The March of Folly (28 page)

Only when he wanted to carry the war to Spain, the other maritime rival, his dominance failed against the resistance to increased taxes and against the new King’s determination to turn out the Newcastle Whigs and take patronage into his own hands. When Pitt resigned in 1761, cheers followed his coach from the palace, ladies waved their handkerchiefs from windows, the populace “clung to the wheels, shook hands with the footmen and even kissed the horses.”

Thereafter Pitt was too unbending, too arrogant, too vain to enter into bargaining for place. He did not fit into the system, having no interest in groups and cabals. His interest was in policy commanded by himself. On leaving office in 1761 he told the House that he would not govern when his advice was not taken. “Being responsible, I
will
direct and will be responsible for nothing I do not direct.” A member thought this was “the most insolent declaration ever made by a Minister,” but it was Pitt to the core. He was of the rare type incapable of acting in association with others. “Unattached to any party, I am and wish to be entirely single,” he said, and more starkly on another occasion, “I cannot bear the least touch of command.” Perhaps what spoke here was a touch of megalomania. Pitt may have suffered from what in our time
would be called delusions of grandeur and manic depression, but these had no names in his time and were not recognized as mental illness.

Tall, pale, thin-faced, with a hawk nose and piercing eye, ankles swollen with the gout that caused him to hobble, he was grand, proud, imposing, appearing always in full dress and full peruke, in manner “sage and awful as a Cato.” He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within. His glance of scorn or indignation could wither an opponent, his invective and sarcasm were “terrible”; he had the same quality of
terribilità
as Julius II. His gift for oratory at a time when political success resided in it was literally spellbinding though few could explain why. His eloquence, vehement, fiery, original, bold, could win the support of the independents in Parliament. Theatrical, even bombastic in language, spoken with an actor’s gestures and plays of tone, employing “very brilliant and striking phrases,” his most successful speeches were composed on his feet, although of a particularly striking phrase he told Shelburne that he had “tried it on paper three times” before deciding to use it. At a whisper his voice could be heard to the remotest benches, and when swelling like a great organ to its fullest register, the volume filled the House and could be heard in the lobbies and down the stairs. All fell silent to listen when Pitt stood up to speak.

Failing Pitt, the Duke of Cumberland put together a mixed ministry whose three principal offices were filled by personal acquaintances from the turf and the Army, none of whom had held ministerial office before. The chief was the young grandee, the Marquess of Rockingham, one of the wealthiest nobles of England, with baronies in three counties, wide estates in Ireland and Yorkshire, the lord-lieutenancy of his home county, an Irish peerage and suitable titles as Knight of the Garter and Lord of the Bedchamber to add to his status. At 35, he was a “new Whig” of the younger generation, untried and uncertain how to proceed. The Secretaries of State were General Conway, who had been the Duke’s aide-de-camp, and Augustus Henry Fitzroy, 3rd Duke of Grafton, a fellow-patron of the turf like Rockingham, known to Cumberland from the Jockey Club. A rather lax young man of thirty, Grafton had no great ambition to make a name in history and was more interested in racing than government, but he was ready from a sense of noblesse oblige to serve his country as well as he could. When rank won him unanimous election as Chancellor of Cambridge University in 1768, the poet Thomas Gray, author of “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” for whom Grafton had secured appointment as Regius Professor of History, wrote an ode that was set to music for
the Duke’s installation. In government Grafton was less happy, uneasy in his duties and given to frequent proposals to resign.

Leading the King’s friends in the Cabinet as Lord Chancellor was the gouty, profane, boisterous Lord Northington, who though frequently the worse for drink had held all the various law posts over the last nine years and was willing to concede the effects of too much port, saying, “If I had known that these legs were one day to carry a Lord Chancellor, I would have taken more care of them when I was a lad.” The Secretary at War, who accepted his post at the King’s express wish, was Viscount Barrington, an amiable man with one brother an Admiral and another a Bishop. He made it a principle, he said, to refuse no office on the theory that “some fortune may at last make me pope.” He remained at the War Office, still waiting, for the next thirteen years, one of the longest tenures of the period. The disunion permissible within a Cabinet is illustrated by his making it a condition of his accepting the post that he be permitted to vote against the ministry both on the Stamp Act and on General Warrants.

Divided and weak, the new ministry headed into the Stamp Act crisis, losing Cumberland by death after only four months, which left Rockingham unsheltered and without guidance. He tried to recruit Pitt without success and when he repeatedly asked what he should do about repeal, Pitt refused to communicate. Suffering from some debility, he was out of affairs throughout 1765.

Non-Importation was cutting into the economy, distressing merchants and labor. Alarming articles appeared in the press, inspired in many cases by an organized merchants’ campaign for repeal, reporting factory closings and an army of unemployed preparing to march on London to obtain repeal by threat of violence to the House of Commons. London’s merchants formed a committee to write to their fellows in thirty manufacturing and port towns urging them to petition Parliament for repeal. The Government was torn between “Stamp Men” and “No Stamp Men,” with Rockingham, Grafton and Conway and the old Duke of Newcastle in favor of repeal, against the Stamp Men, who wanted a demonstration of sovereignty and argued that repeal would destroy Britain’s authority and give the colonies impetus toward outright independence. Openly at odds with the Rockingham faction, Lord Northington announced he would attend no more Cabinet meetings, but rather than resigning, he remained to work through intrigue to bring the government down.

While not himself the possessor of forceful opinions, Rockingham acquired a policy by transfusion from his secretary, Edmund Burke.
He became persuaded that the violent American reaction indicated that an attempt to enforce the Act would be inexpedient, that England would be poorly advised to lose her colonial trade through ill-will, and that if harmony could be restored by repeal, so much the better. Through conciliation, Burke explained, the two Whig principles of liberty of the subject and sovereignty of Parliament could be reconciled.

With a majority determined to teach the colonies a lesson in sovereignty and eager for a reduction in their own land tax in consequence of revenue from America, the hope of moving Parliament to vote for repeal was slight. Grenville fulminated about the “outrageous Tumults and Insurrections” in North America, and Lord Northington declared that to “give up the law” by repeal would mean for Britain to “be conquered in America and become a Province to her own Colonies.” Efforts to elicit an opinion from Pitt during the Christmas recess were unavailing and when Parliament reconvened on 14 January 1766, Rockingham, trying to maintain a government weakened by dissension, was uncertain what to do.

Pitt appeared. The benches hushed. He said to them that the subject before them was “of greater importance than ever engaged the attention of this House” since their own liberties were at stake in the revolution of the last century and that “the outcome will decide the judgment of posterity on the glory of this kingdom and the wisdom of government during the present reign.” Taxation was “no part of the governing or legislative power”; it was a “voluntary gift” of representative assemblies. The idea of “virtual representation of America in this House is the most contemptible idea that ever entered into the head of man and it does not deserve a serious refutation.” Referring to remarks by Grenville denouncing those in England who encouraged colonial resistance, he retorted, “I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.” A member cried out that the speaker should be sent to the Tower, evoking, according to a witness, “such shouts of applause as I never heard.” Shaken but not diverted, Pitt went on to announce that the Stamp Act must be repealed “absolutely, totally, immediately” and at the same time accompanied by a statement of “sovereign authority over the colonies … in as strong terms as can be devised and be made to extend to every point of legislation whatsoever—that we may bind their trade, confine their manufactures, and exercise every power whatsoever except that of taking their money out of their pockets without their consent.”

Here was a fine obfuscation. Was not binding their trade by customs duties another way of taking money out of their pockets without their consent? If Parliament had supreme legislative power, how could taxation not be “part of that sovereign power”? Grenville, in making these points, refused to accept the distinction between external and internal taxation. Pitt was a firm mercantilist and his reply was unequivocal: “Let it be forever ascertained; taxation is theirs, commercial regulation is ours.” His distinction left others unconvinced. “If you understand the difference,” wrote Lord George Germain to a friend, “it is more than I do, but I assure you it was very fine when I heard it.”

It was enough for Rockingham; he had his signal. A declaration of parliamentary sovereignty, which it was hoped would satisfy the demand for assertiveness, was immediately drafted and introduced along with the bill for repeal. The King’s sullen consent was secured by informing him that the choice was either repeal or armed enforcement requiring additional military forces for which it would be hard to find funds. The House resumed debate. In the Lords the Duke of Bedford, leader of the Grenville faction, insisted that the Stamp Act “if suffered to be removed puts a final period to the British Empire in America.” Rockingham, however, had found allies. He encouraged the merchants’ campaign in order to shift emphasis from controversial “rights” to economic consequences. Provincial mayors and leading citizens from 35 cities arrived each day to present petitions from their cities for repeal. Letters from American traders to English shippers canceling orders were presented. More than a hundred merchants gathered in London to exert by their presence in the Visitors Gallery a silent pressure. Twenty riders were kept waiting to gallop with news of the vote.

Forty witnesses, including colonial agents, merchants and visiting Americans were called to testify on Non-Importation. Among them, Benjamin Franklin at his famous examination in February 1766 firmly told the House that Americans would never pay the Stamp duties “unless compelled by force of arms,” and armed forces would be useless because “they cannot compel a man to take stamps who chuses to do without them. They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.” That could stand as Britain’s epitaph for the decade, for at the time Franklin spoke, “an overwhelming majority” of his countrymen, as an English historian has stated, “had never contemplated the idea of severing the connection with the mother country.”

The dilemma was real. To leave the Act in place would be to assure, as the witnesses testified, lasting disaffection, even “total alienation”
in the colonies, while to concede repeal would be to acknowledge loss of authority in America. Horace Walpole, in his memoirs written two years later, added another disturbing factor: enforcement which could “risk lighting up a rebellion” might be a cause of the colonies’ “flinging themselves into the arms of France and Spain.” On the other hand, repeal of a revenue bill was “setting a precedent of the most fatal complexion.”

The Declaratory Act, stating that “The Parliament of Great Britain had, hath, and by right ought to have full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the Colonies and people of America in all cases whatsoever,” won unanimous approval in the Commons and the votes in the Lords of all but five, who included, interestingly enough, Lord Cornwallis. Another was Lord Camden, formerly Chief Justice Pratt, the only minister to speak against the Declaratory Act, who insisted that the very ground of the objection was that taxation without representation was illegal and that “there are some things you cannot do.” The fact that the Act did not mention taxation, the whole point of the dispute, was questioned by the Attorney-General, Charles Yorke, who moved to insert “in cases of taxation” but was overruled by the assurance that “in all cases whatsoever” covered the necessity. That satisfied enough members to win a majority for repeal. But though convenient the Declaratory Act was rash because it locked Parliament into a statutory position that foreclosed compromise. It returned to haunt many who had voted for it when in the next decade the Rockingham party was trying to avert war. For the moment it accomplished its purpose. Repeal was enacted over 167 hold-outs. The Lords still resisted and gave their assent only when the King was induced to let it be known that he favored repeal.

The thing was done. General Conway’s face shone, reported Burke, “as it were the face of an angel.” The messengers galloped away with the glad news, bells rang in Bristol, ship captains raised their flags and fired salutes, huzzahs resounded in the seaports, and when the news reached America, rejoicing was double. John Hancock, a merchant-shipper himself, gave a great party with Madeira and fireworks, militias paraded with drum and fife, taverns burst with celebrators, gala balls were held, loyal thanks offered to King and Parliament and 500 sermons of thanksgiving preached throughout New England. Orders for English merchandise were renewed and itchy homespun garments given to the poor. Eight months later, John Adams wrote that the people were now “as quiet and submissive to Government as
any people under the sun”; repeal had “composed every wave of popular disorder.” The Declaratory Act made no impression for the very reason that it contained no reference to taxation. The Americans may also have assumed that it was a gesture of hurt pride which would not be implemented.