A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

[Sidenote: 1765—The King seeks to remove Grenville]

Grenville acted in the matter of the Regency Bill as if the dearest wish of his heart were to flout the King's wishes and to wound his feelings. The King wished, lest he should again be stricken with illness while the heir-apparent was still an infant, to be given the right to name a regent by will. Grenville and Grenville's colleagues, who were now as jealous of the authority of Bute as any subscriber to the North Briton, saw or professed to see in the King's proposal an insidious scheme for placing little less than royal power within the reach of the favorite. They made it impossible for the King to name Bute by limiting his choice to the members of the royal family. But they went further than this in affronting the King. They limited his choice of a regent to members of the royal family, but they also limited the number of {73} members of the royal family from whom he might make his choice. They insisted that the name of the King's mother, of the Princess Dowager, should not be included in the Bill. It is difficult to understand how the King could ever have been induced to consent to this peculiarly galling insult. It seems that Grenville assured him, on entirely false premises, that if her name were mentioned in the Bill the House of Commons would be certain to strike it out. Preferring the private to the public affront, George surrendered to his minister, only to find that his minister was flagrantly misinformed. The friends of the Princess in the House of Commons moved that her name should be written into the Bill, and they carried their point in Grenville's teeth. Grenville had played the tyrant and George had accepted the humiliation for nothing. George tried at once to overthrow Grenville. In those days a king who disliked a minister had a very simple and easy way of showing and of gratifying his dislike. He could dismiss his minister without ceremony and without question. Nowadays a minister depends for his power and tenure of office upon the majority in the House of Commons, and a sovereign would not think of dismissing a minister, or of doing anything else than accepting formally the decision of the House of Commons. But when George the Third was king the only check upon the royal power of dismissing a minister lay in the possible difficulty of finding another to take his place. This was the check George now met. He wanted with all his heart to dismiss Grenville. He turned to Cumberland of Culloden, and implored him to bring back Pitt and enable him to get rid of Grenville. Cumberland tried and Cumberland failed. Pitt was in one of those paroxysms of illness which seem to have completely overmastered him. He was almost entirely under the influence of Temple. Temple's detestation of Bute reconciled him to Grenville's policy when he found that Grenville seemed to share that detestation. Temple persuaded Pitt to refuse. Cumberland came back to the King to tell of his failure. There was nothing to be done. Grenville had to be kept on. If the enforced association {74} did not make the sovereign and his minister better friends, if both smarted under a sense of humiliation and defeat, it is scarcely surprising that the stubbornness of both was intensified in cases where their stubbornness was pitted not against each other, but against a common obstacle. Such a case was then in existence.

[Sidenote: 1765—The American colonies]

Three thousand miles away the wealth and power of England was represented by a number of settlements occupying a comparatively narrow strip of territory on the Atlantic seaboard of the North American continent. The American colonies were the proudest possessions of the British Empire. Through generation after generation, for more than two centuries, English daring and English courage had built up those colonies, reclaiming them from the wilderness and the swamp, wresting them from wild man and wild beast, fighting for them with European power after European power. They were a source of wealth, a source of honor, and a source of strength to England. They were cheaply bought with the brave lives that had been given for them. It is hard to realize that any sovereign, that any statesman could fail to see how precious a possession they were, or how unwise any course of action must be which could tend in any way to lessen their affection or to alienate their support. Yet such a sovereign was upon the throne and such a minister was by his side.

Mr. Willett, senior, in "Barnaby Rudge," explains to his friends that his absent son Joe is away in "the Salwanners in America, where the war is." Mr. Willett's knowledge and appreciation of the American colonies represents pretty well for profundity and accuracy the knowledge and appreciation of the majority of the English people in the times contemporary with, and indeed long subsequent to, the quarrels between the old country and the new. To the bulk of the British people America was a vague and shadowy region, a sort of no-man's land, peopled for the most part with black men and red men, and dimly associated with sugar-planting and the tobacco trade. Its distance alone made it seem sufficiently unreal to those whose way of life was not drawn by business or {75} by politics into association with its inhabitants. The voyage to America was a grimly serious adventure, calling for fortitude and triple brass. The man was indeed lucky who could make the passage from shore to shore in six weeks of stormy sea, and the journey generally took a much longer time, and under the same conditions of discomfort and of danger that attended on the voyage of the "Mayflower." The vast majority of Englishmen concerned themselves as little with America as they concerned themselves with Hindostan. Both were British possessions, and as such important, but both were too far away to assume any very substantial reality in the consciousness of the bulk of the English people. Of the minority who did possess anything that can be called knowledge of the American colonies, the majority imbibed its information from official sources, from the reports of governors of provinces and official servants of the Crown. These reports were for the most part as reliable for a basis on which to build an intelligent appreciation as the legends of the Algonquins or the myths of the Six Nations.

If the English knowledge of the American colonies had been a little more precise it would have run to this effect. The colonies of the New England region were mainly peopled by a hardy, industrious, sober, frugal race, still strongly Puritanical in profession and in practice, and knowing but little of the extremes of fortune. Neither great poverty nor great wealth was common among those sturdy farmers, who tended their own farms, tilled their own land, lived upon their own produce, and depended for their clothing and for most of the necessaries of life upon the work of their own hands. A slender population was scattered far asunder in lonely townships and straggling villages of wooden houses, built for the most part in the formidable fashion imposed upon men who might at any time have to resist the attacks of Indians. Inside these villages the rough, rude justice of the Puritan days still persisted. The stocks and the pillory and the stool of repentance were things of the present. A shrewish housewife might still be made to stand at her cottage door with {76} the iron gag of the scold fastened upon her shameful face. A careless Sabbatarian might still find himself exposed to the scorn of a congregation, with the words "A wanton gospeller" placarded upon his ignominious breast. Inside those wooden houses a rude simplicity and a rough plenty prevailed. The fare was simple; the labor was hard; simple fare and stern labor between them reared a stalwart, God-fearing race. Its positive pleasures were few and primitive. Husking-bees, quiltings, a rare dance, filled up the measure of its diversions. But the summer smiled upon those steadfast, earnest, rigorous citizens, and in the wild and bitter winters each household would gather about the cheerful fire in the great chimney which in some of those cottages formed the major part of the building, and find content and peace in quiet talk and in tales of the past, of the French and Indian wars, and of their ancestors, long ago, in old England. Those same great fires that were the joy of winter were also one of its troubles. Once lit, with all the difficulty attendant upon flint and steel and burnt rag, they had to be kept alight from morning till night and from night till morning. If a fire went out it was a woful business to start it again with the reluctant tinder-box. There was, indeed, another way, an easier way, of going round to a neighbor and borrowing a shovelful of hot embers wherewith to kindle the blackened hearth. But in villages built for the most part of wood this might well be regarded as a dangerous process. So the law did regard it, and to start a fire in this lazy, lounging fashion was penalized as sternly as any breach of the Sabbath or of public decorum, and these were sternly punished. Drunkenness was grimly frowned down. Only decent, God-fearing men were allowed to keep taverns, and the names of persons who had earned the reputation of intemperance were posted up in those taverns as a warning to the host that he should sell such men no liquor. In Connecticut tobacco was forbidden to any one under twenty years of age, unless on the express order of a physician. Those who were over twenty were only allowed to smoke once a day, and then not within ten miles of any dwelling.

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[Sidenote: 1765—American colonial customs]

In spite of their democratic simplicity, even the New England colonists had their distinctions of rank as clearly marked as among the people of old England. The gentry dressed in one fashion; the working classes dressed in another. The family rank of students determined their places in the lists of Harvard College and Yale College. In Boston, the chief New England town, life was naturally more elaborate and more luxurious than in the country places. Ladies wore fine clothes and sought to be modish in the London manner; gentlemen made a brave show in gayly colored silks and rich laces, gold-headed canes and costly snuff-boxes. Even in Boston, however, life was simpler, quieter, and sweeter than it was across the Atlantic; there was Puritanism in its atmosphere—Puritanism and the serenity of learning, of scholarship, of study.

There was much more wealth in the province of New York; there was much more display in the southern colonies. New York was as famous for its Dutch cleanliness and its Dutch comfort as for its Dutch windmills that twirled their sails against the sky in all directions. There was store of plate and fine linen in New York cupboards. There were good things to eat and drink in New York households. Down South the gentlefolk lived as gentlefolk lived in England, with perhaps a more lavish ostentation, a more liberal hospitality. They loved horses and dogs, horse-racing and fox-hunting, dancing, music, high living, all things that added to the enjoyment of life. Their servants were their own black slaves. The great city of the South was Charleston, the third of the colonial cities. The fourth and last was Philadelphia, the "faire greene country town" of Penn's love, the last in our order, but the first in size and splendor, with its flagged sidewalks that had made it famous throughout the American continent as if it had been one of the seven wonders of the world, with its stately houses of brick and stone, its avenues of trees, its fruitful orchards and sweet-smelling gardens. The people of Philadelphia had every right to be proud of their city.