Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  The contents of the Definitive Treaty of Peace, as implemented on February 10, 1763, convinced everyone except William Pitt and his diehard followers that France had indeed been humbled in the dust. France surrendered to Great Britain all territories and claims in North America east of the Mississippi River except New Orleans and guaranteed the unrestrained navigation of the river to all British subjects. The West Indian islands of St. Vincent, Dominica, Tobago, Grenada, and the Grenadines were all secured to Great Britain, along with Senegal in West Africa. France returned Minorca as well as two East India Company posts in Sumatra captured during the war. France also surrendered all fortifications built and all territories occupied in India since 1749; renounced all claims to compensation for shipping seized by British privateers and naval vessels since 1754; agreed to level its fortifications at Dunkirk; restored all territories still under its army’s control in Hanover, Hesse, and Brunswick; and evacuated the Rhineland possessions of the king of Prussia. Spain turned over Florida to Great Britain, renounced its claims to participation in the Newfoundland fishery, sanctioned the continued cutting of logwood by British subjects along the coast of Honduras, and agreed to allow British admiralty courts to adjudicate all disputes concerning Spanish vessels seized by Britain during the war. In return for all these concessions, Great Britain restored the islands of Belle-Île-en-Mer, Goree, Martinique, and Guadeloupe to France, along with the flyspeck islands of St. Lucia in the West Indies and St.-Pierre and Miquelon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence; permitted the French to resume fishing in the waters off Newfoundland and to trade in India at the posts it had acquired before 1749; returned Havana to Spanish control; and promised Spain that British logwood cutters would not erect fortifications in Honduras.4

  That the Peace of Paris was a phenomenal diplomatic coup for Britain can best be seen in light of the contrasting provisions of the Treaty of Hubertusburg, which Prussia and Austria concluded on February 15 at a hunting lodge in Saxony. Despite the vigorous maneuverings of Frederick the Great and of Maria Theresa’s representative, Count von Kaunitz, Hubertusburg concluded the Austro-German war on the basis of the status quo ante bellum. This meant, in effect, that Frederick kept Silesia and renounced his desire to retain Saxony while Maria Theresa kept Saxony and gave up her wish to regain Silesia. Both king and empress-queen pledged an undying friendship and agreed to promote trade between their realms; Frederick promised to vote, as elector of Brandenburg, for Maria Theresa’s son, Archduke Joseph, in the next election for Holy Roman Emperor. Otherwise—apart from the fact that Saxony received no compensation for the taxes and soldiers that Frederick had drained out of her since 1756—no strategic or financial assets changed hands. Beyond the inevitable adjustments in the way diplomats would think of Prussia as a player in European politics, six years of heroic expenditure and savage bloodshed had accomplished precisely nothing.5

  CHAPTER 53

  The Rise of Wilkes, the Fall of Bute, and the Unheeded Lesson of Manila

  SPRING 1763

  IF HUBERTUSBURG was a conventional diplomatic settlement of the eighteenth century—and it was, in every way, typical—then there is no mystery in George III’s desire to detach Great Britain from the quarrels of Europe, no puzzle in his wish to end the long entanglement between the foreign policies of Hanover and Great Britain. To disengage from European alliances and European wars was, so far as he understood it, the absolute precondition for the regeneration of British political life—the building of a new patriotic spirit centered on the monarchy, Protestantism, and the union of British peoples. Bute’s efforts to end the war, awkward as they were, had fully reflected the will of his master. Indeed, insofar as such views stressed detachment from Hanover and embodied a chauvinist nationalism, they were shared by an overwhelming majority of the political nation. But that alone could not save Bute’s political career, nor make the king a popular figure. Within two months of the signing of the most favorable peace treaty in European history, Bute had been driven from office and a London mob had bombarded the royal coach with stones and horse manure. Such striking developments might almost make one wonder if winning a great empire had somehow made the British people lose their wits.

  The explanation can be found at the interface of two strata in British society and politics, where sometimes violent interactions occurred between the nation’s political elite and a politically aware but generally unenfranchised populace (especially that of London). On both sides of this class boundary, within as well as outside the closed world of parliamentary politics, imperialists had convinced themselves that Britain was invincible and therefore entitled to retain every conquest. They saw the Peace of Paris as a sellout and a sham, and they despised the Scottish interloper (and secretly, the king) who had sacrificed valuable possessions to obtain a craven peace. The imperialists included Pitt and other brilliant figures but, as the Commons vote on the treaty had shown, they were not numerous in proportion to the rest of the political elite. Unfortunately for Bute, the imperialist illuminati were not the only people who detested him.

  Within the ruling class, where ideology generally took a backseat to the politics of personal connection and advantage, Bute had made himself a large number of enemies late in 1762 when he and his new lieutenant in the Commons, Henry Fox, purged Newcastle’s old supporters from office. So ruthless was this ouster of placeholders—in effect, the dismantling of the patronage infrastructure that had sustained the previous administration—that even politicians who approved of the peace treaty came to hate and fear Bute for what he had done. As Horace Walpole described it, “A more severe political persecution never raged. Whoever, holding a place, had voted against the preliminaries [of peace], was instantly dismissed. The friends and dependents of the Duke of Newcastle were particularly cashiered; and this cruelty extended so far that old servants, who had retired and been preferred to very small places, were rigorously hunted out and deprived of their livelihood.” 1

  The patronage system that Newcastle had perfected, of course, could not have worked without the threat of dismissal to ensure discipline; but political housecleanings had generally been restricted to leading figures. This “massacre of Pelhamite innocents” seemed in this context a supremely ungentlemanly act, heralding a new, savage era in British politics. Because Bute was thin-skinned and socially vulnerable he would have been an inviting target for abuse, anyhow; because the normal rules of political discourse did not permit attacks on the king, however, his position as royal favorite made him the ideal candidate for vilification as the “Northern Machiavel.”2

  The nature of opposition politics had shifted in response to the circumstances of the new reign, and this helped promote a disturbingly violent tone in public life. This change reflected the fact that George III was a young, recently married king with no heir apparent living outside the palace. Throughout the previous two reigns, the household of the prince of Wales had been the natural focus of opposition to the policies of the court. In part this was because of the almost chemical disaffinity between the Hanoverian kings and their eldest sons; in part it was because the heir apparent, as prince of Wales, could dispose of a large number of patronage posts, while as duke of Cornwall he could influence elections to the forty-four Commons seats that represented the county and its boroughs. The prince’s household therefore attracted, as honey does ants, ambitious politicians who found themselves out of office. But when there was no independent prince of Wales, political opposition lacked an alternative court around which to coalesce and fragmented into the personal followings of magnates. This made the opponents of the ministry and its policies infinitely noisier than they otherwise would have been.3

  Without a prince to follow into power upon his accession, the most reliable way for an ambitious opposition leader and his followers to gain office was to make such a hullabaloo that the prime minister or the king would shut them up in the only way possible, by inviting them to join the existing administration and giving them offices. To a point, this was
well understood in the highest circles of the British ruling class. What made the noisy opposition of the 1760s unusual and worrisome was that it erupted suddenly, after a long period in which support for the government and the war had been essentially unanimous; and it seemed to be getting out of hand. This too represented a shift in the character of British politics.

  Traditionally, opponents of sitting ministries had presented themselves as friends of English liberties, defenders of the Ancient Constitution against its would-be corrupters. Ironically, this “patriot” (or “country,” or “real whig,” or “commonwealthman”) rhetoric had been the political mother’s milk of George III at Leicester House, when it had been the center of opposition to George II’s ministries; patriot ideals nourished his desire to rule as a monarch who stood above party. That the men who opposed Bute’s ministry adopted libertarian language, therefore, was not in itself surprising. What made it alarming was the context in which this message could now be heard, for social conditions had changed since the last period of highly charged public opposition (an acute phase that had lasted from about 1727 through 1737–38, tapering off after George’s father had established himself at Leicester House). The most important change had been the rapid growth—especially in London, Middlesex County, and the booming provincial cities—of middle-class groups engaged in commerce and the professions. These aspiring merchants, retailers, lawyers, and other professionals were generally not landed and therefore lacked a political voice in proportion to their wealth and ambition. Yet their exclusion from the franchise only made them readier consumers of political literature, more eager advocates of reforms that would enable men like themselves to participate in the political life of the nation. Thus in 1762 and 1763 the writings of opposition politicians found a larger and more avid readership than ever before, and the press responded to the demand by pumping out torrents of ballads, broadsides, pamphlets, cheap ephemeral periodicals, magazines, and newspapers.4

  It was from this striving English middle class, fervently nationalist and deeply supportive of the wars against France, that John Wilkes emerged as the most remarkable publicist of the day. Wilkes’s ability to speak both to unenfranchised middle-class groups and to the plebeians of London made him the most outrageous—and to Bute and the king, the most dangerous—penman of the opposition. Wilkes came from a prosperous distilling family that had given him a genteel education and sufficient means to marry into the Buckinghamshire gentry. There in the mid-1750s he had affiliated himself with the party of Pitt and Grenville, the so-called faction of cousins. Wilkes entered the House of Commons in 1757 and avidly supported Pitt and the war, but he had lacked the social standing and the oratorical skill (not to mention the self-restraint and common sense) to make himself a significant figure in Parliament. His cutthroat wit and skill as a writer of invective, however, opened career opportunities of another sort.

  After resigning as lord privy seal in 1761, the earl Temple set Wilkes up to publish a newspaper called the North Briton, the sole purpose of which was to make Lord Bute look ridiculous, or worse. In successive and ever more outrageous issues, the North Briton identified Bute as (among other things) the man who betrayed the nation’s military glory with an ignoble peace, the author of an unpopular excise tax on cider, a schemer against the liberties and property of freeborn Englishmen, a corrupter of Parliament, the illicit lover of the king’s mother, and, worst of all, a Scot whose family name was—Stuart! Ludicrous as it may seem, the identification of Bute with this absolutist, papist dynasty was by no means the least damaging of Wilkes’s libels, for it played to strands of anti-Scottish prejudice and anti-Jacobite fears common to most middle-class and virtually all plebeian Englishmen.5

  Wilkes’s influence would be hard to overestimate, if only because he aroused such fear and hatred in the ministry and such ardent support in both the middle classes and the London mob. Reveling in his growing celebrity, Wilkes hounded his quarry through the pages of the North Briton until Bute, at best a neurotically hypersensitive man, lost his will to continue in politics. Long before the Peace of Paris it had become obvious that war-created problems would be extraordinarily difficult to solve. Bute’s first, tentative effort to address the issue—a tax of four shillings on each hogshead of cider produced in Britain, to be paid by the maker— proved to be such a disaster that, by the beginning of March, he was begging the king to allow him to resign as first lord of the Treasury.

  It was not so much the strength of the opposition to the new tax itself that posed a problem. Despite the instantaneous protests of the M.P.s from the cider-manufacturing counties, and Pitt’s efforts to portray the measure as an invasion of Englishmen’s liberties, the opposition in the end could never muster more than 120 votes against the excise in the House of Commons, or more than 38 against it in the House of Lords. Rather than an unmanageable political situation, it was the relentless vilification in the North Briton and the rituals of public execration enacted by mobs in the cider counties and London that destroyed Bute’s desire to lead Britain through its difficult transition to peace. At the beginning of April, weary of reading opposition libels and sick of seeing makeshift gallows festooned with top boots and petticoats—the symbols that mobs used to depict him and his supposed lover, the king’s mother—the earl of Bute surrendered the seals of his office to the king.

  He would have quit earlier if he could have, but the king had been unwilling to put the Treasury in the hands of Henry Fox, a man devoid of every conviction except the unshakable belief that he deserved to be rich. For a variety of reasons other candidates for first lord (especially Pitt and Newcastle) were equally unacceptable. Finally the king, unable to hold off Bute’s flight from office another day, broke down and offered the Treasury to George Grenville, a move he dreaded. In part it was personal dislike: Grenville not only bored the king, but seemed responsible for dividing the cabinet and forcing him and his “Dearest Friend” into Fox’s odious embrace. Beyond that, however, the king realized that Grenville made a poor choice for prime minister because he was not a politician of the first rank.

  Before November 1761, when Grenville had become the government’s leader in the House, he had never been more than a secondary figure in a small but significant parliamentary faction. Thereafter he occupied high office only briefly, but even so had managed to put himself at odds with practically everyone more powerful than he—with Bute and the king no less than with his own older brother (Temple), Pitt, Newcastle, and everyone else who had gone into opposition. Finally, the king knew that Grenville’s political skills were more technical than managerial. Even with Henry Fox bought off with a profitable post and exiled from the Commons by a peerage, Grenville was unlikely to be more than a weak political leader. Had he been blessed with personal charm or oratorical genius, his inexperience in distributing patronage alone would have hobbled him. Unluckily for Grenville, his reputation as a self-righteous, condescending windbag had long preceded him when, on April 13, 1763, he assumed the offices of first lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer.6

  And yet, unpropitious as it was, Grenville’s advent as prime minister was not without promise. Above all, he was prepared to apply what Bute had not possessed—a seat in the House of Commons, a real grasp of legislation, and the willingness to work hard—to the resolution of those problems that Bute had lacked the nerve to face: the issues of finance and order that were the legacy of the Seven Years’ War. Despite his deficiencies as a manager, Grenville understood and should have been able to address these pressing affairs. Two important factors favored him. First, he possessed an unexcelled knowledge of public finance. Second, because he, Egremont, and Halifax together formed the “Triumvirate” that helped bring an end to Bute’s administration, all three men entered office as a kind of team. Thus Grenville had access not only to Egremont’s connections but to Halifax’s vast experience in dealing with the colonies. For the first time, a man with a genuine grasp of taxation headed the Treasury at the same mome
nt that a man knowledgeable in American affairs was in a position to formulate colonial policy. Had opposition slackened and the Triumvirate been able to attend to the great issues of postwar reconstruction in an interval of relative calm, the next years should have stabilized both British public finance and relations between the metropolis and its colonies.

  But there was no calm, nor would there be, for a very long time to come. In May the biggest Indian uprising in the history of North America threatened to erase British control over the Transappalachian west: a rebellion that would take Whitehall as much by surprise as the riotous defiance of British authority that would erupt everywhere from New Hampshire to Georgia in the summer of 1765. Two occurrences during April would frame and limit the ways in which the ministers could perceive and respond to these perplexing events. Neither, ironically, had anything to do with America. The first was the refusal of John Wilkes to shut up after Bute slunk off the political stage. The second was news of Britain’s final victory of the war, the conquest of Manila.

  Had Wilkes only known when to stop thumbing his nose, he might have found himself offered some sinecure as a reward for silence. Grenville, no lover of Bute, would surely have preferred it that way. He must therefore have been one of the unhappiest readers of the forty-fifth number of the North Briton, published on April 23. Always before, Wilkes had carefully affirmed his loyalty to the king and attacked only Bute. In number 45, however, he took as his subject the king’s address to Parliament of April 19, and particularly its celebration of the return of peace. Strictly speaking Wilkes attacked only the speech, which, he maintained, Bute had written. His language was so intemperate, however, that the attack seemed an assault on the king himself. By contemporary standards the North Briton number 45 constituted an enormity that no responsible minister of state could ignore. Grenville and Halifax therefore proceeded against Wilkes legally, requesting the issuance of a general warrant, under which he and forty-eight others were arrested and had their households searched for incriminating materials.