The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [87]
In addition to Jackson as a channel, Grenville was in correspondence with the colonial governors and the Surveyor General of Customs in the northern colonies, whose advice he asked before drafting a bill for enforcement of the customs. It was no secret that Americans would regard enforced collection, so long allowed to lapse, as a form of taxation they were prepared to resist. Grenville’s preliminary order of November 1763 instructing customs officers to collect existing duties to the full was reported by Governor Francis Bernard of Massachusetts to have caused “greater alarm” in America than had the French capture of Fort William Henry six years earlier. For the record, the Board of Trade was asked to advise by what method “least Burthensome and most Palatable to the Colonies” they would contribute to the costs of “Civil and Military Establishments.” Since there was no way that burden could be made palatable, and Grenville had already made up his mind, a reply was perhaps not seriously expected.
If prospects of trouble did not greatly disturb the ministry, it was because, as Grenville said reasonably enough, “All men wish not to be taxed,” and because he was determined in any event that America could and should contribute to the costs of its own government and defense. His two Secretaries of State, the Earl of Halifax and the Earl of Egremont, were not men to dissuade him. Lord Halifax had inherited his peerage at 23 and enriched it by the acquisition of a wife who brought him, from a father in textiles, a huge fortune of £ 110,000. With these qualifications, he served as Groom of the Bedchamber and Master of Buckhounds and in other ornamental court posts until the political roundabout dropped him in the Presidency of the Board of Trade, where his tenure at the time of the founding of Nova Scotia caused its capital to be named for him. Considered weak but amiable, he was a hard drinker and a victim of early senility, of which he was to die at 55 while serving in the first Cabinet of his nephew Lord North.
The heavy drinking of the age was often a diminisher of life, or ability. Even the universally admired Marquess of Granby, Commander-in-Chief of armed forces in England in 1766–70, a noble soldier of noble character, did not escape: according to Horace Walpole, “his constant excesses in wine hurried him out of the world at 49.” In the general election of 1774, Charles James Fox, no mean consumer himself, complained of the entertaining he had to do while canvassing. Eight guests came on one afternoon, stayed from three to ten, and drank “ten bottles of wine and sixteen bowls of punch, each of which would hold four bottles”—the equivalent of nine bottles per man.
Grenville’s other Secretary of State, the Earl of Egremont, his brother-in-law, was incompetent and arrogant in equal parts, taking after a ducal grandfather known as “the proud Duke of Somerset.” He was a composite, reports the always uncharitable Horace, “of pride, ill-nature and strict good breeding … [with] neither the knowledge of business nor the smallest share of parliamentary abilities,” and reputedly untrustworthy besides. He looked down on Americans but disappeared from their affairs when a stroke of apoplexy brought on by overeating (according to Walpole) carried him off while the Revenue Bill was still being drafted.
His successor, the Earl of Sandwich, a former and later First Lord of the Admiralty, was a change only in temperament. Hearty, good-humored and corrupt, he used his control of appointments and provisions for the Navy for private profit. Although not a dilettante but a hardworking enthusiast of the fleet, his inveterate