but always returning to the need for resolve in America. “We have a warm Parliament but an indolent Cabinet,” wrote Gibbon, who later told a friend, “The higher people are placed, the more gloomy are their countenances, the more melancholy their language.… I fear it arises from their knowledge—a late knowledge—of the difficulty and magnitude of the business.”
That surely was the case for Lord Dartmouth, the Psalm Singer and secretary of state for America. Having started a war, Dartmouth had no appetite to wage it; he now often abandoned Whitehall for the solace of his country estate. Franklin had once considered him “truly a good man,” but one “who does not seem to have strength equal to his wishes.” By early November, the secretary had arranged to leave the American Department by becoming lord privy seal, a pleasant, toothless sinecure. “Lord Dartmouth only stayed long enough,” Walpole sniffed, “to prostitute his character and authenticate his hypocrisy.”
North also showed weakness in the knees. While affecting a determined ferocity toward the Americans—“we propose to exert ourselves using every species of force to reduce them,” he had declared in October—the first minister was weary of relentless opposition attacks, even if they were said to “sink into him like a cannonball into a wool sack.” Just hours after the king opened the new Parliament, North’s wife wrote that the pressure on her husband was “every day more disagreeable. Indeed it will be impossible for him to bear it much longer.” Since hearing of Bunker Hill, he had doubted that Britain could conquer America by force of arms. But when he hinted at resigning, George replied in a note, “You are my sheet anchor.” The king would further add, “It has not been my fate in general to be well served. By you I have, and therefore cannot forget it.” Loyal North would hold fast and true, even as his countenance grew gloomier, his language more melancholy. He “had neither devised the war nor liked it,” Walpole wrote, “but liked his place, whatever he pretended.”
Clearly the king needed another champion for his cause, a minister who shared his conviction that battering the colonies into submission was politically tenable, morally justified, and militarily necessary. And he had just the man in mind.
In a silver-tongued brogue that his English colleagues at times had difficulty deciphering, the bespectacled Edmund Burke, for three hours and twenty minutes on Thursday, November 16, implored the House of Commons to abandon the war. As usual during debates on the American problem, the galleries had been cleared of most spectators. Only “four women of quality and a few foreigners” had been admitted, reported the Morning Chronicle, perhaps after bribing the doorkeeper.
At Burke’s request, the Speaker, in his black gown and full-bottomed wig, ordered peace petitions from clergymen, clothiers, and tradesmen laid on the clerks’ table. Burke lamented “the horrors of a civil war … [that] may terminate in the dismemberment of our empire, or in a barren and ruinous conquest.” He warned that the longer the conflict persisted, the greater the chance “for the interference of the Bourbon powers” in France and Spain. At length he introduced a bill “for composing the present troubles” by suspending any taxes imposed on the Americans unless approved voluntarily by colonial assemblies. As Burke spoke, members squirmed on their benches, murmuring in assent or dissent. Some dozed or wandered out the door to Alice’s coffeehouse or to the barbershop.
Sitting next to Lord North on the Treasury bench to the right of the Speaker’s chair, a tall, dignified man with sharp eyesight despite his sixty years watched intently as more than a dozen speakers stood in turn to offer their opinions. Years before he had been a prominent general, and though now a bit fleshy he retained his military carriage; one colleague described his “long face, rather strong features, clear blue eyes … and a mixture of quickness and a sort of melancholy in his look.” Lord George Germain was known in Parliament for urging that Americans be treated with “a Roman severity,” and this week he had been appointed American secretary to replace the hapless Dartmouth. After nearly thirty-five years in the Commons, he now stood to deliver his first speech not only as a cabinet member but as a man whose bellicose fervor would make him “chief minister for the civil war,” as one British official called him.
He began slowly. Some thought him flustered, though others admired his “pithy, manly sentences.” On “this American business,” he promised to be “decisive, direct, and firm.” Extracting revenue from America was vital. So, too, was parliamentary supremacy. As for the Americans, “they have a right to every liberty which they can enjoy, consistent with the sovereignty and supremacy of this country.
“Let them be happy,” Germain added, in the tone of a man who cared not a whit for their happiness. “Nobody can wish them more so than I do.” He continued:
What I have always held, I now stand in office to maintain. To the questions, what force is necessary? What do you mean to send? I answer … such forces as are necessary to restore, maintain, and establish the power of this country in America, will not be wanting.… If they persist in their appeal to force, the force of the country must be exerted. The spirit of this country will go along with me in that idea, to suppress, to crush such rebellious resistance.
Just before four a.m., after fourteen hours of debate, Burke’s proposal was defeated, two to one. “Pity me, encourage me,” Germain told a friend, “and I will do my best.”
“Some fall so hard, they bound and rise again,” the ubiquitous Walpole observed. Such had been the fate of George Germain, born George Sackville, the youngest son of a duke. He was among Britain’s most controversial public men of the eighteenth century—esteemed, disgraced, rehabilitated, and raised to high office only to tumble once again. Named for his godfather, George I, and raised in a Kent palace with fifty-two staircases and 365 rooms, he had attended Trinity College in Dublin, said to be “half bear-garden and half brothel,” while his father served as lord lieutenant of Ireland. Ambitious and clever, he was an engaging conversationalist who retailed indiscreet stories of the royal family; his fluency in French reputedly put a serrated edge on his English irony. In either language he had a mordant wit, once telling a supplicant, “I find myself debarred the satisfaction of contributing to your happiness and ease.” Diligent, capable, and a deft debater, Sackville kept a large library of books he tended not to read, claiming, “I have not genius sufficient for works of mere imagination.” Married in 1754—his wife called him “my dearest man”—he proved a good father to five children even as tales circulated of his flagrant homosexuality, both a sin and a capital crime in his day.
He found his calling as a soldier, demonstrating what one admirer called “cannon-proof courage.” At the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, he was so far forward in the fighting that after he was shot in the chest his wounds were dressed in the French king’s tent. A year later he pursued Scottish clansmen through the Highlands after their defeat at Culloden, and in 1758, at St. Malo during the Seven Years’ War, he was again wounded while fighting the French. “Nobody stood higher,” Walpole wrote, “nobody has more ambition or more sense.”
Then came the great fall. On August 1, 1759, Lieutenant General Sackville was the senior commander of British forces serving in a coalition army when thirty-seven thousand allied troops battled forty-four thousand Frenchmen near the north German village of Minden. Subordinate to Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, a man he disliked and distrusted, Sackville failed to move with alacrity when ordered to fling his twenty-four cavalry squadrons against the faltering enemy. The French were defeated anyway, suffering seven thousand casualties in four hours. But they had not been routed. Ferdinand blamed Sackville for the blemished triumph, and a British captain denounced him as a “damned chicken-hearted … stinking coward.”
Recalled to London, smeared by Grub Street newspapers, Sackville appeared before a court-martial board of fifteen generals to argue that Ferdinand’s instructions had been ambiguous and contradictory, that bad terrain had impeded the cavalry, and that only eight minutes had been lost before his reinforcements joined the fight. No matter: he was convicted of disobeying orders and declared “unfit
