The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [133]
Governing opinion in support of the war was no less forward and more general. Not all would have joined in Dr. Johnson’s intemperate outburst, “I am willing to love all mankind except an American,” or gone to the extreme of absurdity of the Marquess of Carmarthen, one of the King’s friends, who demanded in a debate, “For what purpose were [the colonists] suffered to go to that country, unless the profit of their labor should return to their masters here?” But gradations of such sentiments were widely shared. (A notable factor in the British attitude was a bland ignorance of how and why the colonies had been settled.)
Business sentiment was expressed by Bristol, Burke’s constituency, which he addressed in his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol with implacable logic and small effect, for the merchants, tradesmen and clergy of the busy port sent a loyal address to the King urging firm coercion. Landed gentry and fashionable society agreed. All motions of the opposition were routinely defeated in Parliament, where the majority sustained the Government faithfully, not merely from purchased loyalty but from the gruff conviction of the country party that supremacy must be made good and the colonies brought to submit.
The impotence of the opposition, which numbered about a hundred, was owed not only to the power of the incumbents but to their own lack of cohesion. Chatham, sunk in another period of debility, was out of combat from the spring of 1775 to the spring of 1777 but, like Hamlet, not so mad that when the wind was in the right quarter, he failed to know a hawk from a handsaw. After the American Declaration of Independence, he predicted to his physician, Dr. Addington, that unless England changed her policy, France would espouse the cause of the Americans. She was only waiting until England was more deeply engaged in this “ruinous war against herself” before taking an overt part.
Yet when active, Chatham always played his own hand, scorning association. His arrogance and his refusal to act as a functioning leader left the opposition subject to separation and to the vagaries of its chief figures. Richmond, who had emerged as the most aggressive and outspoken voice in the Lords, hated Chatham and was not temperamentally either a leader or a follower. Charles James Fox, rising young star of the opposition, glittered in the Commons with wit and invective, as Townshend once had, but he too played a solo role. Others were ambivalent. Though believing in the justice of the American cause, they could not help fearing that a victory for American democracy represented a threat to parliamentary supremacy and a dangerous stimulus to the Reform movement.
To feel dismayed by their own government and always to be outvoted were dispiriting. Richmond confessed it in replying to Rockingham, who was trying to maintain the opposition front and had summoned him to come to vote on a bill prohibiting trade with the thirteen colonies during the rebellion. “I confess I feel very languid about this American business,” he wrote. There was no use going on opposing this bill and that; “the whole system must be opposed.” He did not come down to London and later took himself off to France to deal with legalities regarding a French peerage he possessed. It might be “a happy thing to have,” he wrote to Burke, for the day might not be distant “when England will be reduced to a state of slavery,” and if he were “among the proscribed … and America not be open to us, France is some retreat, and a peerage here is something.” With the French Revolution coming in the next decade,