Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  But George loathed Temple even more than he did Pitt. Nevertheless, Pitt insisted and the king had to back down and confer the coveted honour. But he made his feelings plain at the investiture. Instead of decorously placing the ribbon over Temple’s shoulder, as etiquette demanded, he threw it at him and immediately turned his back. Faced with the power of Pitt, the king of Great Britain was reduced to making an impotent protest, like a naughty child. Pitt was able thus to humiliate the king, not only because he was uniquely successful, but also because he had a new sort of power. He had been called to office, he asserted, ‘by his sovereign’ – which was conventional – and ‘by the voice of the people’ – which was a radical and bold claim.

  Not even Walpole could boast that. Now, as George II moaned, ‘Ministers are Kings in this Country.’ Frustration built up over the years; when he was in Hanover in 1755 he almost did not go back to England: ‘There are Kings enough in England. I am nothing there. I am old and want rest, and should only go to be plagued and teased there about the damned House of Commons.’ In 1727, when he had come to the throne, a minister as formidable as Robert Walpole had to win and retain royal favour, as his assiduous and unctuous flattery of Queen Caroline showed. Since then, the king had been forced to accept men he hated as ministers, above all William Pitt, who never ceased to denigrate his beloved Hanover and oppose Continental wars. Power was no longer gained by a minister’s standing at court and personal relationship with the king, but by his ability to break down the doors and impose himself on the sovereign. How had George found himself in this situation at the end of his long reign?

  Partly, it was simply a matter of Pitt’s translation of his war aims into bold and vivid language that had a resonance far beyond Parliament. But there were also more concrete alliances, such as the one commemorated in the Guildhall, the centre of the government of the City of London. Pitt’s own statue dominates the hall. But standing up on high to equal the great prime minister is the statue of Alderman William Beckford, millionaire, City politician and radical press lord, who marshalled City opinion behind Pitt with his weekly paper, The Monitor. Imperial might, parliamentary legitimacy and prime ministerial power stood four-square with City finance, mercantile wealth and the press.

  Winston Churchill, who resembled Pitt in so many ways, called the Seven Years War ‘the first world war’. But unlike the world wars of the twentieth century, it did not exhaust the country. When it began, Britain was one of two or three leading European powers. When it ended, she was all powerful and mistress of the first empire to stretch across four continents. But George was not there to see it and Pitt was not in office either.

  IV

  The morning of 25 October 1760 began like any other for George II. He rose early, drank his chocolate and retired to relieve himself on his close-stool. But there, without a day’s illness or a moment’s warning, he died, at about 7.30 a.m.

  The gruff, choleric seventy-seven-year-old was succeeded by his grandson, the fresh-faced, twenty-two-year-old George III. George had been a late developer. Sulky, idle and apparently rather dim at first, he had been transformed in his late teens by a sympathetic mentor into a paragon of hard work and self-discipline. He was intensely musical, fluent in French and German, a competent draughtsman and an omnivorous bibliophile with a particular interest in history.

  He had been a late developer sexually too. But following his marriage, eleven months after his accession, to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, he made up for lost time by fathering no fewer than fifteen children.

  Above all, he was aware, unlike his two predecessors, that he was English through and through by birth and by inclination. He was also determined to fulfil his duties, as he saw them, as a patriotic British king. Perhaps, indeed, he was too determined, too demanding both of others and, critically, of himself.

  The clash with the great war minister, William Pitt, who saw himself as having something of a monopoly on patriotism, came within hours. In his accession speech, given at 6 p.m. on the day of his grandfather’s death, George referred to the ‘bloody war’ in which Britain was engaged. At Pitt’s outraged insistence, this was toned down to ‘expensive but just and necessary war’ in the published version. Within the year, however, Pitt had resigned and in 1763 the Treaty of Paris was signed, bringing the war to a triumphant conclusion.

  Triumphant or not, the war still had to be paid for. So, too, did the new British Empire. The war had doubled the national debt, from £70,000,000 to £140,000,000. This meant that interest payments alone totalled £4,000,000 a year, or half the tax revenue. Ongoing costs had multiplied as well. Before the war, the annual cost of the American establishment was £75,000. Now it had increased more than fourfold to £350,000. All this fell on a British population of only 8 million. Why shouldn’t, ministers asked, British America bear a part? After all, the war, as Pitt had repeatedly stated, had been fought on their behalf, and they had been its principal beneficiaries with the removal of the threat from the French in Canada and the French allies among the Indian tribes. As Pitt had said in 1755, ‘The present war was undertaken for the long-injured, long-neglected, long-forgotten people of America.’ France had been expelled from much of North America while Britain and her allies tied up the French in Europe. ‘America had been conquered in Germany,’ Pitt bluntly asserted.

  And there is no doubt that British America had deep pockets. Philadelphia, New York and Boston were large and rich; Charleston was catching up fast. And these were only the urban centres of an overwhelmingly rural economy in which about two million people were unevenly divided between thirteen colonies. The colonies were wildly different in size, religious complexion, economic interest and geographical focus, and were almost as suspicious of each other as of the British government. Nevertheless, there was a sense of British America and of the fact that it was already four or five times the size of Old England.

  February 12 1765 was a quiet day in the House of Commons, with only a Bill to tap American wealth by imposing stamp duty on American property and legal transactions to be debated. As colonial business rarely aroused much interest (unless Pitt was displaying his pyrotechnics), the Bill was nodded through an almost empty chamber with minimal opposition.

  But the Stamp Act set America alight. For the British Parliament was not the only one in the British Empire. Indeed, in America there were thirteen such assemblies – one for each colony – which, in their own worlds, thought themselves the equal of the Westminster Parliament.

  The eighteenth-century Capitol, in Williamsburg, was the seat of the General Assembly of the Colony of Virginia. The Assembly was the oldest colonial legislature, first meeting on 20 July 1619. It was the closest in structure to Westminster, consisting of an elected Lower House, presided over by a Speaker, a nominated Upper House and the Royal Governor, who opened the sessions with a speech and wielded the veto on all Bills. Above all, perhaps, the personnel of the Virginian Assembly was nearest to that of the Westminster Parliament, since it was dominated by wealthy gentleman-planters, such as the Lee family of Stratford Hall.

  Stratford Hall, built in the 1730s, is a not-so-miniature version of an English country house. And the Lees, with their wealth derived from the surrounding tobacco plantation cultivated by dozens of black slaves, lived a provincial version of the life of the English country gentlemen who made up the great bulk of Westminster MPs, and they displayed a similar self-confidence and sense of their own importance. Thus it was that, on 30 May 1765, with Lees in the lead, the Virginian Assembly passed the first resolution against the Stamp Act. This solemnly declared that ‘the taxation of the people by themselves, or by persons chosen to represent them … is the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom, without which the ancient constitution cannot exist’.

  This was Whig language turned against the British Parliament, which had first invented it. Less decorously, as the date for the coming into operation of the Stamp Act approached, Richard Henry Lee organized a protest procession, fea
turing his own slaves in costume and the mock-hanging of the collector of stamp duties. Similar resolutions and protests, many of them violent, spread like wildfire across the colonies, and British America became ungovernable. Wholly unprepared for the reaction, the Westminster Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. But it tried to preserve the principle of British parliamentary sovereignty by declaring that Westminster was competent to pass laws for the British colonies ‘in all cases whatsoever’.

  There remained only the little matter of translating the principle into practice. This every succeeding British government tried to do and failed. American resistance continued and the net yield of American taxation, at a few hundred pounds a year, was derisory. A final attempt was made in 1773. The usual British duty of 12 pence a pound on tea was lifted and a low American duty of 3 pence imposed. The effect was to make tea cheaper in America than in Britain, and the ‘Sons of Liberty’, as the American radical opposition called themselves, were afraid that Americans, who loved their tea, might sell their liberty for a nice, cheap cuppa.

  To forestall them, in December 1773 they perpetrated ‘the Boston Tea Party’, in which forty or fifty ‘patriots’, disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded three ships in the harbour and forcibly threw 343 chests of tea overboard. Goaded beyond endurance, the British government took a hard line at last. The port of Boston was closed, the Massachusetts Assembly remodelled and British troops exempted from trial by American juries.

  But instead of being cowed, the Americans summoned a Continental Congress of representatives from all thirteen colonies to coordinate their response to the coercive British measures. Once again, the Virginian Assembly, meeting as usual in Williamsburg and steered by Richard Henry Lee, had taken the lead. But the most interesting Virginian initiative had its origins in the College of William and Mary, which lies at the other end of Duke of Gloucester Street from the Capitol.

  The college was the Virginian University and the second oldest of the seven university colleges in colonial America. And it was here that Thomas Jefferson, who came from the same wealthy, slave-owning background as Lee, became a student and began to form the ideas expressed in the paper he wrote for the forthcoming Continental Congress. Entitled ‘The Summary View of the Rights of British Americans’, it takes the Whig idea that all government ultimately depends on a social contract, entered into by the people in a state of nature, and applies it brilliantly to America.

  In Old England the state of nature was a mere abstraction – albeit a very useful one. But in America it was real in the endless, rolling acres of Jefferson’s native Virginia. Here, Jefferson points out, his ancestors had come, voluntarily, to a New World, occupied and cultivated it by their own efforts, formed their own societies and chosen and established their own forms of government. Therefore, for the British Parliament, which represented only the British people, to presume to legislate for the people of America, who already had their own representatives in their own assemblies, was a gross usurpation. Instead, only George himself, as king and ultimate sovereign of America, had a right to intervene.

  This idea of a monarch who, as sovereign of free and independent peoples, holds an empire together was both ingenious and far sighted. Indeed, it became the foundation of Britain’s twentieth-century imperial policy as the empire evolved into the commonwealth of self-governing dominions, united only by allegiance to a common crown. But in the circumstances of the eighteenth century it was impossible.

  Parliament and premier had only just got some sort of control of the monarchy. To allow George to become king of America would be to give the crown a new and expanding power base that might once again allow the old monarchy to challenge the new. Nor did George want the power of an American monarch independent of Parliament, for he was far too loyal to the settlement that had brought the Hanoverians to the throne. Instead, he threw his weight behind the British Parliament’s determination to impose its will on the rebellious colonies. ‘I will never make my inclinations alone nor even my own opinions the sole rule of my conduct in public measures,’ he said, confirming the power of the premiership. ‘I will at all times consult my ministers and place in them as entire a confidence as the nature of this government can be supposed to require of me.’ If the minister had been Pitt, there is little doubt he would have succeeded. But faced by a weak prime minister, the king himself increasingly emerged as the figurehead of the struggle. The result was indecision and disarray.

  Troops, including German regiments personally raised by the king, were dispatched, and in April 1775 the first armed clash, in which the colonials acquitted themselves surprisingly well against seasoned professional troops, took place near Boston, at Lexington. The Americans took this as a declaration of war and a month later in May the Second Continental Congress convened in the State House in Philadelphia, the seat of the Pennsylvanian Assembly, to organize military resistance. On 15 June Congress appointed George Washington as commander-in-chief of the American army.

  It could not have chosen better. For Washington, though not a great general, was a great man. He was another product of the planter gentry of Virginia, where his family were neighbours of the Lees of Stratford Hall. As a younger son, he became an officer in the Virginian militia; played an honourable part in the Seven Years War against the French; and tried but failed to get a commission in the British army. Marriage to a rich widow and deaths in his own family now enabled him to acquire his own plantation at Mount Vernon, where the mansion house, modest at first, was steadily enlarged and beautified over the years.

  But despite his new-found wealth and status, Washington never lost his interest in military affairs, and he turned up to the congress in Philadelphia in uniform and using his rank of colonel in the militia. As commander-in-chief, Washington found himself in charge of a motley crew: badly armed, badly fed and clothed and badly paid when they were paid at all. To keep them in the field required tact, occasional firmness and infinite dogged patience. Washington had them all. He also had the natural leadership of a born-and-bred American gentleman.

  The Continental Congress reconvened the following year at Philadelphia. The fighting had hardened positions, and in June Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved the resolution for independence, while his fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, drafted the Declaration itself, which was adopted on 4 July 1776 and became the Ark of the Covenant of the new republic.

  Subsequent generations have focused on the grand principles of the preamble, with its ringing assertion (written by a slave-owner, of course) that all men, being born free and equal, have the right to determine how and by whom they are governed. Contemporaries were more interested in its violent and highly personal repudiation of allegiance to George III as a tyrant and ‘unfit to be the ruler of a free people’. But the immediate importance of the Declaration lay elsewhere, in the claim that, as Free and Independent States, the United Colonies were entitled to contract what alliances they pleased.

  And there was no doubt where their best hope of allies lay: the old enemy, France. For France was burning for revenge for its comprehensive humiliation by Britain in the Seven Years War. And how better to take vengeance than by separating Britain from the fruits of that victory – the better part of its newly acquired empire? Hence the bizarre marriage of convenience between the new republic and the oldest, proudest and most absolute monarchy in Europe. ‘Do they read?’ a French radical asked, as the French translation of the fiercely anti-monarchical Declaration of Independence was devoured at the Court of Versailles. He might well have asked, ‘Do they think?’, as the sweetly air-headed and super-fashionable queen, Marie Antoinette, demanded news of her ‘dear republicans’.

  And French help was desperately needed since, despite all Washington’s efforts, the Americans barely hung on. New York and Charleston remained in British hands and the most likely outcome seemed a stalemate. The deadlock was broken at Yorktown, a few miles to the southeast of Williamsburg, where Lord Cornwallis, the British commander in America, set up his
headquarters in 1781. Yorktown lies on the narrow peninsula between the estuaries of the York and James rivers as they debouch into the mighty Chesapeake Bay.

  So long as the British navy controlled the sea, Cornwallis was impregnable. But the French threw money – all borrowed and at outrageous rates of interest – at their fleet while the British navy was overstretched and divided. The result was that Cornwallis found himself caught between a strong French fleet – which blockaded the York river – and Washington’s army, which the French had also buoyed up with loans and gifts. Trapped and outnumbered by more than two to one, Cornwallis surrendered to Washington on 19 October with his whole army.

  ‘Oh God, it is all over,’ the British prime minister wailed when the news arrived. It was, though it took George III some time to realize it. In 1783 the Americans, in their first betrayal of their French allies, signed a separate preliminary peace with Britain that recognized American independence. George drafted and redrafted his abdication address. And the Holy Roman Emperor predicted that, with the loss of America, Britain would swiftly become a second-class power, like Sweden or Denmark. His words were echoed in Britain. ‘America is lost,’ said George. ‘Must we fall beneath the blow?’

  Thereafter, Britain and America went their separate ways. But only one remained loyal to its eighteenth-century roots.

  These show clearly in Washington, the new American capital that was named after George Washington, who, after he had resigned his military command, became the first president of the new American Republic.

  Laid out in the 1790s, its monuments, lawns and grand, sweeping vistas are the lineal descendants of the landscape gardens of Stowe. Similarly, it is America today which best embodies the ideas of freedom, power and empire which inspired that great denizen of Stowe, William Pitt, in the reign of George II.