The polemical importance of the search for clear Whig and Tory identities was strongly felt by contemporaries.
By Paul Langford
Late Fellow
Royal Historical Society
The view that the debate about British policy towards the thirteen colonies in the years preceding the American Revolution can be seen simply as an expression of the ancient rivalry of Whig and Tory has long since ceased to hold attractions for historians. No doubt a thorough reappraisal of the activities of George III and Bute and consequent reassessment of the posture of the Newcastle and Rockingham Whigs has done much to assist this development.1 In recent years it has even been denied that the measures of the 1760s and 1770s, the policies which raised up so formidable an opposition outside Parliament, represented a significant departure from the practices of earlier Whig governments, so that the idea of a ‘new Toryism’ has come to seem as implausible as a revived old one.2 Most significantly perhaps, the sophistication of modern political analysis has transformed our understanding of party politics in the period, banishing the idea of a simple and enduring two party structure, and replacing it with a complex and constantly changing pattern, dominated now by old fashioned court and country groupings, now by the jockeying of aristocratic factions, now by the machinations of the various interest groups.3 Out of this confusion, it is recognised that there gradually appeared, first in the form of the Rockingham Whigs and their articulated philosophy of party,4 then, in the 1790s, in the emergence of a new conservative consensus, the essential basis for the nineteenth-century two party system. But how these developments related to the events of the early years of George III’s reign, and more particularly to the American Revolution, is a matter for debate. What follows is an attempt to show how two important preconditions for the establishment of the party system, the weakening of the old Whig tradition, and the forming of a new authoritarian viewpoint, were affected by the conflict with America.
Contemporaries would not have needed enlightening as to the fluidity of party politics in the 1760s and 1770s. The effective dissolution of the two historic parties in the middle years of the century was a matter of frequent comment, not least, for example, by those eminent authorities on whom later historians were to rely, but whose remarks on this point have sometimes been neglected.5 For many political purposes, some would argue for most, it became practicable to act more or less without regard to Whig and Tory distinctions. Admittedly, at a local level, particularly in the larger constituencies, and where great landed interests could trace back a continuous tradition of loyalty to one of the great parties, the old slogans continued to be used at election time, though without much reference to the actual conduct at Westminster of those elected. Moreover, in America the party labels quickly acquired in this period a revived significance, readily applied in a rapidly polarising situation. But to many in the mother country the distinction was merely baffling, and one visiting Englishwoman, for example, was genuinely puzzled to find in New England, that ‘those who are well disposed towards Government … are termd Tories’.6
Despite the growing irrelevance of the old party terminology to the new political realities, the terms themselves continued to play a part in public life. The first two decades of George III’s reign were not short of major issues of principle, and it was natural enough that the political protagonists should endeavour to relate them to old and well-remembered ideologies. Party slogans retained a pronounced emotional appeal, particularly out of doors. In an age deeply conservative in such matters, they also opened promising avenues, depending on the standpoint, to political respectability on the one hand or political disrepute on the other. Naturally it was among opponents of government, faced with the constant need to justify their conduct to themselves and to the public, that the effort to revive old rallying cries was most marked. The most . powerful political figure of the period, the elder Pitt, himself made effective use of such tactics, in a cynical or at any rate suspiciously convenient manner, whenever he found himself in opposition. Typical was his allegation in 1763, that ‘this Government … was not founded on true Revolution principles; that it was a Tory Administration’.7 When in office himself, as in 1766, he talked more of the need to do away with party differences than to establish the new Whig Jerusalem, but in opposition again he quickly returned to the old language, discerning, he claimed, a ‘distinction between right and wrong,-between Whig and Tory’.8 Such opportunism was perhaps as transparent at the time as in historical retrospect. However, a more consistent, more considered Whig critique of supposed court Toryism came from the Rockingham Whigs, who indeed sometimes made themselves unpopular by appearing to claim a monopoly of Whig principles, and by portraying themselves as the only true ‘friends to the Revolution System of Government’.9 Their most effective spokesman, Burke, was too subtle to stoop to the crudities of Pitt, and he always refrained from associating the policies of George III’s ministers with the tainted Tory party of his predecessor’s reign. But he took pride in the Whig antecedents of Rockingham and the Cavendishes, and appealed consciously to their standing as the ‘great Whig families’, the ‘great Whig connexions’.10 Finally, beyond the parliamentary parties, among the many radical groups, and in the popular press, there was a marked concern with the promulgation of a revived Whiggism in the fact of alleged Toryism, even Jacobitism.
The polemical importance of the search for clear Whig and Tory identities was strongly felt by contemporaries. It stimulated varying responses from the critically minded. One natural reaction was the clear analysis of the political realist, incidentally according with the verdict of historians. Thus one newspaper correspondent protested at the over simplifications of the party situation current at the onset of the American War. ‘Our correspondent N. seems to mistake the matter quite. The distinction of Whig and Tory no longer exists in England. He must look for it only in America. It it now
the Butean party, the Bedford party, the Chatham party, the Rockingham party, the Shelburne party, etc. etc. among whom the present contest is for power’.11 Equally strong was the demand for precise formulations of a party creed rather than vague appeals to outdated party principles. Since most of the polemic was designed to renew the vitality of Whig ideals against a supposed recrudescence of royalist Toryism, much of this criticism centred on the relevance of the Whiggism of Shaftesbury, the. Junto, or even Newcastle, to the political problems of George III’s reign. The Crisis, the most intemperate of all the radical journals being published at the outbreak of the war with America, made strenuous attempts to specify the beliefs of real Whigs, and lambasted those who merely referred in appropriately pious but vague terms to the Bill of Rights and the Glorious Revolution. So many Years are now elapsed since the Revolution, that its Principles are almost forgot. They are showy in Theory, but obsolete in Practice‘.12 Such remarks were addressed primarily to the moderate Whigs of the Rockingham party, whose much vaunted loyalty to the Revolution of 1688 begged major questions. Lord Mahon, one of those eccentrically radical aristocrats who sought to revive the popular appeal of the old Whiggism, laid special emphasis on the necessity for precision in this respect. ‘Saying he would act on Revolutionary Principles was saying nothing, unless he would declare what he meant thereby.’13
In the process of defining Revolution principles, and for that matter other elements in the old party philosophies, special attention was naturally devoted to the conflict with America, a conflict which occupied the best part of two decades in British political life, and eventually came to dominate it almost to the exclusion of all other questions. The debate on the American Revolution was of its very nature a debate about fundamentals. At its narrowest the constitutional argument turned on differing interpretations of the venerable maxim that taxation could only be laid with the consent of those taxed. At its widest it was a dispute about the nature of sovereignty and political authority, and involved the clash of two diametrically opposed philosophies. Between lay a great range of legal, constitutional, political, even religious issues which led readily to the posing of basic ideological questions. In America itself, and indeed through much of continental Europe the results were profoundly important for the development of political thought. Within England the significance of this intellectual ferment is the subject of continuing controversy. But if nothing else it made English-men look harder than ever at the evolution of their own political ideas. Both for government and for opposition, in and out of Parliament, it provided a profound challenge, a test of the underlying principles to which they adhered.
English allies of the American cause tended to assume that, in the context of 1776, Revolution principles were synonomous with American principles. Admittedly, the appeal made by the most intellectually adventurous Americans to natural rights theory involved an extension, perhaps a redirection of established Whig ideas. But the narrower, and equally influential reliance on traditional English notions of liberty, particularly in relation to representation and chartered rights, together with the constant stress on America’s debt both to the real Whig tradition and to Lockeian political theory created a natural connection between English and American Whiggism. Certainly it was the deliberate intention of the Anglo-American radical lobby in London to establish and exploit this connection. Conscious manipulators of opinion like Arthur Lee not only appealed directly to the old Whiggism of Revolution days, but unashamedly glorified the oligarchical era of Walpole and the Pelhams, picturing George II, for instance, as ‘a Whig king’ with a ‘Whig Minister, speaking to a Whig people’.14 As for the men in power under George III, it followed ‘that they are Tories, that they. have been bred Tories, and consequently that they must have imbibed such principles as are diametrically opposite to those on which the Revolution was established.’15
The clamour of the radicals makes it easy to forget that America’s claims were rejected as well as supported on solid Whig grounds. Governments were naturally less given than were their opponents to detailed expositions. of their underlying ideology, but in Parliament there was much emphasis on, the Whiggish propriety of the successive measures of taxation and coercion which led up to the American Revolution. At election time ministerial candidates were not afraid to stand on the platform of ‘the Constitution upon Revolution Principles’ to the slight surprise of at least one visiting American.16 In one case, that of George Grenville, we even have a coherent and plausible defence of taxation without representation on the basis of Locke’s Second Treatise. Grenville, who was treated by radicals like Sylas Neville as an ‘arch-Tory’17 was in fact a thoroughly conventional Whig, who consciously saw his policies and principles in a Revolution framework. His interpretation of Locke’s famous statement of the invalidity of taxation raised without consent was arguably attentive both to the real intention of Locke’s remarks and to their historical context. As he pointed out, Locke had been concerned to destroy the basis of Filmerian theory, not to establish the case for a representative democracy. Grenville leaned heavily on the central if at times obscure Lockeian concept of trust in explaining the relationship between both the executive and legislature on the one hand and the people on the other:
Upon this Principle it is true that no man can be tax’d without his own Consent or the Consent of those whom the Society has empower’d to act for the whole and not by the will of anyone claiming a Right from Heaven deriv’d through the Patriarchs to govern the People and tax them as he thinks proper. From the general Doctrine which is evidently true the Idea seems to have been taken that no man could be tax’d without having a distinct Representative which is evidently untrue both in Reason and in fact.18
Grenvillian theory tends to be seen in terms of virtual representation. and in some of his speeches Grenville seems to have employed this obvious line of attack. It would be fairer, however, to see his basic argument as one that representation was simply irrelevant to the legislative powers of Parlia,-ment. But even when he went beyond matters adequately discussed in traditional political theory, and explained the existing relationship between the colonies and the metropolitan authorities, Grenville resorted to the language of Whiggism. Relations with America he apparently saw in terms of the original contract, that familiar theme in Whig literature. ‘My ideas for America have always been to give them good Laws and good Government on the one hand and to exact from them on the other Hand that just Obedience and Subordination which by the original Compact of all Society is the Return due for it’.19 This was arguably a simplistic use of contract theory, frequently in this period used against parliamentary taxation rather than for it. Radicals even argued that the King had actually violated his coronation oath in his treatment of the colonists, and thereby broken the original contract somewhat in the sense that James II had.20 For Grenville it was the colonists who were the contract breakers, a view which he shared with many who accepted the ‘fundamental Principle of Civil Societys that Protection and Allegiance are reciprocal.’21 Staunch Whigs found it hard to see the justice of ‘newfangled and desperate Doctrines’ denying the authority of a legislature which in English eyes had long carried out and continued to carry out its fiduciary duties towards the colonies.22
Few politicians of Grenville’s standing made the conscious effort to link their conduct to first principles. But most of them believed that in taxing Americans, or coercing them in the name of taxation, they had behind them the main body of Whig beliefs. In this they were largely sustained by their belief that the central issue in contention with the colonies was the sovereign authority of Parliament. Blackstone’s complete and uncompromising assertion of the omnicompetence of the legislature was relatively recent, but the supremacy of Parliament, and logically of the King in Parliament, was after all an ancient axiom of Whig theory, and at any rate for less sophisticated subscribers, its essential feature. The value to ministerial Whigs of this reflection was also much enhanced by the growing realisation that a natural consequence of the position adopted by the colonies would be appreciably to enhance the power and influence of the monarchy, that is of the King distinct from the King in Parliament.
This appreciation was neither sudden nor new. A major element in the debate about taxation during the Stamp Act crisis had been the conviction in Britain that if taxation was not within the imperial competence of Parliament, it would be difficult to establish clearly what form of legislative activity was. And some had seen that if America were effectively independent of Westminster, she must be all the more dependent on the crown. As Grenville himself put it, the thirteen colonies would come to be seen as ‘Independent Communities in alliance with us, and only govern’d by the same Prince as Hanover is’.23 The Americans had been understandably slow to reach the same conclusions themselves. The early years of the controversy over taxation saw a remorseless treading and re-treading of the worn ground of representative theory and produced ever more elaborate arguments about the lines which might be drawn between legislation in a general sense, and taxation of particular kinds. By the early 1770s, however, Americans were well on the way to dispensing altogether with the idea of parliamentary supervision and coming to rely exclusively on their link with the crown and its subordinate organs of government, principally the Privy Council. Franklin, for example, found himself increasingly persuaded by the attractions of a constitution which made the crown alone sovereign, and conferred the legislative role exclusively on a combination of the colonial assemblies and King-in-Council, thereby, providing a logically tenable line of defence against the unlimited claims made for Parliament. The argument was fully developed in James Wilson’s Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament and finally emerged as a more or less accepted statement of the American position in the course of 1774 and 1775. The Declaration of Colonial Rights and Grievances, issued by the first Continental Congress in October 1774, by implication came very close to such a statement, and ‘cheerfully consented’ to parliamentary legislation on commercial questions, only ‘from the necessity of the case’ and out of ‘a regard to the mutual interest of both countries’. Even this vestigial role for Westminster was finally whittled away in the reply made by the second Continental Congress in December 1775, to the King’s Proclamation of Rebellion. In this manifesto, ‘allegiance to Parliament’ was specifically disavowed, ‘allegiance to the Crown’ specifically admitted. The Declaration of Independence in effect restated this final assertion of colonial allegiance to the crown, listing as it did in bizarre and colourful detail the alleged misdeeds of the King and referring to Parliament only as ‘a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions’ involving ‘Acts of pretended Legislation’.24
This important and fundamental change of stance in America caused some astonishment in the mother country. An early hint of it drew a sarcastic reaction in print from Josiah Tucker: ‘Good Heavens! What a sudden Alteration is this! An American pleading for the Extension of the Prerogative of the Crown?’25 To most Englishmen iRdeed the notion seemed inhep,ently absurd, and smacked of the antiquated royalism voiced most recently by the pamphleteer Timothy Brecknock in 1764.26 Brecknock’s offending work was ritually condemned by the House of Lords and publicly burned.27 To most contemporaries his doctrines seemed laughable rather than dangerous. But the readiness of the colonists to occupy similar ground proved a godsend to anti-Americans in Britain, for it instantly made it possible to picture their opponents as friends of the royal prerogative. At precisely the moment ia 1775 when Americans were demanding from England the definitive assertion of the Whig case, the form in which they put their demands made government appear impeccably Whiggish.
The opportunity was seized upon. In the Commons, at the beginning of the decisive session of 1775-6, Fox, bitterly denouncing the cabinet as ‘enemies to freedom’ and ‘Tories’, was devastatingly answered by North:
His lordship … said, that if he understood the meaning of the words Whig and Tory, which the last speaker had mentioned, he conceived that it was the characteristic of Whiggism to gain as much for the people as possible, while the aim of Toryism was to increase the prerogative. That in the present case, administration contended for the right of parliament. while the Americans talked of their belonging to the crown. Their language therefore was that of Toryism, although, through the artful designs of the real enemies of freedom, the good sense of the people of England was endeavoured to be misled, and false opinions were industriously inculcated throughout the kingdom.28
This line was naturally taken up elsewhere, and produced an amused response in the press. ‘The Tories, by the acknowledging the supreme power of the British parliament over the whole British empire, appeared to be turned Whigs -And the Whigs, in attempting to extend the power of the King’s prerogative beyond the control of his parliament, shew themselves to be Tories’.29 The ultimate irony perhaps occurred with the loyal addresses to the crown, which in the summer and autumn of 1775 reflected widespread endorsement of the government’s policies, and profoundly dismayed those who looked for a demonstration of public opinion in opposition to North’s policies. Some of these addresses made considerable play with the apparent inconsistency of the Whig position. That from Oxford, for example, expressed ‘heart-felt Pleasure, that your Majesty has not been tempted to endanger the Constitution of Great Britain, by accepting the alluring offers of an unconstitutional Increase of your Prerogative’.30 Maidenhead declared loftily ‘we cannot but protest against the Principles of those Men, who by asserting the Dependence of America on the Crown, exclusively of the Parliament of Great Britain, endeavour to point out a Distinction, that in future Times may be productive of the most fatal Consequences to both.’31
For those in opposition, whose principal aim in politics generally was to criticise the supposed aggrandisement of the crown, nothing could have been more embarrassing than the direction taken by the Anglo-American debate at this critical moment. It was doubly so, because one of their great hopes had long been the possibility that their general concern with the influence of the crown might plausibly be connected with the grievances of the colonies. This possibility had emerged most strongly between the break-up of the Chatham Ministry and the partial repeal of the Townshend duties, when Hillsborough as Secretary for the Colonies seemed genuinely to be considering the employment of prerogative rather than parliamentary powers in America. It was reported: ‘the language of the ministry is that they will restrain the Americans by the Powers and the authority of the crown without the Intervention of Parliament, or in other words they will make them subject to the King though not to the Legislative of Great Britain. This special Tory doctrine will certainly fail in its Effect as it ought to do’.32 The parliamentary opposition made the best of this half-opening. When, in 1769, Hillsborough formally held out to the colonial governors the possibility that the hated Townshend duties would be repealed the following session. Burke and his colleagues were able, somewhat to the bewilderment of their American friends, to attack him on the grounds that he had violated parliamentary privilege, undertaking on behalf of the executive what actually pertained to the legislature.33 The revival of the statute of treasons of Henry VIII, though carried through Parliament, could also be seen as an attempt to employ odious executive and judicial powers not in accord with the spirit of English law. Unfortunately for parliamentary opponents of the ministry, this approach to the Anglo-American question turned out to be a blind alley. What blocked it was not merely the instinctive preference of successive governments for working entirely through Parliament, notwithstanding Hillsborough’s short-lived campaign to the contrary, but the unwavering, almost pedantic constitutionalism of the King himself. His later statement that he was fighting the battle of the legislature is well known, and accurately reflected his conduct over the years. George III personally disliked Hillsborough’s schemes for unorthodox new policies in the colonies,34 and like most of his ministers insisted on treating Parliament’s unlimited supremacy over the colonies as the first and only line of defence. When the next crisis came, in 1774-6, the government’s policy was taken step by step through Parliament, and at every point dealt with in parliamentary terms. Even the highly controversial Massachusetts Government Act, which was primarily designed to strengthen royal authority in New England, was seen essentially as part of the campaign to have the principle and application of Parliament’s supremacy accepted. Thereafter occasional opportunities for reopening the question of the prerogative occurred. For example, in 1775, the King’s action in sending Hanoverian troops to safeguard the strongholds of Gibraltar and Minorca, was portrayed by opposition as a deliberate violation of the Bill of Rights, and stimulated lively pictures of the importation of foreign mercenaries on a scale sufficient to threaten English liberty.35 Fanned by the opposition this innocent, not to say prudent, measure flickered into life when some of the country gentlemen now supporting the crown remembered their anti-Hanoverian prejudices. It was, however, quickly extinguished by the good humoured response of North himself. In the end, the old Whigs went into the American War all too aware that it was a war not for the prerogative of the crown but for that parliamentary sovereignty which they were themselves supposed to venerate.
For some, indeed for most of those who carried the banner of moderate, mainstream Whiggism, particularly the Rockinghams, it was not only the direction taken by the debate about the royal prerogative which hamstrung them in their efforts to develop a politically viable and ideologically pure line of argument. Equally restricting was the common ground which they shared with most of the leading ministers in the period, in their attachment to the unlimited power of Parliament over the colonies. In this respect they were clearly the victims of their own actions, for it was the Rockingham Ministry, which in 1766, had promoted the Declaratory Act, flatly asserting on the lines of the Irish Dependency Act of 1720, the legislative supremacy of Parliament in all cases. To many admirers of Rockingham this seemed a dreadful hindrance to the cause of Whiggism, and one which begged to be exploited by his enemies. Ministerial hacks in Parliament and in the press never tired of pointing out that the coercion of America was carried on in order to preserve the principle of Rockingham’s Declaratory Act. American observers also saw the difficulty. Typical was the verdict of one colonial visitor, Jonathan Williams, whose expectations of Rockingham were sadly disappointed when he heard him speak in the Lords in 1775:
Lord Rockingham got up, and seemed but partly in our favour.-That Declaratory Act of his, is a great stumbling block to his patriotism, for it is impossible to take the matter up to this day without entering into the question of rights, and the whole must now turn on that single point, whether Great Britain has or has not, a right to tax America if she has, in all cases whatsoever there can be no doubt but all her Laws, are on a good Foundation, and we as the most abject Slaves, in acquiescence of that right, must obey; on the other hand, if she has not that right, the Americans must enjoy all the Liberties they claim.36
Jn theory it was possible to get over the stumbling block of the Declaratory Act. Even at the time of its enactment Americans had tended to play down its significance, encouraged no doubt by the widely reported speeches of the elder Pitt, who vociferously opposed it while supporting the ministry’s repeal of the Stamp Act. Henry Laurens described the Declaratory Act as ‘the last feeble struggle of the Grenvillian party’,37 and many other Americans saw it simply as a meaningless piece of paper, a kind of salvo for the authority of Parliament’.38 Even in the Rockingham party itself, the more radical elements confessed to their leaders that they regarded it ‘rather as necessary at the time, than strictly right’.39 In due course Fox was able to pass this interpretation on to later Whigs as the more or less official version of the passing of the Declaratory Act. Unfortunately it simply does not correspond with the facts. The Declaratory Act was not only passed out of conviction by Rockingham and his leading friends, but maintained out of conviction; throughout the difficult years before the outbreak of war, the consistent position adopted by the party was that as a matter of right, in a debate which largely concerned right, Parliament’s powers were unlimited. Jn asserting this they firmly believed that they were asserting the true principles of their party, consciously adhering to its ancient traditions.40
Whether they were right in this belief is a matter for debate. It is tempting to suggest that like most other politicians in the 1760s they were subtly reacting to the great growth in ihe power and prestige of Parliament which had marked the evolution of the eighteenth-century constitution. On this reading there lay, in the not very distant past, a less logically demanding position, one which acknowledged the basic primacy of Parliament established in 1688 and yet retained some semblance of self-government for the colonies. Support for the idea that there was such a middle position may be detected in the gulf between generations which seems to mark the views of the Whigs on this question. The evidence is necessarily thin, but it suggests that the immediate forbears of the Rockingham Whigs might have had some doubts about the sweeping character of the Declaratory Act. This seems to be true of the first Earl of Hardwicke, lifelong friend of Newcastle, and servant successively of the Walpole and Pelham regimes. His experience as Lord Chancellor and his political and legal standing made him as good a representative as any of the official Whig mind in the mid-eighteenth century. There seems no doubt that he disliked the idea of colonial taxation, which was beginning to be discussed in Parliament in 1764, the year of his death. According to an American agent’s report, ‘Mr. Grenvile was shewn Lord Hardwicke’s Opinion relative to Taxing America (Inexpedient) before he bro’t in the Act.’41 This story gains credibility from the testimony of Hardwicke’s son, the second Earl, who told Governor Hutchinson a similar story about his father’s last months. ‘When asked what he thought of Mr. Grenville’s scheme of taxing America, said-They had not been used to taxes: told Archbishop Secker, when he proposed sending a Bishop, that the Americans left England to avoid Bishops’.42 Still more interesting, since it suggests objections on grounds of impropriety as well as inexpediency, is a letter written by the second Earl. This letter has additional value since it was plainly penned at the time that the Stamp Bill was being considered, early in 1765, before the great controversy of I 765-6 could influence his recollections. His father, he remarked, ‘had doubts about the Right. I have no doubts but that the Colonys will be very restive’.43
There are other hints of old Whig attitudes, some of them of doubtful value. Stories about the superior wisdom of Walpole in the 1730s and Pitt in 1750s in refusing to have anything to do with American taxation are legion, but they all seem to reflect the benefit of hindsight. More interesting, perhaps, is the attitude of the survivors of the Hardwicke era. Newcastle did not think deeply about such matters, and was persuaded pragmatically to dwell on the repeal of the Stamp Act as the central achievement of the Rockingham Ministry. Nonetheless. he clearly had instinctive doubts about the Declaratory Act.44 Pitt, though a good deal younger than either Hardwicke or Newcastle, was consciously atavistic in his political views, and his ringing denunciation of parliamentary taxation perhaps recalled an earlier tradition. Unfortunately Pitt’s position, as so often in his political career, presents problems, not least about his basic consistency. The attack which he launched in 1766 on the internal taxation of the colonies savoured as much of characteristic opportunism and rhetoric as of deep political conviction. It also got him, whenever he attempted to define his position more precisely, into logical difficulties from which he never satisfactorily extricated himself. When challenged he tended to lapse into vague and meaningless pronouncements. Nor does his record in office in 1766 provide an easy answer.45
In any event Pitt’s view is more significant as an exception than as a rule. Not the least interesting feature of the I 760s is the arrival in politics of a whole generation of young Whigs who quickly supplanted or succeeded their elders. Apart from Pitt, the old leaders of Whiggism disappeared from the scene in rapid succession; Granville in 1763, Hardwicke, Legge and Devonshire in 1764, Newcastle was of little importance in the years before his death in 1768, and Holland of less before his in 1774. On the American question the new leaders of mainstream Whiggism entertained none of Hardwicke’s doubts or Pitt’s objections. In the Rockingham party Rockingham’s own clear view commanded wide acceptance. Ironically it was strongly supported by a powerful group of his connections, the Onslows, the Townshends, Grey Cooper and their like, who left him to join the court in 1766 and continued to share from an opposite political standpoint the same ideological stance. The same could even be said of the Chatham party, at least before Pitt’s dramatic declaration against the internal taxation of the Colonies in January I 766. Shelburne, one of the more clear thinking of the party, was much embarrassed, for in December I 765 he had publicly adopted more or less independently, what was to become the Rockingham position, that the right existed but that, for the sake of Britain’s commercial strength, it should not be exercised. Like the slightly more cautious Camden, he had some difficulty adjusting to his leader’s view subsequently.46 Among lawyers the unanimity was particularly striking. Hardwicke’s second son, Charles Yorke, as Attorney-General in Rockingham’s ministry, drafted the Declaratory Act and never questioned its validity. Even the Chatham party’s lawyer in the Commons, John Dunning, declined to accept Pitt’s theory of taxation. In fact in this matter Dunning and Yorke both subscribed to the opinion of Mansfield, the legal luminary of the age and, in the eyes of American and English radicals, the eminence grise of North’s imperial policy.
Whether the survival into the later 1760s of the most influential of the old corps leaders would have opened the way for a more credible Whig critique of ministerial policy is a nice question. In one respect it might have actually created additional problems. For the views of ministerial Whigs of the Pelham era were associated with a way of thinking about the colonies which potentially carried the same danger of strengthening the royal prerogative as that so distressingly offered by the evolution of American thought. One pointer to this possibility is the conversation which Franklin recorded as having taken place in 1757 with Lord Granville. Granville was a Whig of great experience and seniority; moreover as Lord President of the Council he was likely to have considered in detail the constitutional relationship between mother country and colonies. The subject of his talk with Franklin was not, naturally, the extent of Parliament’s authority, but rather the perennial problem of conflict between the colonial assemblies and royal governors, and in particular the standing of the latter as representatives of the Crown.
You Americans have wrong ideas of the nature of your constitution; you contend that the King’s instructions to his governors are not laws and think yourselves at liberty to regard or disregard them at your own discretion. But these instructions are not like the pocket instructions given to a minister going abroad for regulating his conduct in some trifling point of ceremony. They are first drawn up by judges learned in the laws; they are then considered, debated, and perhaps amended in Council, after which they are signed by the King. They are then so far as relates to you, the law of the land; for THE KING IS THE LEGISLATOR OF THE COLONIES.
Franklin replied:
I told His Lordship this was a new doctrine to me. I had always under-stood from our charters that our laws were to be made by our Assemblies, to be presented, indeed, to the King for his royal assent, but that being once given, the King could not repeal or alter them. And as the Assemblies could not make permanent laws without his assent, so neither could he make a law for these without theirs. He assured me I was totally mistaken. I did not think so, however. And His Lordship’s conversation having a little alarmed me as to what might be the sentiments of the court concerning us. I wrote it down as soon as I returned to my lodgings. I recollected that about twenty years before a clause in a bill brought into Parliament by the ministry had proposed to make the King’s instructions laws in the Colonies; but the clause was thrown out by the Commons, for which we adored them as our friends and friends of liberty, till by their conduct towards us in 1765, it seemed that they bad refused that point of sovereignty to the King only that they might reserve it for themselves.47
This exchange must obviously be treated with caution. Franklin wrote his autobiography in 1771, at a time when he was particularly interested in the constitutional relationship between crown and colonies. Granville, if he said precisely what he is represented as having said, was presumably anxious to stress to a not uninfluential American the concern of British ministers at the continuing war of attrition against the prerogatives and powers of the King’s deputies in America. He can hardly have intended to cast doubt on the authority of Parliament. Even so his observations are expressive of the mentality of mid-eighteenth century Whigs. Typical of this mentality was the conviction that the colonies were peculiarly the concern of the executive, and except in matters of commercial regulation, outside the natural purview, if not the competence, of Parliament. Thus in 1754 Henry Fox objected to the introduction of parliamentary legislation to regulate American troops on lines similar to the Mutiny Act in Britain: ‘as our colonies are more particularly under the eye of the crown than any other part of the British dominions, it would in my opinion, be too great an encroachment upon the prerogatives of the crown, or at least it would be an intermeddling in the affair with which we have no call to have any concern’.48 This certainly reflected the view of successive ministers, not least in the case of Walpole twenty years earlier. Egmont, for example, had found, in connection with the affairs of Georgia, that Sir Robert ‘was not willing the Colonies should depend on Parliament for their settlements, but merely on the Crown. He objected that the king’s prerogative would be subjected thereby to Parliament’.49
This jealous protection of the prerogative was maintained by the Pelhams. As Henry McCulloch observed ‘it bath not been agreable to the wisdom of the Crown to have the Parliament interfere in any matter relating to the exercise of the regal power’.50 However, McCulloch was one of many who had doubts about this wisdom, and the latter part of George III’s reign witnessed growing pressure from all levels of the imperial bureaucracy to resort to parliamentary weapons. The pressure was as old, strictly speaking, as the Board of Trade itself, but in the course of 1740s and 1750s it became almost insurmountable. Successive body blows to royal authority in individual colonies made the arguments for parliamentary intervention stronger than ever. Moreover the new interest in things American during the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War seemed to make both a strengthening of the machinery of government and more systematic exploitation of colonial sources of financial and military power necessary. Right through the 1750s a succession of colonial officials and military leaders warned ministers at home of the growing insubordination of colonial institutions and the men who ran them, and appealed for the adoption of a grand strategy based on parliamentary action. These demands did much to create among the rising generation which was to provide leadership in the 1760s a climate of opinion requiring firm action, and especially firm parliamentary action, in the colonies. But on the men at the top at the time it made little impression, according to Franklin because they ‘are afraid the Parliament would establish more Liberty in the Colonies than is proper or necessary, and therefore do not care that Parliament should meddle at all with the Government of the Colonies; they rather chose to carry every Thing there by the Weight of Prerogative’.51
Whether this fear was justified is perhaps doubtful. On the rare occasions when Parliament did consider the internal state of the colonies, it did not seem very interested in the maintenance of colonial liberties. The Massachusetts Bay Assembly was rapped sharply over the knuckles for its activities against government in 1733; in the same year Rhode Island’s opposition on the Molasses Bill produced an indignant reaction from MPs, one of whom expostulated ‘as if this House had not a power to tax them, or to make any laws for the regulating of the affairs of their colony’.52 A decade or so later with reports of opposition to royal government growing more frequent, one onlooker warned from London that ‘Every endeavour to wrest the King’s Authority out of the hands of his Governour may draw on the Resentment not only of the King but likewise of a British Parliament who allready seem to have become Jealous of the Dependancies of their Colonies’.53 Such straws in the wind suggest that even before 1760 the Commons would have been disposed rather to chastise the colonial assemblies for aping the authority of the imperial legislature, than to support their struggle against weakening royal prerogative. In any event, by the time in the 1760s that Parliament was finally brought directly into Anglo-American relations, it is easy enough to see that the approach of the Pelhamite Whigs would have seemed to their successors anachronistic and even dangerous.
If the principal representatives of the Whig tradition found themselves embarrassed by the dual need to combat the court and maintain their inherent conviction of the ultimate authority of Parliament, there remained only one means of escape from their dilemma, that offered by the radicals. There was, of course, no unified campaign on the radical front, although radicals on both sides of the Atlantic strenuously sought to make common cause. Between a sophisticated re-examination of fundamental libertarian beliefs, like Richard Price’s Civil Liberty, and the wild ranting of the popular journals there lay a great range of viewpoints.54 Nonetheless it is easy enough to identify elements of consistency in the wide variety of radical approaches adopted in this period. First among these was the basic assertion which made it possible for them all to oppose government, support America, and also appeal to traditional Whig values. This was the claim that whatever the rights and wrongs of the American issue, Parliament itself and the system of which it was a part no longer provided a valid expression of the will of the people or even, indeed, of the will of the propertied. Arguments for constitutional reform based on the absurdities of the existing structure of the parliamentary franchise and constituencies, and on the alleged corruption which sustained them, provided a basis for root and branch opposition to successive governments. This stance was intellectually more effective than the ‘country’ position of the Rockinghams who founded their case against government exclusively on the growing influence of the Crown. Radicals cheerfully absorbed the Burkeian case against influence and ‘double cabinet’, but also went much further, with a frontal attack on the representative credentials of a Parliament which deprived the Middlesex electors of their liberty and simultaneously abused the rights of Americans. Such a posture could readily be made to correspond with the ancient canons of the Whig constitution, and, for instance, Locke’s solemn warning about the inevitable decline of any representative system was frequently quoted.55
Unfortunately, this formula was not for practical purposes available to the Rockingham Whigs. A few of their allies on the radical fringe, like David Hartley,56 were prepared to follow the reforming line to some extent. But the great body of Rockingham Whigs, at any rate before their leadership pllssed into the hands of Fox in 1782, feebly criticised the conduct of Parliament without ever demanding fundamental change. Powerful appeals from the radicals to the effect that the American war had created ‘an actual dissolution of government’57 merely frightened them further away from real reform, and the charge of critics such as Catherine Macaulay, that Rocking-ham was happy to reduce the improper influence of the Crown, but bent on maintaining his own improper influence, made an obvious impact.
None of this means that the Rockinghams failed to evolve a coherent position on America. On the contrary, over the years and thanks in large measure to Burke they put together a tenable position. Their claim for a right of taxation which it was impolitic to exercise proved much easier to defend than the Chathamite distinction between legislation and internal taxation. Burke’s speeches provided a steady stream of statesmanlike common sense which might well, in power, have produced a more sensitive and realistic policy, or so it could be argued. The demand for a return to ‘the ancient Standing Policy of this Empire’58 and repeal of all offending legisla-tion subsequent to 1763 could be made to coincide, on a superficial examination at least, with the wish of Congress to return to the status quo at the end of the Seven Years War. Rockingham, in speaking of this, resorted in yet another version of the contractual relationship with the colonies, to traditional Whig vocabulary;
I don’t love to claim a right on the foundation of the. supreme power of the legislature over all the dominions of the Crown of Great Britain; I wish to find a consent, and acquiesence in the governed, and I choose, therefore, to have recourse to what I think an original tacit compact, and which useage had confirmed until the late unhappy financing project interrupted the union and harmony which had so long prevailed, to the mutual advantage and happiness of this country and its colonies.59
Burke seems to have been more cautious about using contract language to describe the era of salutary neglect, but he relied on it in his crucial distinction between the formal framework of the constitution and the informal network of customs and traditions which governed its operation. No doubt in these concepts latent ideas of trust and tacit contract were implicit. Particularly in his Speech on Conciliation he was able, characteristically, to elevate this pragmatism into something resembling a general principle of federalism such as would attract the applause of later theorists of empire.
The Rockingham position helped to keep a party of opposition in being, capable, unlike its brethren among the Chatham Whigs, of responding to the challenge of conceding American independence. But to many it seemed inconsistent, over-ingenious, and above all lacking in that vigorous assertion of basic principles which was required of the Whig case. Burke’s circumvention of the ideological problems involved was sophisticated but perhaps too sophisticated. Bluff country gentlemen found his distinctions between theory and practice either baffling or objectionable, and in a rare humiliation for Burke on the floor of the Commons, in December 1774, one of them said so in a sensational scene.
Burke was more flowery than ever; he addressed himself with a great deal of rhetorick to the young Members, cautioning them against the wiles of Administration; but was so facetious that he pleased the whole House. A short answer was given by a blunt Mr. Van. ‘The Honourable Gentleman’, says Van, ‘has been strewing flowers to captivate children. I have no flowers Mr. Speaker to strew, all I have to say is, that I think the Americans are a rebellious and most ungrateful people, and I am for assuring the king that we will support him in such measures as will be effectual to reduce them’. The honesty of the man and his singular manner set the whole House into a halloo! and answered Burke better than Cicero could have done with all his eloquence.60
Even worse, the Rockinghams’ posture could readily be portrayed as justifying almost any opinion. The allegations made against Burke by Henry Cruger, his fellow Bristol M.P., came from a malicious opponent, but they stirred matching feelings in others. ‘Today, he will be the first great Promoter of a Declaratory Bill. Tomorrow he shall insinuate the Parliament have not a right to bind the Americans in aII cases-and yet, put him in power, and the third day you shall find him asserting the supremacy of this country with a vengeance’.61 The plausibility of this charge was the price the Rockinghams had to pay for the manifold pressures on the evolution of political theory presented by the American Revolution. Their response to these pressures was defensible, in some measure convincing and at least preserved their self respect through a difficult period. But as the considered attempt of the main representatives of old Whiggism to apply Whig principles to the great ideological issue of the day, it was a complete failure. The young Fox, joining the party in the mid 1770s, sensed this weakness and urged his friends to make it ‘a point of honour among us all to support the American pretensions in adversity as much as we did their prosperity, and that we shall never desert those who have acted unsuccessfully upon Whig principles, while we continue to profess our admiration of those who succeeded in the same principles in the year 1688′.62
The intellectual bankruptcy of the mainstream Whig tradition in the face of the American question would perhaps have been less demoralising for its friends if it had been matched by similar intellectual confusion and division among its enemies. Instead, the unity and coherence of the consensus which emerged in opposition to the claims of the colonies, was a constant source of problems. Only very occasionally were there serious differences in the anti-American camp. In 1766 when the Rockingham Ministry was enjoying its brief year of office, those who opposed its policy of repeal were divided about the relative merits of enforcing the Stamp Act and modifying it, though it was also the case that the possibility of modification was a problem for the Rockingham ministers themselves. Again, nine years later there were serious divisions within the government between those who favoured North’s conciliatory proposals and those who simply adhered to the policy of coercion. But with these relatively insignificant exceptions the opponents of America presented a remarkably united front. And on the central question of sovereignty, there was a striking measure of general agreement, which was to sustain the North Ministry in particular through years of expensive and demoralising war. Many of the leaders of the North regime were of sound Whiggish family for at least two generations, as in the case of North and Gower, or for a much longer period, as in the case of most of their colleagues. Doubtless it was a considerable source of comfort to these men, that it was possible to portray the struggle with America in terms which made the British government’s position at least as solidly Whiggish as that of its enemies. No less significant, however, was the fact that they could simultaneously appeal to what was left of the old Tory tradition, thus having, as it were, the best of both worlds.
That the Tory contribution to the policies which provoked the American Revolution is easily forgotten is largely the result of the superficially negligible strength of the old Tory party by this time. It is difficult, for example, to point to a single minister or a single measure capable of being described simply as Tory, without resorting to the deliberate falsification which radicals engaged in when they roundly condemned all the works of George III and Lord North as Tory and crypto-Jacobite. By the 1760s the old Tory Party was effectively reduced to a rump of country gentlemen, whose distinctive identity was rapidly dissolving. The parliamentary managers of George III’s reign sometimes continued to describe them as Tories. Rockingham’s list of November 1766 did so, as did Newcastle’s of March 1767. It was to be expected that two self-conscious exponents of old style Whiggism would describe their ancient enemies in this way. Charles Townshend, who also attempted to classify M.P.s in January 1767, referred more broadly to the ‘country gentlemen’, a category which matched very closely those described by Rockingham and Newcastle as Tories. Later on the term ‘country gentlemen’ grew universal and in time comprehended those who earlier might have described themselves as country Whigs and whose particular brand of independence was now indistinguishable for most purposes from that of their Tory compatriots. Some Tories escaped the category altogether by moving into one or other of the identifiable party groups. All the latter included one or two Tories, with the Rockinghams, for instance, attracting the support of William Dowdeswell and two of his West Country friends, Charles Barrow and Sir William Codrington. No less significant, very few of the men who carried their Toryism beyond the death of George II and into the reign of George III were of the first or even second rank in point of abilities. Rare exceptions were perhaps Dowdeswell himself, Sir Francis Dashwood, and at a lower level Norborne Berkeley. But none of them emerged as an important supporter of government in debate or in office before or during the American war. In debate indeed the old Tories were generally silent, though they bad a few representatives like Sir William Bagot, M.P. for Staffordshire, Sir Roger Newdigate, M.P. for Oxford University, and Arthur Van among the younger generation who made rather a point of claiming to speak for the country gentlemen.
Paradoxically, the role of the old Tories turned country gentlemen was almost more important in the politics of the 1770s than in those of George II’s reign, when they had found themselves in unremitting opposition to the court. The largely unrecognised but none the less distinct reduction of the influence of the crown in Parliament,63 together with the basic readiness of the Tories to vote for George Ill’s ministers, .made the court increasingly dependent on this large but unreliable body of opinion. Charles Jenkinson, an influential junior minister in successive governments, was acutely aware of this important change in the pattern of parliamentary politics. As a convinced courtier, he described to Governor Hutchinson what he saw as a source of weakness for government. He:
laments the state of affairs in England: speaks of the Minister as not having the influence of Sir Robert Walpole. And that he has no assurance of the success of any measure until it is tried: that a failure upon any question would have been fatal to Sir Robert Walpole because he governed by party, {which is little other than bribery and corruption), but Lord North may lose three or four questions in a Session, and not affect him. He says there are 150 Members, a sort of Flying Squadron, that you don’t know where they will be in a new question. This may enfeeble the executive powers of Government from the uncertainty of support from the legislative power; but it may be questioned whether this state is not to be preferred to the former.64
The final qualification was perhaps a wise one. For if the antics of the country gentlemen could be irritating, their underlying support for Lord North was a source of great strength, more especially since the opinions of these men reflected with considerable fidelity the thinking of the landed classes at large. As one of Rockingham’s friends remarked, ‘Many members support the minister who are not supported by him. In his party, you will find most of the country members. This is the true barometer of the higher orders in England’.65
Admittedly, in the 1760s this element was sometimes responsible for the relative instability of politics. The issues of this period which caused most concern were often ‘court and country’ questions, and in response to them the old Tories would sometimes draw back from their new allegiance to George Ill and vote with opposition. Thus general warrants, the cider excise, the Middlesex Election, all brought independent members not indeed to a desire to bring government down, but at least to a readiness to vote against its measures. One of the most celebrated ministerial reverses of the period, supposedly the first such defeat for government since the Revolution, occurred on the land tax division of 1767, in which the country gentlemen voted as one. The unpredictable character of their vote was in this manner a constant source of anxiety to those like Jenkinson responsible for managing the court’s supporters in the Commons. It also held out to the parliamentary opposition the constant prospect of seriously embarrassing government, if the appropriate issues presented themselves.
Against this background, it was precisely the importance of the American question that it dramatically demonstrated the readiness of the country gentlemen to give their support to government on a more enduring basis. North’s appeal to them was manifold. His own temperament and family connections, not to say his financial ability and his oratory all had their effect. But more than anything North was sustained through twelve years of power and almost as many of crisis by the support of these men for his policy. That support was given freely in the great majority of cases because he was getting one issue, that of America, in their terms largely right. Not only could North not have fought the war without the natural heirs of the old Tories, but his readiness to fight it actually strengthened his following among them. And when after 1782 and the battle of Yorktown they had had enough, their change of front was equally decisive in bringing about his fall. Contemporaries were thoroughly aware of the importance of this element in North’s parliamentary position. Hutchinson, an engrossed observer of the parliamentary scene in England was struck by the impact of the issues. On court versus country questions, he noted, opposition mustered sizeable votes: on American topics it was quite different, ‘the independent country gentlemen being generally against the Americans’.66 Burke, as one of the actors in this scene drew the correct but depressing lesson. ‘He said it was almost in vain to contend, for the country gentlemen had abandoned their duty, and placed an implicit confidence in the minister’.67
How much this development owed to the Tory mentality of the old country families it is impossible to gauge precisely. Even the personnel are not easily identified. The very success of government in the 1770s rendered nugatory the publication of division lists on American questions, and where lists do exist they tend to be exclusively concerned with those in the minority. Nonetheless such evidence makes it clear that those who can plausibly be associated with the old Tory interest were as uncompromisingly hostile to America as contemporary comment suggests. In the crucial divisions of 1775-6, marking the long descent into war, hardly any of the old Tories voted against government. For instance in the division of 26 October 1775, with the Commons preparing to go beyond the coercive legislation of 1774-5 and effectively to commit itself to war, only one of those regarded by contempor-aries as Tories voted with opposition. This was Tom Foley, representative of an old Tory family from the West Midlands, but now a close friend and political ally of Charles James Fox. In fact the Tories as a group were nothing if not consistent in their views on America, for their opposition to the colonists went back at least to the Stamp Act crisis. The turnout of the Tory party against the repeal of the stamp tax was a marked feature of the divisions of February 1766. The names as they appear in the lists read like a roll call of the Tory families: Bagot, Bertie, Blackett, Burdett, Cotton, Curzon, Dash-wood, Drake, Foley, Glynne, Grosvenor, Harley, Hpublon, Isham, Keck, Kemys Tynte, Knightley, Newdigate, Mordaunt, Pryse, Shuttleworth, Sibthorp, Bampfylde, Vansittart, Wodehouse-taking only the better known of them-these were the very backbone of the Tory squirearchy of George II’s reign.68 A decade later the same men or their successors were solidity behind North, supporting him steadily in the Commons, and, no less impor-tant, whipping up a country campaign in favour of his policy. The loyal addresses which in late 1775 finally made it clear that the verdict at least of the countryside and small towns was irreversibly behind coercion rather than conciliation in America owed much to such families, as the names of those M.P.s entrusted with the presentation of the addresses to the King reveal.69
The support of the old Tories for the principle of parliamentary supremacy and their readiness to go to war in its defence provoked much interest at the time. Many contemporaries cynically attributed it to the enticing prospect of relief for Tory purses, severely over-burdened by the land tax. Possibly this had some plausibility in the early stages of the Anglo-American dispute at the time of the Stamp Act and the Townshend Duties. But later, at the onset of the war, in the light of the heavy expenditure plainly involved even in a short armed struggle with America, and with opposition spokesmen bitterly reminding the country gentlemen that an increased land tax was the first fruit of their attitude, it carried less force. More interesting to many were the ideological implications. If it was curious for Whigs in America to be found supporting the royal prerogative it seemed no less odd for Tories to be seen supporting the sovereignty of the legislature.70 Their opponents characteristically attributed this to a major change at court rather than among the country gentlemen. ‘Lucky has it been for many consistent Jacobites, who might otherwise have been reduced to the necessity of turning with the times, that the crown itself has taken a turn in their favour; by which means the morosest anti-courtiers of the last reign are become, without changing their political preferences, the civilist courtiers in this’.71
These calculations about the direction of Tory thinking were contrived and overstrained. For the deployment of traditional Tory emotions and beliefs in the service of parliamentary omnicompetence was carried out much more smoothly than the channelling of old Whig energies in a radical or reforming direction. Seventeenth-century concepts and ideas played a greater part in late eighteenth-century politics than is sometimes allowed for, but the changes in their use were as important as the fact that they were used at all. By the 1770s the surviving element in Tory thinking was not the divine right of the monarch, but rather the divine right of properly constituted authority, and the non-resistance which certainly lingered on in their political vocabulary was owed not to the King but to the King in Parliament. The speed and success with which Tories had adapted their traditional ideas in order to absorb the once traumatic impact of the Revolution of 1688 is now much better understood,72 and certainly by the reign of George III the principle of parliamentary sovereignty was as commonplace among Tories as among their enemies. Moreover the distinctions which caused such agonies among conscientious Whigs were not at all embarrassing to the less pedantic Tory country gentlemen. For them it was sufficient to state that the power of taxation was implicit in the supreme authority necessarily found in every state. This secularised version of the ultimate omnipotence of paternal government figured strongly in Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny. ‘There must in every society be some power or other for which there is no appeal, which admits no restrictions, which pervades the whole mass of the community, regulates and adjusts all subordination, enacts laws or repeals them, erects or annuls judicatures; extends or contracts privileges, exempt itself from question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity’.73 Johnson was not one of the country gentlemen but he shared their political standpoint and was, unlike most of them, capable of articulating it. One of the advantages of such a simple concept was that it made speculation about the precise content of sovereignty pointless-it was in its nature all or nothing. It also permitted somewhat vague statements which jumbled together in a confused but satisfying mixture the supremacy of the nation, the crown, and the legislature. Franklin found this habitual lack of precision deeply irritating: ‘Nothing is more common here than to talk of the Sovereignty of Parliament, and the Sovereignty of this Nation over the Colonies; a kind of Sovereignty the Idea of which is not so clear, nor does it clearly appear upon what Foundations it is established’.74 Such looseness of definition incidentally permitted that sentimental expression of respect for the person of the King, which if it no longer implied doctrines of divine right, gave ample rein to Tory emotions. Most of the addresses of 1775 specifically referred to the need to maintain the lawful authority of the legislature, but most also referred to the rights of the Crown, in one form or another. Expressions such as the ‘legal Authority of the Crown’, the Dignity of your Crown and Person’, ‘our Hearts glowing with Zeal for your Majesty’s Person’ occurred in profusion.75 Some critics were consequently driven to enquire ‘whether passive obedience and non-resistance in all cases what-soever be the duty of British subject’.76
The accusation that the language of the landed interest in this period was the language of non-resistance was not absurdly wide of the mark, at any rate outside Parliament itself, where the debate was generally conducted between different brands of Whigs and among relatively sophisticated politicians. But in settings as diverse as the Common Council of London and the Berkshire county meeting held at Abingdon, there were lively debates about the legitimacy of resistance and the duty of passive obedience to constituted authority.77 The language of the addresses themselves was in many cases savage in its denuciation of the colonists and smacked distinctly of the old abuse by the High Churchmen of commonwealthmen and dissenters. Americans were, for some addressers, ‘Sons of Anarchy’, and ‘Mob and Rabble led by mad Enthusiasts and desperate Republicans’; others referred to the ‘base Innovations and black Ingratitude of rebellious Americans’, and predicted the ‘miseries of a democratical Tyranny’.78 Loyalist journalists encouraged the tendency to make a connection between American radicals and old bogeys of Tory mythology. ‘It is impossible’ one declared, ‘to give you a better description of the bulk of the people on this Continent (and particularly in the province of Massachusetts Bay), than every English history gives of the principles of the Independents in Oliver’s time. There their pictures are justly drawn’.79 The implied hostility to religious dissenters was deeply significant. One pamphleteer referred to ‘these rebellious Republicans, these hairbrained fanatics, as mad and distracted as the Anabaptists of Munster’.80 The American crisis came, by coincidence, at a sensitive moment for relations between the church and the non-comformists in England. The Feathers Tavern petition, in favour of modifying the requirement of clerical subscription to the Thirty-Nine articles, and a renewed demand from dissenters for an extension of the Toleration Act, had both been firmly repressed in 1772-3. Against this backdrop, the religious convictions of New Englanders and the political sympathies of leading English dissenters, were closely noted, and in the minds of Anglicans connected. It would hardly have been possible to raise the cry of ‘the church in danger’ on this basis, but there was no doubt where the inclinations of the Anglican clergy lay, and they made no secret of their desire to stoke the fires of anti-Americanism. In many parts of the country the pulpit reinforced a national political campaign for the first time in many years, and visiting Americans like Samuel Curwen were startled by the recrudescence of the old high Toryism, reflected in virulent sermons.81 The holding of a general fast unleashed a flood of appeals for Anglican unity in the face of a revived dissenting threat,82 while inflammatory addresses from the pulpit were matched by a powerful campaign in the newspapers: ‘All true Churchman are desired to unite in an address to the throne on the present alarming times. It being evident that the Dissenters in general want to subvert the constitution’.83 The taint of radicalism was also readily linked with these prejudices. The loudly expressed interest of Wilkites in the American cause was particularly damaging. Americans tended to believe that such interest enhanced their own prospects in Britain. In fact, with the propertied classes, it had the opposite effect. According to one experienced and friendly observer, Richard Champion, America would have found much more support among moderate Englishmen if the domestic challenges of radicalism in these years had never occurred.84
The defence of the British supremacy in the colonies could easily be portrayed as a defence of all those things which the old Tories most admired. In this respect the changes of George III’s early years had utterly transformed their situation. They were now, as never under George I and George II, part of the natural and settled order of things. No longer engaged in the hopeless defence of an outdated creed against the Whig oligarchs, they once again felt fully a part of a unified ruling class. Tories rarely bothered to compete for government places at the higher levels, but their access to the patronage of the localities was once again as open as under Queen Anne. In particular their acknowledged place in the Commissions of the Peace and in the new-style militia gave them a stake in existing government which they had long lacked. In one of those deeply perceptive analyses of which he was capable, Shelburne saw distinctly the connections between a squirearchy fully restored to its leading role in local society, and the coercion of America. He commented on ‘the alienation of all the landed Interest from the ancient Plan of Freedom: Every landed Man setting up a little Tyranny, and, armed with Magistracy, and. oppressive Laws, spreading a Waste of Spirit and creating an intellectual Darkness around him. Thus employed the country gentlemen were willing, instead of controlling the abuse of Power, to take their Choice with that Government under which their own peculiar Tyrannies were maintained’.85
This was a pejorative way of describing the growing confidence, complacency, and cohesiveness, which marked the attitude of the old landed families and which was reflected not least in their view of the American conflict. It also underrated their readiness temporarily to resume their independence when circumstances dictated. Within four years of the addresses of I 775, they mutinied over the failure of the war and the bleak economic climate at home, came near to overturning the government, and briefly aroused radical hopes of major constitutional change. Nonetheless, Shelburne’s assessment was a shrewd one, for it caught perfectly the mindless authoritarianism which the country gentlemen displayed in the face of the American challenge. Put at its simplest they declined to feel for colonial property holders, those libertarian sentiments which quickly sprang to their minds when the traditional rights and customs of propertied Englishmen were at stake. Americans indeed were in this sense the victims of a revived Tory paternalism, and seen somewhat as monied men or religious dissenters had been seen at the beginning of the century. In their case, moreover, clearly subordinate status and an outlandish identity which placed them on a level little above foreigners reinforced the hierarchical and patriotic instincts of the John Bull Englishman.86 The essential fact was that the English landed gentry altogether rejected, without even giving it serious consideration, the proposition which for Americans was of equally obvious validity-the proposition that the residents of the colonies were indistinguishable from Englishmen in respect of their rights and liberties. Contemporary usage commonly described the plantations in terms which suggested that they were no more than the property of the British, and their inhabitants literally a subject people. This dismayed well-disposed Englishmen and shocked visiting Americans; ironically it offended not least those loyalist Americans who gave up everything for their principles, settled in England and found themselves despised and even cursed with their rebellious compatriots. Richard Price objected strongly to such attitudes: ‘The people of America are no more the subjects of the people of Britain, than the people of Yorkshire are the subjects of the people of Middlesex. They are your fellow-subjects’. His plea feU on deaf ears.
The 1760s and 1770s saw the emergence of a clear consensus iu favour of the principle of British imperial supremacy. Whether this consensus is justly to be termed the ‘new Toryism’ is perhaps a matter of semantics. The country gentlemen and the broader body of provincial opinion which they undoubtedly represented, did not embrace aU shades of opinion in favour of stern measures in the colonies. They did not themselves dictate or shape policy, and their leaders who did, appealed to their prejudices, but did not necessarily share them. On the other hand they provided the essential element of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary support without which an unprecedented war against colonists could not have been fought. Their alliance with the court of George III and its expression in the coercion of America also signified a growing identification of the governing class with the conservative values of the landed interest, and thereby prepared the way for the Church and King reaction of the 1790s. Perhaps significantly, the addresses demanding action against the colonies already provided glimpses of that obsession with the unchanging and unchangeable virtues of the constitution in church and state which was to be the hallmark of Toryism under Pitt and Liverpool. Americans were thus cast in the role which was finally to be allotted to reformers in the 1790s, that of the sacrilegious enemy of the purity of the English constitution. Ironically Burke, who was later to expound and articulate this standpoint with brilliant clarity and devastating force was, in the 1770s, searching conscientiously for a formula which would sidestep, if not supplant it. It is perhaps a measure of the importance of the American Revolution in British party politics that talents which were insufficient to revive the fortunes of the old Whiggism, were not even needed to reinvigorate the old Toryism.
Endnotes
- A convenient summary of the state of the debate is to be found in J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), parts I and II.
- I. R. Christie, ‘Was there a “New Toryism” in the Earlier Part of George Ill’s Reign’ in Myth and Reality in Late Eighteenth-Century British Politics and Other Papers (London, 1970), Professor Christie accepts that colonial policy followed a different pattern from domestic policy during these years. He argues, however, that ‘it is closer to the facts to analyse British colonial policy in terms of an imperialism which failed to find a way through the problem of freedom versus authority than to connect it with any general concept of toryism’ (p. 213).
- The most useful account of the structure of parliamentary politics is provided by the introduction to Sir Lewis Namier and J. Brooke, The History of Parliament. The House of Commons, 1754-90 (3 vols., London, 1964).
- For a recent assessment, see F. O’Gorman, The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs 1760-82 (London, 1975).
- H. Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George III, ed. G. F. R. Barker (4 vols., London, 1894), I. 4; E. Burke, Works (Bohn edn., 8 vols., London, 1854), I. 308.
- Letters of a Loyalist Lady (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), 74.
- The Grenville Papers, ed. W. J. Smith (4 vols., London, 1852), ii. 199.
- Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, XVI. 1107.
- Henry E. Huntington Library, HM22513: Manchester to unknown, 9 January 1776.
- Burke, Works, I. 318.
- Gentleman’s Magazine, 1776, 221.
- Crisis, XXXIX.
- Quoted, B. Donoughue, British Politics and the American Revolution: The Path to War, 1773-5 (London, 1964), 197.
- [A. Lee], An Appeal to the Justice and Interests of the People of Great Britain in the present Dispute with America (4th edn., New York, 1775), 24.
- London Chronicle, 20 June 1776.
- The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, ed. P. 0. Hutchinson (2 vols., London, 1886), i. 257.
- The Diary of Sylas Neville, 1767-1788, ed. B. Cozens-Hardy (London, 1950), 28.
- Huntington Library, Grenville Letter-Book, Grenville to Knox, 16 August 1768.
- Grenville Letter-Book, Grenville to Dr. Spry, 19 August 1766.
- Crisis, XLVIII.
- Address of Middlesex J.P.’s, London Gazette, 17 October 1775.
- Grenville Letter-Book, Grenville to Lyttelton, 20 August 1765.
- Grenville Letter-Book, Grenville to Hood, 30 October 1768.
- Journals of the Continental Congress 1774-1789 (Washington, 1904-37), I. 68; III. 410; V. 512.
- A Letter from a Merchant in London to his Nephew in North America; for this, with an equally sarcastic, but unpublished response from Franklin, see Pennsylvania Magazine, XXV (1901), 314.
- Droit le Roi: or the Rights and Prerogatives of the Imperial Crown of Great Britain (London, 1764).
- Walpole, Memoirs, i. 306.
- Parliamentary History, XVIII. 769, 771.
- London Chronicle, 7 December 1775.
- London Gazette, 14 November 1775.
- London Gazette, 25 November 1775.
- Grenville Letter-Book, Grenville to Whately, 15 November 1769.
- Sir Henry Cavendish’s Debates of the House of Commons, ed. J. Wright (2 vols., London, 1840), I. 441.
- Correspondence of King George the Third from 1760 to December 1783, ed. Sir J. Fortescue (6 vols., London, 1927-8), II. 82-4.
- Parliamentary History, XVII. 773-837.
- Franklin Jonathan Williams and William Pitt. A Letter of January 21, 1775, ed. B. Knollenberg (Bloomington, 1949).
- ‘Letters of Henry Laurens to his son John, 1773-1776’, South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, IV (1903), 33.
- [H. Williamson], The Plea of the Colonies, On the Charges brought against them by Lord Mansfield, and Others, in a letter to His Lordship. By a Native of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1772), 6.
- Correspondence of Edmund Burke, vol. III. ed. G. H. Guttridge, 103.
- See P. Langford, ‘The Rockingham Whigs and America, 1767-1773’ in Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, eds. A. Whiteman, J. S. Bromley, and P. G. M. Dickson (Oxford 1973); P. D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1975), 367-71.
- Connecticut Historical Society, Diary of W. S. Johnson, 13 June 1770.
- Hutchinson Diary, II. 131.
- British Library, Add. MS. 35361, f. 139: Hardwicke to Charles Yorke, n.d.
- British Library, Add. MS. 32973, f. 344.
- For an important clarification of what Pitt said in 1766, suggesting that his widely quoted condemnation of all taxation of the colonies was far from his real intention, see I. R. Christie, ‘William Pitt and American Taxation, 1766: A Problem of Parliamentary Reporting’, Studies in Burke and His Time, XVII (1976), 167-79.
- Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, ed. W. S. Taylor and J. H. Pringle (4 vols., London, 1838), II. 355. See also P. G. Walsh Atkins, ‘Shelburne and America, 1763-83’, upub. Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1971.
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. M. Farrand (San Marino, 1964), 206-7.
- Parliamentary History, XV. 387. Significantly the measure which Fox opposed was eventually adopted, at Grenville’s instance, in 1765, the year of the Stamp Act, and proved deeply controversial in the colonies.
- Historical Manuscripts Commission, Egmont Diary, I. 157. Political considerations, however, were apt to induce Walpole to modify his stance. See T. R. Reese, Colonial Georgia: A Study in British Imperial Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Athens, Georgia, 1963), chap. 3.
- British Library, Add. MS. 11514.
- The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. L. W. Labaree (New Haven, 1959-), VIII. 296.
- Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliament respecting North America, ed. F. Stock (Washington, 1924-41), iv. 190, 214.
- Collection of New York Historical Society, Colden Papers, III (1920), 324.
- For a valuable guide to the main themes, see C. Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1977).
- Parliamentary History, XVIII. 1291-2. Enthusiasts were, however, less ready to quote Locke’s embarrassing reliance on the prince to decide when and how the elective basis of the legislature should be reformed.
- Parliamentary History, XVIII. 1171.
- Crisis, XLVIII.
- Lords Journals, XXXIV. 183.
- Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and His Contemporaries, ed. George Thomas, Earl of Albermarle (2 vols., London, 1852), II. 254.
- Hutchinson Diary, I. 316-17.
- H. C. Van Schaak, Henry Cruger: The Colleague of Edmund Burke in the British Parliament (New York, 1859), 19.
- Rockingham Memoirs, II. 297. This letter to Rockingham was written on 13 October 1776, after the American defeat at Long Island.
- See I. R. Christie, ‘Economical Reform and “The influence of the Crown”‘ in Myth and Reality.
- Hutchinson Diary, i. 454.
- Correspondence of Mr. Ralph Izard of South Carolina (New York, 1844), 87-8.
- Hutchinson Diary, II. 708.
- Parliamentary History, xviii, 1026.
- The most useful lists of the minority in the divisions of February 1766 are those at British Library, Add. MS. 32974, ff. 167, 169 and Sheffield City Library, WWM. R54–l, 11. Namier’s suggestion that 34 Tories voted in favour of repeal is speculation ‘on a pro rata basis’; it is also quite out of line with the comments of contemporaries. (See Sir L. Namier, ‘Country Gentlemen in Parliament 1750–84’, in Crossroads of Power, London, 1962, 43.)
- The names are listed with the addresses in the London Gazette from 16 September 1775 to 4 May 1776. They include many M.P.s who never opened their mouths in the Commons.
- Parliamentary History, XVIII. 938.
- London Chronical, 2 September 1775.
- See, for example, J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689-1720 (Cambridge, 1977), chap. 3.
- Samuel Johnson, Political Writings, ed. D. J. Greene (New Haven, 1977), 423.
- Franklin Papers, XIV. 69.
- London Gazette, 4, 11, 14 November 1775.
- London Chronicle, 4 November 1775.
- London Chronicle, 8 July 1775; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 18 November 1775.
- London Gazette, 17 October, 4 November 1775, 6 January, 30 April 1776.
- London Chronicle, 25 April 1775.
- [M. Cooper], A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans, On the Subject of Political Confusion (New York, 1774), 31.
- Journal and Letters of the late Samuel Curwen, ed. G. A. Ward (New York, 1845), 213-14.
- London Chronicle, 19 December 1776.
- London Chronicle, 30 September 1775.
- The American Correspondence of a Bristol Merchant 1766-1776: Letters of Richard Champion, ed. G. H. Guttridge, Univ. of California, Pubs. in History, XX (1934), 49-50.
- W. L. Clements Library, Shelburne MSS., vol. 165, 221.
- Chain of Friendship: Selected Letters of Dr. John Fothergill of London 1735-1780, ed. B. C. Comer and C. C. Booth (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 285.
Contribution (106-130) from The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution, edited by Peter Marshall and Glyn Williams (Routledge, 07.08.2005), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.