The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [91]
The Wilkes case, which blew up into a constitutional issue of alarming virulence, was important for America because it was to create allies in the cause of “liberty.” Because parliamentary rights, represented by Wilkes, and American rights were both seen as issues of liberty, those who became opponents of the government in the Wilkes affair became ipso facto friends of the American cause. John Wilkes himself was an M.P. and a coarse but witty man-about-town of the type that gains notoriety by being abusive. In 1763 in his journal, The North Briton, he published a ferocious attack on the terms of the settlement with France of the Seven Years’ War laced with insults to the King. He was arrested under a general warrant on a charge of seditious libel and imprisoned in the Tower. Chief Justice Pratt (the future Lord Camden) ordered his release on grounds of his parliamentary privilege. Expelled from the House of Commons by the government majority he fled to France, while in England he was tried in absentia for libel of the King and, irrelevantly, for obscenity for privately publishing a pornographic Essay on Women, which his erstwhile friend Lord Sandwich insisted on reading aloud word for word in the House of Lords.
These attentions secured Wilkes’ conviction and sentence of outlawry and succeeded in raising a crisis when parliamentary opposition, now free of defending the man, rallied around a resolution declaring his arrest by general warrant illegal. When it was barely defeated by a government majority that sank to fourteen, the vote revealed the weakness of patronage when the House scented abuse of its rights. The King angrily ordered Grenville to dismiss all the renegade voters who held positions in the royal household or in the ministry, thus creating a nucleus of opposition that was to grow. George III was not the most astute politician.
2. “Asserting a Right You Know You Cannot Exert”: 1765
The Stamp Tax, introduced by Grenville in 1765, will be remembered “as long as the globe lasts.” So proclaimed Macaulay in one of his bugle calls to historical grandeur. It was the act, he wrote, destined to “produce a great revolution, the effects of which will long be felt by the whole human race,” and he blamed Grenville for not foreseeing the consequences. That is hindsight; even the colonies’ agents did not foresee them. But enough information was available to the English to forecast determined resistance by the Americans and prospects of serious trouble.
Reports were now being received and published in the London Chronicle and other journals of colonial resentment of the Sugar Act and indignation at the proposed Stamp Tax. Emphatic protests were delivered by Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia and South Carolina, each affirming the “right” to tax itself and denying Parliament’s right. The fallacy inherent in the British Government’s position was laid bare by the ill-fated Thomas Hutchinson, Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts, who was to suffer so much worse from his colony than he deserved. He pointed out in a treatise, of which he sent copies to the government in London, that revenue was a fallacious goal because England’s natural profit from colonial trade, which would be endangered by ill-will, was greater than any prospective yield from the tax. A tragic figure, vilified by one side and ignored by the other, Hutchinson thus early identified England’s folly. It was evident also to others. Benjamin Franklin noted in a memorandum to himself that while Americans at present loved British modes, customs and manufactures, “A disgust of these will ensue. Trade will suffer more than the tax profits.” He added a thought that should have been a creed for the British government: “Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done.” This in essence was to be the Burke