At two-thirty a.m. on February 7, the Commons by a vote of 288 to 105 supported North’s proposal to ask the king to declare Massachusetts in rebellion, and to take all measures needed to bring American insurgents to heel. “If they would submit and leave us the constitutional right of supremacy,” North said, “the quarrel would be at an end.” The Lords followed suit, 104 to 29, at one-forty a.m. the following morning. Among new members voting with the Commons majority was an elfin man with a double chin and a squat nose who in his study on Bentinck Street was writing a great saga, the first volume of which would soon be published as The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Few parliamentarians would be as steadfast for the Crown as Edward Gibbon. “We have both the right and the power on our side,” he had told a friend a week earlier. “We are now arrived at the decisive moment of preserving, or of losing forever, both our trade and empire.” Yet few would be as reflective, as when he later conceded, “I took my seat at the beginning of the memorable contest between Great Britain and America, and supported with many a sincere and silent vote, the rights, though not perhaps the interest, of the mother country.” For now, a few hours after casting his vote, Gibbon wrote, “With firmness, all may go well. Yet I sometimes doubt.”
The king had no doubts. Parliament’s resolve “ought to open the eyes of the deluded Americans,” he wrote North on the morning of Wednesday, February 8. “But if it does not, it must set every delicate man at liberty to avow the propriety of the most coercive measures.” Beyond majority votes in both houses, George wanted a theatrical, public display of support. A few hours later, he again wrote North to propose “a large attendance” at St. James’s the next day. Hundreds from the Commons and the Lords were to make the short journey to the palace, as a group, to demonstrate unity. “I therefore hope,” he added, “you will insinuate the propriety of this.”
Shortly before three p.m. on Thursday, braving a blustery wind from the southwest, Parliament picked a path through the willows and poplars of St. James’s Park to the red brick octagonal towers of that “irregular pile,” as one critic described the palace. The London Gazette would report that “there never was known so many of the bishops and peers to attend an address to His Majesty.… There was also the greatest number of commoners ever known on a like occasion.” Not far from the hearth inscribed with the initials of Henry VIII and his doomed queen Anne Boleyn, the king listened as Parliament’s petition was read aloud:
We find that a part of your Majesty’s subjects in the province of the Massachusetts Bay have proceeded so far to resist the authority of the supreme legislature, that a rebellion at this time actually exists.… We consider it as our indispensable duty, humbly to beseech your Majesty that you will take the most effectual measures to enforce due obedience to the laws and authority of the supreme legislature.
George was nearsighted, and some faces around the room were blurry as he read his brief reply, composed with North’s help:
You may depend on my taking the most speedy and effectual measures for enforcing due obedience to the laws.… It is my ardent wish that this disposition may have a happy effect on the temper and conduct of my subjects in America.
Events now moved swiftly. That very day the king ordered several regiments in Ireland to prepare for “foreign service.” On Friday, North introduced another bill, this one to prevent all New England colonies from trading with any foreign nations and to exclude them from the world’s richest fishing grounds, in the North Atlantic. That measure would again muster large majorities. A few days later, Parliament approved hiring another two thousand sailors for the navy; the government also requested money for an extra 4,400 soldiers, with the intention of expanding the army in America to almost 11,000. In recent weeks, the king had considered ousting the military commander there, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, on suspicion of insufficient grit; instead he chose to send three young major generals to stiffen Gage’s spine. He told North to give each an extra £500 before they sailed—“they have behaved so very properly and are so poor.” Whatever Gage’s shortcomings, North knew that nearly all of the forty-five generals senior to him, some in their eighties, lacked the vigor, the experience, or the bloody-mindedness to take command in Boston. “I do not know whether our generals will frighten the enemy,” he supposedly quipped, “but I know that they frighten me.”
Still, the king felt sure of his course. To North he wrote on February 15, at precisely 10:06 a.m.: “I entirely place my security in the protection of the Divine Disposer of All Things, and shall never look to the right or left but steadily pursue the track which my conscience dictates to be the right one.”
For more than three centuries, the Tower of London had issued departing armies the ordnance needed to fight Britain’s expeditionary battles, from field guns and shoulder arms to bullet molds, powder flasks, and musket flints. In the early spring of 1775, the place grew busy again. “Many thousand firearms sent out of the Tower and shipped on board the transports,” a visiting American artist wrote. “Kegs of flints marked ‘Boston’ on each keg, with all the implements of war.” A Tower armory reportedly held eighty thousand stand of arms, “bright and shining.” Visitors could pay four pence to view the “Royal Train of Artillery,” from 6-pounders to 24-pounders, some with new leveling screws for quicker aim and greater accuracy. The train also included 13-inch mortars and “carcass” shells packed with combustibles designed to incinerate enemy towns. New brass cannons filled an adjacent storehouse more than a hundred yards long, with sponges, rammers, handspikes, drag ropes, and other gunnery tools, plus four thousand harnesses for pull teams. Obsolete weapons decorated Tower walls in fantastic sculptures, like the seven-headed hydra constructed from old pistols. Stacked bayonets and ancient firelocks formed a corkscrew pillar twenty-two feet high. The place was a tabernacle of firepower.
Gun shops clustered along the Thames below the Tower walls assembled the flintlock musket known as the Brown Bess. Smiths fitted the barrels and locks, mostly forged in the Midlands from imported Swedish iron, to walnut stocks; they then attached the “furniture”—brass and iron mounts, including triggers and butt plates. Each musket cost one pound, thirteen shillings, plus four pence to prove the barrel and fit a bayonet. Tower officials also tested the potency of gunpowder made in government and private mills. The British appetite for powder was voracious: each foot regiment typically received 42,000 powder charges a year, enough for every soldier to fire 60 to 120 lead balls. That allotment would increase in heavy combat. A single warship of 100 guns might carry 535 barrels, nearly 27 tons; even a small naval sloop could carry 6 tons, more powder than would be found in all the rebel magazines around Boston a few months hence. “Incredible quantities of ammunition and stores shipped and shipping from Tower Wharf for America,” another correspondent reported.
Precisely how this formidable strength should be wielded against America remained in dispute among the king’s men. “A conquest by land is unnecessary,” the secretary at war, Lord William Barrington, had advised in December, “when the country can be reduced first to distress, and then to obedience, by our marine.” That marine—the Royal Navy—might have its own woes, but General Edward Harvey, the adjutant general and the highest army official in Britain, agreed that “attempting to conquer America internally with our land force is as evil an idea as ever controverted common sense.” He added bluntly: “It is impossible.”
The army’s small size fueled this consternation. In 1760, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, Britain had mustered more than 200,000 men, including mercenaries. Now the army’s paper strength had dipped below 50,000—less than a third the size of France’s army—and no more than 36,000 soldiers actually filled the ranks, of whom thousands kept