by Nick Bunker
Like the Mississippi valley, the Windward Islands harbored a community of French settlers, all of whom were Roman Catholic. Accustomed to coexisting with Catholics in Northern Ireland—he found the Presbyterians far more difficult—Hillsborough wished to give the French inhabitants seats in the Grenada assembly as a way to retain their obedience. The idea horrified the British on the island, who flatly refused to cooperate with London and allow the Pope’s children to participate in government. What was worse, the economy had faltered as well. On Grenada, Tobago, and Dominica, the speculators who bought old French estates had mortgaged themselves to the hilt. As the financial crisis began to bite in 1772 in London and Amsterdam, the new plantation owners found it impossible to pay for more slaves or the supplies they needed from the mainland; and some defaulted on money they still owed the government.
In the face of so much trouble in their western dominions, the British needed a farsighted statesman to set priorities and lay down a clear strategy for the future. For all his virtues, Lord Dartmouth could not rise to that particular challenge; but even a politician of genius might have found the task beyond his powers. To heal a failing organization, a manager requires reliable information, and in 1772 the British did not have it. John Pownall and his colleagues could rarely trust the American messages that they received. True, they had General Gage, who always seemed convincing, in letters concise and beautifully written. But if the dispatches came from the royal governors in each mainland colony, sometimes they were worse than useless.
For all the detail they contained, the governors never quite got to the point. In fact, sometimes their communications were deeply misleading, because the men who wrote them had too many private interests and selfish preoccupations. “You can never manage America well, without having good governors,” wrote a wise friend of Lord Dartmouth’s, warning him about the trials he would face in office. The information the British received was only as good as the men who sent it, and they were very mixed.8
Although the file of letters from Governor Hutchinson in Boston was always full to bursting with reports of naughty goings-on, it failed to convey an objective appraisal of public opinion in the Bay Colony. As Pownall already knew, and as Dartmouth would soon learn, although Thomas Hutchinson was highly intelligent, he could also be arrogant, indiscreet, and confrontational. And although he cared deeply about the fate of Massachusetts and the empire, he worried still more about his family, and in particular about his sons, who needed help with their careers. He pursued their material interests with, as we shall see, disastrous consequences. Although Hutchinson was ultra-loyal, the British could not trust him: a lethal paradox.
Much the same was true of his opposite number in New York, Governor William Tryon, an even less disinterested public servant. Firm and effective when it came to hanging farmers who led an uprising in North Carolina, he was nonetheless a dupe of his own vanity. To the outrage of the king, Tryon devoted his time in New York to amassing real estate, awarding great slices of public land to himself and his friends. Strategically, his province was essential—in the Revolutionary War, the Hudson valley held the key to North America—but it was also politically divided, and its internal affairs especially hard to understand. But Tryon’s dispatches amounted to nothing more than long screeds of self-justification, devoid of the cool analysis that Lord Dartmouth required.
As for the other colonies, some rarely sent dispatches at all: freethinking Connecticut and Rhode Island, of course, but also Maryland, where, unknown to the British, the tobacco farmers were some of the first Americans to think of taking up arms against them. The Maryland file was almost empty. But in Virginia the void of information was most damaging of all. In Lord Dunmore, a Scottish nobleman, the British had chosen a governor keen to see the province expand across the Appalachians. His letters dealt chiefly with Indian affairs. He had no inkling that the tobacco planters of the Old Dominion might, in due course, become perhaps the most fearsome rebels of all. “In the progress of our business, the greatest harmony and most perfect good temper have subsisted, between the different branches of the legislature,” Dunmore wrote, just before the Gaspée incident, speaking about the colonial assembly in Williamsburg. The governor failed to detect the unrest that already existed in the South as well as in New England. Almost until the last moment before the revolution began, he believed that however outspoken Virginia might be, it would never desert the Crown.9
To be fair to John Pownall and his staff in the Colonial Department, they were all too aware of the limits of their knowledge. For all the reams of paper they received, some of the most basic facts eluded them. They did not know how many people lived in America, how swiftly the colonies were growing, or how large a militia each one could put into the field. Without data such as these, it was impossible to tell how serious the threat of independence really was. A year after taking office, Dartmouth sent a long questionnaire to each American governor, itemized under twenty-two headings, asking about his population, revenues, system of government, and much else. The first question, intended to help resolve boundary disputes, was this: where is your colony? Some of the governors never replied at all. By the time the answers came back from those who did, the revolution had already started.10
As the crisis approached, the authorities in London fell even further behind the curve. In Boston, Thomas Hutchinson could see that this was so and he felt the same frustration that afflicted William Knox. For Hutchinson, therefore, the news of the Gaspée’s destruction was scarcely unwelcome. Perhaps the British would at last shake off their lethargy and act decisively in New England. There were men in Whitehall who agreed, but the official response turned out to be ill-judged and impractical.
THE KING’S FIRM RESOLUTION
Something must be done about Rhode Island, said Lord Rochford on August 15, the day after Dartmouth took up his new post. He used the weary, peevish tone that he always employed about America, but in the next sentence he admitted that he had no solution to offer. The hard line recommended by Lord Hillsborough struck him as unrealistic. The civil servants Knox and Pownall also wanted firm reprisals, but Rochford took them with a pinch of salt. Their advice had been poor in the past. Instead, he preferred to act cautiously against the Gaspée raiders, even when the lawyers branded them traitors guilty of treason.
Throughout the American crisis, the British cabinet asked for legal advice about every decision they made. Invited to give his opinion, the attorney general, Edward Thurlow, quickly confirmed that burning the schooner was an act of war against the king. He called that treason plain and simple. Off the record, he added a rider: the culprits, he said, committed a felony five times worse than the riots against the Stamp Act. But while the law was one thing, the realities of power were quite another. If the men who destroyed the Gaspée were publicly deemed to be traitors, then Great Britain had to bring them to trial and hang them, and this was what made Lord Rochford so nervous. In the summer of 1772, the British dared not provoke a confrontation in America from which they might emerge as the loser.11
Knowingly or not, John Brown had chosen an excellent time for his private rebellion. The politics of Europe were entering a fraught and alarming phase, with Great Britain cast in the role of a spectator. In the first week of August, the Russians and their allies in Berlin had finally sent their soldiers into Poland to divide that unhappy country between themselves and Austria. France, it was thought, would come to the aid of the Poles, sending its navy to threaten the Russians in the north or in the Mediterranean, where Catherine the Great had placed a squadron of her own. Ominous rumors arrived in London, saying that the French were arming their ships for war; and then, a few weeks later, a still more alarming report of a coup d’état in Sweden. With backing from Paris, or so it was alleged, the young king Gustav had seized control of his country, doing away with his own parliament in Stockholm. This was something Russia would not accept, but if it replied in kind, using force against the Swedes, the British could not stand
idly by. In practice it was too expensive to import the bulk of Britain’s naval stores from America, and so instead the navy relied on the Baltic for its supplies of masts, rope, and tar. A nation built on its power at sea, Great Britain might not survive the loss of the region, whether to France or St. Petersburg.
And so, fearing that they might be sucked into a war in Europe, the cabinet had no choice but to listen to Rochford and act with restraint in Rhode Island. As a parting shot before he left office, Hillsborough tried to force their hand by writing directly to Montagu, telling him to detain anybody he suspected of taking part in the Gaspée raid, but this the admiral simply could not do: the law did not permit the military to arrest civilians on land without a warrant from a judge. When Lord North assembled the cabinet on August 20, they had to begin by recalling Hillsborough’s letter. And then they took the first of the long chain of decisions that led to the war; but they did so in the belief that they were being calm and unprovocative.
The legal opinion from Thurlow dealt not only with the nature of the offense, but also with the venue for a trial. No one in Whitehall trusted a jury in America to convict their fellow countrymen of crimes against the king. Witnesses would lie, if they testified at all, and the jurors would be intimidated into making an acquittal. The evidence of that was plain to see in the dispatches that arrived that year. Happily, however, the attorney general confirmed that an English court could try and hang the Gaspée raiders, and the cabinet gratefully took a piece of advice supported by what seemed to be the best authorities. Because it was a rare and special felony, a case of treason in Great Britain usually came for trial to Westminster Hall to be heard by the Court of King’s Bench. This was what had happened after the 1745 rebellion, and why should the Gaspée raiders be treated any differently? Although King’s Bench rarely tried a colonial defendant, it certainly had the power to do so if an impartial jury could not be found near the scene of the crime. A judge in Westminster could send his writ anywhere in the empire if justice and the king required it. If this were not so, how could the Crown and Parliament be sovereign? The empire would not be an empire if the royal judges could not enforce the law throughout the king’s dominions.12
Far more than merely legal subtleties, these questions went to the very heart of the divisions between the mother country and its colonies. By this time, the political debate in North America had far outgrown the narrow subject of taxation. Could the British be trusted to preserve any of the civil liberties the colonies had come to cherish? Or did they mean to do away with them all, including the right to due process of law? If this were so, Americans would have no alternative but the pursuit of independence; a chain of reasoning which, by the end of 1772, had come to seem compelling, in the light of the British response to the Gaspée incident. By choosing to bring the raiders home for trial—always assuming that they could be caught—North and his colleagues took these questions out of the realm of theory and made them topics for urgent, practical discussion in America.
In the colonies, it was universally agreed that justice required a trial by a jury made up of one’s peers, which could only mean men from the same town or county. It would be a flagrant breach of civil liberties to ship a suspect away to face a hostile English court, packed with loyal supporters of King George. And so, when the newspapers in America revealed that the British intended to do precisely that, the story caused outrage, especially in Virginia, where the news put an end to the peace and quiet that Lord Dunmore had described with such complacency. Two years later, when Thomas Jefferson wrote his first verbal assault against the British, he listed this aspect of their reaction to the Gaspée affair among the worst examples of imperial oppression.*1
Did the cabinet know how much trouble they might cause? Almost certainly not. At the meeting on August 20, the use of force was mentioned only in passing, and no one suggested revoking Rhode Island’s charter. Instead they tried to make the Americans take responsibility for pursuing the traitors. Acting cautiously, or so they thought, the cabinet chose to appoint a commission of inquiry, led by Governor Wanton and composed of the senior judges from Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. Nobody would be arrested until the commission in Newport heard all the evidence the navy had gathered about the Gaspée’s destruction.
Off went John Pownall to draw up a dispatch to Rhode Island for Dartmouth to sign; but here again the British miscalculated. By the time the letter was ready, two weeks later, another report had arrived from Admiral Montagu, pointing the finger at the Browns of Providence. And so, when the dispatch left England in the middle of September 1772, it was couched in a tone of uncompromising harshness. It was, wrote Dartmouth, “his Majesty’s firm resolution” to punish the guilty men with the utmost severity. Worse still, the dispatch contained a threat to send the redcoats into Rhode Island to suppress any riots that might follow an attempt to arrest the raiders.13
Knowing little about the internal workings of Rhode Island, the inexperienced Lord Dartmouth meant the letter to be private, as though Joseph Wanton were a royal appointee. Once again, a gulf of ignorance divided the two nations. A man elected to his post, a close friend of Stephen Hopkins’s and a partner of the Browns, Wanton could not possibly keep the letter confidential. It appeared in print for every American to read and inflamed the situation still further. By the end of the year Britain’s clumsy response to the Gaspée affair had backfired and helped to create the atmosphere of deep distrust that produced the Boston Tea Party.
This blunder about the dispatch was one of many errors that Lord Dartmouth would commit. But Americans, including Benjamin Franklin, made their own mistakes that were equally damaging. They began by misreading Dartmouth’s character. Franklin once called him “a truly good man,” and so he was. William Legge had some detractors, but he made no lasting enemies. When the king asked a Scottish visitor his opinion, he called Lord Dartmouth agreeable, enchanting, and a perfect Christian. On both sides of the Atlantic, it was widely expected that he would take the path of reconciliation with the colonies. His appointment, it was thought, might signify a change of tack and lead to policies intended to bring about a lasting settlement of American grievances. This proved to be a sad illusion.14
Lord Dartmouth’s benevolence is not in doubt. When a clergyman friend lay dying, he nursed the invalid with ass’s milk, and he always gave money freely to support those in distress. The outbreak of the war left him heartbroken. When Dartmouth learned of Britain’s Pyrrhic victory at the battle of Bunker Hill, all he could do was mourn what he called “the melancholy loss” of so many officers and men. But for all his piety and kindness, he too retained a core of damaging conservatism.
In order to prevent the final rift with America, Dartmouth would have had to break with his colleagues, with North and with the king, and take an independent path of his own. This was something he could never do because, for all his virtues, Dartmouth remained a captive of the system that had made him what he was. Tragically, this fine and gentle Christian who hated the thought of fighting came to be one of those most responsible for the war. In 1775, Lord Dartmouth wrote the dispatch from Whitehall that sent the redcoats up the road to Lexington and Concord.15
A QUIET MAN
From his portrait by Gainsborough, Dartmouth gazes out at us with mild serenity. Slender, almost austere, with a long, thin face and a high forehead, he stands tall and upright, dressed with impeccable neatness. With hands folded over his walking stick, he looks like a connoisseur fresh from his picture gallery or his arboretum. Turned slightly away from the viewer, he also seems oddly shy and distant: a sensitive man, detached from the sordid world of politics.
As the war with America drew near, the colonial secretary wrote a thick bundle of letters to his eldest son, an undergraduate at Oxford. Sent to accompany baskets of food and wine, each one contained wise counsel from a loving father. They give us an intimate picture of Lord Dartmouth. “I want you to be everything that can be desired, in a man & a Christian,” he to
ld the boy. Lay down rules for your life, and take them from the very source of wisdom. Pray, and read the scriptures. Be polite, be civil, be methodical, and be exact. Most of all have faith in God. Drink to be sociable but never to excess, and carefully avoid any hint of impropriety: this was his advice. “Be very resolute and steadfast, in shewing your disgust with everything licentious,” Dartmouth wrote, as his son prepared to leave for a European tour. “Never think it can be a credit, to deal in ribaldry, profaneness or satire.”16
These were strange words to address to a young man on his way to Paris. Thirty years later, people would think it normal for a peer of the realm to be devout, when after 1800 religious aristocrats such as Dartmouth came into their own as respected advocates of temperance and charity. In the early years of the reign of George III, he stood out as an eccentric. For the moment evangelical faith remained a minority pursuit in England, despite the best efforts of John Wesley. It was almost unheard of in the peerage. Paying tribute in verse to Lord Dartmouth, his friend the poet William Cowper called him “one who wears a coronet and prays,” as if this were unusual, and it truly was. Dartmouth did not fornicate or gamble. In an era when both sins were routine, people did not know what to make of him. Talking about him, they dealt in clichés, of the kind we use when we understand nothing about the person concerned.
