The March of Folly (30 page)

Their author did not live to witness the fate of his measure. He contracted what was called a “fever” that summer and after several false recoveries, the inconstant career of such short but momentous import for America ended in death in September 1767 at the age of 42. “Poor Charles Townshend is fixed at last,” commented a fellow-member.

Through these events the great Chatham was beyond reach. The distracted Duke of Grafton kept entreating to see him, to consult him just for half an hour, for ten minutes, and the King added his pleas
in letter after letter, even proposing to visit the sick man himself. Replies came from Lady Chatham, the ailing man’s beloved wife and blessing of his tortured existence, who refused for him because of his “utter disability … increase of illness … unspeakable affliction.” Colleagues thought he might be malingering but when Grafton at last, after repeated pressure, was admitted for a few moments’ visit, he found a shattered man, “nerves and spirits affected to a dreadful degree … the great mind bowed down and thus weakened by disorder.”

Isolated at Pynsent, Chatham in a manic upswing ordered the gardener to have the bare hill that bounded the view covered by a planting of evergreens. Told that “all the nurseries in this county would not furnish a hundredth part” of what would be needed, he nonetheless ordered the man to obtain the trees from London, from where they were brought down by wagon. Pynsent was an estate willed to Pitt by its irascible owner, a kinsman of Lord North, who had been so enraged by North’s vote for the cider tax that he had him burnt in effigy and changed his will, leaving his estate to the national hero. To occupy it, Pitt had sold his own estate of Hayes, where he had spent great sums buying up nearby houses to “free himself from the neighborhood.” Now he was seized by an insistent desire to recover Hayes and could not rest until his wife, forced to beg the influence of her brothers, with whom Chatham had quarreled, was able to persuade the new owner to sell it back.

No happier at Hayes, in the grip of gout and despair, Chatham could bear no contact. He refused to see or communicate with anyone, could not suffer his own children in the house, would not speak to servants, sometimes not even to his wife. Meals had to be kept hot at all times to be wheeled in at irregular hours when he sounded his bell. His temper erupted at the slightest defect. For days at a time he sat staring vacantly out the window. No visitor was admitted, but Lord Camden, told of the condition, said, “Then he is mad.” Others called it “gout in the head.”

Gout in the days of heavy diet and heavy drinking of fortified wines played a role in the fate of nations. It was a cause of the abdication of Charles V, Emperor in the time of the Renaissance Popes. A leading physician of Chatham’s time, Dr. William Cadogan, maintained that the disease had three causes, “Indolence, Intemperance and Vexation” (in modern times ascertained to be an overproduction of uric acid in the blood, which, when not absorbed, causes the inflammation and pain), and that an active and frugal life was the best preventive and possible cure. That physical exercise and a vegetarian diet were
remedial was known, but the theory of opposites, one of the least helpful precepts of 18th-century medicine, was preferred by Chatham’s physician, a Dr. Addington. A specialist in lunacy, or “mad-doctor,” he hoped to induce a violent fit of gout on the theory that this would drive out the mental disorder. He therefore prescribed two glasses of white wine and two of port every day, double his patient’s usual intake, over and above Madeira and port at other intervals. The patient was also to continue eating meat and avoid exercise in the open air, with the natural result that the affliction grew worse. Chatham took no part in government through 1767 and 1768. That he survived at all under Dr. Addington’s regimen and was, indeed, to recover his sanity represents one of man’s occasional triumphs over medicine.

While sometimes linked to gout, probably through pain, madness appeared not infrequently in the 18th-century governing class. Two central figures in the American crisis, Chatham during and George III afterward, showed symptoms of it, and in America, James Otis, who had been acting wildly for some time, went definitely insane in 1768. Walpole’s nephew, the Earl of Orford, from whom he was to inherit the title, was intermittently insane, as were Lord George Germain’s two brothers, one of whom, heir to the Sackville earldom, cut down all the trees at Knole and was declared mentally incompetent by his family and eventually died “in a fit.” The other, Lord John Sackville, a victim of melancholia, spent a wandering life in Europe in secluded poverty “fighting off madness.” The Duchess of Queensberry was “very clever, very whimsical and just not mad.” The poet William Cowper, as already noticed, was mad and so too was the minor poet Christopher Smart, whom Dr. Johnson visited in Bedlam. Lord George Gordon, who led the Gordon riots in 1780, was generally considered crazed. While occasional such cases mentioned in the memoirs may not represent a high incidence, they suggest the likelihood of others that are not mentioned. On the basis of such evidence one cannot say anything significant about madness in the governing class, but only that if Chatham had been healthy the history of America would have been different.

The Townshend Duties met a delayed reaction in America. Many citizens and future loyalists, disturbed by the mob action against lives and property during the Stamp Act crisis, had begun to fear the “patriotic” movement as the vanguard of class “levelling.” They were not anxious to provoke a break with Britain. The New York Assembly, rather than accept suspension, had soberly complied with the Quartering Act. Friction, however, developed soon through harassment by
agents of the new American Customs Board, created along with the Townshend Act to administer the new duties. At the same time, Writs of Assistance to allow search of premises had been legalized. Eager to make their fortunes from the penalties they could impose, the Customs agents, with infuriating zeal, halted and inspected everything that floated, boarding ships in every port and on every waterway down to the farmer ferrying chickens across a river in his riverboat.

While tempers rose, America’s cause suddenly found a voice that made everybody listen. It was heard in the
Farmer’s Letters
, which began appearing in the Pennsylvania
Chronicle
in December 1767, written by John Dickinson, a Philadelphia lawyer of a prosperous farming family and a future delegate to the Continental Congress. The letters laid out the colonies’ case so cogently and convincingly that they joined the historic company of writings that persuade and move people to action. Newspapers throughout the colonies reprinted them and Governor Bernard of Massachusetts sent a complete set to the agent Richard Jackson in London, warning that unless refuted they could become “a Bill of Rights in the opinion of the Americans.”

Dickinson’s theme was the necessity for unity among the colonies to protest against the New York Suspending Act, which he called a “dreadful stroke,” and the Revenue Act. He asserted that any tax raised for revenue was unconstitutional and that therefore there was no difference between the Townshend Duties and the Stamp Tax. The colonies owed no contribution to governing costs since Britain already reaped profit from control of their trade. To apply the duties toward the civil list and judges’ salaries was the “worst stroke,” absolutely destructive of local control, potentially reducing the colonies to the status of poor Ireland. Dickinson’s most telling point was his suggestion that the reason the duties were so petty was that the British hoped to have them pass virtually unnoticed, thereby establishing a precedent for future taxation. Therefore they must be challenged at once.

Readers sprang to action even if Dickinson’s argument supplied Townshend with a more rational motive for his policy than he in fact had. Americans tended to see a conscious plan to enslave them in every British measure. They assumed the British were more rational, just as the British government assumed they were more rebellious, than was true in either case.

The effect of the
Farmer’s Letters
was to fire up resistance to the Revenue Act, set Sam Adams on the stump with his calls to the mob and elicit from the Massachusetts Assembly a circular letter summoning
the other colonies to resist any tax revenue. Britain’s response came from a figure of new consequence, Lord Hillsborough, whom fate seems to have selected to ensure that Townshend’s death would not empty the cornucopia of mischief. Hillsborough had moved into control of American affairs in place of Lord Shelburne, whom the Duke of Grafton, under pressure from the King and from the Bedfords, whose alliance Grafton needed, had been forced to remove. Not a man for the axe, Grafton split Shelburne’s office to create a new office of Secretary for the Colonies, to which Hillsborough was named. Because he held an Irish peerage with large estate, Hillsborough opposed any softening toward the colonies in fear, shared by other Irish landowners, of his tenants’ migrating to America and emptying his rent-rolls. Though he had held many offices, he was not known for tact or reason; even George III, who shared the same deficiency, said he did not know “a man of less judgment than Lord Hillsborough.” This shortcoming promptly made itself felt.

In a peremptory letter, the new Secretary ordered the Massachusetts Assembly to rescind its circular letter under pain of dissolution if it refused and informed other governors that any other assembly that followed Massachusetts’ seditious example was likewise to be dissolved. The punitive tone of his letter and its implication that Americans were to be compelled to accept taxation or have their representative assemblies closed down ignited outrage where there had been little before. When Massachusetts refused loudly and passionately to rescind, Pennsylvania and other colonies that had refused her first call now adopted resolutions on the Massachusetts model in defiance of Hillsborough. Self-interest in preserving the empire was not doing well in his hands.

At the same time the Customs Board, growing nervous, appealed in February 1768 for a warship and troops for protection. The arrival of H.M.S.
Romney
in Boston harbor from Halifax emboldened the Customs Board to seize John Hancock’s ship
Liberty
, setting off such a riot that the Customs Commissioners fled aboard the
Romney
in fear for their lives. Fearful of the mounting disorder, General Gage ordered two regiments down from Halifax; two more arrived from the mother country in November. “To have a standing army! Good God!” wrote a Bostonian, after watching the redcoats parade through the city. “What can be worse to a people who have tasted the sweets of liberty!” It would “hasten that independency which at present the warmest among us deprecate.”

Without any plan or decision, the use of armed force for coercion
had entered the conflict. The unwisdom of this procedure disturbed many Englishmen including the Duke of Newcastle, now 75, who had administered the colonies as Secretary of State for a quarter century in his early days and believed that “Measures of Power and Force” should be avoided in dealing with them. “The measure of conquering the colonies and obliging them to submit is now becoming more popular,” he wrote to Rockingham. “I must in conscience protest against it and I hope our friends will well consider before they give in to so destructive a measure.”

The weight of the Cabinet, gradually infused by Bedfords and the King’s friends, was tipping the other way. Conway, who alone had tried to check Townshend and curtail the New York Suspending Act, resigned as Secretary of State, though retaining a minor post. His place was filled by a port-loving lord of small account except as a Bedford “connexion,” Viscount Weymouth, whose specialty was gambling all night and losing so consistently that his house was filled with bailiffs. As Secretary of State, he continued in his habits, going to bed at 6:00 a.m. and rising after noon “to the total neglect of the affairs of his office, the business of which was managed as much as it could be by Mr. Wood, his under-secretary.” Townshend’s empty place as Chancellor of the Exchequer was taken over by Lord North, an equable, comfortable person with a good deal of common sense and few strong opinions, though belonging to the no-compromise side. Two other places were filled by peers of the Bedford faction: Earl Gower when Lord Northington died, and the Earl of Rochford, recently Ambassador to Spain, where in order to leave Madrid he had to pawn his silver plate and jewels for £6000 to pay his debts. He was now named Secretary of State when Shelburne, the only Cabinet member to oppose Hillsborough’s coercive measures, finally resigned—or was pushed—after holding on to the rump of his office for eight months. Informed of his departure, Chatham, on the way to recovery, sent in the Privy Seal, officially resigning his office.

What had once been Chatham’s government now belonged to the Bloomsbury Gang, so called from the Duke of Bedford’s residence in Bloomsbury Square. The Duke himself, aside from great wealth and the many offices he had held in the previous reign and aside from his powers, positions and titles in Bedfordshire, owed his influence to a supremely developed sense of status and self-assurance. He was said to be the only man who could speak openly against Pitt in his great days. He had served as Lord President of the Council and real head of the Grenville government, generally spoken of as the Bedford ministry,
but now, afflicted by gout, he exerted his influence through his followers while spending most of his time at Woburn Abbey, his country home. Together with his brother-in-law Earl Gower and his son-in-law the 4th Duke of Marlborough, he controlled thirteen seats in the House of Commons. Though intelligent and warm-hearted, Bedford was hot-tempered, wrong-headed and obstinate. His entourage included masters of jobbing and electioneering and the strongest advocates of coercing the colonies. Six frigates and a brigade, they kept telling the King, would be enough to suppress American insolence.

King George had only one idea of policy with regard to the colonies: that “it was the indispensable duty of his subjects in America to obey the Acts of the Legislature of Great Britain,” and that the King “expects and requires a cheerful obedience to the same.” In the conduct of government, his influence was more pernicious because he was convinced of his royal duty to purify it after the model of his schoolboy idol, Alfred the Great. Through the Bedfords, he now interfered more than ever, appointing and dismissing ministers at will, controlling patronage, accepting no collective policy from the Cabinet but dealing with individual ministers in reference only to their own departments, even suggesting who was to speak in debates in the House of Commons. His choices for office tended to be courtiers of rank who had made themselves agreeable to him but whose talent or training for government was not likely to be greater than his own.