Читать книгу The British Are Coming - Rick Atkinson - Страница 9

At three-thirty a.m. on June 22, 1773, fifteen minutes before sunrise, a royal chaise pulled by four matched horses burst from the gates of Kew Palace, escorted by cavalry outriders in scarlet coats. South they rode, skirting the Thames valley west of London before rattling onto the Surrey downs. Pearly light seeped into the landscape, and the brilliant green of an English summer day—the first full day following the solstice—emerged from the fens and fields. Even at this early hour the roads were crowded, for all England knew that a great review was planned at the royal dockyards in Portsmouth, a four-day celebration of the fleet that a decade before had crushed France and Spain in the Seven Years’ War to give rise to the British Empire. An exasperated message to the Admiralty headquarters in London earlier this week had warned of “it being almost impossible to get horses on the road owing to the multitude of people going to Portsmouth.” That throng, according to a newspaper account, included “admirals, captains, and honest Jack Tars in abundance … courtiers and parasites, placemen and pensioners, pimps and prostitutes, gamblers and pickpockets.” Innkeepers on the south coast were said to demand ten guineas a night for a bed.

The king himself, a demon for details, had choreographed this seven-hour journey from Kew, arranging the postilions, footmen, and grooms like chess pieces. He had calculated the distance and duration of each leg along the sixty-three-mile route, writing memoranda in his looping, legible hand, adorned only with a delicate filigree of ink that rose from each final lowercase d—as in “God”—to snake back across the paper like a fly fisherman’s line. Nine relays of horses waited along the route in places called Ripley and Godalming, but none at Lotheby Manor on the Portsmouth road, perhaps because an ancient English custom required that if a monarch visited Lotheby, the lord of the manor was “to present His Majesty with three whores.” Or so the London Chronicle claimed.

Bells pealed in welcome as the cavalcade rolled into Hampshire. Country folk stood before their rude cottages, some in farm frocks and red cloaks, some in their Sunday finery, though it was Tuesday. All strained for a glimpse of the man who sat alone with his thoughts in the chaise: George William Frederick, or, as he had been proclaimed officially upon ascending the throne in 1760, “George III, by the grace of God, king of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, defender of the faith, and so forth.” (The claim to France was a bit of nostalgia dating to the fourteenth century.) Below Petersfield, the crowds thickened, spilling along the chalky ridges above the roadbed, and when George emerged from his carriage for a five-minute pause at Portsdown Hill, five thousand people bayed their approval while he admired the vista of the harbor below and the sapphire anchorage that stretched across to the Isle of Wight.

Half an hour later, a royal salute of twenty-one guns sounded from Portsea Bridge. Just after ten a.m. the White Boys, local burghers dressed entirely in white, cleared a lane for the king’s chaise through the throng at Landport Gate. More salutes greeted him, including a triple discharge from 232 guns on Portsmouth’s ramparts in a mighty cannonade heard sixty miles away. When the jubilant crowd pressed close, soldiers from the 20th Regiment prodded them back with bayonets until George urged caution. “My people,” he said, “will not hurt me.”

Most of his cabinet ministers had traveled from London, along with Privy Council members and a royal household contingent of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, who had been advised to bring ample spirits of lavender to calm the jittery. Dense ranks of army and navy officers, along with Portsmouth’s better sort, jammed a public levee at the Governor’s House in hopes of kissing the king’s hand. A prayer that “the fleet may ever prove victorious” was followed by a recitation of “The Wooden Walls of England,” a new, four-stanza tribute to the navy: “Hail, happy isle!… Spread then thy sails where naval glory calls, / Britain’s best bulwarks are her wooden walls.”

Then it was off to see those wooden walls. At one-thirty p.m., draped in a crimson boat cloak adorned with an enormous star of the Order of the Garter, George stepped aboard his ten-oar barge for the three-mile trip to Spithead anchorage. A flotilla trailed in his wake, filled to the gunwales with nobility, gentry, and sea dogs in blue and braid; the procession included the venerable Fubbs—the word was slang for chubby—a yacht named for a favorite mistress of Charles II’s. A gentle June breeze riffled the sea, and in the clear sunshine five hundred vessels large and small could be seen all around: brigs, corvettes, wherries, schooners, frigates, sloops.

Most imposing were twenty ships of the line moored in two facing ranks along five miles of roadstead. Each wore new paint, their bowsprits steeved at a pugnacious tilt of thirty-six degrees above the horizon, their sterns boasting names like Royal Oak, Centaur, Terrible, and Triumph. Some six thousand crewmen crowded their decks, and as the king drew near, fourteen hundred guns opened in another thunderous salute, salvo upon salvo. At last the cannonade stopped, the great gouts of smoke drifted off, and each vessel hoisted its colors, a bright riot of pendants and banners; four hundred flags fluttered from Kent alone. Spectators lined the walls in Portsmouth and along the promenade in adjacent Gosport, where alehouse keepers had erected canvas booths to sell fried sausages and shilling lumps of veal and ham. Now the crowds pressed to the water’s edge, delirious with pride, and their roar carried to the king’s ear, still ringing from all those guns.

As he braced himself in the rocking barge, he looked the part, this king, all silk and fine brocade, “tall and full of dignity,” as one observer recorded, “his countenance florid and good-natured.” At thirty-five, George had the round chin and long nose of his German forebears, with fine white teeth and blue eyes that bulged from their orbits. He had been a sickly baby, not expected to survive infancy; now he incessantly touted “air, moderate exercise, and diet,” and he could often be found on horseback in pursuit of stag or hare. Not for another fifteen years would he be stricken with the first extended symptoms—perhaps caused by porphyria, a hereditary affliction—that included abdominal pain, neuritis, incoherence, paranoia, and delirium. More attacks followed later in his life, along with the madness that wrecked his old age.

Unkind and untrue things often were said of him, such as the claim that he could not read until age eleven; in fact, at a much younger age he could read and write in both English and German. There was no denying that he was an awkwardly shy boy, “silent, modest, and easily abashed,” as a courtier observed. In 1758 a tutor described the prince at twenty, noting traits that would bear more than a passing resemblance to the adult king: “He has rather too much attention to the sins of his neighbor.… He has great command of his passions, and will seldom do wrong except when he mistakes wrong for right.” Still, in the past decade or so he had grown into an admirable man of parts—diligent, dutiful, habitually moderate, peevish but rarely bellicose. Not easily duped, he had what one duchess called “a wonderful way of knowing what is going forward.” He was frugal in an age of excess, pious at a time of impiety. His interests ranged from physics and theology to horticulture and astronomy—he had built the Royal Observatory at Richmond to view the transit of Venus in 1769—and his tastes ran from high to low: Handel, Shakespeare, silly farces that brought his hearty guffaw ringing from the royal box. His sixty-five thousand books would stock the British national library.

Even his idiosyncrasies could be endearing. Until blindness overtook him in the early 1800s, George served as his own secretary, meticulously dating his correspondence with both the day of the month and the precise time, to the very minute. He copied out his own recipes for cough syrup (rosemary, rice, vinegar, brown sugar, all “boiled in silver”) and insecticide (wormwood, vinegar, lime, swine’s fat, quicksilver). He kept critical notes on dramatic actors—“had a formal gravity in his mien, and a piercing eye” or “more manly than elegant, of the middle stature, inclining to corpulency.” He would personally decide which English worthies should get the pairs of kangaroos brought home by an expedition to Australia. Increasingly his conversational style inclined to repetitive exclamation: “What! What! What!” or “Sad accident! Sad accident!” His compulsion for detail drew him into debates on the proper placement of straps on Foot Guards uniforms.

Unlike the two German-born Georges who preceded him—the House of Hanover had been tendered the throne at Westminster in 1714, when Britain was desperate for a Protestant monarch—this George was thoroughly English. “Born and educated in this country,” he proclaimed, “I glory in the name of Britain.” The three requirements of a British king came easily to him: to shun Roman Catholicism, to obey the law, and to acknowledge Parliament, which gave him both an annual income of £800,000 and an army. Under reforms of the last century, he could not rule by edict but, rather, needed the cooperation of his ministers and both houses of Parliament. He saw himself as John Bull, the frock-coated, commonsensical embodiment of this sceptered isle, while acknowledging that “I am apt to despise what I am not accustomed to.”

There was the rub. Unkind things were sometimes said of him, and not all were untrue. George disliked disorder, and he loathed disobedience. He had an inflexible attachment to his own prejudices, with, one biographer later wrote, “the pertinacity that marks little minds of all ranks.” His “unforgiving piety,” in the phrase of a contemporary, caused him to resist political concession and to impute moral deficiencies to his opponents. He bore grudges.

He saw himself as both a moral exemplar and the guardian of British interests—a thankless task, given his belief that he lived in “the wickedest age that ever was seen.” Royal duty required that he help the nation avoid profligacy and error. He was no autocrat, but his was the last word; absent strong, countervailing voices from his ministers, his influence would be paramount, particularly with respect to, say, colonial policy.

His obstinacy derived not only from a mulish disposition but from sincere conviction: the empire, so newly congealed, must not melt away. George had long intended to rule as well as reign, and as captain general of Britain’s armed forces, he took great pride in reciting the capital ships in his navy, in scribbling endless lists of regiments and army generals, in knowing the strong points of Europe’s fortified towns and the soundings of naval ports and how many guns the Royal Artillery deployed in America. He was, after all, defender not only of the faith but of the realm. In recent sittings for portrait painters, he had begun to wear a uniform.

And if his subjects cheered him to the echo, why should they not? Theirs was the greatest, richest empire since Rome. Britain was ascendant, with mighty revolutions—agrarian and industrial—well under way. A majority of all European urban growth in the first half of the century had occurred in England; that proportion was now expanding to nearly three-quarters, with the steam engine patented in 1769 and the spinning jenny a year later. Canals were cut, roads built, highwaymen hanged, coal mined, iron forged. Sheep would double in weight during the century; calf weights tripled. England and Wales now boasted over 140,000 retail shops. A nation of shopkeepers had been born.

War had played no small role. Since the end of the last century, Britain had fought from Flanders and Germany to Iberia and south Asia. Three dynastic, coalition wars against France and her allies, beginning in 1689, ended indecisively. A fourth—the Seven Years’ War—began so badly that the sternest measures had been taken aboard the Monarch in these very waters. Here on March 14, 1757, Admiral John Byng, convicted by court-martial of “failing to do his utmost” during a French attack on Minorca, had been escorted in a howling gale to a quarterdeck sprinkled with sawdust to absorb his blood. Sailors hoisted aboard a coffin already inscribed with his name. Dressed in a light gray coat, white breeches, and a white wig, Byng knelt on a cushion and removed his hat. After a pardonable pause, he dropped a handkerchief from his right hand to signal two ranks of marines with raised muskets. They fired. Voltaire famously observed that he died “pour encourager les autres.”

The others had indeed been encouraged. The nation’s fortunes soon reversed. Triumphant Britain massed firepower in her blue-water fleet and organized enough maritime mobility to transport assault troops vast distances, capturing strongholds from Quebec and Havana to Manila in what would also be called the Great War for the Empire. British forces routed the French in the Caribbean, Africa, India, and especially North America, with help from American colonists. “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories,” one happy Briton reported.

Spoils under the Treaty of Paris in 1763 were among the greatest ever won by force of arms. From France, Britain took Canada and half a billion fertile acres between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, plus several rich islands in the West Indies and other prizes. Spain ceded Florida and the Gulf Coast. Britain emerged with the most powerful navy in history and the world’s largest merchant fleet, some eight thousand sail. The royal dockyards, of which Portsmouth was preeminent, had become both the nation’s largest employer and its most sophisticated industrial enterprise.

“There shall be a Christian, universal, and perpetual peace,” the treaty had declared, “as well by sea as by land.” In time, none of that would hold true. Yet for now, Britain cowed her rivals and dominated Europe’s trade with Asia, Africa, and North America. “I felt a completion of happiness,” the Scottish diarist James Boswell had recently exclaimed. “I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind.” This year another writer, George Macartney, would coin a more dignified phrase, a paean to “this vast empire, on which the sun never sets.”

The king had agreed to dine that June afternoon aboard the ninety-gun Barfleur, and as he clambered to the weather deck, sailors hoisted his royal standard to the main topmast head. A boatswain tweeted a silver whistle, kettledrums rumbled, the marine guard snapped to attention, and every ship in the fleet loosed another twenty-one-gun salute. George adored his navy, over three hundred warships scattered across the seven seas, and with Barfleur cleared for action, he took time to poke about.

More than two thousand mature oaks had been felled to build a ship like this, the biggest, most complex machine in the eighteenth-century world, the steam engine and spinning jenny be damned. The king admired the massive oak balks, the knees chopped from tree forks, the thick planks wider than a big man’s handspan, the gun decks painted bright red to lessen the psychological shock of blood spilled in battle. Twenty or more miles of rope had been rigged in a loom of shrouds, ratlines, stays, braces, and halyards. Masts, yards, spars, tops, and crosstrees rose overhead in geometric elegance. Even at anchor this wooden world sang, as timbers pegged and jointed, dovetailed and mortised, emitted creaks, groans, and squeals. Belowdecks, where each sailor got twenty-eight inches of sleeping width for his hammock, the powder monkeys wore felt slippers to avoid creating sparks in the magazine. The smells of tar, hemp, pine pitch, and varnish mingled with the brine of bilgewater and vinegar fumigant and the hog-lard pomade sailors used to grease their queues. All in all, it was the precise odor of empire.

Thirty dining companions joined George around a horseshoe table. The royal cook had lugged the king’s plate and silver from St. James’s Palace, along with seemingly enough linen to give Barfleur a new suit of sails. For nearly three hours they feasted on thirty-one covers, billed as “soups, removes of fish, removes of roasts, pies,” then more “roasts, pastry, aspics, blancmanges, and jellies,” followed by fruit, ices, and compotes. The libations carted to Portsmouth were no less prodigious: 5,580 bottles of wine and 1,140 bottles of rum, arrack, brandy, beer, and cider.

At six p.m., the assembled guests toasted Queen Charlotte’s health, and by custom, after the king left the table, they drank to his health, too. Again aboard his barge, he passed down the double line of ships. Each company gave three cheers and separate gun salutes. When his oarsmen pulled for Portsmouth, the dockyard cannons barked again, joined by ringing bells. Farthing candles stuck in saucers and gallipots illuminated every window in town. George would later declare that he had never had a finer day.

The king was quartered in a quiet, well-aired house within the dockyards, his bedstead, sheets, and a few sticks of furniture sent from London. That evening he was again alone with his thoughts, except for three aides in adjacent rooms, servants in the garret, and a hundred soldiers of the Foot Guards patrolling outside. An elegant model of the 104-gun Victory had been placed in the sitting room for his pleasure.

James Boswell might hug himself in happiness, but uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. George knew very well that victory in war and a decade of empire building brought complications. New territories had to be absorbed and organized, both for defense and for the profit of the mother country. Did London have the wit to manage these vast holdings, scattered across five continents? Britain now owned thirty separate colonies in the New World alone, with almost two thousand slave plantations growing sugarcane in the West Indies. Emigration from the British Isles, higher this year than ever, had become “epidemical amongst the most useful of our people,” an official warned; in just fifteen years, 3 percent of Scotland’s population and almost as many Irish had bolted for the New World in what one Scot called “America madness.” The empire was both a political construct and a business enterprise—colonies existed to enhance imperial grandeur by providing raw materials and buying British goods—so the “disease of wandering,” as Dr. Samuel Johnson dubbed this migration, was unnerving. And, of course, the Treaty of Paris had left various European powers aggrieved if not humiliated, with smoldering resentments among the Prussians, the Spanish, the Dutch, and, most of all, the French. After the treaty was signed, Britain would remain bereft of European allies for a quarter century.

Then there was debt: the Great War for the Empire had cost £100 million, much of it borrowed, and the country was still strapped for money. There had been fearful, if exaggerated, whispers of national bankruptcy. With the British debt now approaching a quarter billion pounds, interest payments devoured roughly half of the £12 million collected in yearly tax revenue. Britons were already among Europe’s most heavily taxed citizens, with ever-larger excise fees on soap, salt, candles, paper, carriages, male servants, racehorses—often 25 percent or more of an item’s value. The cost of this week’s extravaganza in Portsmouth—estimated at £22,000—would not help balance the books.

It had seemed only fair that the colonists should help shoulder the burden. A typical American, by Treasury Board calculations, paid no more than sixpence a year in Crown taxes, compared to the average Englishman’s twenty-five shillings—a ratio of one to fifty—even as Americans benefited from eradication of the French and Spanish threats, from the protection of trade by the Royal Navy, and from British regiments keeping peace along the Indian frontier at a cost that soon exceeded £400,000 a year. Yet things had gone badly. The Stamp Act, adopted in 1765, taxed paper in the colonies, from playing cards and pamphlets to wills, newspapers, and tax receipts. Americans reacted by terrorizing British revenue officers—stamp agents in the thirteen colonies reportedly collected a total of £45, all of it in Georgia—and by boycotting imports so ferociously that some British factories closed, idling thousands. Repeal of the act in March 1766 triggered drunken revels from Boston to Savannah, with fireworks, much bad celebratory verse, and, in New York, the commissioning of a huge equestrian statue of George III, the “best of kings,” tricked up as Marcus Aurelius.

English workers in places like Sheffield and Birmingham also cheered, but the best of kings had doubts. “I am more and more grieved at the accounts in America,” he had grumbled in December 1765. “Where this spirit will end is not to be said.” Two years later, the government tried again with the Townshend Acts, named for a witty, rambunctious chancellor of the exchequer known as “Champagne Charlie.” Import duties on lead, glass, paint, and other commodities provoked another violent American reaction, with British exports to the colonies plummeting by half. To maintain order, in 1768 the government dispatched four regiments to fractious Boston; that, too, turned sour in March 1770, when skittish troops fired into a street mob, killing five. Two soldiers were convicted of manslaughter—their thumbs so branded—and the regiments discreetly decamped from town, including “the Vein Openers,” as Bostonians called the 29th Regiment troops involved in “the Massacre.” That spring, Britain repealed all Townshend duties except for the trifling tax on tea, left intact to affirm Parliament’s fiscal authority.

An edgy calm returned to the colonies, but British moral and political authority had sloughed away, bit by bit. Many Britons now viewed Americans as unruly, ungrateful children in need of caning. Many Americans nurtured an inflated sense of their economic leverage and pined for the traditional policy of “salutary neglect,” which for generations had permitted self-sufficiency and autonomy, including governance through local councils and colonial assemblies that had long controlled fiscal matters. Colonists also resented British laws that prohibited them from making hats, woolens, cloth, and other goods that might compete with manufacturers in the mother country. Almost imperceptibly, a quarrel over taxes and filial duty metastasized into a struggle over sovereignty. With no elected delegates in Parliament, the Americans had adopted a phrase heard in Ireland for decades: “no taxation without representation.”

George had never traveled beyond England, and in his long life he never would, not to Ireland, to the Continent, not even to Scotland, and certainly not to America. None of his ministers had been to the New World, either. There was much they did not know or understood imperfectly: that the American population, now 2.5 million, was more than doubling every quarter century, an explosive growth unseen in recorded European history and fourfold England’s rate; that two-thirds of white colonial men owned land, compared to one-fifth in England; that two-thirds were literate, more than in England; that in most colonies two-thirds could vote, compared to one Englishman in six; that provincial America glowed with Enlightenment aspiration, so that a city like Philadelphia now rivaled Edinburgh for medical education and boasted almost as many booksellers—seventy-seven—as England’s top ten provincial towns combined.

Also: that eradication of those French and Spanish threats had liberated Americans from the need for British muscle; that America now made almost 15 percent of the world’s crude iron, foreshadowing an industrial strength that would someday dwarf Britain’s; that, if lacking ships like Barfleur, the Americans were fearless seafarers and masters of windship construction, with an intimate knowledge of every inlet, estuary, and shoal from Nova Scotia to Barbados; that nearly a thousand American vessels traded in Britain alone.

And: that unlike the Irish and other subjugated peoples, the Americans were heavily armed. Not only were they nimble with firelocks, which were as common as kettles; they also deployed in robust militias experienced in combat against Europeans, Indians, and insurrectionist slaves.

Sensing its own ignorance, the government had drafted a rudimentary questionnaire that would soon be sent to colonial governors. The twenty-two questions ranged from No. 3, “What is the size and extent of the province, the number of acres supposed to be contained therein?” and No. 4, “What rivers are there?” to No. 10, “What methods are used to prevent illegal trade, and are the same effectual?” and No. 21, “What are the ordinary & extraordinary experiences of your government?” No doubt some helpful answers would emerge.

The remainder of the king’s stay in Portsmouth flew past. George once asserted that seven hours of sleep sufficed for a man, eight for a woman, and nine for a fool. No fool, he was up early each morning to stick his nose into every corner of the dockyard, asking questions and pondering the nuances of ship ballast and the proper season for felling compass timber. As he examined the new ninety-gun Princess Royal, soon to be launched, a master shipwright bellowed for silence; thirty comrades then shouldered their adzes and sang, “Tell Rome and France and Spain, / Britannia scorns their chain, / Great George is king.” Later he watched intently as workmen caulked the Ajax, set the mainmast on Valiant, and swung the ribs into position on Lyon and Berwick. He toured the new oar maker’s shop, the hemp house, the brewery, the cooperage, sail lofts, and mast sheds. Smiths in the forge repaired a four-ton anchor under his eye, and in the ropewalk he watched as three thousand strands were woven into a single twenty-four-inch cable intended for the largest ships of the line. Each afternoon he returned to the Barfleur for dinner, trailed by the usual squadron of yachts and yawls. On Friday night, soldiers, sailors, and townsfolk lined Portsmouth’s ramparts and huzzahed themselves hoarse during a final feu de joie, with another triple discharge of cannons and muskets.

Even a landlubber king recognized that just as his empire was under stress, so too his fleet. Sea power was fragile. A half dozen obsolete ships had been broken up for scrap in the past year, and no new ones launched. The Princess Royal, headed for sea in October, had taken six years to build. Although some wooden warships gave service for decades, many lasted only eight to fifteen years, depending on the seas they plied. Each required incessant, costly repairs in jammed yards like this one. Ships built with green timber—seasoned for less than three years—sometimes had only half the life span, or even a third. The urgent naval demands of the Seven Years’ War had devoured England’s reserves of seasoned oak; many warships during and after the war were built green, which left them vulnerable to dry rot and other ills. New seasoning sheds were under construction to replenish timber supplies, but much of the British fleet was nearing the end of its life. Simply making a new eighteen-ton mainmast for a one-hundred-gun ship—a white pine stick forty yards long and forty inches in diameter—took a dozen shipwrights two months. Portsmouth and other royal yards needed more skilled shipwrights, many more. It did not help recruitment that they earned the same two shillings and one penny per day paid in 1699.

Uneasy lay the head, but at six forty-five a.m. on Saturday, June 26, after pardoning debtors in the Portsmouth jail and dispensing a few royal favors—including £250 for the local poor and £1,500 to be divided among the dockyard workforce—the king climbed into his chaise for the return to Kew. A few final gun salvos boomed, and happy subjects ran after his cavalcade as it rolled beyond Portsea Bridge. In Godalming he emerged from the cab to stand in flowers piled to his knees. A band crashed through “God Save the King,” sung with such fervor by the locals that George wept, then joined the chorus.

“The king is exceeding delighted with his reception at Portsmouth,” wrote the painter Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy of Arts. “He was convinced he was not so unpopular as the newspapers would represent him to be.” Foreign ambassadors in London who had been invited guests in Portsmouth sent reports to their capitals with admiring descriptions of Britain’s might, just as the government had intended. Particular note was taken of the courier who set out for Versailles from the French envoy’s house in Great George Street; that dispatch reportedly described the review as “most noble.”

Later in the year, the Portsmouth spectacle would be mounted as a stage production by the celebrated actor David Garrick, who hired a Parisian set designer to convert the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane into a dockyard and anchorage. Toy cannons popped, model ships sailed on billowing fabric that simulated a rolling sea, and the cast pressed toward the footlights. “Rule, Britannia!” they sang. “Britannia, rule the waves.”