the greater good of the empire. But “that damned American war,” as North called it, forced the government to confront a displeasing dilemma: either accede to conciliation and forgo income from the colonies or prosecute a war that would cost more money than could ever be squeezed from America. Moreover, success in crushing the rebellion would likely be followed by an expensive, protracted occupation. Even from the lofty vantage of a throne, coherent British war aims were hard to discern.
Yet a king must remain steadfast, and George had thrown himself headlong into the role of captain general—studying military texts, visiting summer encampments, reviewing the Guards regiments. He continued to make his lists and his charts, of “ships building and repairing” at various yards; of guard vessels protecting ports and waterways; of “oak timber in store” (more than fifty-seven thousand loads); of royal ships in ordinary—the reserve fleet—including the number of guns mounted. He made more neat columns: of British garrisons abroad from 1764 to 1775; of the commanders of various cavalry units; of all his regiments, including those in Boston, with the number of officers, musicians, and the rank and file tabulated at the bottom of the page and his arithmetic scratchings in the margins.
Finally he sketched an organizational chart of his army in America, using tiny inked boxes hardly bigger than a pinhead, labeled with regimental numbers. Then he gave his draft to a better artist to convert into a smart diagram with copperplate script, symbols in colored pencils, and tiny cannon silhouettes to represent artillery batteries. It helped him to follow that damned American war.
The state coach clopped to a halt. Welcoming guns saluted the monarch’s arrival, rattling windows across Westminster. Horse Guards paraded in Parliament Street to “see that all was quiet,” the Public Advertiser noted. George strode into the former Queen’s Chamber at the southern end of the parliamentary warren, now used by the House of Lords. “Adorned with his crown and regal ornaments,” as the official parliamentary account recorded, he took his seat on a straight-backed throne. “He is tall, square over the shoulders,” an American loyalist in London wrote. “Shows his teeth too much. His countenance is heavy and lifeless, with white eyebrows.” Peers in crimson robes flanked him. On George’s command, the usher of the Black Rod summoned several hundred members of the Commons, who soon stood in the back in their coats and boots, shifting from one foot to the other since there were no benches for them. In his precise, regal voice, the king went straight to the American question.
Those who have long too successfully labored to inflame my people in America … now openly avow their revolt, hostility, and rebellion. They have raised troops, and are collecting a naval force. They have seized the public revenue, and assumed to themselves legislative, executive, and judicial powers.
Parliament and the Crown had displayed “moderation and forbearance,” eager to prevent “the calamities which are inseparable from a state of war.” Alas, war had “become more general, and is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire. I need not dwell upon the fatal effects of the success of such a plan.”
The phrase “fatal effects” seemed to hang in the air. Upturned faces ringed the chamber, every peer and commoner in rapt attention.
“To put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions,” he continued, “I have increased my naval establishment and greatly augmented my land forces.” The full fury of the empire would be unleashed on the rebellion. The government also was considering “friendly offers of foreign assistance,” with treaties likely. He saw “no probability” that the French or other adversaries would intrude in this family squabble. Finally:
When the unhappy and deluded multitudes, against whom this force will be directed, shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy.
In twenty minutes he was done and out the door, rumbling back to the palace in his monstrous coach.
A few naysayers disparaged the address. Horace Walpole, for one, counted “three or four gross falsehoods.” But the Commons voted with the usual hefty majority to thank His Majesty, noting that “on our firmness or indecision the future fate of the British Empire and of ages yet unborn will depend.” An independent America would be “a dangerous rival,” in which case “it would have been better for this country that America had never been known than that a great consolidated American empire should exist independent of Britain.”
The king could only agree. “Where the cause is just,” he would write, “I can never be dismayed.”
For George and Queen Charlotte, monarchical rhythms changed little from month to month, or year to year. “They both meet in the breakfast room about a half hour after 8. When she goes to the breakfast, she rings for the children,” the king had written in an account of their domestic life. “Every evening after dinner they retire into her apartments to drink coffee, & there they generally spend the remainder of their evening.” He fussed with his collections—barometers, clocks, coins, Handel oratorios—or immersed himself in a book and read aloud passages he found especially pithy. Both kept an orchestra and patronized the opera; he played a creditable flute, harpsichord, and violin. Much of their time in the Queen’s House—the family residence, later called Buckingham Palace—was spent instructing their growing brood in the ways of royalty, as in Charlotte’s letter to George P., the Prince of Wales, read to him by a tutor on his eighth birthday: “Above all things I recommend unto you to fear God.… We are all equal, and become only of consequence by setting good examples to others.”
For those with fine houses in the city’s fashionable squares—Berkeley, Grosvenor, Cavendish—the seating of Parliament intensified London’s social swirl. Parties and dinners were often scheduled for Wednesdays or Saturdays, when the Commons and Lords rarely convened. “Come to London and admire our plumes,” one woman wrote a friend in the provinces. “We sweep the skies! A duchess wears six feathers, a lady four, and every milkmaid one at each corner of her cap.” Gentlewomen’s hair, already piled high, grew higher when Georgiana Spencer, an earl’s daughter, created a three-foot coiffure by fastening horsehair pads to her own tresses; sometimes she decorated the tower with stuffed birds, waxed fruit, or tiny wooden trees and sheep. Hair grew so high that women could ride in closed carriages only by sitting on the floor. Young fops known as “Macaroni” pranced through Pall Mall and St. James’s Street in tight britches, high heels, and oversized buttons, their hair dyed red one day and blue the next. Oxford Magazine defined the Macaroni as “a kind of animal.… It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry … it wenches without passion.”
It also gambled without guilt. If London was “the devil’s drawing room,” in the phrase of author Tobias Smollett, gaming had become a diabolical national passion despite the monarch’s disapproval. Bets could be laid not only on horses, cockfights, and national lottery tickets, but on seemingly any future event, from how long a raindrop took to traverse a windowpane to how long Mr. Jones or Mrs. Smith would live; common wagers involved taking out insurance policies on other people’s lives. Walpole described seeing £10,000 on the table at Almack’s Club, where players wore eyeshades to conceal their emotions and leather cuffs to preserve their laced ruffles, then turned their coats inside out for luck. Military pensioners in Royal Hospital Chelsea were said to bet on lice races, and workmen repairing a floor in Middle Temple Hall found nearly two hundred dice that over the years had fallen between the cracks. “Play at whist, commerce, backgammon, trictrac, or chess,” one society dame advised, “but never at quinze, lou, brag, faro, hazard, or any game of chance.” Few heeded her.
London also had more than five hundred coffeehouses, and it was here that politics generally and the American question specifically might be discussed at any hour. Fratricidal war unsettled many Britons, who found it distasteful, if not unnatural. Some feared an endless war, citing published reports—often wildly exaggerated—that the Americans had two hundred thousand armed men, “well trained, ready to
