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HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
by
JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford
VOLUME VIII
MODERN ENGLAND. 1760-1815.
London
MacMillan and Co., Ltd.
New York: The MacMillan Co.
1896
First Edition, 1879; Reprinted 1882, 1886, 1891.
Eversley Edition, 1896.
CONTENTS
BOOK IX
MODERN ENGLAND. 1760-1815.
CHAPTER II
PAGE
THE INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICA. 1767-1782 1
CHAPTER III
INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND. 1782-1792 45
CHAPTER IV
ENGLAND AND REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE. 1792-1801 97
CHAPTER V
ENGLAND AND NAPOLEON. 1801-1815 144
MAPS
I. THE COLONIES OF NORTH AMERICA AT THE
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE _To face p._ 1
II. EUROPE AFTER THE PEACE OF LUNEVILLE, 1801 146
III. EUROPE AFTER THE PEACE OF TILSIT, 1807 158
[Illustration: THE COLONIES OF NORTH AMERICA at the Declaration of
Independence]
CHAPTER II
THE INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICA
1767-1782
[Sidenote: Growing influence of public opinion.]
The Chatham ministry marked a new phase in the relation of public
opinion to the government of the State. In 1766 as in 1756 Pitt had been
called into office by "the voice of the people" at large. But in his
former ministry the influence he drew from popularity could only make
itself effective through an alliance with the influence which was drawn
from political connexion; and when the two elements of the
administration became opposed the support of the nation gave Pitt little
strength of resistance against the Whigs. Nor had the young king had
much better fortune as yet in his efforts to break their rule. He had
severed them indeed from Pitt; and he had dexterously broken up the
great party into jealous factions. But broken as it was, even its
factions remained too strong for the king. His one effort at
independence under Bute hardly lasted a year, and he was as helpless in
the hands of Grenville as in the hands of Rockingham. His bribery, his
patronage, his Parliamentary "friends," his perfidy and his lies, had
done much to render good government impossible and to steep public life
in deeper corruption, but they had done little to further the triumph of
the Crown over the great houses. Of the one power indeed which could
break the Whig rule, the power of public opinion, George was more
bitterly jealous than even of the Whigs themselves. But in spite of his
jealousy the tide of opinion steadily rose. In wise and in unwise ways
the country at large showed its new interest in national policy, its new
resolve to have a share in the direction of it. It showed no love for
the king or the king's schemes. But it retained all its old disgust for
the Whigs and for the Parliament. It clung to Pitt closer than ever, and
in spite of his isolation from all party support raised him daily into a
mightier power. It was the sense that a new England was thus growing up
about him, that a new basis was forming itself for political action,
which at last roused the Great Commoner to the bold enterprise of
breaking through the bonds of "connexion" altogether. For the first time
since the Revolution a minister told the peers in their own house that
he defied their combinations.
[Sidenote: Chatham's withdrawal.]
The ministry of 1766 in fact was itself such a defiance; for it was an
attempt to found political power not on the support of the Whigs as a
party, but on the support of national opinion. But as Parliament was
then constituted, it was only through Chatham himself that opinion could
tell even on the administration he formed; and six months after he had
taken office Chatham was no more than a name. The dread which had driven
him from the stormy agitation of the Lower House to the quiet of the
House of Peers now became a certainty. As winter died into the spring of
1767 his nervous disorganization grew into a painful and overwhelming
illness which almost wholly withdrew him from public affairs; and when
Parliament met again he was unable either to come to town or to confer
with his colleagues. It was in vain that they prayed him for a single
word of counsel. Chatham remained utterly silent; and the ministry which
his guidance had alone held together at once fell into confusion. The
Earl's plans were suffered to drop. His colleagues lost all cohesion,
and each acted as he willed. Townshend, a brilliant but shallow
rhetorician whom Pitt had been driven reluctantly to make his Chancellor
of the Exchequer, after angering the House of Commons by proposals for
an increase of the land-tax, strove to win back popularity among the
squires by undertaking to raise a revenue from America. That a member of
a ministry which bore Pitt's name should have proposed to reopen the
question of colonial taxation within a year of the repeal of the Stamp
Acts was strange enough to the colonists; and they were yet more
astonished when, on its neglect to make provision for compensating those
who had suffered from the recent outbreak in due conformity to an Act of
the British Parliament, the Assembly of New York was suspended, and when
Townshend redeemed his pledge by laying duties on various objects
brought into American ports. But these measures were the result of
levity and disorganization rather than of any purpose to reopen the
quarrel. Pitt's colleagues had as yet no design to reverse his policy.
The one aim of the ministry which bore his name, and which during his
retirement looked to the Duke of Grafton as its actual head, was simply
to exist. But in the face of Chatham's continued withdrawal, of
Townshend's death in 1767, and of the increasing hostility of the
Rockingham Whigs, even existence was difficult; and Grafton saw himself
forced to a union with the faction which was gathered under the Duke of
Bedford, and to the appointment of a Tory noble as Secretary of State.
[Sidenote: His resignation.]
Such measures however only showed how far the ministry had drifted from
the ground on which Pitt took his stand in its formation; and the very
force on which he had relied turned at once against it. The elections
for the new Parliament which met in 1768 were more corrupt than any
that had as yet been witnessed; and even the stoutest opponents of
reform shrank aghast from the open bribery of constituencies and the
prodigal barter of seats. How bitter the indignation of the country had
grown was seen in its fresh backing of Wilkes. Wilkes had remained in
France since his outlawry; but he seized on the opening afforded by the
elections to return and offer himself as a member for the new
Parliament. To the surprise and dismay of the ministers he was returned
for Middlesex, a county the large number of whose voters made its choice
a real expression of public opinion. The choice of Wilkes at such a
moment was in effect a public condemnation of the House of Commons and
the ministerial system. The ministry however and the House alike shrank
from a fresh struggle with the agitator. But the king was eager for the
contest. After ten years of struggle and disappointment George had all
but reached his aim. The two forces which had as yet worsted him were
both of them paralysed. The Whigs were fatally divided, and discredited
in the eyes of the country by their antagonism to Pitt. Pitt on the
other hand was suddenly removed from the stage. The ministry was without
support in the country; and for Parliamentary support it was forced to
lean more and more on the men who looked for direction to the king
himself. At a moment when all hope of exerting any influence seemed
crushed by the return of Chatham to power, George found his influence
predominant as it had never been before. One force of opposition alone
remained in the public discontent; and at this he struck more fiercely
than ever. "I think it highly expedient to apprise you," he wrote to
Lord North, "that the expulsion of Mr. Wilkes appears to be very
essential, and must be effected." The ministers and the House of Commons
bowed to his will. By his non-appearance in court when charged with
libel, Wilkes had become an outlaw, and he was now thrown into prison on
his outlawry. Dangerous riots broke out in London and over the whole
country at the news of his arrest; and continued throughout the rest of
the year. In the midst of these tumults the ministry itself was torn
with internal discord. The adherents of Chatham found their position in
it an intolerable one; and Lord Shelburne announced his purpose of
resigning office. The announcement was followed in the autumn by the
resignation of Chatham himself. Though still prostrated by disease, the
Earl was sufficiently restored to grasp the actual position of the
Cabinet which traded on his name, and in October 1768 he withdrew
formally from the ministry.
The withdrawal of Chatham however, if it shook the ministry, only
rendered it still more dependent on the king; and in spite of its
reluctance George forced it to plunge into a decisive struggle with the
public opinion which was declaring itself in tumult and riot against the
system of government. The triumph of Wilkes had been driven home by the
election of a nominee of the great agitator as his colleague on a fresh
vacancy in the representation of Middlesex. The Government met the blow
by a show of vigour, and by calling on the magistrates of Surrey to
disperse the mobs; a summons which ended in conflicts between the crowd
and the soldiers, in which some of the rioters were slain. Wilkes at
once published the letter of the Secretary of State with comments on it
as a cause of bloodshed; and the ministry accepted the step as a
challenge to combat. If his comments were libellous, the libel was
cognizable in the ordinary courts of law. But no sooner had Parliament
assembled in 1769 than the House of Commons was called to take the
matter into its own hands. Witnesses were examined at its bar: the forms
of a trial were gone through; and as Wilkes persisted in his charge, he
was expelled as a libeller. Unluckily the course which had been adopted
put the House itself on trial before the constituencies. No sooner was
the new writ issued than Wilkes again presented himself as a candidate,
and was again elected by the shire of Middlesex. Violent and oppressive
as the course of the House of Commons had been, it had as yet acted
within its strict right, for no one questioned its possession of a
right of expulsion. But the defiance of Middlesex led it now to go
further. It resolved, "That Mr. Wilkes having been in this session of
Parliament expelled the House, was and is incapable of being elected a
member to serve in the present Parliament"; and it issued a writ for a
fresh election. Middlesex answered this insolent claim to limit the free
choice of a constituency by again returning Wilkes; and the House was
driven by its anger to a fresh and more outrageous usurpation. It again
expelled the member for Middlesex; and on his return for the third time
by an immense majority it voted that the candidate whom he had defeated,
Colonel Luttrell, ought to have been returned, and was the legal
representative of Middlesex. The Commons had not only limited at their
own arbitrary discretion the free election of the constituency, but they
had transferred its rights to themselves by seating Luttrell as member
in defiance of the deliberate choice of Wilkes by the freeholders of
Middlesex. The country at once rose indignantly against this violation
of constitutional law. Wilkes was elected an Alderman of London; and the
Mayor, Aldermen, and Livery petitioned the king to dissolve the
Parliament. A remonstrance from London and Westminster mooted a far
larger question. It said boldly that "there is a time when it is clearly
demonstrable that men cease to be representatives. That time is now
arrived. The House of Commons do not represent the people." Meanwhile a
writer who styled himself Junius attacked the Government in letters,
which, rancorous and unscrupulous as was their tone, gave a new power to
the literature of the Press by their clearness and terseness of
statement, the finish of their style, and the terrible vigour of their
invective.
[Sidenote: Parliamentary Reform.]
The storm however beat idly on the obstinacy of the king. The printer of
the bold letters was prosecuted, and the petitions and remonstrances of
London were haughtily rejected. The issue of the struggle verified the
forebodings of Burke. If, as Middlesex declared, and as the strife
itself proved, the House of Commons had ceased to represent the English
people, it was inevitable that men should look forward to measures that
would make it representative. At the beginning of 1770 a cessation of
the disease which had long held him prostrate enabled Chatham to
reappear in the House of Lords. He at once denounced the usurpations of
the Commons, and brought in a bill to declare them illegal. But his
genius made him the first to see that remedies of this sort were
inadequate to meet evils which really sprang from the fact that the
House of Commons no longer represented the people of England; and he
mooted a plan for its reform by an increase of the county members, who
then formed the most independent portion of the House. Further he could
not go, for even in the proposals he made he stood almost alone. The
Tories and the king's friends were not likely to welcome proposals which
would lessen the king's influence. On the other hand the Whigs under
Lord Rockingham had no sympathy with Parliamentary reform. As early as
1769, in his first political publication, their one philosophic thinker,
Edmund Burke, had met a proposal to enlarge the number of constituents
by a counter-proposal to lessen them. "It would be more in the spirit of
our constitution, and more agreeable to the fashion of our best laws,"
he said, "by lessening the number to add to the weight and independency
of our voters." Nor did the Whigs shrink with less haughty disdain from
the popular agitation in which public opinion was forced to express
itself, and which Chatham, while censuring its extravagance, as
deliberately encouraged. It is from the quarrel between Wilkes and the
House of Commons that we may date the influence of public meetings on
English politics. The gatherings of the Middlesex electors in his
support were preludes to the great meetings of Yorkshire freeholders in
which the question of Parliamentary reform rose into importance; and it
was in the movement for reform, and the establishment of corresponding
committees throughout the country for the purpose of promoting it, that
the power of political agitation first made itself felt. Political
societies and clubs took their part in this quickening and organization
of public opinion: and the spread of discussion, as well as the
influence which now began to be exercised by the appearance of vast
numbers of men in support of any political movement, proved that
Parliament, whether it would or no, must soon reckon with the sentiments
of the people at large.
[Sidenote: Publication of debates.]
But an agent far more effective than popular agitation was preparing to
bring the force of public opinion to bear directly on Parliament itself.
We have seen how much of the corruption of the House of Commons sprang
from the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings, but this secrecy was the
harder to preserve as the nation woke to a greater interest in its own
affairs. From the accession of the Georges imperfect reports of the more
important discussions began to be published under the title of "The
Senate of Lilliput," and with feigned names or simple initials to denote
the speakers. The best known reports of this kind were those contributed
by Samuel Johnson to the _Gentleman's Magazine_. Obtained by stealth and
often merely recalled by memory, such reports were naturally inaccurate;
and their inaccuracy was eagerly seized on as a pretext for enforcing
the rules which guarded the secrecy of proceedings in Parliament. In
1771 the Commons issued a proclamation forbidding the publication of
debates; and six printers, who set it at defiance, were summoned to the
bar of the House. One who refused to appear was arrested by its
messenger; but the arrest brought the House into conflict with the
magistrates of London. The magistrates set aside its proclamation as
without legal force, released the printers, and sent the messenger to
prison for an unlawful arrest. The House sent the Lord Mayor to the
Tower, but the cheers of the crowds which followed him on his way told
that public opinion was again with the Press, and the attempt to hinder
its publication of Parliamentary proceedings dropped silently on his
release at the next prorogation. Few changes of equal importance have
been so quietly brought about. Not only was the responsibility of
members to their constituents made constant and effective by the
publication of their proceedings, but the nation itself was called in to
assist in the deliberations of its representatives. A new and wider
interest in its own affairs was roused in the people at large, and a new
political education was given to it through the discussion of every
subject of national importance in the Houses and the Press. Stimulated
and moulded into shape by free discussion, encouraged and made conscious
of its strength by public meetings, and gathered up and represented on
all its sides by the journals of the day, public opinion became a force
in practical statesmanship, influenced the course of debates, and
controlled, in a closer and more constant way than even Parliament
itself had been able to do, the actions of the Government. The
importance of its new position gave a weight to the Press which it had
never had before. The first great English journals date from this time.
With the _Morning Chronicle_, the _Morning Post_, the _Morning Herald_,
and the _Times_, all of which appeared in the interval between the
opening years of the American War and the beginning of the war with the
French Revolution, journalism took a new tone of responsibility and
intelligence. The hacks of Grub Street were superseded by publicists of
a high moral temper and literary excellence; and philosophers like
Coleridge or statesmen like Canning turned to influence public opinion
through the columns of the Press.
[Sidenote: Renewed strife with America.]
But great as the influence of opinion was destined to become, it was
feebly felt as yet; and George the Third was able to set Chatham's
policy disdainfully aside and to plunge into a contest far more
disastrous than his contest with the Press. In all the proceedings of
the last few years, what had galled him most had been the act which
averted a war between England and her colonies. To the king the
Americans were already "rebels," and the great statesman whose eloquence
had made their claims irresistible was a "trumpet of sedition." George
deplored in his correspondence with his ministers the repeal of the
Stamp Acts. "All men feel," he wrote, "that the fatal compliance in 1766
has increased the pretensions of the Americans to absolute
independence." But in England generally the question was regarded as
settled, while in America the news of the repeal had been received with
universal joy, and taken as a close of the strife. On both sides however
there remained a pride and irritability which only wise handling could
have allayed; and in the present state of English politics wise handling
was impossible. Only a few months indeed passed before the quarrel was
again reopened; for no sooner had the illness of Lord Chatham removed
him from any real share in public affairs than the wretched
administration which bore his name suspended the Assembly of New York on
its refusal to provide quarters for English troops, and resolved to
assert British sovereignty by levying import duties of trivial amount at
American ports. The Assembly of Massachusetts was dissolved on a
trifling quarrel with its Governor, and Boston was occupied for a time
by British soldiers. It was without a thought of any effective struggle
however that the Cabinet had entered on this course of vexation; and
when the remonstrances of the Legislatures of Massachusetts and
Virginia, coupled with a fall in the funds, warned the ministers of its
danger, they hastened to withdraw from it. In 1769 the troops were
recalled, and all duties, save one, abandoned. But with a fatal
obstinacy the king insisted on retaining the duty on tea as an
assertion of the supremacy of the mother country. Its retention was
enough to prevent any thorough restoration of good feeling. A series of
petty quarrels went on in almost every colony between the popular
assemblies and the Governors appointed by the Crown, and the colonists
persisted in their agreement to import nothing from the mother country.
As yet however there was no prospect of serious strife. In America the
influence of George Washington allayed the irritation of Virginia; while
Massachusetts contented itself with quarrelling with its Governor and
refusing to buy tea so long as the duty was levied.
The temper of the colonists was in the main that of the bulk of English
statesmen. Even George Grenville, though approving the retention of the
duty in question, abandoned all dream of further taxation. But the king
was now supreme. The reappearance and attack of Chatham at the opening
of 1770 had completed the ruin of the ministry. Those of his adherents
who still clung to it, Lord Camden, the Chancellor, Lord Granby, the
Commander-in-Chief, Dunning, the Solicitor-General, resigned their
posts. In a few days they were followed by the Duke of Grafton, who
since Chatham's resignation had been nominally the head of the
administration. All that remained of it were the Bedford faction and the
dependents of the king; but George did not hesitate to form these into a
ministry, and to place at its head the former Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Lord North, a man of some administrative ability, but
unconnected with any political party, steadily opposed to any
recognition of public opinion, and of an easy and indolent temper which
yielded against his better knowledge to the stubborn doggedness of the
king. The instinct of the country at once warned it of the results of
such a change; and the City of London put itself formally at the head of
the public discontent. In solemn addresses it called on George the Third
to dismiss his ministers and to dissolve the Parliament; and its action
was supported by petitions to the same effect from the greater counties.
In the following year it fought, as we have seen, a battle with the
House of Commons which established the freedom of the press. But the
efforts of the country failed before the paralysis of political action
which resulted from the position of the Whigs and the corruption of
Parliament. The deaths of Grenville and Bedford broke up two of the Whig
factions. Rockingham with the rest of the party held aloof from the
popular agitation, and drew more and more away from Chatham as he
favoured it. The Parliament remained steady to the king, and the king
clung more and more to the ministry. The ministry was in fact a mere
cloak for the direction of public affairs by George himself. "Not only
did he direct the minister," a careful observer tells us, "in all
important matters of foreign and domestic policy, but he instructed him
as to the management of debates in Parliament, suggested what motions
should be made or opposed, and how measures should be carried. He
reserved for himself all the patronage, he arranged the whole cast of
administration, settled the relative places and pretensions of ministers
of State, law officers, and members of the household, nominated and
promoted the English and Scotch judges, appointed and translated bishops
and deans, and dispensed other preferments in the Church. He disposed of
military governments, regiments, and commissions; and himself ordered
the marching of troops. He gave and refused titles, honours, and
pensions." All this immense patronage was persistently used for the
creation and maintenance in both Houses of Parliament of a majority
directed by the king himself; and its weight was seen in the steady
action of such a majority. It was seen yet more in the subjection to
which the ministry that bore North's name was reduced. George was in
fact the minister through the years of its existence; and the shame of
the darkest hour of English history lies wholly at his door.
[Sidenote: The Boston tea-riots.]
His fixed purpose was to seize on the first opportunity of undoing the
"fatal compliance of 1766." A trivial riot gave him at last the handle
he wanted. In December 1773 the arrival of some English ships laden with
tea kindled fresh irritation in Boston, where the non-importation
agreement was strictly enforced; and a mob in the disguise of Indians
boarded the vessels and flung their contents into the sea. The outrage
was deplored alike by the friends of America in England and by its own
leading statesmen; and both Washington and Chatham were prepared to
support the Government in its looked-for demand of redress. But the
thought of the king was not of redress but of repression, and he set
roughly aside the more conciliatory proposals of Lord North and his
fellow-ministers. They had already rejected as "frivolous and vexatious"
a petition of the Assembly of Massachusetts for the dismissal of two
public officers whose letters home advised the withdrawal of free
institutions from the colonies. They now seized on the riot as a pretext
for rigorous measures. A bill introduced into Parliament in the
beginning of 1774 punished Boston by closing its port against all
commerce. Another punished the State of Massachusetts by withdrawing the
liberties it had enjoyed ever since the Pilgrim Fathers landed on its
soil. Its charter was altered. The choice of its Council was transferred
from the people to the Crown, and the nomination of its judges was
transferred to the Governor. In the Governor too, by a provision more
outrageous than even these, was vested the right of sending all persons
charged with a share in the late disturbances to England for trial. To
enforce these measures of repression troops were sent to America, and
General Gage, the commander-in-chief there, was appointed Governor of
Massachusetts. The king's exultation at the prospect before him was
unbounded. "The die," he wrote triumphantly to his minister, "is cast.
The colonies must either triumph or submit." Four regiments would be
enough to bring the Americans to their senses. They would only be "lions
while we are lambs." "If we take the resolute part," he decided
solemnly, "they will undoubtedly be very meek."
[Sidenote: American resistance.]
Unluckily the blow at Massachusetts was received with anything but
meekness. The jealousies between colony and colony were hushed by a
sense that the liberties of all were in danger. If the British
Parliament could cancel the charter of Massachusetts and ruin the trade
of Boston, it could cancel the charter of every colony and ruin the
trade of every port from the St. Lawrence to the coast of Georgia. All,
therefore, adopted the cause of Massachusetts; and all their
Legislatures save that of Georgia sent delegates to a Congress which
assembled on the 4th of September at Philadelphia. Massachusetts took a
yet bolder course. Not one of its citizens would act under the new laws.
Its Assembly met in defiance of the Governor, called out the militia of
the State, and provided arms and ammunition for it. But there was still
room for reconciliation. The resolutions of the Congress had been
moderate, for Virginia was the wealthiest and most influential among
the States who sent delegates, and though resolute to resist the new
measures of the government, Virginia still clung to the mother country.
At home the merchants of London and Bristol pleaded loudly for
reconciliation; and in January 1775 Chatham again came forward to avert
a strife he had once before succeeded in preventing. With characteristic
largeness of feeling he set aside all half-measures or proposals of
compromise. "It is not cancelling a piece of parchment," he insisted,
"that can win back America: you must respect her fears and her
resentments." The bill which he introduced in concert with Franklin
provided for the repeal of the late Acts and for the security of the
colonial charters, abandoned the claim of taxation, and ordered the
recall of the troops. A colonial assembly was directed to meet and
provide means by which America might contribute towards the payment of
the public debt.
[Sidenote: Washington.]
Chatham's measure was contemptuously rejected by the Lords, as was a
similar measure of Burke's by the House of Commons, and a petition of
the City of London in favour of the Colonies by the king himself. With
the rejection of these efforts for conciliation began the great struggle
which ended eight years later in the severance of the American Colonies
from the British Crown. The Congress of delegates from the Colonial
Legislatures at once voted measures for general defence, ordered the
levy of an army, and set George Washington at its head. No nobler figure
ever stood in the forefront of a nation's life. Washington was grave and
courteous in address; his manners were simple and unpretending; his
silence and the serene calmness of his temper spoke of a perfect
self-mastery. But there was little in his outer bearing to reveal the
grandeur of soul which lifts his figure with all the simple majesty of
an ancient statue out of the smaller passions, the meaner impulses, of
the world around him. What recommended him for command was singly his
weight among his fellow-landowners of Virginia, and the experience of
war which he had gained by service in border contests with the French
and the Indians, as well as in Braddock's luckless expedition against
Fort Duquesne. It was only as the weary fight went on that the colonists
discovered, however slowly and imperfectly, the greatness of their
leader, his clear judgement, his heroic endurance, his silence under
difficulties, his calmness in the hour of danger or defeat, the patience
with which he waited, the quickness and hardness with which he struck,
the lofty and serene sense of duty that never swerved from its task
through resentment or jealousy, that never through war or peace felt the
touch of a meaner ambition, that knew no aim save that of guarding the
freedom of his fellow-countrymen, and no personal longing save that of
returning to his own fireside when their freedom was secured. It was
almost unconsciously that men learned to cling to Washington with a
trust and faith such as few other men have won, and to regard him with a
reverence which still hushes us in presence of his memory. But even
America hardly recognised his real greatness while he lived. It was only
when death set its seal on him that the voice of those whom he had
served so long proclaimed him "the man first in war, first in peace, and
first in the hearts of his fellow-countrymen."
[Sidenote: Declaration of Independence,]
Washington more than any of his fellow-colonists represented the
clinging of the Virginian landowners to the mother country, and his
acceptance of a military command proved that even the most moderate
among the colonists had no hope now save in arms. The struggle opened
with a skirmish between a party of English troops and a detachment of
militia at Lexington on the nineteenth of April 1775; and in a few days
twenty thousand colonists appeared before Boston. The Congress
reassembled, declared the States they represented "The United Colonies
of America," and undertook the work of government. Meanwhile ten
thousand fresh English troops landed at Boston. But the provincial
militia, in number almost double that of the British force which
prepared to attack them, seized a neck of ground which joins Boston to
the mainland; and though on the 17th of June they were driven from the
heights of Bunker's Hill which commanded the town, it was only after a
desperate struggle in which their bravery put an end for ever to the
taunts of cowardice which had been levelled against the colonists. "Are
the Yankees cowards?" shouted the men of Massachusetts as the first
English attack rolled back baffled down the hill-side. But a far truer
courage was shown in the stubborn endurance with which Washington's raw
militiamen, who gradually dwindled from sixteen thousand to ten,
ill-fed, ill-armed, and with but forty-five rounds of ammunition to each
man, cooped up through the winter a force of ten thousand veterans in
the lines of Boston. The spring of 1776 saw them force these troops to
withdraw from the city to New York, where the whole British army,
largely reinforced by mercenaries from Germany, was concentrated under
General Howe. Meanwhile a raid of the American General Arnold nearly
drove the British troops from Canada; and though his attempt broke down
before Quebec, it showed that all hope of reconciliation was over. The
colonies of the south, the last to join in the struggle, had in fact
expelled their Governors at the close of 1775; at the opening of the
next year Massachusetts instructed its delegates to support a complete
repudiation of the king's government by the Colonies; while the American
ports were thrown open to the world in defiance of the Navigation Acts.
These decisive steps were followed by the great act with which American
history begins, the adoption on the 4th of July 1776 by the delegates in
Congress after a fierce resistance from those of Pennsylvania and South
Carolina, and in spite of the abstention of those of New York, of a
Declaration of Independence. "We," ran its solemn words, "the
representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our
intentions, solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are,
and of right ought to be, Free and Independent States."
[Sidenote: Saratoga.]
But the earlier successes of the colonists were soon followed by
suffering and defeat. Howe, an active general with a fine army at his
back, cleared Long Island in August by a victory at Brooklyn; and
Washington, whose force was weakened by withdrawals and defeat and
disheartened by the loyal tone of the State in which it was encamped,
was forced in the autumn of 1776 to evacuate New York and New Jersey,
and to fall back first on the Hudson and then on the Delaware. The
Congress prepared to fly from Philadelphia, and a general despair showed
itself in cries of peace. But a well-managed surprise and a daring march
on the rear of Howe's army restored the spirits of Washington's men, and
forced the English general in his turn to fall back on New York.
England however was now roused to more serious efforts; and the
campaign of 1777 opened with a combined attempt for the suppression of
the revolt. An army which had assembled in Canada under General Burgoyne
marched in June by way of the Lakes to seize the line of the Hudson.
Howe meanwhile sailed up the Chesapeake and advanced on Philadelphia,
the temporary capital of the United States and the seat of the Congress.
The rout of his little army of seven thousand men at Brandywine forced
Washington to abandon Philadelphia, and after a bold but unsuccessful
attack on his victors to retire into winter quarters on the banks of the
Schuylkill, where the unconquerable resolve with which he nerved his
handful of beaten and half-starved troops to face Howe's army in their
camp at Valley Forge is the noblest of his triumphs. But in the north
the war had taken another colour. Burgoyne's movement had been planned
in view of a junction with at least a part of Howe's army from New York;
a junction which would have enabled him to seize the line of the Hudson
and thus cut off New England from her sister provinces. But Howe was
held fast by Washington's resistance and unable to send a man to the
north; while the spirit of New England, which had grown dull as the war
rolled away from its borders, quickened again at the news of invasion
and of the outrages committed by the Indians employed among the English
troops. Its militia hurried from town and homestead to a camp with
which General Gates had barred the road to Albany; and after a fruitless
attack on the American lines, Burgoyne saw himself surrounded on the
heights of Saratoga. On the 17th of October his whole force was
compelled to surrender.
[Sidenote: France and America.]
The news of this calamity gave force to the words with which Chatham at
the very time of the surrender was pressing for peace. "You cannot
conquer America," he cried when men were glorying in Howe's successes
over Washington. "If I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a
foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my
arms--never, never, never!" Then, in a burst of indignant eloquence he
thundered against an outrage which was at that moment nerving New
England to its rally against Burgoyne, the use of the Indian with his
scalping-knife as an ally of England against her children. The proposals
which Chatham brought forward might perhaps in his hands even yet have
drawn America and the mother country together. His plan was one of
absolute conciliation. He looked forward to a federal union between the
settlements and Great Britain which would have left the Colonies
absolutely their own masters in all matters of internal government, and
linked only by ties of affection and loyalty to the general body of the
Empire. But the plan met with the same scornful rejection as his
previous proposals. Its rejection was at once followed by the news of
Saratoga, and by the yet more fatal news that this disaster had roused
the Bourbon Courts to avenge the humiliation of the Seven Years' War.
Crippled and impoverished as she was at its close, France could do
nothing to break the world-power which was rising in front of her; but
in the very moment of her defeat, the foresight of Choiseul had seen in
a future straggle between England and her Colonies a chance of ruining
the great fabric which Pitt's triumphs had built up. Nor was Pitt blind
to the steady resolve of France to renew the fight. In every attempt
which he had made to construct a Ministry he had laid down as the
corner-stone of his foreign policy a renewal of that alliance with the
Protestant States of North Germany against the House of Bourbon which
could alone save England from the dangers of the Family Compact. But his
efforts had been foiled alike by the resistance of the king, the timid
peacefulness of the Whigs, and at last by the distrust of England which
had been rooted in the mind of Frederick the Great through the treachery
of Lord Bute.
[Sidenote: Death of Chatham.]
The wisdom of his policy was now brought home by the coming of the
danger he had foreseen when the foresight of Choiseul was justified by
the outbreak of strife between England and America. Even then for a
while France looked idly on. Her king, Lewis the Sixteenth, was averse
from war; her treasury was empty; her government, scared by the growth
of new movements towards freedom about it, and fearful of endangering
the monarchy by the encouragement these would receive from a union with
the revolted Colonies, still doubted whether America had any real power
of resisting Britain. It was to no purpose that from the moment when
they declared themselves independent, the United States called on France
for aid; or that Franklin pressed their appeal on its government. A year
in fact passed without any decisive resolution to give aid to the
colonists. But the steady drift of French policy and the passion of the
French people pressed heavier every day on the hesitation of their
government; and the news of Saratoga forced its hand. The American
envoys at last succeeded in forming an alliance; and in February 1778 a
treaty offensive and defensive was concluded between France and America.
Lord North strove to meet the blow by fresh offers of conciliation, and
by a pledge to renounce for ever the right of direct taxation over the
Colonies; but he felt that such offers were fruitless, that the time for
conciliation was past, while all hope of reducing America by force of
arms had disappeared. In utter despair he pressed his resignation on the
king. But George was as obstinate for war as ever; and the country,
stung to the quick by the attack of France, backed passionately the
obstinacy of the king. But unlike George the Third, it instinctively
felt that if a hope still remained of retaining the friendship of the
Colonies and of baffling the efforts of the Bourbons, it lay in Lord
Chatham; and in spite of the king's resistance the voice of the whole
country called him back to power. The danger indeed which had scared
Lord North into resignation, and before which a large party of the Whigs
now advocated the acknowledgement of American independence, only woke
Chatham to his old daring and fire. He had revolted from a war against
Englishmen. But all his pride in English greatness, all his confidence
in English power, woke afresh at the challenge of France. His genius saw
indeed in the new danger a means of escape from the old. He would have
withdrawn every soldier from America, and flung the whole force of
Britain into the conflict with France. He believed that in the splendour
of triumphs over her older enemy England might be brought to terms of
amity which would win back the Colonies, and that the English blood of
the colonists themselves would be quickened to a fresh union with the
mother country by her struggle against a power from which she had so
lately rescued them. Till such a trial had been made, with all the
advantages that the magic of his name could give it in England and
America alike, he would not bow to a need that must wreck the great
Empire his hand had built up. Even at this hour there was a chance of
success for such a policy; but on the eve of Chatham's return to office
this chance was shattered by the hand of death. Broken with age and
disease, the Earl was borne to the House of Lords on the seventh of
April to utter in a few broken words his protest against the proposal to
surrender America. "I rejoice," he murmured, "that I am still alive to
lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and noble
monarchy. His Majesty succeeded to an Empire as great in extent as its
reputation was unsullied. Seventeen years ago this people was the terror
of the world." He listened impatiently to the reply of the Duke of
Richmond, and again rose to his feet. But he had hardly risen when he
pressed his hand upon his heart, and falling back in a swoon was borne
home to die.
[Sidenote: England against Europe.]
How well founded was Chatham's faith in the power of Britain was seen in
the strife that now opened. From the hour of his death England entered
on a conflict with enemies whose circle gradually widened till she stood
single-handed against the world. At the close of 1778 the Family Compact
bore its full fruit; Spain joined the league of France and America
against her; and in the next year the joint fleets of the two powers
rode the masters of the Channel. They even threatened a descent on the
English coast. But dead as Chatham was, his cry woke a new life in
England. "Shall we fall prostrate," he exclaimed with his last breath,
"before the House of Bourbon?" and the divisions which had broken the
nation in its struggle with American liberty were hushed in the presence
of this danger to its own existence. The weakness of the Ministry was
compensated by the energy of England itself. For three years, from 1779
to 1782, General Elliott held against famine and bombardment from a
French and Spanish army the rock fortress of Gibraltar. Although a
quarrel over the right of search banded Holland and the Courts of the
North in an armed neutrality against her, and added the Dutch fleet to
the number of her assailants, England held her own at sea. In her
Eastern dependency, where France sought a counterpoise to the power of
Britain in that of the Mahrattas, freebooters of Hindoo blood whose
tribes had for a century past carried their raids over India from the
hills of the Western coast, and founded sovereignties in Guzerat, Malwa,
and Tanjore, the tenacity and resource of Warren Hastings, the first
Governor-General of British India, wrested victory from failure and
defeat. Though the wide schemes of conquest which he formed were for the
moment frustrated, the annexation of Benares, the extension of British
rule along the Ganges, the reduction of Oudh to virtual dependence, the
appearance of English armies in Central India, and the defeat of the
Sultan of Mysore, laid the foundation of an Indian Empire which his
genius was bold enough to foresee. Even in America the fortune of the
war seemed for a while to turn. After Burgoyne's surrender the English
generals had withdrawn from Pennsylvania, and bent all their efforts on
the Southern States, where a strong Royalist party still existed. The
capture of Charlestown and the successes of Lord Cornwallis in 1780 were
rendered fruitless by the obstinate resistance of General Greene; but
the United States remained weakened by bankruptcy and unnerved by hopes
of aid from France.
[Sidenote: America and Ireland.]
Hardly a year however had passed when the face of the war in America was
changed by a terrible disaster. Foiled in an attempt on North Carolina
by the refusal of his fellow-general, Sir Henry Clinton, to assist him,
Cornwallis fell back in 1781 on Virginia, and entrenched himself in the
lines of York Town. A sudden march of Washington brought him to the
front of the English troops at a moment when the French fleet held the
sea, and the British army was driven by famine in October to a surrender
as humiliating as that of Saratoga. The news fell like a thunderbolt on
the wretched Minister, who had till now suppressed at his master's order
his own conviction of the uselessness of further bloodshed. Opening his
arms and pacing wildly about the room, Lord North exclaimed, "It is all
over," and resigned. At this moment indeed the country seemed on the
brink of ruin. Humiliating as it was, England could have borne fifty
such calamities as the surrender at York Town. But in the very crisis of
the struggle with America she found herself confronted with a danger
nearer home. The revolt of one great dependency brought with it a
threatened revolt from another. In Ireland, as in the Colonies, England
had shrunk from carrying out either a national or an imperial policy.
She might have recognised Ireland as a free nationality, and bound it to
herself by federal bonds; or she might have absorbed it, as she had
absorbed Scotland, into the general mass of her own national life. With
a perverse ingenuity she had not only refrained from taking either of
these courses, but she had deliberately adopted the worst features of
both. Ireland was absolutely subject to Britain, but she formed no part
of it, she shared neither in its liberty nor its wealth. But on the
other hand she was allowed no national existence of her own. While all
the outer seeming of national life was left, while Ireland possessed in
name an army, a Parliament, a magistracy, the mass of the Irish people
was as strange to all this life as the savages of Polynesia. Every
Catholic Irishman, and there were five Irish Catholics to every Irish
Protestant, was treated as a stranger and a foreigner in his own
country. The House of Lords, the House of Commons, the magistracy, all
corporate offices in towns, all ranks in the army, the bench, the bar,
the whole administration of government or justice, were closed against
Catholics. The very right of voting for their representatives in
Parliament was denied them. Few Catholic landowners had been left by the
sweeping confiscations which had followed the successive revolts of the
island, and oppressive laws forced even these few with scant exceptions
to profess Protestantism. Necessity indeed had brought about a practical
toleration of their religion and their worship; but in all social and
political matters the native Catholics, in other words the immense
majority of the people of Ireland, were simply hewers of wood and
drawers of water for Protestant masters, for masters who still looked on
themselves as mere settlers, who boasted of their Scotch or English
extraction, and who regarded the name of "Irishman" as an insult.
[Sidenote: Irish Government.]
But small as was this Protestant body, one-half of it fared little
better as far as power was concerned than the Catholics. The
Presbyterians, who formed the bulk of the Ulster settlers, were shut out
by law from all civil, military, and municipal offices. The
administration and justice of the country were thus kept rigidly in the
hands of members of the Established Church, a body which comprised
about a twelfth of the population of the island, while its government
was practically monopolised by a few great Protestant landowners. The
rotten boroughs, which had originally been created to make the Irish
Parliament dependent on the Crown, had by this time fallen under the
influence of the adjacent landlords, whose command of these made them
masters of the House of Commons while they themselves formed in person
the House of Peers. To such a length had this system been carried that
at the time of the Union the great majority of the boroughs lay in the
hands of a very few families. Two-thirds of the House of Commons, in
fact, was returned by a small group of nobles, who were recognised as
"parliamentary undertakers," and who undertook to "manage" Parliament on
their own terms. Irish politics was for these men a mere means of public
plunder; they were glutted with pensions, preferments, and bribes in
hard cash, in return for their services; they were the advisers of every
Lord-Lieutenant and the practical governors of the country. The results
were what might have been expected. For more than a century Ireland was
the worst governed country in Europe. That its government was not even
worse than it was, was due to its connection with England and the
subordination of its Parliament to the English Privy Council. The Irish
Parliament had no power of originating legislative or financial
measures, and could only say "yes" or "no" to Acts laid before it by
the Privy Council in England. The English Parliament too claimed the
right of binding Ireland as well as England by its enactments, and one
of its statutes transferred the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish
Peerage to the English House of Lords. Galling as these restrictions
were to the plundering aristocracy of Ireland, they formed a useful
check on its tyranny. But as if to compensate for the benefits of this
protection, England did her best from the time of William the Third to
annihilate Irish commerce and to ruin Irish agriculture. Statutes passed
by the jealousy of English landowners forbade the export of Irish cattle
or sheep to English ports. The export of wool was forbidden lest it
might interfere with the profits of English wool-growers. Poverty was
thus added to the curse of misgovernment; and poverty deepened with the
rapid growth of the native population, a growth due in great part to the
physical misery and moral degradation of their lives, till famine turned
the country into a hell.
[Sidenote: The Volunteers.]
The bitter lesson of the last conquest however long sufficed to check
all dreams of revolt among the native Irish; and the outbreaks which
sprang from time to time out of the general misery and discontent were
purely social in their character, and were roughly repressed by the
ruling class. When political revolt at last threatened English
supremacy over Ireland, the threat came from the ruling class itself.
Some timid efforts made by the English Government at the accession of
George the Third to control its tyranny were resented by a refusal of
money bills, and by a cry for the removal of the checks imposed on the
independence of the Irish Parliament. But it was not till the American
war that this cry became a political danger. The threat of a French
invasion and the want of any regular force to oppose it compelled the
Government to call on Ireland to provide for its own defence, and in
answer to its call forty thousand volunteers appeared in arms in 1779.
The force was wholly a Protestant one, commanded by Protestant officers,
and it was turned to account by the Protestant oligarchy. Threats of an
armed revolt backed the eloquence of two Parliamentary leaders, Grattan
and Flood, in their demand for the repeal of Poynings' Act, which took
all power of initiative legislation from the Irish Parliament, and for
the recognition of the Irish House of Lords as an ultimate Court of
Appeal. But the Volunteers were forced to bid for the support of the
native Catholics, who looked with indifference on these quarrels of
their masters, by claiming for them a relaxation of the penal laws
against the exercise of their religion and of some of their most
oppressive disabilities. So real was the danger that England was forced
to give way. The first demands were in effect a claim for national
independence. But there were no means of resisting them, for England was
without a soldier to oppose the Volunteers, while she was pressed hard
by the league of Europe and America against her. In the face of such a
rising close at home, it became plain even to the most dogged of Tories
that it was impossible to continue a strife across three thousand miles
of sea; and to deal with the attitude of Ireland became even a more
pressing need of the Ministry which followed that of Lord North than the
need of dealing with America.
[Sidenote: End of the war.]
The blow which had shattered the attempt of England to wield an
autocratic power over her Colonies had shattered the attempt of its king
to establish an autocratic power over England itself. The Ministry which
bore the name of Lord North had been a mere screen for the
administration of George the Third, and its ruin was the ruin of the
system he had striven to build up. Never again was the Crown to possess
such a power as he had wielded during the past ten years. For the moment
however there was nothing to mark so decisive a change; and both to the
king and his opponents it must have seemed only a new turn in the
political game which they were playing when in March 1782 the Whigs
returned to office. Rockingham was still at the head of the party; and
on Rockingham fell the double task of satisfying Ireland and of putting
an end, at any cost, to the war with the United States. The task
involved in both quarters a humiliating surrender; for neither Ireland
nor America would be satisfied save by a full concession of their
claims. It needed the bitter stress of necessity to induce the English
Parliament to follow Rockingham's counsels, but the need was too urgent
to suffer their rejection. The Houses therefore abandoned by a formal
statute the judicial and legislative supremacy they had till then
asserted over the Parliament of Ireland; and from this moment England
and Ireland were simply held together by the fact that the sovereign of
the one island was also the sovereign of the other. The grant of
independence to the one great dependency made it easier to recognise the
freedom of the other. Rockingham in fact took office with the purpose of
winning peace by a full acknowledgement of the independence of the
United States, and negotiations were soon entered into for that purpose.
[Sidenote: The Peace.]
But America was bound by its league with the Bourbon Courts to make no
peace save one common to its allies, and from its allies peace was hard
to win without concessions which would have stripped from England all
that remained of her older greatness. With the revolt of Ireland and the
surrender of Cornwallis the hopes of her enemies rose high. Spain
refused to suspend hostilities at any other price than the surrender of
Gibraltar; while France proposed that England should give up all her
Indian conquests save Bengal. The triumph of the Bourbons indeed seemed
secure. If terms like these were accepted the world-empire of Britain
was at an end. Stripped of her Colonies in America, stripped of her rule
in India, matched on the very ocean by rival fleets, England sank back
into a European State, into the England of the first Georges. And yet
there seemed little chance of her holding out against the demands of
such a league as fronted her at a moment when her military power was
paralysed by the attitude of Ireland. But the true basis of her
world-power lay on the sea. It was by her command of the sea that such
an empire could alone be possible; nor was it possible so long as she
commanded the sea for all the armies of the Bourbon powers to rob her of
it. And at this moment the command of the seas again became her own. On
the 16th of January 1780 Admiral Rodney, the greatest of English seamen
save Nelson and Blake, encountered the Spanish fleet off Cape St.
Vincent, and only four of its vessels escaped to Cadiz. At the opening
of 1782 the triumphs of the French admiral De Grasse called him to the
West Indies; and on the 12th of April a manoeuvre which he was the
first to introduce broke his opponent's line, and drove the French fleet
shattered from the Atlantic. With Rodney's last victory the struggle of
the Bourbons was really over, for no means remained of attacking their
enemy save at Gibraltar, and here a last attack of the joint force
gathered against it was repulsed by the heroism of Elliott. Nor would
America wait any longer for the satisfaction of her allies. In November
her commissioners signed the preliminaries of a peace in which Britain
reserved to herself on the American continent only Canada and the island
of Newfoundland; and acknowledged without reserve the independence of
the United States.
[Sidenote: England and the United States.]
The action of America ended the war; and the treaty of peace with the
United States was a prelude to treaties of peace with the Bourbon
powers. Their actual gains were insignificant. France indeed won nothing
in the treaties with which the war ended; Spain gained only Florida and
Minorca. Nor could they feel even in this hour of their triumph that the
end at which they aimed had been fully reached. In half their great
effort against the world-power of Britain they had utterly failed. She
had even won ground in India. In America itself she still retained the
northern dominion of Canada. Her West Indian islands remained intact.
Above all, she had asserted more nobly than ever her command of the sea,
and with it the possibility of building up a fresh power in such lands
as Cook had called her to. But at the close of the war there was less
thought of what she had retained than of what she had lost. She was
parted from her American Colonies; and at the moment such a parting
seemed to be the knell of her greatness. In wealth, in population, the
American Colonies far surpassed all that remained of her Empire; and the
American Colonies were irrecoverably gone. It is no wonder that in the
first shock of such a loss England looked on herself as on the verge of
ruin, or that the Bourbon Courts believed her position as a world-power
to be practically at an end. How utterly groundless such a conception
was the coming years were to show. The energies of England were in fact
spurred to new efforts by the crisis in her fortunes. The industrial
developement which followed the war gave her a material supremacy such
as she had never known before, and the rapid growth of wealth which this
industry brought with it raised her again into a mother of nations as
her settlers built up in the waters of the Pacific Colonies as great as
those which she had lost on the coast of America. But if the Bourbons
overrated their triumph in one way, they immensely underrated it in
another. Whatever might be the importance of American independence in
the history of England, it was of unequalled moment in the history of
the world. If it crippled for a while the supremacy of the English
nation, it founded the supremacy of the English race. From the hour of
American Independence the life of the English People has flowed not in
one current, but in two; and while the older has shown little signs of
lessening, the younger has fast risen to a greatness which has changed
the face of the world. In 1783 America was a nation of three millions of
inhabitants, scattered thinly along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It
is now a nation of forty millions, stretching over the whole continent
from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In wealth and material energy, as in
numbers, it far surpasses the mother country from which it sprang. It is
already the main branch of the English People; and in the days that are
at hand the main current of that people's history must run along the
channel not of the Thames or the Mersey, but of the Hudson and the
Mississippi. But distinct as these currents are, every year proves more
clearly that in spirit the English People is one. The distance that
parted England from America lessens every day. The ties that unite them
grow every day stronger. The social and political differences that
threatened a hundred years ago to form an impassable barrier between
them grow every day less. Against this silent and inevitable drift of
things the spirit of narrow isolation on either side the Atlantic
struggles in vain. It is possible that the two branches of the English
People will remain for ever separate political existences. It is likely
enough that the older of them may again break in twain, and that the
English People in the Pacific may assert as distinct a national life as
the two English Peoples on either side the Atlantic. But the spirit,
the influence, of all these branches will remain one. And in thus
remaining one, before half-a-century is over it will change the face of
the world. As two hundred millions of Englishmen fill the valley of the
Mississippi, as fifty millions of Englishmen assert their lordship over
Australasia, this vast power will tell through Britain on the old world
of Europe, whose nations will have shrunk into insignificance before it.
What the issues of such a world-wide change may be, not even the wildest
dreamer would dare to dream. But one issue is inevitable. In the
centuries that lie before us, the primacy of the world will lie with the
English People. English institutions, English speech, English thought,
will become the main features of the political, the social, and the
intellectual life of mankind.