The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (60 page)

Washington was an inspired choice of leader. Not only was he famous in the colonies for his bravery, but having served with British soldiers he understood the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses and knew that the British redcoat was vulnerable to the unexpected ambushes and sudden skirmishes in which the colonial militia excelled. But he had a great deal to accomplish before his citizen soldiers were ready to fight. Though the Americans’ outstanding merit was that unlike the British they were fighting for a cause they were prepared to die for, they would be at a disadvantage if they met the redcoats in pitched battle. Enthusiasm and passion would not always carry the day over formal training. Thanks to the passivity of General Howe, who sat at Boston doing nothing all winter, Washington was able to take advantage of those few vital months to drill his troops into disciplined regiments. In 1776 he and his army seized Dorchester Heights, which commanded Boston. Instead of doing battle Howe withdrew to Brooklyn in New York, leaving Washington in possession of one of America’s largest ports.

Once in New York Howe began recruiting as many men as he could find. But since few Americans would fight in the British army he was driven to using the colonists’ enemy, the Indians, and importing 18,000 Hessians to fight against the Americans. These things further alienated the Americans, especially as the German mercenaries’ behaviour was very brutal indeed.

On 4 July 1776, the date which America’s national holiday memorializes, the colonists sitting in Congress in Philadelphia issued the celebrated Declaration of Independence, calling the colonies the ‘free and independent States of America’. Written by Washington’s fellow Virginian planter Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration burned with the spirit of the Enlightenment. Most ringing of all its utterances was the phrase ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. George III was denounced for his ‘history of repeated injuries and usurpations’, and condemned as ‘unfit to be the ruler of a free people’.

Meanwhile to the surprise of the British, a series of military successes for the colonial Americans now ensued. Washington, who marched down from Boston to force the British out of New York, had been defeated, and forced to retreat to Philadelphia. But the British masterplan of an army under General Burgoyne arriving from Canada to join Howe and drive Washington into the south in order to separate New England from the rest of the colonies was humiliatingly defeated. In 1777 at Saratoga on the Hudson river, Burgoyne had to surrender with all his soldiers to the American General Gates.

Saratoga was the turning point for the colonists. Until then the other European powers had not thought it worth their while intervening in the conflict. They had assumed the Americans stood no chance of success against the victor of the Seven Years War. But not only did Saratoga revitalize American morale. More importantly it secured French troops and a French fleet as France officially recognized the colonists’ independence and formed an alliance with America. In 1778 the young Marquis de Lafayette arrived as commander of the French forces which were to fight side by side with the Americans against the British. The end of the war effectively came when the British under General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in Virginia in 1781. They had been defeated by a combined operation: a blockade by Admiral de Grasse’s French fleet from the sea and a land-siege by General Greene.

But Britain was still fighting a new world war, against the Spanish now as well as the French. In 1779 Spain had followed the lead of her Bourbon relation and attacked the British. A year later so did Holland, brought in by Britain’s insulting adherence to the Law of Neutrals, by which Dutch ships carrying (say) French goods were liable to be seized by the British. Further hostility to Britain on similar grounds came from an alliance, the Armed Neutrality of the North, formed by the neutral powers Russia, Denmark and Sweden. They would not allow Britain to stop their ships carrying goods for her enemies. During the war Britain temporarily lost command of the sea: Minorca was seized, Gibraltar was besieged and most of the British West Indies were occupied by the French.

Across the globe Britain’s enemies seized the opportunity offered by the American War to attack her. In India the French attempted to return to their old position of superiority: the Maratha warriors were incited to war against the English and were on the point of overwhelming Bombay, the Sultan of Mysore, Haidar Ali, waged war all over the Karnatic and the French temporarily seized control of the Indian Ocean.

Fortunately for Britain the old hero of the Seven Years War in India, Sir Eyre Coote, was still alive. He completely destroyed the forces of the Sultan of Mysore, while the governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, made a name for himself when he showed great presence of mind in sending troops from Bengal to relieve Bombay. Once Yorktown had fallen, the French attempted to seize Jamaica. They were defeated near Dominica by Admiral Rodney, who restored British naval supremacy. In Ireland a gifted barrister turned politician named Henry Grattan raised what was in effect a substantial army of hundreds of thousands of Protestant volunteers, supposedly to defend Ireland. Backed up by the threat these men represented, a convention met in 1782 at Dungannon–copying the Congress of Philadelphia–and unilaterally declared legislative independence from England.

After Saratoga, although the British government finally offered to repeal all the acts passed for the American colonies since 1763, the Americans were no longer prepared to accept any role for British Parliamentary statutes. In early 1782 Britain at last formally accepted that the Americans were not to be subdued by force and recognized American independence. Soon afterwards, peace was made with the rest of Europe. In September 1783 by the Treaty of Versailles Britain retained Gibraltar, though Spain received back Florida once more together with Minorca, and France was given Tobago, Goree and Senegal.

In Britain events had not stood still during the war. With the issue of liberty dominating the arguments of the day, the 1770s saw Granville Sharp begin the anti-slavery movement, launching a campaign that led to a legal judgement of 1772 which forbade slavery in England. Giving reasons for his decision to free James Sommersett, a black slave brought to London by a West Indian plantation-owner, the judge declared that ‘no law of England allowed so high an act of dominion as slavery’. Sharp was helped by a former African slave, Olaudah Equiano, born around 1745, who was sold to a Royal Navy officer. After fighting in Canada and the Mediterranean, Equiano, who was one of about 30,000 black people living in England in the late eighteenth century and who settled in Bristol, wrote an influential first hand description of slavery. He became much in demand to give lecture tours for the growing number of abolition committees.

The poor progress of the war contrasted dramatically with the triumphs achieved during the Seven Years War over the same ground and radicalized the British public’s assessment of the government, adding to the widespread conviction of corruption in high places. The Americans were not alone in believing that they were not properly represented in Parliament. The loss of the American colonies, the failure of the war and the temporary loss to the French of control of the high seas (an American privateer named Paul Jones had created mayhem by attacking British seaside towns) made many more doubt the efficacy of the prevailing political system. Mass meetings were held throughout the country to demand the reforms in Parliamentary representation for which Chatham and Wilkes had been campaigning for the previous decade.

The most striking was the ‘out of doors’ petition movement begun by highly respectable Yorkshiremen. Lawyers, farmers and gentry demanded another hundred country seats to reflect population changes and rid Britain of corruption and the useless placemen round the king who they believed were responsible for the war going so badly. The Great Yorkshire Petition presented in 1780 was copied by twenty-four other counties. In Parliament it was represented by Edmund Burke’s 1780 Civil List Bill which pledged to investigate who was receiving government pensions.

Britain was undergoing tremendous change and dislocation imposed by the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Throughout the eighteenth century, new techniques of husbandry using drainage, new grasses, fertilizer and crop rotation invented by among others Jethro Tull and Walpole’s brother-in-law Townshend, and later popularized by Thomas Coke and Arthur Young, had been transforming farming by providing hugely improved yields. George III himself, ‘Farmer George’ as he was nicknamed, was fascinated by his own farm at Windsor and wrote on agricultural topics under a
nom de plume
. The new farming needed larger farms of 200 acres or more if they were to succeed, and as information about these methods spread, so the rate of enclosure of the common land quickened–a process that reached its peak in the first half of George’s reign as some two million acres were enclosed by countless private acts of Parliament. The English countryside, from being mainly ribbon strips of smallholdings, became a place of extensive fields surrounded by hedgerows.

As improvements in farming practice created regional unemployment during these years, particularly in the midlands, textile manufacturing piecework at home offered another way of earning money. The full industrial revolution did not get under way until the mid-1780s when Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, combined with James Watt’s double-acting steam engine, transformed the British cotton industry almost overnight. From 1764 with James Hargreaves’s invention of the Spinning Jenny, which adapted John Kay’s Flying Shuttle of the 1730s to a multi-spindle system, cotton manufacture was becoming a far more profitable business. Then Richard Arkwright’s invention of the waterframe, which used water to run the spinning machine far more speedily than the hand loom, not only moved work out of the home in the early 1770s into cotton mills, it attracted the new landless labourers north to the Pennines. For centuries the rushing waters of the Pennines had provided natural sites for the water mills of the woollen industry, and it was there that cotton manufacture took off.

The well-to-do could not be wholly disconnected from the anger over enclosures that was often taking the form of riots, nor did many of them want to. For the way the educated thought about the less fortunate was changing, from the anti-slavery movement to the new concern for the treatment of prisoners expressed in 1777 when John Howard wrote his
State of the Prisons in England and Wales
. But they were not only influenced by the rational thought of the Enlightenment, which in England (propelled by Jeremy Bentham, a barrister and philosopher) was moving towards Utilitarianism–the novel belief that government should be directed towards the greatest happiness of the greatest number. They were also affected by the great religious revival movement begun by the Wesley brothers and the preacher George Whitefield, which from the late 1770s swept the Church of England, creating the Methodist Church.

In the space of thirty years the influential Evangelical movement, as their followers who remained within the Church of England were known, would transform the manners and mores of Britain. The Evangelicals concluded that the people of Britain were very nearly as much in need of missions as those natives in foreign lands who were sent Bibles and clergymen by the growing number of religious societies. The national mood was slowly shifting towards a greater seriousness, the sort of mood that is thought of as Victorian. Piety and hard work were becoming the watchwords of England. They were the values of the inventive middle-class manufacturers, whose factories were poised to make Britain into an industrial giant.

To George III’s anger the loss of the American colonies caused Lord North to resign, and forced the king to bring back the ‘old corps’ Whigs he detested under Lord Rockingham. But it was a short-lived government. The MP John Dunning’s critical motion ‘that the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished’ was the last gasp of a dying breed. Legislative independence for Ireland was passed by Parliament–the Dublin Parliament was led by Henry Grattan–while Burke’s Civil List Act responding to the out-of-doors agitation removed some of the crown’s sinecures and pensions which the Whigs abhorred and excluded government contractors from becoming MPs. But the political scene was altering. The old-style Whig leaders of aristocratic birth, progressive thought and libertarian morals ranged against the king were out of kilter with the new mood. After France had entered the war, feeling hardened against the Whigs as a group, their support for the Americans now seeming especially unpatriotic. They were epitomized by the swashbuckling Charles James Fox, the most famous Whig of his generation, who had helped revive the party during North’s administration and was now one of Rockingham’s secretaries of state. But it would be Fox’s great rival, Chatham’s son William Pitt the Younger, who caught the respectable tone of the age and became prime minister, while Fox’s unscrupulous behaviour brought the Whigs into further disrepute.

Ideologically Fox had a great deal in common with the young Pitt, who was ten years his junior. They both believed in religious tolerance, the reform of government abuses and parliamentary reform. Pitt, like Fox, was a superb orator, with gifts he had inherited from his father, his first speech in the House of Commons prompting Burke to remark that Pitt was not ‘merely a chip off the old block but the old block himself’. The differences between Fox and Pitt were really temperamental, but Pitt was made for the new age. He was far more circumspect and middle class in his attitudes, controlled where Fox was impulsive, and pragmatic where Fox was courageous but unrestrained.

The great-grandson of Charles II by his mistress Louise de Kerouaille, Charles James Fox was the second son of the daughter of the Duke of Richmond. His father, the wily politician Henry Fox, had made a fortune out of the Seven Years War as paymaster-general in the way that Chatham had disdained. Fox was said to be losing his father’s ill-gotten gains more quickly than they had been made, at all-night gaming, the great vice of the period, which saw hundreds of thousands of pounds staked on a throw at the green-baize gaming tables of clubs like White’s or on the horses. Fox’s irregular life never stopped him making a dazzling speech in the House of Commons after a night without any sleep. To his admirers this was true glamour.