by Nick Bunker
Chapter Twelve
“BOSTON MUST BE DESTROYED”
And when the Day shall come, the Fate of all,
That Britain’s Glory, Wealth and Pow’r must fall,
Then shall her Sons, for such is Heavn’s decree
In other Worlds another Britain see:
For what she is, America shall be.
—LINES IN A LONDON NEWSPAPER, MARCH 17741
It was a theatrical era, when lawyers behaved like actors and politicians wrote for the stage. For better or worse, the House of Commons provided the greatest auditorium in the kingdom. On the Treasury bench and on the opposition side, its leading members played the roles of tragedians and comics with a repertoire of jokes and soliloquies. Outside in the country the house had a vast audience, following its debates through the pages of the press. Inside the debating chamber, the stalls and circle were occupied by backbench members of Parliament like Edward Gibbon who were there to listen and to vote, though rarely in silence.
Nine feet shorter than a cricket pitch, the chamber was small, occupying St. Stephen’s Chapel, erected by the Tudors to serve the old Westminster Palace. It was approached by way of an elegant corridor, built of white Portland stone and only recently completed. The Commons had a coffeehouse, called Alice’s, as well as barbershops nearby, because Parliament had to offer the facilities of a club. A member would come up the corridor, pass through the lobby, and enter a space that still resembled a church. On either side it had four rows of benches, covered with green cloth, upon which the members would sprawl, eating nuts and oranges. Above their heads, elegant pillars carried long wooden galleries, added by Sir Christopher Wren to give more room for members and spectators. Even so, the chamber could only hold three hundred, little more than half the number of MPs. It was so cramped and crowded that on one famous occasion, as the myopic Lord North struggled to reach his seat he stuck the point of his scabbard through another member’s wig.
When they were bored or disliked what a speaker had to say, the members would jeer or “chatter like magpies,” said one reporter, or vanish off to Alice’s, only returning when a vote was called. Some came back the worse for drink. Others would fall asleep, including Lord North, who could doze through anything: he kept a colleague close by to make notes of what he missed.2
At three o’clock in the afternoon of Monday, March 7, North rose to deliver an address from the king about America. The clerks had put on the table a thick sheaf of papers, 109 in all, copied from Lord Dartmouth’s files, including the witness statements for any curious member to read. For the time being, North spoke only briefly, to condemn the Tea Party and the resistance elsewhere, but he used the crucial form of words the cabinet ministers had agreed. They would take steps “to secure the dependency of the colonies,” a vague but menacing phrase that left his exact intentions unclear.
Over the weekend the cabinet ministers had met again with some second thoughts and decided to postpone the port bill by seven days. It needed to be legally secure, and they also had yet to draft the bills they needed to reform the charter and the courts in Massachusetts. And so this first debate was just a skirmish, thinly attended, mainly a verbal tussle between Wedderburn and Burke. Even so, it set the tone for what would follow, and it placed the fundamental issues squarely before the house.
It would be hard to imagine two men more unlike each other: the Scotsman who had turned his back on his origins facing a Dubliner who, far from losing his accent, still spoke in a brogue as broad as Phoenix Park. No one could call Burke a careerist. An aesthete and a journalist, invariably wearing spectacles and sometimes smelling of alcohol, he had sat in Parliament for eight years, with an ever decreasing prospect of holding high office. By now Burke had reached his mid-forties. Each year the Whigs saw their numbers dwindle a little more as their friends deserted them, tired of the languid marquess and hoping for favor from North or the king, until by 1774 fewer than fifty were left in the Commons. And yet Burke remained loyal to the Rockingham flag, always fighting hardest for causes that were already lost. Funny, mercurial, and often short of money, he inspired some verses of his own, written by his friend and fellow Irishman the poet Oliver Goldsmith: “In short, ’twas his fate, unemploy’d or in place, sir—To eat mutton cold, and cut blocks with a razor.”
The House of Commons as it was in 1774, with on the left its recently constructed entrance and corridor in white Portland stone, leading to the debating chamber, with the House of Lords in the foreground on the right.
Of course Burke had his faults, including sycophancy. He was apt to bend the knee at the altar of privilege, treating Rockingham, Devonshire, and the other aristocratic leaders of his party as beings of a lofty, superhuman kind. His devotion to their cause sometimes led him astray: in the second half of 1773, he worried so much about the proposed new tax on their Irish estates that he failed to spot the developing crisis in America. Shortly before the Tea Party, the colonial assembly in New York had to write to Burke to complain about his neglect of its affairs. Worst of all, Burke suffered from a lack of focus in his life and his political creed alike. “He’s very friendly, warm, and cheerful,” said a Frenchman who met Burke in Paris at about this time. “But his philosophy is vague, as well as his principles—neither fixed, nor properly connected, one to the other.” But when Burke was on top form, nobody could surpass him for eloquence or visionary grandeur. His speeches on America were some of the finest ever heard in Parliament, with barely an equal until the 1840s and those of Benjamin Disraeli on the Corn Laws and the Irish question.3
On that first day, Wedderburn left no room for doubting the government’s resolve. “An event has occurred in one of the colonies,” he said, “which if it had occurred in a hostile place must have been the immediate cause of war.” As yet the cabinet had made no public charge of treason, but it was obvious that it intended to do so. Burke replied in the same ominous language.
The chamber of the old House of Commons, with the government benches on the left. Crown Copyright: U.K. Government Art Collection
“If the colonies are in a state of resistance, they are in rebellion, and rebellion is war,” he said. “War can only be quelled by war; but take special care that you do not mistake the case. Discover if they have not been driven into measures unjustifiable, by mischievous measures of your own: by relaxation when you should have been firm, by fury when you should have been relaxed.” The debate lasted less than three hours; there was a “dead, dull, stagnant feeling” in the chamber, according to Burke; and most newspapers gave only brief accounts of what was said. Even so, a shrewd observer would have seen a pattern starting to appear.4
On purpose, Wedderburn had been evasive, avoiding detail about the legislation due to be announced. The government used this tactic repeatedly, with Lord North choosing to let his coercive laws emerge only gradually, leaving his opponents with little time to prepare a response. He often asked the Commons for a vote to close the gallery and exclude the public, to prevent the press from passing the word to the colonies before General Gage could arrive with a fait accompli.
On the other side, Burke also set the tone for what was to come. Caught in the old dilemma of his party, he was obliged to fight a campaign of maneuver. Because the Rockingham Whigs had passed the Declaratory Act, they could not deny that the colonies had to obey the will of Parliament. Nor could the Whigs condone an offense so heinous as the Tea Party. Despite all that, they had to find a way to oppose Lord North and defend America as best they could. So Burke tried to make his way around the government’s flanks and rear. He would harry Lord North about his history of errors and delay, he would issue dire warnings about the bloodshed the cabinet might provoke, and he would eventually set out his own vision of a different kind of empire. Edmund Burke would fail, but he would fail in style.
THE TOUCHSTONE OF LORD NORTH
With the cabinet poised to unveil the bill to close the port of Boston, suddenly North scored a propaganda victory of his own. On
March 8, news arrived of another despicable crime committed in Massachusetts. In late January, a Boston mob had seized a customs officer, John Malcolm, stripped him naked, and tortured him for hours with whips, tar, and feathers. At the Treasury Board in 1772, Lord North had been told about violent attacks on the customs service in America and had allowed them to go unpunished. On this occasion he had to act far more decisively.
Two days later, the cabinet told General Gage that he would replace Thomas Hutchinson as governor of Massachusetts, combining the role with that of commander in chief. It was a fateful step because, in effect, Gage would become the virtual military dictator of New England. Nothing quite like this had been seen in the colonies since the days of Governor Andros, ninety years earlier. The news was bound to cause consternation in America, and so, for the time being, the cabinet kept this quiet as well, waiting until early April to make it known officially, just before the general set sail.
Even without the assault on John Malcolm, Gage would have been chosen as the new governor, but the feathers and tar caused justified revulsion in London and served to stiffen the cabinet’s resolve. The outrage also gave Lord North some powerful ammunition when at last, on March 14, he placed the Boston port bill before the Commons. Outside the heavy rains of winter had continued, filling the Thames until it burst its banks, reaching the highest level anyone could recall. Inside the chamber North rose to speak with the galleries emptied of visitors and the press. It was said that he spoke in a lackluster way, without his usual humor and high spirits. He was clearly very tired. Malcolm had suffered, he said, “greater cruelty than any that went before,” in an incident that set the seal on Boston’s history of wickedness.
Despite his fatigue North spoke for an hour or so, carrying all before him as he described the penalty that Boston would receive. The customs officers would be withdrawn to Salem; from the beginning of June the port of Boston would be closed to all but the most essential supplies, with the navy standing by to ensure that the order was obeyed; and the town would have to make financial restitution to the East India Company. The port would reopen only when the king was satisfied that this had been done.*1
Wrong-footed again, the Rockinghams tried to respond with help from the Wilkesites and from a young man, Charles James Fox, making the first of many speeches against the government’s American policy. But again they advanced no alternative strategy of their own. All they could do was state the obvious: that while Boston had to be brought to book, closure of the port was a drastic step without a precedent that anyone could recall. Not only would it be hard to enforce; it would also be unfair, because three other towns had resisted the tea and shared the responsibility for what had occurred. The speeches by Fox and the Rockinghams made little impact. The debate was “one of the coldest proceedings I ever was at,” one MP wrote in his diary. Two weeks of argument still lay ahead before the king could sign the bill into law, but the cabinet already seemed to be close to success.5
Beyond the confines of Parliament, New England had some vocal allies in the business community, but politically they were weak. On the seventeenth, the merchants who traded with the northern colonies sent a deputation to Downing Street to meet Lord North and plead for Boston to be given a second chance. Like Franklin, whom they knew well, they hoped that the Massachusetts assembly might volunteer to make amends. But for a host of reasons, they had little chance of changing the government’s mind. In the first place, the colonial lobby was simply far too small. Half of all the trade between England and North America passed through the hands of just ten firms in London, most of which dealt mainly with Charleston and Virginia. Nor did it help that the merchants who dominated the colonial trade included Wilkesites open to accusations of disloyalty. At least three of the London firms were run by Wilkes’s friends and political supporters, including George Hayley, John Hancock’s agent, who hoped soon to enter Parliament himself.6
By way of religion, Hayley and his allies tended to be nonconformists, Presbyterian or Baptist, which rendered them all the more suspect in the eyes of politicians like North who still saw the Anglican Church as the moral center of the nation. And it was all the harder to listen to their complaints on behalf of America when everyone knew how deeply the colonies, on the mainland and in the Caribbean alike, relied on human bondage. Immensely valuable though the West Indies were, the wealth they produced tended, once again, to flow into a relatively small number of pockets. Among the aristocracy, it was hard to find a peer who invested in Jamaica or the other sugar islands. In fact, the elite in London were already beginning to turn against slavery as a sin that had no place in a Christian country. The king disliked it, as did the greatest judge in the land, Lord Mansfield, who called it “odious,” and Dartmouth moved in religious circles where the antislavery movement had begun to gain ground.
So it was difficult to take Americans seriously when they spoke about freedom in peril. On the streets of Boston, Negroes were bought and sold, while in London it was common knowledge that the Wilkesites included investors who had invested aggressively to buy slave plantations on the Windward Islands. This became another propaganda weapon the government could use to cast the friends of liberty as hypocrites. Ninety years before Gettysburg, it did not seem obvious that America stood for justice and emancipation. On the contrary, the attacks on the Gaspée, on John Malcolm, and on the tea displayed the exact opposite: mob rule. As the days went by, the tide of public opinion appeared to flow ever more strongly in favor of coercion.
Carefully, North had avoided any mention of the scheme to change the Massachusetts charter. But somebody—most likely Lord Gower and the Bloomsburyites—leaked the story to the Morning Post, presumably with the aim of forcing the premier’s hand. Printed on the day the merchants’ deputation went to see him, the item was prophetic too. The writer warned that a war might have to be fought, but if so it was a price worth paying.7
According to the Morning Post, the time for appeasement had long since passed. Some men in the government did not realize, the writer said, that New England was already in rebellion. With his plan to change the charter, to make the members of the Governor’s Council servants of the Crown—which was “certainly right,” said the Post—North would only arouse even more resistance, but if he did, the sooner the better. “His success in this affair will be the touchstone of his power,” the piece went on. “If he stands it, he will stand everything. If he brings in proposals full of indecision, experimental and unmeaning, he will only make bad worse; and on the contrary, if he is firm, vigorous and decisive, America resists him, and the sword must be drawn.” So be it, said the Morning Post, which reminded its readers that New England could be done without. From an economic point of view, tobacco and rice from the South mattered far more to the mother country.
By now, few days were left for legislation before Parliament rose at the end of March for its Easter recess. And another deadline was looming up ahead in the middle of April, the latest date for General Gage to sail from England if he had to be sure of reaching Boston in time to shut the harbor on June 1. And so, on March 23, Lord North appeared in the Commons again for the first of a series of debates that marked a new high point in his career but caused no end of trouble in America. When he passed the Tea Act the previous year, North had overplayed his hand; and now he did so once again.
Before the port bill could become law, he had to fight off a last-ditch attempt to defeat the measure, led by a member of Parliament called Rose Fuller, a sugar planter from Jamaica. Always inclined to speak up for New England, for the sake of the business the northern colonies did with the Caribbean, Fuller proposed that instead of closing the port, the government should simply fine the town some £25,000. Although this would have been a heavy penalty, Fuller found few supporters: the West Indian lobby spoke for no more than a handful of seats in Parliament. It took only four hours on the twenty-third for North to crush Fuller’s effort at compromise. Even Edmund Burke held his tongue. That evening, George II
I sent Lord North a note, timed at exactly 8:35 p.m.—he liked to be precise in every way—offering his congratulations. Once again, the opposition had been languid, he wrote, further proof that the government was acting wisely. It seems that the king knew nothing about some unhelpful remarks uttered in the debate by the honorable member for Brecon.
For nearly two months, Charles Van had been waiting for his chance to call for reprisals against Boston even harsher than those North had announced. Toward the end of the debate, he rose to his feet to denounce colonial treason and dishonesty. In his constituency in South Wales, the foundry masters made iron and shipped it to the colonies, but often they received not a penny in return. Americans never honored their obligations, said Mr. Van. The annual bill for General Gage’s army and the naval squadron came to half a million pounds, all of which fell on the British taxpayer. The worst offenders were the people of Boston, a hateful place. Shut up the port forever, he said: “Demolish it, that is my opinion: delenda est Carthago.”*2
It would be hard to conceive of a more foolish and more inflammatory speech. At the time, Parliament kept only a journal of its decisions, not verbatim minutes of what each member said. So we have three different versions of Van’s comments, two of them from notes hastily scribbled down by fellow MPs. All of them agree that he quoted the Latin tag from the Roman orator Cato the Elder, but when Van’s words appeared in the press, they took a still more appalling form.
Without a seat in Parliament himself, John Wilkes could do little directly for the American cause; but ever since news of the Tea Party arrived, he had kept a close watch on the situation, dining regularly with Arthur and William Lee and even meeting some of the witnesses from Boston. For Wilkes and the Lees, Van’s speech came as a gift from heaven, an opportunity to show Lord North’s supporters in the worst possible light. Of all the papers that leaned toward the Wilkesites, the London Evening Post commanded perhaps the largest following, and its editor, John Miller, had recently lost a cripplingly expensive libel action brought by Lord Sandwich. And so, on March 26, the Evening Post wrote up the debate in full, elaborating on Van’s remarks and awarding him rather more verbal fluency than he actually possessed. According to Miller, the MP had said this: “The town of Boston ought to be knocked about their ears … you will never meet with due obedience to the laws of this country, until you have destroyed that nest of locusts.”8