The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (58 page)

In a few hours it was all over; Quebec was taken by the British and Americans, who had fought like devils under Wolfe’s inspired leadership. Despite being hit by three musket balls, Wolfe allowed his wounds only to be hastily dressed before he encouraged the line to make the final charge that ensured victory, a victory achieved with just one cannon and no cavalry against an enemy armed to the teeth. As the smoke of battle cleared, and he was fainting from loss of blood, Wolfe saw that the French retreat had been cut off as he had directed. The next minute he was dead. Montcalm, too, died from wounds received that day.

Although the actual surrender of Canada to the British crown would not take place for another year, by holding Quebec and thus commanding the St Lawrence waterway, the British prevented the new French commander from bringing his troops up to relieve Montreal. When reports of Wolfe’s gallant death reached England, George II was so inspired by the story that he commissioned Benjamin West to paint a narrative picture of the dying Wolfe which may be seen today in the National Portrait Gallery.

As Pitt had vowed, with the exception of Louisiana in the south the French had been wiped from the face of North America. Their plan of linking Canada and Louisiana and preventing the English colonists from expanding west was in ashes. The extraordinary effort Pitt had exhorted from the colonists with every last drop of his being had come good when they had fought together in the first imperial war. In what became known as the year of victories, 1759, from all parts of the globe came nothing but encouraging news: Britain had captured important French settlements on the island of Goree off west Africa and in Senegal itself. The capture of Guadeloupe, one of the West Indian sugar islands, which had been attacked when the British failed to take Martinique, raised Pitt’s reputation to new heights among his fellow countrymen, as well as bringing £400,000 in income in one year alone. In India under the extraordinary Clive there had been a series of victories, which as in North America had driven the French off the Indian subcontinent. Most important was the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which secured the large area of Bengal in the north-west as a British dependency ruled on behalf of Britain by a new nawab, Mir Jaffier. Sent there from the south, with 2,000 British troops and 5,000 sepoys, Clive destroyed the 40,000-strong army of France’s ally Siraj-ud-Daula.

Like Wolfe’s triumph on the Heights of Abraham, Plassey determined the shape of the future. Adding Bengal to the Karnatic made Britain the most powerful European presence in India; those territories became the basis for the British Empire in India. Though Clive retired to England on grounds of ill-health, his work was continued by Colonel Eyre Coote, who had been at Plassey and who had a unique relationship with the sepoys. By 1761 after decisive victories against the French at Wandewash and Pondicherry, Coote had extirpated the last of French influence in southern India. In Europe too the year 1759 drew to a triumphant close for Britain, bringing nothing but victories: Ferdinand of Brunswick relieved Hanover by drawing the French army into a successful ambush at Minden.

Even the threat of a new French invasion of Britain was foiled by the exceptional bravery of Admiral Hawke, Pitt’s favourite admiral. Transport ships to take French soldiers across the Channel had collected at the mouth of the Seine. Their advance was to be covered by the Brest fleet, so the best chance of preventing it was to destroy the fleet which was anchored below Finisterre, on France’s Atlantic coast, in Quiberon Bay. Distance, and the appalling November weather, would have stopped most men from putting to sea, let alone sailing for the Bay of Biscay, but Hawke was not to be deterred. Though driving rain rendered visibility nil, and massive waves were breaking across the decks, he ordered his pilot to rush into the shallow waters of Quiberon Bay. Its rocks stuck up like needles and the long suck and swell of water presaged disaster for any ship not already at anchor. But it was there that the Brest fleet was drawn up. And it was there that Hawke shouted in words that became legendary, ‘Lay me alongside the
Soleil Royale
!’ The valiant British navy followed Hawke straight into the middle of the French ships and sank them, losing only forty men.

Lost in admiration at the change in Britain’s fortunes under Pitt, Frederick the Great proclaimed that ‘England was a long time in labour, but at last she has brought forth a man.’ The Prussian king himself was almost as popular in England as Pitt, as may be seen from the number of pubs still named the King of Prussia. But in the middle of all these victories in 1760, when England’s reputation had never been higher, George II died suddenly, aged seventy-seven. The throne now passed to his grandson George III. By the end of his reign George II had grown quite fond of the man who had expanded his dominions beyond recognition. Now in 1760, despite all he had done for Britain, Pitt was vulnerable to being toppled by a new court.

Patriot King (1760–1793)

Unfortunately the hero that Britain had at last brought forth to the admiration of Frederick II was not to the taste of the new king George III. Handsome and blond, a devoted husband to Princess Charlotte Mecklenberg-Strelitz who bore him fifteen children–all but one in Buckingham House, which he purchased as a family home in 1761–the twenty-two-year-old George had his own ideas of heroics. The conspicuous part was to be played by himself. He was enormously influenced by Bolingbroke’s writings on the ideal of the Patriot King, whose every virtue he hoped to embody. The Patriot King had as one of its particular tenets that the king should choose his ministers from the best men of all the parties. Parties led to faction, which destroyed the nation; they should be replaced by the lofty figure of the Patriot King from whom all goodness would spring.

Of a pious nature, with a rather slow and limited intellectual capacity, but with firm opinions once he had formed them, George III had a passionate distrust of the dirty arts of politicians–especially those of the great Pitt. He had complete faith in his own ability to cleanse the Augean stable of Whig patronage which had run the country since 1714. In fact, considering the formidable men ranged against him, George would be remarkably successful over the next twelve years. Blessed with a will of iron and considerable cunning, he clawed back the patronage of the crown from the Whigs and substituted his supporters, known as the King’s Friends, in the Houses of Parliament. For all his youthful ideas he soon became as adept as Walpole at using pensions to create placemen.

But by doing so George put himself on a collision course with his fellow countrymen. To British politicians of the 1760s the idea that the king should control the legislature, that is Parliament, through his Friends, was anathema. It was an article of post-revolutionary faith that there should be checks and balances in the constitution, otherwise there was a real danger of arbitrary power. The first twenty years of George III’s enormously long reign (it lasted for nearly sixty years, though he was incapacitated for his last decade) were therefore disturbed by a new struggle between Parliament and king which was expressed at its most extreme by the radical politician John Wilkes. But those two decades also saw a war to the death between the American colonies and Britain because the king refused to acknowledge America’s own Parliamentary traditions.

The legal rights and liberties of the citizen were the outstanding universal phenomenon of the second half of the eighteenth century. The spirit of the time in George III’s domains was against him. Where he viewed his role as the unifying Patriot King, on both sides of the Atlantic his reign was seen as conflicting with the rights won a century before. The interfering king was destroying liberty, which–like reason–was becoming the buzzword of the age.

George III’s reign coincided with the coming to fruition of ideas emanating from the mid-eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement in France, a system of beliefs which spread like wildfire. These ideas were popularized by the French philosophers of the time (for France ever since Louis XIV had been the cultural centre of Europe) in their hugely influential
Encyclopédie
, first published in 1751. Organized by the philosopher Denis Diderot and containing articles by political theorists such as Montesquieu and philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, the
Encyclopédie
aimed at nothing less than explaining the universe. Its founders’ optimistic notion was that, if the
Encyclopédie
contained explanations for everything, progress would result as knowledge advanced. Newton’s discovery of the physical laws of the universe, which he began to publish from the 1680s on, the Swedish botanist Linnaeus’ classification of the natural world into species in 1737 and the scientific discoveries which proliferated in the first half of the eighteenth century convinced them that the intellectual laws of the universe could be determined by the application of human intelligence.

The most striking feature of the Enlightenment was its followers’ belief in the benevolent power of man’s reason. If every aspect of human life–institutions, laws, beliefs–were subjected to reason, man would be inspired to improve it. Its next most important aspect was that the laws which the Enlightenment philosophers, not least Jean-Jacques Rousseau, postulated about the universe by and large moved most of them away from conservative forms of government like monarchies towards the concepts of human rights and equality. Many of the political ideas that inspired the Encyclopédistes came from England. John Locke was hailed by them as one of their own, and Montesquieu cited the separation of powers in England as the model for rational government. Tradition was regarded as being almost as bad as superstition, which in the Christian Churches had been responsible for so many deaths the century before. Deism went in tandem with the Enlightenment, the belief that there was a God but that its or his laws were to be known not through established religions like Judaism or Christianity, but by discovering certain common principles. As with a scientific experiment, every belief was to be questioned and, if it was found wanting in the light of reason, abandoned.

For reason, it was believed, led to virtue. The effect that these ideas had on the world are impossible to underestimate. It was only when the French Revolution had run its course and thrown out every piece of irrational human custom in its pursuit of rational virtue that disenchantment with reason and experiment set in. But until 1789 the western world was awash with all kinds of people tearing down the old in the search of the new. The ideas the Encyclopédistes promoted, of political freedom, of social justice, of equality, would prove so powerful that they moved men to fight wars, to pull down palaces, to create a new world.

Nevertheless the compelling, the intoxicating brilliance of the Encyclopédistes’ writing was such that philosophical ideas of reform–and philosophers themselves–became the fashion even among the most conservative monarchies of Europe. If Caroline of Ansbach had corresponded with philosophers twenty years before, in the mid-eighteenth century autocratic monarchs like Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia and Joseph II of Austria were so influenced by philosophical ideas that they wanted to put them into practice. They prided themselves on being enlightened, as did people from all walks of life all over the world. From such a standpoint eventually flowed the reform movements in England at the end of the century, which demanded religious toleration, an end to slavery, prison reform, parliamentary reform, trade reform and constitutional reform.

In his own way the young George III represented something of the spirit of the age that was determined to sweep away the old and the outworn. He believed in restoring virtue to the country. Unfortunately, when he was a little boy his autocratic mother, who had been brought up as a princess at the despotic court of a small German state and was horrified by the impudence of the English Parliament, was always saying to him, ‘George, be a king.’ He never forgot her advice. But his interpretation of kingship not only conflicted dramatically with the English political tradition. It also led him into conflict with the Whig leaders of his reign, the Earl of Shelburne and the Marquis of Rockingham.

In the atmosphere of the Enlightenment they prided themselves more than ever on being the keepers of the flame of freedom, as true heirs to the Revolutionary Settlement. And they kept up the Whig reputation for being in contact with advanced thought. Just as Locke had been doctor to the first Whig Lord Shaftesbury, the scientist and dissenter who discovered oxygen Joseph Priestley was Lord Shelburne’s librarian, responsible for much advanced rationalist thought percolating into Whig ruling circles. The stage of George III’s reign was thus set for repeated confrontation.

George III remained under the influence not only of his mother Augusta, Princess of Wales, but also of his former tutor Lord Bute, a tall, vain Scotsman, said to be her lover, who was known for priding himself on his good legs. Bute was loathed by most people, partly because he was Scots (the Scots were still very unpopular) and partly because of his passion for intrigue and secret plots. But he did have the sensible idea of getting the new king off to a good start by emphasizing how English he was compared to his great-grandfather and grandfather, George I and George II. George III made a famous speech from the throne in the perfect English accent derived from a childhood spent at Kew, which began, ‘Born and bred in this country I glory in the name of Briton.’ Nevertheless, though he might be regarded with sentimental enthusiasm after such a start, by the easily moved public, to the political classes (that is, the great Whig network spread so effectively throughout the country) George seemed a dangerous new phenomenon.

Emotional and affectionate, the young George III put his faith in those he loved, chief of whom was the Tory Bute, who had been his tutor ever since his father, Poor Fred, died when George was twelve. The pompous Bute was appointed secretary of state by the king and thrust into Pitt’s administration. George did not appreciate that Pitt should be given free rein, while Pitt himself, as a consummate autocrat–Horace Walpole said that he wanted the crown and sceptre and nothing less–was furious that the Cabinet had to have Bute on board representing the king and putting obstacles in his path. Pitt was insulted when Bute wanted George III in his coronation speech to call the war ‘bloody and expensive’ he insisted that it be changed to ‘just and necessary’. Undermined in his own Cabinet and prevented from declaring pre-emptive war on Spain, France’s ally, Pitt resigned in October 1761. Bute was left to face renewed hostilities with Spain in December (though it brought Britain Hanava and Manila) and to manage the peace which all sides were wearily coming to believe was necessary.

The Treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, brought to an end the Seven Years War, but despite Pitt’s entreaties no mention was made by Bute of Britain’s magnificent ally Frederick the Great, who had fought so bravely on her behalf. Bute followed up this ungrateful behaviour by withdrawing without warning the subsidy Frederick had come to depend on. In a sad turnaround the King of Prussia, who had helped to win the war which had left Britain the world’s top trading nation, became her implacable enemy.

Pitt denounced the peace, which he said was ‘as stained as Utrecht’, but just as at Utrecht the gains to Britain from the Seven Years War were immense. Bute’s offensive behaviour certainly left Britain most ominously without a friend in Europe, with Prussia feeling as betrayed as Austria had been, but the British part of North America now extended to the Mississippi. What had become the only French colony in North America, Louisiana, was now worth so little to France that she soon sold it to Spain, in 1762. As a result of giving Havana and Manila back to Spain in return for Florida, the whole of the American eastern seaboard was now in the hands of British colonists, as of course was the vast formerly French settlement of Canada. In addition all the French and Spanish American possessions in the southern part of North America to the east of the Mississippi, with the exception of the town and island of New Orleans, became British too.

Minorca was given back to Britain. In the West Indies Britain kept Grenada and the Grenadines, Tobago, St Vincent and Dominica, but restored Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia to the French. In India all the gains made since 1748 were confirmed. In west Africa the French were handed back Goree, while Britain kept Senegal. In central America Britain obtained the right to cut and trade in Honduras logwood, which would eventually result in protectorate status. Though the French lost Cape Breton by the Peace of Paris, they were still allowed to use the great fisheries round Newfoundland which they had traditionally shared with the British for over a hundred years.

Meanwhile, within Great Britain, the king was starting as he meant to go on. When continuous disagreements with Bute had forced the other pillar of the government, the chief of the great Whig connection the Duke of Newcastle, to resign in May 1762, George III seized the opportunity to dismiss all his followers and dependants. Not only was any Whig who had voted against the treaty in the Houses of Parliament thrown out, so also were Newcastle’s most modest clients such as excisemen. With a quill pen the king personally ran through the name of the Duke of Devonshire on the list of members of the Privy Council, while three of the greatest magnates of the Whig party, Newcastle, Rockingham and the Duke of Grafton, were dismissed as lords lieutenant.

This wholesale sacking of the Whigs was known to their sarcastic contemporaries as ‘the massacre of the Pelhamite Innocents’. The Whigs were truly amazed by the speed and venom with which the young king had struck. As a result the great Whig connection, or ‘old corps’ Whigs, for the first time in two generations broke up into small rival groups, of which the most important were those headed by Pitt and Rockingham. But, just as the king desired, some Whigs began to desert their party and move towards the idea of becoming King’s Friends.

The elegant Bute soon found the rough and tumble of politics too much for him. He preferred, as he put it, to be ‘a private man at the side of the King’, so he retired while nevertheless continuing to make trouble by advising George informally–or from behind the curtain, as was said at the time. Yet the country still had to be governed. Since George III was only at the beginning of his drive to dispose of the Whigs, he was forced to call upon the competent but unimaginative Whig George Grenville, who headed one of the smaller Whig factions, to lead the government. Grenville, who was Pitt’s brother-in-law (though he had quarrelled with him), had few manners and was constantly rude to the king. He was also immediately faced by trouble. At home, the increasingly outrageous newspaper put out by the daring MP John Wilkes, and its insulting criticisms of the king, had to be suppressed once and for all. In America, when Grenville asked the colonists to help pay for the enormously expensive war by a new levy, the stamp tax, to be imposed on every legal document, his request was met by rioting.