While this was in fact a perfectly legal way of proceeding in cases of seditious libel, the use of a general warrant (rather than an ordinary court order that identified suspects by name and authorized searches for specified kinds of evidence) aroused an immediate outcry. Surely, Wilkes’s supporters said, there could be no clearer indication of the government’s willingness to abridge subjects’ rights at wholesale, as a means of crushing dissent. Wilkes did his masterful publicist’s best to turn the uproar to his advantage in the press, but his greatest aid came from the government itself. Unfortunately for the Crown they wanted to serve, Grenville and Halifax had failed to foresee how Wilkes’s status as an M.P. would cloud the legality of the prosecution. Members of the House of Commons were ordinarily immune from arrest for all crimes but treason, felony, and breach of the peace, and it was altogether unclear that to write slightingly of a royal speech constituted anything more than a libel that tended to breach of the peace. Within days the lord chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas had released Wilkes and—to the delight of crowds shouting “Wilkes and liberty!”—dismissed the charges against him as inconsistent with the principle of parliamentary privilege.7
This outcome might only have embarrassed His Majesty’s government, but Wilkes chose to sustain the whirlwind. Capitalizing on his new status as the symbol of liberties threatened by the shadowy crypto-Scottish designs of the king’s ministers, he commenced lawsuits against Halifax and other royal officials, reprinted the entire run of the North Briton in volume form, made public appearances to accept the plaudits of his admirers, and generally cultivated his notoriety like a garden. The government, goaded beyond good sense, fought back, pursuing him in the courts for blasphemy (law officers had discovered an obscene, irreligious poem, An Essay on Woman, in Wilkes’s papers when they searched his house for evidence of seditious libel). At the same time, the ministry opened an assault on him in the Commons, where a substantial majority of M.P.s resolved that the North Briton number 45 was “a false, scandalous, and seditious libel.”
Through the rest of 1763 the London political scene became a vast political carnival over which Wilkes, a prince of disorder if ever there was one, seemed born to preside. Because no legal action against him could be assured of success so long as he sat as a member in good standing of the House of Commons, the government’s hands were tied. In frustration, the ministers and their allies in the House of Lords tried to silence Wilkes by impeaching his moral character as a blasphemer and pornographer. This immediately backfired, since the peer who took the lead as spokesman against Wilkes was the earl of Sandwich, a former friend of Wilkes’s and himself a notorious libertine; as it happened, the opening lines of An Essay on Woman had originally begun
Awake, my Sandwich, leave all meaner things;
This morn shall prove what rapture swiving brings!8
Thus Wilkes’s antagonists found themselves more than ever the butt of satire and popular ridicule. So great was government—and royal— irritation, in fact, that there is reason to suspect that when Samuel Martin, an M.P. with ties to Grenville, challenged Wilkes to a duel in November, he was acting as the ministry’s agent in a plot to silence the gadfly once and for all. But Martin succeeded only in wounding Wilkes (significantly, perhaps, with a pistol ball in the groin), and Wilkes fled to Paris once he had recovered sufficiently to travel. Early in 1764, his fellow members voted to expel him from the House of Commons. With the issue of parliamentary immunity thus resolved, the Court of King’s Bench issued writs for his arrest as a publisher of blasphemy and seditious libel. When he prudently decided to remain abroad, the court pronounced him an outlaw. Yet all of these measures to discredit and silence Wilkes only tended to make “that squinting rascal” more a folk hero than ever: a man who, when he finally returned from exile in 1768, would become the preeminent symbol of a radicalism new to Britain, and uniquely worrisome to its rulers.9
The controversies that swirled about Wilkes from April 1763 onward preoccupied the government and escalated the intensity of opposition politics. While Grenville tried to chart the wisest course to deal with the problems of postwar finance, he could scarcely forget the storm that the North Briton number 43 had helped stir up in response to the cider tax. When Halifax pondered how best to impose order on the empire in
North America and elsewhere around the world, he could scarcely ignore the disorders of radical opposition evident in the streets of London— much less the presence, a few doors down Great George Street from his own house, of a neighbor who was harassing him with lawsuits and reviling him as a tool of despotism, John Wilkes. To perform the difficult tasks that faced them in the aftermath of the war would have been challenge enough, regardless of the circumstances, for the ministers of any government as politically weak as Grenville’s. To undertake them in an atmosphere of disorientation and uncertainty like that of 1763, and then to be confronted with the crisis of an Indian rebellion in the heart of the North American continent, posed challenges to which no conceivable government could have responded adequately.
But even as British domestic politics seemed to be pratfalling into chaos, the arrival of news concerning the outcome of Britain’s last military operation of the war carried a heartening message to Grenville and his colleagues. The conquest of Manila had taken place six months earlier, while Bedford was in Paris trying to negotiate an end to the war and Choiseul was devising the settlement with Spain that would make peace possible. From the perspective of the ambassadors this was just as well: if Manila had had to be factored into the settlement, Choiseul’s tricky equations might well have proven impossible to balance. Despite its diplomatic irrelevance, however, this final victory carried great significance, for on its face the taking of Manila seemed to confirm the overwhelming power of British arms. Once the full story of the expedition made it clear that the Spanish had not been pushovers, the conquest acquired even greater resonance. Then it became possible to see how with pluck, audacity, and hardihood Britons could win through in the face of great adversity, in a setting as far from Europe as anyone could imagine. 10
Lieutenant Colonel William Draper, an officer of the 79th Foot (one of the regular regiments that had fought at the Battle of Wandiwash), had been on leave in England in the winter of 1761–62 when he suggested an expedition against the Philippines to Anson and Ligonier. Reasons similar to those that had made them choose Havana as a target disposed them to listen to Draper’s proposal. Manila was the center of trade and administration for the Spanish Philippines and perhaps even more important in the Pacific than Havana in the Atlantic. Nor was conquest an impossible goal, for although the Spanish had built the fort of Cavite to protect the harbor and had enclosed the city’s core within a bastioned wall, they had clearly believed that Manila’s best source of security was its remoteness. That the Philippines took six to eight months to reach from Europe, in fact, only made the expedition more attractive to Ligonier and Anson, for Draper assured them that all the troops he would need were already in India, just six or eight weeks’ sail from the archipelago. Since Spain communicated with the colony via Mexico on the Manila galleon, there was good reason to hope that the invaders might arrive before the garrison even knew that Spain and Great Britain were at war.
Soon after the declaration of war, therefore, the ministers decided in favor of the venture. In February, Draper left Britain with a temporary commission as brigadier general and authority to raise an expeditionary force of two regular battalions and five hundred East India Company troops. By the end of June he had reached Madras. Once there, however, nothing went as planned, and the would-be conqueror of Manila found that the local authorities were willing to release only one redcoat regiment (his own 79th Foot), and a company of Royal Artillery. Draper therefore recruited what men he could—two companies of French deserters and several hundred Asian recruits (“such a Banditti,” he grumbled, as had “never assembled since the time of Spartacus”)—and sailed from Madras at the end of July.
When Draper’s little flotilla of warships and transports entered Manila Bay on September 22, the Manila galleon had yet to arrive. Thus the British sailed unchallenged past the guns of Cavite, landed near Manila, and attacked the city on the twenty-sixth, before the Spanish commander had heard that a state of war existed between their monarch and his own. Despite the tiny number of troops Draper had at his disposal (only about two thousand, including a battalion of sailors pressed into service), and despite the onset of the monsoon, which repeatedly held up siege operations, the British managed to breach the wall and storm the city on October 5. Manila surrendered later that day. Five days later the fort of Cavite capitulated, and on October 30 Spanish authorities throughout the archipelago made their formal submission. The booty captured exceeded $4,000,000—more than £1,300,000 sterling—in value.11
There could have been no more conclusive demonstration of the global reach that the army and navy had acquired during the Seven Years’ War. In the whole military history of Europe nothing quite compared to it. Even as the government faced unprecedented postwar challenges—as Wilkes railed against the ministers and the London crowds roared back their approval—the conquest seemed to affirm Britain’s essential invincibility. Even more than Havana, Draper’s feat was the crowning accomplishment of Britain’s most glorious war, and in it the British people for one last shining moment saw reflected all their nation’s glory. What they did not see (and perhaps would not have understood if they had) was the significance of what happened once the conquerors ran the Union Jack up Manila’s flagstaff.
Unlike Canada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Havana, the people of the Philippines did not turn out en masse to trade with the British. Instead the East India Company, to which Draper turned over the task of governing in November 1762, never did establish control over the archipelago, or indeed over any territory outside the immediate vicinity of Manila itself. Don Simón de Anda, a junior judge of the royal Audencia (supreme court), managed to slip out of the city during the siege and escape to the province of Pampanga, on the north shore of Manila Bay. There, in the town of Bacolor, thirty-five miles from Manila, he established a provisional government and began to organize an army. The highest officers of the Spanish colonial administration hesitated to join him, but thousands of Filipinos did not. Soon Anda’s guerrilla army mustered ten thousand men, and even though more than seven thousand of them lacked arms more formidable than bows and arrows, they still denied the British control over anything outside of Manila and Cavite. Despite news that a treaty had been signed, Anda refused to agree to a truce until orders arrived from London in March 1764, restoring the archipelago to Spanish control. Even then he would not order his men to lay down their arms until the new Spanish governor arrived. On the last day of May 1764, Anda led a column of native soldiers into Manila to receive the city from its British rulers. Any casual bystander would have concluded that he was witnessing a British surrender. 12
Administering Manila from November 2, 1762, to May 31, 1764, cost the East India Company over £200,000 sterling above its (modest) share of the booty and its (negligible) profits on trade. The conquest of Manila differed from other British overseas victories, therefore, insofar as the occupants of the colony refused to be subdued either by force or by commerce. Anyone paying attention to the history of Great Britain’s occupation of the Philippines at the moment it ended might well have pondered its implied lessons in the relationship between arms and trade, loyalty and empire. In the Philippine episode more than any other of the Seven Years’ War, the principles of imperial dominion stood out with unmistakable clarity. Military power—particularly naval power—could gain an empire, but force alone could never control colonial dependencies. Only the voluntary allegiance, or at least the acquiescence, of the colonists could do that. Flags and governors and even garrisons were, in the end, only the empire’s symbols. Trade and loyalty were its integuments, and when colonial populations that refused their allegiance also declined to trade, the empire’s dominion extended not a yard beyond the range of its cannons.
CHAPTER 54
Anglo-America at War’s End THE FRAGILITY OF EMPIRE
1761-1763
BY THE SPRING of 1763 it had been two years since Great Britain’s leaders had paid more than occasional attention to North America. Ministers concerned with ending the war and plagued by unstable domestic politics had few reasons to worry about a sector in which the fighting was finished. The Cherokee rebellion had caused concern, of course. Yet Grant had evidently restored order on the Carolina frontier; Amherst had initiated reforms in the Indian trade and begun to regulate backwoods settlement; and Johnson had induced the formerly French-allied nations of the interior to accept King George as their new father at a Detroit conference in September 1761. In some ways the colonists were more troublesome than the Indians, but they did nothing so outrageous as to require action. Thus Whitehall could afford to ignore America, and did.
To ministers and commander in chief alike, the main significance of the mainland colonies after the conquest of Canada had been their ability to continue providing provincial troops, and that they had done adequately. True, the colonies’ legislatures had not found it intuitively obvious why they should go on raising and paying for soldiers once Canada had fallen and the threat of Indian raids had subsided. But governors like Massachusetts’s new chief executive, Francis Bernard, hastened to remind their assemblymen that they “must not think that if the War does not rage at your own Doors, you many therefore be unconcerned spectators in it,” and the representatives had for the most part responded well.1
The continuation of parliamentary subsidies helps explain the willingness of representatives in various colonies to heed the empire’s calls for men. But the fact remains that most assemblies showed a degree of enthusiasm nearly comparable to what they had manifested in 1759 and 1760. Only two colonies, both proprietaries split by chronic disputes, refused to raise provincials in 1761 and 1762: Maryland, which kept to its well-worn path of nonparticipation, and Pennsylvania, where the assembly returned to fighting the Penn family once the Indians ceased to be active enemies. Other provinces did their best to comply with the Crown’s request for two-thirds the number of men they had raised in 1760. In all, the four New England colonies plus New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and the Carolinas raised 9,296 men in 1761. In 1762, with the Cherokee War over and no troops needed from the lower south, the same colonies, less the Carolinas, supplied 9,204 troops. These figures represented, respectively, 80 and 90 percent of the total numbers requested— levels that in retrospect would seem to indicate high enthusiasm for the empire. Perhaps equally remarkable was the willingness of the New England provinces to enlist men for full-year terms. Both in 1761–62 and in 1762–63, more than 1,000 New Englanders wintered, without compulsion or mutiny, in garrisons from Halifax to Oswego.2
And yet, ready as most colony governments were to offer their inhabitants’ military services, colonists and their legislatures made no better impression than ever on the men who administered the empire. Amherst, committed to supplying troops for the West Indies expeditions but unable to dispatch redcoat battalions until provincials had relieved them at their posts, despised the Americans who always arrived late and seemed to show initiative best when it came to embezzling rations and pay. To him every case of malfeasance and every shortfall in meeting enlistment quotas demonstrated the poor character of the colonists and the self-interest of their governments, features of American life he had come to expect—and detest. But the commander in chief characteristically kept his own counsel, complaining to his superiors more bitterly than to the provincial legislatures. Amherst’s reports therefore accumulated along with Loudoun’s and Braddock’s older complaints in London, where they formed the consistent pattern on the basis of which ministers understood the character and patriotism of Americans. Yet disturbing as they were, such evidences precipitated no official action. Even the outrage that the Southern secretary, Lord Egremont, felt at
what he believed was the Pennsylvanians’ “premeditated Resolution not to afford any Assistance” once “the immediate danger is removed from their own Doors” produced only a peevish letter to the province’s acting governor.3
Of more immediate concern to Whitehall was the colonies’ commerce with the enemy, which had caused problems from the beginning of the war. In August 1760, Pitt had ordered the colonial governors to crack down on the “illegal and most pernicious Trade, carried on by the King’s Subjects, . . . whereby [the French colonies] are, principally, if not alone, enabled to sustain, and protract, this long and expensive War.” Despite this ringing denunciation, however, smuggling was so extensive, and so many colonial customsmen were on the take, that most governors could do little more than echo Pitt’s condemnation of practices they could not hope to stop. Only a handful of royal officials made any attempt to enforce Pitt’s order. The most significant case occurred in the Bay Colony, where the unusually conscientious Governor Bernard and the equally punctilious chief justice of the colony’s superior court, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, tried to help an honest customs surveyor act against Boston’s smuggling merchants and their ally, the port’s corrupt collector of customs. The results were far from encouraging.4
Crucible of War Page 59
