[Sidenote: 1769—Unpopularity of George the Third]

Of course the petition of Middlesex was rejected; the election of Luttrell was confirmed. On the day of the confirmation the King prorogued Parliament in a foolish speech in which he seemed to think that he had gained a victory. But if the King and the Ministry believed or hoped that in expelling Wilkes from Parliament they had got rid of Wilkes for good and all; if they believed or hoped that in thus degrading Wilkes they would deprive him of his popularity with the people or even diminish that popularity, they were speedily to be undeceived and bitterly disappointed. Both King and ministers knew their business very badly; with limitations of intelligence which would have been disastrous to the conduct of a small shop, they came in this instance, as in other instances, within measurable distance of wrecking a royalty. It is probable that Franklin, shrewd, cool observer though he was, went too far when he wrote in his journal that if George the Third had had a bad private character, and John Wilkes a good one, the latter might have turned the former out of his kingdom. But it is certain that the signs of the King's unpopularity were now as significant as were the signs of Wilkes's popularity. It had been said that at this time a good half of the King's subjects preferred Wilkes to their King. The estimate is probably under rather than above the fact. Wilkes was placed in the position of being the champion of all the rights and liberties that Englishmen most prized; the King in the {133} position of being their most uncompromising, most obstinate opponent.

Thus, while honors were offered daily to the prisoner of the King's bench, insults were daily offered to his royal enemy. The King could scarcely go abroad without becoming the object of a demonstration of popular disfavor, and even in his palace he could not escape from deputations empowered to protest against the conduct of his ministers. In all parts of the kingdom public meetings were held, and from these public meetings petitions poured in upon the King calling upon him to dissolve his Parliament. It has been truly observed that the custom of holding public meetings for the discussion of public grievances dates from this period. On two solemn occasions the Lord Mayor of London, accompanied by the sheriffs, presented addresses to the King remonstrating against the action of the House of Commons. To the first address the King replied that it was disrespectful to him, injurious to Parliament, and irreconcilable to the principles of the Constitution. After which reply he could think of nothing better, nothing more kingly to do than to turn round to his courtiers and burst out laughing. He treated the second address with the same insolence, an insolence which provoked from the Lord Mayor an uncourtierly reply which reminded the King that those who endeavored to alienate the King's affections from his subjects were violators of the public peace and betrayers of the Constitution established by the glorious Revolution. Those words were afterwards inscribed in gold upon the monument of the mayor who spoke them. If those words, and words of like purport and temper, at first moved the King to laughter, they soon exasperated him past laughing. Once he clapped his hand to his sword-hilt and declared that he would sooner have recourse to that than grant a dissolution. The tension of public feeling can best be estimated when a constitutional sovereign on the one side could dare to make such a remark; when a representative of the people like Colonel Barre on the other side could dare in the House of {134} Commons to say that disregard of public petitions might lead the people to think of assassination.

While the King was insulted and insulting, and longing to stifle opposition by the sword, John Wilkes in his prison was receiving new proofs of the place he held in public affection. He was elected alderman for the Ward of Farringdon Without. We are told that his table at the prison was daily supplied with the most rare and costly delicacies, presented to him by his admirers. The mysterious Chevalier d'Eon sent him a present of Russian smoked tongues, with the whimsical wish that they could have the eloquence of Cicero, and the delicacy of Voltaire, to do him honor. Friendly revellers sent him hampers of the wine he liked the best. More serious gifts were laid at his feet. For a while money literally rained in upon him. The leading Whigs provided him with an income. Nobles and great ladies sent him large sums. A number of politicians banded together under the title of the Society for Supporting the Bill of Rights, and raised a great deal of money, much of which went in meeting some of the heavy debts with which Wilkes was embarrassed, much of which went in keeping up the princely way of living which suited Wilkes's temperament, and which was perhaps not unsuited to the part he was playing as the rival of a prince. In the public press, on the platform, on the stage, his influence was enormous. His good pleasure sent politicians to Parliament; his good pleasure made London sheriffs, made provincial mayors. While the false rumor that he was the author of "The Letters of Junius" only swelled the volume of his fame, the author of those letters was adding to Wilkes's pride and power by public championship and by private letters, choking with an adulation that seems strange indeed from so savage a pen. If Garrick dared for a moment to run counter to popular feeling, as a little earlier he had dared to disdain the praise of Churchill, he had to give way in the case of Wilkes, as he had given way in the case of Wilkes's poet. The very name of Wilkes drove men on both sides of the quarrel into a kind of frenzy. Alexander Cruden, of the "Concordance," {135} showed his devotion to his King and his dislike of Wilkes by carrying a large sponge with him whenever he walked abroad in order that he might wipe out the ominous number, forty-five, whenever he saw it chalked up. As the number was chalked up everywhere by the Wilkites, Cruden soon found the task beyond his powers. It was lucky for him that he got no harm in his zeal, lucky for him that he did not come across that militant clergyman who pulled the nose of a Scotch naval officer for attacking Wilkes and then met his man in Hyde Park and wounded him.

[Sidenote: 1770—A fight for the liberty of the Press]

On April 17, 1770, Wilkes's term of imprisonment came to an end. Wilkes immediately started for Bath to avoid a demonstration in London; but London was illuminated in his honor, and in a great number of provincial towns his release was celebrated with all the signs of a national holiday. If he had been a hero in prison, he was no less a hero out of it. He moved from triumph to triumph. While alderman he won a victory over the Court and the Commons which did much to establish the liberty of the press in England. The House of Commons, in a foolish attempt to suppress reports of the debates in Parliament, tried to arrest certain printers. Wilkes and the Lord Mayor took the printers' part; advised them to conceal themselves; and in their turn arrested those who, in obedience to a royal proclamation and the orders of the House, arrested the printers.

The House of Commons committed the Lord Mayor and Alderman Oliver to the Tower, and summoned Wilkes to appear at the bar. Wilkes coolly replied that as he was a member of Parliament, and as he was not addressed as a member of Parliament should be, and ordered to attend in his place according to custom, he should ignore the summons. The House made a second and yet a third order for his appearance, each of which Wilkes treated with disdain. It is a significant proof of the power of Wilkes's popularity that the House did not take any steps to punish his contumacy. While it affected to find a consolation in the assurances of the King that Wilkes was "below the {136} notice of the House," it had to endure as best it might an affront resentment of which would only have added to Wilkes's popularity. The honors paid to the Lord Mayor and the alderman during their imprisonment showed only too plainly that hostility to the Court and the Parliamentary majority was heroism in the eyes of the majority of the citizens of London.

Once again Wilkes had won the day. From that time forward Parliament put no embargo upon the publication of reports of its debates. Fresh honors were showered on Wilkes. He was elected sheriff. He was presented by the Court of Common Council with a silver goblet, designed according to his own wish with a representation of the death of Caesar, and graced with the ominous motto from one of the poems of Churchill:

May every tyrant feel The keen deep searchings of a patriot steel,

a citation which, taken in conjunction with Barre's wild talk in the House about assassination, was sufficiently significant of the temper of the time.

[Sidenote: 1774—Wilkes Lord Mayor of London]

Wilkes had been alderman; he had been sheriff; he was now to bear the crown of civic honors. He was put in nomination for the office of Lord Mayor. The Court party made a desperate effort to defeat him. They had tried and failed to prevent him from being elected to Parliament. They had tried and failed to prevent him from being made alderman, from being made sheriff. They now tried with all their might to prevent him from being made Lord Mayor. Wilkes had much to fight against. There were defections from his own party. The once devoted Horne had squabbled with his idol over money matters, and was now as venomous an enemy as he had been a fulsome partisan. Alderman Townshend, an ex-Lord Mayor, strained all his influence, which was great in the City, against Wilkes. A wild rumor got about at one time, indeed, that Townshend had settled the difficulty of the Court forever by challenging Wilkes and shooting him dead. The story had no foundation, but for a moment it flattered the hopes of Wilkes's {137} enemies and fluttered the hearts of Wilkes's friends. The opposition ended as opposition to Wilkes always ended. Twice he was placed at the head of the poll, and twice the Court of Aldermen chose another candidate. The third time, in the election of 1774, Wilkes was at last chosen as Lord Mayor by the Court of Aldermen in despite of the unwearied efforts of the Court party to defeat him. "Thus," wrote Walpole, "after so much persecution by the Court, after so many attempts upon his life, after a long imprisonment in jail, after all his own crimes and indiscretions, did this extraordinary man, of more extraordinary fortune, attain the highest office in so grave and important a city as the capital of England, always reviving the more opposed and oppressed, and unable to shock Fortune and make her laugh at him who laughed at everybody and everything!" It has been well said by Mr. Fraser Rae that the significance of election to the office of Lord Mayor was very much greater more than a hundred years ago than it is now. Then the Chief Magistrate of the City was not necessarily a man who had passed through certain minor offices and who rose by routine to fill the highest. At that time the Corporation was a political power, which ministers had to take into account, and which sovereigns had to propitiate. A greater triumph than the mayoralty followed in quick succession. At the general election of 1774 Wilkes came forward again, and for the fifth time, as candidate for Middlesex. This time he was not opposed. Luttrell abandoned an impossible position and did not stand. Ten years after Wilkes's first appearance in the House of Commons he returned to it again in triumph as the member for Middlesex and the Lord Mayor of London.

And here, on the top of his triumph, Wilkes may be said to drop through the tissue of our history. He was to live nearly a quarter of a century longer, three-and-twenty years of a life that was as calm and peaceful as the hot manhood that preceded it had been vexed and unquiet. Although he lives in history as one of the most famous of the world's agitators, he had in his heart little affection {138} for the life of a public man. And the publicity of the civic official was especially distasteful to him. He hated the gross festivals, the gross pleasures, the gross display of City life. He sickened of the long hours spent in the business of mayoralty; he sickened yet more of the pleasures incidental to mayoralty. Though he remained in Parliament for many years, and conducted himself there with zeal, discretion, and statesmanship, and always, or almost always, proved himself to be the champion of liberty and the democratic principle, he did not find his greatest happiness in public speeches and the triumphs and defeats of the division lobby. What he loved best on earth was the society of his daughter, between whom and himself there existed a friendship that is the best advocate for Wilkes's character. And he loved best to enjoy that society in the kind of sham classic retirement which had so powerful an attraction for so many of the men of the eighteenth century. His cottage in the Isle of Wight, with its Doric column to the manes of Churchill, with its shrine to Fortuna Redux, was his idea of the ancient city of Tusculum.

His tastes and pleasures were the tastes and pleasures of a man of letters. He affected a curious kind of scholarship. The hand that had been employed upon the North Briton, now devoted itself to the editing of classic texts; the intellect that had been associated with the privately printed "Essay on Woman" was now associated with privately printed editions of Catullus which he fondly believed to be flawless, and of Theophrastus, whose Greek text it pleased him to print without accents. In his tranquil old age he made himself as many friends as in his hot manhood he had made himself enemies. Those who had most hated him came under the spell of his attraction, even the King himself, even Dr. Johnson. His interview with Dr. Johnson is one of the most famous episodes in the literary and political history of the last century. His assurance to King George that he himself had never been a Wilkite is in one sense the truest criticism that has ever been passed upon him. If to be a Wilkite was to entertain {139} all the advanced and all the wild ideas expressed by many of those who took advantage of his agitation, then certainly Wilkes was none such. But he was a Wilkite in the better sense of being true to his own opinions and true to his sense of public duty. When he expressed the wish to have the words "A friend to liberty" inscribed upon his monument, he expressed a wish which the whole tenor of his life, the whole tone of his utterances fully justified. And if he was loyal to his principles he could be chivalrous to his enemies. Almost his last public appearance was at the general election of 1796, when he came forward, with a magnanimity which would have well become many a better man, to support the candidature of Horne Tooke at Westminster, of the man who, after having been his fawning friend, his fulsome flatterer, had turned against him with the basest treachery and the bitterest malignity. There may have been, surely there must have been, a vein of irony in the words in which Wilkes complimented the apostate and the turncoat as a man of public virtues. But the irony was cloaked by courtesy; if the action smacked of the cynic, at least it was done in obedience to the behest to forgive our enemies.

[Sidenote: 1797—Death of Wilkes]

On November 38, 1797, the old, worn, weary man, who had worked so hard and done so much, welcomed, in his capacity of Chamberlain of the City of London, Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson to the honorary freedom of the City. The setting star saluted the rising star. Nelson was then thirty-nine. He had been at sea since he was twelve. He had voyaged in polar seas and tropic waters. He had fought the Americans. He had fought the French. "Hate a Frenchman as you would the devil" was his simple-minded counsel of perfection. He had fought the Spaniards. He had lost an eye at Calvi. He had lost an arm at Santa Cruz. He was ten years married. His love, his error, his glory, Emma Hamilton, Carracioli, Trafalgar, were yet to come.

Less than a month later, in the late December, 1797, John Wilkes was dead. He was seventy years old. For nearly forty years he had lived unknown, unheeded. For {140} ten years he was the most conspicuous man in England, the best hated and the best loved. For twenty years more he was an honored public and private citizen. He will always be remembered as one of the most remarkable men of a century of remarkable men.



{141}

CHAPTER LI.

CHARLES JAMES FOX.

[Sidenote: 1749-1768—A champion of popular rights]

One of the most immediate results of the Wilkes controversy in the House of Commons was to draw attention to a young man who had entered Parliament at the General Election of 1768 while he was still considerably under age. The young member for Midhurst made himself conspicuous as the most impassioned opponent of Wilkes. A strenuous supporter of Luttrell outside the walls of Westminster, inside those walls the boy who represented the fictitious constituency of Midhurst distinguished himself by the easy insolence with which he assailed Wilkes and the popular cause which Wilkes represented. He delighted in informing the delighted majority in the House that he, for his part, "paid no regard whatever to the voice of the people." When Burke condescended to notice and to rebuke the impertinence of a youth of nineteen, he little thought that the lad whom he reproved would come to be a far more extreme advocate of popular rights than he himself, or that the chronicle of the century in recording the names of those who made themselves prominent for the utterance of democratic opinions should place the name of John Wilkes far below the name of Charles James Fox.

It would not be easy to imagine a worse training for a youth intended for the service of his country and destined to contend for the honors of the State than the life that was lived by Charles James Fox from early boyhood to early manhood. It was not in the power of his father, Henry Fox, Lord Holland, to set before his son the example of a parent whose public life was pure, admirable, and honorable. But in the domestic circle Lord Holland was {142} a very different man from the corrupt and juggling politician known to the world. In the domestic circle his affections and his tendernesses were his most conspicuous traits, and in the domestic circle he was as unfortunate for his children through his very virtues as outside it he was unfortunate by reason of his vices. Fox was a loving husband, but he was an adoring father, and the extremest zeal and warmth of his adoration was given to his son Charles James. The child was from the first precocious, alert, and gifted beyond his years, and the father fostered and flattered the precocity with a kind of worship that proved, as it was bound to prove, disastrous. It seems to have been Henry Fox's deliberate belief that the best way to bring up a spirited, gifted, headstrong child was to gratify every wish, surrender to every whim, and pander to every passion that ebullient youth could feel. The anecdotes of the day teem with tales of the fantastic homage that Fox paid to the desires and moods of his imperious infant. He made him his companion while he was still in the nursery; he allowed him to be his master before he had fairly left it. Never was the creed of Thelema acted upon more consistently and persistently than by Lord Holland towards Charles James Fox. It is an astonishing proof of the strength and innate goodness of the childish nature that it was not ruined outright, hopelessly and helplessly, by the worst training ever given to a son by a father. That it did Fox infinite harm cannot be denied and was only to be expected. That it failed entirely to unbalance his mind and destroy his character only serves to show the sterling temper of Fox's metal. His youth was like his childhood, petted, spoiled, wayward, capricious, and captivating. Every one loved him, his father, his father's friends, the school companions with whom he wrote Latin verses in praise of lovely ladies with lovely names. All through his life the love of men and the love of women was given to him with a generosity that was only equal to the lovable nature that compelled and commanded it. His career is one record of unrivalled precocity. As a child he had been his father's friend rather than his father's plaything; as a {143} lad he was his father's travelling companion, and learned from that father the pleasant art of sowing wild oats not with the hand but with the whole sack. He returned to England a proficient gambler, a finished rake, the dear friend of famous men, the darling of beautiful women, to enter, before he was of age, upon that political career in which it seemed certain that if he would follow in his father's steps he might hope for more than his father's fortunes. If Charles Fox had been quite cankered by his father's care, if the essence of his genius had been corruptible, he might have given the King's friends a leader as far removed from them as Lucifer from his satellites, and contrived perhaps—though that indeed would have been difficult—to amass almost as much money as he was able to spend with comfort. To judge by the young man's initial enterprise, his Parliamentary career promised to be as brilliant and as brutal as any king who hated Chatham and hated Wilkes and hated the American colonies could possibly desire. The furious intolerance of his maiden speech was happily, however, only like that false dawn familiar to travellers in the East. The true sunrise was yet to come. But for six years he was as consistent in his support of Lord North and the policy that North represented as for the rest of his career he was consistent in opposition to it.

[Sidenote: 1768—Fox's scholarship]

The life of Fox recalls, in its brilliant activity, in its no less brilliant scholarship, the dazzling careers of some of those Italian princes who were equally at home and equally distinguished in the battlefield and in the library, equally happy in handling their weapons or in turning the pages of the latest volume from the presses of Aldus that renewed the youth of some masterpiece of Greece or Rome. Fox's scholarship would have been remarkable in a man whose days and nights were devoted to scholarship alone. It was little less than marvellous in a man who gave a large part of his days to the fiercest political fights of a fiercely political age and a large part of his nights to the fascination of the card-table, the disasters of the dice-box, and the pursuit of the sweet, elusive shadow which is {144} called pleasure. Fox's love for literature was indeed its own reward. In the darkest hours of a life that tasted the bitterness of many public and many private sorrows he could steep his vexed spirit in the sweet waters watched by the Muses, and arise cleansed, inspirited, and comforted. Though he saw those public honors that his genius deserved denied, though he lost those chances of command by which he could best have served his country, though his own fault wrecked his fortune and his own follies wasted his substance and delivered the home of his glorious youth into alien hands, he could turn from troubles that would have broken the spirit and cracked the heart of a less heroic fighter, to find solace and consolation in the golden music of the "Odyssey" and the majestic cadences of Virgil.

Fox loved the classics with the passion of a poet, not with the patience of a pedant, and found that noble rapture in the human beauty of Euripides which Parson Adams found in the divine grandeur of Aeschylus. But if his reading in the literatures of Greece and Rome was wide and deep, it was not limited to the literatures which the world calls classic. France, Italy, Spain, offered him their best, and found him a worthy worshipper, the faithful lover and loyal student of all that was best in each. He was the comrade of Don Quixote as he was the comrade of Orlando Furioso and the comrade of Gil Blas. But he was never one of those who exalt the laurels of other lands to the neglect of those of their own. He knew English literature and loved English literature as well as if he had never scanned a Latin line or conjugated a Greek verb or read a page of Moliere, or Calderon, or Metastasio. He knew Chaucer as well as it was possible for any one then or for generations later to know Chaucer, and he appreciated him as few have appreciated him before or since. The poets of his own time were as dear to him in their degree as the singer of England's morning song. It is hardly necessary to say that he was as familiar with Shakespeare as every one should be and as very few are. Only one arc was wanting to the circle of his splendid {145} culture, only one string was lacking to the bow of his prodigious reading. There was a great literature growing up in a neighboring country of which Charles Fox knew nothing, and of which we cannot doubt that he would have rejoiced to know much. It is curious that in a country which had been ruled for three successive reigns by German sovereigns, the German language was entirely neglected and the glorious dawn of German literature entirely ignored. While Fox was still a young man, playing at love, playing at cards, playing at politics, and through all these diversions adding to that mighty store of learning, and training his mind in the finest and most intimate judgments upon the Greek and Roman poets, Germany had been enriched by the masterpiece of the greatest critic since Aristotle, and was fostering the golden youth of the greatest poet since Shakespeare. It would have amazed Fox, as it would have amazed every English scholar then living, if he could have been told that the spirit of the antique world was to be renewed in a country which had given them four generations of phlegmatic princes, and in a language of which few scholars in England knew a single word.

[Sidenote: 1768—Fox's quarrel with Lord North]

Fox's term of adherence to North and to North's policy was not too happy a time for the nominal superior. A hot-headed young Lord of the Admiralty resigned his office in a huff, and was not without difficulty persuaded to return to office as Commissioner of the Treasury. The breach between Fox and North was bridged over, but the bridge was frail. The two men eyed each other with disfavor. Fox asserted his independence by occasionally voting against the minister, by consorting with Burke. After the death of Lord Holland, North revenged himself by dismissing Fox from office in a letter famous for its insolent brevity. For a time Fox still accorded to the ministry an uncertain support, but he was drifting in thought and speech and action in the inevitable direction of his genius. The hour came when he took his seat on the Opposition benches, and asserted himself as a {146} formidable opponent of the Government. A quarrel across the Atlantic gave him the opportunity to prove that the principles which men of to-day would call Liberal principles had gained one of their greatest and one of their most eloquent champions.



{147}

CHAPTER LII.

ON THE CHARLES RIVER.

[Sidenote: 1765-74—Lord Hillsborough]

While the battle had been raging over Wilkes at home, the cloud of trouble had been growing larger and larger abroad. The discontent of the American colonies increased in direct ratio with the determination of the home Government to ignore or to override that discontent. The King was fortunate, or believed himself to be fortunate, in finding among his ministers the aptest instrument he could desire for striking at the Americans. Lord Hillsborough, the Secretary of State, was one of those men who appear to be inspired by a very genius of perversity. He had a power of misunderstanding a political situation and underestimating a political crisis which, if it could only have been reversed, would have earned him a foremost place among the statesmen of his time. But his perversity was of like temper with the perversity of the King, and Lord Hillsborough was admirably qualified to interpret the King's dislike of his American subjects and to make himself the mouthpiece of the anti-Colonial feeling which had been steadily growing up in the House of Commons since the days when the repeal of the Stamp Act had known its season of brief popularity.

The comparative temperance and lucidity of the Rockingham period seemed now indeed remote and memorable. Exasperation and not conciliation appeared to be the persistent note of England's colonial policy. It was England's misfortune to be peculiarly ill served on both sides of the Atlantic by those who were intrusted with the conduct of colonial affairs. It would be hard to say whether the provincial governors abroad or the ministers at home were least capable of understanding the people with whom they {148} had to deal, or were most to blame for their actions in the face of a danger that their own folly had brought about. With a man like Lord Hillsborough for Secretary of State in London, with a man like Bernard for Governor of Massachusetts in Boston, it is not to be wondered at now, and it ought not to have been wondered at then, that the colonies refused to crystallize into tranquillity. Francis Bernard was a man of certain ability, certain gifts, and uncertain good intentions. But he was, as we have seen, a perfervid Tory, a zealous champion of the royal prerogative, a profound believer in the wisdom of minimizing, if not abrogating, the privileges of which the colonists, and especially the colonists of Massachusetts, were so proud. It was Bernard's peculiar fortune to be not merely the supporter but the adviser of the English Ministries in almost all the series of disastrous actions towards their colonies. Bernard was inspired by a kind of furious folly in his words and deeds. Unhappily, this kind of furious folly was not confined to the colonial governor. Lord Hillsborough was no less foolish and no less dangerous than Bernard. Horace Walpole described Hillsborough as nothing more than a pompous composition of ignorance and want of judgment. He certainly was hopelessly ignorant of America, and he certainly showed a hopeless want of judgment in his dealings with the Americans. Hillsborough backed up Bernard in his blunders and his braggadocio with the light heart that comes of an empty head. He backed up Bernard with a steady zeal that would have been splendid if it could have been made to serve any useful purpose. Where Bernard was bellicose and blustering, Hillsborough blustered and was bellicose in his turn. It was Hillsborough's honest, innate conviction that the American colonists were a poor-spirited, feeble-hearted, and still more feeble-handed pack of rascals, braggarts whom a firm front discomfited, natural bondsmen to whom it was only necessary, as in the old classic story, to show the whip to awe them into cringing submission. This theory found its fittest formula a little later, when Hillsborough, speaking for the Government he adorned, and {149} inspired by a more than usual afflatus of folly, declared that "we can grant nothing to the Americans except what they may ask with a halter round their necks." It is difficult to believe that a reasonable minister, endowed with a sufficient degree of human ability to push his way from office to office and from title to title, could have known so little of the history of his own country and the characteristics of his own countrymen as to think that any of England's children were easily to be frightened into ignominious supplication. But Hillsborough undoubtedly did think so, and he always acted consistently in support of his strong conviction that the independent colonists were nothing more than a mob of cowardly malcontents. He acted on this conviction to such good purpose that his name has earned its place of honor with that of Grenville, of Townshend, and of Wedderburn, in the illustrious junta who were successfully busy about the sorry business of converting a great empire into a small one.

[Sidenote: 1766—The Mutiny Act]

After the Stamp Act had raised its crop of disturbance and disorder, the Government extended to the colonies the measure called the Mutiny Act, for the quartering of troops and providing them with necessaries. The Legislature of New York refused to execute this Act, on the ground that it involved the very principle of taxation which had just been abandoned by the repeal of the Stamp Act. It made provision for the troops in its own way, and calmly ignored the Act of Parliament. Parliament retorted in due course by passing a bill by which the Governor, Council, and Assembly of New York were prevented from passing any law whatsoever until they had complied with the letter and the spirit of the Mutiny Act. This measure was loudly applauded in England, even by some who had shown themselves very friendly to the grievances of the colonists. When New York found that her great deed was too great, and, bending before the anger of Parliament, reluctantly complied with the terms of the Mutiny Act, there were not wanting observers to point out that the lesson, though only addressed to one colony, was of significance to all, and that an inevitable surrender was the proof {150} of the hopeless inferiority of the colonies when brought into direct contest with the supreme power. These jubilations were as short-lived as they were untimely. If New York was weak and wavered, Massachusetts was more firm of purpose. She sternly refused to comply with the terms of the Mutiny Act. She went farther still in defiance of the Government. She issued a circular to the other colonies, calling upon them very frankly and very clearly to co-operate in taking some united course for the purpose of obtaining redress for the recent acts of the English Government. This was the second instance of deliberate combination for a definite end among the colonies, and it caused much disquiet and more irritation to the Government. Lord Hillsborough, always in favor of what he believed to be firm measures, immediately sent Governor Bernard instructions to have the offending circular rescinded. Governor Bernard would have been only too glad to obey, but obedience was not easy.

[Sidenote: 1770—The Boston massacre]

Bernard could command, but Massachusetts could refuse to give way. When Bernard retaliated by dissolving the Massachusetts Legislature, colony after colony replied to his action by applauding the conduct of Massachusetts and condemning Lord Hillsborough. The English Government answered the protests of Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Georgia, and New York by creating a new office especially to deal with the colonies, and by appointing Lord Hillsborough to fill the post. Everything that could be done on the English side of the Atlantic by those in power to show those on the American side of the Atlantic that they might look in vain for justice or for consideration from authority was done. Lord Hillsborough was under the impression that a little firmness—what he called firmness—would soon bring the colonists to their senses, but every mail that came across the Atlantic showed that Lord Hillsborough's theory was unsupported by facts. Now it was the news that the seizure of John Hancock's sloop "Liberty" for a breach of the revenue laws had brought about a riot in Boston in which the Commissioners of Revenue had to fly for their lives. Now it was the news of {151} a great convention in Faneuil Hall to protest against the troops which Hillsborough, at the request of Bernard; poured into Boston. Now it was the news of daily increasing hostility between the citizens of Boston and the British soldiers quartered in the town. It was evident, even to Hillsborough, that a dangerous spirit had been aroused in America, but he still believed that America could be easily frightened or chastised into good behavior. He proposed to enforce an old law of Henry the Eighth by which the colonists offending could be shipped across the Atlantic for trial in England. All that was best and most eloquent in the House of Commons protested against such folly, and did not protest in vain. Some small concessions were made in a half-hearted and grudging way to the Americans. Governor Bernard was recalled. Some of the obnoxious taxes were repealed, though Lord North was not to be persuaded to abandon the tax on tea. These poor concessions were made known to the colonists in a more than usually uncivil and injudicious letter from Lord Hillsborough. The concessions were too trivial and they came too late. If Boston had its brief day of rejoicing when Bernard took his departure, the men of Boston were soon to be occupied with other thoughts than of banners and bonfires. The bad feeling between the people and the military grew worse, and at last displayed itself in active hostility. March 5, 1770, was a memorable day in the history of Boston. Three thousand miles away Lord North was moving in Parliament for the repeal of all the American duties with the single and fatal exception of the tax on tea. In Boston a small quarrel between some of the citizens and certain British troops under the command of Colonel Preston suddenly blazed up into a dangerous collision. Some of the soldiers fired. Several citizens were killed, several more wounded. There was an angry call to arms, and a general civil attack upon the military was only with difficulty prevented by the Lieutenant-Governor, who ordered the arrest and imprisonment of Colonel Preston and the soldiers under him. These duly underwent a trial whose conduct and whose issue reflect the highest honor {152} upon Boston. The soldiers were defended by no less prominent a man and conspicuous a patriot than John Adams; and, thanks to John Adams, Colonel Preston and six of his men were acquitted, and only two of the soldiers convicted of manslaughter. But if the people of Boston were willing that even their enemies should be tried fairly, and fairly acquitted, they were not willing to allow the events of that day to pass into oblivion. A public funeral was accorded to the victims of the Boston Massacre, and the grim name for a grim deed was for long years later solemnly and publicly commemorated.

The bad news of the Boston Massacre was followed to England by the bad news of the business of the "Gaspee." The "Gaspee" was an English warship employed to enforce the Revenue Acts along the Rhode Island coast. Its commander, Lieutenant Duddington, took an active delight in his duty which brought him into perpetual antagonism with a people who regarded elusion of the revenue laws as their privilege and prerogative. One night the "Gaspee," pursuing the Providence packet, that had refused to lower her colors in salutation as she passed, ran aground in shallow water and lay fast bound for the night. The news of her insolence to the Providence packet and of her present plight flew abroad all over Providence. After sundown a number of the townspeople of Providence, well armed and stern of purpose, rowed from the town to the stranded "Gaspee," boarded her, and overcame the ineffectual resistance of her crew. In the scuffle Duddington was badly wounded. His wounds were dressed: he and his men were put on shore with all their belongings, and then and there the "Gaspee" was set fire to and watched till she was consumed. Though a large money reward was offered for the apprehension of the offenders, no one of the assailants was ever brought before the King's justice.

Misfortunes like the Boston Massacre, disorders like the burning of the "Gaspee," naturally increased the anti-colonial exasperation of the English King and of ministers like North and Hillsborough. North thought whatever {153} the King wished him to think. Hillsborough still believed that the Americans were only to be listened to when they came with halters around their necks. King George was convinced that the New England mutineers would speedily prove to be lambs when England chose to play the lion. At this moment of extreme tension something happened which still further strained the relations between the two countries.

[Sidenote: 1767—The letters of Hutchinson and Oliver]

In the year 1767, Hutchinson, who was then Governor-General of Massachusetts, and Oliver, the Lieutenant-Governor of the colony, wrote certain letters to Whately, who was private secretary to George Grenville. These were private letters, confidential letters. Neither of the writers dreamed that they would ever become public possessions. They were intended to inform and to advise a minister's secretary and the minister himself. In these letters Hutchinson and Oliver set forth very fully and frankly their views as to the condition of the colonies and the better way of dealing with them. Hutchinson and Oliver had suffered much at the hands of the people of Boston. It was chance rather than clemency which allowed them to escape with their lives on that wild August day of 1765. It is probable that their opinion of the popular party in Massachusetts was colored if not prejudiced by memories of the Stamp Act riots. Hutchinson and Oliver were all for strong measures of repression and coercion. To their minds the colonies were allowed a great deal too much liberty; their people and their leaders were not nearly so sensible of the advantage of British supremacy as they ought to be; they were forever asserting their own rights and privileges in a spirit that could only be properly met by a prompt and comprehensive curtailment of those rights and privileges. The colonists were too free, too proud of their charters and constitutions. Hutchinson and Oliver, with that fine superiority to charters and constitutions which characterized so many a royal governor, insisted that very considerable changes of government, all in the direction of coercion, were necessary, in order to make the conceited colonists know their place and to keep {154} them in it. These letters no doubt made their due impression upon Whately and upon Grenville. Letters like them were always being despatched across the Atlantic by governors and deputy governors to persons of importance in England, pointing out how ungrateful the colonists were for their many blessings, and what a good thing it would be for them if a few of these blessings were taken away. These letters had their influence upon the persons of importance to whom they were addressed. They formed the minds of ministers; they fed the fancies of the King. They served to bolster up the singular system of ignorance and incapacity which went by the name of colonial administration.

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.

The plan had been schemed out by a conclave of citizens around a bowl of punch in Court Street, and was carried out with a success that was no less remarkable than its peacefulness. The trappings of the red man concealed the identity of many prominent citizens, friends of John Hancock and Samuel Adams, their rivals in ability and their peers in energy. The sham savages were so numerous and so determined that no resistance was offered by the captains or the crews of the vessels. The shore was picketed with sentinels ready to resist any interference on the part of any representatives of royal authority. There was no interference. The conspirators of the punch-bowl and those who obeyed their instructions kept their secret so close, and did their work so quickly, that those in authority knew nothing about the business until the business was happily over. In about two hours the entire cargo of the three tea-ships was dragged out of the hold and flung into the sea. The patriotic citizen who had asked significantly if tea could be made with salt water was satisfactorily answered by the Mohawks when they cast overboard the last of their three hundred and forty-two chests, and prepared to disappear as rapidly and as mysteriously as they had come. During the whole adventure only one man was hurt, who tried to secrete some of the tea about his person, and who was given a drubbing for his pains. The Mohawks {161} scattered and disappeared, washed their faces, rolled up their blankets, concealed their pistols and axes, and as many reputable Boston citizens returned to their homes. It is related that some of them on their way home passed by a house in which Admiral Montague was spending the evening. Montague heard the noise of the trampling feet, opened the window and looked out upon the fantastic procession. No doubt some news of what had happened had reached him, for he is reported to have called out: "Well, boys, you have had a fine night for your Indian caper. But mind, you've got to pay the fiddler yet." One of the Mohawk leaders looked up and answered promptly: "Oh, never mind, squire. Just come out here, if you please, and we'll settle the bill in two minutes." The admiral considered the odds were against him, that the joke had gone far enough. He closed the window, leaving the bill to be settled by whoso thought fit, and the laughing savages swept on to their respectable wigwams. If some very reputable citizens found a few leaves of tea in their shoes when they took them off that night, they said nothing about it, and nobody was the wiser. So ended the adventure of the Boston Tea-party, which was but the prologue to adventures more memorable and more momentous. We learn that at least one of these masquerading Indians survived to so late a date as the March of 1846. Men now living may have clasped hands with Henry Purkitt and David Kinnison and heard from their own lips the story of a deed that enraged a King, offended Chatham, was disapproved of by George Washington, and was not disapproved of by Burke.

[Sidenote: 1773—After the Boston "Tea-party"]

The news of the Boston Tea-party reached London on January 19, 1774, and was public property on the 21st. Other news little less unpleasant soon followed. At Charleston tea was only landed to lie rotting in damp cellars, not an ounce of it to be bought or sold. In Philadelphia a proclamation of December 27, 1773, announced that "THE TEA-SHIP being arrived, every Inhabitant who wishes to preserve the Liberty of America is desired to meet at the STATE-HOUSE, This Morning, precisely {162} at TEN O'clock, to advise what is best to be done on this alarming Crisis." "What was best to be done" proved to be to compel the tea-ship to return at once with its cargo to England. New York refused to allow the tea-ship "Nancy" to enter the harbor, and if some tea was eventually landed under the cannon of a man-of-war, it was only to be locked up as in Charleston, and to be left to lie unused. The bad news was received in England with an unreasoning fury by those whose fault it was, and by those who knew nothing at all about the matter; with a grave indignation by those who, like Pitt, were as resolute to support the supremacy of England as to plead for justice to her colonies; with despair by those who dreamed of an honorable and abiding union between the two peoples; and with applause by those who admired any protest against injustice, however vehement and irregular.

It is difficult, in reading the debates on the troubles in America, to credit the sanity of the majority of the speakers. These advocated a colonial policy that should only have commended itself to a session of Bedlamites, and clamored for a treatment of the colonists that might well have shocked the susceptibilities of a savage. No Virginian planter could be more disdainful of the rights of his slaves, or more resentful at any attempt to assert them, than the average member of Parliament was disdainful of the rights of the American colonists and resentful at their assertion. The English country gentlemen who applauded the ministers and who howled at Burke seemed to be absolutely unconscious that the men of Massachusetts and the men of New York were not merely like themselves made in the same image, but brethren of their own race, blood of their blood and bone of their bone, children of the same stock whose resistance to oppression was recorded at Runnymede and Worcester, at the Boyne and at Culloden. Even if the colonists had been the knaves and fools and cowards that the Parliamentary majority appeared to think them, the action of that majority was of a kind eminently calculated to lend strength to the most feeble spirit and courage to the most craven heart. The coarse {163} contempt, the brutal menace which were the distinguishing features of all that ill-timed oratory might well have goaded into resistance men who had been slaves for generations till servility had grown a habit. Yet this contempt and menace were addressed to men trained by harsh experiences to be stubborn in defence and sturdy in defiance, men who had won their liberty from the sea and the wilderness, who were as tenacious of their rights and as proud of their privileges as they were tenacious of the soil which they had wrested from the red man and the wolf, and proud of the stately cities which had conquered the forest and the swamp. It was the descendants of Miles Standish and John Smith, of Endicott and Bradford and Underhill and Winslow whom the Squire Westerns of Westminster were ready to insult and were eager to enslave.

It must, however, be remembered that even men who had advocated the claims of the colonies were, or professed to be, shocked at the daring deed of the men of Boston. Dean Tucker declared that mutinous colonies were no use to England, and had better be allowed to depart. Chatham found the action of the Boston people criminal, prompted by passions and wild pretences. In America George Washington disapproved of the exploit.

[Sidenote: 1774—Closing the port of Boston]

The East India Company, pressed by the pinch of financial difficulties, clamored for a revenge that the King was resolved to give them. Under his instigation Lord North, in the beginning of 1774, introduced the famous measure for closing the port of Boston against all commerce. The Bill declared that "in the present condition of the town and harbor the commerce of his Majesty's subjects cannot be safely carried on there." It was accordingly asserted to be "expedient that the officers of his Majesty's Customs should be forthwith removed from the said town." It was enacted that "from and after the first day of June, 1774, it shall not be lawful for any person or persons to lade, or cause to be laden, or put off from any quay, wharf, or other place within the town of Boston, or in or upon any part of the shore of the bay, commonly called the harbor of Boston, into any ship, vessel, boat, etc., any goods, wares, {164} or merchandise whatsoever . . . or to take up, discharge, or cause or procure to be taken up or discharged within the town, out of any boat, lighter, ship, etc., any goods, wares, or merchandise whatsoever . . . under pain of the forfeiture of the goods and merchandise and of the boat," and so on, in a long and drastic measure practically intended to ruin Boston. This was what the Government thought it well to describe by the word "expedient." This was not all. Comprehensive alterations of the laws of the province followed. The charter of Massachusetts was changed. The council for the province, which had hitherto been chosen by the people, was now to be chosen by the Crown, and the judges of the province were to be nominated by the Crown. Another measure authorized the Governor to send persons implicated in the disturbances to England for trial. Boston and the province were indeed to be heavily punished and sternly brought to their senses.

The King and the King's ministers had hoped fondly, in the old as well as the new sense of the word, that their action towards the port of Boston would effectually humble the spirit and crush the opposition of that mutinous city. Their scheme was founded upon a nice calculation of the innate baseness of human nature. They argued that the closing of the port of Boston would turn the stream of her commerce in the direction of other cities, which would be only too glad to enrich themselves at the expense of their disabled comrade. While they believed that the punishment of Boston would thus breed a selfish disunion in the province of Massachusetts, they trusted also that the spectacle of the severe punishment meted out to Massachusetts would have its wholesome deterring effect upon other colonies and destroy at once whatever desire for union might exist among them. The King and the King's ministers were the more deceived. Their ingenious scheme produced a result precisely the opposite of that which they so confidently anticipated. The other ports of Massachusetts did not seize with avidity the opportunity for plunder afforded them by the humiliation of Boston. The other colonies were not driven into discord by the sight of {165} the punishment of Massachusetts. On the contrary, the ports of Massachusetts refused to take advantage of the degradation of Boston, and the colonies were urged, and almost forced, into union by what they regarded as the despotic treachery of the English Crown. The most devoted friend, the most enthusiastic advocate of the rights of the American colonists could scarcely have devised better means of drawing them together and welding them into a solid fellowship than those which had been employed by George the Third and his advisers for the purpose of keeping them apart forever.

[Sidenote: 1774—General Gage]

An immense number of copies of the Boston Port Bill were sent with great rapidity all over the colonies. In the fine phrase which we must needs believe to be Burke's, these had the effect which the poets ascribe to the Fury's torch; they set the countries through which they passed in a flame. At Boston and New York "the populace had copies of the Bill printed upon mourning paper with a black border, which they cried about the streets under the title of a barbarous, cruel, bloody, and inhuman murder." In other places the Bill was publicly burned. All over the Continent great meetings were held, at which, with more or less vehemence of speech, but with a common enthusiasm and a common indignation, the Bill was denounced, and the determination to resist it defiantly asserted. When General Gage arrived on his mission of administration he found not merely the colony of Massachusetts, but the whole continent in an uproar. He had to deal with a vast majority of the people who were in proclaimed resistance to the Act, and who only differed in the extreme of resistance to which they were prepared immediately to go, and a minority who either approved or did not altogether disapprove of the Act. Gage was condemned to the government not of a cowed, humbled, and friendless province, but of a raging nation, frantic at the infringement of its rights, and sustained in the struggle it was resolved to make by the cheer and aid of a league of sister nations. The flame from the Fury's torch had spread with a vengeance. Gage was a brave man, an able man, an {166} honorable man; but for Alexander he was a little over-parted. The difficulties he had to encounter were too great for him to grapple with; the work he was meant to do too vast for his hands or the hands of any man. He was sent out to sway a chastened and degraded province; he found himself opposed by a defiant people, exalted by injustice and animated by attack.



{167}

CHAPTER LIII.

THE "VICAR OF WAKEFIELD."

[Sidenote: 1774—Death of Oliver Goldsmith]

In the early spring that followed upon the winter when the Mohawks of Boston made tea with salt water, at a time when politicians were busy fighting over the Boston Port Bill, and neither side dreamed of the consequences that could come of a decision, one of the gentlest and sweetest writers of the English speech passed quietly, and somewhat unhappily, away from a world he had done so much to make happy. With Oliver Goldsmith an epoch of literature came to an end, as the year that saw his death ended an epoch in the history of the world. The characteristic literature of the eighteenth century, the literature that began with Swift and Addison, and Steele and Pope; that boasted among its greatest the names of Sterne and Richardson, Smollett and Fielding, came to its close with the genius of Goldsmith. With the new conditions which were coming over the world a new literature was to be created. Wordsworth was a child of four, at Cockermouth; Coleridge was a child of four, at Bristol; over in Germany a young poet, whose name was unknown in England, had been much influenced by Goldsmith's immortal story, and was in his turn and time to have a very profound influence over the literature of Goldsmith's adopted country. The year of Goldsmith's death was the year in which the young Goethe published those "Sorrows of Werther" which marked the birth of a new form of expression in art.

Goldsmith was born in Ireland, at Pallas, in the county of Longford, in the early November of 1728. He lived for over forty-five years a life of poverty, of vagrancy, of squalor, of foolish dissipation, of grotesque vanity, of an {168} industry as amazing as his improvidence, of a native idleness that was successfully combated by a tireless industry, of an amazing simplicity that was only rivalled by his amazing genius. There were a great many contrasting and seemingly incompatible elements in Goldsmith's queer composition, but his faults were not of a kind to prevent men from finding him lovable, and, whatever his faults were, they left no stain upon his writings.

The writings of Goldsmith are distinguished in English literature, and, indeed, in the literature of the world, by their sweet pure humor, fresh and clear and sparkling as a fountain whose edges the satyr's hoof has never trampled. They charm by their humanity, by their tender charity, by the nobility of their lesson, a nobility only heightened by the intense sympathy with the struggles, and sorrows, and errors of mankind. A new St. Martin of letters, he was ever ready to share his mantle of pity with the sad and sinning. He had himself suffered so much, and been so tempted and tested, and had retained throughout his trials so much of the serenity of a child, that all his writings breathe compassion for frailty and failure with something of a schoolboy sense of brotherhood which softens even his satire. The flames of London's fiery furnace had blazed and raged about him, but he passed through them unconsumed. The age in which he lived was not an age of exalted purity, the city wherein he dwelt was scarcely saintly. He lived in some of the most evil days of the eighteenth century, but his writings and his life escaped pollution. He was not a saint, indeed; he was a spendthrift and he loved his glass, but he was never tainted with the servile sins of cities. Through all the weltering horror of Hogarth's London we seem to see him walk with something of the freshness of his boyhood still shining on his face. The reflection of the Irish skies was too bright upon his eyes to let them be dimmed by the squalor and the shame of a squalid and shameful city.

[Sidenote: 1774—The friends of Goldsmith]

With the true instinct of his fine nature he made his friends and companions among the wisest and highest of his time. His intimates and companions were Edmund {169} Burke, and Dr. Johnson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. He had women friends too, as wisely chosen as the men—women who were kind to him and admired him, women whose kindness and admiration were worth the winning, women whose friendship brightened and soothed a life that was darkened and vexed enough. Mary Horneck and her sister were the stars of his life, his heroines, his idols, his ideals. He has made Mary Horneck immortal as the "Jessamy Bride." In his hours of poverty he was cheered by the thought of her; while he lived he worshipped her, and when he died a lock of his hair was taken from his coffin and given to her. Thackeray tells a touching little story of the Jessamy Bride. She lived long after the death of the man of genius who adored her, lived well into the nineteenth century, and "Hazlitt saw her, an old lady, but beautiful still, in Northcote's painting-room, who told the eager critic how proud she was always that Goldsmith had admired her."

Goldsmith was a companionable being and loved all company that was not vicious and depraved. He could be happy at the club in the society of the great thinkers and teachers and wits of the time. He could be more than happy at Barton, in the society of Mary and her sister. But he could be happy too, in far humbler, far less romantic fellowship. "I am fond of amusement," he declares in one of his most delightful essays, "in whatever company it is to be found, and wit, though dressed in rags, is ever pleasing to me." There was plenty of wit dressed in rags drifting about the London of that day. Men of genius slept on bulkheads and beneath arches, and starved for want of a guinea, or haunted low taverns, or paced St. James's Square all night in impecunious couples for sheer need of a lodging, cheering each other's supperless mood with political conversations and declarations that, let come what might come, they would never desert the Ministry. But Goldsmith unearthed men of genius whose names nobody ever heard of, and studied them and made merry with them, and transferred them to his pages for us to make merry with more than a century after Goldsmith {170} fell asleep. We may suspect that Goldsmith never really found those wonderful beggars he chronicles. He did not discover them as Cabot discovered America; he is their inventor, as the fancy of poets invented the Fortunate Islands.

Goldsmith's strolling player is as real as Richard Savage, with whom he is contemporary, and it must be admitted that he is a more presentable personage. What a jolly philosophy is his about the delights of beggary! It has all the humor of Rabelais with no touch of the Touraine grossness. It has something of the wisdom of Aurelius, only clad in homespun instead of the purple. The philosophy of contentment was never more merrily nor more whimsically expressed. A synod of sages could not formulate a scheme in praise of poverty more impressive than the contagious humor of his light-hearted merriment. The strolling player has the best of the argument, but he has it because he is speaking with the persuasive magic of the tongue of Oliver Goldsmith.

The same pervading cheerfulness, the same sunny philosophy, which is, however, by no means the philosophy of Pangloss, informs all his work. Beau Tibbs boasting in his garret; Dr. Primrose in Newgate; the good-natured man, seated between two bailiffs, and trying to converse with his heart's idol as if nothing had happened; Mr. Hardcastle, foiled for the five-hundredth time in the tale of Old Grouse in the Gun Room; each is an example of Goldsmith's method and of Goldsmith's manner. If Goldsmith did not enjoy while he lived all the admiration, all the rewards that belonged of right to his genius, the generations that have succeeded have made amends for the errors of their ancestors. "She Stoops to Conquer" is still the most successful of the stock comedies. If "The Good-Natured Man" can scarcely be said to have kept the stage, it is still the delight of the student in his closet. What satires are better known than the letters of the "Citizen of the World"? What spot on the map is more familiar than Sweet Auburn? As for the "Vicar of Wakefield," what profitable words could now be added to {171} its praise? It has conquered the world, it is dear to every country and known in every language, it has taken its place by unquestionable right with the masterpieces of all time.

[Sidenote: 1774—Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson]

"Dr. Goldsmith," said his most famous friend of the man who was then lying in the Temple earth—"Dr. Goldsmith was wild, sir, but he is so no more." This epitaph has been quoted a thousand times, but it must in no sense be taken as a summing-up of the dead man's career. It was a rebuke, justly administered, to the critic who at such a moment could have the heart to say that Oliver Goldsmith had been wild. Dr. Johnson, who uttered the rebuke, put the same thought even more profoundly in a letter addressed to Bennet Langton shortly after Goldsmith's death. In this letter he announces Goldsmith's death, speaks of his "folly of expense," and concludes by saying, "But let not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man." These simple words are infinitely more impressive than the magniloquence of the epitaph which Johnson wrote on Goldsmith.

Goldsmith lived in London and he died in London, and he lies buried in the precincts of the Temple. The noise, and rattle, and roar of London rave daily about his grave. Around it rolls the awful music of a great city that has grown and swollen and extended its limits and multiplied its population out of all resemblance to that little London where Goldsmith lived and starved and made merry, and was loved, and dunned, and sorrowed for. The body that first drew breath among the pleasant Longford meadows, which seem to stretch in all directions to touch the sky, lies at rest within the humming, jostling, liberties of the Temple. It is perhaps fitting that the grave of one who all his life loved men and rejoiced so much in companionship should be laid in a place where the foot of man is almost always busy, where silence, when it comes at all, comes only with the night.

There is not a space in the scope of this history to deal, otherwise than incidentally, with the literature of England in the eighteenth century. The whole Georgian era, from its dawn to its dusk, is rich in splendid names in {172} letters as in art. The great inheritance from the Augustan age of Anne, the anguish of Grub Street, the evolution of the novel, the eloquence of the pulpit and the bar, the triumphs of science, the controversies of scholars, the fortunes of the drama, the speculations of philosophy, the vacillations of the pamphleteer, the judgments of the critics, the achievements of historians—these are themes whose intimate consideration is outside the range of this work's purpose. All that is possible is here and there to linger a little in the company of some dear and famous figure—a Swift, a Johnson, a Goldsmith, a Sheridan—who stands above his fellows in the world's renown or in our individual affection, who played while he lived his conspicuous part on the great stage of public life, or who helped conspicuously to influence public thought. The selection is, within these limitations, inevitably arbitrary, and is given frankly as such. Certain names assert themselves masterfully, and of these Goldsmith's is one of the most masterful. He added images to daily life and common thought as Bunyan did or Shakespeare. There is no more need to explain Dr. Primrose than there is to explain Mr. Facing-both-ways, and if Beau Tibbs is only less familiar as Osric, Tony Lumpkin is to the full as familiar as Falstaff. Goldsmith himself is the lovable type of a class that was often unlovely in the eighteenth century, the needy man of letters. If he has his lodging in the Grub Street of Dreams, his presence there brings sunlight into the squalid place, and an infinite humor, an infinite charity compensate royally for a little finite folly and finite vanity. In the great art he served and the great age he adorned Goldsmith stands, not alone, but apart, with the very human demigods.



{173}

CHAPTER LIV.

YANKEE DOODLE.

[Sidenote: 1775—The Philadelphia Congress]

An English ministry and an English king were convinced that everything necessary to do for the suppression of the mutinous spirit in a turbulent but unwarlike people had been done. The existence of Boston as a trading port had been abolished; Carthage had been blotted out; there was an English army within the walls of Boston; there was an English fleet in the Charles River. Who could doubt that the cowardly farmers whom Sandwich derided, and their leaders, the voluble lawyers whom Sandwich despised, would be cowed now into quiescence, only thankful that things were no worse? The best and wisest in England were among those who did doubt, but they were like Benedict in the play—nobody marked them, or at least nobody responsible for any control over the conduct of affairs. Official confidence was suddenly and rudely shaken. The lawyers proved to be men of deeds as well as of words. The disdained farmers showed that the descendants of the men who had fought with beasts and with Indians after the manner of Endicott and Standish had not degenerated in the course of a few generations. Over the Atlantic came news which made the Boston Massacre, the burning of the "Gaspee," and the Boston Tea-party, seem trivial and insignificant events. An astounded Ministry learned that a formal Congress of Representatives of the different colonies had been convened and had met in Philadelphia, and had drawn up a Declaration of Rights. Chatham admired and applauded their work. To the King and the King's ministers it was meaningless when it was not offensive. But the colonists showed that they could do more than meet in Congresses and draw up {174} splendid State Papers. The next news was of acts of war. Gage schemed a raid upon the stores of powder and arms accumulated by the disaffected colonists in Concord. Warning of his plan was carried at night by a patriotic engraver named Paul Revere to every hamlet within reach of a horse's ride. There was a skirmish at Lexington on the road to Concord between the King's troops and a body of minute-men, which resulted in the killing and wounding of many of the latter and the dispersal of their force. An expedition that began with what might in irony be termed a victory for the British arms ended in a disaster as tragic as it was complete. Concord forewarned had nothing to yield to the English soldiers who invaded her quiet streets; but the surrounding country, equally forewarned, answered the invasion by sending bodies of armed farmers and minute-men from every point of the compass to the common centre of Concord. There was a sharp, short fight on Concord Bridge, which ended in the repulse of the royal troops and the death of brave men on both sides. Then the British officer decided to retreat from Concord. It proved one of the most memorable retreats in history. From behind every tree, every bowlder, every wall, every hedge, enemies trained in the warfare of the wilderness poured their fire upon the retiring troops. It seemed to one of the officers engaged in that memorable fight as if the skies rained down foes upon them, unseen foes only made known by the accuracy of their marksmanship and the pertinacity of their veiled pursuit. All the way from Concord the retiring troops fought in vain with an enemy that was seldom seen, but whose presence was everywhere manifested by the precision of his aim and the tale of victims that followed each volley. The retreat was becoming a rout when reinforcements sent out from Boston under the command of Lord Percy stayed an actual stampede. But it could not stay the retreat nor avert defeat. Lord Percy, who had marched out with his bands playing "Yankee Doodle," in mockery of the Americans, had to retreat in his turn with no mocking music, carrying with him the remnant of the invaders of Concord. He {175} and his force did not get within touch of Boston and the protection of the guns of the fleet a moment too soon. Had a large body of insurgents, who came hurrying in to help their brethren, arrived on the field a little earlier, Lord Percy and his command must inevitably have been made prisoners of war. As it was, this one day's business had given success and the confidence that comes of success to the raw colonists, and had inflicted a crushing defeat upon a body of soldiers who had been led to believe that the sight of their scarlet coats would act like a charm to tame their untutored opponents.

[Sidenote: 1776—Military success of the colonists]

Gage only recovered from the shock of this disaster to realize that Boston was invested by an insurgent army. The victors of the fight and flight from Concord were rapidly reinforced by bodies of men from all parts of the country; their ranks were hourly swelled by levies roughly armed but stubbornly resolved. Unpleasant facts forced themselves thick and fast upon Gage's notice. But yesterday, as it were, he had imagined that the mere presence of the forces under his command was sufficient to overawe the colonists and settle any show of insubordination forever; to-day he had to swallow in shame and anger a staggering defeat. Still Gage did nothing and his enemies accumulated. Royal reinforcements arrived under Burgoyne, Clinton, and Howe, to do nothing in their turn. But the peasants they despised were not idle and would not allow them to be idle. The English general woke up one morning to find that under cover of night an important point of vantage overlooking the town of Boston had been occupied and roughly fortified by the rebels. The citizen soldiers who had gathered together to defend their liberties had stolen a march upon the English general. They had occupied the rising ground of Breed Hill, below Bunker's Hill, on the Charlestown side of the Charles River, and had hurriedly intrenched themselves there behind rude but efficient earthworks. Gage was resolved that the rebels should not remain long in their new position. Chance might have allotted them a scratch victory over a small body of men taken unawares in unfamiliar country {176} and by unfamiliar methods of fighting. But here was a business familiar to the British soldier; here was work that he did well and that he loved to do. If the colonists really believed that they could hold Breed Hill against troops with whom the taking by storm of strong positions was a tradition, so much the worse for them. The order was given that the rebels must be cleared away from Breed Hill at once, and the welcome task was given to Lord Howe, in command of the flower of the forces in Boston. It is probable that Howe felt some pity for the rash and foolhardy men whose hopes it was his duty and his determination to destroy. Confident that the enterprise would be as brief as it must be decisive, Howe prepared to assault, and the battle of Breed Hill began.

[Sidenote: 1775—The Battle of Breed Hill]

The Breed Hill battle is one of the strangest and one of the bravest fights ever fought by men. On the one side were some hundreds of simple citizens, civilians, skilled as individuals in the use of the gun, and accustomed as volunteers, militia, and minute-men to something that might pass for drill and manoeuvre, officered and generalled by men who, like Warren and Greene, knew warfare only by the bookish theoric, or by men who, like Putnam and Pomeroy, had taken their baptism of fire and blood in frontier struggles with wild beast and wilder Indian. On the other side were some thousands of the finest troops in the world, in whose ranks victory was a custom, on whose banners the names of famous battles blazed. They were well trained, well armed, well equipped. They moved at the word of command with the monotonous precision and perfection of a machine. They were led by officers whose temper had been tested again and again in the sharp experiences of war, men to whom the thought of defeat was as unfamiliar as the thought of fear. The contrast between the two opposing forces was vividly striking in the very habiliments of the opponents. The men who were massed behind the breastworks of Breed Hill were innocent of uniform, of the bright attire that makes the soldier's life alluring, innocent even of any distinction between officer and private, or, if the words seem too formal {177} for so raw a force, between the men who were in command and the men who were commanded. The soldiers who were massed below, the force whose duty it was to march up the hill and sweep away the handful in hodden gray and black broadcloth who held it, glittered with all the bravery of color dear to the British army. Splendid in scarlet and white and gold, every buckle shining, every belt and bandolier as brightly clean as pipeclay could make it, the little army under Howe's command would have done credit to a parade in the Park or a field day at Windsor. The one side was as sad and sombre as a Puritan prayer-meeting; the other glowed with all the color and warmth of a military pageant. The holders of the hill had come from their farms and their fields in the homely working clothes they wore as they followed the plough or tended their cattle; the townsmen among them came in the decent civic suits they wore behind their desks or counters. Few men's weapons were fellows in that roughly armed array. Each militant citizen carried his own gun, some favorite weapon, familiar from long practice in fowling, or from frequent service further afield against the bear, the panther, and the wolf. Some of the flint-locks were enormously long; many of them would have seemed extremely old-fashioned to an ordnance officer. But every gun was like an additional limb to those practised marksmen, who knew little of firing in platoons, but everything of the patient accuracy which gives the backwoodsman his unerring aim. The assailants carried the latest weapons approved of by the War Office, and manipulated them with the faultless unison and unswerving harmony that would have compelled the compliments of a commander-in-chief at a review. At the top of the hill were some sixteen hundred men, a mob of undisciplined sharpshooters, few of whom had ever fired a shot in organized warfare. At the bottom of the hill were some four thousand of the finest troops in the world, stiffened with all the strength that prestige and practice could give them. It did not seem on the face of it a very equal combat; it did not seem to the English generals that it ought to take very long to {178} march from the bottom to the top of the hill and make short work of the mutinous peasants on its summit. The best indeed that the mutinous peasants could hope for when the British were upon them was to be shot or bayoneted as quickly as possible, for the terms of Gage's proclamation directly threatened with the gallows every rebel taken with arms in his hands.

But at Breed Hill, as at Concord, the unexpected came to pass. The British troops were unable to endure the destructive fire of the colonists. Again and again they advanced over the incline as calmly as if on parade; again and again they reeled backward with shattered ranks, leaving grim piles of dead upon the fire-swept slope. The execution was terrible; regiments that marched up the hill as if to certain victory fell back from it a mere remnant of themselves, leaving most of their men and almost all their officers behind. For awhile the fight was a succession of catastrophes to the force under Howe's command. It looked as if Breed Hill would never be taken. But there came a time when the men who held it could hold it no longer. Their supply of powder began to run out, and with their means of keeping up their fire their power of holding their position came to an end. Then came a last charge of Howe's rallied forces, this time in the lightest of marching array, a last volley from behind the earth-works, and Breed Hill was in the hands of the British. It was captured at the last without much bloodshed, without much loss to its garrison. The smoke hung so thick about the enclosure where the rebels had held their own so long and so well that it was not easy for the bayonets of the conquerors to do much execution, and the defenders of Breed Hill slipped away for the most part under cover of the mist they themselves had made. Indeed, there was little inclination for pursuit on the part of the victors. They had done what they had been set to do, but they had done it at a cost which for the time made it impossible for them to attempt to pursue an advantage so dearly bought. They did not, could not know the strength of their enemy; they were content to hold the ground which had been won {179} with such a fearful waste of British blood. Breed Hill was a nominal victory for the King; it was a real victory for the rebels, who had shown what an undisciplined force, composed of farmers, trappers, lawyers, shopkeepers, and divines, could do against the finest troops in the world.