First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [83]
Upon his return from the fiery mission to Havre, Rodney found a new King in England. In October, 1760, George III had come to the throne. The first English-born native of the Hanover line, he was infused by belief in his own rectitude and by his mother’s prodding, “George be a King.” He wanted to be a good ruler to his country and a firm sovereign to his empire, especially to those restive Americans, so ungrateful for the war fought on their behalf against the French, as King George and most of his countrymen thought of it. American objection to being taxed for the cost of the war and for future defense was regarded as thankless ingratitude, not as a basic constitutional issue of taxation by a British Parliament in which they had no representation. Whether or not George III comprehended this view of the matter, he was determined to affirm the right of Parliament—or, as he saw it, of the Crown—to tax the Colonies, and he wanted action and active commanders.
A critical area of defense that the King did comprehend was the West Indies. “Our Islands,” George III wrote to Lord Sandwich twenty years later, in 1779, when the American Revolution had become a war, “must be defended even at the risk of an invasion of this island.” George was given to extreme statements, and “even at the risk of invasion” was certainly not a sentiment with which ministers would have agreed. But the navy could not be everywhere at once, and if held in home waters to repel a French invasion, it could not be in sufficient strength in the Caribbean to secure the islands there. “If we lose our Sugar Islands,” the King’s letter continued, “it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war.” While this too seems extreme, it had some basis in the revenue that flowed to the government from the abundant fortunes of the rich planters and merchants of the West Indies. Sandwich agreed that as the French grasp at sea power imperiled the Sugar Islands, Britain’s principal naval effort should be made in the Caribbean. Although the state of the fleet in the Leeward Islands in 1779 was “very deplorable” and needed reinforcements, a successful operation against Martinique was “the most to be wished,” because if it were taken, the other French islands would fall and the French would feel the blow so sharply that “it would probably put an end to the war.” Sandwich also was to recommend, in this 1779 memorandum to the King, action against St. Eustatius, from which the French could supply their West Indies fleet with provisions. If French sea power could be broken in the Caribbean and French islands taken, the full force of the British Navy and Army could be turned upon America and the rebellion put down. While in 1759 the Americans had not yet taken up arms against the mother country, and the letters of the King and the First Lord reflect the strategy of a later situation, they show the overriding importance that the West Indies held in British thinking. Always wanting “bold and manly” efforts and offensive operations to thwart the French instead of the “cautious measures” of his ministers, the King, in October, 1761, the year after he ascended the throne, was happy to approve the appointment of Rodney as Commander-in-Chief at Barbados of the Leeward Island station for the purpose of conducting the naval part of a joint land and sea attack on Martinique. The most populous and flourishing of the French islands, Martinique was the largest island of the chain sometimes called the Windward and sometimes the Leeward group. The nomenclature, as one historian of the region laments, “lacked precision.” Regardless of being nominally grouped with the Leewards, Martinique dominated the windward position. At Fort Royal it had the finest harbor and, as the most flourishing of the French islands, was the capital of the French West Indies and seat of the French Governor-General and the sovereign Council with jurisdiction over all the French Antilles. Barbados,