If there was any trait upon which George III’s contemporaries most commented, it was his seriousness. George’s grandfather, George II, would reign from 1727 until his death in 1760. But George III’s father, Frederick, Prince of Wales, the next in succession, died suddenly after a brief illness in 1751, when George was thirteen. And so from that young age onward, George knew that the responsibilities of serving as the King of England awaited him. With the death of his grandfather in 1760, the full weight of those responsibilities fell on the shoulders of the twenty-two-year-old grandson. Once he had ascended to the throne, however, he showed every indication of being fully prepared to serve in his new role. In addition to his seriousness of mind, we might add conscientiousness and commitment to our description of him, for George III, unlike his grandfather and his great-grandfather, was determined to be a responsible and active sovereign.2
For most of the first fifteen years of his reign—until the conflict between Crown and colonies reached a state of genuine crisis in the winter and spring of 1775—most Americans carried with them a reverence and love not only for the idea of the monarchy but also for the very person of the king himself. Yet as the military conflict escalated, Americans began to change their view, increasingly referring to him as a devil and a tyrant intent on enslaving them. Even the rigorously rational Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, attributed to him such characteristics as “cruelty” and “perfidy,” charging him with having “plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” Toward the end of George’s extraordinarily long sixty-year reign as King of England, the onset of what came to be called the “madness” of George III—whether the result of a longstanding tendency toward manic depression or perhaps a psychological reaction to the painful disease of porphyria—led subsequent generations of Americans, incorrectly, to attribute his “tyrannical” behavior at the time of the Revolution to simple insanity.
George was determined to exercise all of the powers of the sovereign of his nation, but in the fall of 1775, he found himself depending upon his chief ministers when it came to the American situation. However much he may have wished to act as an independent sovereign, he was working within a system in which ministerial power within both Parliament and his own royal circle was deeply entrenched. Moreover, the array of issues with which he was confronted required that he rely on the expertise of others. Like his ministers, he was no doubt dumbfounded about how the posturing of a few radicals in Boston had escalated into warfare and, in the bargain, had spread to nearly the whole of North America. Ignoring the wise counsel of men like Edmund Burke, whose speeches arguing for conciliation George came to regard with contempt, he was more inclined to agree with Lord Sandwich, who in a speech in the House of Lords in the spring of 1775 had dismissed the American colonists as a bunch of “raw, undisciplined, cowardly men.” But the king did not need to depend on the disparaging remarks of a British lord to bolster his sense of rectitude. He had ample evidence both from members of Parliament and from most of the leading members of the merchant class in London that the people of England, in spite of the carefully crafted addresses from the Continental Congress trying to convince them otherwise, were thoroughly in his corner.3
But what to do? It was one thing to be convinced of the correctness of his position, but quite another to decide on a course of action that would bring the Americans to their senses. Clearly, what the king had initially perceived as a ragtag rebellion was rapidly becoming something else entirely. Reports of the Battle of Bunker Hill reached London on July 25. General Gage had attempted to put the best face on things, informing chief minister Lord North and secretary of state Lord Dartmouth that the British forces had won an important “victory” at Bunker and Breed’s Hills, but as news of the extent of British casualties became widely known, undersecretary of state William Eden quite accurately summed up the situation: “If we have eight more such victories,” he observed, “there will be nobody left to bring news of them.”4
Lord North, though still hoping to find some path toward reconciliation, admitted to the king after Bunker Hill that the war had indeed “grown to such a height that it must be treated as a foreign war, and that every expedience which would be used in the latter case should be applied in the former.” The king’s response was even more belligerent. “I am clear,” he said, “that we must persist and not be dismayed by any difficulties that may arise on either side of the Atlantic. I know that I am doing my duty and therefore can never wish to retract.” As the events of the next eight years would demonstrate, his emphatic determination to defend royal authority may have been driven more by ego than by a realistic calculation of the costs and benefits of a protracted, and ultimately unsuccessful, war. But the king would not be the first, or the last, monarch to be so driven.5
At an emergency cabinet meeting on July 26, the king’s ministers debated what to do in the aftermath of Bunker Hill. The secretary of war, Viscount Barrington, argued that British forces would always be at a disadvantage in a land war and proposed that the king use Great Britain’s naval superiority to blockade all American ports and starve the colonists into submission. Lord Dartmouth, whose days as secretary of state were numbered, and the Duke of Grafton, the king’s former chief minister who by 1775 was serving as Lord Privy Seal, one of the king’s personal advisers, argued for further negotiations with the Americans. Both were prepared to make at least modest concessions in order that America’s and Great Britain’s political leaders could “shake hands at last.” But they were in the minority. The ministers, with the king’s support, decided to send another 20,000 men to America, including five regiments of British troops currently in Ireland. Their hope was that by winning a decisive victory in New England, and perhaps in New York, other colonies would see the light and give up the fight. It was also becoming clear that General Gage, who had long ago lost the king’s confidence, would have to go. On July 28, two days after the ministers’ meeting, George III instructed Lord Dartmouth to recall Gage for “consultations.”6
In fact, General Gage’s persistently pessimistic reports about the state of the rebellion in Boston and its vicinity had been consistently accurate. His advice to the ministers during the summer and early fall of 1775—to evacuate British troops from Boston and to establish a more powerful base of operations in the colony of New York, whose population was considered to be friendlier to the British cause—would prove to be the most sensible course of action. It was, in fact, the strategy his successors eventually adopted. But most of the ministers in London, and, in particular, King George III, had run out of patience with him. As one of the king’s ministers commented, “I shall never cease to wonder, that a disciplined army, small as yours was at the beginning of the campaign, could ever suffer an undisciplined rabble to collect themselves, to train and form themselves into an army, and to besiege you in the manner they have done during the whole summer. . . . General Gage must account for this.” And account for it he did. On September 26, 1775, he received the news that he had been relieved of his responsibilities as the military governor of Massachusetts.7
General Gage was not the only person to whom the king would be unforgiving. Contrary to whatever expectations John Dickinson may have had, George III reacted with pure contempt to the Pennsylvanian’s Olive Branch Petition. Indeed, in the context of the long, bloody war that would follow, the story of the delivery—or non-delivery—of the petition might be viewed as the stuff from which tragedy is made.
Richard Penn, the son of Pennsylvania’s proprietary governor John Penn, had been specially dispatched to London to deliver the petition to America’s colonial agents, Arthur Lee, William Bollan, Charles Garth and Edmund Burke. Penn landed in Bristol on August 13, but since he had been instructed not to break the seal on the document until after he had delivered it to the colonial agents, another week went by before he or anyone else in England knew its contents. In fact, Bollan, Garth and, most interestingly, Edmund
Burke wanted no part in the actual delivery of the petition, so it was left to Penn and Arthur Lee to deliver it to Lord Dartmouth, a delivery that was supposed to take place on August 24 but, for reasons unknown, did not occur until the first of September.
Alas, by that time King George III had already made his opinions about the state of the American colonies public. On August 23 the king issued his Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition, which had been in the works for at least a few weeks. Lord Dartmouth hoped to delay issuing the king’s proclamation until the content of the colonists’ petition was known, but because his influence with the king and within the ministry was fast fading, he was unable to slow things down.
Lord North, though he may have had similar feelings, was not of a mind to stand up to the king, who was becoming steadily more exasperated by the Americans. In the proclamation the king repeated the common, but mistaken, belief that the crisis had been caused because “many of our subjects in divers Parts of Our Colonies” had been “misled by dangerous and ill-designing Men.” Those same designing men were to be blamed for the “disorderly Acts,” the “obstruction of lawful Commerce, and . . . the Oppression of Our loyal Subjects.” But no matter who was to blame, it was now evident that the colonies were in a state of “open and avowed rebellion,” in which the rebels were “traitorously preparing, ordering, and levying War against US.” Given the state of war existing between the mother country and her colonies, the king had no choice but to order the forceful suppression of any and all acts that might serve to undermine the authority of the king and his empire. The king no doubt hoped that his subjects in America would come to their senses, and he probably did not intend his words to be the equivalent of a declaration of war. The king’s misreadings were yet more evidence of the wide gulf in attitude and emotion between the king and his subjects in America.
By the time that Lord Dartmouth got around to presenting the colonists’ Olive Branch Petition to the king, sometime after September 1, George III was in no mood even to look at it. Arthur Lee and Richard Penn, in their report back to Congress, averred that though “we thought it our duty to press his Lordship to obtain an answer . . . we were told, as his Majesty did not receive it on the throne, no answer would be given.” The Duke of Grafton, looking back on that moment after the final separation between king and colonies had occurred, believed that this failure of communication may well have doomed any hope for reconciliation. Grafton was aware that John Dickinson “and his party” had worked hard, against the wishes of many, to persuade the delegates in the Continental Congress to give their unanimous support to the Olive Branch Petition, but that it was commonly understood among the delegates that “in the case of a rejection of this final application,” the next step would be a “declaration of Independency.”8
Grafton was himself fast losing favor with the king. He was probably as out of touch about the mood of the British ministry as he was about the possibility that the Americans in Congress could ever have viewed the Olive Branch Petition as a satisfactory basis for compromise. And he was certainly incorrect in his conjecture that some sort of deal had been made in the Continental Congress by which the delegates had agreed in advance that a “Declaration of Independency” would somehow automatically follow should the petition be rejected. Clearly though, the king’s insistence on going forward with his Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition before even looking at the Olive Branch Petition did not advance the cause of reconciliation.
Nor did belligerent words from the king stop with his August proclamation. October 26 was the date of the king’s annual address at the opening session of Parliament, normally a merely ritualistic affair. But on this occasion the king would devote the whole of his speech to the situation in America. There had been a good deal of jockeying and negotiation among the king’s ministers between his August 23 proclamation and his speech to Parliament, with some advocating decisive, punitive action against the colonies, and others arguing for further negotiations. Lord North and Lord Dartmouth continued to hope for some path to reconciliation. They had hoped to insert into the king’s speech some language about the creation of a peace commission. Such a body might perhaps have the authority to negotiate a settlement with individual colonies, if not with the Continental Congress, which most of the ministers assumed had set itself too implacably against any form of reconciliation that would be acceptable to the king. In the end, however, the king’s speech contained no mention of a peace commission. Its tone was essentially similar to that of the August 23 proclamation. It laid blame for the crisis on deranged, self-interested rabble-rousers in the colonies who had duped “my people in America” to “openly avow their revolt, hostility, and rebellion.” Their ultimate desire, an “independent empire” in America, would, he warned, be crushed by “decisive exertions” of force by the British army and navy. Indeed, if the colonists deceived themselves into thinking that the British forces would be insufficient to put down the revolt, the British military had “received the most friendly offers of foreign assistance” should that prove necessary—a clear sign that the king was prepared to use mercenaries from Russia and Germany to augment their forces.9
In the midst of this belligerent rhetoric, however, there was one small ray of hope—a hope no doubt inserted by the dwindling number of individuals who, like Lord North and the soon-to-be-replaced Lords Dartmouth and Grafton, wished to leave the door to peaceful negotiations at least slightly ajar. The king declared:
I shall give authority to certain persons upon the spot to grant general or particular pardons and indemnities, in such manner, and to such persons as they shall think fit; and to receive the submission of any province or colony, which shall be disposed to return to its allegiance. It may also be proper to authorize the persons so commissioned to resort such province or colony so returning to its allegiance, to the free exercise of its trade and commerce, and to the same protection and security, as if such province or colony had never revolted.10
Those words amounted to an offer of amnesty—on the king’s terms—to those colonists or colonies willing to submit to the his authority. They were almost certainly not intended, at least in the mind of the king, as an open-ended offer to carry out peace negotiations. But they would have the effect of further complicating the decision-making process back in America, for they offered to men like John Dickinson a glimmer of hope that somehow, someway, peace with the mother country might still be achieved.
It is difficult to find even that glimmer of hope in the king’s speech. Indeed, all of the evidence suggests that virtually all of the avenues of reconciliation had been closed. The king himself—ever more confident of his abilities and his authority—was becoming more belligerent toward the American rebels by the day. One by one, those among the king’s ministers who were inclined toward reconciliation—Lords Dartmouth and Grafton the most prominent among them—were ousted from their positions of power. The members of Parliament who heard the king’s speech generally supported it. Indeed, with the exception of a few outliers like Edmund Burke and Lord Chatham, most members of Parliament were more hawkish about the need to use massive military force to crush the American revolt than Lord North. Finally, those members advocating a hard line with the Americans could be confident that they had the support of their constituents. When the Continental Congress agreed on the Association, many of the delegates believed that the boycott of British goods would bring the British economy to its knees. In fact, in the fall of 1775, at which point the effects of the American boycott of all trade with Great Britain were not yet being felt, the British economy was booming. As Henry Cruger, a Bristol merchant, reported to his uncle in New York: “Strange to tell, but a melancholy truth it is, this country apparently enjoys the most perfect repose. And were it not for the newspapers, the people at large would hardly know there was a civil war in America. The poor are industrious, and the manufacturers have full employment.” Cruger went on to report that the king was “enraged beyond mea
sure at the defiance” of the Continental Congress, and that the people of the country at large shared in that rage. “Believe me,” he wrote, the “bulk of the people will support [the king and his ministers] with their men, and money; and America by the end of next summer will be in a bad plight, unless a peace is made.”11
Given the apparent solidarity of the British government and its people on the need to crush the rebellion in America, it is in some senses surprising that the imperial crisis between the mother country and her colonies did not explode into a full-scale revolution for independence in America by the late summer or early fall of 1775. One reason for the Americans’ vacillation has a simple explanation: the slow progress of news across the Atlantic once again produced a delayed reaction within America to the bad news coming from the palace of King George III. Members of Congress did not hear news of the king’s refusal to read the Olive Branch Petition or of his Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition until the second week of November; and it was not until early January 1776 that the text of the king’s speech to Parliament reached American shores. The more important reason for the vacillation, though, was that there remained in the Continental Congress a substantial number of delegates—perhaps a higher percentage in Congress than among the people of the colonies at large—whose attachment to king and empire, even if shaken, was not broken. And there would be many more months of vacillation and acrimony among the delegates before that attachment would finally be severed.12
Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor Page 34
