An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  And that is what he urged the king to do. A sedentary officer, Gage had spent most of the previous decade in Manhattan. Rarely if ever did he venture south to Virginia or up into New England. Knowing little about the region firsthand, the general gave an absurd assessment of the mood in Massachusetts, telling George III that the rebels would never dare to fight. Be firm, and they would back down and show themselves “very meek”: those were the words he used. Gage volunteered to return to his post at twenty-four hours’ notice, without a single extra soldier. As it happened, four regiments were already under orders to sail from England, but only to replace existing units in America. Divert them to Boston, said Gage, and the unrest would soon die away.

  All of this was nonsense. The general merely revealed his ignorance about the size of the colonial militia and their willingness to take up arms. Even Fleet Street knew that Massachusetts had part-time soldiers, and a few days later they printed a guess that they might number as many as eighty thousand. This was a wild overestimate, by a factor of four or five, but the story was far less ridiculous than what Gage had to say. The London press, or some of it at least, fully expected the people to take up arms if they had to. As for the charter, it should have been obvious—not least from Hutchinson’s letters—that any attempt to revoke or amend it might cause a violent insurrection.10

  And yet the king chose to believe the plausible general Gage. Years had passed since the last time George III had voiced an opinion about the administration of America, a matter he had left entirely to his ministers. Although the king had never liked the repeal of the Stamp Act, he accepted the decision made by Parliament in 1766. Now the situation was entirely different. Parliament had yet to vote, and so the king felt free to intervene in the cabinet’s discussions. That evening he wrote to North, urging him to listen to the general, whom he called “an honest determined man.” And like Gower and Sandwich, the king traced the Tea Party’s roots back to the Stamp Act’s abolition.

  While George III made his voice heard, so did another constituency that Lord North had to please. On his own backbenches in the House of Commons the rank and file were growing restless, eager for measures to bring the colonies to heel. One obscure politician decided to lead the charge. In due course, he would incur almost as much hatred in America as Alexander Wedderburn.

  Deep in the backwoods of conservatism, there lurked a member of Parliament called Charles Van, a country squire from Monmouthshire. It took him four attempts, but at last Van managed to win a by-election, entering the Commons in 1772 for the distant Welsh borough of Brecon. He soon became a regular speaker in defense of law and order and Lord North. He loathed John Wilkes, and he did not care for Boston either, and on January 26 he became the first MP to stand up in the chamber and call the Tea Party a rebellion. It appears that he also sought out the editor of the Morning Post. Five days later it printed a story saying that Van had drawn up a scheme “to quell the riotous behaviour of the Bostonians,” which he intended to put before the Commons.11

  Edward Thurlow as lord chancellor in the early 1780s, by George Romney. The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple

  If Van had been an isolated case, an extremist with few supporters, he might have been ignored. But he spoke for a great battalion of like-minded gentry in the shires, each with a thousand acres or so, squires and magistrates with brothers and cousins in the army or the church. Far less plutocratic than the Rockinghams, they did not subscribe to the notion that Great Britain was corrupt. By habit and by choice, they upheld authority from the pulpit or the bench of justice: How else could the country be run? These were the kinds of people who surrounded Lord North in Somerset, where he found a wife from exactly this social stratum. He saw them as the core of his support.

  With the army, the navy, the king, and its own backbenchers so hot for retribution, the cabinet began to move forward. On February 5, Dartmouth wrote to the governors in every colony where the tea had been resisted, telling them to stand by for orders intended to restore authority. That same day, he asked Thurlow and Wedderburn to say whether or not the Tea Party was treason. Nearly a week passed before the attorney general replied. The delay upset even the amiable Lord Dartmouth, but Edward Thurlow was not a lawyer who could be hurried into making errors.

  A fierce and forthright barrister who enjoyed his wine, Thurlow played a pivotal role in the decisions that led to war. Aged forty-two, he lived in sin in suburban Dulwich with the daughter of a caterer who kept a coffeehouse. People called Thurlow the Tiger because of his temper—he once fought a duel with pistols after insulting another lawyer—and because of his appearance. During a trial, he would scowl at the defendant from beneath great bushy eyebrows. Some people might call him a thug. Later in life, when Thurlow was on holiday in Brighton, a servant brought him a dish of peaches that he did not like, and so Thurlow had everyone’s dessert hurled out of the window into the street. But despite his irascible nature, Thurlow possessed some qualities that commanded respect and admiration.

  Like the colonial secretary, Thurlow had befriended the gentle, deeply troubled poet William Cowper, who thought of him with deep affection. Most of all, Thurlow had a reputation for being invincible in argument. Another of his friends, Samuel Johnson, regarded him as the one opponent he could never verbally defeat. “I would prepare myself for no man in England but Thurlow,” he told James Boswell. “When I am to meet with him I should wish to know a day before.” Like Dr. Johnson, Thurlow had no time for Americans, whom he detested, but he did not trust his colleagues either.12

  Wary of taking the blame if anything went wrong with the scheme to prosecute the culprits, Thurlow told Lord Dartmouth to go and find more evidence about the Tea Party. In London only one witness had given personal testimony, Captain Scott of the Hayley, whose story was far too thin. And so, with time hurrying by, the Colonial Office had to look for more arrivals from Boston. Altogether it found twelve witnesses, including two who should have been stars: none other than Francis Rotch and his skipper, James Hall.

  For two days, beginning on February 16, Lord Dartmouth interviewed them all, passing the results to the cabinet each evening. Soon they had a complete account of the chain of events, from the riots against the Clarkes until the last tea chest fell into the water, and a long list of names of men who could be charged with treason.*2 They were ready to take the next step by calling the witnesses before the Privy Council to repeat their words under oath.

  By now, nearly a month had passed since the Hayley dropped anchor, and the first flood of excitement had subsided. The press had temporarily lost interest in America, and Edmund Burke complained of a kind of torpor in the capital. But for Benjamin Franklin, who had been caught equally unawares by the news from Boston, it was a worrying time in which—and this was rare for him—he fell into something close to despair. Three days after the meeting at the Cockpit, he wrote to Cushing, Adams, and Hancock, pleading with them to avert disaster by offering to pay compensation for the tea. As he must have suspected, this was entirely out of the question. From the press, Franklin could see how much enthusiasm the Tea Party had aroused in America. Even a patrician as restrained as George Washington shared Boston’s hostility toward the Tea Act, much as he disliked the violent methods that the Mohawks had adopted.

  In Massachusetts the patriots had no intention of turning back. Indeed they planned to go further and impeach the royal judges for accepting the salaries paid by the Crown. Franklin had no inkling of that yet, but he could sense that events were slipping out of control. As the unofficial leader of London’s American community, he soon heard about Dartmouth’s interrogation of the witnesses. On February 18, he wrote a series of gloomy letters home, telling his friends about that and describing the abuse that he had suffered. “It seems that I am too much of an American,” he wrote to one. “The treatment of the tea has excited great wrath,” he said to another. And in a letter to the Pennsylvania Gazette, which printed it anonymously, he precisely captured the mood of the mome
nt. “Fleets and troops are talked of, to be sent to America,” he wrote, “but what they are to do when they come there, I am at a loss to know … God give us all a little more wisdom.”13

  In private Lord Dartmouth experienced similar emotions. Although he kept his distance from Franklin—it seems that after the Tea Party, they never again met face-to-face—he desperately wanted peace. Via a friend, a merchant and evangelical Christian named John Thornton, Dartmouth tried to reach out to New England, pleading for a change of heart. Thornton had a contact in Massachusetts, William Gordon, a nonconformist clergyman from England who had become the pastor at Roxbury, near Boston, and a confidant of the radicals. On February 12, his lordship wrote to Thornton, urging him to forward his comments to America. If only Gordon could speak to Hancock and the others and persuade them of the need for moderation. He could not promise to repeal the tea tax—he would be thought insane if he even hinted at it—but if the Americans backed down, one day it might be done. If they did not? Then, said Lord Dartmouth, “there is an end to all reconciliation.”14

  Taken in the 1930s, this rare photograph shows the London home of Lord Dartmouth in St. James’s Square. His was the house at the center, with awnings on the windows and a car outside. It was here that the cabinet met in February 1774 and drew up its coercive measures against Massachusetts. The house was demolished in the 1950s, and on the site today is the corporate headquarters of the oil company BP. Canada Life Assurance Company

  In fact, by the time he wrote those words, it was already too late for anything of the kind. The parliamentary clock was ticking fast. Lord North would soon be obliged to release the papers that Buckinghamshire had demanded. At that point, he would have to be ready with a package of measures that would satisfy the Lords and the Commons alike. It would have to be announced by early March at the latest if the legislation were to pass both houses before the end of the parliamentary session in June.

  The issues came to a head on the evening of Saturday, February 19, when the cabinet assembled at Dartmouth’s house in St. James’s Square. By now, two warships were already under orders for Boston to reinforce Montagu’s squadron, General Gage had been told to go back to America with the four regiments, and the cabinet also believed it had the evidence required to justify the arrests of the guilty men. Armed with the sworn statements, the Privy Council could issue the necessary warrants and have them hauled back to Westminster for trial. But this left two matters still on the table: the closure of the port of Boston and the problem of the old Massachusetts charter, which had given the colony so much freedom to defy the empire.

  Shutting the port proved to be far more difficult than expected. When the officials examined the legalities, they found that George III could not close the harbor simply with an order issued under the royal prerogative. Although it was arcane and medieval, the law of havens had to be observed. The king could open a port for business, but once granted, the right to sail in and out and handle cargoes could not be removed. In order for this to happen, Parliament would have to pass a special law, the Boston Port Act, which was bound to arouse even deeper outrage than the sending of the tea.15

  This sort of snag kept recurring throughout the crisis. Far from acting arbitrarily, the British agonized about procedure even when it threw new hurdles in their path, causing delays and leading to awkward side effects that only made New England more intractable. The charter raised a similar problem. In Britain in the eighteenth century, the government often did away with local privileges and charters that seemed to be obsolete. Each time, however, it had to take the measure through Parliament first, because the king could not revoke them purely by decree. And each time the risk arose of a noisy, protracted debate, such as occurred in 1772 with Lord North’s Regulating Act for India. But the government had no choice. At the meeting on the nineteenth, the cabinet girded its loins and decided to produce a regulating act for Massachusetts too, along the hazardous lines that General Gage had urged on the king.*3

  It would take many weeks for the officials to write the legislation, but the concept behind it was all too clear. After more than a century in which the colony had enjoyed something close to democracy, the cabinet decided to impose what amounted to direct rule from England. In the future the governor would be supreme, at the head of a council consisting of royal appointees known as the mandamus councillors. The judges would answer directly to the Crown, unlicensed town meetings would become a crime, and juries would cease to be elected. In addition, a law would be passed to protect the military from prosecution in America for homicide if they shot rioters dead without due cause. This would prevent a repetition of the trial of soldiers for murder that followed the Boston Massacre. Instead, any redcoat who acted illegally would be returned to England for prosecution.

  For years, the hawks in the cabinet had argued for just such a package, and for years the likes of Samuel Adams in America had predicted that they would eventually have their way. At the Colonial Office, John Pownall had misgivings about the proposals, but he was obliged to draft the new laws nonetheless. When the news reached New England, it would give the radicals in Boston a huge propaganda victory, and all the more so because of collateral damage caused by the angry words that irresponsible men would speak in Parliament.*4 The worst offender would be Charles Van.

  And then, as the deadline drew near for Lord North to unveil the package, suddenly Edward Thurlow cut the ground from beneath one vital element of the plan. The attorney general had served his legal apprenticeship at the assize courts in the western counties of England, acting in cases of larceny and murder. For a criminal lawyer of his caliber, the rules of evidence were sacrosanct. Thurlow looked again at the sworn statements taken by the Privy Council and decided that they would not do. While he agreed that the Tea Party was treason, too much of the testimony was hearsay, insufficient to prove the charge against named individuals. On February 28, he told his colleagues that he could not write out the warrants for the Privy Council to sign.

  Nor could the attorney general conceal his doubts about North and Dartmouth. He regarded them as second-rate compared with the late George Grenville, whom he had revered. A few days later, waiting outside the cabinet room, Tiger Thurlow exploded in front of poor John Pownall. “Don’t you see that they want to throw the whole responsibility upon the solicitor-general and me?” he said. “Who would be such damned fools as to risk themselves for such fellows as these?”16

  This was very revealing. While Dartmouth had his detractors who saw him as a timid ingénu, North also had his critics, frustrated by his obsession with the minutiae of politics and his lack of strategic vision. While their older colleagues were veterans of two great wars with France, their own careers had been either brief, in Dartmouth’s case, or devoted almost exclusively to domestic affairs and finance, in that of Lord North. When Americans gazed across the Atlantic, they saw powerful foes, arrayed against them like a Spartan phalanx, out to crush their liberties by every means at their disposal. This was an illusion. Although the cabinet ministers wished to be resolute, often their spears were blunt and their quivers only half-full of arrows. Beset by internal rivalries, they pushed each other into a program of coercion in New England without appreciating that they lacked the means to enforce it.

  Without an ally in Europe, and now at odds with America too, the cabinet advanced into the mist with Lord North at their head. At this very moment, he almost succumbed to another bout of depression. Toward the end of February, he suffered one of his rare defeats in the Commons. It arose from a merely technical debate about electoral law, but he found himself on the losing side, with 250 votes against him, including even the ultra-loyal Charles Van. Once more North spoke about resignation. The king tried to calm him down, Suffolk hurried round to see him before breakfast, and he regained his composure. Even so, the omens were inauspicious.17

  Little more than a week later, North would have to face the house with his new American policy. With the plan for treason trials in Lon
don now abandoned, it was all the more urgent to press on with what remained. The date of the first debate was fixed: March 7. It would mark the opening of a parliamentary battle that, in its drama and importance, can claim a status alongside others far better known: the debates in the Commons on the reform bill of 1831–32, the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and those much later on the eve of the Second World War. In the spring of 1774, the Rockingham Whigs finally rose from their trenches in a long overdue rearguard action against the government.

  The campaign of resistance would be led by two politicians who were both, in their own ways, idealists very different from Lord North. Not the marquess himself, who found the task beyond him, but Edmund Burke, at the height of his powers as an orator, and somebody else less famous but often far more effective. At last an unlikely hero appeared, to make the case for colonial liberty: Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, one of the most original characters of his age.

  * * *

  *1 The site of the Cockpit is occupied today by the Cabinet Office.

  *2 The names on the list included not only Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Joseph Warren, and Thomas Young but also Edward Proctor, who is known to have been one of the Mohawks who actually destroyed the tea.

  *3 Usually referred to as the Massachusetts Government Act.

  *4 Collectively, the package came to be known as either the Coercive Acts or the Intolerable Acts, depending on the writer’s political stance.