by Tom Anderson
There had never been any question of Prince Frederick simply lying down and accepting his exile. It is debatable whether even George II truly thought that merely sending his elder son several thousand miles away would stop him interfering in British politics. Certainly, Frederick’s spiritual absence from the British political scene lasted only a few years. Though his body might remain in Fredericksburg, his political will, through his supporters, continued to stretch all the way across the Atlantic to Westminster.
In this, Frederick had several advantages. Firstly, his acquaintance with Lieutenant Governor Gooch meant that he was well aware of the latter’s new policies towards Virginia’s vitally important tobacco crop, long before the London-based investors. The Tobacco Inspection Act of 1730 required Virginian tobacco planters to bring their crops to public warehouses, where it was inspected and stored. This reduced fraud and improved the quality of the overall crop, and within a few years, ‘Virginian tobacco’ was renowned throughout Europe as a superior blend, coming into great demand.
Frederick had gambled on Gooch’s scheme succeeding, and had invested a large part of his still quite meagre funds in the tobacco business. In this he was later helped by his connections with the Washingtons, and some believe that he first encountered Mildred Washington Lewis Gregory due to his inquiries into the important tobacco planting families. Frederick borrowed money from the richer burgesses he had become acquainted with, as well. He was able to pay it back within a few years, as his investments more than matured thanks to Gooch’s policies. Frederick is thus almost unique in British history as a royal who made his own fortune. This too may arguably have endeared him to the colonists’ frontier spirit.
By March 1734, Frederick felt his position—both financial and political—was now secure enough to return to his major mission in life: regaining his rightful heirship. It had been more than six years since his exile began, and he was determined that his father would not rest on his laurels for much longer. Firstly, he would need more influence, and he found a good excuse to go searching for it. He had been given the invented post of Lord Deputy of the Colonies when he had been exiled, a post which technically gave him theoretical powers over all the Colonial Governors. Frederick had never used this power, though, recognising that he would not be taken seriously and it would damage him politically if he gave an order to a Governor only to be politely brushed off. He had instead relied upon suggestion and persuasion to inviegle himself with Gooch and the House of Burgesses. But Virginia, though one of the most populous and important of the British colonies in North America, was not the only one. It was time for Frederick to spread his wings.
In March, Mildred was pregnant again (with a daughter, the future Queen of Denmark, also named Mildred) and Frederick took the opportunity to leave her behind in Fredericksburg with young George and most of the servants. He embarked on what he called his ‘American Grand Tour’, spending slightly more than a year travelling around the Colonies and trying to make at least one appearance in each colonial capital. Stories of him had, of course, already spread throughout North America, and some of the dignitaries of the other Colonies had already come to visit him in Fredericksburg. These men included Lieutenant Governor Patrick Gordon of Pennsylvania, who was not merely a political supporter but had become a genuine friend to Frederick on his rare visits. Regardless of the reasons the far-flung colonial dignitaries had aligned themselves with Frederick, they agreed to find the Prince accommodations for his stay in return for his patronage.
Much has been written about Frederick’s tour, not least by Frederick himself, though he restricted himself to short pamphlets. Most of these at first seemed innocuous, with titles such as Travels in the Woods of Penn’s Land (With Accurate Illustrations) or American Ingenuity, OR, Instructive Innovations of Our Colonial Cousins. However, they always had a hidden meaning that attacked King George’s policies and person. It has been suggested by many historians that Frederick’s works were mostly ghost-written by North American writers, given that he had no history of authorship before his exile and the fact that the writings are almost universally pro-colonial. Frederick did develop a general liking for the land of his exile, but not the love of a native that the pamphlets profess.
It is instructive to contrast Frederick’s two longest stays in his tour, in Pennsylvania (May—June 1734) and New York (July—August). In the first province, he was already friendly with the Lieutenant Governor, Patrick Gordon, and appeared at events in Philadelphia supporting him. It was in Pennsylvania that Frederick was first introduced to the Indians as anything more than a vague threat on the horizon—Pennsylvania was looking to expand at the expense of its Lenape Indian neighbours, potentially ruining the relatively good relationship the colonists had had with them in previous years. Frederick also met with representatives of Pennsylvania’s German population, much larger than that of Virginia, and once again forged new connections with them due to his own ancestry.
New York was different in almost every way. The Governor was William Cosby, a new and oppressive ruler who disliked Frederick and was fiercely loyal to George II.[7] Thus it was that in New York, it was with Cosby’s political enemies, the so-called Morrisite Party, that Frederick met, so enjoyed popularity with the people of New York. When Cosby had arrived two years earlier, he had demanded half the pay of the acting governor, Rip Van Dam, and had then fired Chief Justice Lewis Morris when he had declared the demand illegal. Frederick promised the Morrisites that he would have Cosby thrown out and replaced with one of their own, perhaps Morris himself, if he ever became King. So it was that he achieved more influence with those peers who identified with the Morrisite cause.
It was also whilst in New York that Frederick became involved with John Peter Zenger, a German immigrant who printed the Morrisites’ political paper, the New York Weekly Journal. Cosby had attempted to close the paper down several times, as it attacked his policies—his failure to defend against Iroquois raids, his suspected rigging of elections, and his permission for French ships to illegally dock in New York harbour. Frederick had made it a policy of his own to use his German language skills to become friendly with important or powerful German-speakers in the Colonies. Zenger was not rich, but his role as mouthpiece of the Morrisites meant that he could be very useful to Frederick indeed. The Prince later embarrassed Cosby on his way back to Virginia in winter 1734—the Governor had attempted to have the Journal burned and Zenger arrested for sedition. Frederick used his influence to have the case thrown out[8] and a frustrated Cosby died just one year later. However, this was not the end of New York’s problems, as his successor George Clarke was also a member of the ‘Court’ or Tory Party and continued to interfere with Van Dam’s policies.
Though Frederick had glimpsed Indians in Pennsylvania, he actually met them face to face for the first time in New York. The exiled Prince took tea with a delegation from the Iroquois Confederacy (or Six Nations as it was then known) along with several senior Morrisites. Although the Morrisites had attacked Cosby for failing to respond effectively to Iroquois raids, they also acknowledged that at least some of those raids had been the result of Cosby’s clumsy attempts to appropriate lawful Iroquois land.
Frederick’s chief contribution to the meeting was when he noticed that the Indians seemed to dislike being referred to as Iroquois. Via an interpreter, he asked them about this. The Iroquois replied that the name was, in fact, an insulting epithet given to them by their Huron enemies, and meant Black Snakes. Few Englishmen had ever bothered to learn their true name, which was Haudenosaunee.
Frederick, to everyone’s surprise, seemed delighted at this and even clapped his hands when the words were translated for him. He explained to the puzzled Iroquois about his own people, the Deutsche, who had resigned themselves to being referred to as ‘Germans’ by the English, who in turn gave the name Dutch inaccurately to the Nederlanders.[9] “Perhaps it is too late to undo that injustice,” the Prince commented, “but I, for one, shall call you by y
our true name.” In fact, Frederick’s German accent meant that he had trouble pronouncing the word Haudenosaunee, but the Indians seemed to appreciate him making the effort. Their meeting would have much more important consequences in years to come, but Frederick is believed to have started a fashion for referring to the Iroquois as Haudenosaunee or just Hauden, anglicised to Howden, for short. The choice of which name to use would take on political overtones a century later.
The rest of Frederick’s tours in North America are less important to history, although it is said that he came away with the firm belief that there was no significant difference between any of the feuding New England states. The story of his meeting the young Benjamin Franklin in Boston is almost certainly apocryphal, although the two of them did work together in later years. Frederick more or less managed to fulfil his own target of speaking in every Colonial capital.
Frederick also visited the territory of Nova Scotia, recently (re-)conquered by British and colonial forces during the First War of Supremacy and still occupied by French Acadian settlers who had been forced to swear an oath to the crown, but with the proviso that they would not be called upon to fight either French or Indian forces. It is not known precisely what first gave Frederick a dislike of the Acadians—possibly simply that their oath made them loyal to George—but one of his pamphlets, entitled The Horse of Troy, stated that “What advantage do we gain by possessing a land whose men have no obligation to serve the same duties as our true colonists? Nova Scotia is a British colony in the same sense that the wearer of our Crown is the King of France.” This was a jab at the British King’s absurd holdover claim from the Hundred Years’ War to be the King of France, which George II had not abolished.[10] The Prince’s low opinion of the Acadians’ loyalty would also have serious repercussions in years to come.
Frederick returned home to Virginia in early 1735, having missed the birth of his daughter Mildred Dorothea. He remained there for six months, continuing to build up his position, and then toured the southern colonies in a much shorter trip. In the Carolinas, an intrigued Frederick also met with representatives of the Cherokee Indians, who had just concluded a treaty in which they agreed to be a protectorate of George II and to halt their raids on Carolina.[11] Frederick promised to respect this treaty if he ever became King. He also met with Governor Robert Johnson and Carolina’s own band of German settlers. Like the Virginians, the Carolinians saw these Calvinist refugees as a useful first line of defence against Indian raids, but unlike the Virginians there were serious accusations of the religious differences with the Anglican Carolinians causing potential civil problems. It was a complex situation that Frederick realised could one day go up like a powder keg. Ultimately though it would be other issues that would dominate the future of Carolina, and indeed it is perhaps the need for common cause between Anglicans and Calvinists in the face of these that eventually led to the region becoming known for its religious toleration in general.
Frederick also briefly visited the newly created Proprietory Colony of Georgia, only just split off from Carolina. Georgia also had its Indian problems, in this case with the Creeks. It is thought that Frederick took a dislike to Georgia simply because it was named for his father, although his later actions towards the colony were certainly much more a direct response to events and not due to his holding a grudge.
The exiled Prince returned to Virginia in late 1735 and remained in Fredericksburg until the Second War of Supremacy. However, he was already being informed of the havoc his work was wreaking for his father back in England.
The political system in Frederick’s time was quite different to that today. By the British Constitution of 1688—a document that was referred to almost as holy writ by all politicians—each county elected two MPs, albeit with a very limited franchise dependent on property ownership. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge also elected two MPs each, with any matriculated Members of the University being able to vote. In addition to this, though, there were plenty of so-called ‘rotten boroughs’, meaning tiny villages which could elect more MPs than great towns. The most infamous example was Old Sarum, under the control of the Pitt family, which in the recent 1728 election had elected the candidate Colonel Harrison by a four to one margin—literally four votes to one. It would continue to return two MPs until the nineteenth century, at one point ceasing to have any voters at all. At the same time, no new parliamentary seats had been created since the 1670s due to procedural deadlock, which eventually simply became ‘the way things were’ and some MPs claimed the current situation was perfect, even as growing industrial towns chafed without representation.
There was also the House of Lords, of course, which was to some extent under the influence of the King as he was responsible for creating peerages. However, he also had to cope with the existing Lords created by his father or inherited from their predecessors, whose titles could only be attainted in extraordinary circumstances.
Political parties meant little then. The old labels of Whig and Tory were still in use, but the official Tory party was a shattered rump at this point after supporting the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. Governments were not formed of exclusively Whigs or Tories, but generally of Whigs and perhaps one or two Tories who happened to support the King. The opposition was made up of the majority of the Tories and plenty of rebel Whigs. Also, precisely how the labels Tory and Whig were applied was often a matter of opinion. This situation did not significantly change until the nineteenth century, although additional party labels were often used to describe particular factions within the Whigs.
These more informal factional groupings and coalitions fulfilled the roles of true parties. The loyalist Whigs of Robert Walpole continued to dominate the Commons, although their majority was reduced in the 1734 General Election after Walpole’s attempt to introduce an unpopular customs and excise tax. A far more serious threat to Walpole and George II materialised soon after. Walpole had many enemies in Parliament, including William Pulteney and the young, up-and-coming MPs William Pitt and George Grenville. Previously they had not worked together as a united opposition, but Prince Frederick’s influence from across the waves began to consolidate them into a single movement which he called the Patriot Boys.[12] As their name suggested, one of the Patriot Boys’ tactics was attacking Walpole’s policy of avoiding wars in the interests of trade. Though European wars were indeed unpopular, and Walpole had been praised for preventing George II intervening in the War of the Polish Succession (1733), Frederick knew that colonial interests would be served by them.
As well as North American-born and economically influenced peers and MPs—of which there were a few—Frederick had the advantage of being Duke of Cornwall. Cornwall was an oddity, possessing many historical anachronisms as a result of the 1688 Constitution. It elected no fewer than 22 MPs, largely due to Elizabeth I packing the House with her supporters a century and a half before. This was only slightly fewer than the whole of Scotland, and more than any other English county despite being one of the smallest and least populous. Crucially, most of these constituencies were under the direct control of the Duke of Cornwall—either directly through patronage or indirectly through his authority over the Stannary Parliament, a sort of early trade union for the tin miners who formed the primary basis of Cornwall’s economy. Frederick also controlled some seats in Wales that still saw him, not William, as their rightful Prince, and he had achieved some level of support from Scottish peers such as Lord Orkney (the nominal Governor of Virginia) and the Earl of Bute. It was this coalition that led to one of Walpole’s loyalists, the Earl of Godolphin, sourly labelling the Patriot Boys as “A band of Scotch, Welch, Dutchmen and Colonials who think they can rule England.” Godolphin’s peerage was Cornish in origin, he had served as High Steward of the Duchy in the past, and he appeared nervous about the level of popular support that the exilic Prince was gathering in the county.
Indeed, Frederick clawed back a surprising level of support in general, but the Patriot Boys (led by
the rebel Whig Pulteney) never came close to unseating Walpole’s Government. Nonetheless, they caused headaches for his father and ensured that the people of England could not forget their absentee Prince.
Frederick’s plan was going as well as could be expected, but everyone’s plans were thrown out when an unthinkable event happened: Walpole supported a war.
And it was a war that began in America...
Chapter #4: The “Yes, but we’ve changed our minds now” War
“European wars do not have to have causes or explanations. It is the rare European peaces which must be explained and annotated to show why they came about.”
- Philip Bulkeley, 1840
*
From: “A Guide to the Second War of Supremacy” by Dr James Foster (1950)—
Robert Walpole had made a career of keeping Britain out of damaging wars, but both that policy and, latterly, his career were coming to an end. Lord Cobham is known to have remarked that Walpole was ‘destroyed by the two Fredericks’, an apt observation. The exiled Prince Frederick’s Patriot Boys had been assailing Walpole’s Whigs for years, but what sent him on the final path to ruin were the whims of another Frederick. Frederick II, King in Prussia.[13]
The legal cause for the war had its roots in events of decades earlier. After the First War of Supremacy, Spain had come under a Bourbon dynasty and the Austrian Hapsburg empire had benefited from sweeping up several former Spanish possessions. These included the formerly Spanish and now Austrian Netherlands,[14] greatly desired by France. More importantly, Charles VI, the Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria, had no male heirs. He possessed only a daughter, Maria Theresa. On his death, she would become Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduchess of Austria, and Duchess of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla. The elective position of Holy Roman Emperor was separated from the Hapsburgs for the first time in centuries and awarded to her husband, Francis I the Duke of Lorraine.