Conceived in Liberty (159 page)

But the major threat lay in the court suits of the Reverend Mr. Camm and four of his fellow ministers. For their victory would mean that the Twopenny Act had been void from the start, and that the government would have to reimburse the ministers. The slow processes of the courts kept the whole issue alive and festering. The first case to be decided was that of Reverend Alexander White of King William County. White’s case was turned over
in toto
in the fall of 1762 to the jury, which naturally found for Virginia. In the case of the Reverend Thomas Warrington, decided soon afterward, the Elizabeth City County Court, headed by George Wythe, sustained the original validity of the Twopenny Act. Furthermore, it also found for the defendant.

The third case to emerge was that of the Reverend James Maury of Louisa County, and was decided in Hanover County Court. On November 5, 1763, Judge John Henry decreed that the Twopenny Act had been null and void from the start. The only problem remaining was a jury trial fixing the amount
of damages due to Maury. The trial was held in December. To Maury’s disgust, the jury included “the vulgar herd,” two of which were ardent New Light Presbyterians. Dissenters had obvious reason to be hostile to levying taxes upon themselves for the benefit of an Anglican establishment.

The great significance of the Maury trial was the emergence upon the scene of the brilliant young lawyer Patrick Henry. Henry, son of Judge John Henry, a leading planter of Hanover County, was a nephew of a venerable Anglican minister, the Reverend Patrick Henry, who was one of the ministers filing suit against the colony. Young Patrick had every family incentive to be on the Tory-Anglican side of the dispute. Instead, hired despairingly at the last minute, Henry, presumably in a helpless situation, radicalized the atmosphere and captured the imagination of the colony in a dramatic speech to the jury. In short, Henry escalated the dispute straight up to the Crown. By annulling the good and necessary Twopenny Act, the king had violated the “original compact” between king and people, by which the latter had promised obedience in return for royal protection of their rights. Therefore, concluded Henry inexorably, “A King, by disallowing acts of so salutary a nature, from being the father of his people, degenerated into a tyrant, and forfeits all rights to his subjects’ obedience.” At that point, the Reverend Mr. Maury recounted that “the more sober part of the audience was struck with horror.” Peter Lyons, the leading lawyer of the area and Maury’s counsel, cried out at this that Henry “had spoken treason,” and murmurs of “treason” arose from the audience. But Henry, unruffled, continued to denounce bitterly the Anglican clergy: “The clergy of Virginia... [on] refusing to acquiesce in the law... ought to be considered as enemies of the community,” and Maury and his colleagues should be not rewarded but stripped of their appointments. In a stirring peroration, Henry warned that unless the jury “were disposed to rivet the chains of bondage on their own necks, he hoped they would not let slip the opportunity which now offered, of making such an example of him [Maury] as might hereafter be a warning to himself and his brethren, not to have the temerity, for the future, to dispute the validity of such laws....”

The jury, swayed and moved, brought in a verdict for token minimum damages: one penny. Judge Henry, moved to tears by his son’s great speech, upheld the verdict, and the happy crowd, “wild with delight,... seized their champion and bore him on their shoulders in triumph around the court yard.”

John Camm’s own case came to trial in April 1764. This critical case was decided by the Council of Virginia sitting as the Supreme General Court of the colony. The Council decided against Camm by a vote of five to four.
*
White, Warrington, and Maury each had appealed their cases to the Council sitting as the Supreme General Court, and the Reverend Mr. Henry’s suit was dismissed when the Camm case was decided. All the other cases were now ended, and the Parsons’ Cause rested on Camm’s further appeal to the Privy Council in England.

Meanwhile, the pamphlet war between Camm, on the one hand, and Bland and Carter, on the other, had renewed in 1763 and 1764. Finally, Richard Bland published in August 1764 his famous
The Colonel Dismounted,
which the historian Lyon G. Tyler has called “the great critical paper of the revolution.” Colonel Bland began by asserting that the Virginians properly retain the rights of all Englishmen. He added: “Under an English government all men are born free, are only subject to laws made with their own consent.” If then Virginians are freeborn and have the rights of Englishmen, then laws over them can be made only by their
own
representatives—this, Bland declared, applied to internal laws, whereas external laws are to be determined by Parliament. As for the royal prerogative, Bland warned that “submission, even to the supreme Magistrate, is not the whole duty of a citizen...: Something
is
likewise due to the rights of our country, and to the liberties of mankind. To say that a royal instruction to a governor... is to have the validity of a law, and must be obeyed without reserve is, at once, to strip us of all the rights and privileges of British subjects, and to put us under the despotic power of a French or Turkish government....”

Thus, the strictures of Bland and Henry emphasized the importance of the Parsons’ Cause in expanding the colonial conflict with Britain—from taxation by colonists themselves to legislation by the colonists. As historian Richard Morton puts it, “From the principle of ‘no taxation without representation,’ Virginians had moved on to no ‘legislation without representation.’... During this debate, Virginians developed the great constitutional arguments which they were to use effectively a few years later to justify rebellion; and it started Patrick Henry on his eloquent and outspoken defiance of British authority in America.”
*

Nullifying the Twopenny Acts by the Crown irritated the Virginians in many ways; it involved using royal power to annul a law popular in the colony; it attempted to impose suspension clauses to restrict further Virginia legislation; it gave rise to the Parsons’ call for rendering such laws initially null and void; it rendered obnoxious to moderate low-church Virginia an influential portion of the Anglican clergy devoted to high-church Tory principles; and it recalled the episcopal schemes of the leaders of the Church of England. Furthermore, the Parsons’ Cause polarized Virginian opinion, aligning the Anglican and dissenting laity of Virginia against the reactionary wing of the local Anglican clergy, the English church, and the Crown itself.

The Parsons’ Cause now rested on Camm’s appeal to the Privy Council. To combat Camm’s case, the Virginia Assembly’s Committee of Correspondence, in July 1764, prepared argumentation against Camm. The main brief was drawn up by committee member Robert Carter Nicholas of Williamsburg, who had been chief defense lawyer against Camm before the General Court, and by George Wythe of Williamsburg. The case dragged on unresolved until the end of 1766, when the Privy Council dismissed Camm’s appeal on a legal technicality. The Parsons’ Cause was ended, but even then unclearly and inconclusively. It left a significant legacy of opposition and hostility by Virginians to the Crown.
*

*
Voting against Camm were: John Blair of Williamsburg, sometime president of the Council; John Taylor; William Byrd III; Robert Burwell; and Pressley Thornton. Voting for Camm were: Richard Corbin; Robert Carter; Peter Randolph, surveyor general of the customs; and Philip Ludwell Lee. William and Thomas Nelson of York County excused themselves from voting as parishioners of the Reverend Mr. Camm.

*
Richard L. Morton,
Colonial Virginia
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1960),
2:819

*
Professor Tate’s attempt to depreciate the importance of the Parsons’ Cause in the brewing temper of colonial revolution is unconvincing. See Thad W. Tate, “The Coming of the Revolution in Virginia: Britain’s Challenge to Virginia’s Ruling Class, 1763—1776,”
William and Mary Quarterly
(July
1962):
325–33.

In June 1762, John Wilkes, a country squire who was high sheriff of Buckinghamshire and a member of Parliament, set up his weekly newspaper, the
North Briton,
in opposition to the Tory Bute regime in Great Britain. Wilkes took the Newcastle-Whig line in opposition to the harshly expansionist peace terms the British were exacting from the French, especially their insistence on ousting the French completely from the North American continent. At the end of December, the
North Briton
denounced the purge of the Newcastle Whigs from the administration and called for a determined popular opposition to Tory rule. Out of power for the first time in two generations, the disoriented Whigs polarized: the more conservative moved to make their peace with the Tory administration; the younger and more radical members, led by the young Marquis of Rockingham, formed an opposition “club” with the tentative and worried blessing of Newcastle.

On April 11, 1763, Lord Bute was driven from office by the revolt in Parliament against the tax on cider, a revolt joined by Whigs and West Country Tory gentlemen.

With his old enemy Bute ousted from office, John Wilkes felt that his task was done, and he suspended publication of his radically liberal
North Briton.
But the Tory regime continued virtually unchanged, and the king’s speech at the opening of Parliament on April 19, 1763, inspired by the new prime minister, George Grenville, goaded Wilkes into publishing a harsh comment in the famous Number 45 of the
North Briton.
The Crown decided to take the opportunity to crack down on the annoying Wilkes as a libeler of the king, and issued a general warrant for the arrest of everyone connected with the publication of the “seditious and treasonable”
North Briton.
In doing so,
the Crown also hoped to discredit the opposition by associating them with a notorious rake and libertine like Wilkes. Wilkes was summarily arrested, along with forty-eight others connected with the publication of his journal, and sent to the Tower. Those most closely implicated in the Crown’s decision, aside from Grenville and the king, were the powerful secretaries of state, Lords Egremont and Halifax; Charles Jenkinson, the secretary of the treasury; Jenkinson’s counsel, Philip Carteret Webb; and the Crown’s law officers, Sir Fletcher Norton and the renegade Whig, Attorney General Charles Yorke.

The Whigs were now placed squarely on the spot by the summary arrest of Wilkes and the suppression of his paper. Wilkes’ mentor and patron, Earl Temple, did not hesitate to rush to the aid of his beleaguered friend. But what would Newcastle do? The aging Whig leader was beset by conflicting advice on where he—and hence his party—should go. For on his position in the Wilkes affair rested the choice of whether the Whigs would subsist in moderate and respectable dissent from the administration, or whether they would become a party in radical opposition to the status quo in behalf
of
liberty. The Whigs were again being polarized by the larger polarization occurring in England as a whole: between the aggressive Tory imperialists in power, and the rising agitation of the people, as expressed in the rebellion against the cider tax, for “Liberty, Property and No Excise!”

The younger and more ardent Whigs pressured Newcastle to declare for Wilkes. These liberals were headed by Newcastle’s nephew George Onslow and, particularly, Lord Middleton, another nephew, who, like Temple, declared his intention to visit Wilkes in the Tower. But on the other side, the older and more tired Whigs counseled caution. These were led by Lord Hardwicke, the father of Yorke, who bitterly denounced Wilkes’ “audacious... libel” as “not only unjustifiable but inexcusable.” Hardwicke carefully concealed the secret role that he himself had played in the affair, when he had advised the Crown to proceed with the stamping out of its most ardent opposition. Pitt, of course, remained cool to the Wilkes cause. Newcastle finally was persuaded by his old friends not to plunge into the Wilkes imbroglio.

Wilkes, undaunted, fought on brilliantly, his first success being to win a writ of habeas corpus and a release from the Tower. Wilkes carried on his fight on two levels: the legal level, aided by his counsel, Serjeant John Glynn; and the political level, aided by his own appeal at the London trial. At his trial in early May, a cross section of Londoners—gentlemen, shopkeepers, craftsmen—packed the courtroom and first raised the thunderous shout: “Liberty! Liberty! Wilkes forever!” The Wilkite cause had been swiftly adopted by the people of London. In his argument at the trial, Wilkes made sure that his London followers got the point: “The liberty of all peers and gentlemen, and, what touches me more sensibly, that of the middling and inferior set of people, who stand most in need of protection, is in my case this day to be finally decided....” Chief Justice Charles Pratt ruled general warrants to be
legal but freed Wilkes on his privilege as a member of Parliament. The crowd (which included George Onslow) on hearing the verdict burst into loud cheers, and Wilkes was borne home by many thousands of Londoners shouting “Whigs forever, no Jacobites” and the new slogan of the radicals, “Wilkes and Liberty!”

John Wilkes followed up his victory by a direct challenge to the Crown. After his arrest, his house had been ransacked for evidence, and Wilkes now boldly and heroically called upon Lords Egremont and Halifax to return his “stolen” papers. Receiving the expected angry reply, Wilkes now magnificently brought suit against Halifax, Egremont, and Undersecretary of State Robert Wood for theft, and against Webb for perjury. With widespread support in the press, and numerous bonfires and rejoicings among the people at every Wilkite victory, Wilkes and the printers associated with the
North Briton
won numerous damage suits against Wood and other government officials during the remainder of 1763. The sympathetic juries took care to award heavy damages to the Wilkes forces.