An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  His order book shows how his thinking was developing. His chief concern was this: to delay any fighting until he had what he wanted; firm instructions from London telling him to pursue the rebels. In the meantime, Gage wished to avoid provoking the other colonies to come to the aid of Massachusetts before he was ready to move. For the same reason, he needed to prevent random incidents of violence between his troops and the citizens of Boston that might lead to a premature encounter.12

  And so from the end of October the army’s discipline became especially severe. Three men were flogged as deserters, with a thousand lashes apiece, the sentries were ordered not to bandy words with passersby, and Gage told his officers to liaise with Boston’s magistrates to ensure that they arrested any soldiers caught brawling in the streets. From November 14 he imposed a strict curfew on his camp, with no redcoat allowed outside it after eight at night.

  With work nearly finished to fortify the Boston Neck, and temporary barracks rising on the Common, despite a campaign of obstruction by the citizens, the general stepped up the training of his battalions. On every fine day, they practiced firing independently or by platoon. The infantry had to learn to turn and wheel “with the utmost rapidity,” said their commander in chief. They were drilled in loading their muskets quickly, with the hammers hardened to prevent misfire.13

  At the end of November, General Gage drew up an order of battle for the engagement that he knew was bound to come. Ten regiments—more had arrived, as well as ammunition from New York—divided into three brigades, amounting to nearly four thousand men: that was all he had at his disposal. Their winter would be hard, soldiers and their families living in huts short of firewood, with dysentery and smallpox taking many victims. Around them the town of Boston was as hostile as ever. But on the other side of the ocean the months of delay and hesitation were at last about to end.

  While the Americans had begun the revolution, the British were ready to start the war. In the first week of January, Lord North received the necessary confirmation that John Hancock and his comrades had set up an illegal government. It left the British with no choice. Like the Scottish Jacobites of old, the rebels in New England could expect no mercy and no quarter.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE FATAL DISPATCH

  An account is come of the Bostonians having voted an army of 16,000 men, who are to be called minute men, as they are to be ready at a minute’s warning.

  —HORACE WALPOLE, JANUARY 15, 1775

  In London, the old year drew toward its close in a mist of rumor and confusion. With Parliament in recess, the army stuck fast in Boston, and no sign of a new plan from Lord North, speculation filled the vacuum of policy. By the middle of December everyone knew the outcome of the Continental Congress, with the text of the Association reprinted many times in Fleet Street. What would the cabinet do in response? Did the ministers view the boycott as another act of treason, or did they see it merely as a gesture or a bluff? As yet it was impossible to say. The government gave mixed signals and left the public to guess whether it intended to fight or to negotiate.

  As always the British took refuge in laughter, in the worst possible taste. With the party at the Oaks still so fresh a memory, mistletoe and fauns were all the rage that winter. At Covent Garden, in the presence of the king, the company staged a pantomime, The Druids, with dances, masques, “elegant transparencies,” and a famous comic in the role of Harlequin. At the climax of the show, he tormented Pantaloon with what the newspapers called “an American suit of tar and feathers.” George III, the critics said, “seemed much disconcerted.” Elsewhere the rumor mill ground on with its usual combination of the true and the false.1

  For this we can partly blame Lord North, who did something so apparently bizarre that it was bound to make men and women scratch their heads. On December 16, a few days before the vacation, the ministers came to the Commons with the budget for the forces. Despite the turmoil in America, they proposed to increase the army in the colonies by only four hundred men. The navy would actually shrink, with four thousand fewer sailors in home waters.

  This was hardly the sign of a cabinet bent on war, and yet its language and the king’s had seemed to point in that direction. Up stood the prickly Scotsman George Johnstone, the old assailant against the Tea Act, to expand upon the paradox that seemed to be so obvious. Opposed to any measures to coerce the colonies, Governor Johnstone had voted against them the previous spring. Given the stance the cabinet had taken toward America, “nothing but the sword can now decide the contest,” he said. And yet, he went on, the navy was about to be depleted, leaving Great Britain exposed if the French picked this awkward moment to attack.2

  In fact this was highly unlikely, since Louis XVI had his own afflictions to endure. It was because of this that Lord North had felt able to save money. In the hope of repairing his weak finances, the new king had appointed a philosophe, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, to act as controller general. An ardent free marketeer, Turgot hoped to revitalize the French economy by doing away with old regulations that controlled the price of grain. Here was another bold idea whose timing was inept. In France, the series of bad harvests had already caused hardship even more severe than in England, and the reforms came into force in September 1774 at just the moment when the heavy rains made another poor crop inevitable. As the price of a loaf soared again, riots spread across the north of France and reached the very gates of Versailles.

  The guerre des farines—the “flour war”—continued for nine months, closely watched from London by Lord Rochford. Seeing France in turmoil, the British could relax about the threat to India, and they saw no danger that their old enemy would intervene to help the Americans. And so the cabinet cut the military budget. Its spending plans easily passed through the Commons, thanks to Lord North’s huge majority, but the decision was damaging strategically. With the fleet reduced in size, it would now become impossible for the government to change its mind and do what Lord Barrington had proposed: withdraw the army from New England and rely on the navy to make the colonies see sense.

  As Christmas drew near with the mind of the cabinet still so hard to read, many different stories flowed around the capital. Was General Gage about to be recalled? Would he be replaced by some new soldier more skillful and more brave? By the fourth week in December, this was what many thought likely. Just before Parliament rose, Edmund Burke joined the chorus against him: Gage, he said, was “both besieger and besieged” and his strategy absurd. His dismissal was imminent, the papers claimed, in sly little articles following reports about the efforts Boston had made to frustrate his fortification of the Neck.

  It was even said that North himself was about to fall from office. He would be superseded by a ministry led by Gower and Hillsborough, who would take the steps required to end the crisis. Since the king still seemed so loyal to Lord North, this idea was surely absurd. And yet during the Christmas break this story went the rounds as well, from sources so apparently reliable that Arthur Lee sent it home to Virginia. And what about that old friend of America’s, Lord Chatham? It was rumored that he would soon rise from his sickbed to act as the broker of some new settlement with the colonies. Because Chatham’s parliamentary following was small and erratic, nothing of the kind was even remotely likely, but somehow—doubtless from the noble lord—talk of such a great event leaked into the public domain, with the newspapers awaiting a decisive speech when the lawmakers gathered again in January. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin for one believed that only Chatham, as the sole British statesman whose word Americans would trust, could prevent catastrophe. The previous August the two men had met to share ideas. As the months went by, they kept in touch, while in deep midwinter Chatham also spoke to Arthur Lee.3

  Most probably, Lord Chatham was simply maneuvering. It seems likely that he merely wished to stake out his ground again as a critic of Lord North so that much later, if disaster struck and a war went badly wrong, he could step forward as the only person who could either bring
the Americans to the table or crush them militarily. If this is what he hoped for, it was equally ridiculous. However well he had led the nation to victory during the Seven Years’ War, Chatham’s arrogance and selfishness in peacetime had alienated almost every mainstream politician in Great Britain. But he had many friends in the press, and he carried weight across the ocean. If he rose to the occasion, his eloquence might gravely undermine the government, even if he could not topple it from power. Lord Chatham was one of two political opponents whom the cabinet could not ignore. The other was Benjamin Franklin.

  If Great Britain were ever to negotiate with the Continental Congress, the ministers would have to begin with the American. Despite the loathing he aroused in Whitehall, they had no one else to speak to. And indeed on December 23 the stock market rose sharply on a story that Franklin and Lord North had reached a deal to keep the peace. The story was another wild exaggeration, but the market has a way of sniffing out things politicians prefer to keep secret. In fact, at the end of November, Franklin had received two separate approaches from well-connected people who suggested that the government might be willing to talk about a compromise. In response, he opened a new dialogue with Lord Dartmouth that continued fitfully for three months. The talks had not the slightest chance of success.

  The more serious of the two approaches came from a pair of Quakers, David Barclay and John Fothergill, whose motives were clearly sincere: they wanted to prevent a war. A prosperous merchant, Barclay came from the family that gave the modern bank its name. Friendly with the Wilkesites and with businessmen who dealt with the West Indies, he worked hand in hand with Fothergill, a physician who acted as family doctor not only to the Dartmouths but also to Franklin. At the end of November, Fothergill and Barclay contacted Franklin with a hint that the colonial secretary might be open to discussion.

  For the obvious reason—the American remained persona non grata for the cabinet—any exchanges, however tentative, would have to be kept secret and undertaken at arm’s length. With that understood, Franklin overcame his skepticism, and talks began. To this day their significance remains obscure. The British kept no official record that any discussions had taken place, leaving Franklin’s papers and a few rough notes by Lord Dartmouth as almost the only source of information about them. It may be that Barclay and Fothergill acted on their own initiative, reaching out to both sides in the hope that they might find some common ground. Another possibility is this: that Lord Dartmouth, dreading the thought of bloodshed, saw this as one last avenue that he must explore, and so the two Quakers acted at his instigation. This seems just as likely. Given his Christian beliefs, Dartmouth could never forget Saint Matthew and the duty placed on him to make peace. But neither could he waive his other obligation: to uphold the law that kept the sinner from committing evil in the fields of Massachusetts or the alleyways of Covent Garden.

  And so in early December he entered the talks with Franklin, perhaps unsure of what he wanted to achieve. A divided soul, lost between charity and rigor, Lord Dartmouth could only try to do his best. One great question had to be answered first. What did the Americans want? How little, or how much, would they require to satisfy their urge for liberty? Fothergill and Barclay asked Franklin to put the colonial case. By December 6, the American had drawn up a paper setting out some terms. Cogent and detailed, it carried the title “Hints for Conversation.” In seventeen numbered paragraphs, Franklin outlined a plan to preserve “a durable union” between the mother country and America. Boston would pay for what it had destroyed, and Britain would repeal the tax on tea: a fair exchange, he thought.

  Indeed, his paper contained many sensible ideas, but as so often with Benjamin Franklin they were also too far ahead of their time. For example, he suggested a modest tax to help finance the army and the navy, to be levied in America in time of war with France or Spain. The amount would be linked to the land tax the British paid themselves, adjusted to allow for America’s smaller population. In principle, this might have done the trick; indeed, in 1800 when they negotiated the terms of their union with Ireland, the British devised a similar arrangement, apportioning each nation’s taxes according to a formula based on their population and economic resources.4

  But in the 1770s Franklin’s ideas still seemed far too extreme. In particular, he proposed three conditions to which Lord Dartmouth could never agree. No redcoats in the colonies, unless each colony gave permission? The British could never say yes to that. Franklin also demanded the repeal of the Quebec Act and the new laws for the government of Massachusetts. This was unacceptable as well. Most provocatively, Franklin wound up his paper with a bald rejection of the empire’s right to rule. His seventeenth item was this: “All powers of internal legislation in the colonies to be disclaimed by parliament.”

  Perhaps this merely represented an opening gambit in a process of give-and-take, but Franklin’s paper offered Dartmouth very little to work with. He could never sell these ideas to his colleagues or to George III, who had already set his mind against any concessions. Even so, the talks continued into the new year of 1775, with Dartmouth still listening. And while Franklin went on meeting Fothergill and Barclay, the American held separate conversations with an admiral in the Royal Navy who also believed that war could be avoided. These meetings began in the following way.

  At about the same time that the two Quakers approached him, Franklin received an invitation to play chess with an attractive widow of fifty or so called Mrs. Caroline Howe, whose younger brothers had both served courageously in the armed forces. A clever, stylish woman, with a flair for mathematics and intrigue, Mrs. Howe met Franklin twice across the chessboard. During their second encounter, which took place on December 4, she steered the conversation toward Great Britain’s quarrel with the colonies. “I hope we are not to have a civil war,” the lady remarked. “They should kiss and be friends, says I.” Expert in flattery as well as algebra, she suggested that Franklin was the ideal diplomat to settle the dispute. He thanked her kindly and went on his way for another session that evening with Fothergill and Barclay.

  Three weeks later, on Christmas Day, Franklin called on Mrs. Howe. By now the press had run the story that he had struck a deal with Lord North. It was ridiculous of course—both Franklin and Mrs. Howe knew that—but seizing the moment, she suggested that he speak to her brother Rear Admiral Richard Howe, who might have his own useful contacts in the government. A brilliant commander who had led daring raids on the coast of France during the Seven Years’ War, he was still only forty-eight, and likely to achieve the highest rank in any future conflict. Warily, Franklin agreed to a meeting: whereupon the admiral appeared through the door, and another intermittent round of talks began. Under cover of more games of chess, they continued until the middle of February, with Richard Howe offering his services as an intermediary with the cabinet.

  But the admiral’s intervention was just as hopeless as that of the Quakers. On reading Franklin’s seventeen terms for a settlement, Howe “lamented,” the American recalled, “that my propositions were not such as probably could be accepted.” By now no small group of human beings in the metropolis, however well-intentioned, could stand in the way of what was about to happen. Too much had already occurred. In America, the people were already up in arms; and after all that they had said about submission by the colonies, the king and his cabinet dare not yield an inch.

  Perhaps only two politicians in London truly understood how dire the situation had become. One was Charles Lennox, the indomitable Duke of Richmond, but even among his own Whig allies he was often regarded as too strange and too Frenchified to be listened to. The other was again Lord Barrington in the War Office. From his experience doing battle with the French, he knew just how difficult it would be to feed and supply an army in America against the will of the people who lived there. On Christmas Eve, Barrington wrote another memorandum calling for retreat from Massachusetts.

  On land the British simply could not win. The province was too lar
ge, he told Lord Dartmouth, and too full of farmers used to bearing arms. Even if it were conquered, the cost would be appalling, involving what Barrington called “the horrors and bloodshed of civil war,” followed by the burden of a long occupation. He agreed that Boston deserved to be punished, but not at such a price. Pull the army back to Canada, said Barrington: then send more ships to patrol the coast until the Americans began to succumb and Britain could offer honorable terms with which both countries could be content.5

  His argument, so strongly made, fell on deaf ears. A week later the schooner St. Lawrence arrived in England swiftly followed by a merchant vessel, the Minerva from Salem, and then a military transport, the Charming Nancy. After the snow and the storms of November, the skies had cleared to bring an unexpectedly mild winter on both sides of the Atlantic. After leaving Boston as recently as December 16, the Charming Nancy sped across the ocean in a mere twenty-four days. Suddenly, after so many long delays, the flow of official news became a torrent. At last the British cabinet need not rely on dispatches alone. All three ships brought passengers who could brief the ministers face-to-face. In the new year of 1775 the decision for war became impossible to avoid.

  THE NEWS ON THE CHARMING NANCY

  The crucial events at Westminster in January have rarely been explored in detail. Only two British historians have written about them at any length. Understandably, most American scholars focus far more closely on the revolutionary process on their side of the water. And when they do try to analyze the decisions taken by the British, they tend to veer toward one of two extremes. American writers either dismiss Lord North and his colleagues as fools or tyrants, who instinctively resorted to force against the uprising regardless of the blood that would be shed; or they lean too far in the other direction, arguing that the cabinet never seriously intended to begin a war but merely wanted General Gage to frighten the Americans until they ceased to resist authority.