The Traumatic Colonel. Ed White

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      This special iconic status, inherited by George III, anticipated the domain eventually to be occupied by the Founding Fathers. But a particularly North American occupation of this semiotic space also depended on the emergence of the king’s negative composite during the years of the imperial crisis. Bernard Bailyn long ago noted the oddly persistent significance of John Stuart, the third Lord Bute, in pre-Revolutionary rhetoric, in which he was not only “the root of the evil” of the imperial crisis but also the “malevolent and well-nigh indestructible machinator” behind British politics.⁵ If Bute is now largely unknown in popular Revolutionary lore, he appeared repeatedly in texts of the imperial crisis, from the Stamp Act controversy to the Declaration of Independence. Historian John Brewer has provided the most detailed account of the iconography of Bute,⁶ trying to explain the strange “range and extent of hostility to Bute” by excavating the underlying “theory of politics” motivating this antipathy (MLB 5).⁷ Indeed, Brewer, whose work belongs within the transatlantic “republican synthesis,” argues that the fixation on Bute resulted from a conjunction of whig beliefs about monarchical prerogative, undue nonparliamentary influence, and fears of an unbalanced constitution, going so far as to add that such associations with Bute were unfair and somehow incorrect.⁸ While one should certainly link the figure of Bute with related ideological positions, we should not let this prosaic translation exercise obscure Bute’s tremendous symbolic composition, which Brewer elsewhere discusses. Two qualities seem most important. For one thing, Bute was a centripetal figure combining and channeling other figures. Indeed, other political officials were deemed Bute’s “locum tenens”—his placeholders—in the parlance of the time, such that his distance or absence from the political scene simply provided more proper names to constitute his power.⁹ These secondary figures—considered “‘cyphers’ or agents for the minions of Bute” (FLB 102)—were linked metonymically in discourse: Bute and this or that puppet. But in narrative, these connections were made through the emplotment of conspiracy, whereby secondary characters were metaphorical placeholders of the primary figure. In this framework, Revolutionary conspiracy theories may be read not so much as explanations of events, or indices of theories of historical causality, but rather as maps of semiotic layerings.

      Just as important, however, was a countervailing centrifugal or splitting dynamic, whereby Bute gathered together traits, events, and qualities that could not initially be linked with King George. “Clearly, it was argued, responsibility” for absolutist tendencies in government “could not be placed upon a King who it was traditionally claimed ‘could do no wrong’” (FLB 114). Thus emerged a theory of a secret “inner cabinet,” or a “dual system of government”—a public or legitimate or monarchically constrained order, on the one hand, and, on the other, a secret, scheming, and prerogative-driven system (FLB 98, 102); thus also emerged the scandalous accusations that Bute had sexual relations with the Princess Dowager (FLB 111).

      We see both of these dynamics in the North American versions of Bute, where he is the central figure in characterological clusters including other figures, most notably Lords North and Mansfield. Thus, we find John Leacock’s satirical, mock-scriptural First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times presenting this composite vision: “Behold, yonder I see a dark cloud like unto a large sheet rise from the north, big with oppression and desolation, and the four corners thereof are held by four great beasts, bute, mansfield, bernard and hutchinson.”¹⁰ When, in 1776, Leacock published his mock metadrama The Fall of British Tyranny, “Mr. bute” would top the list of “Dramatis Personnæ” as “Lord Paramount,” with Mansfield, Dartmouth, North, and others in subordinate roles.¹¹ John Trumbull’s 1775 M’Fingal opened linking its central character with a Scottish rebelliousness that “With Bute and Mansfield swore allegiance / . . . to raze, as nuisance, / Of church and state the Constitutions.”¹² Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s 1776 dramatic poem “The Battle of Bunkers-Hill” envisioned General Gage crying “Oh bute, and dartmouth knew ye what I feel.”¹³ The popular pamphlet series The Crisis, collaboratively written in England but published serially and repeatedly in the colonies, was full of similar references.¹⁴ Bute, for example, “sternly bids North lay another tax,” while anti-American “sentiments are Bute’s by Mansfield’s penn’d”; royal speech, in yet another installment, is “no ordinary composition, it originates from Bute, is trimmed up by Mansfield, adopted by North, and pronounced by a royal Orator.”¹⁵ Similarly illuminating is a 1776 pamphlet, published in Philadelphia, focused on persuading Quakers to join the independence movement. In one scene, four of the main characters—the Irish American “Pady,” the Quaker “Simon,” the Scottish American “Sandy,” and the New Englander “Jonathan”—have largely come to agreement about the imperial crisis but suddenly come to blows as they begin to fantasize that one another are scheming counselors to the king: “Simon: If you were lord North, I would—then fetches Sandy a blow and knocks him over the bench, and breaks his arm;—whilst Jonathan and Pady keeps struggling on the floor, Jonathan cries out if you were lord Bute, but I would—and in striving to throw him, breaks his leg, and down he goes, crying out for justice.”¹⁶ Apologizing for the broken limbs, Simon says, “When I began to think of lord North, it put me all in a fume his laying the Americans at his feet,” while Jonathan answers, “That’s what made me think of Bute when you mentioned the other, and I thought they should go together.”¹⁷ One last example: Mercy Otis Warren begins her History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution describing “Lord Bute, who . . . had become the director of the monarch on the throne of Britain” and by “secret influence” had made Parliament “the mere creature of administration.”¹⁸ She later mentions Bute’s retirement in 1766, but adds “there had been an extraordinary variety and succession of characters in the colonial department” who had subsequently “taken the lead in this thorny path”—she mentions lords Grenville, Rockingham, North, Hillsborough, and Dartmouth.¹⁹

      Thus, the semiotic field, on the eve of the Revolution, was occupied by two complementary figures: a positively valorized George III and the negatively charged, aggregative figure of Lord Bute. George represented an executive power, a royal prerogative, an ability to act on behalf of the colonists, though acting in silence. Bute, by contrast, represented deliberative powers—suasion, rhetoric, manipulation, misinformation, and jesuitical sophistry. What is important, from our point of view, is that this pairing persisted even after the sudden emotional reversal toward the king, at which point the pairing designated differently inflected qualities mobilized for tyrannical purposes. The king still represented executive power, though in the form of coercive actions and violence, and these were complemented by the schemes and plans of Bute and his minions. Such a dichotomy is implicit, for example, in The Crisis number 18, which suggests that “Fate hangs on Bute’s proud will and George’s brow. / Below, North represents absconding Bute, / Above, a Nation dyes by Roy le veut.”²⁰ Here George is the exterior bodily expression—the brow—as compared to Bute, whose “will” speaks of intellectual, emotional, and religious interiority.²¹

      Generating Washington

      We pause here to discuss briefly the semiotic square theorized by the structuralist linguist and narratologist Algirdas Greimas.²² Greimas argues that a given cultural situation will be structured around a fundamental opposition that expresses a logical understanding of that moment. In the mid-1770s, many British North American colonials perceived their political conflict as an opposition between a practical, politically active, yet nonintellectual kingly force and a deliberative, insinuating intellectual advisory force. What is important about this binary, for Greimas, is that, when it comes to be perceived as inadequate, its stalled logic generates its solution or transcendence—that is, a culture does not simply reset or shift to altogether different figures but attempts to develop a solution from within its semiotic constraints. What this means for the political conflict in question is that the Revolutionary response would be constrained by the terms of the initial pairing.

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