by Nick Bunker
George III reviewing the fleet at Spithead, June 22, 1773, with the royal yacht in the center, by John Cleveley the Younger. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
In the early hours of June 22, George III left his palace at Kew with an escort of cavalry. Over the heaths of Surrey they galloped down to Portsmouth, where they were greeted by a salute of guns heard sixty miles away across the hills. Behind the king, Lord North and the rest of the government came hurrying down as well, with Lord Dartmouth bringing his son, whose term at Oxford had recently ended. To feed the royal entourage, the finest chef in London joined the procession to the coast, carrying with him His Majesty’s silver plate, acres of white linen, and a cellar full of wine and brandy: six thousand bottles, more or less, to lubricate the banquets on the flagship. In brilliant sunshine, George III toured the dockyard, the forts, and the fleet, drawn up in two lines abreast. The sailors rowed him up and down in a gilded barge, past twenty battleships fully rigged and newly painted. Onshore he watched the blacksmiths repair a huge anchor, and he doubled their ration of beer. A choir of shipwrights sang “God Save the King,” and the king was duly gratified.5
Nothing like this had been seen in England before. The roar of the cannon brought spectators to the waterfront in their thousands. And when after three days the king left for home, the crowds lined the streets of every town along the route. In Guildford and Godalming they struck up the national anthem, “expressing, in the warmest manner, their Duty and Affection,” said the official report in the London Gazette. Later that year, David Garrick turned the review into a play to entertain the audience at Drury Lane. Eager to surpass his rivals in the theater, Garrick hired the finest set designer from Paris and put on a reenactment of the great event, complete with rolling waves and model ships and choruses of “Rule, Britannia.”
The cabinet was equally delighted. Lord Rochford kept the French envoy at his side and gleefully reported his grudging admiration. The fleet had saved the peace, said his poetical friend Lord Suffolk. “How must our royal master exult in the proud pre-eminence it gives!” he wrote. “How must this display of national strength, these floating bulwarks of his kingdom, strike his maiden view!”6
And yet, in every capital in Europe, old hands at diplomacy knew that for all its ships and artillery, Great Britain was powerless to determine the course of international affairs. The British still had not a single ally overseas. Unable to intervene, the cabinet had watched the cruel partition of Poland come and go. And while Corsica had fallen to the French, in the east the Turks were soon to lose the Crimea to Catherine the Great. Nothing could be done to prevent either development, despite the strategic importance of both pieces of territory.
To all of this, the British were merely bystanders, entering their period of not-so-splendid isolation. Their lack of allies would cost them dearly during the war for America, when they had to fight on many fronts without an ally. But nobody in London expected anything so extraordinary to occur. For the time being, the mood in Whitehall remained confident and calm.7
On July 1, Parliament rose for an unusually long recess. With India dealt with, the budget passed, and the French put back on the leash, no business remained outstanding. Lord North had even pacified the London weavers with a new law to regulate their wages. Not for another six months would Parliament reassemble, and by then it would be too late to prevent the calamity in Massachusetts.
THE VEIL OF ERROR
It might have helped if in Virginia the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had noticed the signs of increasing disaffection. Of all the businesspeople in America, the tobacco farmers had probably suffered the most from the financial crash. After borrowing heavily from British merchants to expand their acreage, suddenly they faced demands for swift repayment, and for a while new loans were almost impossible to find.
Already uneasy about the empire, the planters read the news from the northern colonies with all the more dismay. Their sympathies lay with John Hancock and his comrades. When Virginia’s House of Burgesses met in March 1773 for its annual session, the members had before them press reports about the Gaspée commission and the British plan to pay the judges’ salaries with the tea tax. They had also seen the Boston pamphlet and Hutchinson’s foolish reply. On March 12, the assembly chose its own committee, eleven strong, to correspond with Boston and watch for more signs that American freedom was in peril. Its members included not only Richard Henry Lee, brother of Samuel Adams’s friends in London, but also Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, who was in his first outing as an activist against the Crown. Again, it would be hard to overstate how dangerous this situation was for the British. Via the network of correspondence, created by Adams, Joseph Warren, and their allies, the sense of grievance felt in New England came to be shared across the continent. And yet barely a word of this reached Whitehall from the governor in Williamsburg.8
A proud, flamboyant man, Lord Dunmore once had himself painted in full Highland dress by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In later life, in retirement in Scotland, he erected a giant stone pineapple on top of a summerhouse to commemorate his years of service in the colonies. But while he was there, it did not occur to him to listen to public opinion or to relay it back to London. In the first half of 1773, he sent only six official letters home, and none of them mentioned the new committee. Then, at the end of July, he fell silent. Nine months passed before he wrote his next dispatch in the spring of 1774. With so little information to go on, it was all too easy for the British to imagine that Massachusetts and Rhode Island were alone in their discontent.
Sometimes Lord Dartmouth would receive private letters from English travelers who knew America well and wanted to alert him to trouble ahead. Occasionally, their observations were very accurate indeed, but they appear to have been ignored. One such letter arrived on his desk in March 1773 from the pen of a merchant named Charles Smith. A shrewd, observant man, every few years Smith crossed the Atlantic and rode from New England to Pennsylvania, collecting debts as he went, reading newspapers, and listening to the people whom he met.
That year, he came home alarmed by what he had heard. Along the coast and even three hundred miles inland he encountered a spirit of rebellion, forming what he called “a regular connected chain, from New England to Georgia.” Everywhere Americans were talking about John Wilkes, whom they took for a hero. Everywhere the press ran incendiary attacks on the British. On the frontier, Smith found “an uncultivated banditti,” villains given to theft and murder, many of them recent arrivals from Ireland with a record of insurgency in their native land. As for Massachusetts, that was very nearly lost, according to Smith. In a few years, he said, the people there would “throw off their dependence on England—be assured it will be the case.” How should the British respond? Coercion would fail, Smith argued: “rough threatening measures” would never work, but only “those of a more lenient mild nature.” Every colony needed better governors, he said, Massachusetts should be closely watched, and most of all “the wisest heads in ministry” should devise a comprehensive plan to reconcile the colonies to the empire.9
We have no idea what Dartmouth made of Smith’s comments, because no reply has survived. In any event, nothing was done. The system did not allow the Colonial Office to intervene directly. They had to work through the governors they had appointed. If the men in question neglected their duties like Lord Dunmore, or if they were as self-seeking and corrupt as William Tryon in New York, they might eventually be recalled, but only when it was too late. No comprehensive plan of the kind proposed by Smith was ever formulated. And then, on March 26, word arrived in London that the Gaspée commission had failed to break the wall of silence in Newport. Not a single reliable witness would come forward to testify against John Brown of Providence.
Three days later, after eight weeks at sea—an unusually long passage—a dispatch came in from Thomas Hutchinson describing his verbal fracas with the House of Representatives. An earlier report about the governor’s speech had alrea
dy raised eyebrows in London, and now, when the Baltic crisis was growing ever more serious, Lord Dartmouth discovered that Hutchinson had provoked the assembly to adopt the Boston pamphlet as its own. Massachusetts seemed to be going the same way as Rhode Island. His lordship replied, telling Hutchinson to keep quiet. If the assembly made any more gestures of disobedience, he should simply dissolve it and call new elections. Other than that, Hutchinson should do nothing. The colonial secretary was even more forthright about the governor early in May, when he saw Franklin again.
“What difficulties that gentleman has brought us all into by his imprudence!” Dartmouth said. As far back as December, the colonial secretary had warned Hutchinson not to indulge in what he called “nice distinctions of civil rights and legal constitutions,” which would simply arouse more controversy. For reasons not only of political expediency but also of faith, Dartmouth hoped to avoid unnecessary strife. When he wrote to the governors in America, his language carried religious connotations drawn from his Calvinist reading of the Gospel. In his eyes, every human being was a soul in danger, inclined to sin, but he also believed that Christ had the power to save them. Dartmouth was convinced that the unrest in Massachusetts arose not from any genuine grievance but from a defect of the spirit.*1
Like sinners everywhere, the people of Boston saw the world, he wrote, through “a veil of error,” cast over them by atheists and fanatics. Far from patriots defending liberty, they were merely men and women imprisoned by their carnal passions. And yet, if they would only pause and listen patiently to a government that cared only for their welfare, perhaps the Bostonians might be won over, like the London prostitutes who filled the hospital wards at the Lock. “The seat of the disorder is rather in the head than in the heart,” Dartmouth told Thomas Hutchinson. “A time may come when men will see that they have been cutting up the root of their own felicity, under the false notion of resisting injuries that never existed.” The last thing he wanted was to bully them into submission.10
By now, however, a moment was rapidly approaching when the hawks in the cabinet could argue that coercion was the only option. Although the Tea Party was still six months away, by the end of June it had already become practically inevitable. In theory, it was still possible for Lord North to delay the implementation of the Tea Act, and the precise manner in which the tea would be sent to America was still open for discussion. But in practice, the flow of news from the northern colonies gave His Majesty’s Treasury no reason to alter course. On the contrary, New England seemed to become more annoying with every month that passed.
In Massachusetts, the House of Representatives had at last drawn up its petition to the king. Badly timed, badly written, and addressed to the wrong party, it took far too long to draft and even longer to arrive. Dated March 6, it reached Whitehall only on May 12, when Franklin gave it to Lord Dartmouth, just as the Anglo-French crisis reached its peak. Tactless or even insulting, the petition began by lecturing George III about the history of England. Under the charter of 1691, it said, the colony made its own laws and voted its own taxes. Parliament in London had no right to interfere. As for the plan to pay the salaries from the tea duty, it was a clear infringement of their rights as loyal but self-governing citizens. They appealed to the king to save them from what they called “the perversion of law and justice” by judges in thrall to Lord North.
For any number of reasons, this document could do nothing but harm. A month earlier, the king had received an equally rude petition from the liverymen of the city of London, demanding the reinstatement of John Wilkes as member of Parliament for Middlesex. If that was a flagrant piece of impertinence, the same was true of the lecture from the colonists. In addressing their petition to the monarch, Samuel Adams and his allies had displayed their own misunderstanding of the British system of government. The king ruled not by fiat or decree but only by the consent of Parliament. Even if George III had wanted to, the constitution did not permit him to interfere. A matter concerned with taxation and finance, the scheme to pay the salaries out of the tea duty arose from a law passed by the House of Commons. Only the Commons could repeal a statute it had approved but by now the parliamentary session was very nearly over. On June 2, Lord Dartmouth wrote to Benjamin Franklin conveying the king’s response: he refused to intervene, and condemned the petition as the work of what he called “the artifices of a few who seek to create groundless jealousy and distrust.”11
Even so, Dartmouth tried to salvage something from the wreckage. Along with the petition, Franklin had given him a covering letter filled with more grievances from the assembly in Massachusetts. The list was long. Besides the judges’ salaries, the assembly members complained about the customs service, the navy, the Gaspée commission, and the troops at Castle William. Dartmouth took it all in his stride and did the best he could.
On June 19, shortly before he left for the Spithead review, he went behind Thomas Hutchinson’s back. Against protocol, and apparently without consulting his staff, Dartmouth wrote privately to Franklin’s closest contact in Boston, Thomas Cushing, the Speaker of the House, a man believed to be a moderate. Dartmouth tried to offer him a deal. As he explained, Parliament could never surrender its authority over the colonies. It was a matter of principle, without which the empire could not function. But it might agree to suspend its right to levy taxes in America provided Massachusetts, in its turn, agreed to be reasonable. The assembly would have to disown the Boston pamphlet and withdraw the motion it had passed on January 26. If it did, he would go to Parliament in the next session and attempt to have the grievances removed.
In writing this, Dartmouth went beyond anything that hawks like Sandwich and Suffolk could endorse. But it would have made no difference even if his colleagues had undergone a conversion of their own. The minister’s letter took two months to cross the ocean, arriving only in the middle of August. By that time, the Massachusetts assembly was also in recess. Cushing shared the letter with Samuel Adams and other members of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, who flatly rejected the deal. By now, the situation had passed beyond the control of any politician, however wise, in either nation. Since the Virginians met in March, five other colonies, from New Hampshire to South Carolina, had created their own Committees of Correspondence. “The alarm is universal,” Cushing wrote to Franklin late in August. “The eyes of the whole continent are turned upon this province.”12
In fact he was exaggerating—New York and Pennsylvania were still hanging back—but Cushing made an important point: that after spreading the word so widely about its plight, Massachusetts could no longer act unilaterally. Even if it wished to—which it did not—the House of Representatives would have to consult its counterparts in the other colonies before it could comply with Dartmouth’s suggestion. Cushing replied to the colonial secretary, telling him that the British would have to redress American grievances before Massachusetts could back down.
Although Cushing wrote that on August 22, his letter did not reach Lord Dartmouth until November. By then the ships with the East India Company’s tea were already halfway across the Atlantic and beyond recall. And here we come to what might seem, at first sight, a bizarre turn of events. While Lord Dartmouth was aware of the Tea Act, he apparently knew nothing about the way it was put into practice. Neither he nor John Pownall took part in the final decision to ship the tea to America in enormous quantities and in a manner bound to end disastrously. This was less remarkable than it might appear, and it goes to the heart of the misunderstandings between Great Britain and the colonies.
Many Americans had come to view the British government as an evil machine, single-mindedly doing the bidding of a clique of men obsessed with power. While some blamed Lord North, and others blamed King George III, they believed they were dealing with a ruthless autocracy out to do them down. And this was exactly what John Wilkes and his supporters in the London press had been telling them for nearly a decade. But in fact it was a travesty of the truth. In reality, North led a
cabinet and not a tyranny. His government consisted of rival departments, each one with its own agenda. Power lay scattered among them. So did information, and they answered to a Parliament often uncertain and divided. Apart from Lord Dartmouth, who was above this kind of thing, ministers briefed the press against each other, off the record. Each one fought to enlarge his share of public spending, just as their successors do today.
Only a very gifted British prime minister can make the cogs and wheels of government mesh smoothly together. Although in his own era nobody surpassed Lord North as a manager of Parliament, he rarely thought through the implications of official policy. Even when he did, he could not ensure that everyone cooperated to fulfil it. In terms of power and prestige his own department, the Treasury, stood head and shoulders above the rest, as it still does, but this only added to the confusion. North and the Treasury Board had devised and passed the Tea Act without consulting their colleagues about its practicalities. As a result, the policy was hijacked from outside by self-interested sharks from the business community keen to make it serve their own purposes.
THE TEA SHIPS SAIL
The Tea Act of 1773 allowed the East India Company to apply to the Treasury for a license to ship tea to the colonies without any duties paid in the United Kingdom. That was all. The text of the legislation said nothing about the methods by which the shipment should be made or the tea distributed in North America.
The simplest option would have been to put the tea up for auction in London in the usual way but with each wooden chest stamped “only for export.” Any merchant could have placed a bid for however much he chose, subject to a written undertaking that it would be sent only to the colonies, where the threepenny Townshend tax would have to be paid. If so, the tea might have traveled in small consignments on many different ships, denying the people of Boston their opportunity to produce a political motion picture by torchlight in December. It seems that Lord North’s aide Charles Jenkinson initially intended the tea to sail to America in just such a piecemeal fashion.
