The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [114]
If he could not hide from the harassments of office, he took refuge from them by sleeping on the front bench during debates. Asking to be wakened when Grenville in the course of a ponderous and long-winded discourse should reach modern times, and nudged when the speaker was citing a precedent of 1688, he opened an eye, muttered “a hundred years too soon” and relapsed into somnolence. He carried the habit to Cabinet meetings, where, according to Charles James Fox, who later served with him, “he was so far from leading the opinions of other ministers that he seldom gave his own and generally slept the greater part of the time he was with them.” This did not conduce to firm collective policy.
If seldom voiced, North’s opinions were firmly on the Right. He voted for the cider tax, for the expulsion of Wilkes, for the Stamp Act and against its repeal. Although against compromise with America, he was in practice ready to proceed by conciliation toward a possible middle ground, and “heartily wished to repeal the whole of the [Townshend] law” if he could have done it without giving up “that just right which I shall ever wish the mother country to possess, the right of taxing the Americans.” Though not a member of the Bedford clique, he was acceptable to them or he could not have been named First Minister. His chief disability lay in the extended and tight-fisted life of his father, who lived to be 86, depriving his son of the inheritance of a considerable fortune until he was old and blind and within two years of his own death. The result was that with a large family to support and an important position to keep up, North was in financial straits throughout his political life, dependent on office and obligated to the King, who, however kindly and tactfully, gave his First Minister £ 20,000 to pay his debts. Under such circumstances, independence of mind or action was less than likely.
When debate was renewed from March to May 1770, opposition speakers unsparingly depicted the Government’s record in America since the Townshend Act as a series of infirm policies, contradictory measures, irresolute and in some cases unconstitutional action and judgments contrary to Britain’s interest—in short, as folly. The terrible Colonel Barré excoriated the Cabinet for taking it upon itself to inform the Americans of its intention to repeal the duties before Parliament had acted, thus inspiring them “with a most contemptible idea of the measures of Parliament and the imbecility of those by whom lawful government is administered.” He scolded them further for reviving the statute from “the tyrannical reign of Henry VIII” and yet, “with weakness no less conspicuous than their wickedness … they had not the resolution to execute it.”
Pownall explained that it was the preamble to the Act “which gives the offence and raises the alarm in America”; in order to remove it, the whole Townshend Act must be repealed and exclude tea, and he so moved. Grenville, acknowledging himself the originator of the controversy with America, offered the unhelpful opinion that partial repeal would not satisfy the colonies while total repeal would not “sufficiently provide for the dignity of the nation,” and therefore he would abstain from voting. An independent member, Sir William Meredith, found the Government “so perversely, so inflexibly persisting in error on every occasion” as to cause surprise, in Dryden’s phrase, “that ‘they never deviate into