An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  But then William Palmer intervened with a more sophisticated plan. The ink was scarcely dry on the Tea Act before Palmer and his competitors laid siege to the company with schemes of their own. At last, merchants who sent tea legally to America could hope to outwit the smugglers by matching the price at which it was sold on a colonial street. Palmer had a head start: his friend Governor Thomas Hutchinson had written to him at the end of February, giving him discretion to order as much tea that year as he thought fit.

  With the wholesale price in London still very low, Palmer urged the company to send all its surplus tea to the colonies, but in bulk and not in dribs and drabs. Armed with data supplied by the Hutchinsons, he reckoned that the American market could easily take about ten thousand chests, enough to generate nearly £300,000 in cash. A contest began between Palmer and his rivals to win mandates to handle the business. Palmer moved first, on May 19, but by the end of June at least eight London firms were bidding for contracts from East India House.

  They all agreed on one thing: instead of putting the tea up for auction, the company itself should ship it out to agents whom each firm would appoint in the leading American ports from Charleston up to Halifax. Although the company would have to share its profits with the dealers in London and the consignees in the colonies, its margin would still be very attractive.

  Best of all, the tea would hit America in such a huge quantity that it would saturate the retail market and forestall the smugglers, whose own supplies would not arrive until after the Amsterdam sales in September. William Palmer volunteered the Hutchinsons to act as the consignees in Boston.13

  Speed was of the essence, but first the East India Company’s chairman had to fight off another shareholder revolt. For months the Johnstones, William Crichton, and a few Rockingham Whigs had sought to derail Lord North’s proposals to reform the company. It took until the middle of July for Crabb Boulton to win a vote in favor of the tea scheme. As later events would show, this delay was more than inconvenient, but at last, on July 30, ten of the leading tea traders in London gathered at India House to finalize the details.

  Five days later, the company’s directors gave their blessing. By August 10 the size and composition of the cargoes had been agreed. Nine days after that, and without informing the Colonial Office, Lord North and the Treasury Board issued the license for the tea to sail.*2 The lion’s share would go to New York and Philadelphia, the largest markets, with the rest headed for Boston and Charleston. Cautiously, just in case their agents in America failed to find buyers, they chose to send only 600,000 pounds of tea. That was only a tenth of the amount the colonies drank each year, but even so the volume was enormous, coming to more than two thousand chests. More than three-quarters were filled with the cheapest variety, Bohea. But then the plan began to go awry.

  A cargo so large took weeks to load, and so it was September 27 before all the tea ships had left the Thames. With the wind against them, it was the middle of October before they could leave the English Channel and enter the Atlantic. Four were bound for Boston: two brigs, the Beaver and the William, and two larger ships, the Eleanor and one called the Dartmouth. The earliest they could expect to arrive would be late November. By that time word of their mission had circulated all over the colonies, with awful results.

  In London, however, the voyage of the tea ships still aroused little interest, partly because so few people actually knew that they had left. At the Colonial Office, John Pownall seems to have learned of their departure only in December. Meanwhile, during the autumn, with North away and Parliament in recess, politics remained in its season of suspended animation. And when the capital began to fill again in late October the chief talking point was not America but Ireland.14

  To the dismay of the Whigs, the parliament in Dublin proposed to put a tax on the Irish income that accrued to absentee landlords. The scheme had originated with the government as a means to pay off the debts that Ireland had run up to pay for its military garrison. Time and again in the century that followed, issues to do with Irish land and Irish finance would rear their heads to baffle English politicians. So it was on this occasion. Among the Rockingham Whigs two men—not only the marquess, but also the Duke of Devonshire—extracted huge rents from a reluctant Irish tenantry. And so, oblivious to what was happening in the colonies, the Whigs mobilized to defend their rights as people of property. Until January 1774, Edmund Burke and the Rockinghams filled their correspondence with huffs and puffs about the absentee land tax. They ignored the rising tide of resistance in America, obvious though it should have been from the colonial newspapers available in London’s coffee houses.

  Meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin was growing ever more uneasy. As always he spent the summer in the country, but when he returned to the capital in September, he wrote to Speaker Cushing to give him a belated warning about the tea ships. The tone of his letter betrayed his mounting frustration with Dartmouth and Lord North. During the second half of 1773, Franklin began to lose his last vestige of loyalty to Great Britain. Never popular with the hawks in Whitehall, he was about to incur their outright hatred. In England, the game of politics had certain rules by which gentlemen were expected to abide. In the government’s opinion, Franklin broke them in a manner close to criminal. In due course they would take their revenge by seeking to humiliate him, with more dire consequences for the empire.15

  SATIRE AND SUBVERSION

  By midsummer, anyone who knew Franklin well could tell just how irritated he had become. Tired by what seemed to be endless muddle—about the Ohio country, about colonial boundary disputes, and most of all about Massachusetts—he felt he could do nothing more in London. He began to make plans to leave for America in the autumn.

  In July, Franklin wrote to Samuel Cooper in Boston to congratulate him on his new church at Brattle Square, suggesting that the building be heated with the latest kind of iron stove. As for the differences between the mother country and the colonies, the British would never act, he predicted, “till the breach becomes greater, and the Difficulty of repairing it greater in a tenfold proportion.” Pleased to hear that Virginia was aligning itself with Massachusetts, Franklin hoped that the anger aroused by Hutchinson’s speech in January would lead to a continental congress to defend American liberty. “Nothing would more alarm our Ministers,” he wrote. Only a shock would bring them to their senses. And as it happened, the previous year Franklin had already taken steps to bring about a shock of such a kind at the expense of Thomas Hutchinson, whom he regarded as a pedant and a fool.16

  Over the years, so many indiscreet letters had flowed from Hutchinson’s pen that sooner or later some were bound to see the light of day. In particular, the governor had exchanged some embarrassing correspondence with a British politician, Thomas Whately. In six of these letters, Hutchinson had chosen to grumble about the freedoms that Massachusetts enjoyed under its charter from King William. In one of them, the governor had hinted that the charter ought to be amended or revoked. The empire could not endure, he wrote, without “an abridgement of what is called English liberty.” This was, at the very least, a very unfortunate turn of phrase. In the summer of 1773, the letters were published in America after Franklin sent them to Thomas Cushing. When they appeared, they aroused another furor, just before the news of the Tea Act arrived.

  To be fair to Thomas Hutchinson, he had some valid reasons for writing letters so unguarded. A gifted and wide-ranging intellectual, an expert on landscape gardening and Shakespeare, Thomas Whately was immensely well connected. Among his closest friends he counted the former prime minister George Grenville, whom he helped to draft the Stamp Act, and in due course he became a senior aide to Grenville’s protégé Lord Suffolk. The son of a banker but trained as a lawyer, Whately had a special aptitude for finance, on which he wrote with elegance and learning. He also took a special interest in New England, where his family had been early settlers. By making contact with him, Hutchinson gained access to the innermost circles of Lord North’s
administration. This was not unreasonable. Sooner or later there had to be a new deal of some kind between the colonies and the mother country, and the governor’s voice needed to be heard in whatever negotiations might occur.17

  And then, in 1772, Whately died suddenly, at forty-five, without leaving a will. In the confusion that followed, somebody took the governor’s letters and gave them to Benjamin Franklin for reasons that remain obscure. Franklin would never reveal his source, except to say that he was “a gentleman of character and distinction.” But the fact was that Hutchinson had few admirers in England. An awkward, prickly fellow, apt to ask for favors, he worked hard: but was he really quite up to his job?18

  Clearly the man who passed on the letters thought not, and neither did Franklin. By now, Franklin had come to see Hutchinson as a primary source of division between Massachusetts and Great Britain. And so, in December 1772, he sent the offending letters to Cushing. He wanted the Speaker to share them with the Boston Committee of Correspondence, but confidentially, without letting them reach the columns of the press.

  In doing this, Franklin took an enormous risk. He clearly intended to undermine the governor. Given his dim view of Hutchinson, which was honestly held, that was his duty, but it was a rash course of action even so: indeed, perhaps one of Franklin’s most endearing features is just this, his unusual tendency as he grew older to become more radical and more daring. Once Cushing showed the letters to Samuel Adams, it was only a matter of time before they were published. And so they were, in June 1773, when Adams read them aloud to the House of Representatives. A printed version duly followed. Every newspaper in New England ran the story, and the House sent another petition to George III, calling for Hutchinson’s immediate dismissal for gross misconduct.

  The petition arrived in England in August, but again the Americans were asking the impossible. Perhaps it would have suited Whitehall to be rid of the governor, who had outlived his usefulness. Even so, the law had to run its course: an office such as Hutchinson’s was regarded as a form of personal property, protected by due process of law. No British monarch could recall a governor on grounds of misconduct without a full inquiry by the Privy Council. But it would not meet until January, when Parliament reassembled after its extended break.

  In the meantime, the Hutchinson letters ran in the British press as well, serialized in August in the paper read by the king, the Public Advertiser. As yet, Franklin’s involvement remained a secret, and so he chose to raise the stakes again. Detached though he was from the political mainstream, he kept in close touch with a few journalists, especially at the Advertiser, where he found a willing helper. With a blend of serious news, humor, and acid commentary on public affairs, it was the finest newspaper of its day. The Advertiser also prided itself on its independence from the Wilkesites and the government alike. One of its proprietors, Caleb Whitefoord, summed up its editorial stance. “What first engaged me in political controversy was a desire of undeceiving the Publick,” he wrote. “Whenever any change of Ministry happen’d, I have always endeavoured to make such changes a matter of laughter.”19

  In 1773 the Advertiser was fighting hard for circulation against an upstart rival, the Morning Post, recently created to serve a growing taste in the West End for gossip, scandal, and tales from backstage in the theater. With the Advertiser in need of good copy, Whitefoord instantly agreed when his friend Benjamin Franklin—they lived in the same street—offered him a series of columns defending American freedom. Hoping to capitalize on the impact made by the governor’s letters and weary of Dartmouth’s well-meaning inertia, Franklin took up the weapon of ridicule. By means of satire he would try to jolt public opinion in England into a new, more enlightened attitude toward the empire. Written with verve and wit, and with irony and passion, his columns ran nose to tail for two weeks.

  However little he knew about North and the cabinet, Franklin perfectly understood the English sense of fun. In a few thousand words, he conveyed every grievance felt by the colonies in a style that appealed to men and women raised on Jonathan Swift and Tristram Shandy. His articles reached their brilliant climax on September 22, with a satire cast in the form of an edict from the king of Prussia. An elaborate hoax, the article poured scorn on the official British view, so dear to men like Thomas Whately, that the colonies should pay taxes to help meet the empire’s running costs. It purported to contain a proclamation from Frederick the Great, dated from his palace at Potsdam a few weeks earlier. Its premise was this: since the Anglo-Saxons came from Germany, they owed allegiance to the Prussian king, and, being his colonists, they owed him money too, for the cost of defending them in the Seven Years’ War. “Those who are descendants of our ancient subjects should contribute to the replenishing of our royal coffers,” said the edict. The readers clearly enjoyed the joke, because the edition sold out within hours.20

  Clever though they were, Franklin’s articles might also be described as rash and counterproductive. His thinking apparently ran as follows. With a general election due to occur by the summer of 1775 at the latest, Franklin expected America to be one of the issues on which it was fought. North was weak, he believed, like the nation he led, and frightened of gains by the Wilkesites at the polls. So North might be prepared to offer new concessions to the colonies, but only if the newspapers kept him under pressure.

  Franklin’s strategy sprang from a misreading of the British system. In fact, eighteen months was a very long time in politics; for the time being, the American question remained a relatively minor issue; and the articles appeared when Parliament was on holiday and the London social season had yet to begin. And so the articles merely came and went without raising more than a laugh. The publication of the Hutchinson letters was quite another matter. This did excite genuine anger in the government and convinced it that Franklin had become an enemy in league with the worst elements in New England.

  The early death of a colleague as competent as Thomas Whately had left his friends distraught, and they were powerful men with sharp tongues of their own. They also had ready access to the law. Had the letters been stolen? It certainly seemed that they had. If it emerged that Franklin had sent them to Boston, at best he would find himself pursued through the courts for civil damages; at worst, he might face a criminal charge of theft.

  Of all Whately’s closest friends, one man posed by far the greatest threat to the American. This was a Scotsman, Alexander Wedderburn, a barrister renowned for his intellect, the size of his fees, and his vindictive nature. Under Lord North, he served as solicitor general, advising the cabinet on points of law. In that capacity, he helped the attorney general, Edward Thurlow, to compose the opinion that the Gaspée raid was treason. On the Treasury bench in the Commons, one observer recalled, Thurlow and Wedderburn sat “like two brazen pillars” on either side of the prime minister. Both men fiercely rejected any concessions to the colonies. If Franklin were named in connection with the letters, Wedderburn would seek to destroy him: partly in revenge for the affront to Whately’s memory, and partly as a warning to other outspoken colonials.21

  At first, suspicion pointed at a former customs official in Boston, John Temple, who nursed an old grudge against Hutchinson. Accused of having taken the letters, Temple protested his innocence to the point of fighting a duel against Whately’s brother William. It appears that neither man had any experience of affairs of honor. Even so, they met in Hyde Park at dawn on December 11. Whately fired first and missed, Temple discharged his pistol into the air, and then they drew their swords. Whately was wounded nine times, it was said, but he survived, and the duel became another sensation in the press.

  With lives at stake, Franklin could no longer hold his tongue. Even now it took him two weeks to come forward, but on Christmas Day the London Chronicle ran a brief statement in which he cleared John Temple’s name. Franklin said that he had obtained the letters elsewhere, from the gentleman of character whom he would never identify. In his defense, he argued that far from being truly pri
vate, they were written by a man in public office. “Their tendency was to incense the Mother Country against her colonies,” Franklin went on. That being so, it was his duty to give them to the Massachusetts assembly for which he acted. Although it contained elements of comedy, the affair had also become a political matter of the utmost seriousness. Even if the Boston Tea Party had never taken place, Franklin would have faced at the very least a sharp rebuke when the Privy Council met. As it was, something much worse lay in wait at the hands of Alexander Wedderburn.

  For many years since the repeal of the stamp tax in 1766, other matters that seemed to be more pressing had pushed colonial affairs into the background of British politics. This would only change when the first reports of the Tea Party arrived in London. The news would fall like a sword on Lord North, whose education and career had left him entirely unprepared for such a turn of events. In America, meanwhile, the army and the navy looked on with emasculated fury as acts of rebellion unfolded before their eyes.

  * * *

  *1 Under Lord Dartmouth, the Colonial Office became a bastion of the new evangelical Christianity that was gaining ground inside the Anglican Church. For example, when early in his tenure a vacancy arose on his staff, he appointed a young man named Ambrose Serle, a disciple of Dartmouth’s friend the Reverend William Romaine. In 1775, Serle published an antirevolutionary pamphlet titled Americans Against Liberty; or, An Essay on the Nature and Principles of True Freedom, Shewing That the Designs and Conduct of the Americans Tend Only to Tyranny and Slavery. It included a description of American patriots as “noisy restless animals.” He went to America in 1776 as private secretary to the new British commander in chief, Admiral Lord Howe. In later life Serle wrote a series of Calvinist tracts, the most popular of which—The Christian Remembrancer—was still being reprinted as late as the 1850s.