by Nick Bunker
As often, the surviving evidence lies open to more than one interpretation; but examined as a whole, it leads to the following conclusion. Believing that they were taking a calculated risk, North and the cabinet deliberately chose to begin what they thought would be a brief, local war in Massachusetts. In doing so, they allowed themselves to be deceived by the only precedent available, the defeat of the Jacobite insurgency of 1745. Its shadow fell across the table at every meeting the cabinet held. After the battle of Culloden, the Highlands had fallen quiet forever, and this seemed to prove the point that military action could bring about a lasting peace. As always, Alexander Wedderburn made the point with brutal candor. “The people of Scotland were better humoured ever since the rebellion,” the solicitor general told Thomas Hutchinson on January 19. Under fire from their opponents and the press, the ministers felt obliged to act as firmly as their forebears had done against Charles Edward Stuart.
Once the government had chosen to use force, there could be no turning back, and this North and his colleagues knew full well. But they expected the fighting to be confined to the hinterland of Boston. They failed to realize that any armed clash in Massachusetts would inevitably raise the rest of the colonies against them too. Despite what they knew about the Continental Congress, they convinced themselves that John Hancock and his comrades spoke only for misguided zealots in New England. This was a terrible error, but again it came about with a fearful inevitability.
In the first week of January, the cabinet ministers received a stream of new evidence that they were staring treason in the face. In sailed the St. Lawrence, sending her papers straight up to London, where they reached Lord Dartmouth on the second. They included not only the request from General Gage for an army twenty thousand strong but also confirmation of the votes in Cambridge in late October that had formed a new militia and called for each town to withhold its taxes. The same day, the story appeared in the newspapers, which—as they had with the Tea Party—immediately recognized how grave its implications were.6
The affairs of Great Britain were “tumbling to the dogs,” said the Morning Post. “America resists by force of arms.” Delay would be disastrous, the paper cried, by giving the colonial militias time to train and equip. Worst of all, the government had failed to assess the scale of the military task that lay ahead. Soon this became a dominant theme, not only in the press, but among the politicians. For Burke and the opposition in Parliament, it opened a new line of attack against Lord North, for whom the reports were acutely embarrassing.
His own colleagues were exasperated, with Rochford still deeply upset by Dartmouth’s lack of initiative, while Gower was apparently feeding the press with more tales of a change of leadership. By now even North was losing patience with Lord Dartmouth, sending him a note calling for new ideas. Under heavy pressure, the colonial secretary gradually abandoned his own hopes of peace. The ships from America brought the first eyewitness account of the uproar the previous summer. It left him with no room for doubt about the nature of the beast unleashed in Massachusetts.
Among her passengers, the Minerva carried Jonathan Bliss, a pro-British lawyer from Springfield, a town where his neighbors were especially fiery radicals. When a crowd three thousand strong gathered there in August to close the Hampshire County Court, they had forced Bliss to sign a paper in which he agreed not to take office under the new colonial regime. On January 4, he met Lord Dartmouth and gave him a firsthand description of the troubles in the region. Should the British offer concessions? the minister asked. No, Bliss replied: only the use of force would restore the province to order.7
Thomas Hutchinson witnessed the conversation and was struck by what seemed to be the idleness of Dartmouth’s most senior aides. He found William Knox and John Pownall lounging at their desks, something he considered very odd, but there was an explanation. The British officials kept Hutchinson at bay, telling him little of what they had in mind. Their plans were far too sensitive to share with someone who talked and wrote so incessantly. The former governor left for a holiday in Bath, while the officials began to swap information with a new urgency.
From the Admiralty, word arrived the next day about the latest dispatch from its officer on the spot. According to Admiral Graves, the rebels intended to attack the army, take Boston by storm, and set it ablaze. Next there came a report from New York, saying that the radicals had gained control of the town and fallen in behind the Continental Congress. And with the newspapers pursuing every lead, the city of London had also begun to stir, placing still more pressure on Lord North.
Until now the business community had remained relatively quiet, but the latest stories from America led to intense activity. On January 3 the West India merchants, alarmed by the threat of a boycott that would ruin the commerce between the sugar islands and the mainland colonies, held an emergency meeting. The following day, John Hancock’s friend George Hayley addressed a gathering of three hundred traders who dealt with Virginia and New England. They voted to draw up a petition calling on the government to find a peaceful resolution of the conflict. While petitions from the colonies could be ignored, a protest from the city would require a debate when the House of Commons reassembled. At that moment, or soon afterward, North would need to be ready with a new plan to satisfy his own backbenchers. Meanwhile, the press accused the government of incompetence and inertia. “America will triumph, and see her own independence the distant consequence of British policy,” said the Morning Post. “Never was Great Britain in a situation so contemptible.”
As yet, the political class remained mostly away in the country, where the frosty weather made the ground ideal for hunting, but soon enough London would be full again. In a fortnight’s time Queen Charlotte would celebrate her official birthday, with the ball that marked the start of another social season. The day after that—January 19—Parliament was due to reopen, with Lord Chatham likely to reappear. To prepare themselves for the political fray, the cabinet ministers agreed to meet the previous week at Lord Rochford’s office in Cleveland Row, facing St. James’s Palace. By the time they gathered on January 13, they had received a dispatch from Boston that struck a new note of confidence and resolve.
Written less than a month earlier, the letter arrived on the Charming Nancy carried by a senior officer on Gage’s staff, Colonel Richard Prescott of the Royal Fusiliers. This was very unusual—the general had never sent a personal envoy before—and not least because Prescott was a highly experienced man in his late forties, a veteran of the war in Germany and soon to be promoted to brigadier. Far from being merely a messenger, Prescott came under orders to meet the cabinet, answer any questions the ministers might have, and give them information too secret to be put in writing. Because no verbatim note survives, we will never know precisely what he told them, but his briefings removed their last lingering doubts about the military option.
The colonel brought a bundle of Boston newspapers containing a new word—“minuteman”—deriving from another act of treason by John Hancock. Meeting at Cambridge in December, the congress had told each town in Massachusetts to have its part-time soldiers ready to fight at a minute’s notice, with each volunteer carrying a firearm, a bayonet, and thirty rounds. Something of the sort had been discussed in New England before, way back in August, but news of this had not crossed the ocean. Now the term appeared openly in the Boston papers in stories making it plain that the Provincial Congress saw itself as a legitimate government.
On the left, the office of the senior secretary of state, Lord Rochford, in Cleveland Row, St. James’s, where the cabinet met to approve the use of force in New England, from a painting by Paul Sandby. On the right is St. James’s Palace. Crown Copyright: U.K. Government Art Collection
The Congress planned to meet again in Cambridge on February 1: a crucial piece of information that gave the cabinet no choice. Any assembly of the kind would be another act of rebellion, which had to be suppressed with whatever forces General Gage had under his command.
He could not be given twenty thousand soldiers—time was far too short—but the tone of the general’s dispatch suggested that if he acted firmly, the rebels would disperse. Gage’s letter was calm and even quite optimistic, conveying the improvement in his morale since the dark days of the summer. It also contained a fateful prediction: that if the British were seen to be resolute, and put what Gage called “a respectable army” in the field, they would be joined by loyal Americans ready to defend the empire.
From what happened next, it is clear that Colonel Prescott said the same thing. The atmosphere became more ominous immediately after his appearance. Thomas Hutchinson was still away on holiday when he heard that the colonel was in London and that nine letters from America were awaiting his return. Filled with a new sense of alarm, he hurried back from Bristol. En route, he suffered a strange hallucination—“that part of my body was gone, which I now felt no more affection for, than if it had been the tooth of a stranger”—whose symbolism could not be more clear. America was being lost, like an amputated limb.
Meanwhile, another colonial visitor to London had noticed the same change in the political weather. It was of all people Josiah Quincy Jr., the radical lawyer from Boston, who had come to England on a bizarre personal mission to make peace. After landing in late November, he met Dartmouth and then Lord North, who listened patiently and then, when he had gone, dismissed him as a troublemaker. But Quincy still went on hoping for the best until suddenly, on the morning of January 13, he discovered that the crisis was irreparable. Impressed by the merchants’ meetings in the city, up to that moment Quincy had convinced himself that public opinion had swung behind the American cause. But then he received a visit from Thomas Pownall, the brother of Lord Dartmouth’s closest aide. “You will have terrible news from Boston soon,” Thomas Pownall said. “The matter is decided.”8
He would not tell Quincy exactly what decision had been made, but Pownall was correct. The colonel’s briefings and the news carried by the Charming Nancy had put an end to hesitation. At eight o’clock that evening, the cabinet ministers assembled at Cleveland Row to draw up a new and vigorous policy to stamp out the insurgency. First, Parliament would be asked to declare that Massachusetts was in rebellion; and then, to reinforce General Gage, the cabinet would send three more regiments to Boston, two of foot and one of light dragoons, while Admiral Graves would be given more ships and marines. The cabinet also began to formulate a plan for a commercial embargo of its own, a retaliatory ban on American trade by sea, to be imposed on every colony that had signed the Association. Once again Lord Dartmouth suggested sending peace commissioners to negotiate with the Continental Congress. This idea was put aside, as something that would have to wait until after Massachusetts had surrendered to royal authority.
The Queen’s Palace, where Colonel Prescott briefed the king about the situation in Boston, as it was in 1775 before the rebuilding that transformed it into Buckingham Palace, from a painting by Joseph Collyer.
On Saturday, January 14, Colonel Prescott went to see the king. Again we have no record of exactly what was said, but according to Hutchinson the news the colonel brought had “fixed those who were wavering.” With every new dispatch the situation seemed to grow worse. The same day the Admiralty circulated a report from Rhode Island, where the people of Providence had seized a battery of cannon belonging to the Crown. By Sunday night the talk of minutemen was all over London, reaching the ears of the diarist Horace Walpole. The press also knew the outcome of the cabinet’s deliberations.9
The ministers convened again on Monday evening. Only two days were left before Queen Charlotte’s ball, the city was filling fast, and, said the Morning Post, “the milliners of the West End were never more hurried.” Across the capital the crisis in America had drowned out every other topic for conversation, as a pamphlet war broke out in which opposing writers put the case for appeasement or for severity. While the government looked for help from Thurlow’s friend, Dr. Johnson, who began to pen his anti-American polemic, Taxation No Tyranny, Burke reprinted his finest speech from the previous year. Bookstores began to sell a pocket atlas of the colonies, with maps for readers to follow the campaign Gage was about to wage.
In this feverish atmosphere the cabinet assembled on January 16, with two urgent matters on its agenda: to decide what North should say to Parliament and to draw up new orders for the general. For weeks the navy had kept a sloop, the Falcon, standing by at Spithead to sail to Boston with cash for the army—another £10,000—and with whatever instructions the cabinet might issue. If Gage were to have his orders in time for an encounter in the spring with the Massachusetts militia, the Falcon would have to sail without delay. And so, at the meeting on the sixteenth, Lord North began to add the last element his new American policy required.
It came to be known as the Conciliatory Proposition. While its name suggests that Lord North wished to be amicable toward the colonies, the plan he outlined really had two objectives, only one of which was peaceful. Revisiting the problem of taxation, North reaffirmed the principle that the colonies had to contribute to the costs of empire. The army and the navy had to be financed, and so did the royal bureaucracy in America, tiny though it was. Great Britain would ask every colony to make a fixed annual grant to the Crown. In exchange, Parliament would surrender its right to levy any more taxes in each colony that agreed to do so.
This would provide, Lord North believed, the basis for a new and lasting settlement, but that was not his only motive. The Conciliatory Proposition was also a maneuver aimed at isolating New England and making it easier to reconquer. Far from replacing the military option, it would stand alongside it, as a means of discouraging the other colonies from rallying to defend Massachusetts. Crucially, however, the plan assumed that the other colonies contained a moderate majority who would abandon the defiant pose struck in Philadelphia; and for this assumption Lord North had not a shred of evidence.10
In any case, the plan was still vague and sketchy, the details would take a month or so to finalize, and some of his colleagues were skeptical. A more pressing matter had to be dealt with at once. It was at this meeting on the sixteenth that the cabinet finally crossed the Rubicon and formally decided to end the insurgency by force. This must be so, because at the end of that week Lord Suffolk said as much in debate in the House of Lords. Queen Charlotte’s birthday ball came and went, with the usual ringing of bells and a display of fireworks at the French embassy. On Thursday, Parliament reopened, and at last Lord Chatham made his speech, so well trailed in the press. Britain should withdraw its troops from Boston, where Gage led only what he called “an army of impotence and contempt.” On January 20 his motion went down to defeat by seventy-seven votes to eighteen. But in reply to Chatham, Lord Suffolk confirmed what everyone already suspected: he avowed, said a reporter, “the ministerial resolution of enforcing obedience by arms.”
On the same day the cabinet asked the lawyers for a written opinion that Massachusetts had risen in revolt. Lord Dartmouth gave Thurlow and Wedderburn the Boston Gazette with its stories about the minutemen and the votes taken at Cambridge in October. Then he settled down to wait in a mood that swung back and forth between extremes. To Dartmouth’s delight his wife, a woman now in her early forties, had recently given birth to a baby girl, while his friend the poet William Cowper was at last recovering from years of insanity. But while Dartmouth rejoiced in both happy events, the crisis in America left him exhausted and distraught. It fell to him to draft the new orders for the general; but as he did so, he found himself besieged by well-wishers and cranks who thrust upon him long letters of advice.
Somebody calling himself “ZYX” wrote four times, assuring him that all the talk of rebellion was nonsense: bar the lunatics in Boston, Americans remained devoted to the Crown, and resistance was about to fizzle out. “Depend upon it, sir,” he told Lord Dartmouth, “that nothing less than a miracle could make the New Englanders the warlike people they pretend to be.” Another writer took
the opposite view, urging the government to occupy Long Island and make it an armed camp from which the British could put down the insurrection and allow loyal merchants to defy the colonial boycott. Self-proclaimed experts gave Dartmouth absurd suggestions. A ranting letter arrived from one of Scotland’s richest men, Richard Oswald, the owner of thousands of slaves, telling him to send an envoy to Virginia. The problems in New England were the work, he said, of “a confederacy of smugglers, narrow-minded bigots,” but in the South the planters were still friendly. Win over what he called “the best families” with an offer of a monopoly over trade to the West Indies, and they would stop what he called “the pestilential blasts from the North.” John Pownall was inclined to agree; but although there was a time when tactics such as these might have worked, that time had long since passed.11
And so Lord Dartmouth began to write his new instructions for General Gage. On January 26 the press ran the story that a dispatch was being prepared, and soon enough they guessed its contents. Marked “secret” and dated on the twenty-seventh, the letter can fairly be called the fatal dispatch. When it arrived in America in April, it sent the army marching out of Boston and up the road to Lexington and Concord.
This letter has received much less scrutiny than it deserves. Sometimes historians fail to mention it at all, and when they do they offer widely differing interpretations of its significance. Occasionally, they argue that General Gage received it reluctantly and would have preferred to sit out the spring secure behind his fortifications. It has also been suggested that Dartmouth wrote the dispatch dishonestly, filling it with caveats intended to make Gage bear the blame if military action ended in disaster. Another school of thought says that by the time the letter reached Boston, the cabinet ministers had already changed their minds in favor of a new attempt at reconciliation.
