LII. 1775. tidings Lord Dartmouth wrote to recall him from CHAP. his post, under the honourable plea however of desiring to consult him on the plans for the next campaign. Accordingly in the month of October General Gage took his departure from Boston, and sailed homewards, leaving by the King's direction the chief command to General Howe.* The despatches of Lord Dartmouth on the events at Lexington and Bunker's Hill (July 1. and August 2. 1775) as derived from the State Paper Office are published in both the collections of Mr. Peter Force and Mr. Jared Sparks, CHAPTER LIII. CHAP. IN England the tide of public feeling continued LIII. to set strongly against the conduct and the claims 1775. of the Americans. Their recent resistance was deemed no better than rebellion. Their professions of loyalty were disbelieved, and their prospects of ultimate success derided. Nothing is more certain than that at this time, and during the whole first period of the war, by far the greater part of the British people most earnestly and zealously upheld the King in his determination, according with their own, to maintain, as he and they conceived, both the rights of the Crown and the authority of Parliament. On this point-on the reality and extent of this public feeling at that juncture-the testimony from the most opposite quarters is nearly the same. When Lord North sent over his Conciliatory Resolution, it was accompanied by a Note which he had dictated to Mr. Grey Cooper, Secretary to the Treasury, and which in its semi-official form was laid before the Congress. Among other arguments that Note - 66 LIII. 1775, states: "The temper and spirit of the nation are CHAP. so much against concessions, that if it were the "intention of the administration they could not carry the question." We may acknowledge some exaggeration in this statement, since probably the aim of the people was to give their full support, if required, to the King and Government, and not to go beyond them; yet still this is surely no unimportant testimony to the spirit of the time. But did the members of the Opposition deny that statement? Quite the contrary, when they spoke together in confidence. In October of this year Lord Rockingham writes to Burke that his own observations have been confirmed by Lord John Cavendish, by Sir George Saville, and by several more; all owning the real fact to be "that the "violent measures towards America are fairly "adopted and countenanced by a majority of "individuals of all ranks, professions, or occu"pations in this country." † To this state of public feeling the London Magistrates were however a signal exception. When in August the King issued a Proclamation for suppressing rebellion and sedition in America and preventing traitorous correspondence with that country, and when that Proclamation was read forth at the Royal Exchange, Wilkes, as Lord Mayor, would not allow the Mace to be carried, nor the usual forms of respect to be observed; * Minutes of the Continental Congress, May 30. 1775. + Burke's Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 68. CHAP. and at the close of the ceremony his partisans LIII. 1775. raised a hiss.* At nearly the same time the City chiefs endeavoured to draw His Majesty into an unseemly contest, by declining to present an Address, unless the King would receive it seated on his throne. "I am ever ready," rejoined the King, "to receive Addresses and Petitions, but I am "the judge where." There is reason to believe that even in the City the larger number disapproved this low and petty game of faction in their chiefs. Certain it is at least that loyal Addresses -declaring in strong terms attachment to the Throne and Constitution and disapprobation of the insurgent colonies -came in at this time spontaneous and unsolicited from every part of the kingdom,-from the trading towns, as Manchester and Liverpool, no less than from the rural districts. It was under circumstances thus unfavourable to the issue of his mission that Richard Penn brought over "the Olive-branch"- the Petition, namely, from Congress to the King. On the 1st of September Penn himself, accompanied by Arthur Lee, delivered it for presentation to Lord Dartmouth. His Lordship received it from their hands in silence. Three days afterwards he informed them by letter that to this Petition no answer would be given. It was deemed that since the Congress had met not only without the King's * Annual Register, 1775. p. 149. LIII. 1775. permission but against his injunctions; since it CHAP. was in fact a self-constituted body; and since it had sanctioned and directed the taking up arms against His Majesty; its authority had no claim to any recognition nor its Petition to any reply. Some degree of just weight may be acknowledged as attaching to these considerations. Yet after all they amount to little more than a punctilio— a punctilio, namely, as to the rank and title of the persons petitioning-a punctilio which, as all parties when too late perceived, ought by no means to have barred a practical consideration of the Petition itself. Even then, perhaps, the terms not indeed expressed but implied in that Petition might if welcomed have averted the further growth of civil strife, and once more united together the two great branches of the British race. Its rejection on the contrary, though little considered at the time in England, was never forgotten in America. An American historian records that afterwards, when pressed by the calamities of war, a doubt would sometimes arise in the minds of many of his countrymen, whether they had not been too hasty in their resistance to their parent state. "To such minds," he adds, "it was usual to pre"sent the second Petition of Congress to the King, observing thereon that all the blood and "all the guilt of the war must be charged to "British and not to American counsels."* * Ramsay's History of the American Revolution, vol. i. p. 214. ed. 1793. |