An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  Since this was the eighteenth century, only ninety-five constituencies would actually witness a contest. The rest were either counties where the local gentry struck deals between themselves to choose the successful candidates, or boroughs with a small electorate controlled by a local patron or the government itself. Even so, an election was a great event. In the previous decade, the press, John Wilkes, and men like Edmund Burke had brought excitement into politics, even for the vast majority who had no right to vote. For the British, an election represented another entertaining spectacle, full of beer and controversy. That in itself was one more reason to make the campaign as brief as possible, and especially in the capital, where the Wilkesites had high hopes for their political machine.11

  “It will shorten that period of drunkenness and riot that always attends elections,” said Lady Mary Coke, a close friend of the royal family’s, when she heard the announcement.*2 But even before the news was official, it seemed that the gods were angry. In the middle of September, with the harvest yet to be complete, suddenly the rain began to fall. The bad weather went on for weeks, with London often waking to a cold and heavy fog. On the twenty-ninth, with the Thames in flood again, North gathered his colleagues in Downing Street to make the formal request for Parliament to be dissolved. That evening the news rushed around the court, arousing mixed feelings of enthusiasm and dismay. “It puts everything in a bustle,” wrote Lady Mary, “and displeasures some.” As Lord North warned the king, he would probably lose some seats himself for lack of time to organize, and among the disappointed men there might be members of the royal entourage.12

  His Majesty brushed these worries aside, but the following day their plans were interrupted by a dreadful item of news. A dispatch arrived from Boston on HMS Scarborough, bringing word of the powder alarm and the uproar that followed. This was the letter, written in a panic, in which General Gage reported his failure to make the colony see sense and told Whitehall that the province would have to be subdued by force. At noon on Friday, September 30, the general election was proclaimed, a few hours later the Scarborough dropped anchor, and that evening London was full of rumors that Massachusetts had risen in an armed rebellion.

  “The town was all joy on Friday night, at the dissolution of parliament,” said one paper close to John Wilkes. But his friends at the London Evening Post carried a far more sensational story. Alongside a few garbled lines about the powder alarm, it claimed that the army had been attacked, that two regiments of redcoats had mutinied, and that General Gage was dead. It was the first in a series of false alarms of war, recurring every few weeks until the following spring, which led many Britons to believe that fighting had already begun months before the actual moment came. These reports made the war all the more likely, not least because they ran alongside genuine scoops that the press received before the same information reached Whitehall officially. The same thing had happened after the Tea Party, but the autumn was a season much busier with traffic from the colonies. With scores of tobacco ships arriving, mostly via Liverpool or Glasgow, which heard American news a week ahead of the capital, the flow of news across the Atlantic sometimes became overwhelming.*3

  A mixture of fact and fiction, the stories in the press embarrassed the government; they accustomed people to thinking that bloodshed was inevitable, even when it might still be avoided; and they undermined official confidence in General Gage. Soon even John Pownall, who sincerely wanted peace, was privately sharing his doubts about him with Thomas Hutchinson. Pownall spoke “but lightly of his powers,” Hutchinson recalled, and reminded the governor of the poor advice that Gage had given the king.13

  For the government, the timing of the Scarborough’s arrival could not have been more inconvenient. Lord Dartmouth had begun to think about calling his own congress in America, with delegates chosen by each colony and a chairman appointed by George III, to design a new government for the continent as a whole. But this was no more than a vague idea, suddenly overtaken by the bad tidings from Boston. The reports reached England to find the cabinet in disarray. Again, Lord Suffolk had fallen ill, while his colleagues were mostly away in the shires, fixing their local elections, and their opinions differed widely. Rochford was calm and confident—“I do not yet despair”—but Gower was fretful and alarmed by news that he called “big with mischief.”14

  Should they try to placate the colonies by giving a firm undertaking never to impose any more taxes? Or should they go even further and abolish the hateful duty on tea? In private conversations in Whitehall, both ideas were gaining ground, with even hawks like Edward Thurlow seeking a formula for compromise. But proposals such as these kept running up against familiar obstacles. How could they convince the Americans that they were serious without doing away with the Declaratory Act as well? And if they did that, or abolished the tea tax, how could they still claim that Parliament was supreme? “In what way or in what manner this could be done without giving up all, he was utterly at a loss,” the attorney general told Thomas Hutchinson.15

  All North could do was convene a small emergency meeting on October 3, at which Lord Dartmouth made the case for a cautious response. He persuaded his colleagues not to order more troops to Boston, at least for the time being. While the king suggested the dispatch of two more regiments from Ireland, the cabinet chose only to send three more warships and as many marines as Lord Sandwich could spare. There was little other action they could take. Although the general had shut the port of Boston, the rest of the Coercive Acts had already failed: that much was obvious. But by calling the election—a decision he could not revoke—in effect Lord North had paralyzed the work of government for perhaps three months or more.

  The new Parliament could not assemble until the second half of November at the earliest. Even then, another four or five weeks might pass before they could vote on any new initiative against New England. At that time, the electoral system was so complex, with so many different rules about who could vote, who could stand, and how a poll should be conducted, that the outcome of the poll would take many weeks to settle entirely. When Parliament met, it would have to resolve disputes about dozens of individual elections. That, and the annual debates about the budgets for the army and the navy, would consume all the time available before the Christmas break.

  But meanwhile the general election still had to be fought. For all his lack of foresight and his tendency to worry, Lord North resembled his American opponents in his will to win the game of politics. As every politician must, North had a very thick skin; when he tripped and fell, he picked himself up and went on fighting; and he kept at his desk or on his feet in the Commons until the job was done.

  In the autumn of 1774 ministers had no bodyguards, despite a recent spate of armed robberies around the capital. On the night of October 4, in a country lane at Gunnersbury, two highwaymen held up his coach and relieved Lord North of his wallet after shooting his postilion in the thigh. His instincts were those of a gentleman, and so Lord North made light of the affair. “I lost a very few guineas,” he said, showing more concern for the postilion than for himself. Next morning he was back at work, writing letters and pulling levers to secure every winnable constituency.16

  In his constituency at Banbury, where only eighteen citizens could vote, his position was impregnable. His agent, the vicar, assembled them for supper, with wine and cheese and a bowl of punch, and they duly elected Lord North. A few weeks later, the Norths said thank you with a handsome gift of venison. “I never remember to have seen the people better pleased,” said the vicar, regretting only the fact that His Lordship would have to be carried around the town in a chair to celebrate his victory. Elsewhere, however, Lord North had to work much harder for success. To help him, the Treasury supplied a slush fund of £50,000, but this would buy only twenty-five seats in Parliament from patrons happy to sell to the highest bidder. He could not afford to be complacent. All the time North worried more about the Wilkesites than he did about the Rockinghams.17

 
; As always the latter were badly led, and their morale was weak. “I confess indeed,” said the marquess, “all politics are now in such a low state, and so little likely to revive, that I should feel a hesitation … to drudge on in such a laborious occupation.” Rockingham was feeling out of sorts and found the election simply too vexatious. Among his friends in the aristocracy, only the radical Duke of Richmond showed any eagerness to fight, but he spoke for no more than a few seats in Sussex. At Bristol, with little money behind him and no help from the marquess, Edmund Burke came only second in the vote. That was enough to get him reelected, because the borough had two seats, but at the top of the poll was the American radical Henry Cruger, the business client of John Hancock’s, a man with his own close ties to Wilkes.18

  The voting was mostly done by October 20. When the dust settled, it emerged that Lord North had kept his solid majority in the Commons, with about 320 members likely to support him. But while the Wilkesites had taken only a handful of seats, they performed far more strongly than mere numbers would suggest. Their appeal was broad and genuine. Wherever the electorate was large and free and urban, they did well, with a manifesto that could not have been more outspoken. At its heart lay the old Wilkesite program—shorter Parliaments and a wider franchise—but it also called for justice for America in the most uncompromising terms. “No Popery Members—No Unrepealers of the Quebec and Boston Acts,” cried the London Evening Post the day after the election was called. With the press still full of Massachusetts, the Wilkesites swept the capital, taking six seats in the London area, with Hancock’s friend George Hayley among the victorious candidates. Better still, John Wilkes won the election to follow Frederick Bull as lord mayor, by a margin so wide that this time it could not be vetoed.

  Up to a point, they owed their success to the bigotry so crudely visible in the riot outside Parliament in June. The unpleasant Mr. Bull was baiting Roman Catholics again, using the powers of his office to close two chapels where priests said Mass. But the evidence from elsewhere in the country suggests that the Wilkesites were building a wider radical movement that, over time and under different leadership, might have evolved into a popular party of a modern kind. If only it had been far larger, it might have prevented the war.19

  A case in point was Worcester, the English cathedral city, whose politics looked a little like those of its namesake in Massachusetts. A place that earned its keep by manufacturing—gloves, carpets, and the chinaware for which it was already famous—it was lively, educated, and alert to every modern trend. With six meetinghouses for Presbyterians, Baptists, and the like, the English Worcester had a reputation for dissenting views about religion and much else. For discussion of the issues of the day it had a coffeehouse called Tom’s, where in the pages of the local newspaper its citizens could read all the American news and even an extract from Jefferson’s Summary View. As for the women, a small but gallant band showed their support for Boston by refusing to drink tea.

  And so, when the election came, the Wilkesites saw this constituency as one that they might win. By a fluke of history, the city charter had created an unusually large electorate, with two thousand names on the roll, more than half the adult males. At Worcester the polls were always riotous, and bribery was rife, but in 1774 no fewer than seven hundred voters backed a London radical, Sir Watkin Lewes, another member of Wilkes’s inner circle in the capital. Although he lost, the result was revealing. In the dynamic, progressive parts of the country, if the people were given a choice as many as a third of them would favor a pro-American candidate.20

  Much later, when the war for the colonies was nearly lost, Lord North would claim that it had been a people’s war, urged upon him by public opinion and supported by the vast majority of Britons. This was certainly true in 1775, after the news arrived of the casualties at Concord and Bunker Hill. At that point the British public began to cry out for vengeance. But nine months earlier, at the time of the election, their views about the crisis in America had yet to crystallize, and a case for reconciliation could still be made. Perhaps James Boswell captured the mood of the moment most accurately in a letter to Samuel Johnson filled with doubts about coercion in America. “Imperfect hints … float in my mind,” he told his friend, but he feared that the government had been, as he put it, “precipitant and severe” toward the Bostonians. “Well do you know that I have no kindness for that race,” Boswell went on. “But nations or bodies of men should … have a fair trial, and not be condemned on character alone.”21

  These might have been the views of a minority of Britons, but the results from London, Bristol, and Worcester suggest that the minority was actually quite large, with a strong groundswell of sympathy for Boston. But sadly the nation had only a handful of open boroughs where it could influence the ballot. In practice the electoral system ensured that places such as these were merely scattered islands of liberty, surrounded by a sea of dogma and reaction. The drift toward war continued, and in four different ways the general election helped to make it all but irreversible.

  In the first place it tied the hands of the government until the new year of 1775. Second, the outcome strengthened the position of the hawks—Suffolk, Gower, and Sandwich—who had urged Lord North to call an early poll. Third, Lord North’s victory in the country had been so large that it left him unable to deviate from the hard line he had already chosen. Behind him in the Commons he would have a loyal army of conservatives, eager to give him a mandate for military action in New England. If North were to flinch or to waver, his supporters would be horrified. At worst he might face a leadership challenge from a rival determined to use force.

  The fourth and final point concerns the king and his response to the election. As the weeks went by, he became ever more hawkish himself. “The die is now cast, the colonies must now submit or triumph,” he wrote in September, even before the voting began. “I do not wish to come to severer measures but we must not retreat.” As the election unwound, the king closely followed each result. While he loathed the idea of John Wilkes as mayor of London, in the country as a whole the outcome was excellent. With Lord North safely returned to Downing Street, George III saw all the less reason to appease America. It would take only one more item of news to convince him that General Gage had to take the field.

  Soon enough it came. In the middle of October a secret dispatch arrived from the Netherlands, bringing word of yet another act of treason by the people of Rhode Island.22

  * * *

  *1 The fashions of 1774–75 can be seen in contemporary paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds: for example, his portrait of Mrs. Elizabeth Carnac in the Wallace Collection in London.

  *2 Born in 1727, the daughter of the second Duke of Argyll, Lady Mary Coke kept a private journal that amounts to an intimate portrait of the aristocracy at the time, informal but very revealing about the political climate.

  *3 Thanks to the prevailing winds and currents, the fastest sailing route between America and Britain passed around the north of Ireland. Despite this, the navy ignored the Mersey and the Clyde and persisted in using the ports of the English Channel. This increased the average journey time for official mail by up to 20 percent.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE ARMING OF AMERICA

  This country is now in as open a state of rebellion as Scotland was in the ’45.

  —BRIGADIER GENERAL PERCY, BOSTON, SEPTEMBER 17741

  Some thirteen years earlier, the British had appointed as their ambassador to The Hague an abrasive old military man named Sir Joseph Yorke. An envoy with an odd approach to diplomacy—for him, it involved berating the Dutch until they did as he wished—Yorke was another veteran of Culloden Moor, where at the age of only twenty-one he had helped defeat the Jacobites. His political views boiled down to little more than a hatred of the French. Everywhere the ambassador saw their evil hand at work. With the help of Britain’s ring of naval spies, Yorke kept a close watch for any signs that they or the Russians were on the move; and early in October 17
74, his agents in Amsterdam sent him word of something quite extraordinary.

  A small ship called the Smack had sailed into the port from Rhode Island under a skipper called Benjamin Page. In itself, this was unusual—it was rare and generally illegal for colonial ships to visit Dutch or German harbors without clearing British customs first—but the voyage of the Smack looked like something far worse than a simple case of smuggling. Dealing with a Mr. Hodson, an Amsterdam merchant with long-standing connections in New York, Page was said to be loading his vessel with firearms, gunpowder, and forty small pieces of cannon.

  On October 11, Sir Joseph sent the report to Lord Suffolk, who sprang into action at once, alerting the navy. Lord Sandwich sent a cutter, HMS Wells, to patrol the Dutch coast and seize the Smack if she tried to cross the North Sea. At home a few weeks earlier, the War Office had already stopped a cargo of gunpowder leaving for America, and now the news from Holland made it essential for the cabinet to act decisively. Within the week, the king signed an order forbidding any shipments of powder or weapons to the colonies. Published in the London press on October 20, news of the decree instantly revived the talk of war, running close to long stories from Boston about the army’s fortification of the town. 2