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By Root 1045 0

interest in 1768 among the governing class was not the Americans or even Wilkes but the scandal caused by the Duke of Grafton in “defying all decency” by escorting his mistress, Nancy Parsons, to the opera in the presence of his divorced Duchess and the Queen. Grafton was at least divorced, which most men who kept mistresses were not, but this did not reduce the scandal. Daughter of a Bond Street tailor and former mistress of a West Indies merchant, Nancy was also known as Mrs. Hoghton, having acquired marital status along her way, but that too failed to palliate society’s scorn. The fact that Grafton “paraded” her in public and sat her at the head of his table excited a peculiar indignation. It was the sensation of the season. Nancy quite blanketed out the obstreperous colonists.

Indignant protests in Parliament from Virginia, Pennsylvania and other colonies showed that resistance to the Revenue Act was spreading and cold figures confirmed the fact. From 1768 to 1769, English exports to America dropped by a third, from £2,400,000 to £1,600,000. New York cut its imports to one-seventh of what they had been in 1764, from £482,000 in that year to £74,000 in 1769. Boston’s imports were cut in half, those of other colonies, where compliance with Non-Importation was uneven, by less. Receipts from the Townshend Duties in their first year amounted to £16,000, compared to military expenditures for America of £170,000. Even Hillsborough, as Secretary for the Colonies, had to admit that the Townshend Act was “so anti-commercial that he wished it had never existed,” while the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord North, said the duties were “so preposterous that he was amazed that they had ever been passed by the British Parliament.” Both gentlemen had voted for the Act they now deplored.

Rather than conciliate for the sake of quickly terminating Non-Importation, the Government’s instinct was punitive. Having maneuvered itself into a situation of challenge from its subjects, it felt obliged to make a demonstration of authority, the more so as it was feared that American protest, if it succeeded, would inspire the spirit of emulation in English and Irish mobs. Hillsborough, like Rehoboam, believed effective demonstration lay in being as rough as possible. He resurrected from the autocratic era of Henry VIII an ancient statute providing for trial in England of persons accused of treason outside the kingdom and this was moved by the Duke of Bedford as a parliamentary resolution with reference to the offenses of Massachusetts. The Commons concurred, the Chathamites of Grafton’s group in the Government seem to have raised no objection and the order was duly transmitted to Governor Bernard in Boston. Reaction was naturally violent. Citizens to be snatched from home and delivered to trial in hostile surroundings 3000 miles from friends and defenders! Here was tyranny unconcealed!

At the same time in England the basic fear of the encouragement being given to American industry by the Non-Importation movement was taking effect. Having recklessly provoked the boycott, Government and Parliament now began to consider how to undo the damage by repeal. The Stamp Act experience was re-enacted as if the governing establishment of Britain were under a gambler’s compulsion to keep placing its chips on the same squares where they had lost before. The process of repealing the Townshend Act took more than a year, from March 1769 to May 1770, during which other measures taken to discipline the colonies were as counter-productive as the one undergoing cancellation.

By now accumulated folly was fully perceived and explicitly and derisively denounced in the year’s debates. Opposition speakers roused to outrage against the Government over the non-seating of Wilkes, which was considered a “violation of the sacred right of election” and an “overturn of the whole constitution,” felt free to castigate the Government equally severely on America. Burke launched his sarcasm, Colonel Barré his scorn; Lord Mayor Beckford observed “that it was a strange piece of policy