Lord North

W. Baring Pemberton

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787204188
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1938, this is a book on the life of Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford (1732-1792), otherwise known by his courtesy title, Lord North.Lord North was Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1770-1782 and led Great Britain through most of the American War of Independence. He also held a number of other cabinet posts, including Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer.North's reputation among historians has swung back and forth. In the late nineteenth century he was depicted as a creature of the king and an incompetent who lost the American colonies, but in the early twentieth century a revisionism emphasized his strengths in administering the Treasury, handling the House of Commons, and in defending the Church of England.With this book, author W. Baring Pemberton affirms his support for Lord North's later reputation, aiming—as he himself professes—to show that "while North was not a great statesman, he is deserving of revaluation."A fascinating look at the formerly ill-reputed "Prime Minister who lost America."

CHAPTER I—LEADING STRINGS

‘A man in this country is fit for any place he can get.’—GEORGE II (Selwyn Correspondence, iv. 103).

THE year 1732 was for Europe one of uncommon peace. Not a frontier was violated. Not a succession was in dispute. Even the Porte lay undisturbed. It was one of those rare cases of tranquillity which in the eighteenth century can be counted upon the fingers of a single hand. It was in fine a fitting moment for two men to be born who throughout their lives wished to live at peace and without adventure; who, if a dispute had arisen between themselves rather than between their countries, would have preferred to settle it as prosaic citizens quietly over a bottle of claret rather than as gentlemen of honour by the sword.

On February 11 (O.S.) in Westmorland County, Virginia, to Augustine and Mary Washington was born a son, George. On April 13 in Albemarle Street, Mayfair, the wife of the seventh Lord North gave birth to a son and heir, Frederick. Barely two months separated these infants; one to become the first President of the United States of America, the other the last Prime Minister of the First British Empire. Both grew up to be men of ingenuous tastes and of unquestioned integrity, who would at any moment in their long public careers have gladly exchanged the burden of responsible office for the quiet of their own homes, had not considerations of duty been involved.

With this, all resemblance ceases. Washington, the tobacco planter, has become, deservedly, one of the most respected figures in history. The eighth Lord North, for fourteen years Chancellor of the Exchequer, for a dozen consecutive years—a term only twice exceeded—Prime Minister, has become an object of derision, if not of contempt: ‘The Minister who lost us America.’{1}

Historical verdicts, if they are to be entitled to any respect, must be subjected to a constant revision as fresh evidence is forthcoming and contemporary opinion (frequently the most dangerous of opinions) can be qualified. Hardly anywhere is this process more indispensable than in dealing with the eighteenth century, when pens, while never more actively employed in recording impressions in letters, diaries and pamphlets, were never more directed by passion and prejudice. To contemporaries of the War of Independence, the loss of the American colonies either presaged the eclipse of Britain or vindicated the triumph of liberty over despotism. In either view the man who fought America and lost had performed a disservice to his country or his countrymen. Regarded through the perspective of a century and a half it becomes increasingly clear that the greatest service any eighteenth-century statesman could have performed was to sever the bond that bound Britain to her American colonies. Had one of the many schemes of compromise been successful, or, as at more than one period seemed probable, had the Mother Country subdued her colonies by force, the rapid growth of America in wealth, the increasing influx of non-British immigrants, and the lack, almost inevitable with the leisurely communications then obtaining, of any constructive colonial policy from Whitehall, must have made separation merely a matter of time. Dependence could scarcely have withstood the disturbing effects which the Industrial and French Revolutions must have had upon the commercial and political relations between Britain and her colonies. And when America went she most assuredly would have carried with her Canada, the West Indies, and more than half Britain’s overseas trade.{2} Yet even allowing separation to have been desirable criticism might (it would seem) be directed against the ways and means by which the bond was loosed. Better (it might be argued) a Round Table conference at which both parties agreed to separate politically but to remain commercially the best of friends than the bloodstained heights of Bunker Hill or the bitter tragedy of York Town. Such a contention, unanswerable in the twentieth century, would in the eighteenth have been preached to incredulous ears. The idea of sitting down on equal terms with the Adamses, the Rutledges, and the Otises would to its patrician states-men have appeared as ludicrous as a proposal that they should marry their mistresses. Moreover, it may well be doubted whether, but for the animosities raised by the war, there would have been found a body of United Empire Loyalists, numbering nearly 100,000, prepared at the sacrifice of all they possessed to pass into Canada, there to create a strong and enduring core of imperial sentiment in a country which till then possessed little and must almost certainly have followed the example of her neighbour. It would indeed have spared poor North many hours of bleak despair could he have glanced into the future and felt that in losing the fight he was indirectly benefiting the country and empire he loved so much. For no man more earnestly desired to quit supreme office than he did during his twelve years as First Lord of the Treasury. Whether Britain would have been the better off had he done so must remain a matter of speculation. Why he did not do so is the tragedy of his life.

*****

At the moment when Frederick North was born, his family had belonged to the peerage for close on two centuries, and in one direction or another had been active in public service. The lives of the most eminent members from Sir Edward North, in whose person Queen Mary ennobled the family, down to Lord Keeper North in the reign of Charles II, have been celebrated in a work which Jowett considered after Boswell’s Johnson and Lockhart’s Scott to be the finest study in British biography.{3} By tradition the Norths were King’s men and of the stuff of which Tories were made. Dudley, the third Baron, may have timidly attempted to sit upon the fence during the Civil War; but his son and numerous grandchildren returned with the Restoration to unequivocal allegiance. The eldest of these was created by Charles II Lord Grey during the lifetime of his father; the second became the famous Lord Keeper and was raised to the Barony of Guilford{4}; the youngest, Roger, later the biographer of his family, was appointed Solicitor General to the Duke of York, afterwards James II. Strong Stuart leanings and associations were not easily deflected by the Revolution. Roger, who alone of the brothers lived to regret the Stuarts, shrank into voluntary retirement and literary activity. His nephew, Lord North and Grey, compromised sufficiently with his conscience to fight and lose a limb at Blenheim for King James’s daughter Anne. But at the coming of an alien and Parliamentary King, he, too, drew the line, although not so discreetly as his uncle. In 1722 he was implicated along with Bishop Atterbury in the Layer Conspiracy and spent some months previous to exile in the Tower. Twelve years later he died on the Continent, about the same time as his Uncle Roger in England, and like him childless. The family was now reduced to the line of the Lord Keeper, represented by Francis North, third Lord Guilford, the father of the future Prime Minister.{5} If Lord Guilford had inherited any Jacobite sympathies he prudently mortified them in the interests of the winning side. In 1730, at the age of 26, he even consented to serve the alien dynasty in the office of Lord of the Bedchamber to Frederick, Prince of Wales. This appointment, which must have clouded the sunset of his Uncle Roger’s life, was to have consequences of some importance for the future Frederick North. No man could serve Hanoverian King and Hanoverian Prince. The antipathy between father and son which characterized the Brunswick Royal Family, and conveniently provided a safety valve for political discontent, which might otherwise have taken an anti-dynastic turn, divided society into two mutually exclusive camps. Tories who had shed their Stuart feathers like Guilford, the ginger-group associated with the name of William Pitt, jetsam of the Whig party like Pulteney and Carteret, flotsam like Bubb Dodington, gathered round the heir apparent at Leicester House. There they intrigued and there they drank damnation to Walpole, and a speedy succession to the Prince who should dispense the loaves and fishes of office to his faithful and desperately famished dependents.

Two years after Lord Guilford had joined the Prince’s Court of Great Expectations and four since he had married the sister of the Earl of Halifax, his son Frederick was born. The Prince of Wales, as a matter of course, stood godfather and gave the child his name. This innocent act of courtesy was distorted in the most unsavoury fashion, when five years later his own son and heir, afterwards George III, was born and exhibited an astonishing likeness to young Frederick North.{6} The inference was too good not to be turned into a scandal. A common father—and he not the Lord Guilford-had begotten both sons. Although the similarity in features, in colouring, and in eyes which protruded and in the end lost their sight was remarkable, the pasquinade is unlikely to have had any foundation in truth. The very fact that the Prince of Wales constantly alluded to it in jest is its best possible refutation. A Charles II might have rallied the husband he had cuckolded; but never a Hanoverian heir-apparent to whom seduction was more a matter of routine attached to his position than a subject for badinage.

*****

The eighteenth century with its Grand Tours, its Macaronis, its Stowes, its Pump Rooms and its Gout, saw the burgeoning of the British aristocracy into its fine flower. Never before and certainly never since has it displayed itself in such a riot of colour. Never at home did it enjoy such unchallenged powers and privileges or stand possessed of such uncontested reversions to the thousand and one places and sinecures which made the task of governing congenial and in not a few cases rendered existence possible. Never abroad did it post along the highways more arrogantly, more self-assumingly, more acquisitively. In a manner which has become legendary, it laid appreciative fingers on marbles and frescoes; on old masters and tapestries. It was cultured; it was rich; it was cosmopolitan. It had the entrée into the salons of the Esterhazies, the Orlovs, the du Deffands. It conversed with Italians and Frenchmen and Viennese in their own tongues. It was an exclusive club to which there was no qualification but birth, no rules but those instinctive to a gentleman. When even a Pope of Rome confessed he would have been proud to have been born a common Englishman, to have been born heir to a British peerage could have seemed hardly less than heaven.

It was in such a world as this that Frederick North grew up against the lovely background of an unchanging Wroxton Abbey, the Oxfordshire seat of his family. With a father possessed of wealth and consequence, it was merely a question of time—George II could not live for ever—before some obliging Minister would be happy to accommodate the son with some pleasant salaried office. Meanwhile all that became the young aristocrat was to proceed to Eton or Westminster, to familiarize himself with Oxford, to learn to dance, perhaps to dice; certainly to make the Grand Tour and to acquire the polish necessary to appear with effect at the Court of St. James’s and in the salons of Mayfair.

However, long before the first of these steps could be taken, an event occurred within his own family which was to have an important effect upon North’s life. When he was three years old his mother had died in childbirth, and, in the following year, Lord Guilford married the widow of Viscount Lewisham. The second wife brought with her a son nine months older than Frederick North, bearing at the time his father’s title though later, on his grandfather’s death, destined to succeed to the Earldom of Dartmouth. In a century of aristocrats which began with a Duke of Wharton and ended with an Old Q., the Earl of Dartmouth was the most distinguished exception to a general rule of dissoluteness. Quite early in life he had acquired a reputation for sanctity and never forfeited it. He became closely associated with Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, in the Wesleyan movement, and was believed to have been the original of Richardson’s ‘most faultless monster’ of British fiction, Sir Charles Grandison. To anyone at all susceptible to influence, especially where his affections were concerned, the association with such a paragon in the nursery and in adolescence could hardly fail to have consequences. And North was such a one.

Though an indefatigable husband (he was to marry a third time) Lord Guilford was no prolific father. Besides Frederick, there had been by his first marriage only a daughter, Louisa. By the second came a son, Brownlow, six years junior to Frederick. By the third there were no children. Perhaps it was because the family was small, and of much the same age, that the father was able to exert an unusually powerful and enduring influence over his children.{7} Unlike his elder son’s, Lord Guilford’s is not a character which improves on acquaintance. Hervey describes him as ‘a very good poor creature but a very weak man,’{8} and the picture is perhaps less distorted than many in Lord Fanny’s gallery. Moral he certainly was (no Sandwich or Queensberry would have married three times), weak he proved himself to be in the precautions he seems to have taken lest his children might develop wills of their own to his personal detriment. Upon a naturally domineering temperament a disagreeable meanness was grafted. The richer he grew by his three prudent marriages, the closer-fisted he became and the allowance made to his heir was meagre out of all proportion to his future expectations.{9} Without an appreciation of the strength and authority of this figure, which to within two years of his son’s death stood in the background of his life, much of North must remain an enigma and any account of his life insubstantial.

During Frederick’s early years, his father’s influence was to some extent beneficial. This much must be conceded to Lord Guilford: his son’s integrity in public life and his purity in private life were due in a great measure to the influences which surrounded him in childhood. Homely unaffected virtues were inculcated as much by example as by precept, and there is little doubt that down at Wroxton paternal despotism was of a benevolent kind and the atmosphere devout without being prudish. ‘The Christian religion,’ Guilford once told his son, ‘is strangely misapprehended by those to whom it seems a dull thing. To me it seems to be the only solid foundation of constant cheerfulness.’{10} No lesson was taken more thoroughly to heart. Throughout the vicissitudes of his life, including those last years of physical darkness, North ex...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• PREFACE
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• CHAPTER I-LEADING STRINGS
• CHAPTER II-THE ROYAL MASTER
• CHAPTER III-APPRENTICESHIP
• CHAPTER IV-PRIME MINISTER
• CHAPTER V-THE INDIA BILL
• CHAPTER VI-AMERICAN COMMENTARY
• CHAPTER VII-THE AMERICAN WAR
• CHAPTER VIII-DEBACLE
• CHAPTER IX-THE SLEEPING PARTNER
• CHAPTER X-TWILIGHT
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER