The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [115]
Again Pownall returned to the offensive when the debate turned to American policy as a whole. He showed that the real apprehension of the colonies, apart from taxation, was of a British “design to alter their civil constitution.” They found it confirmed in Hillsborough’s order dissolving their assemblies and in the Townshend Act preamble, which they feared would “render all their assemblies useless.” By this time news had reached England of the so-called Boston Massacre, which had raised local emotions to such a pitch that to prevent further incident, the redcoats who had been sent to cow Boston had to be removed, with less than glory to British arms, to the safety of Castle William in Boston Harbor. The withdrawal gave opportunity for the “infinite wit and raillery” of Mr. Edmund Burke, who of all the speakers of his time is the best known to posterity.
Burke’s ideas had the great advantage of being housed in mastery and felicity of language. Had his ideas been fuzzy, verbal beauties would not have helped, but his political thinking was acute and incisive. Though often prolix and overstated, his remarks became epigrams because they were so well phrased. He had a way of “winding into his subject like a serpent,” said Oliver Goldsmith, who thought him in conversation the equal of Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson agreed. “Burke talks because his mind is full.… No man of sense could meet Mr. Burke by accident under a gateway to avoid a shower without being convinced that he was the first man in England.” He often talked at such length as to empty the House and so vehemently that his friends had to hold him down by the skirts of his coat to restrain his passion, but his wit and intelligence prevailed. The bite of his speeches on America, wrote Horace Walpole, excited “continual bursts of laughter even from Lord North and the Ministers themselves.” His pathos “drew iron tears from Barré’s cheek”; his scorn would have excited strangers, if they had not been excluded from a certain debate, “to tear ministers to pieces as they went out of the House.”
Burke had no difficulty in making the Government look foolish with his list of its infirm chastisements of the colonies: how the Massachusetts Assembly, after being ordered to rescind its seditious resolution or suffer dissolution, was permitted to sit again without rescinding; how the other assemblies under the same threat defied the penalty and “treated the Secretary of State’s letter with contempt”; how the pains of the Henry VIII statute “never were, as it was known they never would be, carried into execution”; how a fleet and army sent to Boston to control the situation “are now withdrawn out of the town”; how in sum “the malignity of your will is abhorred and the debility of your power is condemned,” which has ever been the case of “government without wisdom.”
The majority, of course, defeated Burke’s eight resolutions of censure, and the same fate met a similar censure moved in the House of Lords by the young Duke of Richmond, a new and important, if rather too independent, recruit to the American cause who was to become an eminent opponent of Government policy.
Richmond was a glittering personage who personified in many ways the unreality of 18th-century English government. He was so heavily weighted with fortune’s goods that they hampered his thorough performance of any one task. A great-grandson of Charles II by his mistress Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, a brother of the lovely Lady Sarah Lennox, whom George III wanted to marry, he was dignified, courteous, strikingly handsome and together with his wife,