Doves And Hawks, 1776 (Februrary 1968 | Volume: 19, Issue: 2)

Doves And Hawks, 1776

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Februrary 1968 | Volume 19, Issue 2


On May 20, 1779, the Earl of Pembroke—lord lieutenant of Wiltshire, a former Lord of the Bedchamber to the reigning monarch, George III—was in despair. He felt a deep sense of shame that was impossible to hide. As he wrote to his son, Lord Herbert, who was making the Grand Tour in Italy: “I wish I were a Laplander, or anything but a Briton.”

A month later he explained at greater length to his son the reasons for his dissatisfaction: Our Ministry, taken en gros, are certainly such as no wise nor honest man can trust, & in whom the country can conceive no hopes; men who have proved themselves incapable, whose characteristic is indolence, & whose sistem is unwise, who are overpowered by misfortune, because they are leagued with absurdity, whose obstinacy is not to be softened by advice, & whose eyes are not to be opened by experience.

As a soldier (he was an over-age colonel in the elite Royals) Pembroke was of course distressed by the defeats sustained by the British forces in America —hence his shame—but his anger with the government welled from deeper springs than this. In his quick-tempered, completely uninhibited letters to his son, he does not disguise his contempt for the members of George III’s Parliament. He considered it an utterly corrupt institution and he wondered that the people did not nail up the doors of both Houses and set fire to them. In all cities, he told his son, there was the utmost discontent, particularly among manufacturers. His sympathy was with them.

Indeed the political state of England in 1779 was a sorry mess, and for nearly two decades every ministry had proved itself totally incapable of dealing with the American question. During the sixties, harshness alternated with weakness, repression was followed by conciliation as one Whig ministry rapidly followed another. The House of Commons was composed of small Whig factions struggling for power, and George III’s faith in Lord North derived from the fact that North in 1770 had brought to an end the confusion of a decade and created a stable ministry, solidly Whig at the core, but supported by many Tories and independents. Nevertheless, not until rebellion flared up was North’s American policy much more consistent than that of his predecessors. As rebellion turned to war and the war itself grew long and difficult, many of North’s erstwhile supporters began to have doubts of the wisdom of his policy. Criticism grew in volume. And criticism mattered. Public opinion was important in a crisis, even in the oligarchical structure of British politics. Since the accession of George III in 1760, the feeling had steadily strengthened that a Parliament of landowners, dominated by the aristocracy, was becoming out of touch with the true needs of the nation. Criticism of the parliamentary system as well as of North’s American policy had become widespread. The radicalism of these critics was social,