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Frederick, Lord North - Thomas Jones

Given the necessities of the times, the prevailing mood of the country, and the configuration of political power in Great Britain, the selection of Frederick, Lord North, as prime minister to His Majesty George in was no surprise. In 1770, when the king was forced to call for a general election, he sought a man who would execute his policies and pull the government together, and he turned to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and eldest son of the first Earl of Guilford. “If you don’t accept,” he informed North, “I have no one else,” and from that moment forward—for twelve destiny-laden years—the management of events was largely in the pudgy hands of a man who gave his master utter subservience and loyalty.

In nearly all respects the creature of his king, North also bore a striking physical resemblance to him. Roundshouldered, fat, with a puffy, sleepy, piglike face and an oversize tongue that thickened his speech, North was hopelessly shortsighted, and his large, bulging eyes, wide mouth, and thick lips gave him what Horace Walpole called “the air of a blind trumpeter.” But within this graceless exterior was a remarkably capable individual—cultured, charming, quick-witted, shrewd, and honest—a man possessing infinite patience, a delightful sense of humor (frequently at his own expense), and an even temper that infuriated his opponents. Of particular value to the king was the fact that he had never headed any political faction nor made powerful enemies, and his conciliatory disposition and mastery of politics enabled him to command a majority in the House of Commons. As a practical matter the cabinet, consisting of George III’s principal ministers, made or approved policy; North presided at meetings, which were conducted weekly over the dinner table at his house unless some emergency demanded quicker action. In order to survive and achieve real stability in that day, an administration had to be led by a politician who held the confidence of the king and the support of Commons, and it was North’s peculiar talent to succeed at both.

By all odds the largest bloc in Commons consisted of independents mostly country gentlemen beholden to no man for their seat or their source of income—and for almost the entire course of the war they formed a solid, silent majority that supported the king and North unquestioningly, enabling the ministry to overwhelm the opposition with ease. Edmund Burke, who so often opposed North and his policies, thought him nevertheless “a man of admirable parts … fitted for every sort of business,” but Burke perceived the fatal flaw in the man: the trouble with North was that “he wanted something of the vigilance and spirit of command that the time required.” North, in short —for all his political dexterity and loyalty to the Crown—had neither the stomach for war nor any real optimism that it could be won. He admitted to this “indolence of temper,” but the king, knowing he had no alternative, clung to him through thick and thin, preferring lethargy and indecisiveness and a man he could dominate to the difficulty of replacing him. At times, under the opposition’s withering criticism, North offered to resign (one such gesture produced the reply by Colonel Isaac Barré that if he found the office so burdensome, thorny, and wretched, the country would happily release him from it, since he had “given the world the most perfect demonstration that he could neither make war, nor establish peace”). Burdened with immense responsibilities, temperamentally unsuited for war, North became more despondent and worn out by his duties as the conflict dragged on. He kept threatening to retire, but no one could tell if he meant it or not, for he always coupled this with the statement that loyalty and a sense of obligation to the king prevented him from abdicating “till the storm had subsided.” But as the years passed and he abandoned hope that a victory or a negotiated settlement would produce a miracle, North buried himself in the routine of departmental work—a gloomy, inaccessible figure, conducting affairs out of sight in order to avoid the problems and crises which exposure would bring.

A the end of the war he had been unable to win, North defended his program in the House of Commons. Denying that it had ever been a war of the Crown, waged against the wishes of the people, he maintained that it was “the war of Parliament,” and thus of the people as a whole. “Nor did it ever cease to be popular,” he reminded the Members, “until a series of the unparalleled disasters and calamities caused the people, wearied out with almost uninterrupted ill-success and misfortune, to call out as loudly for peace as they had formerly done for war.” When news of Yorktown reached him, he took it “as he would have taken a bullet through his breast,” an observer said, agitatedly walking up and down the room repeating, “Oh God! It is all over!” several times. And when in fact he did submit his resignation, his capacity for passive obedience at last exhausted, the king greeted it with reproval and dark threats, treated him as if he were a traitor, and was persuaded only reluctantly to grant North a pension for his untiring but fruitless labors.

After the war North remained in Parliament until his eyesight failed entirely, and there is a glimpse of him, just before his death in 1792, greeting his old Parliamentary adversary, Colonel Barré, in Tunbridge Wells with all the customary charm and wit. Both men were blind, and North remarked, “Well, Colonel, whatever may have been our former animosities, I am persuaded there are no two men who would now be more glad to see each other than you and I.”

To read Thomas Jones’s acerb History of New York during the Revolutionary War is to behold the outward man of the portrait—prim, carping, easily outraged, a nob who looks as though he had sniffed something odious. When he began writing this record in 1783, Judge Jones was prepared to particularize his hates. He was less concerned by then with issues than with people, and he divided his cast of characters into two simple categories: good and bad. Considering the authorship, it is not surprising that the book brims with bile or that rebel sympathizers are represented (to use a few of his phrases) as enemies to monarchy, haters of episcopacy, libellous dissenters, a seditious and rebellious multitude, or simply rabble. Yet Jones was impartial: he had spleen to spare for a legion of bunglers on the other side.

What could one expect, he asked, from a general like Sir Henry Clinton, who was “possessed of so little resolution, such indecision, and such rank timidity” that he was “laughed at by the rebels, despised by the British, and cursed by the loyalists"? Or from Howe, “lolling in the arms of his mistress, and sporting his cash at the faro bank"? As for the British command as a whole, “a fatality, a kind of absurdity, or rather stupidity” had characterized every action they took during the war.

From the time Thomas Jones was born in 1731, he had known the social position and affluence of the fortunate early comer: his grandfather Jones acquired six thousand acres around South Oyster Bay from the Indians, built Long Island’s first brick house at Fort Neck, and was granted the highly lucrative monopoly of whaling and other fisheries off Long Island by the Crown. On the old man’s tombstone was an inscription he had written himself, ending with these hopeful lines: Long May his Sons this Peaceful Spot Injoy, And no Ill Fate his Offspring here Annoy.

Thomas’ mother’s people arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1632 and prospered; his father became speaker of the New York assembly and a justice of the supreme court; and after graduating from Yale in 1750 the son followed him into the law in a manner that smacked of nepotism to Liberty Boys. He married a daughter of James de Lancey, chief justice and lieutenant governor of the province, and in 1773 succeeded his aging father on the bench.

The society to whose orderly maintenance he directed his efforts counted itself civilized—a term implying tranquillity and an absence of savagery. But civilization is a fragile condition: let one element of a community get out of hand and the entire structure may be threatened, as by the furtive onset of a plague. The tradesman encountered on the street last week, all subservience and smiles, wears the face of hate today, and one walks faster, avoiding his eyes and the possibility of contamination. Suddenly the world is all haves and have-nots, each acutely conscious of the other’s personal balance sheet. Fear is the handmaiden of daily life, and people listen for the sound in the night that means the barbarian is at the gate … as the judge and members of his family could testify.

In June, 1776, while the rebel army occupied New York, the provincial assembly had the judge arrested for failing to answer a summons that required him to prove why he “should be considered a friend of the American cause.” He was released on parole, but the warning was clear: something of the sort would occur again. On August 11, with the British threatening to invade Long Island or New York momentarily, Jones was taken into custody and sent for safekeeping to Connecticut, without being charged. Then he was released on parole again. For three anxious years he remained at Fort Neck, theoretically within the protective sphere of the British army but in fact in the no man’s land that existed just outside occupied Manhattan. Then it happened: like a gang of latter-day storm troopers a party of militiamen from Fairfield, Connecticut, broke into his home, disregarded his parole, and abducted him in front of family and guests. After ransacking the house, they took him off to Newfield (now Bridgeport), where he was held for the rest of the winter. It seems they wanted someone of suitable rank to exchange for the militia general Gold Selleck Silliman, a Yale classmate and friend, who had been captured by loyalists.

The terror had struck close to home before then, in 1777. Jones’s niece Elizabeth Floyd was visiting the daughter of the loyalist Oliver de Lancey at his house on upper Manhattan when they heard voices on the grounds and called from a window, “Who is there?” Instantly the house was broken into by rebel soldiers, who struck the women with muskets and began setting the place on fire. As the ladies ran off in their nightdresses Miss Floyd barely escaped being incinerated when a man threw a burning window curtain over her; Miss de Lancey managed to snatch up her brother’s baby from the nursery, and the refugees spent the night in a nearby swamp. Mrs. de Lancey, who was too feeble to run away, hid in a stone dog kennel, from which sanctuary she watched the night raiders burn down her home.

In March, 1781, the judge and his wife, accompanied by Miss Floyd and two servants, sailed for England. His health had deteriorated in prison, and he thought the treatments at Bath might help his rheumatism. He would return, he told friends, as soon as possible. But the end of the war, which he thought would bring peace, brought him no such thing. New York had passed an Act of Attainder, whereby a list of persons charged with “adhering to the enemies of the State” would forfeit not only their property but their lives if they were caught. Thomas Jones was one of those named, and he prudently remained an exile in England until his death in 1792. Before he died, the government to which he had been loyal awarded him £5,447 in compensation, but the sum bore no relationship to the value of what he had lost—two large houses, a huge estate on Long Island, land in New York City and in Westchester, Ulster, Orange, and Tryon counties.

From the judge’s standpoint, the accounting could scarcely be reckoned in pounds, shillings, and pence. He had lost what he valued above all else—his country.

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