The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (6 page)

Every British monarch in the eighteenth century accepted this system and worked willingly within it. None admired it more than George III, who in a characteristic statement declared his "enthusiasm" for "the beauty, excellence, and perfection of the British Constitution as by Law established."
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He wrote these words in 1778 when he had been the monarch for eighteen years, thoroughly experienced in playing his part as the executive in a mixed form of government.

George III had come to the throne unprepared for this role, though unlike his grandfather, George II, he was British-born, and though he had a better-than-average formal education. Yet his incapacity on becoming king did not lie in his education but in his temperament and his lack of understanding of men -- or, as the eighteenth century put it, of human nature. Although he learned much of men during his long reign,

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Fortescue, ed.,
Correspondence of George the Third
, IV, 220-21.

he was never able to understand the subtleties in their behavior.
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Born in 1738 at Norfolk House, St. James's Square, the first son and second child of Frederick, Prince of Wales, George III had a difficult and lonely childhood. His mother, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, was not, as commonly thought, a stupid woman, only a rather frightened one who kept her son cut off from other children on the grounds that they were "ill-educated" and vicious. George's only real companion in his early years was his brother Edward.

Lady Louisa Stuart, a perceptive observer, remarked that the prince was "silent, modest, and easily abashed." His parents' behavior toward him undoubtedly prompted silence and modesty, for they did not conceal their preference for his brother. George observed the petting of Edward and learned to stay within himself. He was usually ignored, at least in Edward's company, and when he spoke seems occasionally to have been rebuked with the gentle rejoinder, "Do hold your tongue, George: don't talk like a fool."
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If there was a fool in the household, it was Frederick, George III's father, who at the age of thirty-nine still found amusement in breaking other people's windows at night. Frederick, however, had much to recommend him: he was a good husband (though a not very sensitive father), a patron of the arts, and interested to some degree at least in science and politics. His interest in politics came naturally to one who expected in the normal course of things to become king. Frederick did not handle this situation well, quarreling with his father, George II, and going into opposition. A following collected around him at Leicester House, composed of some of those excluded from power who looked forward to enjoying it when the king died and the prince took the throne. They received a nasty surprise in 1751 when Frederick died, not his father the king.

Prince George was thirteen years old in 1751, and became immediately the center of great interest. His education, control of the shaping of his mind and opinions, was recognized as a subject of importance. The king might have taken the boy from his mother, but he did not.
The

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prince was now even more isolated; his mother feared the king's intentions and took pains to shelter her son from all but the most carefully scrutinized influences. In 1755 the key influence was John Stuart, the Earl of Bute, a Scot, the adviser -- not, as some whispered, the lover-of George's mother.

Princess Augusta introduced Bute to her son, and for the next five years he served as the prince's tutor and friend. The friendship seems to have developed easily -- in part, we may suppose, because George craved affection and kindness and Bute responded with both. Yet warm as their relationship was, it was not between equals. Bute held the upper band: he was twenty-five years older, strongly opinionated, obviously intelligent, and be was in charge of the prince's education. Although Bute possessed the learning required, he was not a good teacher. To be sure, he launched the prince on an impressive series of studies and saw to it that George continued those already under way. And George at this time had sampled books and subjects far beyond those ordinarily taken up by an English gentleman.

When Bute became the prince's tutor the prince was seventeen years of age. He had at least an elementary knowledge of French, German, and Latin, less Greek, some mathematics and physical science. He had read fairly widely, though superficially, in history, and he had, in the manner of those of birth and breeding, studied military fortification. His previous tutors had not neglected to introduce their pupil to the social attainments necessary to a monarch -- riding, fencing, dancing, music. And, of course, the prince had received careful religious instruction according to the creed of the Church of England.

Bute saw to it that his charge continued these studies and personally supervised a more thorough study of English and European history. In the process, the prince absorbed much knowledge of the British constitution and of statecraft and yet did not understand either. In Bute's unpracticed hands the prince's insecure, rather rigid personality grew more rigid and no' more confident, though he became proud, and intolerant of others whose views did not agree with his or his tutor's. Bute himself knew much but did not understand men or human conduct. His pride reinforced the prince's; his propensity to judge others by abstract principles -- he lacked the experience which wiser men rely upon -- strengthened a similar tendency in the prince. Master and pupil then and later commonly mistook inflexibility for personal strength and character. Understandably, George's studies did not produce the qualities needed by a monarch: good judgment and a capacity to take fully into account the principles and interests of others without giving over one's own.

George III was twenty-two when he ascended the throne in 1760. For the next few years he clung to his prejudices and to Bute with a tenacity that reflected his and Bute's miscomprehension of the political world. He would reform their world, he thought, and make virtue his real consort. Factional politics, which were of course based on interest, not ideology, revolted him -- and he would somehow change them. If this dream soon disappeared in disappointment, the king's rigidity did not, and though he learned to play the game -- at times with remarkable skill -- his early mistakes and his attachment to Bute bred a suspicion in Parliament that introduced a dozen years of instability to his government.

Instability in Parliament occurred at a most inopportune time -- the beginning of the American crisis. Quite clearly, English political arrangements worked better in periods of calm than in crisis. They reflected the views of the satisfied, of the haves more than the have-nots, and by their inertia protected the liberties of the subject, defined negatively. But how else was liberty to be defined? Fortunately, a static order stood in the way of change, which no one of consequence -- that is, no one with land who had connections -- wanted anyway. Had these men who ran things been able to declare explicitly the assumption on which they lived, they would have said that the world was essentially perfect, fixed, and unchanging.

And their world changed very little in the eighteenth century, at least before the American Revolution. Their assumptions were widely shared in the villages and parishes of England, as well as in London. There was a good deal of energy in English local government, but it arose in isolation and it remained uncoordinated from above. For the most part, the Crown and Parliament ignored government in the municipal boroughs and corporations, in parishes, in the Quarter Sessions of the counties, and in the Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes. Parliament, at least, recognized their existence and over the course of the century passed hundreds of statutes concerning local affairs. But the manner in which this was done reflected the regnant ideas about the proper role of government in the life of the nation.

Parliament had begun early in the seventeenth century to pass "Local Acts," which applied not to the whole kingdom as a Public General Act did, but to a designated locality. These Local Acts created the

Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes -- the Commissioners of Sewers, the Incorporated Guardians of the Poor, the Turnpike Trusts, and the Improvement Commissioners (charged with lighting, watching, paving, cleaning, and improving streets). At the time of the American Revolution, there were over a thousand such bodies; eventually their number would reach eighteen hundred, with responsibilities extending over a larger area and more people than all the Municipal Corporations taken together. These statutory authorities differed from all other types of local governing agencies, parishes, counties, and boroughs, for each of them was created by a special act of Parliament to fulfill one function, prescribed by the establishing statute, in a designated place. Commissioners of Sewers built and maintained in hundreds of localities trenches and drains to carry off storm water; they also constructed drains and other works to reclaim marshes and to keep out the sea. The verdant Midlands of England were in a sense the creation of these bodies, which drained off the water and kept it out, turning marshland into lovely and productive fields and pastures.

Most of the hundreds of statutory authorities operated independently of other local agencies; the Guardians of the Poor, who handled relief of the indigent, vagrants, idlers, and others commonly despised by eighteenth-century society, were a notable exception. They were usually connected by the laws with parish and sometimes county and borough governments. But they had no ties, neither responsibilities nor claims, to any agency of the ministerial government: their accounts were not audited, they published no accounts or reports, their actions passed uninspected by anybody, and yet they possessed the power to arrest, detain, and punish the poor in their charge.

This freedom to act irresponsibly came from the form of their creation and from Parliament's indifference. The special authorities got their bearings not as the result of a considered policy of Parliament or the government, but from the initiative of interested local groups. The Local Acts which set them up did not enter the full debates of either house, but usually were discussed only in small meetings by the members of the counties and boroughs to be affected by their passage.

Thus these special authorities, like the Municipal Corporations and the Quarter Sessions, operated unchecked by the Privy Council or the Assize Judges, and virtually ignored by their parent, the Parliament. In this way the localities were governed -- the poor supervised, the streets improved, the marshes drained, the roads built and maintained, and a variety of other essential services provided, or unprovided -- all without

a governing policy or without a central direction. The result was, in the fine phrase of the Webbs, "an anarchy of local autonomy."
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The Webbs' phrase also describes the situation of the American colonies before the American Revolution. All but Georgia had been founded in the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth century, though all were under the supervision of Britain, they pretty well ran their own affairs. The general outlines of their formal relationship to the Crown were known, but their objective situation -- their virtual autonomy -- was not. The disparity between reality and what was imagined in England is not surprising: the distance between England and America was great and communication imperfect, and no very enlightened colonial administration which might have explained each to the other existed.

The colonies had been founded under the authorization of the Crown, and governmental authority in them had always been exercised in the king's name, though rather ambiguously in the three proprietary colonies, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and tenuously in Rhode Island and Connecticut, the two corporate colonies. What had lasted long apparently seemed best left unchanged. The administrative structure on which the Crown relied to "govern" the colonies was old and never really adequate to govern the vast holdings in the New World. In England the Privy Council and the Secretary of State for the Southern Department did the actual work of administration before 1768. The Privy Council's primary responsibilities lay elsewhere, or its interests did; and the chief concern of the Secretary of State for the Southern Department was relations with Europe. For advice the Secretary relied on the Board of Trade, an advisory body primarily concerned with trade.
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