London lay damp and heavy under low clouds as the Cabinet met in a large room at 10 Downing Street to consider the latest dispatches from America.1 The Scarborough had made a fast crossing.2 It was less than a month since it had sailed from Massachusetts Bay on September 9 with the long reports, scrawled in Gage’s sharp pointed handwriting, that “civil Government is near its end,” that he would “avoid any bloody crisis as long as possible,” that “conciliating, moderating, reasoning is over. Nothing can be done but by forceable means.”
And the men at that Cabinet table knew that “forceable means” were out of the question for the time being. Because of the winter gales, it was too late in the year for transports to sail, even if any troops had been ready for them to carry.
It was eight months less a day since the King’s ministers had made the decision in Lord Rochford’s office to act against Boston and Massachusetts. Since then, the picture in both America and Europe had changed out of all recognition.
At that moment, as their lordships in London discussed the news from Gage, the General Congress in Philadelphia was planning joint action against Britain. At any time this illegal combined movement by colonies in a subcontinent would have caused great concern in Whitehall, but a new situation had just emerged in Europe that framed it in a setting of enormous national danger.
In May, Louis XV had died at Versailles. The sixty-four-year-old French autocrat, with his famous mistresses and his spectacular court, had pursued a policy of maintaining peace with Britain. France had been badly savaged in the Seven Years’ War, and Louis had firmly opposed any moves to resume the conflict.
However, the war had now been over for more than ten years. France had recovered. The trauma of a new king had gripped Paris and Versailles. Anything could happen. Governments all over Europe were transfixed as they studied the changing power structure with intense care. Louis was only twenty-one—a dull, plain, slow-witted young man, allegedly impotent, with little political acumen and a single-minded obsession for hunting. Marie Antoinette, his beautiful young wife, daughter of the Empress of Austria, was frivolous, irresponsible and wayward.
The young couple had absolute power, and their preferences had been reflected very fast at Versailles. Old favorites had been banned from court, ministers stripped of influence. Madame du Barry, the old King’s favorite mistress and previously a woman of enormous stature in the court, had been ordered to a convent soon before the dying monarch expired. In the tense mood at the French palace, Marie Antoinette had only to be a little cool to the wife of a member of the old regime for the news to be reported that day to the capitals of Europe—as, indeed, it was in one note to London.
Every week Lord Stormont, British ambassador in Paris, wrote long letters to Lord Rochford, Secretary of State for the Southern Department, speculating on the changes as they occurred, reporting every rumor. On the new King’s attitude to Britain, he was reassuring but uncertain. “I should not think it impossible,” he wrote, “that he [the new King] may have censured as pusillanimous the conduct of this court for some years past . . . but his passion for economy and his dread of expense give room to hope that he will not wantonly and hastily plunge into a war with England.”
All the same, a revolt in America—an old and sensitive territory of conflict between the two traditional enemy powers—would clearly expose a vulnerable underside of the British Empire that could be tempting to a France humiliated ten years before. As Dartmouth had written to Gage, “Everything depends on what ministers the young king will choose to put his confidence in.”
In May, another factor emerged that was closely linked to France. Parliament processed the final stages of a bill on the future of Canada. The Quebec Act, which had, in fact, been on the drawing board long before Samuel Adams organized the Boston Tea Party, restructured the government of Canada, altered its borders, and gave formal recognition to the Roman Catholic Church in Canada.
This was an enormous concession to the many Catholics who, following the years of French control, now lived in the colony. But it created a fierce wave of resentment both in England and in anti-Papist America.
When the King drove by coach to Parliament to sign his royal assent to the bill, angry crowds in Parliament Square mobbed him. “No Popery,” they yelled. “Remember Charles the First!” The King was not likely to forget Charles I. Every year, on January 30, St. James’s Palace went into mourning for a day to commemorate the royal execution.
Whig sophisticates in London, however, viewed the religious clauses in the bill cynically as a clever move to keep Canada clear of the American agitators. “It was evident,” commented the waspish diarist Horace Walpole, “that the Court was preparing a Catholic Army to keep the colonies in as great subjection as they had been when Canada was in the hands of the French.”
This, too, was the interpretation seen by many Americans. In a petition to the King the General Congress made a big and emotional highlight of it. And it figured prominently as an important extra grievance in the stream of reports that, through the late summer and early autumn, had been flowing into Dartmouth’s office in Whitehall. All the governors of the colonies —even Sir James Wright in Georgia, the only one of the thirteen American provinces which had not sent delegates to the Congress in Philadelphia—had warned of the universal support of Boston and Massachusetts and a violent opposition to Parliament’s measures.
Most of them were very gloomy about the future. “The cloud to the eastward,” commented William Try on, governor of New York, where the Tories were very strong, “seems to thicken and will, it is probable, break in thunder and lightning.”
At that October Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, the ministers considered the possible action that was open to them—and hoped the problem would go away. “This . . . is a state that cannot have long duration,” Dartmouth wrote cheerfully to Gage a few days later. “The discontinuance of the courts of justice must produce the greatest anarchy and confusion.”
Time would be needed to raise more troops, and it would be the spring before they could arrive. Meanwhile, as a gesture, the Cabinet decided to send out three big ships of the line to augment Graves’ fleet—provided they could make the winter voyage without too much risk. The touchy Lord Sandwich was not present at the Cabinet meeting, and when Dartmouth suggested the possibility of hazard in his note to the Admiralty, the First Lord bristled. “English men of war,” he retorted, “are likely to make the passage at any time of year.”
And so the Boyne, the Somerset and the Asia, together with nearly 600 marines, headed through the Atlantic storms for Boston. This meant that by Christmas Gage would have a fighting force that, in addition to his ships, amounted to nearly 4,000 men.
Meanwhile, from Holland came a report that a ship from Rhode Island was loading with small arms, ammunition and cannon in Amsterdam. Immediately, Lord Suffolk, Secretary of State for Northern Europe, ordered the British ambassador in Holland to urge the Prince of Orange to intervene. And the Admiralty sent a fast cutter to stand off the port and seize the ship if it was permitted to sail.
From Hamburg in Germany came news that a ship named the Flora was also loading with firearms. The destination was unknown, but Dartmouth did not have any doubts about the course it would be steering. By then Lord Barrington, the War Secretary, was anxious about similar trouble on home ground. At Plymouth lay a vessel loaded with gunpowder, waiting to leave for America. “I do not know,” he wrote to Dartmouth, “by what authority it can be stopped.”
Repeatedly, the British administration, in great need of overhaul to meet the worldwide imperial problems that it now had to cope with, was caught unawares by sudden situations it had not anticipated. Now it rushed out an order of the King in Council—a technical emergency device—banning the export of arms and ammunition from Britain for a limited period of six months, while Parliament processed legislation to put the embargo on a more permanent basis.
During these weeks of crisis, Britain was in the throes of a general election. Because of the bad news brought by the Scarborough and the political ammunition it gave the opposition, the King had dissolved Parliament. He was busy buying his power in the new Commons with the Secret Service Fund, normally reserved for the payment of spies. Skillfully managing the royal campaign, he scribbled note after note to Lord North with his election instructions. No less than £70,000 was spent in bribes. The cunning Lord Falmouth, who controlled six seats in the House, exploited the King’s critical need for voting power and forced up his price of £7,500 to guineas.
By the middle of November the King could relax. The voting was over. From his palace at Kew, he wrote to North: “I am much pleased at the state of the supposed numbers in the new Parliament.” And he had good reason, for he had stepped up his control.
Now, with a Parliament he could rely on to support his policies, he could concentrate once more on America. In fact, he was spoiling for a fight. “I am not sorry,” he wrote to North from Queen’s House at precisely 12:48 a.m. on November 18, “that the line of conduct seems chalked out . . . the New England Governments are in a state of rebellion, blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.”
On November 29, attended by the household cavalry, he drove in the state coach to Parliament to open the new session, and made a fighting speech about “the daring spirit of disobedience to the law . . . in Massachusetts Bay.
“These proceedings.” he declared to the Lords and the new members of the House of Commons, crowded together listening to him, “have been . . . encouraged in other of my colonies and unwarrantable attempts have been made to obstruct the commerce of this kingdom by unlawful combinations.”
The King’s message was a battle cry—a public declaration that, come what may, Britain would curb its colonies. It served to heighten the crisis. For throughout the remaining weeks of 1774, the news from the governors in America, arriving with every ship that crossed the Atlantic, grew steadily worse.
The General Congress had announced from Philadelphia its full approval of the resistance of the people of Massachusetts and urged that “if Britain tried to use force, all America ought to support them in their opposition.”
Privately, Joseph Reed, a Congressional delegate for Pennsylvania who for some time had corresponded with Dartmouth in a series of rational letters in which both men displayed great tolerance, warned of the imminent dangers of “a civil war not to be equalled in history.”
Tea was no longer discussed on either side of the Atlantic. The dispute was now about “slavery,” as the issue was being canvassed in Philadelphia, and “sovereignty,” which was the prime concern of the men in London who had to cope with the repercussions of American events throughout the Empire.
“The question,”3 Dartmouth pointed out to Reed, was whether the laws of “the mother country . . . are to be submitted to. . . . If the people of America say no, they say in effect they will no longer be a part of the British Empire; they change the whole ground of the controversy. . . .”
Despite the aggressive attitude implied by the King in Parliament and in his private letters, conciliation was in the wind. The policy that was emerging gradually from the Cabinet meetings and the King’s conferences in St. James’s aimed at combining peace offers with even more repressive measures—power accompanied by benevolence—but the government’s presentation was poor. It could have used a Samuel Adams. For in Parliament, various bills often seemed to be in direct conflict and bore the impression of having been devised hurriedly, almost on impulse the night before, depending on whether the strong men like Sandwich or the moderates like Dartmouth had been most persuasive in the Cabinet.
Strangely, in view of his former disgrace, Benjamin Franklin was pressed diplomatically to play the key role in an important unofficial peace move, during a series of chess games with the attractive sister of the Howe brothers. Vice Admiral Richard, Lord Howe and his younger brother, Major General William Howe, were celebrated more for their talents as fighting commanders than in politics. But they had some influence at court, and the general was even rumored to be the illegitimate son of George II.
Lord Howe had plans to lead a British commission to America to settle the dispute before events reached a point from which they could not be reversed—a move which, if successful, would carry a great deal of recognition.
He used his sister, Mrs. Caroline Howe, who was a skillful chess player, to act as intermediary. Friends the Howes had in common with Franklin, who was known to be especially fond of the game, extended the invitation.
She did not mention the subject until their second game. Then casually, according to Franklin, in the course of play, she asked: “What is to be done with this dispute between Great Britain and her colonies? I hope we are not to have a civil war.”
“They should kiss and make friends,” Franklin said with a smile.
“I have often said/’ she answered carefully, “that I wished Government would employ you to settle the dispute for them. . . .”
Apparently, Franklin’s answers encouraged her to go further, for on Christmas Eve, she introduced him to her elder brother. Lord Howe asked him if he would use his personal contacts to join him in seeking a peace formula.
Franklin agreed, though he was not optimistic, and even prepared a memorandum that was discussed with Dartmouth. But the King was not keen on the idea of a peace commission because “this looks like the Mother Country being more afraid of the continuance of the dispute than the colonies and I cannot think it likely to make them more reasonable.”
From the start, the basic attitude of George III was consistent. He demanded submission—nothing less. He was prepared on occasions to consider and even to go along with the idea of concessions, but his correspondence suggests a skepticism about this as a technique. Military force was the way to curb rebellion. “I entirely place my security in the protection of the Divine Dispenser of all things,” he told Lord North, implying complacently that God was on the side of kings, “and shall never look to the right or left but steadily pursue the track which my conscience dictates to be the right one.”
On January 2 the St. Lawrence reached England with Gage’s latest dispatches and news of extreme crisis. Now the government knew the worst. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress, aided and abetted from Philadelphia, had taken over the government of the province and was actively preparing for armed revolt. The angry mobs of September, uncertain and leaderless, were now being organized. Crude, perhaps, un-uniformed, barely armed, but an army for all that.
From then on, the government hard-liners dominated the Cabinet meetings. Dartmouth wrote to Gage ordering him that “now force was to be repelled with force.” In the early spring, when the weather permitted, big reinforcements, including a cavalry regiment, would be shipped to him.
The long-term plan was to give Gage a strength of 10,000 men—exactly half what he had asked for, but more than double what he already had—and he was ordered “to take a more active and determined part” than the defensive policy he had operated so far. And “the first essential step” was “to arrest and imprison the principal actors . . . in the Provincial Congress [Adams and Hancock].”
Meanwhile, across the park at St. James’s, the King was planning to strengthen the military command in Boston. To support Gage,4 who no longer seemed as tough as he had, the King planned to send out to Boston three major generals: William Howe, who had led the assault up the Plains of Abraham when Wolfe had stormed Quebec; “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, a flashy but competent cavalry commander who had eloped as a young officer with the daughter of the powerful Earl of Derby; and Sir Henry Clinton, a quiet somber man with a tendency to brood about the injustice of his superiors. “As you know,” Clinton wrote to a friend about his voyage with the other two generals, “I’m a shy bitch.”
All were to play vital leading roles in America, but the prickly Clinton, complaining all the time, was to be at the center of the conflict for virtually the entire period.
Howe went through the motions of resisting the appointment— because, as a Whig Member of Parliament, he had told his electors that he would. But when Dartmouth sounded him out through a joint friend, the report to the Colonial Office suggested that he was open to offers. “Is this a request or an order?” he asked when told of the appointment. All the signs indicated a sense of relief when he was told firmly that it was an order.
By then the opposition in Parliament to the British policy in America had hardened. Because of the King’s voting control, government critics could achieve little that was practical, but they were angrily persistent. In the Commons, Edmund Burke and Charles Fox, two of the most brilliant orators ever to speak in Parliament, lashed repeatedly into Lord North, attacking him for the crass failure of his policies and threatening him with a move to impeach him. In the Lords, the Marquess of Rockingham and the Duke of Richmond led a sustained attack on the government’s plans.
“We were promised,” taunted Fox, “that on the very appearance of troops, all was to be tranquility at Boston, yet so far from reducing the spirit of that people, these troops were . . . reduced to the most shameful situation. . . .”
“Your army,” sneered Burke, “is turned out to be a mere army of observation.”
The aim of the British Whigs was similar to that of the Americans, but their reasoning was different. The war, they declared, was one that could never be won. “It is obvious,” insisted Lord Camden in the House of Lords, “that you cannot furnish armies or treasure competent to the mighty purpose of subduing America.”
“What are your armies?” challenged the rakish John Wilkes, once expelled from the Commons but now back in full voice. “And how are they to be kept up and recruited? Do you recollect that the single province of Massachusetts Bay has at this moment 30,000 men well trained and disciplined? Do you not know that they can bring near 90,000 men into the field?” This was an exaggeration, but he had made his point.
Whig after Whig in both houses attacked the government for persisting so stubbornly with its tax rights in America. They argued that the benefit of trade, not tax, was the key to the situation. Estimating that there were already 2,000,000 European Americans, Burke insisted volubly that they were multiplying daily at an incredible rate. “Whilst we spend our time deliberating on the mode of governing two millions, we shall find we have millions more to manage. Your children do not grow faster from infancy to manhood than they spread from families to communities, and from villages to nations.”
The trade figures supported Burke’s argument. In 1704 Britain’s exports to North America and the West Indies had been less than £500,000. By 1772 they had soared to nearly £5,000,000. “The trade with America alone,” declared Burke, “is now nearly equal to what this great commercial nation, England, carried on at the beginning of this century with the whole world!”
British merchants were suffering under the American trade bans, and petitions were pouring into Parliament and St. James’s Palace from men who saw their profits diving. Burke himself sat for Bristol, a big port and commercial center. Wilkes was lord mayor of London, as well as one of the city’s MP’s. “Who can tell,” he forecast, “. . . should success attend them, whether in a few years the independent Americans may not celebrate the glorious era of the Revolution of 1775, as we do that of 1688?”
It was, however, the great Lord Chatham—who, as William Pitt, had directed British victorious wars against France and Spain—who made the biggest impact. Now old and crippled with gout, he hobbled into the upper chamber in black fur boots and submitted a peace plan. It had much in common with the proposal the Howes and Franklin had been working on: the dropping of taxation, the removal of troops and, of course, the repeal of the punitive acts that gripped Boston.
Tactfully, Dartmouth—speaking for the government—suggested that Chatham’s proposal should “lie on the table” for study. But immediately, his Cabinet colleague Sandwich was on his feet in strident protest. “I could never believe this bill to be the production of any British peer,” he snarled and turned to look at the “bar” of the House of Lords, where Benjamin Franklin, who had come as Chatham’s guest, was standing. “I fancy,” continued the First Lord, “I have in my eye the person who drew it up—one of the bitterest and most mischievous enemies this country has ever known.”5
Inevitably, Chatham’s bill was thrown out by a big majority, and for all the oratory in favor of the Americans, the voting during those early weeks of 1775 was overwhelmingly in favor of the government that was now pursuing the King’s tough policy. All the American governors had already been ordered to take every step they could to stop delegates from attending the second General Congress, scheduled for May. And, at home, North was doing what he did superbly—manipulating Parliament.
Through weeks of debate, bill after bill was steered through with big majority votes. Opposition amendments were stamped on. Petitions that urged peace negotiations were overridden. Massachusetts was declared to be in a state of rebellion. Parliament approved an increase in the size of the army.
Again and again the opposition attacked, but the government ministers stood their ground with a wooden stubbornness. When Lord Camden in the Lords insisted that the bill must involve a war that Britain could not win, Lord Sandwich was incredulous. “Suppose the colonies do abound in men, what does that signify?” he asked. “They are raw undisciplined cowardly men. . . . Believe me, my Lords, the very sound of a cannon would carry them off . . . as fast as their feet could carry them.”
The Commons, too, had been reassured about the frail courage of the Americans. Colonel James Grant, who had served across the Atlantic, insisted that “they would never dare to face an English Army.” Richard Rigby sneered at the whole opposition notion that the Americans might be goaded into bravery by despair, describing it as “an idea thrown out to frighten women and children.”
On April 5, after General Henry Conway had warned of “the horrors of a civil war,” Rigby still persisted in his confident belief in the deterrent of British troops in Boston. “The Americans,” he declared stoutly, “will not fight. They will never oppose General Gage with force of arms.”
It was an opinion that within days—twelve days to be exact—was to be challenged.