11.0 - Britain in 1770 (The Story So Far)

Link: Britain in 1770 (The Story So Far)

Episode Transcript

Abram: Welcome to Prime Factors. This week, Britain in 1770, the story so far.

Abram: Hello and welcome back to Prime Factors. I'm Abram, and I'm here with my dad, where we usually review all the British Prime Ministers from Robert Walpole to Keir Starmer. But, but today we are having a special episode.

Joe: We're about to reach a milestone. After around 50 years of Prime Minister history, we have arrived at Lord North and the American Revolution. As Americans learning and teaching British history, this is a big moment for us.

Abram: And since we live in New England, we are right near a lot of sites and battles.

Joe: This episode is going to be both for our regular listeners who have come with us on our journey so far but also a good jumping-on point if you happen to primarily be interested in the American Revolution and you want a primer on the story up to this point.

Abram: It's not a clip show, but even I'm forgetting things after 30 episodes. I think it's 29 or 28, I'm not sure.

Joe: It is 30 with specials.

Abram: Okay, so every 30 episodes we'll do a recap.

Joe: Not promising that, but maybe.

Abram: Promising that, yes.

Joe: Yeah, right. If this works out, we'll do more signpost episodes like this every so often.

Abram: And don't forget that you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and at primefactorspodcast.com. We're also on Facebook and BlueSky. If you enjoy listening, please like, subscribe, comment, and review.

Joe: Are you ready, Abram?

Abram: Yep. Picture—

Joe: No, no, no "Picture This" this week. Sorry.

Abram: Oh.

In The Year 1770

Abram: Britain in 1770. Britain in the year 1770 is a dynamic place with a lot happening at once, and many threads that are going to set up the American Revolution and struggles back in London. We cannot cover everything in a recap, but here are some overarching ideas that set up Lord North's rise and fall that I'd like us to pay special attention to.

Joe: First off, it's the delicate balance between Parliament and the King, especially how this new role of Prime Minister upsets that apple cart. The whole idea of a Prime Minister as we understand it is less than 50 years old, so we have to look at how George I and George II accepted it, and then how George III fought back to try to reclaim some of that power and authority for himself.

Abram: Second, it's the rise of the Empire. Britain had been colonizing for 150 years by this point and controlled territory all around the world. The sun surely never set, but generations of settlers lived as Englishmen without ever even stepping foot in England. They often lived in places where the native population didn't relish their new overlords.

Joe: And finally, as President Bill Clinton famously said, "It's the economy, stupid." Don't call me stupid. While the sentiment is gruff, it is accurate. Building and maintaining an empire is expensive, and the choices London would make to keep the money flowing would set the table for the next 50 years of Prime Ministers. Before we get too far, let's step back and start from the beginning.

What Is Parliament Anyway?

Abram: What is Parliament anyway?

Joe: We did a history of Parliament way back in our first episode.

Abram: Wasn't that the entirety of our first episode?

Joe: It was the entirety of our first episode. But while we talked a lot about the development of Parliament from the Witan to the Magna Carta to the Model Parliament and more, we didn't really talk about practicalities. And if anything, that episode is a little bit of a long parade of dates and names. More importantly, the Prime Minister is a member of Parliament.

Abram: Parliament.

Joe: We'll do an episode after the revolution where we compare the US and British systems. We will? We will. But there's no strict separation between the parts of the British government. In fact, Prime Time might do that with us. Yay! Parliament is, of course, a two-chamber system where the House of Commons and the House of Lords meet separately.

Abram: I didn't know Parliament was a cave.

Joe: You've been there.

Abram: Oh yeah, I forgot.

Joe: Where the House of Commons and the House of Lords each meet separately to pass their own bills. Oh. And have to negotiate on final language before the monarch approves and creates a new law. The power of the two houses has varied over time, but for our story in the 1700s, what we have is a House of Commons that is on an upswing while the House of Lords keeps them in check. I'm assuming—

Abram: Like chess? Like the bishops can check the king?

Joe: Something like that.

Abram: That was a good metaphor, Dad, because like the bishops are like the lords and they can keep the king in check. And the king is the commons, I guess, or not really, because the king isn't even allowed in the commons, right?

Joe: That's correct.

Abram: But like, you know, metaphor until you think about it that deeply.

Joe: It's a metaphor until you think about it. OK, I'm skimming over a lot of details. And a government at this time is going to contain ministers from both the Commons and the Lords.

Abram: Let's talk about the Lords first, Dad. Is that a fine decision with you?

Joe: Well, today the Prime Minister has to be from the Commons, but at the time of our story, that hasn't been locked in yet, and most of them are from the Lords.

Abram: The Lords.

Joe: So let's talk about the Lords first.

Abram: Thank you for taking my suggestion.

Joe: The Lords in this case are just that, the entire noble class of England.

Abram: The Lords.

Joe: Every Duke, Marquess, Earl, Viscount, and Baron was invited to participate in the Lords anytime they wanted. These are generally the top 200-and-so gentlemen in the country. It doesn't count courtesy titles like the kids of nobles or women or other peers, but it's still pretty much every blue blood in the realm has a seat on one of those benches. The Lords at this time also included a handful of bishops, and after 1707, a small number of Scottish Lords.

Abram: The point is, it's not a democracy.

Joe: Correct. And so naturally you are thinking that the democratic part comes with the Commons, and you'd be partly right.

Abram: At least partly.

Joe: The Commons are the non-nobles and they are elected, but "elected" doesn't mean what we think of today. The original British system didn't have the equivalent of redistricting, and so parliamentary constituencies in the 1700s had been unchanged since the Middle Ages. Towns that had once been thriving are now dead. Cities sprung up where there had been no cities before. One town had literally fallen into the sea.

Abram: Which one?

Joe: I don't remember.

Abram: Was it one of— Old Sarum, Gatton, Newtowne, East Loo, Dunwich, Plympton Erle— they're like places that once existed but now are under the sea. We can hog up all the seats and give the two a friend. Old Sarum, Gatton, Newtowne, East Loo, Dunwich, Plympton Erle—

Joe: It might be one of those.

Abram: Oh, did you see what I did?

Joe: I did see what you did. It might be one of those. The point is that these towns existed a long time ago, and now some of them even have multiple seats for a population of zero.

Abram: That's why you can hog up all the seats and give them to a friend.

Joe: So there are a bunch of special seats for universities, port towns, and other crazy things. But that's most of them. Now, the worst of these seats, as you just said, Abram, are called the rotten boroughs.

Abram: The rotten boroughs.

Joe: And Old Sarum being, like, the proof case of the rotten boroughs. But even the ones that weren't fully corrupt were still part of the system.

Abram: We've been there. Isn't it just a bunch of ruins?

Joe: Yeah, Old Sarum is a bunch of ruins.

Abram: That's why it's old.

Joe: It's right next to Salisbury. It has a very beautiful—

Abram: And Salisbury is right next to Stonehenge. The place ruled by sheep.

Joe: That is true.

Abram: We've also been to Stonehenge.

Joe: We visited England. We liked it.

Abram: England.

Joe: So the worst of these we call the rotten boroughs, like Old Sarum. But even the ones that weren't fully corrupt were part of a system that we would barely recognize as democratic. The game in the 1700s, if you can call it that, is that the wealthy families who already controlled seats in the Lords also fought to control the most seats in the Commons. Election laws were highly variable. But a rich person could buy up a lot of property in a place and control the voters. Votes—

Abram: I'm gonna control your minds.

Joe: Well, votes weren't private. And if you voted in a way that your overlord didn't like, he could kick you off his land.

Abram: Bye.

Joe: Do other things. So it was even legitimate at the time to sell your vote. And even in regions where MPs were elected more fairly, suffrage was limited to something like, you know, white male property holders. It wasn't a broad base of voters. A duke might, through patronage or property, control more than a dozen seats. And that's gonna lead to factions.

Abram: Duke, duke, duke, duke, duke. That's the Duke song.

Joe: Great.

Abram: I love the Duke song.

Joe: By our point in the story, we have two real political parties: the Whigs and the Tories.

Abram: Did the Whigs wear wigs?

Joe: Everyone wore wigs.

Abram: The Tories— Tori, Tortor, Torus— wear wigs.

Joe: Yes. Everybody wore wigs.

Abram: Dad, come sing with me. 3, 2—

Joe: No, I don't want to sing with you.

Abram: Tory, Tory, Tory, Tory, Tory, Tory.

Joe: So they weren't as organized as parties are today, but the idea broadly holds.

Abram: Party! Time to party. Cha-cha-cha-cha.

Joe: So Tories are the conservative party.

Abram: Yes.

Joe: They believed in the power of the church and the monarch. And they had a lot of the old money. For most of the century, Tories were associated with Catholics and Jacobites, people that wanted to bring the Stuart dynasty back.

Abram: Stuart! Okay, continue.

Joe: By the 1770s, something of a new Tory party was just starting to develop that was less associated with treason and more with the old values, but that's a development we'll be tracking in our upcoming episodes. Their rivals are the Whigs. They're liberal in some respects, such as being more inclined to boost the power of Parliament.

Abram: Whigs?

Joe: The Whigs. And maintaining the freedom of the press and that sort of thing. But they were still big money families that benefited from the system as it was. Ultimately, it's not about the factions and the parties, but who had ultimate power in government. The Parliament or the monarch.

Abram: Parliament.

Joe: The 1700s saw a dramatic shift where not only did Parliament become more powerful, but also introduced a new key focus of that power in the office of Prime Minister. And it took a special set of circumstances to lead to that kind of change.

Those Crazy Georgians

Abram: Those crazy Georgians!

Joe: In 1770, we had King George III on the throne, the third Hanoverian king. He's gonna be known to history as the crazy one, but—

Abram: The mad one.

Joe: The mad one, yeah. Mad, crazy, same idea. But let's rewind a bit and talk about how these German nobles became the leaders of England. I mentioned the Jacobites already, but the truth was that ever since Henry VIII split off the Church of England, English politics has been dominated by religious questions. That was a long time ago, but more recently there was a crisis in the 1680s where the Catholic King James II, who was old and had two Protestant daughters, unexpectedly had a Catholic son. Most of England was Protestant, and it was looking like maybe there would be a permanent Catholic monarchy, perhaps even one that would force the people to return to the Pope. Some members of Parliament acted, triggering now what is known as— do you know what it is?

Abram: The Glorious Revolution.

Joe: The Glorious Revolution.

Abram: Wasn't so glorious for James II and VII.

Joe: No.

Abram: Remember, he's James II and VII.

Joe: I have not forgotten. So James's daughter Mary and her Protestant husband William of—

Abram: Green.

Joe: Orange.

Abram: Green.

Joe: Orange.

Abram: Green.

Joe: Were invited to invade England. They kicked James II off the throne, or rather he technically abdicated, and the Protestant—

Abram: And then he left to France.

Joe: And the Protestant succession was assured. The followers of James II will be the Jacobites and a major headache for the first half of the 1700s.

Abram: Oh, my head.

Joe: So eventually, Mary died. Do you know what year?

Abram: 1694.

Joe: Then William.

Abram: 1702!

Joe: Then Anne.

Abram: 1714!

Joe: And three monarchs later—

Abram: And then George I, 1727. And then George II, 1760.

Joe: You're getting ahead of us.

Abram: No, I'm not. I know everything.

Joe: All right. And three monarchs later, they were stuck without a natural Protestant heir. They had to dig through the family tree to find George, the Elector of Hanover, a German noble with no experience running anything larger than a principality, who became the next king. Oh, the early years of George I's reign were a mess. The Jacobites revolted right after he came to power in 1715. Issues with Scotland were far from settled, and the kingdom had some severe money problems. He didn't have the acumen to govern a system he barely understood on his own. And while he spoke English more than some history books imply, he was at a disadvantage navigating court life. This unique situation made it all but inevitable that King George would need to rely on someone to take the reins, shifting power dramatically, not only back to Parliament, but to a single powerful figure who leads but is not the king. There had been others called Prime Minister in the past, but Walpole so changed the nature of the game he's credited as being the first of a new kind of political leader for Britain.

Abram: And now that the South Sea Bubble crisis has just hit, who will it be?

All Those Men Have Their Price

Abram: All those men have their price.

Joe: When we talk about the first kings or the first anything in a country, we tend to romanticize them a bit. George Washington was a great leader.

Abram: George Washing Machine!

Joe: But he certainly could tell a lie when it suited him, and he believed that people could be property even if he claimed he didn't like it very much. Let me be blunt. Even by the standards of his day, Robert Walpole was a corrupt man.

Abram: Dun dun dun!

Joe: And it is also true what they say: if you go after the king, don't miss. In the early part of the century, Walpole was a corrupt Whig politician in the House of Commons who profited from his jobs and used his influence to control people. He was tried for notorious corruption in 1712 and locked in the Tower of London. His six months in jail didn't make him contrite, but they did make him a Whig hero and martyr. And when the Whigs returned to power with George I's coronation, Walpole was able to use his political and oratory skills to lead the House of Commons as well as gain other jobs in the king's government. This is a dramatic oversimplification of a complex man and a complex situation.

Abram: Just listen to our Walpole episode if you want more detail.

Joe: Yeah, we'll roll with it for now. Walpole broke into power when the country was at a breaking point. The South Sea Company Crisis, a stock market crash caused by over-speculation in a British trading and slaving company. Even the British national debt had been leveraged against the company, so a failure would be a disaster for the nation.

Abram: Failure.

Joe: With Walpole's financial skill, he was able to convince George I to give him unprecedented power. He would run the House of Commons, become the First Lord of the Treasury, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He would control the voting, the money coming in, and the money going out. This unification of power under a single individual other than the king was unprecedented. Walpole navigated the crisis successfully, but he brought near-authoritarianism to the country. He expanded censorship on plays. He pressured opposition newspapers. He spied on his enemies by reading their mail. He bribed people up and down the government using Treasury funds. He would contest election results, only to have his own hand-picked committees decide the winner, and always in his favor. He controlled patronage and could punish anyone that went against him by firing them, and could keep people loyal by giving them paychecks for jobs they didn't even need to show up for. He also cheated on his wife, but compared to everything else, maybe that's minor.

Abram: No, it isn't.

Joe: Robert Walpole did not introduce corruption to the British government, and those ideas weren't new. But he turned corruption into a finely tuned machine. When Walpole looked at those who'd oppose him, he famously stated, quote, "All those men have their price." Cha-ching! Which is the origin of that modern expression. But on the plus side, Walpole also believed that stability brought profit and sought to keep the country stable and out of wars. When he was in office, Britain wasn't even a bad place to live, assuming you were of the appropriate social class and all the other usual caveats. When George II came to the throne, when was that?

Abram: 1727?

Joe: He challenged this balance of power. He wanted his own Prime Minister and not someone as independent as Walpole. And the truth is, he tried. Walpole had amassed so much political muscle, so much political capital, and such strong relationships including with the Queen herself, that George II was ultimately forced to accept him as his Prime Minister, establishing the role as being separate and independent from the monarch that handed him the seals. This tension will continue to be important in our story. Eventually, of course, Walpole upset too many people, made a few too many mistakes, but we'll get there in a minute. Walpole was not gonna be a one-off. He established a pattern where non-noble leaders of the House of Commons could be the most powerful force in the kingdom. It'll be a long time before that becomes a standard, but that's how it works today.

Fifty Years in Five Minutes

Abram: Fifty years in five minutes.

Joe: Although Walpole controlled just about everything, he was not invincible. He made enemies and those enemies formed factions. Do you remember some of those factions?

Abram: No.

Joe: Cobham's Cubs.

Abram: Oh yeah!

Joe: The Patriot Whigs.

Abram: I love them guys. How could I ever forget them?

Joe: The Tories may have been defeated, but the next decades were Whig-on-Whig struggles for supremacy. And despite his belief that peace led to profit, Walpole was forced by his enemies and public opinion to enter the War of Jenkins' Ear.

Abram: My ear!

Joe: A conflict with Spain that he was not successful in waging. That was enough to cost Walpole the confidence of Parliament, and he was finally pushed out. And he was given the ultimate punishment as a farewell gift. Do you remember what his punishment was?

Abram: Becoming Orford.

Joe: Becoming an Earl. Earl of Orford. So that he could never again control the House of Commons because he'd be trapped in the Lords.

Abram: Uh, the Lords?

Joe: The role of Prime Minister might have ended there because number two—

Abram: Spencer Compton.

Joe: Yep, the Earl of Wilmington. He was a Lord and was largely ineffective. He allowed his Southern Secretary, Lord Carteret, to largely drive his government.

Abram: However, it was revived by Pelham. Pelham's our highest scoring so far, and we score them. However, that isn't our main thing. We mostly do history, and then like one every three episodes we score, as our two episodes are Prime Minister and almost always a special because Dad can't stop making specials, and he really likes specials more than actual episodes, and we try our best not to, but it's always inevitable.

Joe: Great.

Abram: That was a really short sentence.

Joe: It was something. So Wilmington died in office after a year and a half, and then number three was, as you already said, Henry Pelham. And he was, in addition to our highest scorer, he was the glue that made this job real. Glue.

Abram: Uh-oh.

Joe: For all that Walpole was corrupt, Pelham was seemingly incorruptible. He built a broad-bottomed government that included the top men from nearly every faction. He also managed to survive George II trying to kick him out, and he essentially forced the king to grant him even more autonomy in exchange for keeping the country running. It is Pelham, perhaps not Walpole, that is the George Washington of the early Prime Ministers. He led the government for the second time from the Commons. That is not gonna stick yet, but he showed what a capable and honest leader could do in that position, and Britain was better off for it. Of course, some of what allowed Pelham to be that incorruptible leader was that he had an elder brother that was a little bit less uncomfortable doing the dirty behind-the-scenes work.

Abram: Who became Prime Minister after he died.

Joe: Yes.

Abram: Because at that point, two of the three Prime Ministers didn't survive to see the next Prime Minister come in.

Joe: Yeah. So as you say, Pelham died after eleven years in office. What year was that?

Abram: 1754?

Joe: Right. Pelham died after eleven years in office, putting his elder brother in charge, Thomas Pelham-Holles, or Thomas Pelham-Hollis if you want to pronounce it the British way, the Duke of Newcastle.

Abram: We aren't British.

Joe: He wasn't as good. Like his brother and Walpole, Newcastle strived to keep Britain out of wars, but then a young George Washington attacked a French detachment in what is today western Pennsylvania. This tiny mistake was going to snowball into one of the largest wars the world had ever seen. In the United States, we call this the French and Indian War, but in Britain, it is the Seven Years' War. Do you remember why we don't call it the Seven Years' War in the US?

Abram: Because it wasn't actually seven years.

Joe: How long was it?

Abram: Nine.

Joe: Nine years. In Britain, they can't count.

Abram: Yeah. 1, 2, 4, 10, 35, 112. Those are their numbers?

Joe: So the French quickly gained the upper hand. They captured Minorca, which is in the Mediterranean, and Newcastle's government fell. Newcastle was replaced by Prime Minister number five, William Cavendish, the Duke of Devonshire. But his short time is notable less for him and for who came with him. Who came with him?

Abram: Himself.

Joe: And?

Abram: His shadow.

Joe: William Pitt the Elder.

Abram: Oh yeah.

Joe: Pitt was brought in as the war minister, and he was very good at it. And Devonshire spent much of his administration setting up Newcastle for a second term where he would run the government while Pitt ran the war. Under Pitt's leadership as war minister, one part genius, one part ensuring that the most qualified men were given positions of leadership, Britain turned a losing war into its most winning, even as the shape of the war continued to spiral larger and larger. What started in the Pennsylvania woods expanded outward to include Spain, Russia, Sweden, various Germanic states, and more. Britain conquered territory in the Americas, the Pacific, India, Africa, and all while navigating shifting alliances and a grueling Central European campaign.

Abram: The remaining Prime Ministers—

Joe: Pitt's victories also left Britain with a territory far larger than could be managed, and with a debt burden that would weigh down the nation in the decades to come. And enemies, especially France, that were all too eager to strike back at the country that had defeated them. When George II died— when did he die?

Abram: 1760?

Joe: He was replaced not by his son, but by his grandson.

Abram: Because his son was dead.

Joe: Yeah. Frederick, the Prince of Wales, had died young. As the fourth generation of Hanoverians, the young George was not socially disconnected from England. He did not pine for a faraway German homeland. George III was British, but he also had a very different view on the power that a British monarch should wield. In short, George was pretty sure that he should be the one wielding the power.

Abram: Not whoever this First Lord of the Treasury guy and the Exchequer guy.

Joe: Exactly.

Abram: Why? Why do they have power? They're just in charge of money and stuff.

Joe: Yep.

Abram: I'm in charge of the rest. So I'm bringing in some new government, some Tories, to kick out these Whigs. Come in, Tories! Ahaha! The Tories are back in charge with their leader, John Stuart. But he didn't do as well as a lot of people think he should have. Explain more about that situation.

Joe: Yes, you've covered it all very well. He successfully pushed out Pitt and Newcastle, he brought in his best friend and tutor, John Stuart, the Earl of Bute, as Prime Minister number six.

Abram: I like how he brings in the Tories.

Joe: If you know British history well, and you do, you might be thinking that George III is the mad one.

Abram: From what I could tell, his first period of madness is in like 1787, but it wasn't a common thing until like 1800, and he wasn't completely mad until 1810.

Joe: Spoilers, Abram.

Abram: About someone we'll never cover.

Joe: That's true. No, I'm impressed that you know the timeline.

Abram: I'm guessing. I think it's around that.

Joe: If there's one thing I know about you, it's that you get dates right. Anyway, Bute was tremendously unpopular, both because he was Scottish and because he didn't have a parliamentary mandate.

Abram: So forced out, right?

Joe: Yeah, he wasn't part of the Whig establishment. He didn't have any power of his own. Parliament didn't respect him, and neither did the people.

Abram: Left and became a gardener. Good job.

Joe: Yes.

Abram: So they brought in this new guy, this Grenville guy. He's green, and the last guy is a boot. So the colonists decided, based on his actions, which included tax, tax, tax— he's very notorious for not being a good guy. So they took a boot and a green thing and burned them. So he wasn't that popular. Bye-bye. Then they brought in this Watson-Wentworth guy who eased the situation a little up by keeping both sides happy. But he only lasted a single year. So they brought in Pitt to go again. Except Pitt, he was old, so he really only lasted for the first year of his, like, two and a half years. And then it was basically ruled by— who was it again?

Joe: Augustus Fitzroy.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: The Duke of Grafton.

Abram: And then Grafton, no one fights like him, came in, except he wasn't really that good, I don't think. So it didn't really go that well.

Joe: That is an exceptionally effective summary of the entire rest of this section. Mm-hmm. Sometimes you remember everything, and sometimes you're like, who's this John Wilkes guy?

Abram: Who is this John Wilkes guy?

Joe: Not gonna cover him again.

Abram: Who is he?

Joe: He was the—

Abram: Prison guy?

Joe: Prison guy, yeah.

Abram: Okay, continue.

Joe: So when it came to John Stuart, and when it came to all of these Prime Ministers, George III realized that he couldn't keep them in power just by the sheer force of his kingly will. And so what followed was a rapid-fire decade of Prime Ministers rising and falling, with no one able to both have the confidence of the king and Parliament. Bute's collapse led to George Grenville as Prime Minister number seven. A Whig turncoat who abandoned his family for power. He is famous for introducing the Stamp Act to the colonies, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. Grenville was followed by Charles Watson-Wentworth, the Marquess of Rockingham, as number eight, but he struggled after the death of his patron, the king's uncle, and his government collapsed. Prime Minister number nine was William Pitt. War hero and hero to the people. But while he aspired to be the second coming of Henry Pelham, by this point the government had collapsed into so much factionalism that it was impossible to get the best men together to agree on anything. And then he turned down control of the Commons by accepting an earldom to be the Earl of Chatham. To make matters even worse, the war hero Pitt suffered from severe mental and physical health problems. He was forced to step away from public life, leaving the government to Prime Minister number ten, the unable and unwilling playboy Augustus Fitzroy, the Duke of Grafton.

Abram: No one fights like him.

Joe: Right.

Abram: That will be included in a later episode.

Joe: Yes, we're working on a song about Grafton. It's not quite done yet.

Abram: It's like halfway done.

Joe: It's a little bit done.

Abram: We need two verses and two choruses.

Joe: Yeah, it's not there yet. So Grafton's brief tenure was marked by failure and scandal. Until Pitt himself emerged from his sickbed to tear his protégé's government to shreds. And that brings us to 1770. The stability of Walpole and the Pelhams had long since been forgotten, and now even the best men struggle to hold on to the office for more than a year.

Abram: And someone's coming in who is only like 37. What's his name? I don't think that's a good last name. Are you sure it's— North? Is that right? Yes, it's right. That isn't a name. Yes, it is. I look exactly like your king, and I can act like him too. Okay, so now we have this guy, this 37-year-old who looks suspiciously like the king.

Joe: Yes.

Abram: Let's see how that plays out.

Joe: It's not spoiling too much to say that Lord North is at least going to put the government on firmer footing. He holds a ministry together for a lot longer. But we'll save those details for our next episode. Let's take a little closer look at the setting as Lord North enters the stage.

The Sun Never Sets

Abram: The sun never sets in Britain.

Joe: The story of Britain in 1770 is a story of an empire growing beyond its borders or ability to control. With money problems at home, and a government that was dramatically unstable. Key decisions about taxes, foreign policy, and the colonies would be set one year and then overturned the next when the new ministry came to power. And while the Seven Years' War will set the apple cart ready to topple, the British Empire and the problems it created at home and abroad were not new. And notice that I consistently say British, because Scotland was incorporated into Great Britain in—

Abram: I'll say if I get paid. 1707.

Joe: Right. Scotland was incorporated into Great Britain in 1707, the third of the constituent realms. And that might seem like it was a happy occasion. After all, their crowns had been joint since James I and—

Abram: VI.

Joe: But it was far from it. When the Jacobites rebelled in 1715 and 1745, they did so with significant Scottish support. Not surprising, because the House of Stuart were the ones they were trying to bring back. And in 1770, these events were well within living memory. The Jacobite and the Scottish boogeymen were never far from thought. And while there had been a Scottish Prime Minister, the Earl of Bute, he was subject to an intense amount of prejudice, which contributed to his inability to stay in power. Scotland in general was an oppressed and half-integrated nation where a few Scottish Lords were permitted to sit with the English in Parliament. But this was a conquered people fighting to not lose their identity. And they knew that they had to fight hard. Wales had been merged with England in— do you know that?

Abram: No, I don't know.

Joe: 1535.

Abram: Oh yeah.

Joe: And by this point in our story, had ceased to be a distinct legal entity. In a broad sense, Wales was England. Ironically, the comparison to Scotland would eventually give Wales the pass to foster its unique cultural roots, but that's going to be a long time coming.

Abram: Does Wales have any representation in Parliament?

Joe: Yes, but no. Wales is England.

Abram: But in like modern Parliament, does Wales have it?

Joe: Yes. Wales got its own Parliament in May 1999.

Abram: Are there Welsh people in the English Parliament?

Joe: By this point in the story, Wales had been integrated fully into the English system, and so that Welsh lords were British lords.

Abram: Okay.

Joe: Just to the west, Ireland was still technically an independent kingdom with a joint crown. Ireland had a parliament, but it was nearly fully controlled from London with no ability to pass laws that were not approved by the British Privy Council. As in Scotland, racism persisted against the Irish locals, but here there was a much larger push towards colonization with plantations set up, especially in Northern Ireland, for English settlers to move to and gradually push out the native and usually Catholic Irish. The division that was sowed by these colonization efforts can still be seen today in the separate territory of Northern Ireland, which is still part of the UK.

Abram: Is there a Northern Irish Parliament?

Joe: Yes, there is a Northern Irish Parliament, which was established in 1998. These are all very new things. The point is that as we enter the 1770s, Britain is in a fragile state. Where troubles at home are always one bad harvest away from boiling over. And when politics is that fragile at home, a crisis abroad doesn't stay over there for very long. Britain's history with Africa was of course worse. Britain didn't have a huge presence on the continent but operated several trading posts, often trading enslaved people, all along the coast, especially Gambia, Senegal, and Ghana. Walking around London in 1770, you are unlikely to see any Black slaves, and few people seem to have been talking about it. Out of sight, perhaps out of mind. But Britain was one of the leaders of the slave trade. They transplanted many thousands of enslaved people out of Africa to work in their colonies, especially in the southern and Caribbean ones where slaves were regretfully very useful for things like sugar plantations. Let me introduce you to someone, Abram. James Somerset.

Abram: James Somerset?

Joe: He was born in Africa, enslaved by the British, and brought to Virginia. There he was purchased by a Scottish merchant and eventually forced to move to Boston.

Abram: We know there. We just walked around there just yesterday.

Joe: Yes. So there he was purchased by a Scottish merchant and eventually forced to move to Boston when the merchant took a job there with the customs office. In 1769, however, that merchant moved back to England and took his slave with him. This triggered a three-year legal battle that resulted in slavery being unenforceable in England, but nowhere else in the British Empire. I hope we can cover more of that during Lord North's episodes. We should not deny how morally compromised the British government was by their African policies. Robert Walpole and several early Prime Ministers had invested in the slave trade, and while the British legal system found it repugnant on their own shores, they actively promoted slavery across their colonial empire.

Abram: Four hypocrites?

Joe: Yes. In India, the situation was a little different. The British East India Company has at this point direct or indirect control over several regions of India, competing with the French and the Dutch. What had once been one of the richest nations on the planet was seeing its culture and wealth siphoned off by European traders. As they did everywhere, British people saw the native population as inferior and exploited the local caste system to legitimize their control.

Abram: The caste system, I know what that is. I learned about it this year.

Joe: Hmm, good. The British taxation and control over the Indian population was callous. 1770 saw a rash of crop failures in the Bengal region. The British refused to lower taxes or help the natives in any systematic way, and that's going to indirectly lead to the famine and the death of millions. The Company will leverage this tragedy to take even greater control over the Indian local governments. Mm-hmm. Britain essentially treated the subcontinent like a profit machine. Depersonalizing the subjugation of a nation by incorporating them into a for-profit company. There's more places we can talk about. Gibraltar was British, for example, and the British were just beginning their adventures in Australia and New Zealand. But let's close out looking at North America.

Abram: Okay.

Joe: In addition to the thirteen American colonies, Britain had captured much of the interior of North America in the Seven Years' War. A territory that now stretched to the Mississippi. They also controlled roughly Ontario and eastward in Canada, the Maritimes, Florida, and lots of islands in the Caribbean. By 1770, the native peoples of North America had been largely pushed away from the coasts. While the American colonists were indifferent or worse to the native population, faraway Britain seemed sympathetic to the natives, establishing a reserve beyond the Appalachian Mountains where the natives could remain and where the Americans were told they would not be allowed to settle.

Abram: That's good. And then in school, don't we act like that's a bad thing? Like the colonists wanted to expand past the Appalachians, and school's like, oh, the British were being mean by not letting them go past the Appalachians and get the expansion that they needed. They were being nice to the natives. I think that I've already sided with the British on this whole war.

Joe: Congratulations. You are about to learn how beautiful it's going to be to have two Americans studying the American Revolution from the British perspective.

Abram: Yeah, and I hope any new people or old people that have listened to this episode in terms of coming here, not like old people and like 80-year-olds, but I hope that you come around and stay with us to learn about the American Revolution, but from the British side.

Joe: Yeah, amen. You're absolutely right. The Americans hated this line. They routinely ignored it, and it was just one more thing on the big pile of reasons they hated the British. And boy, did the Americans have issues with the British. In an effort to pay down the war debts, debts that the British felt they incurred in part to keep the American colonies safe during the Seven Years' War, there had been a sequence of taxes lobbied at the colonies. We usually focus on the colonies that would become the United States, but all of the British colonial possessions suffered similarly. George Grenville's government brought the Stamp Act, which was broadly defeated by the colonists with their cries of "Taxation Without Representation!", not to mention a considerable amount of looting and economic boycotts. Rockingham's government brought the Declaratory Act, which rolled back the taxes but made it clear to the Americans that Parliament had the ultimate control.

Abram: Parliament.

Joe: When Pitt was ill, factions of his government brought the Townshend Acts to bear. A new and worse series of taxes and laws, which were half designed to punish the rowdy colonists. Britain stripped New York of its legislature's power, and when the new taxes were fought by the Boston merchants, Britain landed redcoats to occupy the city and ensure the taxes were being paid. Grafton succeeded in rolling back most of the Townshend Acts during his brief tenure, but one critical tax remained. The tax on tea. And as we arrive in 1770, we find the British government struggling to maintain control of the colonies, struggling to pay down their immense debt, and a king struggling to maintain control of Parliament and his ministers.

Abram: Stay tuned for what's gonna happen next.

Joe: This is where Lord North enters our story. He's a talented politician who's gonna be, at least for a while, able to navigate the three key levers we talked about. He's friends with the king, so that restores some of the monarch's personal power.

Abram: And he looks like him too.

Joe: He does. He has many years of experience working in the Treasury for several governments, making him ideal to solve some of the country's financial woes. And, well, he has opinions about the colonies. We'll get to that later. And that is Britain in 1770. I hope you enjoyed this little recap. I am hard at work prepping for Lord North and the American Revolution, so we will not have a regular episode in two weeks. If all goes well, we'll be posting an interview with Abram and me somewhere around February 21st. Intelligent Speech is February 28th, where I'll be talking about Lord North's special relationship with George III. And as Abram pointed out, they do look pretty similar. You can use coupon code FACTOR to get a discount on admission, and we'll be donating our proceeds to the Save the Manatee Club in Florida.

Abram: That's why Manatee joined us the past few times. Unfortunately, he was unavailable to join us today, but I'm sure he would love to be here.

Joe: That special conference episode will be posted to our feed in a couple of months, but please join us live if you can. We also plan to do a panel with Prime Time. We have a lot to come with Lord North, including a couple of American Revolution specials. So please look forward to that, hopefully coming in March.

Abram: I want to do a sandwich episode which will include two specials about, like, Boston American Revolution things, as well as in the middle a bit more interview. But we're not sure if it's getting through yet. I hope it does. But I think that Dad thinks that there's only one more thing left to do.

Joe: Okay. Well, Abram, there's only one more thing.

Abram: Say goodnight?

Joe: No, not that.

Abram: Say good afternoon?

Joe: Nope. Please say "Picture This."

Abram: Picture This.

Picture This

Joe: It's March 5th, 1770. Word has just come from London that there was a new Prime Minister, Lord North. But on this snowy evening in Boston, that was on absolutely no one's mind.

Abram: Like today? Today's a snowy evening in Boston.

Joe: It is. Who had the king's ear in London had little bearing on the day-to-day struggles of the people here. Our scene opens to church bells and a crowd gathering in one of the central squares of young Boston. The throng assembles outside of the Boston Customs House on King Street, just steps from Faneuil Hall, the Dockside Marketplace, and the Massachusetts Town House. Today, because of the events that will soon unfold, we call this State Street and the Old State House. We push through the crowd, which is becoming more and more agitated as ruffians assemble at the sound of the bell. They taunt and throw snowballs, some laden with rocks or oyster shells, at someone ahead. As we push, we break through the crowd to a panicked scene on the stairs of the Customs House. There, shivering in the cold and fear, stands Private Hugh White, a guard assigned to protect the Customs House, a symbol of British control over the city. The mob cries out for his blood. Several British redcoats have been able to break through the mob and now surrounded White, muskets tipped with bayonets spread out, holding the crowd back as best they could. The British soldiers were outnumbered ten to one as the American mob pressed in closer and closer on the men. They looked for an exit, but there was no way out. They prayed for reinforcements to come to disperse the crowd. Private White was not innocent, not exactly. He was an arrogant British soldier. When he was taunted by a 13-year-old earlier in the day, he struck the boy with the heel of his musket. The Bostonian mob, men and boys, merchants and sailors, miscreants and gentlemen, hardly needed an excuse to hate the British officers that occupied their town and suffocated their port. The church bells kept ringing and the crowd grew larger. Somewhere we hear the sound of shattering glass. The British soldiers did their best to remain calm, but there were too many angry faces. Too many rocks and too many snowballs. A shot rang out and then another. The sound of church bells mingled with the sound of men crying out in agony. This is what it looks like when Parliament's taxes, a king's authority, and an empire's nerves all collide at street level.

Abram: Is that the Boston Massacre?

Joe: Yes.

Abram: So I think it's time for me to say good morning.

Joe: Okay.

Abram: Okay, so good morning.

Produced by radioguru.co.uk.

Join the Discussion: We want to hear your ranking! Find us on BlueSky at @primefactorspod.bsky.social

Support the Show: If you enjoyed our show, please leave us a rating or review on your podcast app. It helps others find us and makes Abram very excited.