An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  The war had been long in the making, the product of an empire and a system deeply flawed, the work of ignorance and prejudice and of men well-meaning but the prisoners of ideas that were obsolete and empty. “You cannot force a form of government upon a people,” the Duke of Richmond had said in the House of Lords on January 20, but although the radical duke would be proved right, it would take long years of fighting before the nation could admit that this was so. Charles Lennox had spoken for his country; but the time had not yet come when England could listen.

  * * *

  * Far from having any second thoughts, Lord Dartmouth sent Gage another four dispatches, the last dated April 15, reiterating the instructions from January 27.

  Epilogue

  THE NOBLE DEAD

  Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,

  And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.

  —ALEXANDER POPE, The Iliad of Homer, 1715–20

  In search of the resting place of Frederick, Lord North, it is best to go to Wroxton in the autumn, when the rain brings out the beauty of the buildings at their finest. The village sits on a slope at the northern end of that great belt of limestone which, beginning on the coast of Dorset, sweeps up as far as Oxfordshire. The village has a pond, with a duck house on an island, and a sign that urges drivers to slow down and mind the ducks. It has two pubs, selling ales with names like Crazy Ox, but best of all it has the stone from which its cottages are made. As it weathers, tiny particles of iron give the stone a warm, deep color, a tawny yellow or a brown, like toast or butter left too long to simmer in a pan.

  The village has a peaceful history in which the name of North takes pride of place. Eight centuries ago, a band of monks came here to build a monastery, which eventually became a Jacobean mansion with a deer park and an obelisk. For nearly three hundred years the Norths lived at Wroxton Abbey. When they died, they were taken to All Saints, the parish church, and the vault beneath the chancel where Lord North lies buried. The church has a tower whose stone turns in the wet to the same rich shade of nutty brown.

  The bells still ring on Sundays; a yew tree sheds its needles on the path; and inside the church we find the old familiar things: the pews, the hassocks, and the font. If we know what to look for, we can also find the traces of the system that produced Lord North, with his flaws but also with his finer qualities. In the north aisle of the nave, only two small gray tablets remain from the eighteenth century, with nothing to explain why the names inscribed on them were worthy of commemoration. These were the agents who managed the North estates and collected the rent from his tenants.

  Far away beside the Mississippi we encountered, in the fort that fell into the river, a symbol of the British Empire’s frailty in America. But the deepest of its weaknesses lay at home in the mother country, in the old regime that had created North and his colleagues. In the church at Wroxton we can see the traces of the system they administered: a system that held rural England in a grip apparently far more secure. It was a system based on hierarchy and servitude, in which power remained the possession of a few, and it rested on the ownership of land. The Norths spoke for half the acres in the village, and their influence spread over all the rest. This is why their agents are remembered in the church.

  There is a phrase, coined with his usual flair by Benjamin Disraeli, that perfectly describes the English system of the eighteenth century. The country had what he called “a territorial constitution.” It lay embedded in the fabric of the nation, as deeply as the rust that stains the masonry in Oxfordshire. When Lord North led a meeting at the Treasury, he occupied the summit of the edifice of power, but its foundations lay in thousands of parishes like this, each with a local elite whose authority arose from their tenure of the soil.

  The Norths were a dynasty of exactly such a kind. Of course the family had to perform the duties that their rank imposed, even when their own resources were slim. Despite the burden of debt they carried, they chose to be benevolent at Wroxton, providing the village with what it had by way of public welfare: the tower of All Saints, for example, which is rather less ancient than it might appear. In the 1740s a gale blew down the medieval tower, and so Lord North’s father paid the cost of building the one we see today. There was a village school, with a master: his salary came from the Norths. The family gave the church its silver plate, they mended the roof of the chancel, and when the bill came in each year for the cost of poor relief, they paid the bulk of that as well.

  Beneath their supervision, the village was quiet and orderly, but in exchange for their kindness the Norths demanded far more than just the rent. They expected obedience as well, in everything to do with God or politics. On another wall inside the church there hangs a list of Wroxton’s clergy down the ages. Both here and nearby at Banbury, the Norths chose the vicar—the same man occupied both pulpits—and he served their interests faithfully. In 1774 it was the vicar of All Saints who arranged the reelection of Lord North to Parliament. Meanwhile, Brownlow North sat as bishop of the next diocese, keen to place tame clergymen in every parish.

  Since the vicar also served as a magistrate, passing judgment on poachers and petty thieves, the power of the Norths reached into every little corner of their enclave. And while by nature they were easygoing, if they chose to be otherwise they had many ways to be harsh. If you vote against his lordship, said the vicar, expect to be struck off the list of suppliers of beer to the abbey. And whenever a tenancy at Wroxton fell due for renewal, only loyal supporters were encouraged to apply.

  All of this was what Disraeli meant by a constitution based on property in land. Every one of Lord North’s colleagues in the cabinet had Wroxtons of his own, places where as landlords they could dominate their neighborhood. So did most of their allies on the benches in the Commons and the House of Lords. While the system they administered had a vast superstructure—not only Parliament and the church, but also the army, the navy, and the universities—it could not survive without its rural base, in ten thousand parishes like Wroxton, each with its proprietors. The system could not endure forever, and in time it vanished, although it took another century or more to reach extinction.

  While it lasted, the territorial constitution encouraged some men and women to be virtuous in public life. It might compel a politician to pay close attention to his roots and to behave with a nobility worthy of his status. Ambushed by a rioter or a highwayman, he would have to keep his nerve: that was what a gentleman did. As a matter of honor as well as out of ambition, he might feel obliged to work hard at Westminster in the service of what he took to be the national interest. At home in the shires, generosity would feel like a duty, requiring him to keep open house and support every new initiative—a workhouse, a canal, or a turnpike road—to improve the prospects of his area.

  These were exactly the virtues that Lord North possessed, but the territorial constitution had its vices too, which far outweighed the benefits it yielded. Hypocrisy and pride were merely the most obvious. The crisis that led to the revolution in America had many causes, and ranking high among them was the narrowness of vision that afflicted North and his colleagues. Its origins lay in the system that a place like Wroxton epitomized. The system set mental boundaries that they could not transcend, raised as they were in a culture where the landscape and the parish church bore everywhere the signs of privilege.

  They found the rebels in America unthinkable. Nothing in rural Oxfordshire could prepare Lord North for an encounter, at a distance of three thousand miles, with men like Boston’s Thomas Young or his friend Ethan Allen of Vermont. For radicals like Young and Allen, the tenant was the equal of his landlord or even his moral superior; they would never pay a tithe to please a vicar or doff their hat in the street as he walked by; nor would they permit a magistrate to jail a laborer for poaching. An English country parish in the 1770s bore not the slightest resemblance to a township in the colonies. The attitudes that each engendered were profoundly different too.

  Perhaps the d
eepest divide of all was the one that separated Lord North from John Hancock. In the eyes of the king and his ministers, a Bostonian so wealthy had a duty to defend the status quo. Since the empire had enriched his uncle, what right had he to question its authority? At best the man was deeply ungrateful, while at worst he was a traitor, which eventually he proved himself to be, becoming the rebel whom the British most wanted to hang. In reality, John Hancock shared some of the virtues of Lord North; but the citizen who endowed the church on Brattle Square came from a place where, although the wealthy expected to lord it over their neighbors, they had to ask their permission first.

  A man with origins like those of Frederick North could never understand an enemy of Hancock’s kind. Nor could he be creative in response to the challenge that the colonies threw down. The very qualities George III liked best about him—his devotion to his church, to his king, and to the landed gentry—were precisely those that rendered North incapable of governing America. And so what became of him and his friend and kinsman William Legge?

  After the terrible casualties at Bunker Hill in the summer of 1775, Lord Dartmouth lost what appetite he still possessed for public life. The battle had occurred, on the slopes across the water from Boston, because of the error he and Gage had made: their attempt to hold the town as a way to force New England to submit. Deeply grieved by what had come to pass, hoping for peace but unable to achieve it, in November Lord Dartmouth resigned from his post as colonial secretary. The old soldier George Germain supplanted him, finally free to be severely Roman with the rebels. By this time General Gage was coming home at last, as the British prepared to withdraw to New York, which the army should have done so long before.

  After that Dartmouth beat his own retreat into a quiet family life of prayers and the countryside. He continued to support the new evangelists inside the Church of England until his death in 1801. By the time he breathed his last, nearly ten years had gone by since Lord North preceded him to the grave, at the age of only sixty. North’s career had not collapsed after Bunker Hill. Instead, North had survived, still a superb commander of the House of Commons and still the only man whom the king could really trust.

  On he went, through triumph and disaster, but increasingly the latter, until the war was lost and his melancholy had become almost unbearable. The redcoats surrendered at Yorktown, and after a messy crisis in Parliament Lord North had to go as well. A year or so later he returned to office, in a coalition with his old antagonist Charles James Fox. Another crisis intervened, centering on India again, and the coalition lost a general election, defeated in a landslide by the younger William Pitt, Lord Chatham’s son. Estranged from George III, Lord North left the government for good.

  That was in 1784. His health began to fail, and his weight began to dwindle, suggesting—like his early death—that he suffered from a form of cancer. Never strong, his eyesight grew weaker with each passing season until he lost his vision altogether. Since his days at Eton and Oxford, North had never forgotten his Latin, and so, in his years of blindness, his daughters would read to him from Horace or Virgil. At dinnertime they would carve his meat, while Lady North stood by and fussed about the husband she loved. While North served his king, his life had been filled with toil and worry. With the cares of office cast aside and with friends like Edward Gibbon to amuse him, he was cheerful and funny to the last.

  The monument to Lord North by John Flaxman, at All Saints Church, Wroxton, Oxfordshire.

  Among their social equals the Norths were renowned for their charm, their hospitality, and the pleasure they took in each other’s company. When he died in 1792, the family gave him a monument whose grandeur conveys the depth of their affection. They chose the finest sculptor of the day, John Flaxman, to make a marble likeness of Lord North, his double chin, plump face, and flabby lips. His image can be seen in the chancel of All Saints, with his blind eyes staring upward and toward the east in search of the day of resurrection.

  Beneath him the artist carved a tall, slim figure of Britannia with a spear, a shield, and a British lion reclining at her side. For more than two centuries the children of Wroxton have adored the lion, stroking his nose until the marble shines amid the gloom. Below the lion with the gleaming nose there lies the vault where Lord North sleeps forever.

  Appendix One: The Meaning of Treason

  It was a lawyers’ war. On both sides of the Atlantic people made the decision to fight in the belief that they had the law on their side, whether they were Americans defending the civil liberties enshrined in their old colonial charters or British politicians convinced that Parliament was sovereign. This decision was never taken lightly. Before they resorted to force, the combatants in both nations took legal counsel from experts, however hurried and informal the process might appear if it occurred in a small town in New England or in the backcountry of Virginia.

  American lawyers gave their opinions about the rights and wrongs of resistance in speeches in colonial assemblies or at the Congress in Philadelphia, in private letters and conversations, or in columns in the press, of which those written by John Adams are the most famous. In Great Britain the legal advice was brief or even terse. It was provided by just three officials: in writing by Thurlow and Wedderburn and then orally by the lord chief justice, William Murray, Lord Mansfield. He attended the crucial cabinet meetings in 1775.

  The American view of the law is well-known. It was eloquently expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s Summary View, in Adams’s Novanglus essays, and then eventually in the Declaration of Independence. The British side of the story is far less familiar. From the cabinet ministers’ perspective, it was essential to have a firm answer to the following question: had treason been committed in the northern colonies? If the answer was yes, then they had not only a right but also an obligation to punish the traitors and put a stop to any further crimes of the same kind.

  Thurlow, Wedderburn, and Mansfield all agreed that treason had taken place in New England, not once, but at least three times. Try as he might, it would be very hard for any lawyer in London, whatever his political persuasion, to deny that this was so, although two or three—principally Franklin’s barrister, John Dunning—made a valiant effort during the debates in Parliament. The relevant law was a statute from the reign of King Edward III, but far from being archaic or obsolete, it actually remains in force today. Used many times in the eighteenth century, it was clearly understood by judges and advocates alike.

  First enacted in 1351, the statute against treason certainly used vivid language and dealt with some picturesque, Shakespearean types of treachery. It was high treason “to compass or imagine the death of our lord the king,” his wife, or his son and heir, or to conspire to do so. Sex with the queen, the king’s eldest daughter, or the consort of the monarch’s eldest son: these also fell within the meaning of the crime. A man could also die as a traitor for counterfeiting the king’s great seal, for making false coins, or for killing a judge in open court.

  So far, so medieval, but the statute was readily adaptable to fit more up-to-date kinds of disloyalty. It contained an important clause that called it treason “to levy war against the king in his realm.” This made treason and rebellion synonymous, and over time the judges extended the definition of the words to cover situations beyond the physical act of taking up arms. For example, after the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, the courts sent people to the gallows for exporting gunpowder, knowing that it might find its way into rebel hands, for collecting money for the Stuart cause, or for encouraging other people to do so. It was also treasonable to write letters to the Stuarts in exile or to claim that they were still the rightful rulers of the kingdom.

  As Scotsmen themselves, both Mansfield and Wedderburn were especially familiar with the cases from that era. Indeed Lord Mansfield had acted as one of the prosecuting counsel in the Jacobite treason trials of 1746. It was relatively easy for them and Edward Thurlow to take precedents such as these and apply them to the outrages perpetrated in A
merica, starting with the sinking of the Gaspée.

  Only two issues had to be addressed before John Brown and his accomplices could be described as traitors. First, did Rhode Island fall within the realm as the statute required? It certainly did, because the law defined the colonies as “dependent dominions,” subject to the authority of the Crown and Parliament. Second, Thurlow and Wedderburn had to be sure that the raid itself was treasonous. It clearly was, because the Gaspée’s commander held the king’s commission. By attacking his ship, the colonists had levied war against His Majesty. This was treason, for which the penalty was always death.

  On the face of it the Boston Tea Party seems more complicated, but again the law of England left no room for doubt. Here the precedent came from the reign of Queen Anne. In 1710, during the so-called Sacheverell riots in London, a mob had attacked chapels belonging to Protestant dissenters. “Down with the Presbyterians!” the rioters cried. In Drury Lane a boatman called Daniel Damaree appeared at the head of the crowd and was heard to shout “Come on boys, I’ll lead you, down with the meeting houses!” He was arrested, charged with high treason, put on trial, and hanged.

  According to the court, Damaree’s crime amounted to an act of war against the Crown and the legislature. A riot was a private thing, in which the mob attacked a particular person or place out of some local grievance or merely because they were drunk and disorderly. The crowd led by Damaree did something far worse. Far from being merely a riot, their rampage against the chapels was a public act of rebellion, aimed at destroying all the chapels in the city, not just one. Damaree wished to frustrate the will of Parliament, which had voted to allow Presbyterians to worship free from harm.