Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [22]
If the British were able to consider the world their oyster, it was one which had grown around a piece of French grit.
The Seven Years War had been a massively expensive enterprise for all concerned: the British national debt had virtually doubled. On top of that, the vast new territories offered up by the peace settlement promised further big bills for administration and protection. The obvious solution was to milk the colonial cow. The burden fell on the settlers in North America, for whom the London government proposed taxes on a range of commodities, including official papers, sugar, paint, lead, glass and, most famously, tea. This practice of making the cost of empire fall upon those who had been colonized was one that would later be applied elsewhere, sometimes with disgraceful consequences – oppressing people to pay for their oppression.* But in this case the plantation territories of New England contained plenty of settlers who came from families that had left the British Isles to escape overweaning government and religious discrimination: the military campaign of resistance they now began would deliver the colonies their independence from Britain. One of the most striking things about the war, whose trigger was the cry ‘no taxation without representation’, is the very British nature of the conflict, for that issue had been a repeated theme in the nation’s history, most notably in the English Civil War. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the most influential revolutionary tract ever written, was published in Philadelphia as ‘written by an Englishman’. This extraordinary state of affairs was made a great deal worse by the utter incompetence of the government in finding itself embarking on a war against its closest natural ally while having simultaneously failed to secure adequate counterbalancing allies elsewhere. The Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, noted bleakly that ‘If Russia declares against us, we shall then literally speaking be in actual war with the whole world.’ His own actions spoke volumes: while the colonists in America were polishing the rolling sentences of the Declaration of Independence, he had been off on a three-week trout-fishing holiday.
The war was an unmitigated disaster. When news of the British surrender at Yorktown reached the Prime Minister, Lord North, he took it ‘as he would have taken a ball in his breast’, exclaiming, ‘Oh god! It’s all over,’ and throwing his arms in the air. There was some bleak comfort in the retention of Canada and the West Indies, but when the former Foreign Secretary Lord Stormont saw that all thirteen of the rebel colonies had gone he despaired. ‘There is not a ray of light left,’ he sighed. ‘All is darkness.’ Culprits were sought. Charles James Fox (who had supported the revolutionaries, as he would later support the revolutionaries in France) blamed the king. Many others saw the loss of the colonies as the product of some moral decadence in the nation. The Newcastle Chronicle wailed that ‘Everything human … has its period: nations, like mortal men, advance only to decline; dismembered empire and diminished glory mark a crisis in the constitution; and, if the volume of our frame [national story] be not closed, we have read the most brilliant pages of our history.’ This piece of journalistic breast-beating turned out to be as wide of the mark as so many later, similar examples of the genre, for there was a century of increasing global dominance ahead. But it would be a very different sort of imperial enterprise. The war with the American colonists had been quite unlike previous conflicts, in which the enemy had generally been either a less technologically advanced people or a foreign-speaking,