The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [138]
On 7 April 1778, Richmond moved in a speech of passion and urgency to request the King to dismiss the incumbent ministry, withdraw the troops from the colonies, recognize their independence and negotiate to “recover their friendship at heart if not their allegiance.”
Chatham should have concurred because concentration against France was always his object and because it was obvious that the colonies’ Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation that had followed could not be annulled except by a military defeat, which Chatham himself had declared to be impossible. Yet personal outrage extinguished logic; the break-up of empire was to him intolerable. Informed by Richmond that he was going to move the recognition of independence, Chatham summoned all his flickering strength, invested all the remnants of his once great authority in a sad offensive against his own side and against history.
Supported by his nineteen-year-old son, soon to make the name of William Pitt again the awe of Europe, and by a son-in-law, he limped to his seat, as always in full dress, with his legs wrapped in flannel. Beneath a huge peruke, the piercing glance still gleamed from eyes sunk in an emaciated face. When the Duke of Richmond closed, Chatham rose, but his voice was at first inaudible and when the words became distinct, they were confused. He spoke of “ignominious surrender” of the nation’s “rights and fairest possessions” and of falling “prostrate before the House of Bourbon.” Then he lost track, repeated phrases, mumbled, while around him the embarrassed peers, whether in pity or respect, sat in silence so profound it seemed tangible. Richmond replied courteously. Unyielding, Chatham rose again, opened his mouth soundlessly, flung a hand to his chest, collapsed and fell to the floor. Carried to a nearby residence, he recovered enough to be taken to his country home at Hayes, where in the next three weeks he sank slowly toward death. At the end, he asked his son to read to him from the Iliad about the death of Hector.
Forgetting the great statesman’s decline and failings, the country felt a sense of ominous loss. Parliament voted unanimously for a state funeral and burial in Westminster Abbey. “He is dead,” wrote the unknown author of the Letters of Junius, for once forgoing his usual venom, “and the sense and honor and character and understanding of the nation are dead with him.” Dr. Addington thought his death was the mercy of Providence, “that he might not be a spectator of the total ruin of a country which he was not permitted to save.”
It is striking how often the prospect of losing America inspired predictions of ruin, and how mistaken they were, for Britain was to survive the loss well enough and go on to world domination and the apogee of imperial power in the next century. “We shall no longer be a powerful or respectable people,” declared Shelburne, if American independence were recognized. On that day, “the sun of Great Britain is set.” Richmond foresaw the Franco-American alliance as “a Measure which must be our ruin.” Walpole scattered his letters with gloomy prognoses, predicting, “whatever way this war ends it will be fatal for this country,” or just before the end, foreseeing dire consequences of defeat: “We shall be reduced to a miserable little island, and from a mighty empire sink into as insignificant a country as Denmark or Sardinia!” With her trade and marine gone, Britain would lose the East Indies next, and “then France will dictate to us more imperiously than ever we did to Ireland.”
These dark expectations derived from two assumptions of the age: that the