London society competed to pay its respects to Georgiana. Her aristocratic status was confirmed when John Spencer became a viscount in 1761, making her Lady Spencer; when he was elevated to the rank of earl four years later, Georgiana became a countess. If Caroline had overlooked her little cousin back in their childhood days, she now must have seen her in an entirely different light.
The friendship that developed between the two women was an attraction of opposites. In contrast to Caroline’s forthright personality, it was said that Georgiana Spencer had the womanly art of “seducing people into right ways.”12 Her emotional empathy may have been a bit of a pose; her desire to help the unfortunate was genuine, but so was her urge to show off. The incongruous mixture was not lost on Caroline, who once observed to her friend: “I have often wonder’d that you who cast so much light, & who do not appear to me quite to dislike that others should observe the bright shine, have more than once expressed sentiments expressive of liking the ___secretum iter, et fallentis semita vitae [the untrodden paths of life].”13
The Spencers were pronounced one of the happiest married couples of their day. They had wealth, rank, youth, and, within a few years of their marriage, three children. The eldest, Georgiana, born in 1757—“my Dear little Gee,” Lady Spencer called her—was to become the famous Duchess of Devonshire, a fashion leader, gambler, and politician. A year later, in 1758, Lady Spencer produced the all-important male heir, George, followed by younger daughter Harriet in 1761.14
Though outwardly their marriage must have looked like a fairy tale, John Spencer was a difficult person, often moody and withdrawn in company and subject throughout his life to bouts of ill health. Acquaintances complained of his penchant for “fretting,” and looking on the worst side of things. Six years into the marriage, Caroline was reassuring her friend that she was “not half so afraid of [Lord Spencer’s] grave looks as I used to be.”15 Spencer’s one significant display of emotional intelligence was his marriage to an affectionate, communicative woman whose warmth had the capacity to open him up. But if Georgiana listened sympathetically to the introverted John, he did not listen to her in turn. Rather, Caroline would become an emotional mainstay to her over many years, a friend to whom she could confide her worst fears. Caroline understood Georgiana’s need to unburden herself and encouraged her, counseling, “whenever you have these black ideas hovering round in your mind, . . . I wish you, if you cannot at once drive them away, that you’ll sit down & write to me, I am certain it would be useful to let them out that way, & I shall always receive such communications as the greatest mark of confidence & friendship you can give me.”16 Her friendship with Lady Spencer would in many respects reprise Caroline’s greatest role in life, that of eldest sister.
Caroline often came across as direct and unfeminine in her interactions with others, but, like all the Howes, she only talked about her deepest feelings with reluctance. “I well know,” she wrote, quoting from contemporary poet William Mason’s Caractacus, that “ ‘The Heart that bleeds from any stroak of Fate, or human wrongs, loves to disclose itself, that listning Pity may drop a healing Tear upon the wound,’ yet I fear such indulgence is sometimes detrimental, & the Nerves afterwards the worse for it.”
Emotional venting was not always wholesome, she thought. Even in the midst of a Howe family crisis, she apologized to Lady Spencer for “unburthen[ing] my mind”; “I am afraid of probing myself too deep when I am with you lest I should hurt you.” Yet she was unstinting in expressing affection. “[M]y dearest best beloved friend,” she wrote to Lady Spencer, “I will not attempt to tell you how happy I shall be to see you again.” And on other occasions she wrote artlessly, “do love me,” and “I do most heartily wish you to love me,” and “I have only to repeat that I for ever think of you, & am always wishing for a letter.”17
Their shared love of gambling brought into relief the contrasting personalities of the two friends. Both women enjoyed competitive games. Lady Spencer played billiards, becoming so adept at the tabletop game that her friend confessed to feeling jealous. Caroline’s consolation was her superior skill at chess. “[A]ll my hopes are you never will find time for it,” she warned Georgiana, as she could not endure being beaten.18 But their chief love was the card games played for money that were ubiquitous to high society, such as quinze, whist, faro, loo, and macau.
During the century, betting as a means of adding zest to any activity was endemic to every social rank of the nation. The proverbial story is often told of the London club where, when a member fainted, his fellows immediately laid bets on whether he was dead or alive. For aristocratic women gamesters such as Caroline and Lady Spencer, gambling was a chance to test their courage in the roll of dice or a play of cards.19 Caroline was a risk-taker, like her brother George, and she was naturally attracted to “high play” (betting large sums). But if Caroline sometimes liked to coax her fellow players to place ever-higher bets, she kept her own gambling under control.
Lady Spencer, on the other hand, came from a family of compulsive gamblers.20 Over many years of friendship with Caroline, she confessed her attempts to overcome her addiction. Once, when she had failed in a resolution to put a time limit on her cardplaying, Caroline counseled her that it was much easier not to begin to play in the first place. Trying to quit midplay, “when spirits & hopes of winning back, eggs one on,” was almost sure to fail. It was not the money, she warned, but “a desire to win,” that kept one at the table. Lady Spencer admitted, “I am an Idiot about play, & make what amends I can for that Vice—by being something of a Lady Bountiful to the poor. I believe these two qualities hang by some whimsical Connection together,” acknowledging that her celebrated charity was at least in part driven by a guilty urge to compensate for her gambling.21
For both Caroline and Lady Spencer, love of cards brought them into another crucial social space where aristocratic women were able to engage in the men’s world of politics. Women played alongside men in private settings rather than clubs, but that did not inhibit them from throwing themselves into the same excesses as the male gamblers, presiding at the table in the role of dealer or banker, running up fantastic debts, and staying up until dawn in pursuit of winnings.22 The relationships established around the gaming table segued naturally into the social politics that was never far below the surface of eighteenth-century aristocratic gatherings.
Like other politically involved aristocratic women of their time, Caroline and Georgiana always operated in private and informal spheres. As long as they did so, they were recognized and accepted by their contemporaries. In sharp contrast, the women who occasionally crossed boundaries—for example, by excessive public involvement in political campaigning—could find themselves barraged with criticism. In such cases, the so-called sexual slander in the press could be extremely hostile, depicting them as unfeminine and power-hungry.23
Women like Caroline Howe and Lady Spencer were not feminists. Their political engagement was accepted by them and by the world only insofar as it was clearly for the sake of family, not of self. “It was a society,” writes historian Elaine Chalus, “that accepted women as political actors as long as their participation did not threaten the fiction of a male polity on the one hand or that of female inferiority and natural subordination on the other.”24 An example of this was Dowager Lady Howe’s successful newspaper appeal to the Nottingham constituents in 1758 without drawing criticism upon herself.
Caroline Howe and Lady Georgiana Spencer gathered and purveyed political intelligence, acted as go-betweens in requests for political favors, and protected the images and reputations of the men in their families. Lady Spencer was uniquely situated in this respect. The eccentric Duchess of Marlborough, John Spencer’s great-grandmother, had stipulated in her will that he must take no active part in Parliament. Spencer was confined to managing elections for others, something his great wealth made possible. Even after his elevation to the peerage placed him in the House of Lords, he continued to sponsor candidate
s for the House of Commons, as he did for Thomas Howe for Northampton in 1768.25 Because of the vicarious nature of his involvement in parliamentary politics, and also because of his poor health, John Spencer relied heavily on his wife as a political collaborator. This put husband and wife on the same level in many respects as they both pulled strings from a distance.26
Caroline, for her part, had been raised in a family whose women regularly exerted whatever influence they possessed on behalf of their men. She had served an apprenticeship under the indomitable Lady Pembroke, and, after twenty years of marriage, she continued to act on behalf of her brothers—although, curiously, never her husband. John Howe was sometimes assumed to be one of the famous “brothers,” in the newspapers, but he had no aspirations to enter Parliament, nor did he have extended kin who might gain advantage from his wife’s court and political connections.27 In fact, John was somewhat in the shadow of his wife’s more eminent family. In an era when wives were firmly subordinate to their husbands, advocating for her younger brothers instead allowed Caroline an unusual degree of latitude. As we shall see, it was the sister and the brothers acting together that brought the Howe dynasty into the American War of Independence.
CONFLICT WITH THE American colonies was one of the most divisive issues in British politics after 1763. The Seven Years’ War had generated an immense national debt that led to a series of attempts to tax the American colonies. The most famous of these—the Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Duties Acts of 1767, the enforcement of duty on tea that led to the Boston Tea Party in December of 1773—gave the hitherto-disunited thirteen mainland American colonies a focus around which they moved toward nationhood.
But American nationalism was still in the future. At the outset of the colonial protests against British taxation, the Americans were loyal Britons. There was not yet any idea of an American nation. On the contrary, Americans felt that they had just helped their mother country to vanquish a hated French threat to British liberties in America. They were sincere in their admiration of British military heroes—to some, martyrs—like General James Wolfe and George Augustus Lord Howe. This sparked all the more outrage at what they believed were unconstitutional taxes imposed on them in the decade after 1763. They naturally looked for a champion in the metropolis for their cause, and they found it in Richard Howe’s patron, William Pitt, who would earn the admiration and gratitude of many American colonists for his forthright speech against the Stamp Act, enacted just a few years after the peace.
In 1763, George Grenville became prime minister with a determination to enforce taxation of the American colonies. It was under his administration that the Stamp Act was passed, placing duties on a range of everyday items from playing cards and dice to newspapers, legal forms, and shipping documents. This sparked protests on an unprecedented scale in America. The Stamp Act Congress that met in New York in October 1765 announced the mantra “No taxation without representation.” Merchants in the major American seaports canceled their orders from London, adopting a boycott of British goods as a means of forcing a repeal. Meanwhile, a wave of riots throughout the colonies successfully prevented peaceful distribution of the stamps. In Boston, in particular, fierce riots had raged for days in August, culminating in the notorious destruction of the home of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who saw his fine house with its woodwork wainscoting vandalized, his garden torn up, his family’s money, clothes, and library destroyed. In practice, royal authority was nullified by the crowd actions.
In January 1766, American colonists eagerly hailed Pitt as their savior when he was reported to have declared in Parliament that Britain had no right to impose taxes on the colonies. Pitt was already a hero on both sides of the Atlantic for leading the nation to victory in the Seven Years’ War. Now he declaimed that American rights were as dear to him as the rights of Englishmen, as he championed American resistance. There were very few British politicians, if any, who would agree that Parliament had no right of taxation over its American colonies. It has remained a moot point whether in fact Pitt actually said it or was misreported.28 Pitt himself would subsequently distance himself from such a huge concession of Parliament’s sovereignty, but he certainly thought that assertion of full British authority over the colonies was impolitic and an error. He was a high-profile figure who might naturally have stepped forward to resolve Anglo-American differences, yet he was also a mercurial—perhaps manic-depressive—and unpredictable individual who did not work well with others. His health would break down repeatedly after 1763, until his death fifteen years later.
George Grenville had no chance to respond to the colonial unrest, because George III, who had a personal antipathy toward him, had removed him from office by July 1765. His replacement was the Marquis of Rockingham, whose government would repeal the Stamp Act in 1766, but with the mitigating declaration that Parliament had the right to legislate for the American colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”29 If leading American patriots understood this to be a mere sword of state—words to appease members of Parliament but never to be put into practice—they would find themselves disabused of that idea in the years to come.
William Pitt’s mental imbalance was only one contribution to the instability of the nation’s politics during the crucial decade when a resolution of Anglo-American tensions was needed. Another was the determination of its new king, George III, to assert what he saw as his proper position as a “patriot” prince. George—remembered as the monarch who endured lengthy bouts of insanity in the final half of his almost-sixty-year reign—had come to the throne as a young man in 1760 with rigid ideas about his role.
The previous two Georges had been strongly attached to their Kingdom of Hanover, a bias that aroused anti-Hanoverian feeling within the British nation. George III was determined to show that he was a true Englishman, famously asserting in his accession speech, “I glory in the name of Britain.” But if he loved Britain, he was unhappy with the mainstream Whig party politics that had prevailed since the time of his great-grandfather George I. As we have seen, leading politicians like the Duke of Newcastle had for decades presided over a political system that managed elections and distributed places and pensions to MPs in order to control Parliament. In practice, the Whig political machine never entirely controlled the House of Commons, but it constituted a monolith that prevented effective opposition.
The Whig argument that the rival Tory party constituted a threat to liberty and the Protestant Hanoverian succession was wearing thin. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Tories had been tarred as disloyal Jacobites who sought the restoration of the absolutist Catholic Stuarts to the throne. The stereotype—never really accurate in any case—was badly outdated. In fact, the Tories shrank as an organized movement to the point where almost everyone in British mainstream politics called himself a Whig. Instead of rival parties, it was Whig factions—headed by people such as the maverick William Pitt or the mainstream Duke of Newcastle—who clashed with each other for power.30
By the middle of the century, the Whig party appeared to some as a bloated political system that was improperly diminishing the power of the Crown rather than saving the kingdom from a Tory threat. Ministers such as the Duke of Newcastle, who had headed the Whig government party since 1754, purportedly undertook to manage the House of Commons in the service of the king. In practice, George II had been obliged at times to give way to his powerful prime ministers. Nevertheless, leading Whigs could defend their methods with the argument that their political machine ensured a functioning and responsible Parliament that checked the power of the monarch, secured stability against faction and mob rule, and safeguarded British liberty—a system that was in marked contrast to the absolute monarchies on the European Continent.31
But George III had a different view of the matter. He saw the powerful Whig magnates as unconstitutionally curbing his royal authority and obstructing good government. He believed their “corrupt politics of place and pension” served
the few at the expense of the nation’s welfare. The young king was determined to act independently for the good of his realm, breaking the rigid party pattern by employing good men, whether Whig or Tory, and creating a “non-party government.”32
George III’s ideas were not unique; the notion that party politics got in the way of the public good was a commonplace one. But George, a stubborn young man who did not easily accept points of view that were not his own, accelerated the process of dismantling the old Whig system. His first actions in office triggered a lengthy period of political instability as longstanding political alliances fell apart. From 1763 until the 1770 appointment of Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford, whose administration would oversee the start of the American Revolution five years later, George III had no fewer than five prime ministers.
The Howe brothers, who would play a leading role in the only effort to bring a peaceful resolution to the conflict between Britain and her colonies in 1776, have left scant evidence of their attitude toward the burgeoning American controversy during the decade leading to war. They were not political thinkers, but rather men of action. The brothers, unsurprisingly, were not given to great speeches in Parliament. In the twelve years between the end of the Seven Years’ War and the start of the American Revolution, there is almost no record of William having spoken before the House of Commons.33 Richard did better, speaking on at least a score of occasions, but contemporaries complained that his delivery was confused.34 It has been said of Richard that “his primary allegiance was to himself,” because he appeared to accept government office without regard to people or principles.35 But viewing Richard’s career moves through the prism of his sister’s letters during a decade of political turmoil reveals a different story.
The Howe Dynasty Page 15
