The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [109]
What had once been Chatham’s government now belonged to the Bloomsbury Gang, so called from the Duke of Bedford’s residence in Bloomsbury Square. The Duke himself, aside from great wealth and the many offices he had held in the previous reign and aside from his powers, positions and titles in Bedfordshire, owed his influence to a supremely developed sense of status and self-assurance. He was said to be the only man who could speak openly against Pitt in his great days. He had served as Lord President of the Council and real head of the Grenville government, generally spoken of as the Bedford ministry, but now, afflicted by gout, he exerted his influence through his followers while spending most of his time at Woburn Abbey, his country home. Together with his brother-in-law Earl Gower and his son-in-law the 4th Duke of Marlborough, he controlled thirteen seats in the House of Commons. Though intelligent and warm-hearted, Bedford was hot-tempered, wrong-headed and obstinate. His entourage included masters of jobbing and electioneering and the strongest advocates of coercing the colonies. Six frigates and a brigade, they kept telling the King, would be enough to suppress American insolence.
King George had only one idea of policy with regard to the colonies: that “it was the indispensable duty of his subjects in America to obey the Acts of the Legislature of Great Britain,” and that the King “expects and requires a cheerful obedience to the same.” In the conduct of government, his influence was more pernicious because he was convinced of his royal duty to purify it after the model of his schoolboy idol, Alfred the Great. Through the Bedfords, he now interfered more than ever, appointing and dismissing ministers at will, controlling patronage, accepting no collective policy from the Cabinet but dealing with individual ministers in reference only to their own departments, even suggesting who was to speak in debates in the House of Commons. His choices for office tended to be courtiers of rank who had made themselves agreeable to him but whose talent or training for government was not likely to be greater than his own.
American eruptions at every tax and every measure proved to the Bedfords that the colonists were bent on breaking the mercantilist system and obtaining free trade and would raise the cry of “Tyranny!” at every act of Parliament. If given in to, their protest would soon leave not a shred of sovereignty remaining.
As regards trade, these apprehensions were not misplaced. Breaking the mercantilist yoke while developing home industries was indeed an idea that had taken hold of the Americans, prompted by the success of Non-Importation. By provoking the colonists’ turn to homemade cloth and other goods, Britain had brought upon herself the very impulse toward commercial independence she was most determined to prevent. Even to Pitt, mercantilist regulation had always been the essence of colonial policy. “Not a hobnail or a horseshoe,” he once declared, should the colonies be allowed to manufacture. Now the impulse was reinvigorated. In August and September 1768, the merchants of Boston and New York agreed to cease importing from Britain until the Townshend Duties were repealed. Philadelphia’s merchants joined the agreement a few months later, followed by most of the other colonies through the course of 1769. Home weaving by organized groups of “Daughters of Liberty” had in fact continued since the Stamp Act. The graduating class of Harvard College in 1768 and the first graduating class and President of Rhode Island College (now Brown) in 1769 all appeared in clothes of American homespun.
At home the return of Wilkes reawakened a furor of resentment against the Government when he was re-elected to Parliament from Middlesex, London’s county, and re-expelled by the government majority in the House. At once his cause rallied all opponents of the royal prerogative and invigorated the Radicals’ movement