Lord Chatham's Great Speech on American Affairs

This great speech--this noble plea for justice--made the king very angry. He regarded Chatham's independence as ingratitude, and he openly expressed a desire for the arrival of the day "when decrepitude or old age should put an end to him as a trumpet of sedition." The lords immediately censured Chatham's speech by a vote of sixty-eight to eighteen, against his proposition. Not discouraged, he immediately presented a bill which provided for the renunciation of the power of taxation, demanding an acknowledgment from the Americans of the supreme authority of Great Britain, and inviting them to contribute voluntarily a specified sum annually to be employed as interest on the national debt. It also provided for an immediate repeal of all the objectionable acts of Parliament (ten in number), passed during the administration of the reigning monarch.

Now occurred a remarkable scene. The petulant Earl of Sandwich said the proposition deserved only contempt, and ought to be immediately rejected. He could not believe it was the work of a British peer, but of some American. Turning his face toward Franklin, who stood, leaning on the bar, he said: " I fancy I have in my eye the person who drew it up, one of the bitterest and most mischievous enemies this country has ever known." The eyes of the whole House were now fixed on Franklin, when Chatham arose and said, with emphasis, "The plan is entirely my own; but if I were the first minister, and had the care of settling this momentous business, I should not be ashamed of publicly calling to my assistance a person so perfectly acquainted with the whole American affairs--one whom all Europe ranks with our Boyles and Newtons, as an honor, not to the English nation only, but to human nature." Sandwich moved that the bill be "rejected now and forever," and it was done. This drew from Chatham a terrible storm of invective. He perceived the fixed intention of the ministry to enslave the Americans at all hazards. "I am not surprised," he said, " that men who hate liberty should detest those who prize it, or that those who want virtue themselves should persecute those who possess it. The whole of your political conduct has been one continual series of weakness and temerity, despotism, and the most notorious servility, incapacity, and corruption. I allow you one merit, a strict attention to your interests; in that view, who can wonder that you should put a negative on any measure which must deprive you of your places, and reduce you to that insignificance for which God and nature designed you." The bill was rejected, because it was considered a greater concession to the colonies, and quite as injurious to the national honor as the proposition of Dean Tucker, a famous pamphleteer, that Parliament should by solemn enactment sever the colonies from the parent government, and disallow any application for restoration to the rights and privileges of British subjects, until, by humble petition, they should ask for pardon and reinstatement. This would not have been a severe punishment for the Americans.

So firmly supported in the House of Lords, the ministers proceeded to put the engine of coercion into full play against the Americans. On the 2d of February, North proposed the first of a series of measures for compelling the Americans to submit. He moved in the House of Commons for an address to the king, affirming that the province of Massachusetts was in a state of rebellion; that Great Britain would not relinquish an iota of her sovereign rule in the colonies; and urging his majesty to take immediate and effectual measures for enforcing obedience to the laws. They contemplated a material increase of the military force in America, and to restrain the entire commerce of New England with Great Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies. Charles James Fox moved an amendment censuring the ministry, and praying for their removal. A warm debate ensued, when Fox's amendment was negatived by a vote of three hundred and four against one hundred and five. North's motion, which ended with the usual pledge of "lives and fortunes," prevailed by a majority of two hundred and ninety-six in the Commons, and in the Lords by eighty-seven to twenty-seven; nine peers protesting. Gibbon the historian, who then had a seat in the Commons, and had veered from the Opposition to the Ministerial side, wrote: "We voted an address of 'lives and fortunes,' declaring Massachusetts Bay in a state of rebellion; more troops, but, I fear, not enough to go to America, to make an army of ten thousand men at Boston; three generals, Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne! In a few days we stop the ports of New England. I cannot write volumes, but I am more and more convinced that, with firmness, all will go well; yet I sometimes doubt." Gibbon had written in favor of the Americans. Fox, in an epigram of twelve lines, alludes to his venality in these words: