by Nick Bunker
Meanwhile, the press hammered on with stories that the colonists intended to resort to bloodshed. The newspapers carried reports of gunpowder shipments on the way to rebels in New England, and although they were premature—the Americans did not begin to arm seriously until August—they served to raise the political temperature. Even the king was rumored to have cracked a tasteless joke at one of his levees, saying that he would as happily fight the Bostonians as the French.13
Last but most important, the prospect of a general election concentrated the mind. Long before the polls were held, candidates began to look for safe seats, especially those that Lord North and the Treasury could help them win. What better way to catch his eye than to stand up and support him on the colonial question? On the other side, in those open boroughs where the election was likely to be hard fought, radicals and Whigs did the opposite: they put themselves forward as friends of America and liberty.
Against this background, the Commons met on May 2 for the final debate on the Massachusetts government bill. Four hundred MPs had arrived at the house by four o’clock for a session packed with business for which time was running out. As a preliminary, they were told about yet another measure, a fourth coercive law, allowing General Gage to requisition buildings in Boston as billets for his men. And then the real battle began, with the opposition in full flood. Out of his tent came John Dunning, stung by the memory of the humiliating session at the Cockpit; later, Colonel Barré rose to his aid, and so did Charles James Fox, and finally Edmund Burke. On both sides of the house, MPs spoke in the bluntest terms, trading insults and blaming each other for causing an imperial crisis so grave.
Since January, Charles Van had found allies ready to use language as intemperate as his own. Up stood Richard Rigby, fifty-two years old, a heavy drinker with a purple face, a fighter of duels, and a loyal supporter of Lord North. “I say: stand and deliver to the Americans,” he bellowed. “America, at this instant, is a downright anarchy—let us give it a government!” He might have been misquoted—a surviving shorthand note suggests that Rigby used slightly more delicate language—but these were his words as they appeared in the London Evening Post, to be read in the colonies later that year.14
It was a noisy debate, in which Burke received the roughest handling from the benches opposite. “You will lose America,” he said, but time and again they drowned him out as he spoke from midnight until one o’clock, an effort so exhausting that he took two days to recover. Feeling free at last to attack the government head-on, the opposition denounced the coercive laws on the most basic constitutional grounds. Taken together, they amounted to an infringement of freedom of a kind that Britons would never tolerate at home. The opposition united around the principles for which the Rockinghams had always claimed to stand: the defense of civil liberty against the arbitrary power of the king and his minions.
According to Colonel Barré, the Americans would rise in rebellion with consequences almost too appalling to contemplate. There would be war with the colonies, he said, a war that would require more than thirty battalions, half the fighting strength of the British army, and all the while the French would be watching, biding their time to intervene. “The voice of humanity, law and justice is against you in this wicked proceeding,” the colonel said as he sat down, “and I fear the hand of heaven will take the same direction.” At two o’clock, the vote was called. For the government, 239; for the opposition, 64. At Downing Street, before he went to bed, North scribbled a note to George III, who replied later that day. “I am infinitely pleased,” he wrote.15
With that, the campaign in the House of Commons began to wind down. There were still more bills to pass and more debates to be had, but after losing on May 3 by such a large majority the opposition could not hope to inflict any serious wounds on Lord North. Gradually the Whigs fell back, leaving it up to the Duke of Richmond to lead a last stand in the upper chamber. There Charles Lennox could muster at least twenty votes, enough to make it very clear that the ruling elite was divided. Again, he was thinking about the future, preparing for the next phase in the crisis. It was no use trying to compromise. The Rockinghams had to be outspoken so that one day the political classes would look back and see that the Whigs had entirely opposed a policy that led to catastrophe.
So the duke sought out the young bishop of Lichfield, Brownlow North, to warn him that he intended to be outrageous, knowing that the bishop would pass this on to his half brother. It was a tactic presumably intended to provoke the government into a showdown where Richmond could speak as plainly as Barré. Indeed, because they were unelected, the duke and his friends in the upper house could make the same case against the government even more vigorously.
As usual, the debates in the Lords were not reported in great detail. On May 11, the peers voted on the regulating bill; on the eighteenth, the justice bill to protect the army; and on the twenty-sixth, the quartering bill to give the troops billets in Boston. Even the Marquess of Rockingham found time to attend between the end of foxhunting and the best of the flat racing season. And for that last debate, the duke had another eccentric ally, in the person of Lord Chatham, finally appearing from the wings for a performance that reeked of anticlimax. The old Agamemnon was sixty-five, theatrically ill, leaning on a crutch, and wearing black velvet boots to ease the pains of gout. He gave “a feeble harangue,” said a cruel observer, Horace Walpole, in which Chatham condemned everything—the tea tax, the Stamp Act, and the rioters in Boston—but without a hint of what course he might follow if he were Lord North. Then Chatham took his exit, leaving his audience little the wiser.
Of course the government won every vote, but that was not quite the end of the story. The procedural rules in the Lords gave Richmond a weapon of a kind that Edmund Burke could not deploy in the Commons. In the Lords, a peer could propose a motion of dissent, a gesture of protest whose text was entered in the record for everyone to see. Seizing an opportunity, Charles Lennox put down two motions of the kind, each one long and strongly worded, carefully drawn up in numbered paragraphs to condemn every single component of the Coercive Acts. They included words of warning as strident as Barré’s. To enforce the new laws, the British would need to use military force: a force so large and so expensive that it would bring about “the inevitable ruin of the nation.”16
And that was the final scene in the rearguard campaign by the Rockinghams and their allies. The curtain fell on a performance that had occupied three months of political time. What had the opposition achieved? On the face of it, very little, since Lord North had accomplished his mission, and Gage was on his way. In the closing days of May, the king signed the remaining bills for Lord Dartmouth to send to Gage on June 3 with a secret letter of instructions sealed inside the messenger’s pouch.
If Great Britain had been the despotic tyranny that Americans liked to think it was, the politics would have ended there; but in fact, the parliamentary campaign had taxed Lord North to the limit, leaving him even more uneasy and fatigued than he usually was by midsummer. With the general election looming up ahead, North also had to contemplate what might prove to be a still deeper crisis if Barré’s predictions were fulfilled.
And at this moment North made another serious mistake. Until now, none of his new laws had affected any colony other than Massachusetts, but before Parliament rose, the cabinet chose to look further afield. For years the future of the western wilderness had gone unresolved, despite constant worries about a general Indian war. At last the time seemed right to deal with this matter too; but in doing so, Lord North would unite the colonies in resistance to Great Britain.
THE QUEBEC ACT
Two years earlier, when Lord Hillsborough resigned, his departure had seemed like a triumph for the bankers and visionaries, including Benjamin Franklin, who sought to open the Ohio country to new settlers. But among the officials in Whitehall, this still aroused deep anxiety for the usual reasons. It would provoke the Indians and weaken the mother country’s control over the co
lonies on the seaboard. The law officers, Thurlow and Wedderburn, dug in their heels and prevented the Grand Ohio Company from obtaining the land grants for which it had applied.
The British government, however, could not prevaricate forever about the wilderness. In Canada and the Illinois country the old French pioneers, all of whom were Roman Catholic, had made a convincing case to be given their own civil government, with a French system of law and a promise of freedom for their faith. If arrangements such as these would guarantee the settlers’ loyalty, so be it, thought the ministers in London; and they found nothing alarming about Catholicism three thousand miles away. Loyal Anglicans though they were, North and his colleagues had shaken off the crude old English hatred of the Vatican. In the upper ranks of society, that sort of prejudice had lost its appeal at a time when the last Jacobites were dying out and every young British nobleman went to Rome to look at statues and to catch the pox.17
On May 2, Lord Dartmouth announced a new Quebec bill, drafted mainly by Wedderburn, intended to answer the western question forever. Despite some fierce criticism, especially from John Dunning, it passed swiftly through the Commons, often with very few members taking the trouble to attend debates about what seemed to be a tedious, provincial matter. In the Lords, Chatham reappeared to denounce the measure, on a variety of grounds that included an appeal to anti-Popery, but Richmond opposed it only halfheartedly. Like Edmund Burke, who favored Catholic emancipation in Ireland, the duke held liberal views about religion and did not stoop to bigotry.
In some ways the bill was a farsighted, even progressive piece of legislation, but the ministers were playing with fire. It would have been far wiser politically to leave the Canadian question on one side, for perhaps another year or two, in the hope that in the meantime New England would fall quiet. As it was, the bill contained elements that were bound to antagonize the colonies, the Wilkesites, and the people on the streets of London. The new law said that in Quebec the French would be entirely free to worship as they chose; they would join a new legislative council to help the British governor rule the province; and its boundaries would be pushed a long way southward and westward all the way to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. In other words, Quebec would encompass the western wilderness in its entirety, blocking the path of settlers from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New York. The Indians would be protected and their reservations guaranteed.
When news of the Quebec Act reached the colonies, it did indeed cause a furor; and because, far from being trivial or technical, its scope was so wide, it offended men and women in every single province. It was a plot, some would say, not only to bring Catholicism into America by the back door but also to confine Americans to the East, where they would lie at Britain’s mercy. Indeed Wedderburn freely admitted that this was so. The Ohio would set a limit that settlers must not cross. “We ought to confine the inhabitants,” the solicitor general told the Commons on May 26, “to keep them according to the ancient policy of this country, along the line of the sea and rivers.”18
Meanwhile, in London, the Quebec Act’s religious dimension aroused the fiercest opposition. Here as well as in the colonies the bulk of the population lagged far behind the cabinet in its tolerance of Roman Catholics. Even the bishops of the Church of England grew uneasy about a measure that might lead in time to a Catholic revival on both sides of the Atlantic. Up to this point, the Wilkesites in the capital had done little to help their cousins in New England, other than in the columns of the press. But now, with the old Roman enemy in full view, they finally began to stir. At the very last moment, when the act was just about to become law, they organized a protest against it, but one that owed as much to sectarian hatred as it did to the love of freedom.
The campaign against the Quebec Act found its leader in Frederick Bull, the lord mayor of London, who also sat in the Commons as an MP for the city. A successful tea merchant and an associate of John Hancock’s friend George Hayley, Bull cut a curious figure, becoming an object of ridicule in parts of the press. While the London Evening Post called him “the patriotic chief magistrate,” others dismissed him as “a weak and silly character,” a toady manipulated by John Wilkes, to whom he was very close: they would dine together several times a week. A religious dissenter, probably a Baptist, Bull had run for mayor on a platform that included “the restoration of the liberties of our American brethren.” Among his allies were two genuine colonials: Stephen Sayre from New York, an adventurer who ran a rather suspect banking house, and William Lee, Arthur’s brother. Lee and Sayre had both taken large bets on the West Indies, buying slave plantations on the island of Dominica at the peak of the boom in real estate.
Together with Bull, they belonged to a small London caucus that had built the radical, Wilkesite majority in the capital. As a means to qualify their friends to vote and hold office, the caucus had quietly taken over a small livery company, the Framework Knitters, an empty shell run from the New England Coffee House with Sayre and Arthur Lee among its members. Thanks to deft organization, as well as the appeal of their ideas, the caucus gradually gathered support among the other livery companies until it had the backing of nearly 60 percent of the city’s voters.19
The previous year, they had engineered the choice of Sayre and William Lee as the two sheriffs of London, while also keeping in close touch with Samuel Adams in Boston. With the general election approaching, they were hoping to win seats in Parliament not only in the London area but also in Bristol, Hull, Newcastle, and Worcester, where radicalism still ran deep. While they advocated parliamentary reform, they also appealed to anti-Catholicism, the blind emotion that formed the Wilkesite movement’s dark side. In Parliament that spring, Bull never once rose to his feet to speak against the new coercive laws for Massachusetts. Instead, he waited until the Quebec Act had already passed both houses before he rallied the city against Lord North.*4
On the evening of June 18, the day after the last vote was taken and close to the end of their terms of office as sheriffs, Sayre and Lee paid a visit to Downing Street, where North turned them away. He knew precisely what the two Americans wanted: to make an appointment for Bull to present a petition against the act before George III gave it the royal assent. “I think it scarcely decent to receive them,” North told the king, but sooner or later they would have to be heard because, by ancient precedent, the lord mayor always had the right to address the monarch directly. On the morning of the twenty-second, the petition arrived at last, signed by the Corporation of London, only moments before the king was due to go to Parliament to close that year’s session. The city accused him of breaking his coronation oath to defend the Protestant faith.
First published in London in May 1774, and later reprinted in Boston by Paul Revere, this cartoon depicts the Quebec Act as a plot by English bishops to foist Roman Catholicism on America, while Lord North looks on with a Jacobite in Highland dress. Library of Congress
For weeks, the press had been full of agitation against the act, and now a crowd gathered in St. James’s Park and outside the House of Lords to shout, “No Popery! No French government!” According to one report, John Wilkes appeared at a window to greet them as they passed. First as the royal coach arrived, and then again when it left, the crowd jostled around it, shaking their fists at the king with cries of “Remember Charles I! Remember James II!” It was all very different from the applause that had greeted His Majesty a year earlier at the naval review. George III was left visibly shaken, unable to give his speech without stumbling over his lines.20
This was the only recorded case of Londoners taking to the streets to protest on behalf of America. The demonstration did nothing but harm, and it helped to make war more likely. The king and Lord North swiftly recovered, all the more convinced that they stood for reason and enlightenment, while their opponents were bigoted and seditious. From the riot against the Quebec Act, they also drew the lesson that the Wilkesites would make the colonies an election issue; and, in due course, this persuaded the cabinet
to deliver a preemptive strike of its own, to be launched at the end of September.
On the far side of the Atlantic the riot left another dangerous legacy. The press reports about it arrived in Boston in August and were reprinted by newspapers all over the continent, giving a false impression of the breadth of support the colonies commanded in the mother country. For this, Lord Chatham must also bear much of the blame. With his futile and xenophobic speech against the Quebec Act, Chatham encouraged Americans to believe that with him at their head the ordinary people of England stood shoulder to shoulder with their colonial cousins. In London and a few other cities a great many did, but not in the shires of middle England, where so much political power still lay. However much the English disliked Catholicism, it seems that no demonstrations occurred outside the capital.21
Meanwhile, as the summer wore on and General Gage’s orders crossed the ocean, Lord Dartmouth had little to do but wait anxiously to see how Massachusetts would respond. Shy and tongue-tied, always worrying about his son at Oxford and the godless morals of the kingdom, he had mostly sat through the parliamentary debates in silence. In reply to Richmond, he made only one substantial speech in the Lords at the end of March. Horace Walpole the diarist heard it and came away thinking he hoped for reconciliation. The colonial secretary had been “conscientious and mild,” Walpole thought, but Dartmouth’s secret letter of instructions to Gage told a different story. Whatever his private feelings, he did not have the power to waver from the hard line taken by his colleagues.
As yet, no one had explicitly laid down the doctrine, so central to British politics today, that the cabinet must take collective responsibility for every decision it reaches. But even so, the convention was usually observed, despite the personal rivalries that drove Lord North to distraction. Neither he nor Dartmouth could make policy in isolation. Once the new coercive laws were passed, they had to be enforced to the letter whatever private reservations Dartmouth might have.
