The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ make only 806 muskets in 1776.) Those sympathetic to the insurrectionists’ cause sometimes donated money to help rebel prisoners. The Duke of Richmond sailed his yacht, reportedly with an American pennant flying, through a British naval squadron.

      “I am growing more and more American,” James Boswell had written in August. “I see the unreasonableness of taxing them without the consent of their assemblies. I think our ministry are mad in undertaking this desperate war.” Others were even more strident, like Lord Mayor John Wilkes, described as “a charming, cross-eyed demagogue” who was elected to Parliament after marriage to an heiress gave him the fortune to bribe enough voters. In answer to the king’s Thursday address, Wilkes, whose noisy radicalism made him enormously popular in the colonies, called the war “unjust, felonious, and murderous.” The Americans, he warned, “will dispute every inch of territory with you, every narrow pass, every strong defile, every Thermopylae, every Bunker Hill.” But opponents of coercion lacked strength and unity. When votes were tallied in the Commons, no faction proved more formidable than the government supporters known as the King’s Friends.

      Newspaper resistance to colonial policy proved more obdurate, however. Britain now boasted 140 newspapers, including 17 in London. Thirteen million individual news sheets would be printed across the country in 1775, many of them handed round until the print wore off. A reader of the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser wrote that the “affairs of America engross so much of the attention of the public that every other consideration seems to be laid aside.” The king himself insisted that the latest London and American papers be delivered to him as soon as they arrived. A few publications hewed to the ministerial line. The Royal Gazette, denounced by competitors as the Royal Lying Gazette, promoted the delusions that the colonies would collapse without British trade and that most affluent Americans sought reconciliation. The government encouraged loyalty by paying printers and writers for anti-American screeds, often from the secret service fund and other obscure accounts. Some critics were silenced with cash: the acerbic editor of the Morning Post grew milder in exchange for almost £4,000 slipped under the table.

      Yet many British “newspapers went straight for the King,” the historian George Otto Trevelyan later wrote, depicting him as “a bigoted and vindictive prince, whose administration was odious and corrupt.” The war became a cudgel with which political opponents could whack North, Dartmouth, and other government ministers. In early August, the Stamford Mercury printed a table showing that more British officers died at Bunker Hill than in the great Battle of Minden in 1759. Other accounts described hardship and poor morale in the British ranks. The radical Evening Post denounced the war as “unnatural, unconstitutional, unnecessary, unjust, dangerous, hazardous, and unprofitable.”

      Biographical profiles of American leaders appeared, their heroic attributes often contrasted to the venality of British politicians, even if the portraits were at times ludicrous. A new article in Town and Country told readers how George Washington’s daughter had fled to England after the general’s men slew her loyalist lover. Of greater consequence were loosened restrictions allowing parliamentary debates to be reported without the six-month delay previously required—or without pretending, as one magazine had, that the published transcript was from the “Senate of Lilliput.” The subsequent coverage, as historian Troy O. Bickham would write, “made the American Revolution the first event in which the government’s handling of a controversial conflict was aired before an eager national audience.”

      Irked at the dissent, the government had stepped up covert surveillance and intelligence gathering. Suspected rebel sympathizers in London were ordered “narrowly watched,” their neighbors discreetly questioned about irregular activity. The baggage of passengers arriving from North America was searched for rebel correspondence. In a three-room suite off Lombard Street, a growing staff of secret service clerks by mid-September was opening and reading up to a hundred letters a day from the New York mailbags, with or without warrants, including private correspondence from Royal Navy officers and British officials in America. Additional letters were intercepted from foreign diplomats, European bankers, and political opponents trusting enough to rely on the Royal Mail. Especially intriguing correspondence, such as letters addressed to Dr. Franklin or General Lee, was copied and sent to the king and his senior ministers, while the originals went back to the General Post Office for normal delivery. A superintendent complained of overwork in deciphering coded letters and repairing wax seals so that they appeared unbroken. “I had so much to do,” he added in a November memorandum, “that I knew not which way to turn myself.” Despite such “difficulty, pains, and trouble,” the intelligence collected often was disappointingly thin, little more than gossip. George nevertheless carefully noted the time—to the minute, as usual—he received each batch of pilfered mail.

      As October spilled into November, the king immersed himself in tactical details of the American war. George received copies not only of ministry dispatches to and from his generals, but also paymaster and commissary instructions. He reviewed intelligence on possible gunpowder shipments from Lisbon, clandestine activities in Amsterdam and Dunkirk, and river inspectors’ reports of suspicious cargoes on the Thames. He was consulted about the choice of commanders, the composition of particular regiments and where they should deploy, and the shipment of salt and candles across the Atlantic. He arranged, at an initial cost of £10,000, for twenty-four hundred German troops to serve at British garrisons in the Mediterranean, freeing regulars there for combat service in North America. He also weighed in on a proposed military assault on the southern colonies; on which widows and orphans of men killed in Boston should receive pensions; and on whether American prisoners should be shipped to India, where the insalubrious British territories were short of white settlers. When Catherine the Great declined to rent him twenty thousand Russian mercenaries—“she had not had the civility to answer in her own hand,” George wrote North “at 2 minutes past 8 p.m.” on November 3—he insisted that German legions could be hired “at a much cheaper rate, besides more expeditiously than if raised at home.” On his orders, the colonel negotiating with various German princelings was told, “Get as many men as you can.… The King is extremely anxious.”

      Broad domestic support for the war eased his anxiety, despite the nattering newspapers and rapscallions like the lord mayor. Solid majorities in both the middle and the upper classes disapproved of colonial impertinence. Edward Gibbon, who was just finishing his first volume on the Roman empire’s collapse, wrote in October that the government’s “executive power was driven by the national clamor into the most vigorous and repressive measures.” Many towns across Britain sent endorsements of ministerial policy to London. “It was the war of the people,” North later observed. “It was popular at its commencement, and eagerly embraced by the people and the Parliament.”

      Without doubt, the disruption of transatlantic trade injured some London merchants, as well as woolen workers in Norwich and linen weavers in Chester. British exports to America plummeted from almost £3 million in 1774 to barely £220,000 this year. But many other businesses thrived. Britain would be at war for more than half of the years between 1695 and 1815, and there was money to be made in those years by traders and vendors, brokers and wholesalers. “The greater number of them begin to snuff … a lucrative war,” wrote Edmund Burke, the Irish-born political philosopher who represented Bristol in the House of Commons. “War indeed is become a sort of substitute for commerce.” Orders poured in from Germany and the Baltics. New markets emerged in Spain, Russia, and Canada. Military contracts boomed, for uniform cloth, munitions, shipping, and provisions of every sort. “We never knew our manufactures, in general, in a more flourishing state,” a London firm wrote to a former American customer.

      For the king, it was all part of what he called “a great national cause.” George “would put heart into the hesitant, stir up the idle, and check the treacherous,” the historian Piers Mackesy later observed. “He never wavered from the chosen object of the war.” If doubters could be bought, he bought them. To North on November 15, he applauded Generals Howe and Burgoyne for their “unanimity and zeal, the two great ingredients that seem to have been wanting in this campaign.” George also sought unanimity СКАЧАТЬ