This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  By 1770 George III had been on the throne for ten years. He was thirty-two years old and his first decade as king had been one of political instability. He wanted to change the political system. He wanted to get back control of political patronage – the key to government.

  By the time George III came to the throne, the Whigs had broken into Old Whigs and New Whigs (although that’s not a term found in history books). The Old Whigs were the followers of Pitt, Grenville and Newcastle, while the New Whigs said the King was a tyrant, seeking more political control than was good for the country. They said he corrupted Parliament and ignored the views of the people. They claimed he was trying to return to the age of the Stuarts and absolute power.

  It was now that a stout, loud-voiced earl became Prime Minister. His name was Lord North and his task was to bring about political stability. Frederick North, Baron North and Earl of Guildford, was fat, thick-lipped and had bulging eyes. He had an apparently inexhaustible good humour and the knack of explaining in the simplest terms the most complex matters of national economics. From 1770 until 1782 he was Tory Prime Minister and so ended the Whig domination which had existed since the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Although the Tories had gone along with the 1688 Rebellion, which eventually got rid of James II, they had been seen as supporters of the Catholic Jacobite Pretenders to the throne.

  During Lord North’s twelve years, attempts were made to reform Parliament; Adam Smith published his great work, The Wealth of Nations; Jeremy Bentham published his Fragment on Government; and Joseph Priestley discovered and isolated oxygen. The actress Sarah Siddons appeared with David Garrick at Drury Lane and became the darling of theatregoers, and Gainsborough painted her. The Sunday School movement started; Britain lost the American War of Independence; and the first Derby was run at Epsom Racecourse.

  Lord North’s constituency, Banbury, was owned by his family and thus his family could say who would be MP: such an arrangement meant that it was an example of what was called a ‘pocket’ or ‘rotten’ borough. Although his ministerial career was prompted by family and friends, North was no political charlatan. He was a good debater and he had a sharp and amiable mind which could unravel tangled policy problems. The movement towards Parliamentary reform was partly prompted by growing mistrust of the very system which had made North an MP. In 1770, William Pitt (the Elder) proposed in the House of Lords an increase in County Members. Pitt had set out on his Parliamentary career by becoming the Member for Old Sarum, a family borough which was nothing more than a mound of earth in Wiltshire. He had sat for Seaford in Sussex and Aldborough in Yorkshire, both owned by the Duke of Newcastle. He’d also been the Member for Okehampton which was owned by his old school chum George Lyttleton. But the rottenness in the election system by bought or even non-existent (other than on paper) boroughs could not forever last. The constitutional integrity of the Parliamentary system resided in the metropolitan regions with their potentially important voters. The potential was there, but not for the moment. Curiously, the urge for reform was not simply in the hands of far-seeing political leaders. Certainly from the second half of the eighteenth century there was more evidence of change in the Churches and from those changes, mostly through evangelical movements, reform was demanded. It was a sense of social reform that extended from the very rights of mankind to the abolition of slavery movement to Parliamentary reform that would take place in that period leading to the end of the Hanoverians. Just three examples demonstrated this era of reforming movements: in 1807, the slave trade was banned by the British. In 1832 the first of the Parliamentary Reform Bills was passed. In 1833, slavery was abolished.

  In 1770, one person who most definitely did not want Parliamentary supremacy was George III. George demanded that Parliament took its cue from him, not from the nation. The way it worked was simple: the King handed out jobs, contracts, offices of State and fat pensions to those who did as they were told, in other words, those who voted for his policies. For those who didn’t there were punishments which included loss of pensions and jobs. There was nothing new in this; it was the centuries-old practice of royal patronage and, for the first twenty years of his reign, George III followed the path of Parliamentary, and official, corruption. Some of the great personalities of the age – almost every wit and radical, every stoic and pragmatist – stood on their feet in both Houses during George’s reign: the National Debt, taxes and a badly thought-through war inspired even the dullest Parliamentary speaker. However, that is not to say that Parliament was not still in the possession of the King and in Lord North, appointed in 1770, he now had a leader who would be the obedient agent of his business; in other words, His Majesty’s most loyal subject. George III held Parliament, the Cabinet and policy in his hand. His ambition was fulfilled. Effectively, the King was his own prime minister.

  However, although power was his, the blessing of all his people was not. The people had always looked to other heroes. Marlborough had been one. Clive of India was the most recent and when, in 1774, Clive committed suicide, there was doubt, conjecture, intrigue and even uneasiness throughout the land. There were stories that Clive had died from an apoplectic fit, or that he had taken an overdose of opium. But the truth seems to be that on 22 November 1774, he could stand the agonies of his ongoing stomach illness no longer and, as one observer has said, ‘In a paroxysm of agony, he thrust his penknife into his throat.’ Perhaps he had not been comforted by the accusations from home that he had diverted East India Company funds into his own pockets. The irony, of course, was that Clive was desperately needed by the Company to root out corruption at all levels. Indeed, Clive the reformer was perhaps more spectacular than Clive the general and his reforms were drastic. Their success prompted the Mogul Emperor to invite Clive to extend a British protectorate to Delhi and all northern India. This is a useful reminder that, at that time, British interests only covered Bengal. The reason was that when the East India Company established itself in India, Bengal became the capital of its trading interests. (The popular image of the British Raj is a nineteenth-century phenomenon.) So, in the 1760s, Clive had to decide whether to expand the Company administration or to stay put. To expand would require an enormous bureaucracy, complex communications and a ruthless army – and it would have been a Company army, not a British army. So he refused the Mogul’s request. The princes would have liked the British to run much of India but the British were fighting the Seven Years War against the French, and had insufficient interest and certainly neither the manpower nor the organization to take over from the Company.

  In fact, Clive was far from certain that the Company could any longer run its own business in India and he had suggested to Pitt that the government should take it over. The British government refused and continued to refuse until the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857. In 1767, when he returned to England, it was so evident that Clive had done well out of India that he was accused of doing too well. Just as an earlier British hero, Marlborough, had been accused of lining his pockets, so Clive was now subject to the same accusations. Clive mounted a counter-offensive as bold as any skirmish he’d led or organized in India. And he reminded Parliament that after the horror of the Black Hole of Calcutta, it was he, Robert Clive, who had defeated Siraj-ud-daula, the man the British held responsible, at the Battle of Plassey. By the end of a Parliamentary committee’s interrogation, it was clear to everyone that although he had received great gifts and had made a minor fortune, his profits were never so great as rumour would have wished. The Commons passed a motion declaring that Clive had ‘rendered great and meritorious services’ and that as far as Parliament was concerned, the matter was done with. Yet it is doubtful if Clive properly recovered from his inner torments.

  Similar torments to be faced by his successor in India, Warren Hastings (1732–1818). Hastings came from a wealthy Worcestershire family that had fallen on hard times. The family home, Daylesford, had been sold many years earlier and Hastings intended to make his fortune and buy it back. At the age of
sixteen he went to India, like Clive, to be a clerk in the English East India Company. Eleven years later he had risen to be a member of the Bengal Council and, after a four year interval in England, became a member of the Madras Council in 1768.

  In theory, all should have been well in the coffers of the Company but by 1770, it was close to bankruptcy. North went to Parliament in 1773 with his Regulating Act, which left all the commercial operations of the East India Company in the hands of its Directors, but the government of Bengal was to be administered by a governor general and a four-man council, and Britain was to appoint a justice of the Supreme Court. Seemingly it was inevitable that with his success, Warren Hastings was made the first Governor General, with a salary of £25,000 a year. Hastings achieved a great deal and laid the groundwork for what became the British Raj. He also gathered terrible enemies of his own side. He quarrelled with his own Council, appointed not by him but by London. One of the members, who had hopes for governorship, fought a duel with him. Hastings was also accused of making the mistake of confirming Maharaja Nandakumar’s sentence of hanging for forgery. When Hastings went back to England in 1785, it was to face up to allegations that he was a bad and partial ruler and was corrupt. His opponents were formidable – Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Edmund Burke. That trial went on for seven years. In the end, Hastings was acquitted. And in spite of the cost of defending himself, there was still enough left to realize his ambition. He bought back the family home, Daylesford. By this time at Westminster there was growing support for the proper governing of India. Hastings, certainly no saint, had gone a long way to lessen the corruption and maladministration that had been the Company’s way in India. He had effectively laid the ground rules for what became the Indian Civil Service. Above all, he had preserved British rule of one empire while the wise Councils of Westminster had managed to lose another in America.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  1770–81

  The Boston Tea Party did not start the American War of Independence, but it did inflame an already sore relationship between Britain and her colonial interests in America, which had come to the boil under Grenville’s premiership of the 1760s. At the time there were thirteen colonies in America. Parliament declared that Britain had a right to tax those colonies because they were subjects of the Crown just as much as any county in England. But most, although not all, British taxpayers were represented in Parliament. No colonist was, and so their argument was based upon ‘Taxation without representation’. Even Pitt the Elder had argued in the Commons that Britain had no right to tax the colonies because, although they were supposedly subjects of the Crown, they were not represented in Parliament.

  The cost of the colonies and the lack of money to pay for them was a constant factor in assessing the British Empire. For example, after the war with France the National Debt was about £150 million and the interest on that sum was more than £4.5 million a year. Nothing after the war occurred to ease the debt problem, which meant the prosperity of the nation was in doubt. The huge benefits of reconstructed finances plus those which came from the highlights of the Industrial Revolution were still to come. Although the figures may not impress in the twenty-first century, seen in context of government spending the price of having colonies was prohibitive in the 1760s.

  For example, the cost of running the government was estimated at some £10 million. Within that figure, the bill for the colonies – mainly keeping the troops to protect them – was £350,000 a year, a considerable percentage of the total. Prime Minister Grenville may have been uncertain how to meet these costs, which were over and above those incurred by the commercial investors, but he was sure that his only source of income would be, at the very least, maintaining taxes and in some ways introducing new ones. The accounting system made it very difficult to know what benefits the taxpayer got from the import/export trade between the West Indies and the North American colonies. Should people in Britain foot the bill for defending those colonies that were not protected by company militia? In 1765 Grenville’s arithmetic suggested that if he imposed so-called stamp duties on the American and West Indian settlements he might raise as much as 15 per cent of the overall administrative costs.

  We should not see this tax-raising proposal in the same way as budgets are presented today. There was no threshold for tax-paying nor was this income tax as we know it. That was not introduced until 1799 by William Pitt the Younger to help finance the war against France. That rate was two shillings (10p) in the pound. Grenville’s tax would come from the rich through their businesses. The stamp duty would be imposed as a percentage of the value of, for example, contracts, licences and even playing cards. This was already a feature of the British tax system. Grenville accepted that people in Britain would be extremely unhappy to pay for the colonies. The colonists would surely see that it was only fair that they should make a contribution to their own administration and defence because by paying for security, stability would be guaranteed and that would allow them to be protected and go on to make more money for themselves and a better way of life. The logic of this escaped the colonists who were independently minded, saw the Governor and his administration as a wasteful extravagance of the Crown and believed that Grenville’s proposal was nothing more than a method of getting yet more money out of the colonists who got very little in return. They demanded rights by being British, even though they paid no more than 1 per cent of the taxes. They accepted that the Crown had a right to tax, but only in general terms. The colonists said that any specific taxes had to be endorsed and then ratified by their assemblies. Moreover, when, in 1765, Grenville introduced stamp duties, colonists understood that by combining in opposition to the taxes, they would make them uncollectable.

  The opposition to paying more tax began in Virginia and in the autumn of 1765 there was general disorder throughout the colonies. Some of the colonists rioted simply because of the financial effect the stamp duty would have on everyday life; some were inflamed by the lack of representation in the far-away Parliament; but some frontiersmen were riled by any interference from a land, its State and established Church, that they had sought to escape. The Stamp Act provided a means of focusing their joint efforts. Thus in October 1765, the thirteen colonies agreed a plan for opposition to the new taxes and even an outline to boycott British goods. Imagine the consternation in London where the trade balance was an essential element in the government’s economic plan for the North American colonies. By that October, Grenville had gone from office.

  The new First Lord of the Treasury was the Marquess of Rockingham, who disliked the idea of a stamp duty. It was not a simple task to repeal the Act. To do so would have financial implications, although if the tax could not be collected and the consequences of the opposition to them unacceptable, they indeed had to go. An equally important conundrum for Rockingham was protection of the monarch’s dignity. George III had approved the Stamp Act. The balance had to be a repeal of the Act and, at the same time, an assertion of the Crown’s authority.

  So in March 1766, exactly twelve months after stamp duties had been introduced by Grenville, Rockingham’s administration abolished them. The face saver was the Declaratory Act. In February, in the Lords, Augustus FitzRoy, the Duke of Grafton (who would soon be Prime Minister and who was said to have a more conciliatory attitude towards America) had proposed a motion which insisted that Parliament did indeed have the authority to bind the colonies to any laws. On 10 February 1766, Lord Mansfield got to his feet in that debate to express two propositions about the relationship between Parliament and Empire:

  First, That, the British legislature, as to the power of making laws, represents the whole British Empire, and has the authority to bind every part and every subject without the least distinction, whether such subjects have a right to vote or not, or whether the law binds places within the realm or without.

  Second, That the colonists, by the condition on which they migrated, settled and now exist, are more emphatically
subjects of Great Britain than those within the realm; and that the British legislature have in every instance exercised their right of legislation over them without any dispute or question till the fourteenth of January last . . . In every government the legislative power must be lodged somewhere, and the executive must likewise be lodged somewhere. In Great Britain the legislative is in Parliament, the executive in the Crown . . . When the Supreme Power abdicates, the Government is dissolved. Take care my Lords, you do not abdicate your authority. In such an event, your Lordships would leave the worthy and innocent, as well as the unworthy and guilty, to the same confusion and ruin.

  Power, Supreme or otherwise, had decreed that the taxation of Americans was legitimate and the consequences understood. Benjamin Franklin, who then lived in London, made his view known that Parliament should restrict its colonial law-making to mercantile issues. It was a debate that would last ten years.

  During the next few years, the American colonists lived in uneasy state with the British government. When confrontation came, it demonstrated that no part of the worldwide empire could be seen in isolation.

  In every school textbook of British history there used to be a scene of the Boston Tea Party. Colonists dumped tea into the harbour, thus creating the brew that would begin the war between Britain and the thirteen states of America. Like all over-simplifications there is an element of truth. With that truth came the connection between one part of the Empire and another. What was going on in India had an effect on what would take place in America.

  In one hemisphere were the sometimes disparate colonists of the North American continent; in another was the well-established East India Company. The government in London tried to force the American colonists to import cheap East India Company tea because the Company was suffering hard times. That really is the basis of the Tea Act which caused the trouble; how did all this come about and if it could have been avoided, would America have remained British?