No people ever enjoyed more Happiness, or lived under a milder Government, than those now revolted Provinces.
—KING GEORGE III TO PARLIAMENT, OCTOBER 31, 1776
LONDON
October 31, 1776
Sir Francis Molyneux strode with purpose, his footsteps echoing in the cold, empty halls of the Palace of Westminster. He was the seventh of the Molyneux Baronets, a gentleman of the English aristocracy, a loyal courtier to his sovereign—and today he was fulfilling one of his most important duties. In his right hand, balanced on his shoulder, he carried a simple stick of dark ebony wood tipped with gold at both ends. This unique instrument gave Sir Francis his most impressive title—the “Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod,” or simply “Black Rod” for short.
There had been a Black Rod serving the British Parliament going all the way back to the fourteenth century. Normally, his duties required him to maintain order and security in the House of Lords, Parliament’s upper chamber, where the scions of Britain’s oldest families and bearers of its most ancient titles held forth on the day’s most pressing issues. Today, however, he was carrying an important formal message to the lower house, the House of Commons, whose members were elected by the people.
As Sir Francis drew closer to the House of Commons chamber, the doors were suddenly slammed shut. But Sir Francis did not break his stride. This was all part of the plan and had been for more than a hundred years. He walked up to the heavy oak doors, raised his rod, and banged deliberately three times.
“Who’s there?” called a voice from within.
“Black Rod,” Sir Francis answered clearly.
At this, the doors were opened and Sir Francis took his first measured steps into the chamber. Arrayed before him in their tiered benches on either side were the British people’s representatives in government, presided over by their Speaker, Fletcher Norton. But the house where the people’s voice was supposed to ring loudest was about to get a reminder of where the real power resided.
Sir Francis bowed and made the traditional announcement: “Mr. Speaker, the King commands this honorable House to attend His Majesty immediately in the House of Lords.”
It was the opening day of the third session of the Fourteenth Parliament of Great Britain, and as usual, the centerpiece of the day was to be the speech made by the sovereign. The ruler formally known as “His Majesty George the Third, by the grace of God, of Great-Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith” had already arrived, and taken his place on the throne set up in the chamber of the House of Lords. It had been the task of Sir Francis Molyneux and his black rod to formally invite—or “command”—the Members of Parliament in the House of Commons to make their way to the upper chamber and listen to the speech from the throne along with their noble colleagues.
The activities of the day had so far followed the tradition and protocol so much a feature of British parliamentary rule—then and now. But thanks to unprecedented events thousands of miles away, this was going to be a king’s speech unlike any other.
King George III took the throne in 1760, at the tender age of twenty-two, and that same year he commissioned the grand State Coach, which, drawn by eight horses, carried him that October day to the Palace of Westminster to open his Parliament. Now known as the Gold State Coach and still in use in Britain, the carriage drips with gilded carvings, all of which are loaded with symbolism meant to project the divine right and power of the British monarchy. There are lions, the national symbol; there are cherubs, signifying the monarch’s rule by God’s grace; but perhaps most prominently placed, looming over each wheel, are four figures of Triton.
Triton is a Greek water deity, and his inclusion is meant to symbolize the reach of Britain’s—and thus, the King’s—power across the seas. A formidable naval power, Britain was said, in the lyrics of a song that had been popular for decades, to “rule the waves” and thereby keep its far-flung colonies around the world in check.
One of those far-flung colonies, however, was in the midst of showing just how wide a gulf, greater even than the sprawling ocean between them, had developed between King George and some of the people he ruled. Three months earlier, English colonists in eastern North America had formally broken away from Great Britain and established themselves no longer as subjects of the Crown but as citizens of the “free and independent states” in which they lived.
In doing so, they claimed to be asserting their rights as Englishmen to enjoy “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to the same degree as their cousins in mainland Britain. Why, they reasoned, should an Englishman living in Boston be subjected to greater rules, regulations, taxes—and perhaps worst of all, the presence of armed soldiers on his streets—when these would have been considered outrageous to any Englishman in London?
It was no small irony that the idea of individual rights and liberties had been present in English government for some time, going back to the Magna Carta of 1215. An assertion of resistance to royal despotism was even built into the very ceremony over which George III was presiding today.
When the doors of the House of Commons had been shut in the face of Black Rod, the messenger of the King, and the nobility, it was a symbolic act of highlighting the independence of the people’s elected representatives who met in that chamber. Its roots went back to an incident in 1642 when King Charles I, in the lead-up to the English Civil War, barged into the House of Commons chamber intending to arrest a group of rebellious members led by John Hampden. Such an attack on duly elected Members of Parliament was unconscionable, even by a monarch who ruled by supposed divine right. Hostilities began shortly thereafter, and in 1649 Charles I ended up losing not just his crown but his head.
While the House of Commons retained this flourish of symbolic defiance, they still would admit Black Rod, and they still would rise from their seats to walk to the House of Lords chamber to hear their sovereign speak. The opening of Parliament on October 31, 1776, was no exception. But much of their talk of late was about the rebellious colonists in America who instead of temporarily shutting out the symbols of the monarch’s rule were apparently casting them off for good.
Their Declaration of Independence, the document by which the colonists had officially separated themselves from Great Britain, had been issued on July 4 in Philadelphia. In the next few days, word of this dramatic action had apparently reached General William Howe, the commander of British forces in New York. When from his base at Staten Island he dashed off the next dispatches to London, dated July 7 and 8, he focused on reporting troop movements but included this offhand note: “Several Men have within these last two Days come over to this Island . . . and I am informed that the Continental Congress have declared the United Colonies free and independent States.”1
Howe’s letter was published in the London Gazette on August 10, marking the first official announcement of the Americans’ separation. By the following week, the full Declaration had been printed in the British press and the word was out far and wide.
One of the Members of Parliament now on his way to hear the King speak had had a particularly strong reaction when he heard what had transpired in Philadelphia in July. Edmund Burke, who was then representing the City of Bristol in the House of Commons, had long been one of the voices in support of the American colonists, urging the King and the prime minister, Lord North, to treat them with a spirit of respect and reconciliation. The previous year, Burke stated in the House that “in this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole,” but that the “colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force” this freedom, which Burke noted was to the Americans “the only advantage worth living for.”2
Burke understood the Americans, and he had hoped for them to remain subjects of the Crown, but with the full panoply of rights enjoyed by other Englishmen. Now, however, the moment he had dreaded had come to pass. Burke said later that he was “sick at heart” when he heard about the Declaration of Independence. The news “struck [him] to the soul,” and he saw there was no hope of reconciliation, no hope of turning back.3
Perhaps Burke understood this immediately, and he was not the only parliamentarian who was convinced it was time to simply bid farewell to the American colonies and stop spilling British blood and treasure in a long war in which the colonies enjoyed an obvious home-field advantage. His sovereign, however, felt different, as he would soon reveal.
The members of the House of Commons made their way to the House of Lords chamber to join the noble Peers of the Realm and bishops composing the upper house. The nobles were dressed in brilliant red robes trimmed with ermine, the bishops in simple black and white. And in the center, seated on his throne, sat the man whose presence commanded theirs: King George III.
Not yet forty, the King nonetheless now had nearly two decades of experience on the throne. The crisis in America was, however, proving a difficult one to address. And His Majesty was taking it personally. George III was the first of his royal dynasty—called the Hanoverians, after the family’s original seat in Germany—to rule Britain after having actually been born there. His two immediate predecessors, George I and George II, had been born in Germany. But this George had been born in London, and he took his identity as an Englishman very seriously. When he first took the throne and made the customary speech to Parliament, into the ghostwritten remarks he added this sentence of his own: “Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Britain.”4 Now some rebels sought to rip apart the Britain he held so dear, to tear away a major component of the empire over which he ruled and in whose name he gloried. It was not just his power that these Americans sought to attack—it was his very identity.
And yet, as the monarch sat in Parliament surveying his captive audience, these emotions were kept below the surface. His full—some might even say pudgy—face remained placid, betraying little emotion and giving away no hints as to his mood. George III had made no public pronouncements since news of the Declaration broke in England, and the lords and elected officials assembled waited to hear how he intended to address it.
From the beginning of his speech, his agenda was clear:
“My Lords and Gentlemen,” he began, “Nothing could have afforded Me so much Satisfaction as to have been able to inform you, at the Opening of this Session, that the Troubles, which have so long distracted My Colonies in North America, were at an End.” He condescended to add his wish that “My unhappy People, recovered from their Delusion, had delivered themselves from the Oppression of their Leaders, and returned to their Duty.”5
This was an especially awkward start. Not only were the troubles not at an end, they had gotten far worse. But the King swiftly acknowledged this: “So daring and desperate is the Spirit of those Leaders,” he said, “whose Object has always been Dominion and Power, that they have now openly renounced all Allegiance to the Crown, and all political Connection with this Country.”
His Majesty was almost directly parroting the language of the Declaration itself, as crafted by Thomas Jefferson, which declared that the colonies are “absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”
The King further snarled that the colonists had “rejected, with Circumstances of Indignity and Insult,” Britain’s attempts at reconciliation—which in the colonists’ view had come too little, too late—“and have presumed to set up their rebellious Confederacies for Independent States.” He knew this disrespect could not stand and that the entire European colonial system could be in jeopardy if it went unanswered: “If their Treason be suffered to take Root, much Mischief must grow from it, to the Safety of My loyal Colonies, to the Commerce of My Kingdoms, and indeed to the present System of all Europe.”
He then called for “unanimity at home” in the cause of pursuing the American war, perhaps anticipating that this latest development would put even more British politicians in the mind of Burke and let the Americans get away with it. To that end, he proceeded to give an update on British victories on the battlefield in New York, make assurances that the other European monarchs were behind him, and remind members of the House of Commons of their duty to fully fund his campaigns.
The King concluded with the opinion that “no people ever enjoyed more Happiness, or lived under a milder Government, than those now revolted Provinces.” “My Desire,” his final sentence proclaimed, “is to restore to them the Blessings of Law and Liberty, equally enjoyed by every British Subject, which they have fatally and desperately exchanged for all the Calamities of War, and the arbitrary Tyranny of their Chiefs.”
His Majesty had saved the most disingenuous claims for last.
The government he claimed was “mild” had in fact visited great oppression, even violence, on the people of those “revolted provinces.” They had been taxed into oblivion, bullied by soldiers in the streets of their hometowns, and had their representative assemblies disbanded. Thomas Jefferson had taken great care to detail these and other offenses in the list of grievances against George III, which made up the bulk of his Declaration.
Jefferson and his compatriots had indeed sought “the Blessings of Law and Liberty,” but the simple fact was they were not “enjoyed equally by every British subject.” The British subjects in America were not guaranteed these blessings under the Crown anymore, so they set off to claim them for themselves. That the King still, after their formal split, dismissed this as a “delusion” and sought to bring the Americans to heel showed how out of touch he and his government remained, exhibiting the same lack of understanding that brought this situation into being.
Edmund Burke’s first reaction when he heard the news of the Declaration was accurate. Nothing like the Declaration of Independence had been issued before as the foundation for a new nation. The map had been redrawn, the shape of the world had changed—there was no turning back.
LONDON
September 1775
There was a time when there was hope. There was a time when some of the leaders among the American colonists still felt that if they could make their case to the King, if His Majesty could read their words for himself rather than relying on the reports of his scheming ministers and advisers, he would see reason and loosen his stranglehold on their colonies. Further fighting like what had scorched Massachusetts, from Lexington to Concord to Bunker Hill, in the spring and into the summer of 1775 could perhaps be avoided. In September of that year, those hopes rested in the hands of two men: Arthur Lee and Richard Penn. They were charged with delivering a petition addressed “To the King’s most excellent Majesty” from his “faithful subjects,” the members of the Continental Congress.
The men who shared this mission also shared some aspects of their background: Both came from the ranks of the colonial elite, and both had been educated in England. But in the current conflict between the colonies and the Crown, they had taken different sides.
Richard Penn was the grandson of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, and had previously served in the royal administration as lieutenant governor and later acting governor of that colony. A loyalist, he decamped for England when Philadelphia became a center of revolutionary activity, but he agreed to assist the Continental Congress in taking their case to the King.
Arthur Lee, on the other hand, came from that large and active Virginia family that had thrown its considerable resources behind the patriot cause. Two of Arthur’s brothers, Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee, were members of the Congress who had approved the document for which Arthur was now responsible. For him, this mission was not just a political errand but a family matter as well.
The petition borne by Penn and Lee may have been approved by the entire Continental Congress and signed by many of its delegates, but it was largely the brainchild of one man: John Dickinson of Pennsylvania. Dickinson was a leading moderate in the Congress, and in the summer of 1775, as Thomas Jefferson noted, “still retained the hope of reconciliation with the mother country.”6 In the first days of July 1775, Dickinson and Jefferson wrangled over the “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms” against the King’s forces, which Congress passed on July 6 of that year. In what Jefferson saw as a consolation prize for Dickinson, Congress allowed him to draw up a second and more conciliatory document addressed directly to King George. It became known as the Olive Branch Petition.
Its tone was almost servile. Greeting the King as “Most Gracious Sovereign,” it begged to “entreat your Majesty’s gracious attention to this our humble petition.” It blamed government officials in London, not the King himself, for the present difficulties, but opted to “decline the ungrateful task of describing the irksome variety of artifices, practiced by many of your Majesty’s Ministers,” presumably to avoid offending the monarch’s delicate ear. Still, Dickinson noted, these ministers “have compelled us to arm in our own defense, and have engaged us in a controversy so peculiarly abhorrent to the affections of your still faithful colonists.” Then he really laid it on thick:
Attached to your Majesty’s person, family, and government, with all devotion that principle and affection can inspire, connected with Great Britain by the strongest ties that can unite societies, and deploring every event that tends in any degree to weaken them, we solemnly assure your Majesty, that we not only most ardently desire the former harmony between her and these colonies may be restored . . .
He concluded by asking the King to intervene more directly in colonial affairs, “that your royal authority and influence may be graciously interposed to procure us relief from our afflicting fears and jealousies.”7
Jefferson, for one, was appalled—and his memoirs suggest that he wasn’t the only one. “The disgust against this humility was general,” he said, “and Mr. Dickinson’s delight at its passage was the only circumstance which reconciled them to it.” Jefferson felt the whole exercise was a waste of time, “a signal proof of [Congress’s] indulgence to Mr. Dickinson.” Yet Dickinson’s colleagues approved the document on July 8, 1775.
Jefferson could not help but recount an awkward incident following the petition’s passage when, despite the debate being closed, Dickinson “could not refrain from rising and expressing his satisfaction” in an impromptu speech.
“There is but one word, Mr. President, in the paper which I disapprove,” he said in conclusion, “and that is the word ‘Congress.’”
At this, Jefferson’s fellow Virginian Benjamin Harrison rose and responded: “There is but one word in the paper, Mr. President, of which I approve, and that is the word ‘Congress.’”8
By late August, the petition—bearing the signatures of Jefferson and Harrison among those of their fellow delegates, despite their objections—was in the hands of Richard Penn and Arthur Lee in London. They sent a copy to Lord Dartmouth, secretary of state for the colonies, for his advance review and requested a meeting to formally present him with the original. Seeking to bolster their case, Lee also wrote to Edmund Burke, whose sympathy for the colonial cause was well known, inviting him to join them for the meeting with Dartmouth.
Burke politely declined, but he wrote to Lee to express his support for the Congress’s petition. “I am convinced,” he remarked, perhaps overly optimistically, “that nothing is further from the desires of the gentlemen who compose it, than to separate themselves from their allegiance to their sovereign, or their subordinate connection with their mother country.” Rather, Burke suggested, “I believe they sincerely wish for an end of these unhappy troubles, in which, while all are distressed, they must be the first and greatest sufferers.”9
Burke’s words echoed in Arthur Lee’s memory as he and Penn waited to be shown into Lord Dartmouth’s office in London on September 2, 1775. The day before, they had finally presented him with the original petition, which he had promised to bring to the King himself. Now the two colonial agents were anxious for His Majesty’s answer. But when Lord Dartmouth arrived, his news was surprising. “As His Majesty did not receive it on the throne,” His Lordship reported, “no answer would be given.”10
Lee was aghast. If the fighting continued, soon it would stretch from New England down to his native Virginia. But he had found Dartmouth to be “a man of great candor and amiableness of character,” so he felt free to speak his peace. He gave the only response that came to him.
“I am sorry,” he told Dartmouth, “that his majesty has adopted a measure which will occasion so much bloodshed.”
But Dartmouth was dismissive. “If I thought it would be the cause of shedding one drop of blood I should never have concurred in it,” he replied. “But I cannot be of an opinion that it will be attended by any such consequences.”
Lee would not back down. “My lord,” he continued firmly, “as sure as we exist, this answer will be the cause of much blood being shed in America, and of most dreadful consequences.”11
With that, Lee and Penn excused themselves. They had to dash off a quick report of their meeting so it could make it across the Atlantic as quickly as possible. They left Dartmouth with that dire prediction ringing in the air.
They were right, of course. The consequences would be dreadful. Not least because King George had already made up his mind before the petition was even submitted: The rebels in America were not to be compromised with; they were to be crushed.
On August 23, as Penn and Lee were preparing for their meeting with Dartmouth, King George III issued a royal proclamation. His American subjects, it observed, “misled by dangerous and ill designing men, and forgetting the allegiance which they owe to the power that has protected and supported them,” had “at length proceeded to open and avowed rebellion.” His Majesty accused them of “traitorously preparing, ordering and levying war against us,” and commanded that “all our Officers, civil and military, are obliged to exert their utmost endeavours to suppress such rebellion, and to bring the traitors to justice.”12
The King had decided that the time for compromise was over, and as such he was in no mood to receive the petition brought to him just days later. In the following weeks, he addressed Parliament and stated his resolve even more clearly. The colonists, he was convinced, were trying to break away, and His Majesty simply would not permit it:
“The rebellious war now levied is become more general,” he observed on October 27, 1775, “and is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire.” King George was preparing for American independence well before the Declaration was issued. He viewed this as an affront to British identity—to his identity:
The object is too important, the spirit of the British nation too high, the resources with which God hath blessed her too numerous, to give up so many colonists which she has planted with great industry, nursed with great tenderness, encouraged with many commercial advantages, and protected and defended at much expence of blood and treasure.13
To keep his empire together, King George III knew that more “blood and treasure” would be the answer.