by Nick Bunker
Among the guests was Lord North’s sister-in-law Henrietta, the lady prone to losing money playing cards, married to Bishop Brownlow. The bishop was away doing something ecclesiastical, and so he missed the party, but she gave him a full account of the event. It was, the bishop told his father, “the finest and prettiest entertainment that ever they were at.” The party cost £4,000, enough to keep a regiment of redcoats for six months. The largest single item was the grand pavilion, for supper and for dancing, built from painted canvas, wood, and papier-mâché and taken down at once the morning after.1
Three hundred guests arrived in fancy dress and were greeted on the lawn by dancers, miming scenes of rustic frivolity, while music floated around them from the shrubbery. The evening was warm, the trees were hung with flowers, and songbirds sang from cages hidden in the branches. On one side of the house, Adam had put up a portico to serve as the Temple of Venus. The guests passed through an arch and corridor to reach the temporary ballroom, lined with colonnades and hung with silk in white and gold. There they danced cotillions until a moment came when Burgoyne gave a signal and a curtain rose, revealing tables spread with food and drink.
While they ate, the curtain fell, to rise again at midnight. They watched the masque that Burgoyne had composed, performed by nymphs and fauns in tiger skins. In came an actor playing a Druid, the Spirit of the Oaks, to wave a wand of mistletoe and bless the happy couple. Lord Stanley danced a minuet with Lady Betty, and the actors sang a patriotic anthem in praise of the oaks that built the Royal Navy:
Grace and strength of Britain’s isle,
Mayst thou long thy glories keep,
Make her hills with verdure smile,
Bear her triumphs o’er the deep.
After that there came more minuets, and then the country dancing, while outside the gardens shone with lanterns in the shape of pyramids. Not until dawn did the guests depart. In Parliament the day before, the prime minister had faced sarcastic jeers from Edmund Burke—he would be “smothered in roses, and crowned with never-fading laurels,” said the Irishman—but North left the Oaks in the highest of spirits. At eleven o’clock the following night, the government won the last vote in the Commons on the new law for Quebec.2
In a host of different ways, the party had epitomized the culture of the period: or at least the taste and attitudes of the aristocracy. Like the review of the fleet at Spithead, it appealed to an ardent love of spectacle, intended to be dazzling and to make observers envious. Just before the war, this appetite for glamour reached a new peak of extravagance in the shows produced by Garrick and even in the dresses worn by women. Necklines were plunging; hair was combed up high above the forehead in a beehive crowned with feathers; and the very latest gowns were cascades of drapery, sweeping freely round the body to emphasize its curves, as though the woman were a figure from a mural at Pompeii.*1
Like the Adelphi or the party at the Oaks, the fashions of the time harked back to ancient Rome. The elite even had a Pantheon of their own, opened in London’s Oxford Street in 1772, to provide a pillared rendezvous for peers and courtesans. In each case the message conveyed was much the same: that the British could outdo the achievements of antiquity. Not only did they enjoy the benefits of science. As Edward Gibbon never tired of pointing out, the British had given themselves a free constitution, and in that respect as well they surpassed the Roman Empire. Best of all the British had the navy, with its wooden walls protecting the liberty they prized.
It would not occur to the guests at the fête champêtre that America, so far away and so provincial, might represent the future, or that the colonies might prefer a different kind of progress and prosperity to their own. With all its talk of covenants and charters, in British eyes Boston seemed to be a throwback to the obsessive age of Oliver Cromwell. For Lord North and his friends, New England was a vast, unruly sink of prejudice and hatred, where no one would appreciate the masque of Venus.
AN AUDIENCE WITH THE KING
And so the summer holidays drew near, with the king and his cabinet apparently in control of events. After such a warm and sunny spring, they even had the prospect, for the first time in many years, of an abundant harvest. By now the economy had begun to thrive again, and all Great Britain required was a bumper crop of wheat and barley to complete the recovery in its fortunes. At the end of June, a week after Parliament rose, a ship arrived at last from Massachusetts carrying, like some specter from the west, the tall cadaverous figure of Thomas Hutchinson. He landed at Dover on the twenty-ninth and hurried up to London, where he found the government relaxed and optimistic.
In the weeks that followed, the man from Boston met every member of the cabinet. They were grateful and sympathetic about the seasickness that made his journey wretched, about the abuse he had endured, and most of all about the theft of his private letters. Six months after the affair at the Cockpit, the cabinet still seethed with anger at Benjamin Franklin. Hutchinson found Lord Suffolk especially charming, between attacks of gout; he talked to Wedderburn about the law of treason and whether General Gage could shoot at rioters, and of course he met Lord North. He also went to hear the preachers whom Dartmouth recommended. He even dined with Robert Adam at Kenwood, the house above Hampstead Heath that the architect had beautified for Lord Mansfield, the lord chief justice. For three months, in fact, Hutchinson toured the south of England, visiting the landed gentry and encountering strong support for the stance the cabinet had taken. But something was strangely absent: in all his conversations with the government, he heard nothing about an alternative plan in case Boston failed to give in.
During the whole of this period, lasting until the end of September, North and his colleagues did nothing more about the colonies, but merely left the Coercive Acts to take effect. Although Dartmouth sometimes felt uneasy, the cabinet as a whole clung firmly to decisions it had already made. No military plans were laid; no one, least of all Lord Dartmouth, thought of trying to bribe or seduce the Continental Congress; and the cabinet ministers remained obsessed with Massachusetts. Like General Gage, they scarcely gave a thought to discontent elsewhere.
Early in July, word arrived from Virginia about the meeting at the Raleigh Tavern, but Dartmouth merely promised to consult his colleagues. The session at the tavern had been “extraordinary,” he said, “it has given me the greatest concern,” but he took no further action. Once again, the British displayed their old, familiar inattention to the tobacco planters of the South, at the very time when they were thinking hard about rebellion.3
In order to make New England submit, the British needed to isolate the northern colonies from Virginia and Maryland. This might have been achieved by reaching out to the planters of the Chesapeake with an array of commercial concessions intended to blunt their appetite for disobedience of their own. Lord North might have granted them complete control of their own currency; he might have cut the import duty on tobacco, if only temporarily; or he might have given farmers like George Washington entirely free access to Great Britain to sell their wheat. Nothing of the kind was proposed until it was too late. The South was allowed to fall away with scarcely an effort to keep it within the fold.
That summer, in all the discussions in which Hutchinson took part, the gaps and the omissions were as revealing as the words men spoke. At the heart of British policy there lay nothing but a void. It was born of ignorance, and of a failure to take a broader view of America as a whole. With their eyes so firmly fixed on the wickedness of Boston, the cabinet ministers missed the point that seemed so obvious to Jefferson. If the empire were to last, it would have to be reformed entirely, with some grand, overarching scheme for all the colonies, not merely Massachusetts. There would have to be some great new plan of union to satisfy the needs of every section of the continent, all the way down from Maine to Savannah, and those of the mother country as well.
That was what Jefferson said in his Summary View. But although Dartmouth had begun to muse about something of the kind, in practice n
obody in power in London could meet the Virginian even halfway. Preoccupied with Boston, a problem that they saw as merely one of law and order, they could not find a point of vantage from which they could survey the colonies in their entirety. They simply wanted to bring New England to heel, as though it were another tiresome pack of hounds. Of all the meetings that Hutchinson had, the most significant were those with the king and with Lord North. Again, the discussions showed no trace of a wider plan, either to pacify the rest of the colonies or to impose a harsher regime upon them.4
Twice a week at noon it was the custom for the king to hold a royal levee, open to any adult male who could afford the uniform of a courtier. It was always held at St. James’s Palace. On the morning of July 1, Hutchinson received a card from the colonial secretary, who had welcomed him to England with his usual good grace. Dartmouth asked him to attend that day’s levee but took so long to dress that they missed the formal part of the proceedings. Instead, the former governor enjoyed a rare privilege: a private audience with the king for whom Hutchinson had done so much.
They ushered him into His Majesty’s closet, the room in which he conferred with his ministers. George III held out his hand for the governor to kiss, and then for two hours they talked about America. It was a friendly but eccentric encounter. Given the nature of the British constitution, the king could not talk in detail about the policy his ministers had chosen. That was something he had to leave to Lord North, whom he had to trust as his executive. Even so, the king’s remarks were very revealing. Although they betrayed no sign of ill will toward America, they also showed just how deeply attached he was to the status quo. Apart from the coercive laws for Massachusetts, he saw not the least necessity for reform, whether at home or in the colonies.
Fourteen years had yet to pass before King George would suffer his first episode of madness. When he met Thomas Hutchinson, he was thirty-six and in his prime, a man at peace with himself and with the God in whom he fervently believed. Every morning at eight o’clock he would kneel in worship in the royal chapel with Queen Charlotte at his side. By now, they had ten children, making the succession entirely secure. The king was tall and lively and alert, with the ruddy cheeks and muscular strength of a keen equestrian. His mind was sharp, and his manners were gracious, if sometimes a little strange.
Although inclined to shyness—in childhood, he was lonely, cut off from other boys—he did his best to calm the nerves of anxious visitors. At any royal reception, George III would try to speak to every guest, stooping down to peer at him or her with eyes almost as shortsighted as Lord North’s. In public, the king could be nervous himself, with a tendency to walk too fast and talk too quickly. In private, and especially when the queen was with him, people found him “cheerful, affable and easy,” according to a visitor who met the couple in 1773. He was also well-informed. Hutchinson faced a stream of detailed questions, which showed that up to a point the king had been carefully prepared.5
He knew the names of many men in Boston: John Hancock and Samuel Adams, of course, but also Cooper, Cushing, and Bowdoin. He even knew that Hancock’s business was in difficulties. How had Adams come to be so influential? asked the king. “A great pretended zeal for liberty,” Hutchinson replied. Would Virginia support its northern cousins? Probably not, thought the former governor. What about those awkward people in Rhode Island? They were a problem, Hutchinson agreed, but he saw no signs of trouble in Connecticut. New York was quiet as well.
And so it went on, with nods and smiles from George III and every so often a deferential comment from Lord Dartmouth. But soon enough the conversation wandered away from politics and toward the topics that the king preferred. Throughout his years of sanity, he liked to talk about two subjects above all: agriculture and the Almighty.
So George III asked about religion in New England, the different sects, their liturgy, their prayers, and the unruly sermons preached by Dr. Cooper and the rest. “I have heard, Mr. H.,” the king inquired, “that your ministers preach that for the sake of liberty, any immorality may be tolerated?” The governor admitted that they did. “That’s a strange doctrine,” said the king, who did not care for anything unorthodox. After God, he turned to farming, where Hutchinson had to struggle under close interrogation. What did they eat? What crops did they grow? Did they really make bread with maize? It was all very odd, said the king, before he turned to population, climate, and the Indians, who would soon die out entirely, Hutchinson replied, due to the loss of their land and their own taste for liquor.
At last the audience came to an end with Dartmouth, kind as ever, worried that their guest was tired. In the presence of their sovereign, both visitors had to stand throughout the meeting, as did the king himself. Not once had George III shown any anger with the colonies. The king said nothing about revenge or retribution. He never made a threat or mentioned the use of force. Just as he had from his meeting with Gage, the king came away persuaded that it would not be necessary. Massachusetts was “a scene of anarchy,” he told Lord North that evening, in another brief note, dated at exactly 9:02; but after listening to Hutchinson, he felt entirely satisfied with everything the government had done. “I am now well convinced that they will soon submit,” he wrote.6
Never a tyrant and never a bully, though often he condoned acts of cruelty performed in his name, the king had no desire to fight a war. Although he loved his navy and his army—he liked to be painted in uniform, and he carefully vetted the choice of generals and colonels—he shared with North a deep reluctance to embark on costly military adventures. His principal flaw was simply this: a narrowness of vision, as revealed by his session with Hutchinson. He could see the details but not a larger picture.
This flaw arose not from a lack of intellect—the king read all the latest books, by Gibbon, Burke, or Dr. Johnson—but from his firm attachment to tradition. From his mother, Princess Augusta, and from the tutors she appointed, the king had acquired a painful sense of duty. It helps to explain his addiction to routine, his early rising, and his love of punctuality. His life was a mission with two purposes: to uphold the highest standards of morality, and to maintain what he once called “the beauty, excellence and perfection of the British constitution.” And that included the preservation of the empire. Time and again by wide majorities, the Lords and the Commons had voted to assert their sovereignty in America. Even if the king had disagreed, his respect for Parliament would have compelled him to adopt the same hard line.7
When Hutchinson met Lord North a few days after the levee, he found him equally relaxed and intransigent. For the first time, Hutchinson let it be known that he had doubts about the plan to change the constitution of his province. Why had no one thought to tell the colony first and allow its assembly a chance to have its say? Because, North replied, time was up for Massachusetts. Long before the Tea Party the colony had already declared its independence, when the assembly voted to endorse the Boston pamphlet. Parliament had waited far too long, hoping that the colony would mend its ways. Now that its behavior was “so gross and so notorious,” the government could not flinch from measures to make it toe the line. And by the way, North added, do not think that British industry will rally to support Americans. Trade was healthy once again, at home and abroad. In Lancashire, the merchants who made woolen textiles were tired of bad debts from the colonies, and they could easily sell their goods elsewhere. After they parted, Hutchinson wrote a letter home to New England. “There is no going back,” he told a friend.
That was on July 8. Briefly, in early August, there was a minor panic in Whitehall, when word arrived from General Gage about the Solemn League and Covenant, the defiant manifesto promoted by Samuel Adams, and about the general’s failure to arrest the culprits. In a state of high anxiety, Dartmouth hurried round to see Hutchinson. “He was not one who thirsted for blood,” he told the governor; he simply wanted to see just punishment for Hancock and Adams. But the mood soon passed away, the king remained relaxed—“matters go on well in Am
erica, they are coming right,” he said—and at last, in the middle of that month, Lord North could leave the capital for Somerset. Far away in the colonies, the delegates were leaving home to gather for the Continental Congress, but in England the holidays were beginning, with North convinced that the Congress would produce nothing more than idle chatter.8
Everything seemed to be quiet, but the summer was not as uneventful as it would appear. Unknown to Hutchinson, whom the British trusted rather less than they led him to believe, the cabinet ministers were making other plans. Catching their opponents off guard, they decided to call an early general election. It would end with an overwhelming victory for Lord North. But as sometimes happens in British politics, too large a success at the polls can lead to a crushing defeat of a different kind.
THE GENERAL ELECTION
It was not supposed to happen, the election, until the spring of 1775, seven years after the last time Britain chose a new House of Commons. Already many candidates were out campaigning in the field, making speeches, looking for friends in the press, or greasing the palms of the voters. Suddenly they found that they had only a few days in which to make their final preparations.
When the announcement appeared, it caught everyone by surprise, not least the Marquess of Rockingham. “I am not a little perplexed,” he wrote, which was exactly the effect the cabinet intended to achieve. The idea for an early poll apparently came from Lord Suffolk. The Americans, he believed, would try to influence the result by stirring up what he called “jealousies, fears and prejudices” among the voters, especially those from the business community, worried by the prospect that the colonies might boycott British trade. Best to go early, said Suffolk, to catch the Whigs and the Wilkesites unawares and forestall the arrival of any more news of unrest in America.9
He seems to have spoken to George III because, on August 24, the king wrote to North in the country, making the case for a snap election. With the Congress now assembling in Philadelphia and with a war in Europe still a possibility—he had his eye on both the Russians and the French—the king agreed with Suffolk. Once the election was out of the way, Lord North could ride out any storm with a secure majority, safe in office for another seven years. The polls might even produce a better quality of member, with fewer radicals or men enriched by African slavery or the plunder of Bengal. “I trust it will fill the House with more gentlemen of landed property,” wrote the king, “as the Nabobs, planters and other volunteers are not ready for the battle.”10