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

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

Of course Hutchinson and Oliver and their kind thought that they were only writing for ministerial eyes, that they were only whispering into royal ears. They no doubt assumed that their letters would be safely pigeon-holed, or still more safely destroyed. It did not occur to them that they ever could or would be made public, and by their publication thrust new weapons into the hands of the men whose liberties they were so zealous to suppress. But the unexpected often, if not always, happens. Whately died in the June of 1772, and after his death the letters he had received, and preserved, from Hutchinson and Oliver, were somehow stolen. We shall probably never know how they were stolen or by whom. It was claimed in later years, but not proved, that Dr. Hugh Williamson was the means of transmitting the letters to Franklin. All that we know for certain is that they came into the hands of Benjamin Franklin, and that Benjamin Franklin believed it to be his duty as agent for Massachusetts to make them known to the colony he represented. He was only allowed to do so under certain strict and definite conditions. The source from which they came was to be kept absolutely secret. They were only to be shown to a few leading colonists; they were to be neither printed nor copied, and they were to be returned promptly. Franklin accepted these conditions, and as far as was in his power observed them. The source from which they came was kept a secret, is still a secret. {155} But Franklin could not very well enforce, perhaps did not very greatly desire to enforce, those conditions upon his friends on the other side of the Atlantic. He pointed out that, though they might not be printed or copied, they might be talked about. And talked about they were. The knowledge of them set all Boston afire with excitement, filling the colonists with indignation and their opponents with dismay. The Massachusetts House of Assembly carried by a large majority a petition to the King, calling for the removal of Hutchinson and Oliver as betrayers of their trust and enemies to the colony. Hutchinson, soon made aware of the publicity given to the correspondence, demanded to see the letters that were said to come from him. The Assembly permitted this, but accorded the permission with a show of distrust that was in itself the crudest affront. A small committee was appointed to take the letters to Hutchinson and to show him the letters in their presence, the implication being that Hutchinson was not to be trusted with the letters except in the presence of witnesses. Hutchinson had to submit to the insult; he had also to admit that the letters were genuine. He gave, or was understood to give, permission that the letters might be made public. The letters were promptly made public. Thousands of copies were struck off and scattered broadcast all over the continent.

[Sidenote: 1772—Temple and Whately fight a duel]

England was scarcely less excited than America by the publication. There was a general curiosity to know how the letters had been purloined and how they had been made public. The Whately to whom the letters had been addressed had a brother, William Whately. William Whately seems to have been alarmed lest it might be thought that he was in any way instrumental to the promulgation of the letters. He diverted any suspicion from himself by accusing another man of the theft. This other man was a Mr. John Temple, who had once had an opportunity of examining the papers of the late Mr. Whately. Temple immediately challenged his accuser; a duel was fought, and as far as ordeal of battle went, Temple made good his innocence, for he wounded William Whately. At {156} this moment Franklin came forward. He admitted that the letters had come into his hands, and that he had despatched them to America. He declined to say how they did come into his hands, but he solemnly asserted the absolute innocence of both Temple and Whately of any knowledge of or complicity in the transaction. A storm of popular anger broke upon Franklin. He was regarded as a criminal, spoken of as a criminal, publicly denounced as a criminal. Wedderburn, the Solicitor-General, was his denunciator, and he chose for the place of his attack the House of Commons, and for the hour the occasion of the presentation of the petition of Massachusetts for the removal of Hutchinson and Oliver.

[Sidenote: 1772—Wedderburn's attack on Franklin]

Wedderburn assailed Franklin in a speech whose ability was only surpassed by its ferocity. In the presence of an illustrious audience, that numbered among its members some of the most famous men of that time or of any time, Wedderburn directed against Franklin a fluency of invective, a fury of reproach that was almost splendid in its unbridled savagery. The Privy Councillors, with one exception, rocked with laughter and revelled in applause as the Solicitor-General pilloried the agent from the colony of Massachusetts Bay as a thief, well-nigh a murderer, a man lost to all honor, all decency. The one grave exception to the grinning faces of the Privy Councillors was the face of Lord North. He sat fixed in rigidity, too well aware of all that depended upon the glittering slanders of Wedderburn to find any matter of mirth in them. Only one other man in all that assembly of genius and rank and fame and wit carried a countenance as composed as that of Lord North, and that was the face of the man whom Wedderburn was bespattering with his ready venom. Benjamin Franklin, dressed in a gala suit, unlike the sober habit that was familiar with him, stood at the bar of the House and listened with an unconquerable calm to all that Wedderburn had to say. If it was the hour of Wedderburn's triumph, it was not the hour of Franklin's humiliation. He held his head high and suffered no emotion to betray itself while Wedderburn piled insult upon insult, {157} and the majority of his hearers reeled in a rapture of approval. But if Franklin listened with an unmoved countenance, the words of Wedderburn were not without their effect upon him. He was human and the slanders stung him, but we may well believe that they stung him most as the representative of the fair and flourishing colony whose petition was treated with the same insolence that exhausted itself in attacking his honor and his name.

The clothes philosophy of Diogenes Teufelsdroch is readily annotated by history. There are garments that have earned an immortality of fame. Such an one is the sky-blue coat which Robespierre wore at the height of his power when he celebrated the festival of the Supreme Being, and in the depths of his degradation when a few days later he was carried to his death. Such an one is the gala coat of flowered Manchester velvet which Franklin wore in his day of degradation when he was compelled to listen with a tranquil visage and a throbbing heart to the fluent invective of Wedderburn, and which was laid away and left unused through five tremendous years, not to be taken from its retirement until Franklin wore it again on the day of his greatest triumph, when he signed that treaty with England which gave his country her place among the nations of the world. Battles had been fought and won in the saddest of civil wars, the trained and seasoned troops of Europe had learned the lesson of defeat from levies of farmers, English generals had surrendered to men of their own race and their own speech, and a new flag floated over a new world between the day when Franklin went smartly dressed to Westminster to hear Wedderburn do his best and worst, and the day when Franklin vent smartly dressed to Paris as the representative of an independent America. Franklin's flowered coat is no less eloquent than Caesar's mantle.

The man whom the Court party employed to deal the death-blow to colonial hopes, and to overwhelm with insult and abuse the colonial agent, was a countryman and intimate friend of the detested Bute. Alexander Wedderburn attained the degree of eloquence with which he now {158} assailed Franklin at a cost of scarcely less pains than those devoted by Demosthenes to conquer his defects. He had a strong and a harsh Scotch accent, and neither the accent nor the race was grateful to the London of the eighteenth century. Wedderburn's native tenacity enabled him in a great degree to overcome his native accent. He toiled under Thomas Sheridan and he toiled under Macklin the actor to attain the genuine English accent, and his labors did not go unrewarded. Boswell writes that he got rid of the coarse part of his Scotch accent, retaining only so much of the "native wood-note wild" as to mark his country, "which if any Scotchman should affect to forget I should heartily despise him," so that by degrees he formed a mode of speaking to which Englishmen did not deny the praise of eloquence. Successful as an orator, secure in the patronage of the royal favorite, Wedderburn sought the society of the wits and was not welcomed by them. Johnson disliked him for his defective colloquial powers and for his supple readiness to go on errands for Bute. Foote derided him as not only dull himself, but the cause of dulness in others. Boswell, who admired his successful countryman, assumed that his unfavorable appearances in the social world were due to a cold affectation of consequence, from being reserved and stiff. The scorn of Johnson and the sneers of Foote would not have saved him from oblivion; he owes his unlovely notoriety to his assault upon Franklin, with all its disastrous consequences. Many years later, when Wedderburn was Lord Loughborough and Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, a humorous editor dedicated to him ironically a new edition of Franklin's "Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One."

The English Government was now resolved to show that it would temporize no longer with the factious colonists. If in a spirit of rash and ill-repaid good-nature it had repealed certain taxes, at least it would repeal no more. The tax on tea existed; the tax on tea would be enforced; the tax on tea should be respected. The East India Company had a vast quantity of tea which it desired {159} to sell. It obtained from the Government the permission to export the tea direct to America instead of being obliged to let it pass through the hands of English merchants. Under such conditions the tea could be sold very cheaply indeed in the colonies, and the Government hoped and believed that this very cheapness would be a temptation too keen for the patriotism of a tea-drinking city to withstand.

[Sidenote: 1773—The Boston "Tea-party">[

If the King and the East India Company were resolved to force their tea upon the American colonists, the Americans were no less stubborn in their resolution to refuse it. The tea-ships sailed the seas, weathered the winds and waves of the Atlantic, only to be, as it were, wrecked in port. The colonists in general, and especially the colonists of Massachusetts, were resolved not to suffer the tea to be landed, for they knew that once landed it could be sold so cheaply that it would be hard for many to resist the temptation to buy it. Every effort was made to prevent the importation. In many cases the consignees were persuaded, not wholly without menace, to make public engagement to relinquish their appointments. Pilots were advised as patriots to lend no aid to the threatened importation; indeed, it was pretty plainly hinted to some of them that they would best prove their patriotism by using their especial knowledge in such a way as would most effectually prevent it. Boston set the example of self-denial and of resistance. In the December of 1773 three ships laden with tea arrived in her port. Their captains soon heard of the hostility to their mission, were soon warned of the dangers that awaited them. Alarmed at their perils, the captains declared their perfect willingness to return with their cargoes to England if they were permitted to do so by the Board of Customs and the persons to whom the tea had been consigned. But the willingness of the captains was of no avail. The consignees insisted that the tea should be delivered to them, and neither the Custom House nor the Governor would grant the captains permission to return. But if the consignees and the authorities were resolved that the tea should be landed, the citizens of Boston were equally resolved that it should {160} not. Their fantastic method of giving force to their resolution has made it famous. In the dusk of a December evening the three tea-ships were suddenly boarded by what seemed to be a small army of Mohawk Indians in all the terror of their war-paint. These seeming Indians were in reality serious citizens of Boston, men of standing, wealth, and good repute, wearers of names that had long been known and honored in the Commonwealth. The frightful paint, the gaudy feathers, the moccasins and wampum, the tomahawks, scalping-knives, and pistols that seemed so alarming to the peaceful captains of the boarded ships were but the fantastic accoutrements that concealed the placid faces and the portly persons of many a respectable and respected Boston burgess.