Benjamin Franklin in London by Goodwin George

Author:Goodwin, George [Goodwin, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300222944
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2016-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

By 1769 Grafton was certainly not a Chathamite. Most of the Chathamites, marshalled by Shelburne, were in concerted opposition along with the followers of Rockingham and Grenville. Grafton had turned to the authoritarian Bedfordites for support in Parliament and, without being overtly cynical about what became an evidently long and happy marriage, his choice of Bedford’s niece as the new Duchess of Grafton helped to consolidate the connection.

It was during this period of courtship, on 1 May 1769, that the fate of the Townshend taxes was decided by nine present and one absentee member of the Cabinet. Grafton showed himself sensitive to the current of feeling in America by recommending that the taxes should be repealed in their entirety during the new session of Parliament that autumn. In this he was supported by Lords Camden and Granby and by Henry Seymour Conway. The two Bedfordites, Gower and Weymouth, supported Hillsborough in the view that the tax on tea should remain. They felt that it was in principle less objectionable to the Americans than that on the other products, being merely a traded commodity rather than an English manufacture. However, they also considered that its retention would affirm the right, as set out in the Declaratory Act, for Parliament to tax the colonists. Besides which, it was the only one of what Grafton would later refer to as ‘these trifling taxes’ that brought in anything approaching significant revenue, around three-quarters of the entire Townshend tax take. North used it, following Townshend, to pay colonial salaries.

North supported its retention as did Secretary of State Rochford. Grafton had thus been outvoted five to four by his own Cabinet. He later maintained, with some justification, that had Sir Edward Hawke not been ill and thus absent, then those in favour of complete repeal would have carried the day. And as Professor P.D.G. Thomas rightly says of this: ‘By such accidents is history made.’58

However, had Grafton given, at the time, the same weight to the measure’s importance as he was to do in his much later Memoirs, then he would have focused his attention and better managed the matter. This is implicit in the prominence he gives in those Memoirs to some extraordinary actions of Lord Hillsborough. Grafton felt these to be sufficiently disturbing that he went to great trouble to research the relevant papers in order to reproduce them. For, as he tells his readers: ‘Considering what important consequences this very decision led to; there is no minute part of it, on which you should not be informed.’59 And he proved himself to be more attentive as an elderly historian than as a young Prime Minister, because these documents – a mid-June exchange of letters between Hillsborough and a furious Lord Chancellor Camden – support Grafton in a bitter accusation against the former.

Hillsborough, notwithstanding the fact that he had got his way on the vote, decided to disregard the Cabinet’s agreed view on how the decision should be recorded and then communicated in a ‘circular letter to all the Governors in America’.

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