THE KING’S PROCLAMATION
Penn made all possible haste, and arrived in London on the 14th of August; but when he got there the king would neither see him nor receive the petition in any way, directly or indirectly. The Congress was an illegal assembly which had no business to send letters to him: if any one of the colonies wanted to make terms for itself separately, he might be willing to listen to it. But this idea of a united America was something unknown either to law or to reason, something that could not be too summarily frowned down. [The king issues a proclamation, and tries to hire troops from Russia]So while Penn waited about London, the king issued a proclamation; setting forth that many of his subjects in the colonies were in open and armed rebellion, and calling upon all loyal subjects of the realm to assist in bringing to condign punishment the authors and abettors of this foul treason. Having launched this thunderbolt, George sent at once to Russia to see if he could hire 20,000 men to aid in giving it effect, for the “loyal subjects of the realm” were slow in coming forward. A war against the Americans was not yet popular in England. Lord Chatham withdrew his eldest son, Lord Pitt, from the army, lest he should be called upon to serve against the men who were defending the common liberties of Englishmen. There was, moreover, in England as well as in America, a distrust of regular armies. Recruiting was difficult, and conscription was something that the people would not endure unless England should actually be threatened with invasion. The king had already been obliged to raise a force of his Hanoverian subjects to garrison Minorca and Gibraltar, thus setting free the British defenders of these strongholds for service in America. He had no further resource except in hiring troops from abroad. [Catherine refuses]But his attempt in Russia was not successful, for the Empress Catherine, with all her faults, was not disposed to sell the blood of her subjects. She improved the occasion—as sovereigns and others will sometimes do—by asking George, sarcastically, if he thought it quite compatible with his dignity to employ foreign troops against his own subjects; as for Russian soldiers, she had none to spare for such a purpose. The king hires German troopsFoiled in this quarter, the king applied to the Duke of Brunswick, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, the princes of Waldeck and Anhalt-Zerbst, the Margrave of Anspach-Bayreuth, and the Count of Hesse-Hanau, and succeeded in making a bargain for 20,000 of the finest infantry in Europe, with four good generals,—Riedesel of Brunswick, and Knyphausen, Von Heister, and Donop of Hesse. The hiring of these troops was bitterly condemned by Lord John Cavendish in the House of Commons, and by Lords Camden and Shelburne and the Duke of Richmond in the House of Lords; and Chatham’s indignant invectives at a somewhat later date are familiar to every one. It is proper, however, that in such an affair as this we should take care to affix our blame in the right place. The king might well argue that in carrying on a war for what the majority of Parliament regarded as a righteous object, it was no worse for him to hire men than to buy cannon and ships. The German troops, on their part, might justly complain of Lord Camden for stigmatizing them as “mercenaries,” inasmuch as they did not come to America for pay, but because there was no help for it. It was indeed with a heavy heart that these honest men took up their arms to go beyond sea and fight for a cause in which they felt no sort of interest, and great was the mourning over their departure. The persons who really deserved to bear the odium of this transaction were the mercenary princes who thus shamelessly sold their subjects into slavery. It was a striking instance of the demoralization which had been wrought among the petty courts of Germany in the last days of the old empire, and among the German people it excited profound indignation.[Indignation in Germany] The popular feeling was well expressed by Schiller, in his “Cabale und Liebe.” Frederick the Great, in a letter to Voltaire, declared himself beyond measure disgusted, and by way of thriftily expressing his contempt for the transaction he gave orders to his custom house officers that upon all such of these soldiers as should pass through Prussian territory a toll should be levied, as upon “cattle exported for foreign shambles.”
[Burning of Portland, Oct 16, 1775] When the American question was brought up in the autumn session of Parliament, it was treated in the manner with which the Americans had by this time become familiar. A few far-sighted men still urged the reasonableness of the American claims, but there was now a great majority against them. In spite of grave warning voices, both houses decided to support the king; and in this they were upheld by the university of Oxford, which a century ago had burned the works of John Milton as “blasphemous,” and which now, with equal felicity, in a formal address to the king, described the Americans as “a people who had forfeited their lives and their fortunes to the justice of the state.” At the same time the department of American affairs was taken from the amiable Lord Dartmouth, and given to the truculent Lord George Germain. These things were done in November, 1775, and in the preceding month they had been heralded by an act of wanton barbarity on the part of a British naval officer, albeit an unwarranted act, which the British government as promptly as possible disowned. On the 16th of October, Captain Mowatt had sailed with four small vessels into the harbour of Portland (then called Falmouth), and with shells and grenades set fire to the little town. St. Paul’s Church, all the public buildings, and three fourths of all the dwellings were burned to the ground, and a thousand unoffending men, women, and children were thus turned out-of-doors just as the sharp Maine winter was coming on to starve and freeze them.
The news of the burning of Portland reached Philadelphia on the same day (October 31) with the news that George III. was about to send foreign mercenaries to fight against his American subjects; and now the wrath of Congress was thoroughly kindled, and the party which advised further temporizing was thrown into helpless minority.
A CONTEMPORARY SKETCH OF THE BURNING OF FALMOUTH
[Effects upon Congress] “Well, brother rebel,” said a Southern member to Samuel Ward of Rhode Island, “we have now got a sufficient answer to our petition: I want nothing more, but am ready to declare ourselves independent.” Congress now advised New Hampshire, Virginia, and South Carolina to frame for themselves new republican governments, as Massachusetts had already done; it urged South Carolina to seize the British vessels in her waters; it appointed a committee to correspond with foreign powers; and above all, it adopted unreservedly the scheme, already partially carried into operation, for the expulsion of the British from Canada.