Prime Factors - Ranking UK Prime Ministers

11.3 - Frederick North, Lord North (Part 2) - "The Good Years"

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11.3 - Frederick North, Lord North (Part 2) - "The Good Years"

Episode Transcript

Abram: Welcome to Prime Factors. This week, Frederick North, Part 2.

Parliament: Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!

Frederick North (Part 2)

Abram: Hello and welcome back to Prime Factors. I'm Abram and I'm here with my dad. We are reviewing all the British Prime Ministers from Robert Walpole to Keir Starmer. This is Episode 11.3, Frederick North, Part 2.

Joe: We hope you enjoyed our Boston Massacre special. It was a lot of fun to put together, even if the content got a little bit dark.

Abram: Bad, dad.

Joe: But this week we're back across the Atlantic to continue the life and premiership of Frederick North, Lord North. We're going to be looking at his so-called good years from January 1770 to February 1774. Before we get to a Boston Tea Party special.

Abram: Yay, they threw a party and invited all the tea!

Joe: After this, we don't know if Lord North will have one more episode, or if we're gonna divide the domestic politics from the war, or something else. Abram, what's your opinion?

Abram: It's not fun for me to get off of track unless it's about the Beatles.

Joe: So we'll probably try to end Frederick North with the next episode, although we will have some Boston Massacre specials.

Abram: Don't forget, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and at www.primefactorspodcast.com. Also on Facebook and BlueSky. If you enjoy listening, please like, subscribe, comment, and review.

Abram: And please check out Prime Factors Music, my new music podcast currently discussing, reviewing the Beatles. They're available wherever you get this podcast or at primefactorsmusic.com.

Joe: Thank you, Abram. Will you do the honors?

Picture This

Joe: The date is June 4th, 1770, and our scene opens on a rocky beach. A small group of children are playing near the shore. It's far too cold for a swim, but they're having fun throwing stones into the water and arguing who can throw the farthest.

Joe: The landscape is treeless and hilly. Just a few hundred yards behind the children, you can make out a small colonial village, but one clearly in an early stage of development. A few houses have been built and the start of a palisade, but many of the houses resemble little more than huts along what one day might become a street.

Joe: In the distance, Fort George looms, also incomplete. From the village, a cry rings out. The children look up from their playing and watch as a warship appears in the harbour. Then another. And another. Their cannon ports are open and their guns are visible.

Joe: The ships advance menacingly towards the settlement. Parents gather up their children and flee to the blockhouse, a wooden fortification inside the settlement. As they race up towards the shore towards their village, the children disturb a resting flock of gentoo penguins.

Abram: Mmm! They're the fastest penguins in the world. They can go up to 36 miles per hour and are speedy little guys. They squawk and trumpet menacingly. Squawk!

Joe: But the children pay no attention in their rush to get to safety from the approaching ships. This is not a cold beach in New England. This is not Massachusetts or Maine or even Nova Scotia.

Abram: Well, Dad, if you— there's penguins there. How could it be in the north?

Joe: Exactly. The warships approaching are not British.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: They're Spanish.

Abram: Dun dun dun!

Joe: The children race past incomplete buildings and piles of bricks and lumber unloaded but yet to be put to use. This settlement is so new it barely has a name. They call it Jason's Town, named for the ship that some of them had come on, and itself a reference to the ancient Jason who searched for the Golden Fleece. But history will know this town by another name. The name of its harbor, Port Egmont.

Joe: We're in the far northwest corner of the Falkland Islands, in the cold South Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Patagonia.

Joe: The town and its garrison, just over 100 soldiers and Marines, laborers and specialists, plus wives and children, was no match for the force entering the harbor. The Spanish brought 1,400 men, 27 cannons, and 5 warships. The British had only an incomplete fortification, a handful of cannons, and only one working ship after the second had been destroyed during a winter storm.

Joe: For several days, the two sides stared each other down, with the children taking refuge with their scared families. On June 10th, the Spanish landed.

Joe: There was no question how this would end, and neither side wanted a massacre. The British fired their guns. The Spanish fired theirs. Neither side hit anything. Honor had been satisfied, and the British surrendered to the overwhelming force.

Joe: The colonists and soldiers were held prisoner on the island to allow Spanish ships a head start to deliver the news of the conquest to Spain. After 20 days, the British colonists were permitted to board the remaining ship called the Favourite, and sail for home.

Joe: They would soon deliver the message to London that Spain had seized Port Egmont. Britain was at an uneasy peace with Spain, but when the government finds out, honor will dictate one thing: there will be consequences. Abram, what did you think of that?

Abram: Spa!

Joe: Okay, I have to know. Did you at least think it was in Massachusetts until the penguins showed up?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: I was trying to make it like a surprise. It's a penguin!

Abram: I didn't expect it to be in the Falkland Islands.

Joe: Ah, I win.

Abram: Squawk!

A Brief Recap

Joe: Abram, what do you remember of Frederick North so far?

Abram: Nothing.

Joe: Nothing.

Abram: We did too many specials.

Joe: All right, so I'll recap briefly then.

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: Frederick North is the son of Francis North, the Earl of Guilford, although there's a longstanding rumor that he's really the half-brother of George III. And he grew up as part of the future king's household, kinda, and they knew each other pretty well.

Abram: Oh yeah.

Joe: As an adult, North was a boring but competent leader in the Treasury who gradually took on new responsibilities. As the political crises of the 1760s toppled government after government. He served through Grenville, resigned in protest over Rockingham, and returned for William Pitt the Elder and Grafton. Is any of this, like, ringing a bell?

Abram: Hmm, some.

Joe: By the end of Grafton's short tenure, Lord North had become the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the leader of the House of Commons, in a government that managed to score negative points. Do you remember Grafton scoring negative points?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: Lord North was the only adult left in the room when Grafton's government fell. And so George III asked his old friend to become the next Prime Minister, and North reluctantly accepted.

Joe: And then meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the last special, the American colonies are increasingly incensed by the Townshend duties. Anti-taxation group called the Sons of Liberty organized demonstrations and mob violence against the hated taxes.

Joe: And after John Hancock's ship, the Liberty, was seized for smuggling, the Crown-appointed governor of Massachusetts requested help from Britain, which arrived in the form of troops. Two regiments arrived and suffocated the city, but they could not put out Boston's rebellious spirit. Violence followed, most notably the March 1770 death of several civilians known today as the Boston Massacre.

Joe: Abram, in terms of characters for this episode, we're gonna largely follow two members of North's family. Who? I don't even wanna say it.

Abram: What?

Joe: William Legge.

Abram: William Legge! William Legge!

Joe: The Earl of Dartmouth is North's stepbrother and the man that once traveled Europe with him. And throughout their lives, it has been Dartmouth that has been the fortunate one, and he is still far richer. But North's political career has blossomed while Dartmouth's has not.

Joe: And we'll also talk about Francis North, Frederick North's dad, and he's the Earl of Guilford. He's controlling, and despite the fact that his son is now Prime Minister, he like doesn't give him any money and tries to control him. And we're not gonna see that too much this time, but North always tries to please his father. And never quite seems to do it. So let's get on with his premiership.

Prime Minister North

Joe: On January 28th, 1770, Frederick North became Prime Minister. By our count, he's the 11th, but that doesn't include Newcastle getting 2 terms or the very brief runs of Bath and Waldegrave.

Joe: Although the role had been well established by this point, Lord North came in with a very different idea of what Prime Minister was than most of his predecessors. He was there to serve the Crown, not be an independent leader. George III needed him to stabilize a government that had faced a run of short-lived prime ministers pretty much since the moment he took the throne.

Joe: North was tasked with reversing the disorganization that had broken Grafton and to get enough of the Whig factions aligned that they could pass bills through the Commons. Lord North didn't really want to be there, but he was happy to serve the King.

Abram: Yay! Happy guy!

Joe: Lord North insisted, at least initially, that he was becoming the First Lord of the Treasury and not the Prime Minister. His daughter wrote later, quote, "He would never allow us to call him Prime Minister, saying there's no such thing in the British Constitution." Despite his protests, history unambiguously sees him as the Prime Minister during this era. He can't get around it.

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: To implement the King's agenda, North's initial priorities would be resolving the longstanding national debt, smoothing out relations with the colonies, and helping the King deal with whatever else came his way. And perhaps because he didn't really see himself as the Prime Minister, he initially made no changes to Grafton's cabinet.

Joe: Factionalism was a huge problem for the Whigs at this moment, and while Grafton headed the Chatham faction after Pitt's illness, his government was increasingly under control of the Bedford faction. Former Prime Ministers Grenville and Rockingham also commanded sizable factions.

Joe: In fact, North's first real test came from the Grenville faction in the form of an electoral reform bill. Do you remember, Abram, we talked about this in Grenville's episode?

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: It was like the one thing we gave him points for at the very end of the episode.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: He's like, he didn't accomplish anything as Prime Minister, but then he did this bill later. Anyway, he wanted to strike down the corrupt system that allowed the government to control electoral disputes, right? So Robert Walpole and his successors had basically used disputes as a way to hold onto seats that might be competitive, basically saying, we contest the election, and then having a lawsuit, and then that lawsuit would go to the Whigs, and then the Whigs would say, oh, we win, right?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: Doesn't seem very fair, does it?

Abram: It really doesn't.

Joe: Well, Grenville said it wasn't fair, so he set up this thing, would make a commission to judge these cases. And that commission would at least in theory be more fair. And what do you think North thought about this? I mean, North is an upstanding guy. He hates financial corruption.

Abram: He likes this?

Joe: No, he hates this.

Abram: Why?

Joe: Because he's like, I don't want anyone to take away my power. I'm against corruption, but this isn't corruption. This is just—

Abram: They're taking my power.

Joe: Exactly.

Abram: Boo-hoo.

Joe: So North actually loses this and Grenville's bill passes, but it's only temporary. But to make it permanent, there's going to be another pass of this bill. Then we'll get to that story when we get to 1774.

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: We now know that while North was settling in, Boston was exploding. He didn't know yet that in March troops would be relocated to an island in the harbor. And local tax collection would be blunted. But even before he knew what was happening, Lord North was already moving to find compromises with the American colonists. He would soon need to answer the question: was he a friend to America?

A Friend to Trade, A Friend to America

Joe: The Townshend Acts had been passed in the chaotic months between when William Pitt had his medical crisis— Do you remember that?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: Oh, good.

Abram: He was sick.

Joe: And when Grafton took full control of the administration, they represented a shining moment when Charles Townshend seemed to be the one taking the reins of government. But guess what? What happened to him? He died.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: Just a few weeks later. Those acts increased taxes on the colonies, punished the New York colonial legislature for fighting back, implemented a more efficient taxing apparatus in the colonies— Oh wait, you said don't say apparatus anymore.

Abram: Why?

Joe: I don't remember, but you were mad at me for using that word.

Abram: Why?

Joe: I don't know. Maybe ask Abram.

Abram: Squawk!

Joe: Not only were taxes higher, they were much more forceful in collecting them. And when Grafton took control, he actually started the process of repealing that act, but his government fell before it was completed, and it was up to Lord North to finish the job when he took office.

Joe: William Pitt, now fully recovered, pushed for a full repeal. Rockingham agreed with him, and Grenville's posture was more nuanced, and some hardliners in the Bedford faction, well, they wanted no change at all.

Joe: And in one of history's great coincidences, Thomas Pownall, the former colonial governor of Massachusetts and now an MP, participated in the debate on the bill on March 5th, 1770. The same day as the Boston Massacre.

Joe: He knew more than anyone there how life worked in the colonies and the spirit of the people of Massachusetts. In fact, several years before, he wrote something called The Administration of the Colonies, a book describing what he had seen in America and the risks that Britain was taking by not treating Americans as fully British.

Joe: If there was a British expert on America, it was him.

Abram: It was who?

Joe: Thomas Pownall, the former colonial governor of Massachusetts.

Abram: Oh.

Joe: He had some interesting ideas for how he would want to fix the problem. Do you wanna hear what they were?

Abram: Yes.

Joe: So he advocated for an imperial parliament, this idea that Britain and the colonies would be more equal and have the colonies have representatives and Britain have representatives, and they would all come together in this empire parliament that would be somehow distinct or separate from what was in Westminster.

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: He was also, by the way, good friends with Benjamin Franklin. And he was generally pro-America, pro-colonies, but he wanted the colonies to take a larger part in British life. Do you think they would have done that if they would have had an imperial parliament with the colonies having seats and Britain having seats and Scotland having seats and India having seats and all these other places? Do you think that could have prevented the revolution?

Abram: I don't know.

Joe: But the key thing is, he told Parliament that they didn't understand the colonies. Despite being, in some cases, generations removed from being born in Britain, the colonists still regarded themselves as British and they held on to British rights. He argued that colonial taxation was never gonna be accepted in America and that the full Townshend Act should be repealed.

Joe: Lord North responded that he just wanted everyone to get along. He said, quote, "I wish for harmony, but I see no prospect of obtaining it." And later adding, quote, "I wish to be thought what I really am, to the best of my conviction, a friend to trade, a friend to America."

Joe: But Lord North also saw the issue as being one of honor, right, Abram?

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: Even the idea that the colonies might push back was a part of the problem, saying, quote, "No authority was ever confirmed by the concession of any point of honor or point of right." And with this framing, Lord North was not going to repeal the full act because that would be giving up.

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: Instead, North returned to Grafton's compromise. Keep a tax on tea, but remove everything else. The honor of both the colonies and Britain, that would be satisfied by that, right?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: And Britain would still have the precedent that they could tax and the colonies would be happy. And how important is a tax on tea anyway?

Joe: The repeal received royal assent on April 12th, and perhaps surprisingly, the conditions in the colonies settled. With the repeal of the acts, the Sons of Liberty saw interest wane in their cause. They couldn't keep the mob angry when the taxes were lower, and the remaining tax on tea was not sufficient for most to continue the boycott. By the end of 1770, the boycott was all but over. And most of the merchants had returned to trade as usual. The revolution almost fizzled out.

Joe: There was still sporadic violence. In 1772, for example, a British revenue ship called the Gaspee was attacked by patriots after it had run aground near Providence, Rhode Island. The ship was looted and burned, its commander wounded. But events like that were few and far between compared to the bloodshed of the previous years.

Joe: But there was still an undercurrent of anger. The Sons of Liberty adapted their approach. They formed committees of correspondence between the colonies, and they organized for future mass action. But for now at least, their impact was blunted.

Joe: It would take a few missteps from the British government to light the match again in December 1773. I wonder what happened then.

Abram: Some guys dressed as natives throw big things of tea into the ocean?

Joe: Yeah, something like that.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: But it looked, at least for a time, like Frederick North had saved the British Empire. Yay! But south of these colonies, a new colonial crisis was brewing off the coast of Patagonia.

Abram: Squawk!

The Falklands Crisis

Joe: We made it to our Picture This scene, but let me provide a little bit more background for our narrative.

Abram: Okay.

Joe: You know this, Abram, but maybe our listeners don't. Actually, why don't I ask you, Abram, where are the Falkland Islands?

Abram: Near Argentina.

Joe: Right. Do you know what they're called?

Abram: The Falkland Islands.

Joe: Yes. But do the islands themselves have names? Uh, they're very boring names.

Abram: Uh, Robert and Steve. Aw, they're not named Robert and Steve.

Joe: So there's two big islands. Called West Falkland and East Falkland.

Abram: Those are so creative names.

Joe: But there's many other smaller islands surrounding those. The islands are cold. They have no native trees.

Abram: Unless you're a penguin.

Joe: And were a difficult place to live in that area, and well, for a long time after. Just calling them the Falklands reflects our British bias. In Spanish, the islands are Islas Malvinas. And there's a lot of difficult history surrounding the Falklands and strong opinions.

Abram: We'll get to that in like 5 years.

Joe: Yeah, we'll get to that. We definitely will.

Abram: Stay tuned.

Joe: Although there is some evidence of pre-European visitors, the data is disputed, and there was no native population when the Europeans first visited the islands in the 1600s.

Abram: That means they can't do bad things to natives there.

Joe: Well, there weren't any natives to kick out.

Abram: So wait. That means it wasn't exactly wrong to colonize that area.

Joe: Yeah.

Abram: For— reasonable for them to colonize there. Glad they didn't have to kick anyone out.

Joe: Yeah.

Abram: So in a way, are the colonizers the natives?

Joe: I think that's going a little far, but for our story, we care most about the near simultaneous colonization of the islands by the French on East Falkland in 1764 and the British on West Falkland in 1765. Although both sides claimed the entire island group. Spain also claimed the entire island group, and they actually persuaded the French to just give us your colony in 1767. And this is where things get complicated.

Abram: Let me guess, the British refused. So yes, there's our Picture This.

Joe: The British colony was primarily a military one. Unlike the North American colonies, there was very little reason to be there. Britain wasn't having a wave of emigration at the time. There wasn't any gold. There was no good farmland, no trees.

Abram: But there were penguins.

Joe: The real purpose was to establish a beachhead in the South Atlantic and help control access to the Pacific. Britain claimed them and established a fort and a small town. One population report I found said 50 soldiers, 30 men, 3 women, and 2 kids. Another report said 9 women and 11 children. Regardless, we're talking about a settlement that was almost entirely military with a limited civilian structure and with a small number of the men bringing their wives and children with them.

Joe: In 1770, a Spanish commander visited this ragtag settlement. And I say visited, but I want to say discovered because it wasn't clear where the English colony was. Like, Spain didn't know. So when the commander visited, he basically marked the pin on his map. He told about that pin to his superiors in Buenos Aires and then returned in June with a force of 5 warships and 1,400 troops.

Abram: Uh-oh.

Joe: The tiny British settlement, well, it had only 1 ship and few defenses, so they surrendered, as we discussed. The Spanish were not looking for unnecessary bloodshed, so they allowed the British to leave after taking things of value and forcing them to wait. So that the news could reach Spain first.

Joe: And as we already discussed with the America question, Lord North cared a lot about honor. And so it was a scandal that the Spanish had just conquered a British colony. Grafton, you might remember, had lost Corsica, which was a proxy, not a colony, to the French.

Abram: Dad?

Joe: What?

Abram: I don't think it's no one can fight like Grafton. I think it's no one can fight as poorly as Grafton. Do you think so? Yes. He's the first one to get negative points, right?

Joe: Yes.

Abram: He's bad.

Joe: So the point was Britain didn't want to lose even more influence, but Lord North also didn't really care about the colony at all. And it was so close to the Spanish South American coast that it would be pretty much impossible to defend.

Joe: War with Spain was an option, but not a good one. France would almost certainly join in. You know, they still had that Bourbon Compact. And Britain, frankly, was in no position to repeat the Seven Years' War, least of all over an island with more penguins than people.

Abram: Squawk!

Joe: Only the hardline Bedford faction really wanted a military altercation over this at all. Instead, North sought a creative approach which would allow both sides to save face. Not all of his cabinet agreed. Weymouth, his Southern Secretary, resigned over it.

Joe: But the approach was subtle. So listen to this, Abram.

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: Lord North would act as if the Falklands were not taken by Spain. Instead, it was a rogue action by the Spanish governor of Buenos Aires. He didn't have permission to do that. And so by telling it to the Spanish king, King Charles III of Spain, that gave him an opportunity to back down.

Joe: Like, King Charles III could say, oh yeah, I didn't really order your colony to be invaded. That's this guy in Buenos Aires. He did it on his own. In return, North made hints that Britain really didn't care to keep the colony on the Falklands after all. And, you know, we're just going to abandon it soon. This would give Spain a victory of a sort while also providing cover at home that Spain really didn't conquer the territory. We just didn't want it.

Abram: They didn't want enough to really defend against the rogue action.

Joe: Yeah, it was a subtle dance. And some of the details differ in the telling, but my favorite part of the story is a meeting with a French ambassador in December 1770. And I almost made this the Picture This, but quite frankly, I just wanted penguins.

Abram: Squawk!

Joe: Britain really cared about how France was going to react and was very fearful of a French-Spanish alliance because they didn't think they could get into a war and win. But France did not believe that Britain would abandon the colony. And so Lord North was meeting with the ambassador to discuss it.

Joe: And I don't know whether what I'm about to tell you is real or not, but it was reported by the French, so I think it's probably true. So North invited them to a meeting, Abram, 9:00 PM. And guess what? North was having a dinner meeting with Lord Sandwich.

Abram: Lord Sandwich.

Joe: Just before. And you know, they accidentally got really, really drunk. Abram is miming eating the table, which I don't understand.

Abram: Drunk.

Joe: Drunk people eat tables?

Abram: They think they can.

Joe: Okay, I'll take your word. The point is that the French ambassador shows up for this meeting. Lord North is completely drunk. But guess what? He still tells the French that he doesn't care about the islands. And the French say, aha, he says the same things when he's drunk as when he's sober. Therefore, he must mean it. And the French allowed the secret deal to proceed.

Joe: It's an amazing story. It's probably one of those stories that's so amazing, it's too good to be true. But I like that it shows a shrewdness in Lord North that we don't normally see.

Joe: The deal was set: Spain would back down, blame the whole thing on an overzealous South American governor, Britain would abandon the colony anyway. Notably, Britain did not agree to renounce their claim, but a claim with no colony was a much less urgent problem for Spain.

Joe: Port Egmont was re-established in 1771, but then abandoned as part of that secret deal in 1774. They left behind a plaque marking the territory as British, and then sailed away.

Joe: As you would expect about secret deals, history is a little murky here. And one of my sources that I was reading said there's no deal, just three countries really trying not to go to war with each other over penguins. And Britain abandoned the colony in 1774 because they needed to shift troops for the problems in North America.

Joe: In any event, the Spanish colony remained on East Falkland until 1811, when it too was abandoned during the Napoleonic Wars, and they left behind their own marker to say that the islands were claimed by Spain. Argentina claimed to inherit that claim.

Abram: Like, around the same time, right?

Joe: Well, when they became independent. Do you know when they became independent?

Abram: 1821, I'm guessing?

Joe: 1816. Good guess.

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: We won't see the next chapter in this story until Palmerston, I think. And then British and Argentinian claims are going to come into conflict. But that was two major diplomatic successes in just a few years. This Lord North guy—

Abram: He's really good.

Joe: He's doing pretty well.

Abram: And that'll never change. Once he gets the colonies down, he'll probably be a known and one of our best prime ministers.

Meanwhile in London

Joe: There's a couple more things that was going on in London that I'd be remiss not to mention. First, there was something called the Printers Crisis of 1771. A different podcast could probably spend a whole episode on this, but in short, newspapers were becoming a bigger and bigger deal in London, and so was the expectation that parliamentary proceedings would be documented in the newspapers.

Joe: Reporters would sit in the galleries and write about what went on in Parliament, often in fanciful or coded ways, because there were laws, Abram, to prevent talking about what actually happened in Parliament. As you might expect, John Wilkes, remember him?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: He was at the center of this and he was actually Sheriff of London at the time. So remember, this is the guy that was like in prison for a long time and had the printing press that got raided by Grenville.

Joe: Long story short, several reporters were arrested. Even the Lord Mayor of London was put in the Tower of London. So I guess he was the Lord Mayor of the Tower of London. Because he supported the printers. Popular support was with the journalists, and a mob even assaulted Lord North's carriage on the way to Parliament one day.

Joe: North took a pragmatic approach. The government technically won the case, but never again asserted its rights to not have parliamentary procedures public. And over the following decades, Parliament's actually going to start publishing their own records.

Joe: We already talked about the second in our "Britain in 1770" episode. Remember, there was James Somerset, a Black slave from America freed by a British court, which limited slavery in Britain. And the details of this case are subtle and complicated, but the important thing I want to add here is the case sent shockwaves through the southern American colonies, who suddenly began to fear that an English court far away might take away their right to enslave people.

Abram: That's good.

Joe: And that is one more grievance on the pile that would eventually send the southern colonies into revolt. So you got the northern colonies and they cared about trade and the southern colonies cared about slaves.

Abram: Trade and slaves.

Joe: And other things too. But overall, things were going pretty well.

An Able and Good Minister

Joe: For all that we hear about Lord North as a terrible politician, he seems to have done pretty well so far.

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: The History of Parliament writes this about North: Quote, "His first year in office had been a triumph of coolness, courage, and determination, and he had revealed qualities of leadership that few had expected."

Joe: A contemporary letter wrote, quote, "Lord North bids fairer for making an able and good minister than any man we've had in a great while."

Joe: And he was bringing together some of the Whig factions. When George Grenville died in November 1770, many of his supporters joined North.

Joe: Even William Pitt warmed to him, saying, quote, "This tenure seems to be a good one," and, "He serves the Crown more successfully and more sufficiently than any other man." I bet that you thought this was going to be another Grafton and he was just going to suck, right?

Abram: Yeah. Well, he doesn't.

Joe: Yet.

Abram: Huh? Don't spoil anything.

Joe: As a reward for good service, North was made the Ranger of Bushy Park, a job that entailed no actual work but gave him a mansion at the park. And North would actually reserve his weekends to spend time at the park with his family and closest friends. He had daughters at this point, probably a wonderful place for them to spend time with their father. He liked a work-life balance. He insisted on leaving for the weekends.

Abram: That means you must like him because—

Joe: Because I have no work-life balance. We hear about him building a skittles ground, which is a game somewhat like bowling.

Abram: Okay, he didn't like Skittles, the candy.

Joe: Well, they didn't know about that yet.

Abram: Oh.

Joe: But he could play bowling with his family and friends. In June 1772, he was made a Knight of the Garter.

Abram: Knight of undies!

Joe: And would afterwards be called or teased in the House of Commons, the noble lord in the blue ribbon. Because you gotta wear a blue ribbon when you're a Garter.

Abram: Huh.

Joe: He's only the second MP to receive that honor after Robert Walpole. This was almost unheard of, an honor for a commoner, and reinforced the special relationship between North and George III. And I guess if you're looking for a sign that maybe he's really an illegitimate royal, you can look at it here. But also, Robert Walpole got it, so it's not really that strong of a sign.

Joe: He was made the Chancellor of Oxford University in 1772. And even his brother Dartmouth is back into his professional life, having agreed to be the Colonial Secretary, or the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in August 1772. This was a relatively new position, so for a couple of years there's now 3 secretaries: Northern, Southern, and Colonial.

Joe: He even managed to find a job for his dad, who was made the Treasurer to Queen Charlotte.

Joe: In other business, the economy of Britain was improving. With his focus on the Treasury, North was able to bring the budget under control, reduce the national debt, and improve the financial health of the country.

Joe: North also helped to restructure the economy of the East India Company, but I'm gonna not talk about that today and save that for our Tea Party episode. Everything will connect, but just be aware that he's using his financial experience to have a wide impact across the empire.

Joe: And he even proved his control of the Commons by passing an extremely unpopular Royal Marriages Act. It's too soap opera to get into, but George III's brothers had married lowborn women, and it was a bit of a scandal, so the act essentially prevented any more princes from marrying without permission. This was generally seen as not really the business of Parliament, but it made George III happy, so North did it.

Je Me Souviens

Joe: Everything seemed to be going well. But circumstances would start to change.

Joe: As we wrap up Lord North's early premiership, I'm gonna be a little loose with the timeline for narrative simplicity. When decisions were made isn't the same as when they were implemented, but 3 threads would come together at the end of 1773 and the beginning of 1774 that was gonna set up the more difficult remaining time in office.

Joe: The first, of course, is the attempt to stabilize India, and that leads to the Tea Party. And we'll talk about that next time.

Joe: The second of these is the Quebec Act, and some American sources call this one of the Intolerable Acts or the Coercive Acts, but it actually was separate. It happened before, and it was even being discussed before the Boston Tea Party. But for Britain, this act ensured that Quebec and Canada broadly would remain loyal during the revolution.

Joe: In short, the Quebec Act expanded the borders of Quebec south and west to incorporate the land that had been French prior to the Seven Years' War. This included much of what today is Ontario and Quebec, but also the Great Lakes region, the Ohio River. It directly conflicted with claims from New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Virginia.

Abram: By Connecticut, do you mean the weird Pennsylvania thingy?

Joe: Yes, yes, the Western Reserve. Even my hometown of Pittsburgh would have been part of, or at least on the border with, Quebec.

Abram: Do you speak French?

Joe: No.

Abram: Did you learn French?

Joe: No, not really. Je parle français un petit peu.

Abram: You're required to speak in French for the rest of the episode.

Joe: Ah, no.

Abram: Ah.

Joe: So the point is, the Ohio River would have been like the new border between Quebec and the English colonies. And maybe Pittsburgh would even have had to been renamed Duquesne again. Probably not.

Joe: In this special region, French culture and laws would be permitted to sit alongside British ones. Freedom of worship would be guaranteed for Roman Catholics. Catholic churches could collect tithes, which are a little bit like religious taxes, to help with upkeep. Catholics were allowed to hold public office. And in short, Britain agreed to govern the former French regions with a soft hand without forcing them to become British.

Abram: So essentially took over an area, but it's allowing them to stay Catholic.

Joe: Exactly. And this is one of the reasons that Quebec even today has a unique French culture and administration.

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: This is not to say that it was fully fair. Britain prevented the colony from electing their own leaders, instead appointing a council to lead them. But it might have been as much because of their fear of local legislatures as it was a fear of Roman Catholics.

Joe: The British colonies hated this bill, as they saw it granting lands to the former French colonies that they had wanted for themselves. New York, New England, and the others saw it as an attack on their borders, possibly as a punishment. Protestants saw the acceptance of Roman Catholics as a threat to their own religion.

Joe: Like, this bill upset a bunch of people, but it really did not upset the people that lived in the former French part of the territory.

Joe: This act is an essential moment in the creation of Canada, and it is cited as one reason why the northern territories did not rebel against the British during the coming revolution, as well as another reason why the middle colonies would benefit from revolting.

Joe: In this construction, while Frederick North will eventually lose America, maybe he deserves credit for saving Canada. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Joe: Back in Britain, a domestic squabble was threatening to topple his administration. George Grenville's hated electoral reform was back on the menu. And that's the third and final thread that's just beginning to unravel.

No Exit

Joe: On December 16th, 1773, the Boston Tea Party happened. We'll talk about that in detail soon. But news was slow to cross the Atlantic, and North faced one more crisis before the full impact of the Tea Party was evident.

Joe: In February 1774, George Grenville's old election integrity bill was brought up. Not just for renewal, but to make it permanent. North had fought against it at the beginning of his term and lost, but the intervening years it had only become more popular. Public and political opinion was in favor of the reform, even if George III wasn't.

Joe: Reform was so popular that Lord North's own father voted against him to enact the reform in the House of Lords. It seems like a small thing, but for North, it might have felt like a betrayal.

Abram: What about William Legge?

Joe: You know, I don't know. I assume that he voted against it. Dartmouth could have been in the House of Lords and voted, but I didn't see how he voted on this.

Abram: Oh.

Joe: So defeated by this bill, Lord North did for the first time what is going to become a repeated pattern for him over his entire administration. He offered to resign.

Abram: Don't leave!

Joe: But George III did not accept his resignation. Was he serious? Was he posturing? We don't know. But I can't help but wonder if Lord North didn't realize that he was trapped. His friend George III might never let him leave.

Joe: If Lord North had resigned there at the beginning of 1774, we might even have had the story of a successful, a capable Prime Minister. He helped to ensure Canada's loyalty, prevented a war with Spain, brought the love lives of royalty under control, improved the British economy, restored stability to a role that had barely seen a minister survive more than a year for a decade. He was, as William Pitt had even been forced to admit, a very good administrator.

Joe: If his premiership had ended here, history might see Lord North a little differently.

Abram: I agree.

Joe: But the tea was already in the harbor and Lord North had perhaps lost his last chance for an exit. And we'll get to what happened with him and his legacy in our next two episodes.

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

Joe: Next time, Abram, we will return to Boston and attend a little tea party before following North to the American Revolution.

Abram: Okay.

Joe: Abram, what did you think of Lord North?

Abram: He's a great prime minister.

Joe: Isn't that surprising?

Abram: Yeah.

Joe: Like, how did that happen?

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: I don't know, but I am glad that we got a chance to review him because all I've ever heard is that he screwed up the revolution, but he apparently did other things too.

Abram: This has been Prime Factors. I'm Abram and I'm here with my dad. Don't forget that you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and at primefactorspodcast.com. Also on Facebook and BlueSky. If you enjoy listening, please like, subscribe, comment, and review.

Joe: Just one more thing is left. Say goodnight, Abram.

Abram: Ad libs closing.

Bibliography

Joe: After the last episode got a little dark, I took pains to make this one more fun. Frederick North is going to have a lot of challenges in his near future, but he had a couple successful years which are frequently overlooked in telling his story. And I'm really especially proud of the penguin reveal.

Joe: Abram and I went through a penguin phase a couple years ago, and we visited a lot of aquariums and zoos. We've seen 9 distinct penguin species and a couple subspecies. We tried to visit wild ones in New Zealand but failed. So, I knew some surprise gentoo penguins would be a great treat and something to make up for a very dark Picture This last time.

Joe: The Falklands are actually home to one of the largest gentoo penguin populations on the planet, as well as a couple of other species. So maybe we'll go there someday. Probably not.

Joe: Speaking of the Falklands topics, I supplemented what was already in North's biographies with Falklands Wars: 1700 to 1850, A Concise Narrative History by Roger Laurton, second edition published in 2022. This is a self-published book, and it's not really that afraid to show a pro-British bias, but it's been a great source for some of the details, and I've tried to use its content very carefully. I know this is a fraught area of British history, and I don't know where the mines are, so I'm gonna be— well, I hope I was adequately careful.

Joe: Otherwise, I broadly stuck to the same biographies of North that I used last time: Lord North: The Prime Minister Who Lost America by Peter Whiteley, written in 1996, and Lord North by Reginald Lucas, published in 1913.

Joe: I also still have my North by North book, but I don't think I used anything from there in this episode.

Joe: Next time should be the Tea Party episode. I have new books arriving tomorrow for that, and I cannot wait. And then we'll see what happens after that. See you next time.

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