The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

No one having calculated the expected return from the cider tax, it was not clear how much of the deficit it could make up before resentment would bring down the Government. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was a prominent rake, Sir Francis Dashwood, shortly to succeed as 15th Baron Le Despencer. A founder of the notorious Hellfire Club, which was given to exercises of debauchery in a reconstructed monastery, he was not a competent financier: his knowledge of accounts, said a contemporary, “was confined to the reckoning of tavern bills,” and a sum of five figures was to him “an impenetrable secret.”

The extra importance of high rank was accepted by all classes in the 18th-century world from yeoman to King; the enlightenment of the age did not extend to egalitarianism.

Regard for rank and riches propelled the Marquess of Rockingham and the Duke of Grafton to the premiership and the Duke of Richmond to office as Secretary of State in the 1760s. Rockingham, even when First Minister (the title Premier, though describing the office in fact, was not used), had the greatest difficulty in speaking on his feet, and Grafton complained regularly of feeling unequal to his task.

The cider tax provided the final tumult in unseating the hated Earl of Bute, who was suspected of subverting the King by Tory advocacy of the royal “prerogative.” He resigned in 1763, to be succeeded by Pitt’s brother-in-law, George Grenville. Although the cider tax had clearly failed and was repealed within two years, the Government in its search for revenue was to attempt the same method of taxation in America.

George Grenville, when he assumed the first office at 51, was a serious man, industrious among dilettantes, inflexibly honest among the venal, narrow-minded, self-righteous and pedantic.

George followed the classic path through Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, studied law at the Inner Temple and was admitted to the Bar at 23, entered Parliament at 29 in 1741 for a family borough, which he represented until his death, pursued ministerial rank with the unusual intention of earning it by mastery of the business, served in most of the important offices under the aegis of Pitt, who had married his sister, while he himself had not neglected to marry a sister of the Earl of Egremont, a principal Secretary of State.

This was the pattern of the British minister. They came from some 200 families inclusive of 174 peerages in 1760, knew each other from school and university, were related through chains of cousins, in-laws, stepparents and siblings of second and third marriages, married each other’s sisters, daughters and widows and consistently exchanged mistresses (a Mrs. Armstead served in that role to Lord George Germain, to his nephew the Duke of Dorset, to Lord Derby, to the Prince of Wales and to Charles James Fox, whom she eventually married),

Of some 27 persons who filled high office in the period 1760–80, twenty had attended either Eton or Westminster, went on either to Christ Church or Trinity College at Oxford or to Trinity or Kings at Cambridge, followed in most cases by the Grand Tour in Europe. Two of the 27 were dukes, two marquises, ten earls, one a Scottish and one an Irish peer; six were younger sons of peers and only five were commoners, among them Pitt, the outstanding statesman of the time, and three who through the avenue of the law became Lords Chancellor.

Nepotism and privilege at its worst.

Why did possessors of wealth, privilege and great estate enter government? Partly because they felt government was their province and responsibility. Noblesse oblige had roots in the feudal obligation that originally obliged nobles to serve in the King’s council, and they had long governed as landlords and Justices of the Peace in their home counties.

In the election of 1761, 23 eldest sons of peers entered the House of Commons at their first opportunity after reaching 21, all but two of them under the age of 26.

For another thing, high office offered the means of support for dependent relatives.

Through patronage and connections at court, a minister could take care of his own. Salaried sinecures of rather misty duties were limitlessly available. Sir Robert Walpole, dominant minister of the previous reign, distributed among his three sons, including Horace, the post of Auditor of the Exchange, Usher of the Exchange, and Clerk of the Pells, while two of the sons shared a Collectorship of Customs.

George Selwyn, a fashionable libertine and connoisseur of public hangings, was appointed and served as Registrar to the Court of Chancery in Barbados without his ever gracing the island by his presence.

More than patronage, the lure of power and status has bewitched men of all times and conditions, in comfortable circumstances no less than in needy.

The aristocracy of 18th-century England succumbed to the lure like other men; even the Duke of Newcastle’s fear of office was surmounted, says Horace Walpole, by “his passion for the front rank of power.”

They entered young, were rarely prepared or trained for the tasks, could become restless or bored under difficulties and usually retreated for half the year to the charms of their country homes, their racing stables, hunting fields and adventures in landscaping.

their attitude toward government was less than professional. Indeed the profession of government did not exist; the idea would have shocked those who practiced it. Social pleasures tended to come first; office was attended to in the time remaining.

Lord Shelburne, in whom it was strong, once commiserated with a colleague on how provoking it was to have Lord Camden and the Duke of Grafton “come down [to London] with their lounging opinions to outvote you in the Cabinet.”

Noble circumstances did not nurture realism in government.

When the village of Stowe interfered with the designer’s planned view, all the inhabitants were moved to new houses two miles away and the old village razed, plowed over and planted with trees.

Tastes were not in all cases confined to the outdoors and the clubs. Education at school and university was supposed to have provided a respectable acquaintance with the Latin classics and some Greek, and the continental Grand Tour some acquaintance with the arts, embellished by the purchase of paintings and casts of classical sculpture to bring home. The Tour usually included Rome, which seems not to have greatly changed since the times of the Renaissance popes.