The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [80]
Six months after Otis’ plea, England took the first in what was to be her long train of counter-productive measures when the Attorney General in London ruled that the Writs of Assistance were legal to enforce the Navigation Acts. The resulting cost in alienation far outweighed the revenue collected from the ensuing duties and fines.
In the meantime the Peace Treaty of 1763 was divisive and fiercely opposed as too yielding by William Pitt, architect and national hero of Britain’s victories in the war. Under the celebrated thunders of his scorn, the House of Commons shook and ministers blanched, but nevertheless voted for the Peace Treaty by a majority of five to one, chiefly out of desire to return to peacetime expenditures and a reduced land tax. That proved illusory. Instead, Lord Bute, George Ill’s choice to replace Pitt, who had haughtily removed himself when overruled on the war issue, levied an excise tax in Britain on cider with calamitous effect. Like the Writs in America, the act empowered inspectors to visit premises, even live with owners of cider mills to keep count of the number of gallons produced. So loud was the English cry of tyranny at this invasion and so violent the protest that troops had to be called out in apple country, while at Westminster Pitt was inspired to his immortal statement of principle: “The poorest man in his cottage may bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!” This was the voice that but for tragic flaws in the man might have prevented all the wrong turnings.
No one having calculated the expected return from the cider tax, it was not clear how much of the deficit it could make up before resentment would bring down the Government. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was a prominent rake, Sir Francis Dashwood, shortly to succeed as 15th Baron Le Despencer. A founder of the notorious Hellfire Club, which was given to exercises of debauchery in a reconstructed monastery, he was not a competent financier: his knowledge of accounts, said a contemporary, “was confined to the reckoning of tavern bills,” and a sum of five figures was to him “an impenetrable secret.” He seems to have discerned that the cider tax would not bring him glory. “People will point at me,” he said, “and cry, ‘There goes the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever appeared!’ ”
Consciousness of their inadequacy for the work of government commonly afflicted the noble lords who filled the offices, not least when rank was their only qualification. The extra importance of high rank was accepted by all classes in the 18th-century world from yeoman to King; the enlightenment of the age did not extend to egalitarianism. George III made it quite clear: “Lord North cannot seriously think that a private gentleman like Mr. Penton is to stand in the way of the eldest son of an Earl, undoubtedly if that idea holds good it is diametrically opposed to what I have known all my life.”
As a qualification for office, however, rank did not necessarily confer self-confidence. Regard for rank and riches propelled the Marquess of Rockingham and the Duke of Grafton to the premiership and the Duke of Richmond to office as Secretary of State in the 1760s. Rockingham, even when First Minister (the title Premier, though describing the office in fact, was not used), had the greatest difficulty in speaking on his feet, and Grafton complained regularly of feeling unequal to his task. The Duke of Newcastle, who inherited estates in twelve counties and an income of £40,000 a year, who served several times as First Minister and controlled political patronage for forty years, was timorous, anxious, jealous and probably the only Duke on record who went about always expecting to be snubbed. Lord North, who headed the government throughout the crucial decade of the 1770s