the official files relating to Boston. Lord Dartmouth could hardly refuse, but the request was highly embarrassing. The papers would show just how weak and complacent the government had been in the face of so many warnings of unrest in Massachusetts dating back to the autumn of 1772.8
With this threat hanging over it, the cabinet met on the evening of January 29 at Lord Suffolk’s home in Duke Street, Piccadilly. It was the first of many sessions about America held discreetly, away from the eyes of the press, in private houses in London’s West End. It would take three weeks to contrive a new colonial policy, and then another two before it could be put to Parliament, but by midnight they already knew what they wanted to achieve. First they approved the release of the documents. Then they signed a resolution pledging to take “e
ffectual steps … to secure the dependence of the colonies on the mother country.”
They had only the barest outline of a plan for doing so, drawn up by the weary officials in the Colonial Department. It contained nothing remotely resembling an olive branch. Instead, they began with a scheme to punish Boston in two ways: by moving the government of Massachusetts to another town, and by shutting down the port where the tea had been spilled. In the past, Thomas Hutchinson had already tried the first of these measures, with little success. Closing the port was a much bolder move, but it raised questions of its own. It might require an act of Parliament, and that would entail delay. The cabinet met again on February 4 and decided that it needed nothing more than an executive order from the king. But as all the ministers agreed, punishing the town was not sufficient. They chose to target the ringleaders as well.
Although this approach had failed in Rhode Island, they decided to try again, even if this meant hanging William Molineux, John Hancock, and the others. This was next to impossible, as the cabinet ministers would soon discover, and yet, for the next few weeks, the idea dominated their discussions. Like the attack on the Gaspée, the Tea Party cried out for retribution. Everyone in the cabinet knew that, including Lord Dartmouth, despite his attempts the previous year to avoid a confrontation in New England. Meanwhile, George III had made his own feelings very plain.
Before the cabinet assembled on the fourth, the king received a visit from General Gage, still on leave from his post as commander in chief in America. It might have been better for all concerned if the interview had never taken place, because Gage persuaded the king to opt for severity. Nine years earlier, during the Stamp Act crisis, Gage had seen the mob run riot in New York. Like Lieutenant Colonel Leslie in Boston at the time of the Tea Party, the general had come away angry and frustrated. Ever since, he had tried to persuade London to take a tougher line with the colonies. As far back as 1770, he had wanted to do away with the Massachusetts charter, abolish town meetings, and give the Crown direct control of every branch of government.9