a big man’s handspan, the gun decks painted bright red to lessen the psychological shock of blood spilled in battle. Twenty or more miles of rope had been rigged in a loom of shrouds, ratlines, stays, braces, and halyards. Masts, yards, spars, tops, and crosstrees rose overhead in geometric elegance. Even at anchor this wooden world sang, as timbers pegged and jointed, dovetailed and mortised, emitted creaks, groans, and squeals. Belowdecks, where each sailor got twenty-eight inches of sleeping width for his hammock, the powder monkeys wore felt slippers to avoid creating sparks in the magazine. The smells of tar, hemp, pine pitch, and varnish mingled with the brine of bilgewater and vinegar fumigant and the hog-lard pomade sailors used to grease their queues. All in all, it was the precise odor of empire.
Thirty dining companions joined George around a horseshoe table. The royal cook had lugged the king’s plate and silver from St. James’s Palace, along with seemingly enough linen to give Barfleur a new suit of sails. For nearly three hours they feasted on thirty-one covers, billed as “soups, removes of fish, removes of roasts, pies,” then more “roasts, pastry, aspics, blancmanges, and jellies,” followed by fruit, ices, and compotes. The libations carted to Portsmouth were no less prodigious: 5,580 bottles of wine and 1,140 bottles of rum, arrack, brandy, beer, and cider.
At six p.m., the assembled guests toasted Queen Charlotte’s health, and by custom, after the king left the table, they drank to his health, too. Again aboard his barge, he passed down the double line of ships. Each company gave three cheers and separate gun salutes. When his oarsmen pulled for Portsmouth, the dockyard cannons barked again, joined by ringing bells. Farthing candles stuck in saucers and gallipots illuminated every window in town. George would later declare that he had never had a finer day.
The king was quartered in a quiet, well-aired house within the dockyards, his bedstead, sheets, and a few sticks of furniture sent from London. That evening he was again alone with his thoughts, except for three aides in adjacent rooms, servants in the garret, and a hundred soldiers of the Foot Guards patrolling outside. An elegant model of the 104-gun Victory had been placed in the sitting room for his pleasure.
James Boswell might hug himself in happiness, but uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. George knew very well that victory in war and a decade of empire building brought complications. New territories had to be absorbed and organized, both for defense and for the profit of the mother country. Did London have the wit to manage these vast holdings, scattered across five continents? Britain now owned thirty separate colonies in the New World alone, with almost two thousand slave plantations growing sugarcane in the West Indies. Emigration from the British Isles, higher this year than ever, had become “epidemical amongst the most useful of our people,” an official warned; in just fifteen years, 3 percent of Scotland’s population and almost as many Irish had bolted for the New World in what one Scot called “America madness.” The empire was both a political construct and a business enterprise—colonies existed to enhance imperial grandeur by providing raw materials and buying British goods—so the “disease of wandering,” as Dr. Samuel Johnson dubbed this migration, was unnerving. And, of course, the Treaty of Paris had left various European powers aggrieved if not humiliated, with smoldering resentments among the Prussians, the Spanish, the Dutch, and, most of all, the French. After the treaty was signed, Britain would remain bereft of European allies for a quarter century.
Then there was debt: the Great War for the Empire had cost £100 million, much of it borrowed, and the country was still strapped for money. There had been fearful, if exaggerated, whispers of national bankruptcy. With the British debt now approaching a quarter billion pounds, interest payments devoured roughly half of the £12 million collected in yearly tax revenue. Britons were already among Europe’s most heavily taxed citizens, with ever-larger excise fees on soap, salt, candles, paper, carriages, male servants, racehorses—often 25 percent or more of an item’s value. The cost of this week’s extravaganza in Portsmouth—estimated at £22,000—would not help balance the books.
It had seemed only fair that the colonists should help shoulder the burden. A typical American, by Treasury Board calculations, paid no more than sixpence a year in Crown taxes, compared to the average Englishman’s twenty-five shillings—a ratio of one to fifty—even as Americans benefited from eradication of the French and Spanish threats, from the protection of trade by the Royal Navy, and from British regiments keeping peace along the Indian frontier at a cost that soon exceeded £400,000 a year. Yet things had gone badly. The Stamp Act, adopted in 1765, taxed paper in the colonies, from playing cards and pamphlets to wills, newspapers, and tax receipts. Americans reacted by terrorizing British revenue officers—stamp agents in the thirteen colonies reportedly collected a total of £45, all of it in Georgia—and by boycotting imports so ferociously that some British factories closed, idling thousands. Repeal of the act in March 1766 triggered drunken revels from Boston to Savannah, with fireworks, much bad celebratory verse, and, in New York, the commissioning of a huge equestrian statue of George III, the “best of kings,” tricked up as Marcus Aurelius.
English workers in places like Sheffield and Birmingham also cheered, but the best of kings had doubts. “I am more and more grieved at the accounts in America,” he had grumbled in December 1765. “Where this spirit will end is not to be said.” Two years later, the government tried again with the Townshend Acts, named for a witty, rambunctious chancellor of the exchequer known as “Champagne Charlie.” Import duties on lead, glass, paint, and other commodities provoked another violent American reaction, with British exports to the colonies plummeting by half. To maintain order, in 1768 the government dispatched four regiments to fractious Boston; that, too, turned sour in March 1770, when skittish troops fired into a street mob, killing five. Two soldiers were convicted of manslaughter—their thumbs so branded—and the regiments discreetly decamped from town, including “the Vein Openers,” as Bostonians called the 29th Regiment troops involved in “the Massacre.” That spring, Britain repealed all Townshend duties except for the trifling tax on tea, left intact to affirm Parliament’s fiscal authority.
An edgy calm returned to the colonies, but British moral and political authority had sloughed away, bit by bit. Many Britons now viewed Americans as unruly, ungrateful children in need of caning. Many Americans nurtured an inflated sense of their economic leverage and pined for the traditional policy of “salutary neglect,” which for generations had permitted self-sufficiency and autonomy, including governance through local councils and colonial assemblies that had long controlled fiscal matters. Colonists also resented British laws that prohibited them from making hats, woolens, cloth, and other goods that might compete with manufacturers in the mother country. Almost imperceptibly, a quarrel over taxes and filial duty metastasized into a struggle over sovereignty. With no elected delegates in Parliament, the Americans had adopted a phrase heard in Ireland for decades: “no taxation without representation.”
George had never traveled beyond England, and in his long life he never would, not to Ireland, to the Continent, not even to Scotland, and certainly not to America. None of his ministers had been to the New World, either. There was much they did not know or understood imperfectly: that the American population, now 2.5 million, was more than doubling every quarter century, an explosive growth unseen in recorded European history and fourfold England’s rate; that two-thirds of white colonial men owned land, compared to one-fifth in England; that two-thirds were literate, more than in England; that in most colonies two-thirds could vote, compared to one Englishman in six; that provincial America glowed with Enlightenment aspiration, so that a city like Philadelphia now rivaled Edinburgh for medical education and boasted almost as many booksellers—seventy-seven—as England’s top ten provincial towns combined.
Also: that eradication of those French and Spanish threats had liberated Americans from the need for British muscle; that America now made almost 15 percent of the world’s crude iron, foreshadowing an industrial strength that would someday dwarf Britain’s; that, if lacking ships like Barfleur, the Americans were fearless seafarers and masters of windship construction, with an intimate knowledge of every inlet, estuary, and shoal from Nova Scotia to Barbados; that nearly a thousand American vessels traded in
