The March of Folly (24 page)

For all their cultivated tastes, the upper crust of the governing class produced during this period few of outstanding mind. Dr. Johnson declared he knew “but two men who had risen considerably above the common standard”: William Pitt and Edmund Burke, neither wholly of the upper crust. Pitt suggested a factor, doubtless subjective, in his remark that he hardly knew a boy “who was not cowed for life at Eton.” He kept his own children at home to be educated privately. The general state of mind was better understood by William Murray, the Scottish lawyer and, as Earl of Mansfield, future Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor. He had tried without much success to direct a course of study in history, oratory and the classics for his nephew, the future Marquis of Rockingham, and wrote to him when he turned 21, “You could not entertain me with a more uncommon sight than a man of your age, surrounded by all the baits and instruments of folly, daring to be wise; in a season of dissatisfaction, daring to think.” That was the condition of the period 1760–80; daring to be wise, daring to think was not its forte. But then, how often has it ever been of any period?

The young monarch presiding over this establishment was not widely admired in these years. On George Ill’s accession to the throne in 1760 at the age of 21, Horace Walpole found him tall, florid, dignified and “amiable,” but the amiability was painfully assumed. Fatherless since the age of twelve, George had been brought up in an atmosphere of the harshest rancor between his grandfather George II and his
father, Frederick, Prince of Wales. While common among royalty, the paternal-filial hatred in this case was extreme, leaving young George inimical to all who had served his grandfather and persuaded that the world whose rule he inherited was deeply wicked and its moral improvement his duty. In the narrow family circle at Leicester House, he was poorly educated with no contacts with the outside world and grew up obstinate, limited, troubled and unsure of himself. He liked to retire to his study, reported his tutor, Lord Waldegrave, “to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill humor.” He would seldom do wrong, “except when he mistakes wrong for right” and, when this happens, “it will be difficult to undeceive him because he is uncommonly indolent and has strong prejudices.”

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so. In a boyhood essay on King Alfred, George wrote that when Alfred came to the throne, “there was scarce a man in office that was not totally unfit for it and generally extremely corrupt in the execution of it.” Removing the incorrigibles, “reclaiming” the others, Alfred had “raised the glory and happiness of his country” with the help of the Almighty Power that “wrecks the cunning of proud, ambitious and deceitful men.” Such was George’s view of his ministers and such his own program. He must clean out the system, restore righteous rule—his own—and carry out his mother’s injunction, “George, be a King.” His efforts from the first day of his reign to unseat the Whig grandees who complacently ruled through a pervasive distribution of patronage, by acquiring control of the patronage in his own hands, not unnaturally convinced many of his intention to restore the royal absolutism defeated at such cost in the previous century.

In need of a father substitute, George had fixed on the Earl of Bute with a neurotic adoration that was bound to—and did—end in disillusion. Thereafter, until he found the comfortable Lord North, he either disliked or despised every First Minister, or swung over into dependence, and since he had power to appoint and dismiss within certain limits, his swings kept government unstable. Because Pitt had left the Prince of Wales’ circle to serve under George II, George called him “the blackest of hearts” and a “true snake in the grass,” and vowed to make other ministers “smart for their ingratitude.” Often confessing to Bute the torture of his self-distrust and irresolution, he was convinced at the same time of his own righteousness, which had as its basic assumption that because he wished nothing but good, everyone who did not agree with him was a scoundrel. This was not a sovereign likely to understand or try to understand insubordinate colonials.

A weakness of England’s government was lack of cohesion or of a concept of collective responsibility. Ministers were appointed by the Crown as individuals and pursued their own ideas of policy often without consulting their colleagues. Because government derived from the Crown, aspirants to office had to find favor and work in partnership with the King, which proved a more ticklish job under George III than it had been under the thick-witted, foreign-born first Hanoverians. The sovereign was, within limits, chief of the executive with the right to choose his own ministers although not on the basis of royal favor alone. The First Minister and his associates had to have the support of the electorate in the sense that, even without a political party, they had to muster a majority of Parliament and rely on it to enact and approve their policies. Even when this was achieved, George Ill’s erratic and emotional exercise of his right of choice made for extreme uncertainty of governments in his first decade, the brewing years of the American conflict, besides fostering personal rancor in the struggle of factions for favor and power.

The Cabinet was a fluid body constantly being reshuffled and not charged with a specific policy. Its chief was called simply First Minister; resistance to the title of Premier, which Grenville called “odious,” was a legacy from the twenty-year tenure of Sir Robert Walpole and the fear of renewed aggregation of power in one man. The function, insofar as it had to be exercised, inhered in the First Lord of the Treasury. The working Cabinet numbered five or six including, besides the First Lord, two Secretaries of State, for home and foreign affairs—oddly designated the Northern and Southern departments—the Lord Chancellor for law and the Lord President of the Council, meaning the Privy Council, a large floating group of ministers, former ministers and important officials of the realm. The First Lord of the Admiralty, representing the major service, was sometimes though not always a member of the inner Cabinet. The Army had a Secretary at War without a seat in the Cabinet and a Paymaster-General, who, through control of pay and supplies, held the most lucrative post in the government, but it had no representative in policy councils. Until 1768, no department was specifically charged with administration of the colonies or execution of measures pertaining to them. Pragmatically, colonial affairs became the business of the Board of Trade and Plantations; equally pragmatically, the Navy, which maintained contact across the ocean, served as policy’s instrument.

Junior Lords, Under-Secretaries, Commissioners of boards and customs, performed the daily business of government, suggested and drafted the bills for Parliament. These members of the civil service, as
far down as clerks, were appointed through patronage and “connexions,” as were the colonial governors and their staffs and the Admiralty officials in the colonies. “Connexion” was the cement of the governing class and the operative word of the time, often to the detriment of the function. This did not go unrecognized. Asked by the Duke of Newcastle to appoint to his staff an unqualified M.P. for the sake of assuring his vote, Admiral George Anson, who became First Lord after his celebrated voyage around the world, bluntly stated the disservice to the Navy: “I must now beg your Grace will seriously consider what must be the condition of your Fleet if these burrough recommendations which must be frequent are to be complyed with”; the custom “has done more mischief to the publick than the loss of a vote in the House of Commons.”

Beyond ministers, beyond the Crown, Parliament held supremacy, bitterly won in the last century at the cost of revolution, civil war, regicide, restoration and a second royal ouster. In the calm that at last settled under the rule of the imported Hanoverians, the House of Commons was no longer the fiery tribunal of a great constitutional struggle. It had settled into a more or less satisfied, more or less static body of members who owed their seats to “connexions” and family-controlled “rotten” boroughs and bought elections, and gave their votes in return for government patronage in the form of positions, favors and direct money payments. In 1770, it has been calculated, 190 members of the House of Commons held remunerative positions in the gift of the Government. Though regularly denounced as corruption, the system was so ubiquitous and routine that it carried no aura of disgrace.

Members were associated in no organized political parties, and they were attached to no identifiable political principles. Their identity came from social or economic or even geographical groups: the country gentlemen, the business and mercantile classes of the cities, the 45 members from Scotland, a parcel of West Indian planters who lived on their island revenues in English homes—a total of 558 in the Commons. In theory, members were of two kinds: knights of the shire or county, of whom two were elected at large for each county, and burgesses representing the boroughs, that is, any town empowered by its charter to be represented in Parliament. Since the knights of the shire were qualified by holding land worth £600 a year, they belonged to the substantial gentry or were sons of peers. Combining with them in interest were the members from the smaller boroughs, who had so few voters that they could be bought or were so tiny that
the local landlord held them in his pocket. They generally chose members belonging to the gentry who could further their interests at Westminster. Hence the landed gentry or country party were by far the largest group in the House of Commons and claimed to represent popular opinion, although in fact they were elected by only some 160,000 voters.

The larger urban boroughs had virtually democratic suffrage and held contested, often rowdy, elections. Their members were lawyers, merchants, contractors, shipowners, Army and Navy officers, government officials and nabobs of the India trade. Though influential in themselves, they represented an even smaller electorate, hardly more than 85,000, because the country party managed to keep the urban population largely disenfranchised.

About half the seats, it was estimated, could be bought and sold through patronage vividly portrayed in Lord North’s instructions to the Treasury Secretary at the time of the general election of 1774. He was to inform Lord Falmouth, who controlled six seats in Cornwall, that North agreed to terms of £2500 for each of three seats to fill by his own nomination; further that “Mr. Legge can only afford £400. If he comes in for Lostwithiel he will cost the public some 2000 guineas. Gascoign should have the refusal of Tregony if he will pay £1000”; further, “Let Cooper know whether you promised £2500 or £3000 for each of Lord Edgcumbe’s [five] seats. I was going to pay him £12,500 but he demanded £15,000.”

Political patrons controlled sometimes as many as seven or eight seats, often in family groups depending from a peer in the Lords, whose members acted together under direction from the patron, although when an issue took fire, dividing opinion, individuals sometimes voted their own convictions. The knights of the counties whose electorates were too large to be dominated by any patron, and thirty or forty independent boroughs not controlled by estates, considered themselves the country party. Here the Tory idea still existed, a residue of the Crown party of the 17th century, exiled from the central government, grown crusty. Long accustomed to local government, the counties resented interference from London and despised court and capital on principle, although this was not incompatible with supporting Whig ministeries. Attached to no faction, following no leaders, soliciting no titles or “place,” serving their constituency, the county members voted according to that interest and their own beliefs. A Yorkshire M.P. wrote in a letter that he had “sat twelve hours in the House of Commons without moving, with which I was well satisfied, as it gave me
some power, from the various arguments on both sides, of determining clearly by my vote my opinion.” Men thinking for themselves will defeat the slush funds—if there are enough of them.

George Grenville’s primary concern when he took office was Britain’s financial solvency. With the Peace of Paris in hand, he was able to reduce the Army from 120,000 to 30,000 men; his economies at the expense of the Navy, involving a drastic cutting back of dockyard facilities and maintenance, was to have crippling consequences when the test of action came. At the same time, he prepared legislation for taxing American trade, in no ignorance of the sentiments likely to be aroused. Agents or lobbyists retained by the colonies to represent their interests in London, given their lack of representation in Parliament, were often M.P.s themselves or other persons with access to government. Richard Jackson, a prominent M.P., merchant and barrister, and agent at different times of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York, was Grenville’s private secretary. “I have access to almost every place any friends of the Colonys wd wish to have access to,” he wrote to Franklin, “but I am not sensible of my making any impression proportional to my Endeavors.” He and his colleagues did what they could, against a cloud of indifference, to make colonial opinion known in the capital.

In addition to Jackson as a channel, Grenville was in correspondence with the colonial governors and the Surveyor General of Customs in the northern colonies, whose advice he asked before drafting a bill for enforcement of the customs. It was no secret that Americans would regard enforced collection, so long allowed to lapse, as a form of taxation they were prepared to resist. Grenville’s preliminary order of November 1763 instructing customs officers to collect existing duties to the full was reported by Governor Francis Bernard of Massachusetts to have caused “greater alarm” in America than had the French capture of Fort William Henry six years earlier. For the record, the Board of Trade was asked to advise by what method “least Burthensome and most Palatable to the Colonies” they would contribute to the costs of “Civil and Military Establishments.” Since there was no way that burden could be made palatable, and Grenville had already made up his mind, a reply was perhaps not seriously expected.