by Nick Bunker
The Evening Post’s article would not reach Massachusetts until the middle of May; but the timing was disastrous, because the story came hard on the heels of reports of Wedderburn’s tirade against Franklin and then the news of the closure of the port. While in London some of Van’s fellow politicians and the press dismissed him as a buffoon, in the colonies his words were widely reprinted. Americans took them as a serious threat, issued with the government’s approval. This was a calamitous piece of public relations, but one that the cabinet ministers had brought upon themselves, by using language sometimes almost as extreme. And while Van was an oaf, he only expressed in public the hard line that other backbenchers were probably taking in private, at Alice’s and elsewhere. In any event, with the hawkish Gower and Sandwich snapping at his heels, Lord North had no option but to press ahead, regardless of what Americans might think.
He reached the Easter break in what seemed to be splendid shape. After so much rain and even a few late snowstorms, the winter had given way to a warm and sunny spring, during which the port bill swiftly passed into law. Again, the opposition did not even call a vote, because they dared not defend the Tea Party and Lord North’s majority seemed sure to be overwhelming. And then, on March 28, as Sandwich sent orders to the navy to arrest any ship that tried to enter Boston, at last the government confirmed the details of its regulating bill for Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, the Rockingham Whigs remained below the parapet, still reluctant to risk their political lives for criminals in the colonies. Unwilling to be seen as troublemakers, they held their fire, hoping that North might offer the Americans at least one concession—the abolition of the Tea Act—unlikely though that was. Their disarray was all the more complete because their leader in the Commons, William Dowdeswell, had reached almost the point of death. A gifted politician, one of the few who could match Lord North in a debate about taxes and spending, Dowdeswell would leave for the Côte d’Azur that summer and pass away early in 1775. But as the weeks went by and the government showed not the least sign of softening its stance, it became apparent that the Whigs could wait no longer.
Although Edmund Burke had already made one excellent speech, his best were yet to come. And soon enough, he would be able to count on powerful reinforcements. Among them was Lord Chatham, elderly, frail, and eternally unpredictable. Another friend of the London Evening Post’s, the old war hero stood ready to intervene on behalf of New England, whether out of vanity or for love of country. It was impossible to say precisely what William Pitt’s motives were—even in his years of greatness, Chatham had always been a loner and an egotist—but he would not allow Lord North, whom he despised, to win more victories unchallenged. And elsewhere in the House of Lords the Rockinghams could deploy a maverick peer of their own who was equally determined to fight. As the port bill passed through the upper chamber, the Duke of Richmond had attacked it with far more energy than even Burke had displayed in the Commons. As the war approached, the Americans found their best and most outspoken British friend in the topmost tier of the aristocracy.
Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond, by James Watson after George Romney. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
A NOBLE DUKE
Clever, rich, handsome, and rather eccentric, Charles Lennox had lived thirty-nine years in the world with a great deal to vex him. He belonged to an echelon of dukes who regarded themselves, not George III, as the rightful leaders of the nation. When he surveyed the political horizon, the Duke of Richmond saw nothing but corruption everywhere: a vast but tawdry scheme by the king and his friends, led by Lord North, to gather all the reins of power into their hands.
In his opinion, Lennox had every right to question the monarch’s authority, and not least because he outranked the upstart dynasty from Hanover. A bastard member of the Stuart royal family, he owed his rank to his great-grandmother Louise de Kérouaille and her skill at fornication in the expert arms of Charles II. The king had said thank you to his mistress with the dukedom and a handsome gift of money. In the future, her family would have the right to collect a tax on all the coal shipped out of Newcastle. By 1774, this yielded £15,000 a year, an income that gave Charles Lennox the freedom to be difficult. “I pass in the world for very obstinate, wrong-headed and tenacious of my opinions,” he once told Edmund Burke.
Shy, abrasive, and prone to depression, the Duke of Richmond knew precisely how to upset the orthodox. Perhaps it would be hard to dislike a man who put central heating in his kennels to keep his foxhounds warm, as he did, but many people hated him, including George III. “His whole conduct is dictated by malevolence,” fumed the king, when Richmond opposed the Regulating Act for India. In return, Lennox called the king a liar.
An enlightened politician far ahead of his time, the duke had studied biology in Paris, met Frederick the Great, and read Rousseau and Voltaire. A soldier in his youth, he served in combat in the German theater of the Seven Years’ War with a military record arguably rather better than General Gage’s in America. At home in England, Richmond joined the Rockinghams, but he showed himself to be far broader in his sympathies. Long before his contemporaries, he called for a fair deal for Ireland and for religious dissenters, eventually becoming a Unitarian himself. In France he befriended John Wilkes, whom he supported in his bid to enter Parliament. As early as 1780 the duke called for sweeping constitutional reform: a vote for every male over eighteen, a secret ballot, fair and equal constituencies, and elections every year, all as a means to curb the overweening power of the executive.9
On ten separate occasions between the Tea Party and Lexington, Lennox rose in the House of Lords to try to stop the drift to war. Because debates in the upper chamber were only sketchily reported, often we do not know exactly what he said, but he left a deep impression. “The Duke of Richmond spoke warmly for Boston,” wrote Horace Walpole, who admired him immensely, about one debate in 1774. “Said they would be in the right to resist … and if they did resist, he should wish them success.”10
Nobody else in Parliament dared to voice such unpopular opinions, but when they reassembled in the middle of April, the duke had little choice. While some of the Rockinghams still dragged their heels, the duke understood how desperate the situation had become. General Gage was just about to leave England—on HMS Lively from Plymouth, on April 16—and so far the opposition had scored not a single point. The government rode the crest of a wave, with the king quietly confident that the package of new laws for Massachusetts could be completed swiftly.
Twenty-four hours before the general set sail, Lord Dartmouth produced yet another tranche of documents, twenty-eight papers in all, to show just how little support Governor Hutchinson had received from his council of advisers. Lord North struck again the same day, April 15, with the text of his bill to sweep away democracy in the province by making the councillors and the judges royal appointees and by curbing the power of town meetings.
That evening he went still further and announced a third measure: the Impartial Administration of Justice Bill, a clumsy name for another coercive law. Like the others, it would come into force on June 1. From that day forward, if Gage believed that a jury in Massachusetts could not be trusted, then he could move the site of a trial to another province or to England. This could already be done with a writ from a judge in the Court of King’s Bench, but Gage needed the power to act quickly to protect his soldiers or himself if and when they spilled American blood. When word reached the colonies, people called it “the murder act,” and although it seems that it was never used, it gave the Boston patriots another stick with which to beat the British.
Yet again the cabinet had failed to understand an essential feature of American life: in this case, the deep attachment the colonists felt to their own local laws and legal culture, not only in Boston and Rhode Island, but in every other province. And again, the new law aroused all the more anger because of a threat made by Charles Van. After Lord North sat down, it fell to Alexander Wedderburn to give a lon
g speech of justification. “If you go with the olive branch without a sword, you drop the sword for this moment you give up the authority,” the solicitor general said, according to the shorthand notes, and then, just before the house adjourned, Van made another atrocious comment. “Set the woods on fire!” he suggested. The following day the London Evening Post quoted him again, like this: “If they oppose the measures of government that are now sent out, I would do as was done of old, in the time of ancient Britons, I would burn and set fire to all their woods, and leave their country open; and if we are likely to lose that country, I think it better lost by our own troops, than wrested from us by our rebellious children.”11
Although Van probably never uttered a sentence quite so eloquent, the story traveled to Boston, where the threat to burn the forests of New England entered into revolutionary folklore. In the colonies, the reports about the justice bill hardened attitudes still further, partly because the proceedings in Parliament seemed to be so one-sided. If the opposition in the mother country lacked the stomach for a fight at Westminster, what course lay open to Massachusetts but all-out resistance? By the time General Gage arrived, the colony’s distrust of the British political system had become almost terminal. But ironically enough, by the end of April, at last the Rockingham Whigs had begun a sustained counterattack against Lord North.
This had always been a possibility, if only the Whigs could agree to work with the Wilkesites, the followers of Lord Chatham, and a few other mavericks in a last stand against the Coercive Acts. Although they could not stop the government in its tracks—North’s majority was far too large—a united opposition might at least delay the implementation of his policies. They also had to think about the future: a situation where, perhaps, America resisted the new laws so fiercely that they became a dead letter. If the kingdom came to the brink of war, then conceivably the government might weaken or even collapse. At that point, the opposition had to be ready to step forward and form a new administration, perhaps in the wake of the general election due in 1775. And so the Whigs and their allies had to use the debates in the spring of 1774 to put down a marker, positioning themselves as the statesmen who had warned that coercion would fail.
And this they began to do. Of all the Rockingham Whigs, Richmond had always been the most open-minded and the most willing to reach out to members of Parliament of whom the marquess disapproved. Behind the scenes, and working with Burke, Lennox began to organize a new campaign against the government. For this, he could count on old comrades with whom he had tried to save the East India Company from control by North and the cabinet. Foremost among them was George Johnstone, the angry Scotsman, with his years in Florida to give him some authority on colonial affairs. He enjoyed the rare distinction of having spoken out against the sending of the tea.
There was also Franklin’s lawyer John Dunning, gradually regaining his health, and an old soldier, Isaac Barré, who had served with General Wolfe at Quebec. Both were close to Lord Chatham, sharing his hostility toward the Declaratory Act, and both men had a history of opposing foolish schemes to tax America. With them came another fine lawyer, Charles Pratt, Lord Camden, a former lord chancellor who held the same opinions. And last but not least they had the assistance of Benjamin Franklin, who had at last emerged reenergized after his mauling by Wedderburn. “The torrent is still violent against America,” Franklin wrote to his Boston friend Speaker Cushing on April 16, but he was doing what he could, briefing the opposition with the facts it needed.
Three days later, the Whigs were ready. Richmond would have to wait until May for the next debate in the Lords, but in the meantime Burke seized an opportunity in the Commons. Unable to make a credible case against the port bill, the Whigs had been looking for a chance to appeal to independent members of the house. The moment arrived on April 19.
At three o’clock that afternoon, Rose Fuller, the Jamaican, called for a vote to review the threepenny tea tax, the source of all the trouble. Here the opposition found an easier target: the tax was clearly an absurdity that the smugglers had already defeated. With the Americans united against it, any attempt to enforce the law would only end in violence. Take the path of reconciliation, said Fuller. North had already abolished the other Townshend duties: if he did away with this one as well, Britain would offer the colonies the olive branch that was so obviously necessary. A few other MPs said the same thing, and Wedderburn replied—“if you give up this duty, you give up the whole of your authority,” he said—and then, at 5:15, Edmund Burke rose to give his great speech on American taxation.12
He spoke for two hours. According to the London Evening Post, the Commons hung on his every word, but the Post could never be trusted to report debates objectively. Other accounts of his speeches that year suggest that Burke was always jeered at by the Northites. He tended to speak too quickly, and sometimes his Irish accent left his audience puzzled and confused. Even so, Burke lifted the debate to a new peak of intelligence.
“I know the map of England,” he said. “And I know that the way I take is not the road to preferment.” Burke struck that note throughout: bold and unrepentant. Refusing to apologize for the repeal of the Stamp Act, he gloried in it, as a magnanimous gesture that had simply restored the colonial status quo before Grenville. After repeal, America had fallen quiet, and so it would again if Parliament removed the tea tax. “Nobody will be argued into slavery,” said Burke in a speech full of brilliant lines. “Reflect how you are to govern a people, who think they ought to be free. Your scheme yields nothing but discontent, disorder and disobedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you began: that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found.”
The core of the problem, he said, was simple: that the government had never risen to what he called “large, liberal ideas” about the colonies. Without a plan or a vision for the empire, it had dealt in “bits and scraps … full of meanness and full of mischief,” until at last it was close to causing a war for the sake of a trivial tax: “a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of disputation.” Abolish it, and peace would follow, based on mutual respect and justice. And when again the time came to fight the French, the Americans would freely volunteer to help with soldiers and money.
These were fine words, but they came too late. The general had already boarded his ship for Boston, with news about the revocation of the charter soon to follow. And however hard Burke tried, he could not escape his party’s old predicament. For all his eloquence, his speech contained a fatal weakness, which he could not conceal: logic was never really Edmund Burke’s strong point. His difficulty was this: taxation had ceased to be the principal issue at stake. As the weeks went by, in both London and America the political debate had shifted its focus, moving on to more urgent questions about the very nature of imperial authority. “The disturbances in America proceed from deeper causes,” said Lord North. “Mere tax is not their objection.”
In theory, the Rockinghams upheld the Declaratory Act and the doctrine that Parliament was supreme. In practice, said Lord North, they were calling for retreat in the face of violence and mayhem, despite the evidence that retreat would arouse even more resistance. Every newspaper in London had printed angry words from the colonies, denying that Parliament had any say in their affairs. If Parliament scrapped the tea duty, it would reveal itself to be powerless against Americans already pursuing independence. It had come to that: a choice, which the British had to make, between a cowardly surrender, which would spell the end of empire, and a firm resolve to force America into line. Both North and Wedderburn made that very clear. After eight hours of debate, the opposition called a vote and lost. The Whigs and their allies went down to defeat by 182 votes to 49. At that moment, all the technicalities of tea and tax fell away into the shadows in Britain and the colonies alike. As the war approached, they would briefly return to the stage, but only to play a relatively minor role in the drama of events. Instead, the spotligh
t shifted elsewhere, to the matters of fundamental principle that the town of Boston had already been discussing for so long.
In Parliament, a fortnight passed before the next great encounter. When it came early in May, at last it filled the Commons to overflowing. The measure before them was the most controversial of all: the bill to change the government of Massachusetts, which was reaching its final stage. Once again, the cabinet seemed to hold the upper hand. Since the news about John Malcolm, little more had been heard from the colonies, but silence had done nothing to reduce British animosity toward New England.*3 On the contrary, in Parliament the independent members were swinging all the more firmly behind Lord North.
There seem to have been three reasons why this occurred, the first of which was commercial. Since the crash of 1772, the nation had slowly pulled itself out of the economic mire. In response to the recession, the factory masters looked to continental Europe as a market, with Josiah Wedgwood in the lead, launching an export drive that carried his pots all the way to Siberia. As British sales to Europe grew, America diminished in importance, and a trade boycott by the colonies ceased to be as worrying as in the past. The industrial lobby felt no need to agitate again on America’s behalf, as it had done at the time of the Stamp Act.
