Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  He demanded order and system as the watchwords of the new reign. It may have come as a warning to the courtiers that he kept a collection of clocks and barometers; rigour and precision would be the accompaniments of proper service. He knew all the little things about the Army List and courtly etiquette; he knew what buttons should be worn and on what occasions; he knew the routine of everyone attending court, from the highest ambassador to the lowliest page. He rose at six in the morning, and then shaved and dressed before attending to the correspondence that had arrived in the night. He rode before breakfast, which was his only meal before dinner at four. The day was given to business, formal or informal, but he met selected guests for supper at ten. He was always a frugal eater and a prudent drinker.

  Yet it would be wrong to paint too staid a portrait of a king who, after all, was only following the example of his Elizabethan and Stuart predecessors in insisting upon the prerogatives of a king. Nothing he said or did would have shocked Elizabeth I or Charles II, except perhaps for his protestations of piety. He loved the outdoors, revelled in sports such as riding and hunting; later in his reign he picked up the soubriquet of ‘Farmer George’ for his love of all aspects of the land.

  In the draft of his first formal proclamation to the privy council he had written of ‘a bloody and expensive war’. Pitt of course could not allow any such judgement on the conflict that he had guided towards victory, and in the published version the sentiment had been transformed into this ‘expensive but just and necessary war’. It was believed, not without reason, that the young king had been bullied or otherwise persuaded by the first minister into changing his declaration; this was a lesson that the king would not forget in all his later dealings with his politicians. He came to believe that he had a right to implicit support, and he refused to make concessions; he was not dismayed by criticism and opposition because he knew that he was right. ‘I know I am doing my duty’, he once said, ‘and therefore can never wish to retract’ to which may be added the remark that ‘I would rather risk my Crown than do what I think personally disgraceful.’ This was the habit of mind that lost America.

  At first George III revelled in the name and nature of the ‘patriot king’, and even earned the praise of the acerbic Horace Walpole as ‘handsome, open and honest’. The duchess of Northumberland compounded the praise by describing him as ‘fair and fresh coloured’ with blue eyes and white teeth. What more could a king enjoy? But who could have known or guessed that during his long reign he would face madness, the French Revolution, the glory of Napoleon and the loss of America?

  Yet already he had ideas of his own, and such a monarch might turn out to be dangerous. He had conceived a hatred for Whigs and Tories alike; he despised the cynicism and the back-biting, the profiteering and the posturing, the lies and the hypocrisy. So he decided to rule without the aid of any party at all, bringing in a variety of ministers as and when he thought fit. It was hoped and believed that this would introduce a new period of peace and understanding in which the Tories, in particular, hoped for the dismantling of the Whig juggernaut and a return to royal favour. The king would once more assume a central political position. This was more than a policy; it was a moral duty.

  He brought in a close confidant to help him; Lord Bute was in his late forties and had been his cherished councillor since childhood, and the equally intimate companion of his mother, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. The young king, not trusting any of the councillors and politicians who had clustered around his grandfather, relied upon him for everything. Two days after his accession he told Pitt that ‘the king would have no meetings held at which he [Bute] was not present’. This did not of course impress Pitt, who was accustomed to managing matters in his own way. ‘I know’, he wrote, ‘it is impossible for me to act in a responsible ministerial office with Lord Bute . . . I can’t bear a touch of command, my sentiments in politics like my religion are my own. I can’t change them . . . I cannot be dictated, prescribed to . . .’

  The king’s trust and dependence upon Bute, however, do suggest that he was still too modest, or too diffident, or too anxious, to exercise his power with proper self-confidence; he always possessed a strain of melancholy and nervous excitement that may have contributed to his later periods of madness.

  Bute repaid the trust with loyalty and gratitude, but in other respects he did not seem altogether suitable for the highest offices. He was by no means popular. Scotland was his birthplace and ever since the Act of Union in 1707 the English had had an ambivalent attitude towards the Scots themselves, born out of pride and prejudice. They condemned the majority for their slatternly habits and yet at the same time denounced the most prominent for rapacity and ambition. The fact that his name chimed in the popular ear as Lord Boot was not helpful.

  Lord Waldegrave noted that Bute ‘has a good person, fine legs, and a theatrical air of the greatest importance . . . for whether the subject be serious or trifling, he is equally pompous, slow and sententious’. The new king’s father had once remarked that he would make an excellent ambassador in a court where nothing happened. It seems that he was dry and awkward in company, but he compensated for his social incapacity by endless business. Chesterfield noted that ‘he interfered in everything, disposed of everything, and undertook everything’.

  The politics of the realm were in confusion, with the principal ministers at loggerheads. The king and Bute wished to discontinue the war as soon as practicable; Pitt and Newcastle were in favour of its full continuance. There was a lack of trust at the highest levels, therefore, and Pitt in particular felt that he was impeded and hindered. The Tories hardly knew who or what they were any more, having found royal favour after almost fifty years in the wilderness, and the Whigs were split and dissipated into so many factions and interests that they scarcely recognized each other. As one member, Henry Conway, put it, ‘parties seem not only to have lost their animosities, but the very line that distinguished them is effaced’.

  Encouraged by the presence of the king and of Bute, with their known animosity towards Pitt’s war policy, there was a general movement towards peace among the political classes. It was well known that the country was tiring of war but, more particularly, it was tiring of taxes to pay for it. The first move came from the French king, Louis XV, who believed or hoped that the financial resources of the enemy were close to exhaustion. At the end of March 1761 he issued a declaration that talks between the parties should be held on the basis of territorial possessions now held. The technical term for this arrangement, uti possidetis, was a diplomatic nicety that could be interpreted in any number of fashions.

  In this period, perhaps fortuitously, a general election was held that engrossed the attention of political spectators. It was a hard and expensive campaign with Horace Walpole describing ‘West Indians, conquerors, nabobs, and admirals’ descending on every borough. ‘West Indians’ were the owners of plantations and ‘nabobs’ were the English who had picked up the riches of India. Bribery and corruption increased proportionately and one parliamentary borough, Sudbury, even advertised itself for sale. Given the confused and heterogeneous mixture of alliances, groups, loyalties, factions and coteries – all of them floating above the divisions between Whigs and Tories – it was of course difficult to decide who, if anyone, had ‘won’. The inevitable result was insecurity, and instability, at a time when the challenges to the king’s administration had never been greater.

  Pitt, however, was still the dominant minister until the parliament assembled in October 1761. One member, Richard Rigby, described him as ‘the Dictator’ and the French ambassador, François de Bussy, remarked that ‘he has few friends in the Council, but there is no one there strong or bold enough to try to replace him’. He was of course all for continuing the war against the French, on the principle that it is better to knock out your enemy when he is already down.

  Pitt also called for a pre-emptive war against Spain so that the two Bourbon powers might not have the time or opportunity to a
lly against the common foe. He called together his colleagues to reveal to them the information that France and Spain had indeed concluded a family pact. It was doubly important to intercept the annual plate fleet from the Americas that filled its treasury. ‘France is Spain,’ he told them, ‘and Spain is France.’ His colleagues were not inclined to draw the same conclusions. The City declared that there was not enough money for further warfare; Admiral Anson complained that the fleet was not ready. A thousand plausible reasons could be given for caution or inaction.

  Pitt reacted in the only way he knew. He would, he said, ‘be responsible for nothing but what he directed’. He resigned on 5 October, to the great relief of Spain, France, the earl of Bute and the new king. ‘I would say,’ George wrote, ‘let that mad Pitt be dismissed.’ But Pitt, to the dismay of his supporters and the incredulity of his opponents, then decided to accept a government pension of £3,000 per year. The cynical response, although brief, was overwhelming. The great patriot could be bought after all, and his selfless direction of his country could now be seen by cynics in a different light. As Horace Walpole put it, ‘Alack! Alack! Mr Pitt loves an estate as well as my Lord Bath.’ Pitt’s resentment was such that his supposed retirement from politics turned out to be temporary. He burned for revenge on his calumniators.

  It was now the turn of the earl of Newcastle, the old warhorse of the administration for thirty-eight years, to bow to the force of the ‘new men’ and resign his office as first lord of the treasury. He had already complained that ‘my advice or opinion, are scarce ever asked, but never taken. I am kept in, without confidence, and indeed without communication.’ His lament emphasizes the extent to which public policy was determined by a small handful of councillors. In the early years of George’s reign a group of principal men, generally seven or eight in number but reaching up to thirteen, now took on the name and nature of an inner cabinet as opposed to a larger outer cabinet of assorted worthies. The earl of Bute himself took command of policy with a profound sense of self-importance. Lord Shelburne had remarked that he was ‘always on stilts’.

  By the new year Pitt’s prognostications had in fact proved to be correct. The treasure ships sailed into Spanish harbours and the Spanish authorities, so provided, rejected complaints concerning their provocations against English vessels. A war upon Spain was declared in January 1762, and the superiority of English sea power was manifest in the conquest of Havana and Manila. From the West Indies to the Philippines the Royal Navy seemed to be invincible. Yet even as the smoke cleared Bute was pursuing the path of peace; through various intermediaries he was in contact with the courts of Madrid and Versailles. He was perhaps in concert with the popular mood, since in this year there occurred a sharp economic depression which was the harbinger of a decade of droughts and poor harvests.

  The preliminary articles of peace were signed at Fontainebleau at the beginning of November, and in the welter of complex negotiations it became clear that England was the gainer of most spoils. Minorca, Nova Scotia, Canada, Senegal, St Vincent, Grenada and other territories now became her property by conquest. The French also ceded British supremacy in India. But Pitt, the man who had fought the war, was not content. He came to parliament with his legs and feet wrapped in flannel; he suffered so badly from gout that he was allowed occasionally to sit as he spoke. Nevertheless his speech against the preliminaries of peace lasted three and a half hours, in which time he described France as a powerful and dangerous rival who should not be rescued at the last minute. Yet the war was over.

  The treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, set the seal on the general peace that followed. The countries of Europe were exhausted after seven years of conflict, and the majority of them had gained little if anything from the bloodshed and the destruction. Nobody could keep a list of the homes pillaged, the fields devastated and the inhabitants destroyed by invading armies. Nobody kept a list because nobody cared. The mood, in England at least, was sanguine to the point of smugness. Horace Walpole wrote to a friend that ‘you would not know your country again. You left it a private little island, living upon its means. You would find it the capital of the world . . . St James’s Street crowded with nabobs and American chiefs, and Mr Pitt attended in his Sabine farm by Eastern monarchs and Borealian electors, waiting till the gout has gone out of his foot for an audience.’

  It would seem, then, that by the early 1760s England took its place at the centre of what was rapidly becoming a vast trading network from Canada to Bengal. It was still not seen in imperial terms, and the concept of empire was usually reserved for the vast Chinese Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or the Mughal Empire; it was not a European pursuit as Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published thirteen years later, helped to demonstrate. Nevertheless the gains acquired during the Seven Years War seemed to some to have political as well as mercantile associations, and allusions to empire became more frequent in the 1770s. But there was no planning, no strategy, no coherent policy for the vast agglomerate of colonies, territories, provinces and states that were now under English rule. The response was one of caution and indecision. The prevailing mood was one of unease and uncertainty, with an upsurge in prophetic dissent and apocalyptic moralism that tried to counter what many contemporaries denounced as laxness and irresponsibility. England had a relatively small population on a small island. It was predicted that within a few years more people would inhabit North America.

  Trade was the key. Trade promoted wealth and independence; trade nurtured strength. The standard theory of mercantilism held that there was only a finite amount of bullion in the world, and that England should control the largest share. Commerce could, according to Edmund Burke, be ‘united with and made to flourish by war’. Slaves, sugar and tobacco were the principal commodities that expanded in the new climate. The war had repercussions at home, with the gun-smiths, sword-smiths, and dock-workers in eternal demand; the foundries, forges and mills were red-hot. It was not yet clear to contemporaries that this was the prelude to something on an altogether larger scale.

  The effort of funding a world war for seven years, of furnishing ships, of paying mercenaries, of collecting taxes and of begging for loans from companies, also ensured that the nation itself would be changed inexorably. It was no longer a private little island that could, theoretically, keep to itself. It had become a giant enterprise with all the demands and appurtenances of state power. It relied upon an expanding treasury and the support of high finance; it depended upon an ever-increasing number of bureaucrats and administrators – let alone the teeming excise men and customs men – to maintain its authority. By the 1720s it had enrolled 12,000 government servants.

  A foreign observer noted that ‘the English are taxed in the morning for the soap that washes their hands, at nine for coffee, the tea and the sugar they use at breakfast; at noon for the starch that powders their hair; at dinner for the salt that savours their meat, and for the beer they drink’. The bricks that built their houses, and the coals that kept them warm, the candles and even the windows that gave them light, were also the subject of tax. It is perhaps ironic that the people who complained most loudly about taxation, on the grounds of liberty, were in the end the most willing to pay it. It was part of a generally equivocal attitude towards authority that encouraged revolts but not revolution.

  By these means, and others, the English administration consumed the largest proportion of national income of any European state. A substantial 83 per cent of this public money was spent for military purposes. Between the reigns of James II and George IV, at the beginning and end of this volume, taxes had multiplied sixteen times; in the same period England had declared war against foreign enemies on eight separate occasions. The administration had become in effect a war machine directed principally against the Bourbons. It was the most egregious fiscal and military country in the world. Whether many people understood the implications of that fact is another matter. Their awareness is more likely to h
ave expressed itself in the popular patriotic songs that rang out in the halls and tea gardens where it was taken for granted that:

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

  Britons never, ever, ever shall be slaves.

  Bute had said of the treaty of Paris that ‘he wished no other epitaph to be inscribed on his tomb than that he was the adviser of it’. Yet two months later he resigned from office; his pride was of the brittle kind that is shattered by criticism. There were some who complained like Pitt, for example, that Spain and France had been let off too lightly. It was Bute who had defended the peace and his thin skin does not seem to have been capable of withstanding assault. He had already been badly rocked by the imposition of a cider tax that provoked riots in the West Country and elsewhere. And so, on 8 April 1763, he went. He did not disappear altogether. It was believed that he simply slipped ‘behind the curtain’ to lend the king clandestine advice for the next three years. From that position, therefore, he was about to watch two of the most incendiary events in eighteenth-century English and American history.

  20

  Here we are again!

  He was called ‘Dictionary Johnson’ and ‘the old elephant’, the former term both more eloquent and more accurate after the publication of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language in the spring of 1755. It was an age of prescription as well as of enquiry; what was loose was confined; what was energetic or exuberant was chastened by rules of good order. The language had been in Johnson’s own words characterized by ‘perplexity’, ‘confusion’ and ‘boundless variety’. He himself was a great shambling devourer of words, a bibliophile and an antiquarian all at once.