by Will Durant
Beaten on this issue, he renewed, on March 22, 1775, his plea for conciliation. He pointed out that trade with America had grown tenfold between 1704 and 1772, 111 and he asked was it wise to disrupt, perhaps sacrifice, that commerce with war. He feared that war with the colonies would leave England open to attack by a foreign enemy; this happened in 1778. He agreed that American representation in Parliament was made impracticable by the sea; opposuit natura; he asked only that England rely not upon taxation but upon voluntary grants from the colonial assemblies; such grants might well exceed the proceeds of direct taxation after the costs of forcible collection had been deducted.112
His motion to this effect was rejected 270 to 78, but he had the solace of winning to his cause the eloquence and skill of Charles James Fox; so began a friendship cemented by the American Revolution and sundered by the French. Gibbon called Fox’s speech of October 31, 1776, the most masterly that he had ever heard, and Horace Walpole declared it “one of his [Fox’s] finest and most animated orations.”113 Walpole ranged himself on the side of conciliation; he deplored the collapse of British statesmanship under Lord North; and on September 11, 1775, he wrote to Horace Mann:
The Parliament is to meet on the 20th of next month and vote 26,000 seamen. What a paragraph of blood is there! With what torments must liberty be preserved in America! In England what can save it? Oh, mad, mad England! What frenzy, to throw away its treasures, lay waste its empire of wealth, and sacrifice its freedom, that its prince may be the arbitrary lord of boundless deserts in America, and of an impoverished, depopulated, and thence insignificant island in Europe!114
Not the fervor of Chatham, Burke, and Fox, but the victories and diplomacies of the colonies persuaded the English people, and then their government, to thoughts of peace. Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga (October 17, 1777) was the turning point; for the first time England appreciated Chatham’s warning, “You cannot conquer America.” When France recognized the “United States of America,” and joined in war against England (February 6, 1778), the judgment of French statesmen confirmed Chatham’s, and the weight of French arms and of a restored French navy was added to the burden borne by the British nation. Lord North himself lost heart, and begged permission to resign; the King, loading him with gifts, bade him stay on.
Many prominent Englishmen now felt that only a government led by the Earl of Chatham could win the colonies back from the French alliance to union with England. But George would not hear of it. “I solemnly declare,” he told North, “that nothing shall bring me to treat personally with Lord Chatham.”115 The Earl came to the House of Lords for the last time on April 7, 1778, supported by crutches and his son William, his face ghastly with the nearness of death, his voice so weak as to be barely heard. Again he counseled conciliation, but stood out “against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy” by a grant of independence to America.116 The Duke of Richmond answered that only by such a grant could America be won away from France. Chatham tried to rise and speak again, but he collapsed in an apoplectic fit. He died on May 11, 1778. Parliament voted him a public funeral, with a tomb and monument in Westminster Abbey. He was, by general consent, the greatest Englishman of his time.
Events hurried to complete the catastrophe that he had predicted. In June, 1779, Spain joined France in war against England; it laid siege to Gibraltar, and sent its fleet to share in the attack upon British shipping. In August a combined flotilla of sixty French and Spanish vessels entered the English Channel; England feverishly prepared to resist invasion; sickness disabled the hostile fleet and compelled it to retire to Brest. In March, 1780, Russia, Denmark, and Sweden united in a “Declaration of Armed Neutrality,” which vowed to resist England’s practice of boarding neutral vessels in search of enemy goods; soon other neutrals signed the declaration. English search of Dutch vessels continued; it found evidence of secret agreements between the city of Amsterdam and an American negotiator. England demanded the punishment of the Amsterdam officials; the Dutch government refused; England declared war (December, 1780). Now almost all the Baltic and Atlantic states were allied against the England that only recently had ruled the seas.
The mood of Parliament reflected the multiplication of disasters. Resentment was mounting against the King’s frustration of his minister’s desire to end the war. On April 6, 1780, John Dunning had offered to the House of Commons a motion declaring “that the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished”; the motion was approved by a vote of 233 to 215. On January 23, 1781, the younger Pitt took his seat in the House; in his second speech he denounced the war with America as “most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and diabolical.”117 Fox joyfully welcomed Pitt to the ranks of the opposition, not foreseeing that this youth was soon to be his strongest foe.
On October 19, 1781, Lord Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown. “Oh, God, it is all over!” exclaimed Lord North, but the King insisted that the war must go on. In February and March, 1782, news came that Minorca had been taken by the Spaniards, and several West Indian islands by the French. Public meetings throughout England clamored for peace. North’s majority in the Commons fell to twenty-two, to nineteen, to one—on a motion “that the House could no longer repose confidence in the present ministers” (March 15, 1782); this set an historic precedent for Parliament’s procedure in forcing a change of ministry. On March 18 North wrote to George III a letter telling him, in effect, that both the royal policy toward America and the attempt to establish the supremacy of the king over Parliament had failed.
Your Majesty is well apprized that in this country the Prince on the throne cannot, with prudence, oppose the deliberate resolution of the House of Commons. … The Parliament have uttered their sentiments, and their sentiments, whether just or erroneous, must ultimately prevail. Your Majesty … can lose no honor if you yield.118
On March 20, 1782, after twelve years of patient service and submission, Lord North resigned. George III, his spirit broken, wrote a letter of abdication, but did not send it. He accepted a ministry of triumphant liberals: Rockingham, the Earl of Shelburne, Charles James Fox, Burke, and Sheridan. When Rockingham died (July 1), Shelburne succeeded him as first lord of the treasury. Fox, Burke, and Sheridan, disliking Shelburne, resigned. Shelburne proceeded to arrange a treaty of peace (Paris, November 30, 1782; Paris and Versailles, January 20 and September 3, 1783) that surrendered Minorca and Florida to Spain, and Senegal to France, and acknowledged not only the independence of the American colonies but their right to all the territory between the Alleghenies, Florida, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes.
The English people had been eager for peace, but they resented the cession of so much terrain to the colonies. Criticism of Shelburne reached such bitterness that he submitted his resignation (February 24, 1783). As the quarrel between Shelburne and Fox had divided the liberal Whigs into factions neither of which was strong enough to control Parliament, Fox agreed to form a coalition ministry with his old enemy Lord North. Burke again became paymaster of the forces. Sheridan, who was always in debt, was made secretary of the treasury. Both Fox and Burke had for some time been studying the behavior of Englishmen in India, and that country now replaced America as the most urgent problem in British politics.
VI. ENGLAND AND INDIA
The British East India Company had been reorganized in 1709 as the “United Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indies.” Its charter from the British government entitled it to a monopoly of British trade with India. It was managed by a chairman and twenty-four directors annually elected by a “Court of Proprietors” in which every holder of £ 500 or more of stock had one vote. In India the company became a military as well as a commercial organization, and fought Dutch, French, and native armies for pieces of the crumbling empire of the Moguls. It was in one of these wars that Siraj-ud-daula, the Nawab (Viceroy) of Bengal, captured Calcutta from the company, and imprisoned 146 Europea
ns in the “Black Hole of Calcutta”—a room eighteen by fourteen feet, with only two small windows; 123 of the prisoners died overnight (June 20-21, 1756) from heat or asphyxiation.
Robert Clive, governor of Fort St. David, led a small force to recapture Calcutta for the company. He joined in the plot of Mir Jafar, a noble at Siraj-ud-daula’s court, to overthrow the Viceroy; with nine hundred European and 2,300 native troops he defeated fifty thousand men at Plassey (June 23, 1757); Siraj-ud-daula was put to death, and Mir Jafar was set up in his place as nawab of Bengal. Clive entered the capital, Murshidabab, as a conqueror. It seemed to him equal to London in size and perhaps superior in wealth. In the Nawab’s treasury he saw an incredible accumulation of rupees, jewels, gold, silver, and other riches. Invited to name his reward for enthroning Mir Jafar, he asked £ 160,000 for himself, £ 500,000 for his army and navy, £ 24,000 for each member of the company’s governing board, and £ 1,000,000 as indemnity for damage to the company’s property in Calcutta. It was to this occasion that Clive referred when he told the House of Commons that he marveled at his own moderation.119 He received a total of £200,000 as presents from Mir Jafar,120 and was acknowledged as British governor of Bengal. The company, by paying a yearly rental of £27,000 to Mir Jafar, was recognized as supreme landlord of 882 square miles around Calcutta. In 1759, in return for aid in suppressing a rebellion, Mir Jafar agreed to remit to Clive annually the rental paid by the company.
Secure from competition, the company exploited with scant mercy the natives subject to its rule. Armed with superior weapons, it made Indian rulers pay heavily for British protection. Far from supervision by the British government, and immune to the Ten Commandments east of Suez, its senior officials made huge profits in trade, and returned to England as nabobs capable of buying, without serious injury to their capital, a pocket borough or a member of Parliament.
Clive came home to England in 1760, aged thirty-five, expecting to enjoy fame and wealth. He bought enough boroughs to command a bloc in the Commons, and was himself elected from Shrewsbury. Some directors of the East India Company, feeling that he had stolen beyond his years, attacked him for using forged documents in dealing with Siraj-ud-daula and Mir Jafar; but when word reached London that native revolts, official venality, and administrative incompetence were endangering the position of the company in India, Clive was hurried back to Calcutta (1765) as governor of Bengal. There he labored to stem corruption among his aides, mutiny among his troops, and recurrent uprisings of native rulers against the company. On August 12, 1765, he persuaded the helpless Mogul Shah Alam to give the company full financial control of the provinces of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, with a population of thirty million souls and an annual revenue of £4,000,000. This, and Clive’s victory at Plassey, created the British Empire in India.
His health shattered by two years of strife, Clive returned to England in January, 1767. The attack upon him by company directors was renewed, and was seconded by officials whose extortions he had checked. News of a great famine in India, and of native attacks upon company strongholds, shared in causing a panic in which prominent Englishmen suffered severe losses. In 1772 two parliamentary committees investigated Indian affairs, and revealed such exactions and cruelties that Horace Walpole cried out: “We have outdone the Spaniards in Peru! We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped. Nay, what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of provisions by the servants of the East India Company?”121 In 1773 one of the investigating committees called upon Clive to account to the House of Commons for his methods and gains in India. He admitted nearly all the facts, defended them as warranted by local customs and the necessities of the situation, and added that when the members came to judge of his honor they should not forget their own. The House voted, 155 to 95, that he had received £ 234,000 during his first administration of Bengal, but that he “did at the same time render great and meritorious services to his country.”122 A year later, aged forty-nine, Clive killed himself (November 22, 1774).
In 1773 Lord North put through Parliament a regulatory act that advanced a loan of £1,400,000 to the company to save it [and its parliamentary shareholders] from bankruptcy, and brought all company-ruled territory in India under the presidency of Bengal, which in turn would be responsible to the British government. Warren Hastings was appointed governor of Bengal.
He had risen to this position from lowly origins. His mother died in giving him birth; his father went off to adventure and death in the West Indies. An uncle sent the boy to Westminster School, but in 1749 the uncle died, and Warren, aged seventeen, sailed to seek fortune in India. He enrolled as a volunteer under Clive, shared in the recapture of Calcutta, showed diligence and ability in administration, and was appointed to the council governing company affairs in Bengal, in 1764 he returned to England. Four years later the directors persuaded him to join the Council of Madras. On his way to India he met Baron Imhof and his wife, Marion, who became Hastings’ mistress and then his wife. He did well in Madras, and in 1774 he began his turbulent rule as governor of Bengal.
He worked hard, but his methods were dictatorial, and some of his measures provided material for attacks upon him by Sir Philip Francis in the Bengal Council, as later by Burke in Parliament. When Maratha tribes restored Shah Alam to the Mogul throne at Delhi, and he made over to them those districts of Kora and Allahabad which Clive had assigned to him, Hastings sold the districts to the Nawab of Oudh for fifty lacs of rupes ($20,-000,000?), and assigned company troops to help the Nawab recover the region. He allowed the Nawab to use company troops to invade and appropriate the territory of Rohilkhand, whose chief (said the Nawab) owed him money; the company received a large sum for these soldiers. Hastings’ action clearly violated orders given him by the directors;123 however, those directors reckoned the worth of a governor by the money he sent back to England.
An Indian official, Nuncomar, accused Hastings of accepting a bribe. Francis and other councilors credited the charge, and alleged that there was “no species of peculation from which the Honorable Governor has thought it reasonable to abstain.”124 Nuncomar was arrested on a charge of forgery, was convicted, and was put to death (1775) Hastings was suspected of having influenced the chief justice, Sir Elijah Impey (formerly a fellow student at Winchester), to exact an unusually severe penalty. In 1780 Hastings promoted Impey to an additional post bringing £ 6,500 a year. Mutual recrimination between Hastings and Francis led to a duel in which Francis was seriously wounded.
Haidar Ali, maharajah of Mysore, thought the quarrels between Hastings and his council offered an opportunity for expelling the company from India. Supported by the French, he attacked company strongholds, and won some alarming victories (1780). Hastings sent troops and money from Bengal to oppose him; Haidar Ali died (1782), but his son Tipu Sahib carried on the war till his final defeat in 1792. Probably it was to finance these campaigns that Hastings resorted to money-raising schemes that led to his impeachment.
He demanded from Chait Singh, rajah of Benares, a war subsidy additional to the revenue which that district annually paid to the company. The Rajah pleaded inability to comply. Hastings led a small force to Benares (1781), deposed Chait Singh, and exacted double the revenue from Chait’s successor.—The Nawab of Oudh, remiss in his payments to the company, explained that he could make these payments if the company would help him compel his mother and grandmother, the begums (princesses) of Oudh, to release to him some of the £ 2,000,000 left them by the Nawab’s father. The mother had already yielded him a large sum on his promise to ask for no more; the company, over Hastings’ protest, made a like promise. Hastings advised the Nawab to ignore the promise. He sent company troops to Fyzabad; by torture and near-starvation they forced the eunuch servitors of the princesses to surrender the treasure (1781). Out of this the Nawab paid his dues to the company.125
Meanwhile Sir Philip Francis, having recovered from his wounds, returned to England (1781), and exp
ounded to the directors and to his friends in Parliament what he considered to be the crimes of Hastings. In 1782 the House of Commons censured Hastings and other company agents as having “in sundry instances acted in a manner repugnant to the honor and policy of the nation,” and ordered the directors to recall them. The directors issued such an order, but the Court of Proprietors countermanded it, probably because the Mysore revolt was continuing.
In November, 1783, Charles James Fox, as secretary of state for foreign affairs in the coalition ministry, offered Parliament an “India Reform Bill” that would have put the East India Company under control of commissioners appointed by the ministry. Critics moaned that the bill would give the Fox-Burke Whigs a rich well of patronage. It passed the House, but the King sent word to the Lords that he would consider as his enemy any man who voted for the measure; they voted against it, 95 to 76. The Commons filed a formal protest that this royal interference with legislation was a scandalous breach of parliamentary privilege. The King, claiming that the coalition ministry had lost the confidence of Parliament, dismissed it (December 18, 1783), and invited William Pitt, aged twenty-four, to form a new government. Believing that he could win a national election, George III dissolved the Parliament (March 23, 1784), and ordered his agents to spread the royal wishes and plums among the electorate to insure the return of a conservative majority. The Parliament that assembled on May 18 was overwhelmingly for Pitt and the King.
Pitt was a master of political administration and management. His meticulous devotion to his task, his detailed knowledge of affairs, his habit of careful reflection and prudent judgment gave him a superiority which nearly all his fellow ministers soon conceded. Now for the first time since Robert Walpole (for whom his son had used the term in 1773126), England had a “prime” minister, for no important action was taken by Pitt’s colleagues without his consent. In effect he established “cabinet government”—the assembled deliberation and united responsibility of the leading ministers under one leadership. Though Pitt had assumed office as favoring the royal authority, his hard work and wide information gradually raised him to a position where he guided rather than followed the King. After George Ill’s second seizure (1788) it was Pitt who ruled England.
