Читать книгу The British Are Coming - Rick Atkinson - Страница 10

The celebratory mood soon faded: the next eighteen months proved bleak. An American woman the king would never meet, a New Jersey Presbyterian named Jemima Condict, captured the prevailing distemper in the colonies when she wrote, “We have troublesome times a-coming for there is a great disturbance abroad in the earth & they say it is tea that caused it.”

Seventeen million pounds of troublesome tea, more than England consumed in a year, had accumulated mostly in warehouses along Lime and Fenchurch Streets, a short walk from the Tower of London. The East India Company, Britain’s largest mercantile enterprise, tottered toward bankruptcy, in part because too many Britons preferred cheaper tea provided by European smugglers. Even a new East India monopoly on Indian opium, to be peddled in China, could not compensate for the firm’s mismanagement, plus a depressed international market for tea. The company’s dire financial plight jeopardized the broader British economy.

Just before the king’s excursion to Portsmouth, an ingenious, ill-advised rescue plan had passed Parliament, hardly noticed by the London press. The Tea Act restructured the East India Company and gave it a monopoly on tea sold in America. The company could appoint its own American agents, eliminating the expense of British wholesalers; the tax of three pence per pound imposed under the Townshend Acts would be retained to again affirm Parliament’s authority, but other export duties were eliminated. The price of tea in America would drop by more than a third, selling for less than the smuggled Dutch, Danish, and Portuguese tea popular in the American market. Pleased by this windfall, the East India Company prepared two thousand lead-lined tea chests for shipment to New World ports.

Too clever by half, the plan infuriated both smugglers and American merchants now superseded by favored East India agents. It implied Parliament’s authority to create monopolies for other commodities and reawakened the fraught issue of taxation without representation. The cynical manipulation of colonial markets on behalf of British mercantile interests nudged American moderates toward common cause with radicals who deplored all British meddling in American affairs. In an attempt to stigmatize the beverage, one writer asserted that tea turned those who drank it into “weak, effeminate, and creeping valetudinarians.” English tea supposedly attracted insects, aggravated smallpox, and, a Boston physician insisted, caused “spasms, vapors, hypochondrias, apoplexies of the serious kind, palsies, and dropsies.”

Others took bolder measures. On the evening of December 16, 1773, a few dozen men said to be “dressed in the Indian manner,” their faces darkened by lampblack or charcoal, descended with war whoops down Milk Street in Boston to board three merchant ships moored at Griffin’s Wharf. Prying open the hatches, they used block and tackle to hoist from the holds hundreds of heavy chests containing forty-five tons of Bohea, Congou, Singlo, Souchong, and Hyson tea. For three hours they methodically smashed the lids and scooped the leaves into the harbor. Confederates in small boats used rakes and oars to scatter the floating piles, and by morning almost £10,000 worth of soggy brown flakes drifted in windrows from the wharf to Castle Island and the Dorchester shore. “The devil is in these people,” a British naval officer wrote after surveying the damage. But a local lawyer exulted. “This destruction of the tea,” John Adams declared, “is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid, & inflexible.” An equestrian silversmith named Paul Revere carried a detailed account of the event to New York and Philadelphia in the first of his famous gallops. The tea party, as this episode later was called, inspired the kind of doggerel that always annoyed the British: “Rally, Mohawks, bring out your axes, / And tell King George we’ll pay no taxes / On his foreign tea.”

“I am much hurt,” King George confessed when news of this outrage reached him in mid-January 1774. Sorrow soon yielded to anger. An American in London described “a great wrath” sweeping Britain, not least because although thousands had watched or participated at Griffin’s Wharf on the night of December 16, only one witness agreed to testify in court, and then only if the trial convened in London. Demands mounted for vengeance against Boston, “the metropolis of sedition,” including proposals that the town be reduced to salted ruins, like Carthage. The essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, known without affection as Dictionary Johnson, had already denounced the Americans as “a race of convicts, [who] ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” Now Dr. Johnson “breathed out threatenings and slaughter, calling them rascals, robbers, pirates, and exclaiming that he’d burn and destroy them,” his companion James Boswell recorded.

What should be done? Some merchants—potters and shoemakers in Staffordshire, the makers of fishing nets and lines in Bridport—signed petitions urging caution, for fear that the loss of American markets would cripple their businesses. The colonists bought up to 20 percent of British manufactured goods, but the market for certain commodities was much bigger—a quarter of British white salt and wrought brass, a third of refined sugar, tin, and worsted socks, half of wrought copper, glassware, and silk goods, and two-thirds to three-quarters of iron nails, English cordage, and beaver hats. The Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, at work on a sweeping study of political economy titled The Wealth of Nations, to be published in 1776, argued that Britain would be better off jettisoning her colonies. The New World was “not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine … mere loss instead of profit.” Confusion and uncertainty plagued the government, beset with conflicting reports and opinions. Was this challenge to British authority widespread or limited to a few scoundrels in New England? Was conciliation possible? Appeasement had failed after the Stamp and Townshend Acts—would violence now be necessary?

The king’s heart hardened. Spurning petitions and appeals from those pleading for moderation, he vowed in March 1774 to “stop the present disorders.” To Parliament he denounced “a dangerous spirit of resistance” in America among “my deluded subjects,” who, according to a new legal opinion by the British attorney general, were committing “the crime of high treason.” The troubles in Boston threatened “anarchy, the most terrible of all evils.”

George’s resolve helped his ministers rally around three critical assumptions, each of which proved false: that most colonists remained loyal to the Crown, notwithstanding troublemakers in Massachusetts capable of inciting a rabble; that firmness, including military firepower if necessary, would intimidate the obstreperous and restore harmony; and that failure to reassert London’s authority would eventually unstitch the empire, causing Britain to “revert to her primitive insignificancy in the map of the world,” as a member of the House of Commons warned.

Here, then, was the crux. The king and his men believed that British wealth and status derived from the colonies. The erosion of authority in America, followed by a loss of sovereignty, would encourage rebellions in Canada, Ireland, the Caribbean, India. Dominoes would topple. “Destruction must follow disunion,” the colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth, warned. With the empire dismembered, an impoverished Great Britain, no longer great, would invite “the scorn of Europe” and exploitation by enemies in France, Spain, and elsewhere. Those windrows of wet tea leaves foretold political and economic ruin.

From late March through June 1774, Parliament adopted four laws known collectively in Britain as the Coercive Acts (and later in America as the Intolerable Acts). The first was punitive: Boston’s port must close until the cost of the ruined tea was paid to the East India Company. The other laws tightened British control over Massachusetts by converting an elected council into one appointed by the governor, by restricting town meetings and jury selection, and by permitting royal officials accused of serious crimes to be tried in England or another colony. British troops would return to Boston under a commander in chief who would also serve as the royal governor.

With exquisitely bad timing, in June Parliament passed another sweeping law, one that colonists assumed was part of the tea party retaliation but that in fact had taken years to craft. The Quebec Act replaced military rule in newly acquired Canada with an autocratic civilian government, while legitimizing the Catholic Church’s authority and vastly extending the provincial boundaries west and south, to the rich territory between the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. The empowerment of popery enraged Protestant New Englanders, who for more than a century had battled French Catholics and their Indian allies; colonists from New York through the Carolinas, keen to expand west of the Appalachians, were likewise infuriated at being confined to the Atlantic seaboard.

“The die is now cast,” George wrote. “The colonies must either submit or triumph. We must not retreat.”

The die was indeed cast. Despite London’s hope of isolating Boston as a pariah, indignation and resentment swept the colonies. The Coercive Acts and the Quebec Act galvanized American resistance, empowering the radicals and further converting neutrals and moderates to a cause now touched with fire. Rather than shun those who staged the tea party, towns in New England and as far south as Charleston sent food, firewood, and money to sustain Boston when the port closed in June.

In September, fifty-five delegates from a dozen colonies—Georgia remained ambivalent—gathered in Philadelphia, emboldened enough to call themselves the Continental Congress. Not only did they endorse resistance to the Coercive Acts, the delegates also agreed to halt trade with the British Empire over the coming months. Imports and exports would be forbidden in an escalating economic campaign intended to pressure London by hurting British merchants, manufacturers, and consumers. Elected committees of safety and inspection “in every county, city, and town” were to enforce this agreement on retaliatory trade restrictions, known as the Association. Civic virtue would be measured by a colonist’s refusal to consume British goods or trade with the mother country; transgressors were to be publicly shamed, or worse. The Association committees—revolutionary and robust—drew an estimated seven thousand Americans into political office for the first time. At the same time, American militia leaders had begun stockpiling gunpowder and other munitions.

“A most daring spirit of resistance and disobedience” had infected the colonies, George told Parliament that November, with “fresh violences of a very criminal nature.” As captain general and first soldier of the empire, the king would do what was necessary to compel obedience from over two million recalcitrant subjects, even if they lived three thousand miles away in a country six times larger than England. What he would call his “great lenity” toward the Americans had been a mistake; he would not make it again. “I am not sorry that the line of conduct seems now chalked out,” he wrote his chief minister, Lord North, in a note dated “48 minutes past midnight” on November 18. “Blows must decide.”

London on the march toward war was much like London at peace—aggressive, vivid, and alive with animal spirits. Cockfights and bearbaiting remained popular, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays. Raucous crowds assembled on January 10, 1775, to see six criminals—four burglars and two thieves—trundled in carts down Oxford Street to the Tyburn gallows. Another eight were condemned to death that week in an Old Bailey courtroom, among them a defendant who stole sixpence from a farm boy. The British penal code listed nearly two hundred capital crimes, including such heinous offenses as demolishing fishponds and wandering at night with one’s face blackened, not unlike the tea party hooligans in Boston. Tyburn’s hangman would rarely be idle.

The largest city in the Western world now held three-quarters of a million souls, and what a din they made: the bawl of balladmongers, knife grinders, itinerant musicians, and pleading beggars, some with rented babies on their hips; the clop and clatter of hooves and iron-wheeled carts on paving stones; the tinkling bells of scavenger drays; the cries of Thames ferrymen and higglers selling flowers, or apples, or jellied eels, or quack potions. Watchmen known as Charlies—the office dated to Charles II’s reign—called out the hour when clocks struck, proclaiming good weather or bad. With noise came the stink of sea coal and wood smoke and thick effusions from smithies, dyers’ yards, and earthenware kilns. Pigs, chickens, and cows lived in cellars with their owners, and streets served as open sewers for tripe dressers, sausage makers, and the offal of catgut spinners.

The city had 42 markets and countless public houses, including, by one later tally, 55 Swans, 90 King’s Heads, 120 Lions, but only 1 Good Man; the author Tobias Smollett claimed a man could get drunk for a penny and dead drunk for tuppence. Among the estimated ten thousand prostitutes, streetwalkers worked the Strand or the alleys near Covent Garden, where higher-priced courtesans preened in bay windows on the piazza and men paid to be flogged by women known as “posture molls.” Freaks and frauds peopled the metropolis: a certain Mary Tofts who supposedly gave birth to rabbits, an armless man who shaved with his foot, a Scot who broke glasses with a mighty shout, and shopkeepers who sold donkey as mutton and white bread kneaded with chalk or bone ash. But mostly it was a city that toiled hard: clerks and barbers, merchants and printers, coal heavers and coppersmiths with their beards stained green. If not already the world’s greatest metropolis, London was working to earn that laurel.

For those whose carriages and sedan chairs kept them above such hurly-burly, the queen’s birthday, on January 18, marked the traditional opening of London’s social season, with Parliament scheduled to convene the following day. Charlotte had been an obscure, drab German princess in 1761 when George chose her sight unseen to be his queen. During the voyage across the North Sea to Britain she took English lessons and learned to play “God Save the King” on the harpsichord; they were wed in St. James’s Palace six hours after her arrival. At his instruction, the marriage bedroom decor included seven hundred yards of blue damask, a mahogany four-poster with five mattresses, and large glass basins of goldfish. The happy union proved fecund—she produced children with lunar regularity, eventually to number fifteen—and her birthday was always cause for carefully orchestrated jubilation at St. James’s.

A peal of bells marked the day, with an oration by the archbishop of Canterbury and an ode by a royal chorus. The poet laureate scribbled verse to fill up strophes, antistrophes, and various declamations on Charlotte’s virtues. The Tower guns fired at one p.m., and illuminations brightened Westminster; those at the French ambassador’s house were exceptionally radiant, a tribute, it was said, from Queen Marie Antoinette as a gesture of royal sisterhood. But it was the birthday ball that had kept West End milliners, mantua makers, and bespoke shoe cobblers in a stitching frenzy for weeks.

The evening began badly. A fine day turned wet, and churning fog limited the visibility around St. James’s to five yards. Even footmen wielding white wands could not prevent the collision of several coaches, with bones broken and horses entangled. Constables spotted seven suspected pickpockets sidling through the pandemonium, and marched them off to Bridewell Prison. The guests soldiered on, rescuing the night through determined elegance. Pigmented ceruse rouged the cheeks, and wigs were powdered to make the eyes appear brighter, an effect enhanced by false eyebrows made from mouse skins, which were applied with gum. “The dresses were splendid and magnificent, much beyond anything I had ever before seen,” one foreign visitor wrote. “The queen appears amiable.” Of 177 peers of the realm, including 23 dukes and 77 earls, a gratifying number strode through the fog to attend their amiable queen, who wore a new diamond stomacher over her brocaded gown, with matching necklace and earrings. The minuets began at nine p.m. and continued for two hours, followed by country dances. The Morning Chronicle would assure its readers that “more brilliants were never there at one time than was seen last night.”

The king, regal in a suit of blue velvet trimmed in silver, appeared to be a happy man. Few knew that George’s good spirits derived not only from a successful fête for his queen, but from hopes that a decisive strategy had emerged to crush the American insurgency once and for all. During secret meetings this week at offices in Cleveland Row, a narrow street behind St. James’s, cabinet ministers—heeding their monarch’s sensible request for “a general plan”—drafted a scheme to send more regiments, warships, cash, and marines to Boston, along with instructions for hunting down insurgent leaders. But first, Parliament would have to agree.

For more than two hundred years, the House of Commons had met in St. Stephen’s Chapel, built within the palace of Westminster in the twelfth century for the monarch’s private worship. Window glass depicted biblical stories. Peacock feathers and squirrels’ tails had been used to paint angels on the walls and saints around the altar; white down plucked from the breasts of royal swans was daubed in paint to inflect the high blue ceiling with thousands of gold stars. When Henry VIII shifted to a new palace at Whitehall, old choir stalls became members’ benches, a Speaker’s chair replaced the altar, whitewash covered the wall paintings, and the spangled ceiling was lowered to improve the acoustics. Architect Christopher Wren added galleries above the debating chamber, which was smaller than a tennis court. The hall retained an ecclesiastical air, even as parliamentarians cracked nuts, peeled oranges, or wandered out through the lobby for a game of whist and a glass of Madeira.

On January 19, when the Commons reconvened after the Christmas holiday, members as usual were packed like sprats in a tin. With a thud, a clerk dropped 149 documents on a central table, announced that they were “papers relating to the disturbances in North America,” and in a somber tone began to read the titles of each: Royal Navy dispatches from American waters; seditious extracts from the Continental Congress; reports written by royal officials from New Hampshire to Georgia; official correspondence from London to colonial governors.

Slouched on the Treasury bench to the right of the Speaker’s chair, a corpulent, round-shouldered figure listened as the recitation droned on, his eyelids so heavy that he appeared to be dozing. Thick-lipped, with both brow and chin receding, he was said to have a tongue “too large for his mouth” and “prominent eyes that rolled about to no purpose.” No matter: Lord Frederick North, a man without vanity who referred to himself as “an old hulk,” was always pleased to be underestimated.

In the first decade of George III’s reign, six men held the office of prime minister, better known at the time as chief or first minister. They had little in common other than slender competency and an unsteady handling of Parliament. In 1770 the king turned to a childhood playmate—he and North had acted together in a schoolboy production of Joseph Addison’s Cato—and a political partnership began that would endure through a dozen difficult years. George knew he had his man when he wrote North just a few months into his new chief minister’s tenure, pleading for £13,000 in cash by day’s end because of “a most private and delicate” need—the Duke of Cumberland had successfully sued the king’s younger brother after catching him in flagrante delicto with his wife. North replied within hours that he had “no doubt of being able to procure the sum desired … in such a manner to keep it as much out of sight as possible.” George answered, “This takes a heavy load off of me.”

Even his adversaries adored North, a man “of infinite wit and pleasantry,” as one admitted. A diplomat added, “It was impossible to experience dullness in his society.” Now forty-two, the son of an earl, he was a gifted Greek and Latin scholar, adept in French, German, and Italian, with an adhesive memory, a youthful delight in the absurd, and “a temperament completely free from irascibility,” as one admirer observed. A happy husband and a doting father to six children, he was generous, companionable, and honest. “He kept his hands clean and empty,” a colleague wrote, while another noted, “What he did, he did without a mask.” North held a constituency in Banbury with fewer than two dozen eligible voters, who routinely reelected him after being plied with punch and cheese, and who were then rewarded with a haunch of venison.

Capable of reciting budget statistics for hours without consulting a note, he supervised national finance as head of the Treasury Board. Deft in debate, North was the principal defender of government policy in the Commons. In the past year he had delivered more than a hundred speeches on various measures, most of them harsh, relating to America. Many more such speeches lay ahead.

Ahead, too, lay calamity. By his own recent acknowledgment, North was “fond of indolence and a retired life.” Averse to confrontation and an instinctive conciliator, he was given to melancholy and indecision. Now he was fated to be a war minister, with his king’s empire in the balance. He could talk tough, as in his claim that “America must fear you before they will love you” or his assurance to the Commons that “four or five frigates” could close Boston Harbor because “the militia of Boston were no match for the force of this country.” Yet colleagues sensed that his heart was not in it; he lacked, one said, the requisite “despotism and violence of temper.” His confession that “upon military matters I speak ignorantly, and therefore without effect” revealed his ambivalence.

Devoted to George, he would stay the course set by his monarch, a vessel for the king’s obstinacy. A loyal friend though perhaps not a good one, he reinforced His Majesty’s narrow attitudes rather than gently widening his vision. It was North, after all, who in 1770 had said, “I can never acquiesce in the absurd notion that all men are equal.” Now, with his stack of 149 documents as proof of American perfidy, he would seek Parliament’s agreement to force submission.

The first obstacle arose in the other chamber, the House of Lords, which met nearby in a medieval hall at the south end of the Westminster warren. On January 20, William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, the venerable statesman and strategist who had engineered Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War, rose to his feet to denounce the government’s folly and to demand withdrawal of British troops from Boston. “He seemed like an old Roman senator,” a witness in the gallery reported, “rising with the dignity of age, yet speaking with the fire of youth.” Chatham’s long decline, physical and mental, was well advanced—he called himself “the scarecrow of violence”—but he knew his mind in urging reconciliation with the Americans. “All attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation must be in vain,” he warned. “We shall be forced, ultimately, to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must.” France and Spain, he told the peers, “are watching your conduct, and waiting for the maturity of your errors.” He continued:

My lords, there is no time to be lost. Every moment is big with dangers.… The very first drop of blood will make a wound that will not easily be skinned over.

The old lion’s eloquence changed few minds; his motion lost 68 to 18. Ten days later, Chatham would try again with a proposal to designate Congress as a lawful entity and to suspend the Coercive Acts, with complete repeal to follow upon American acknowledgment of Parliament’s authority. Once again a heavy majority defeated the bill. Chatham wrote his wife that the government seemed “violent beyond expectation, almost to madness.”

To Lord North’s satisfaction, the House of Commons proved no less bellicose. American insurgents were “an enemy in the bowels of the kingdom,” one member insisted. Another who had seen military service in America during the last war assured his colleagues that five thousand British regulars could march through the colonies unhindered; Americans, “of a pusillanimous disposition, and utterly incapable of any sort of order or discipline,” would “never dare to face an English army.” It helped the government’s cause that roughly a hundred members of the Commons were past or current military officers, reliably loyal. It also helped that North had spent £50,000 from a Treasury slush fund in the 1774 election to buy a couple dozen seats for other pliant candidates. Further, the king had purchased additional loyalty by sprinkling lucrative sinecures and patronage appointments among members of both houses, including eleven grooms of the bedchamber, a master of the jewel office, a master falconer, an usher of the exchequer, rangers of the royal forests, seven equerries, and various masters of the harriers, buckhounds, and staghounds. “This Parliament,” observed the writer Horace Walpole, the son of a former prime minister, “appeared to be even more corrupt and servile than the two last.”

At two-thirty a.m. on February 7, the Commons by a vote of 288 to 105 supported North’s proposal to ask the king to declare Massachusetts in rebellion, and to take all measures needed to bring American insurgents to heel. “If they would submit and leave us the constitutional right of supremacy,” North said, “the quarrel would be at an end.” The Lords followed suit, 104 to 29, at one-forty a.m. the following morning. Among new members voting with the Commons majority was an elfin man with a double chin and a squat nose who in his study on Bentinck Street was writing a great saga, the first volume of which would soon be published as The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Few parliamentarians would be as steadfast for the Crown as Edward Gibbon. “We have both the right and the power on our side,” he had told a friend a week earlier. “We are now arrived at the decisive moment of preserving, or of losing forever, both our trade and empire.” Yet few would be as reflective, as when he later conceded, “I took my seat at the beginning of the memorable contest between Great Britain and America, and supported with many a sincere and silent vote, the rights, though not perhaps the interest, of the mother country.” For now, a few hours after casting his vote, Gibbon wrote, “With firmness, all may go well. Yet I sometimes doubt.”

The king had no doubts. Parliament’s resolve “ought to open the eyes of the deluded Americans,” he wrote North on the morning of Wednesday, February 8. “But if it does not, it must set every delicate man at liberty to avow the propriety of the most coercive measures.” Beyond majority votes in both houses, George wanted a theatrical, public display of support. A few hours later, he again wrote North to propose “a large attendance” at St. James’s the next day. Hundreds from the Commons and the Lords were to make the short journey to the palace, as a group, to demonstrate unity. “I therefore hope,” he added, “you will insinuate the propriety of this.”

Shortly before three p.m. on Thursday, braving a blustery wind from the southwest, Parliament picked a path through the willows and poplars of St. James’s Park to the red brick octagonal towers of that “irregular pile,” as one critic described the palace. The London Gazette would report that “there never was known so many of the bishops and peers to attend an address to His Majesty.… There was also the greatest number of commoners ever known on a like occasion.” Not far from the hearth inscribed with the initials of Henry VIII and his doomed queen Anne Boleyn, the king listened as Parliament’s petition was read aloud:

We find that a part of your Majesty’s subjects in the province of the Massachusetts Bay have proceeded so far to resist the authority of the supreme legislature, that a rebellion at this time actually exists.… We consider it as our indispensable duty, humbly to beseech your Majesty that you will take the most effectual measures to enforce due obedience to the laws and authority of the supreme legislature.

George was nearsighted, and some faces around the room were blurry as he read his brief reply, composed with North’s help:

You may depend on my taking the most speedy and effectual measures for enforcing due obedience to the laws.… It is my ardent wish that this disposition may have a happy effect on the temper and conduct of my subjects in America.

Events now moved swiftly. That very day the king ordered several regiments in Ireland to prepare for “foreign service.” On Friday, North introduced another bill, this one to prevent all New England colonies from trading with any foreign nations and to exclude them from the world’s richest fishing grounds, in the North Atlantic. That measure would again muster large majorities. A few days later, Parliament approved hiring another two thousand sailors for the navy; the government also requested money for an extra 4,400 soldiers, with the intention of expanding the army in America to almost 11,000. In recent weeks, the king had considered ousting the military commander there, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, on suspicion of insufficient grit; instead he chose to send three young major generals to stiffen Gage’s spine. He told North to give each an extra £500 before they sailed—“they have behaved so very properly and are so poor.” Whatever Gage’s shortcomings, North knew that nearly all of the forty-five generals senior to him, some in their eighties, lacked the vigor, the experience, or the bloody-mindedness to take command in Boston. “I do not know whether our generals will frighten the enemy,” he supposedly quipped, “but I know that they frighten me.”

Still, the king felt sure of his course. To North he wrote on February 15, at precisely 10:06 a.m.: “I entirely place my security in the protection of the Divine Disposer of All Things, and shall never look to the right or left but steadily pursue the track which my conscience dictates to be the right one.”