During the Seven Years’ War France tried to invade Britain; Britain lost Minorca (which resulted in the execution of a British Admiral by the name of Byng), but won Martinique, St Lucia, St Vincent, Grenada, Tobago, Havana and Manila (some of which was given back to the French and Spanish). The Black Hole of Calcutta became an infamous entry in British colonial history and General Wolfe died famously at Quebec. But most significantly, this war was the first world war and the beginning of the British Empire.
And so everything should have pointed to a successful period in British government but it was not. The Duke of Cumberland (or the Butcher as he was known after the Battle of Culloden) was no strategist, and the Duke of Newcastle, now Prime Minister, at least nominally, demonstrated expected incompetence. This opened the way for William Pitt the Elder who, although not Prime Minister, became Britain’s war leader, an early day Churchill, c.1940–45. Pitt’s opportunity to lead came through what twenty-first-century Britons might think a preposterous incident.
Britain lost one of her possessions – Minorca. The Spanish had owned Minorca but handed it to Britain (along with Gibraltar) as part of the War of Spanish Succession reparations under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. Minorca was a symbol of British military virility and the feelings of the British at the time were similar to the feelings that would have erupted in Britain more than 200 years later if the Task Force Commander had backed away from trying to retake the Falkland Islands after the Argentinian invasion. On the occasion of the loss of Minorca, Admiral John Byng (1704–57) failed to relieve the British garrison on Minorca. He was tried for cowardice, which was a nonsensical claim by the disgraced British government, and shot on his own quarterdeck. In April 1756, Byng had been sent to relieve the English garrison at Fort St Michael, which was then besieged by the French army commanded by the Duc de Richelieu. Byng’s fleet was not in best condition and the Admiral himself had a reputation as a commander who could find reasons why a mission was far more difficult than his instructions suggested. But in the case of relieving Minorca, he may well have been correct. He engaged the French fleet, but little came of it and the siege went on. Byng then left the region without landing British reinforcements and without blockading the French logistics line between Toulon and Minorca.
In the British fleet, as well as in Parliament, there was a sense of hopelessness and injustice. News, claim and counter-claim took days, often weeks, to reach home. So by the time the report of the loss of Minorca reached London the chattering crowds, the superior officers who had kept back ships and, most of all, the King all wanted the head of the man who had failed to bring them Minorca.
This incident in the Seven Years’ War is hardly discussed today, but in the mid-eighteenth century it was celebrated in long articles in the growing numbers of newspapers and journals. And one of the most telling quotes of the Byng affair remains common currency. It comes from Voltaire in his novel Candide: ‘Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres’ (In this country it is thought well to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others).
A scapegoat was needed and so Byng was shot. But the incident, and the other inefficiencies of this war, reinforced the fact that no matter how much the King disliked William Pitt, he needed this man who was capable of marshalling the people, the military, Parliament and government if the wider war, the coming world war, was to be won. The people wanted Pitt and so they had him.
In 1757, Pitt introduced a Militia Act which laid down who would be called up, who would be trained, for how long and when. It was a system that lasted until the twentieth century and the introduction of the Territorial Army of 1917. For the first time, the militia would be raised by ballot. This meant that almost anyone, rich or poor, would be trained, county by county; would be subject to the Mutiny Act; and would, in theory at least, be the Home Guard or the second line of defence against invasion – and this is important – or any rebellion in Britain.
Pitt’s attention now turned to America. Lord Loudoun had command of the British forces in North America but he wasn’t much good at it; his planning was bad, he had poor tactical vision and he had unrealistic expectations. So he was replaced by General James Abercromby. And Pitt, who was wise enough to bring the colonial governors into his confidence, wrote to those of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey and New York. He had a plan: he was going to invade Canada and this would be the start of a campaign which, although not immediately successful, led, eighteen months later, to the conquering of Quebec and, more famously, the death of General James Wolfe and the beginnings of Canada as part of a British Empire.
Pitt wanted to attack on three fronts. It was an ambitious plan. The first thrust would be the St Lawrence River, Louisburg and Quebec; the second through Ticonderoga and the Great Lakes; and the third into Ohio. Louisburg fell in the summer of 1758 and Fort Duquesne in the November. (Incidentally Fort Duquesne was soon renamed Pittsburgh.) By 1758, the tide of war was beginning to turn. A central policy of this war was to keep the enemy – that is, France – occupied. One way to achieve this was to subsidize the Prussian war effort in order to make them more enthusiastic about taking on the French. This allowed British forces to attack the French in India and North America, knowing that the enemy would be stretched on more than one front. It also allowed the Royal Navy to raid the French coast, thereby stretching the French resources even further. However, these ideas, which looked good on paper, weren’t always successful.
Many of the British Americans were by now second, third and fourth generation Americans. The reasons they left Britain are well-documented: poverty, disillusion, adventure and opportunity. The circumstances of life in America were little understood in the Royal Closet and in the halls of Kensington, Westminster and Whitehall. The efforts of British commanders in America had never been impressive, and there was little real reason for these people not to be united against the government of Britain. America was more than 3,000 miles away and no British leader had ever been asked to execute a war over such vast distances. And, as the Romans had found, the more roads their legions marched along, the more vulnerable they became. Pitt understood this, especially with regard to America. Years later, in his last speech to the House of Commons, he would plead for an understanding of the colonists. But he would be ignored.
And as Jeffrey Amherst and James Wolfe prepared their battle plans in Canada, Britain was only twenty years away from a war that would result in American independence. In 1759 Wolfe was dead, killed taking the Heights of Abraham. He was a casualty of victory. Such fickleness turns on a single moment. Wolfe’s death provided a hero. The King’s death would provide a political conundrum. In the autumn of 1760 George II, the last man who could keep Pitt in power, died. He was seventy-seven and, for the thirty-three years of his reign, Britain had flourished. As much as George disliked Pitt, he had learned to trust his abilities. And he recognized the wisdom of supporting the combination of Newcastle managing the finances with Pitt managing the war, a war in which Pitt had gained Canada and with it the assurance that France would not rule from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico. Political leaders who insist that victories do not remove dangers of war have never had much of a hearing in any century, including the twenty-first. Pitt was no exception and on 5 October 1760 he resigned.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
1760–68
During the three decades of George II’s reign the system of constitutional monarchy was established: the monarch no longer reigned by Divine Right. There were rules of succession and the powers of the monarch, although still considerable, were governed by political expediency. The monarch needed the Prime Minister; the Prime Minister needed the monarch; both needed Parliament.
Into this, now established, system came the twenty-two-year-old George III, in 1760. He was George II’s grandson, the son of Frederick, the Prince of Wales who died. The third Earl Waldegrave observed the young George shortly before he became Ki
ng and remarked that it would be unfair to decide upon his character in the early stages of his life. But he observed that there was room for improvement. George III was not bright, perhaps even a little backward. He was nevertheless seen as a conscientious man with ideas (not always his own). Mostly he relied on John Stuart Bute (1713–92), the Earl of Bute, for his political education. Bute had joined the royal circle during a downpour at Egham racecourse. The rain had driven the then heir to the throne, Frederick, Prince of Wales, into a sporting marquee. The Prince’s party needed a fourth at cards; Bute was their man, and from that moment he became an intimate member of Frederick’s set. When the Prince died Bute befriended his widow, Princess Augusta. In fact, it was thought they became very close friends indeed. Bute became indispensable to Prince George – the future King. He was a father figure and the new King George relied on him.
Pitt, on the other hand, although not Prime Minister, was the most powerful politician in the land – but not at court, and it was at this point that he found himself isolated. The Seven Years War trundled on. Britain’s successes against the French in India, in North America and its support for Frederick the Great of Prussia had brought victories and commercial dividends. Now there was, to Pitt and Newcastle, the Prime Minister, a case for declaring war against Spain. The Cabinet said no and Pitt resigned. The Duke of Newcastle was not much good without Pitt, and Bute – a man with no political, only courtly, experience – became Prime Minister in 1762. He would not last. He was not a great political plotter or manipulator.
Inside three months of Pitt’s going, Britain was at war once more with Spain. It was not a disastrous affair for the British. They captured Havana and Manila, and could then say they had toeholds throughout the northern world. From such a strong point, in 1763, it seemed the time was right to sign a peace treaty with France. Pitt’s reading of history suggested to him that there was a danger, a very real one, of concluding not a peace treaty, but a truce. In other words, he felt that unless France was hobbled and not allowed to regain its possessions, regroup its resources and then its forces, a new war between the two nations would come soon. But Pitt was no longer in command. Bute really had little perception of what he was getting into yet, in spite of Pitt’s cries of anger from the sidelines, Britain was achieving the formality of treaty rather than truce that she craved. True, Britain formally now had Canada, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Grenada, St Vincent, Dominica, Tobago and, from the Spanish, Florida. But in return, Britain gave France the lucrative sugar island of Guadeloupe, Martinique and St Lucia. Such a prize was Guadeloupe that at one stage the British thought it might be worth letting the French have Canada instead. The worst part of the treaty for Britain was the giving away of fishing rights that were even in those years considered to be worth £1 million a year.
The British public were less than impressed and the terms of the Paris Treaty, together with new and unpopular taxes in the spring of 1763, brought about mob protests on the streets of England and newspaper articles condemned the government and Bute in particular. Bute was not a political pugilist and within weeks he was heading for a nervous breakdown. He resigned and the new chief minister, the new First Lord of the Treasury, was George Grenville (1712–70), William Pitt’s brother-in-law. But the King still regarded Bute as his Prime Minister. So, effectively, there were two Prime Ministers: Grenville and, behind the curtain, the Earl of Bute.
Bute was, and remained, George’s mentor, his father confessor, his ‘dearest friend’, and although Grenville might have become a fine office manager for Britain, he was no managing director. He was an isolationist. And he had an ambition to reduce the tax burden. He did so by making the British Americans pay more. In doing so, and in doing so diligently, Grenville may perhaps be accused of hastening the American War of Independence.
The administration of Britain was going through the agony of the King’s dislike and mistrust of his Prime Minister, of the Prime Minister’s mistrust of the King, and of Parliament’s mistrust of both. As Dr Johnson remarked, ‘Most schemes of political improvement are laughable things’. Bute was a laughable character by now whose effigy was burned in the streets. And the fire-raisers could have burned effigies of any number of public figures at the time. In the early 1760s the seven million or so people of England and Wales knew that the ruling society was as corrupt as it was thoughtful even if some of the practices were not seen as unusual at the time. For example, the buying and selling of votes and seats was commonly practised; few thought that wrong. It was simply the system. After all, here was a society that had only very recently decided that witchcraft wasn’t a crime; a society that treated its poor as outcasts, commonly practised religious and racial bigotry, still accepted slavery without question (the Slave Trade Act did not come until 1807 and Abolishment not until 1833) and treated backhanders and bribes as a way of everyday life and office. For years, the engravings of Hogarth and others, and the writings of many, had shown how badly, at least by twenty-first-century standards, children were treated at this time. And although Defoe talks of five-year-olds working at machinery, and praises this as good, industrious order, Jonas Hanway, in 1766, wrote in a pamphlet, ‘An Earnest Appeal for Mercy to the Children of the Poor’:
Never shall I forget the evidence given at Guildhall, upon occasion of a master of a workhouse of a large parish, who was challenged for forcing a child from the breast of a mother, and sending it to the Foundling Hospital. He alleged this in his defence, ‘We send all our children to the Foundling Hospital; we have not saved one alive for fourteen years.’
Jonas Hanway wanted an Act of Parliament that would make London parishes and poor children under the age of six in the country to be nursed. Hanway was not much interested in the Englishness of the infants, only that 47 per cent died before the age of two.
While social pleading depended on debate and Parliament’s whim, the industrial upheaval brought added miseries. Take, for example, the plight of hand spinners. In 1765 James Hargreaves, a carpenter and weaver, produced his most famous invention and named it after his wife. It was to be called the spinning-jenny. By using eight spindles driven by a great wheel, Hargreaves revolutionized the methods of the textile industry. And just like those who, 200 years on, viewed automation with dismay, the spinners understood perfectly that their livelihoods would never be the same again. This era was the beginning of what is now called the Industrial Revolution. And inventiveness was not confined to the industrial drawing board: musicians, writers, painters and diarists were prolific, and to be found at every coffee house, salon and studio. Among them were Thomas Sheridan and then his son, Richard, Thomas Tyrwhitt, Joshua Reynolds, Tobias Smollett, James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne and Oliver Goldsmith.
Smollett published Peregrine Pickle and Sir Launcelot Greaves and then he decided to produce a political magazine. Smollett’s The Briton was in direct opposition to John Wilkes’s North Briton. Where Wilkes lambasted the King’s closest friend and political mentor, the Earl of Bute, Smollett supported Bute. But it was neither a well-produced journal nor a popular cause and The Briton folded. It was Laurence Sterne who called Smollett ‘Smelfungus’, and it was now Sterne who achieved a great following through his volumes of Tristram Shandy.
But Sterne, like many of his time, was a moralist. Horace Walpole said that the sermon in the third volume of Tristram Shandy was the best part of the novel and Voltaire regarded it as required reading. Perhaps William Pitt thought so, too – the first two volumes were dedicated to him. Another Irishman (Sterne was born in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary), Oliver Goldsmith, became a friend of Samuel Johnson. It was Johnson who sold the manuscript of The Vicar of Wakefield for Goldsmith. Johnson got £60 for it and probably saved Goldsmith from the debtors’ prison.
But for the King there was a more complicated book balancing to be performed: the sombre business of balancing his own ambitions for government with the reality of eighteenth-century politics was uppermost. Grenville was Prime Minister, with George
Montagu, Earl of Halifax, and Charles Wyndham, Earl of Egremont, as the two senior secretaries of state. When, after Egremont’s death, the King tried to persuade Pitt to become Prime Minister, Pitt said no. Two years later, George III tried once more but the result was the same and Grenville felt himself more secure in office, to the extent that he threatened to resign unless the King agreed to get rid of a number of Bute’s admirers. He was challenging the monarch, telling him there could not be two governments of Britain. Most distinctly, he was saying that the King could not have two Prime Ministers. And, for the time being, Grenville won.
Grenville was dedicated to the good of the nation even if he was unimaginative. He was a diligent economist and the arch tax collector of the eighteenth century. By 1765 the Grenville administration had angered the colonists by limiting by law their westward expansion in North America. Now there was to be a new tax – the Stamp Tax – and it would be remembered as one of the main catalysts for the American War of Independence, of which more later. Grenville had not worked out the consequences of the tax and by the summer of 1765 he was gone. His successor, Charles Watson-Wentworth, the Marquess of Rockingham, whose secretary was Edmund Burke, who was to become one of the most influential thinkers in eighteenth-century political history. Rockingham’s administration was not really to the King’s liking. Not much was, especially when he was in puritanical and preachy mood. Consequently, this was not a happy period for the King. There was already a talk of war with the American colonies.
Rockingham perceived the need for a change in Whig politics. He believed in a proper party programme of government, one that would be supported by a wider electorate, especially among traders. He saw the need for a group that would act on party principle rather than simply do anything to stay in power. And in this the beginnings of a system of party politics – not just the parties themselves – began to change the climate. One of the longer term victims of party politics would be the monarch’s role in government. But let us not put down too many plaudits at Rockingham’s political feet.
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