The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (59 page)

Grenville saw no reason why the burden of the colonies’ defence should fall on the English taxpayer alone. And perhaps if they had been asked to consider the request in their assemblies the Americans would have returned a favourable answer. The problem was the peremptory way in which the tax was demanded. The American colonists had a very proud parliamentary tradition of their own in their assemblies. Following the example of their English cousins in the seventeenth century, they held to the belief that they could not be taxed without their consent. Since they were not represented in the British Parliament as they had elected none of its members, the British Parliament had no right to tax them. The passing of the Stamp Act in 1765 in the Parliament at Westminster, but not in their own parliaments and state assemblies, resulted in uproar and riots driven by a slogan which seventeenth-century Englishmen would have understood: ‘No taxation without representation’. Six of the thirteen colonies’ governments made formal protests.

As a patriotic duty Americans refused to accept the stamped paper sent over from England, and boycotted British manufactures. British manufacturers who relied on the vast American trade started to go bankrupt, and amid the chaos, alarmed by such fury, Grenville resigned. The Stamp Act was repealed in 1766 by Grenville’s successor, the Marquis of Rockingham. Grenville had been no less thoroughly defeated at home by the antics of the libertarian Wilkes, a member of the debauched Hell-Fire Club.

Ever since the accession of George III, Wilkes’s newspaper the
North Briton
–so-called in mock-honour of Bute’s antecedents–had specialized in attacking the king’s rule. The removal of the ‘old corps’ Whigs (with secret encouragement from his confrères) had been portrayed as another royal attack on liberty. Wilkes and his paper already had a reputation for scurrility, but in issue No. 45 of April 1763, he went too far when he alleged that the king’s speech to Parliament included a lie. Grenville, who was a lawyer himself, was determined that the recalcitrant Wilkes should feel the full force of the law. He had Wilkes and the printers of the
North Briton
tried and imprisoned for having had anything to do with the production of the paper, through the unspecific catch-all mechanism known as the general warrant. But Grenville was made to look foolish by an unsympathetic judiciary. On appeal, Chief Justice Charles Pratt released Wilkes by ruling general warrants illegal.

The squinting, licentious Wilkes was already a popular hero among high-spirited and sophisticated Londoners who themselves had long enjoyed a reputation for disliking restraint of all kinds. Wilkes’s imprisonment was worked up into the issue of the right of the citizen to publish the truth and Pratt’s judgement was represented as a blow for liberty. Wilkes sued the government for his arrest and was given damages by the ecstatically partisan London jury. The House of Commons nevertheless expelled him, and because he risked arrest once more for an obscene poem, he was forced to flee for France. But this was only the beginning of his career as the self-appointed gadfly of the state. Often on the run Wilkes had enough of the popular vote behind him to be re-elected to Parliament, to be made an alderman of the City of London and finally to become mayor. He began to campaign for freedom of all kinds, but particularly for press freedom and American rights–a campaign which for the next ten years convulsed the colonies with violence.

For the sake of some governmental stability, George had asked Lord Rockingham to take office as prime minister because he had assumed the leadership of the largest Whig faction, which contained many of the ‘old corps’ Whigs–that is, the old Newcastle or Pelhamite Whig connection. Rockingham (whose secretary, the Irishman Edmund Burke, was to become the supreme thinker of the Whig party) had a great deal more common sense than Grenville. But thanks to the king’s activities behind the scenes, and those of the King’s Friends whom he imposed upon the ministry, the Rockingham government could not last. Though the Duke of Newcastle was a member of the government as lord privy seal, he was too old and unwell to be of much use, while Pitt–who was temperamentally unsuited to playing a supporting role–refused to shore up the ministry. It was thus to Pitt once more and his small band of followers that George III turned to form a government in 1766, in hopes of a smoother time ahead since Pitt himself had now professed contempt for the party system.

In theory Pitt might have ameliorated the continuing poor relations with America. He had persuaded Rockingham to repeal the stamp tax by pointing out how foolish it was to threaten the trade with the American colonies, worth £2 million a year, for the peppercorn rate of stamp duty, which might bring in one-tenth of that revenue. In his view Britain might have a moral right to tax the colonies, but she had no legal right. However, Pitt now fell ill and was obliged to take a prolonged leave of absence, while refusing to resign as prime minister. This left his rash chancellor Charles Townshend to rush into more taxation of the American colonies, since the problem of the unresolved war debts had not gone away. Townshend hoped he had found a way round the dispute by imposing customs duties, which after all were indirect taxes on tea, glass, paper and other essentials, but the Americans saw through this. Their response was more rioting.

Moreover, even before Pitt had what seems to have been some kind of a nervous breakdown, his government was not at all the same as his old ministry. In his pride and grandeur he had accepted the earldom of Chatham. In effect, though, this was the equivalent of being ‘kicked upstairs’. As he now had to sit in the House of Lords, he could no longer employ his formidable powers of rhetoric to control the House of Commons. And since he would not have one party, the Chatham administration was made up of an unworkable ragbag of men of opposing views. Edmund Burke would memorably describe it as ‘such a piece of mosaic, such a tessellated pavement without cement, patriots and courtiers, king’s friends and republicans, Whigs and Tories, that it was indeed a curious show, but unsafe to touch and unsure to walk on’. Chatham was far too grand to try and wield this mass of warring factions into a workable whole, and it became beset by internal problems when Townshend died unexpectedly. The severity of Chatham’s illness at last compelled him to resign in October 1768.

Then Wilkes returned to London from abroad to make mischief. Despite being imprisoned once more on the outstanding charge of his obscene poetry, he got himself elected MP for Middlesex where his depiction of the corruption in Parliament gained him a willing audience. Chatham’s first lord of the Treasury, the Duke of Grafton, now took over as prime minister, and his government made the House of Commons refuse to accept Wilkes’s election and keep him in prison. Wilkes decried this as further evidence of a conspiracy against liberty, and rioting began outside his prison in Southwark in 1768. The following year he was re-elected and expelled three times. Re-elected one more time, his seat went to his defeated opponent.

By 1770 Grafton had had enough. He had battled against attacks in the House of Lords by a revived Chatham, roused by the imprisonment of Wilkes, which he too saw as an issue of liberty, but he was soon defeated, resigning after two years under the stress of it all. Since all the Whig factions were by now in a profound state of disarray and disagreement with one another, Grafton’s ministry gave way to one consisting entirely of the King’s Friends under Lord North. The son of the Jacobite Earl of Guildford, North was a witty, cherubic and deceptively sleepy-looking man with the sort of emollient skills needed to hold a government together. At last the king had triumphed. Though North was the first Tory to hold office in two generations, the real point about him was that he had risen to power as a King’s Friend. For twelve years Britain got ministerial stability under this affable man, who understood that his hold on power depended on his accepting that the real chief minister was the king.

Unfortunately these years coincided with increasing restiveness in America. English goods were being simultaneously boycotted by all the colonies, while mobs roamed the streets of Massachusetts led by masked men called the Sons of Liberty, who tarred and feathered anyone not in agreement with them. The Massachusetts Parliament debated what form a protest to the British government should take which would deny Britain’s right to make laws for or to tax the colonies. This was a revolt fast developing into revolution.

There were now 10,000 British soldiers in Massachusetts, for Grafton had sent out 2,000 more to Boston, and every day the Boston mob spent hours taunting the troops; tempers were at breaking point. On 2 March 1770, seven British soldiers separated from the rest of their regiment were backed into a corner by an enraged mob advancing down one of Boston’s boulevards, hurling abuse and stones. Fearing for their lives, the soldiers fired into the crowd and killed five men. This was immediately seized on by American agitators as a ‘massacre’ and they demanded nothing less than that all British soldiers should leave the colonies.

George III could not view the colonists’ actions with tolerance; it was not in his nature. They were rebellious subjects whose ideas should not even be listened to, but must be destroyed. Yet the people whose views the king had no patience for were highly sophisticated men and women with their own political traditions who, just as much as their cousins across the Atlantic, had been profoundly influenced by the ideas of John Locke, especially in his sanctioning of rebellion against unjust rulers. In the years since the founding of the American colonies (in the case of Virginia and New England, well over a hundred years before), their own institutions had grown up which were completely independent of and far more real to them than what went on 3,000 miles away at Westminster. Many of the colonists were as practised in debating in their own assemblies as any MP. Well educated at their excellent new universities of Harvard and Yale, they were growing ever more impatient with the mother country. By a strange irony of history, the supreme sacrifice Pitt had demanded of the Americans, the propaganda he had bombarded them with in order to make the colonies see the French as their enemy, had given the thirteen colonies much more of a sense of common destiny than ever before.

But ever since George III had come to the throne and started taking his kingdom in hand there had been other more immediate reasons for friction. The mercantile system, under which the colonies were to import British manufactures but make nothing themselves, infuriated the Americans. They wished to build up their home manufacturing base, but were forbidden to do so by law. Under the old Whigs the colonies had been pretty much left to themselves to run things, but George III had insisted on a much more rigorous observance of the mercantile system. The illegal trade with other parts of Europe and other colonies to which everyone had turned a blind eye was curbed, and customs duties at colonial ports were raised.

At first North tried to be conciliatory to the colonists. He repealed all the taxes except for the one on tea, which was only three pence per pound, and removed the soldiers from Boston. He promised that the British government would not try and raise any more taxes in America, but at the same time, because the king insisted, he weakly said that the tax on tea would nevertheless remain as a matter of principle. The 298 chests of British tea that arrived in Boston Harbour in December 1773 provided too good a symbol of British oppression for an increasingly important circle of American agitators to miss. In what has become known to history as the Boston Tea Party, a group of patriotic young Americans dressed as Mohawk Indians climbed aboard ships in the harbour and emptied all the tea into the water. All patriotic Americans from then on refused to drink tea.

Lord North and George III reacted with intemperate fury. They attempted to punish the Bostonians as if they were children by withdrawing all responsibility from them by means of the Coercive Acts (known to the Americans as the Intolerable Acts). In 1774 the agitators were sent to England for trial, the Massachusetts charter of government was suspended and the colony was henceforth to be ruled directly from Britain. To add insult to injury the port of Boston was closed until compensation had been paid to the tea-merchants. The British government was so ignorant of what effect these draconian measures were going to have on the American colonies that it never considered that the Americans would rather fight than put up with them. The renowned Virginian orator Patrick Henry spoke for all Americans when he said, ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!’

At Westminster, unlike the rest of Britain which was outraged by the impudence of the Americans, Chatham, his followers and the Rockinghamite Whigs, all opposed the Coercive Acts and called on the government to give in and save the empire. They persuaded North to offer a get-out clause: if the colonies made a grant towards the expense of the war they would not be taxed. But it was to no avail. Events in America were achieving their own rolling momentum. When the British commander General Gage, who had replaced the governor at Boston, tried to carry out his orders to dissolve the Massachusetts Parliament, the Bostonians simply reassembled at Concord, a few miles to the west.

Realizing that the moment had come for real defiance of the mother country, the people of Massachusetts organized their militia into a company called the Minute Men, because they could be called out at one minute’s notice. They also started to pile up guns in their clapboard houses. When Gage sent troops to seize the rebels’ military stores in April 1775, they were attacked at Lexington and 270 British soldiers were killed. The shot fired then has been called one that ‘echoed round the world’, for that was the beginning of the American Wars of Independence.

The Americans then went on the offensive. They drew themselves up on Bunker Hill overlooking Boston Harbour and there at first they kept Gage at bay. All the colonies joined Massachusetts and declared war on Britain, whose legal dependants they had been only a few months before. They appointed George Washington, the hero of the Seven Years War, their commander-in-chief. He was sent up to Massachusetts to co-ordinate the war effort there. In Britain the government grasped that the situation in America was much more serious than had been thought and despatched General Sir William Howe across the Atlantic to Boston to take over from Gage because he was a veteran of the Seven Years War and therefore knew the American terrain well.