Following the prorogation of Parliament at the end of Mary 1775, the situation changed for the worse, as news of the armed confrontation at Lexington and Concord in April reached Britain. Following that, reports of Britain’s bloody pyrrhic victory in June at Bunker Hill (Charlestown) arrived in London on 25 July. Almost immediately the government of Lord North decided on sterner measures against the unruly colonists. The principal minister co-ordinating the deployment of troops was North’s step-brother, William Legge, 2nd earl of Dartmouth, secretary of state for America. The office had only existed since 1768 and Dartmouth, who came from a family that had long contributed officials, had held it since August 1772.

Dartmouth’s papers suggest that he was efficient in preparing for an increased military presence in America. As someone who had always sought conciliation, more troublesome to him were plans for a Royal Proclamation declaring the American colonies ‘in rebellion’ and thus that a state of war existed between Britain and America. On 1 February 1775, he had refused ‘to pronounce any certain opinion’ regarding the earl of Chatham’s conciliation bill, and even admitted he ‘had no objection to the bill being received’. [Almon, Parl. Reg., ii. 23] Similarly, in August, Dartmouth had feared that a formal declaration of war would jeopardize negotiations. He held off on agreeing to the Proclamation for as long as he could on the news that the Continental Congress was sending new proposals for a settlement: the so-called ‘Olive Branch Petition’. By late summer, however, the government was in belligerent mood, and on 23 August the Proclamation of Rebellion was promulgated.

Thus, when Parliament resumed on 26 October, Britain and the colonies were formally at war. Even Lord North ‘had changed his pacific language and was now for vigorous measures’. [H. Walpole, Last Journals, i. 490] One result was a ministerial reshuffle over 9-10 November. This gave the government a radically new complexion, and Dartmouth was moved from the American office, apparently unwillingly.

To soften the blow, the king offered Dartmouth his choice of being appointed groom of the stole, secretary of state for the southern department, or taking a pension. Dartmouth turned them all down and instead insisted on taking over as lord privy seal. The king had intended the place for Thomas Thynne, 3rd Viscount Weymouth, but made him secretary of state for the southern province instead. Dartmouth, George III complained, was not ‘in the least accommodating’ by ‘carrying obstinacy greatly too far’. [Fortescue, iii. 282-88]

The man who Replaced Dartmouth as secretary of state for America was Lord George Germain, a younger son of the duke of Dorset. Horace Walpole described him as ‘of very sound parts, of distinguished bravery, and of an honourable eloquence, but hot, haughty, ambitious, obstinate’. [Walpole, Mems. of George II (Yale), i. 190]

In 1758 Germain (at that point known as Sackville) had been sent to Germany as second-in-command of the British forces and was later promoted commander-in-chief. At the battle of Minden on 1 August 1759, though, he failed to obey orders given by his superior, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, commander-in-chief of the Allied army, to lead the British cavalry against the shattered French forces. The prince charged him with disobedience, while Sackville held that he had received conflicting orders, often delivered in German, and had been stationed on difficult terrain. He was castigated as a coward, even a traitor, by the enemies he had gained by his high-handed behaviour. Ever self-confident, Sackville insisted on convening a court martial so he could justify himself. According to Walpole, ‘Nothing was timid, nothing humble, in his behaviour’ [Mems. of George II, iii. 101-105], but the court declared him ‘unfit to serve… in any military capacity whatsoever’.

The shame of Minden always hung over Sackville, and for the next decade and a half he worked to rehabilitate his reputation. His chances were improved by the death of George II, who had developed a violent personal dislike of him. Sackville looked forward to better treatment from George III, but even he was unwilling to take a disgraced soldier back into favour immediately. Sackville relied for his slow recovery on his service in the Commons, where he advocated a firm line against the colonists, arguing at one point that ‘The ministers… must perceive how ill they are requited for that extraordinary lenity and indulgence with which they treated… these undutiful children’.[HMC Stopford-Sackville, i. 119]

In 1769 Sackville took the surname Germain, after inheriting property from Lady Elizabeth Germain. He continued speaking against the colonists throughout the first half of the 1770s and on 7 February 1775 he was the Commons’ messenger to the Lords requesting a conference on the address declaring Massachusetts in rebellion. He seemed, thus, an obvious choice as North looked for a new direction in the morass of the American crisis. Walpole summarized the effect that the change had on the war and the ultimate loss in America: ‘Till Lord George came into place, there had been no spirit or sense in the conduct of the war… [He was] indefatigable in laying plans for raising and hiring troops’. [Walpole, Last Journals i. 511, ii. 49]  Some contemporaries went so far as to suggest that Germain’s belligerence towards the Americans was an attempt to put to rest the shame of Minden. As Edward Gibbon put it, Germain hoped to ‘reconquer Germany in America’.

CGDL

Further reading:

P.D.G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773-1776 (Oxford, 1991)

Andrew O’Shaughnessy, The Men who Lost America (Yale, 2013), esp. ch. 5

Alan Valentine, Lord George Germain (Oxford, 1962)

HMC Dartmouth

HMC Stopford Sackville, vols. I and II

On 10 February 1793, 21 Members of the Commons gathered at 106 Pall Mall. Over 50 had been expected only for the invitations to be sent out late. The attendees were mainly conservative Foxite Whigs, and all were horrified by events in France and the stance of Charles James Fox. They resolved to secede and form a ‘Third Party’ while providing qualified support for William Pitt’s Ministry. This secession, which augured the disintegration of the Foxites and the formation of the Pitt-Portland coalition, was pursued with considerable hesitation.

The anguished path towards secession was illustrated well in the man reluctantly acclaimed as leader, William Windham (1750-1810).

The scion of an old Norfolk family, Windham began his political career in 1778 with a well-received address opposing the American War. After a brief, difficult tenure as Chief Secretary for Ireland, he was returned as one of the Members for Norwich in 1784. Windham slowly grew into his role as a parliamentarian, occasionally crippled by anxiety and hypochondria, and first achieving note as one of the managers of the impeachment of Warren Hastings. Initially moderately liberal, Windham became increasingly conservative by the early 1790s, influenced by his close friend Edmund Burke.

Like many in the political nation, Windham was initially sympathetic to the French Revolution, visiting Paris in August 1789 and writing approvingly of the situation to Burke. Fox’s nephew, Lord Holland, thought him a ‘warm admirer’ of the Revolution. Windham was among a group of British visitors to Paris in August 1791 observing the formal ratification of the new Constitution, where the treatment of Louis XVI horrified him. Windham had come to France, as Lord Auckland recorded, ‘a great admirer’ of the Revolution and returned increasingly alarmed.

The schism of his close friends Burke and Fox over the Revolution by May 1791 anguished Windham profoundly. Like other conservative Foxites, he agreed privately with Burke, but was deeply reluctant to split from Fox and the Whigs’ de jure leader, the respected but indecisive conservative 3rd duke of Portland. By 1792 Windham was increasingly prominent as an anti-Jacobin, fostering social links with French royalist émigrés and supporting anti-sedition measures at home. Still, he was resistant to give way to secession, wishing that the Foxites ‘should act as cordially together as if no such difference had ever occurred’.

The increasing violence of the Revolution by 1792 and Fox’s continued sympathies eventually convinced conservative Foxites they could not sway Fox towards their position. With Portland more interested in avoiding a split, conservative Foxites looked increasingly to Windham for political direction. Fellow conservative Sir Gilbert Elliot opined in December that with Portland’s ‘indecision’, conservatives looked to Windham, who ‘stands higher at present, both in the House and in the country, than any man I remember’.

The execution of Louis XVI and the outbreak of war by early February 1793 finally provoked the secession with the aforementioned meeting of 10 February followed by another a week later. ‘The meeting has a good effect’, wrote Elliot:

It must show the Duke of Portland that we are determined to take our own line even without him; and it has pledged Windham more distinctly than he was before to a separation from Fox.

Despite this the ‘Third Party’ hoped to convince Portland to split from Fox and take ‘his natural place as our leader’. The seceders were thus forced into a curious situation of defecting from a faction whose nominal leader they still pined for. Their resolve was, however, demonstrated further with the secession of 45 men from the Whig Club in late February 1793.

Windham initially hoped for around 86 defectors, yet the number settled ultimately to 38, of which at most 28 were ex-Foxites. Of the 45 Whig Club seceders, 18 were MPs and only ten joined the Third Party. The party’s membership illustrates the Opposition’s ideological fluidity before the polarization of the 1790s. It included the ‘High Tory’ Foxite Sir Francis Basset; Lord North’s son Frederick North; John Anstruther, whose political trajectory mirrored Windham’s, and Thomas Stanley who abandoned his reformist-leaning sentiments after witnessing the storming of the Tuileries Palace. Crucially, however, prominent conservative Whigs such as Earl Fitzwilliam, Earl Spencer, Tom Grenville, and Portland opposed the move, considering Whig unity paramount.

Described by Elliot as ‘dilatory and undecided’, after this period of political activity Windham was initially a reluctant leader expressing to John Coxe Hippisley how ‘much against my will I have been obliged to act as a sort of head of a party’ nicknamed ‘as the sect of Alarmists’. Windham believed that if Portland continued to dither, they would ‘dwindle away and be dispersed in various channels till the very name and idea of the party will be lost’. Windham was finally roused into political action with his spirited opposition to Charles Grey’s motion on parliamentary reform in May 1793, after which he focused on urging Portland’s secession from Fox and preventing Pitt from poaching Alarmist MPs.

Under Windham the Alarmists pursued an independent line, providing outside support for Pitt while insisting that they would only rally to him as a collective and not individually. The latter, Pitt’s preferred strategy, had already seen Lord Loughborough (the future earl of Rosslyn) defect to become Lord Chancellor in January 1793, followed by other conservative Whigs such as Gilbert Elliot and future Member, Sylvester Douglas. Over summer 1793 Pitt attempted to coax Windham over to the Ministry with offers of high office, which Windham refused despite considerable pressure from Burke and others.

Windham persisted with his independent stance, stressing in August 1793 that a coalition was only possible ‘if others could surmount those objections’. September saw Windham appeal to Portland to lead his followers from Fox, feigning a wish to be ‘a mere member of Parliament’. He stressed that a Whig reunion was impossible and that the only options were to ‘remain a third body’ or join en masse with Pitt. Portland continued awkwardly to affirm his support for the war and opposition to Pitt.

Conservative horror was heightened further by the execution of Marie Antoinette in October and the fall of Toulon in December. Realizing the inefficacy of his stance, Portland finally led an exodus of 51 MPs. The Portlandites adopted the independent line at a meeting attended by Windham and Burke and joined the Third Party, now under Portland’s leadership. ‘Being able to form an independent Party under so very respectable a head’, Frederick North expressed to Windham, was ‘the most desirable political Event’. Despite Portland assuming leadership, though, Windham remained a significant presence.

With around 77 former Whigs among their ranks, the seceders now outnumbered the remaining 66 Foxites. What had begun with a mere 21 MPs in Pall Mall had grown to include over half of all Foxite Whigs. Despite some individual defections to Pitt, Windham’s line of ‘no longer answer[ing] separate’ remained. After negotiations, a Pitt-Portland coalition was agreed with the new ministers receiving their seals on 11 July, Windham among them as Secretary at War.

While short-lived, the party ultimately succeeded in its central objectives. An independent, hawkish, conservative Whig faction was later seen in the form of the Grenvillite ‘New Opposition’, which opposed Henry Addington’s Ministry from 1801. That stridently anti-peace faction was led in the Commons, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the resident of 106 Pall Mall.

JO

Further Reading

Herbert Butterfield, ‘Charles James Fox and the Whig Opposition in 1792’, The Cambridge Historical Journal, ix (1949), 293-330.
Leslie Mitchell, Charles James Fox and the disintegration of the Whig Party, 1782-1794 (1971).
Frank O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (1967).
Max Skjönsberg, The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2021).
David Wilkinson, ‘The Pitt–Portland Coalition of 1794 and the Origins of the ‘Tory’ Party’, History, lxxxiii (1998), 249-64.

On 7 Feb. 1775 the House of Lords considered an address from the Commons claiming for the first time that ‘a Rebellion at this time actually exists’ in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The inflammatory language was accepted, and in consequence a bill to restrain the trade of the Massachusetts Bay colony was introduced. Both its committal at second reading on 16 March and its eventual passage five days later led to violent debate. Another bill to extend trading restrictions to the colonies south of Massachusetts was debated at third reading on 12 April.

Inevitably, events on the ground in America overtook many of these discussions, as on 19 April American militiamen and British troops exchanged gunfire at Lexington and Concord. Crucially, news of their confrontation did not reach Britain until the end of May, and the House continued unaware that armed conflict had already begun. On 17 May Charles Pratt, Baron Camden, brought in a bill to repeal the Quebec Act, one of the so-called Coercive Acts of 1774. The government’s motion to reject the repeal bill occasioned yet another debate.

In all, these matters occasioned eight divisions in the Lords between 7 February and 17 May 1775. The government won every one handily, with the numbers in the minority ranging between 21 and twenty-nine. In other words, there was a core of about 22 lords who consistently opposed the government’s bellicose policies towards the colonies during the tense spring of 1775. Both then and in the years following, the opposition’s main concern was domestic, as they fought against what they saw as the corruption, ‘secret influence’, and tendency to arbitrary rule of George III’s government.

The opposition used the ministry’s mismanagement of the American crisis as a means to attack the Crown and seek for ‘new measures and men’ in government. With a few exceptions, however, they did not apply themselves to addressing the substantive constitutional questions raised by the colonists.

There were some within the opposition who came close to an actively pro-American stance, or at least made an attempt to understand the colonists’ complaints, such as Willoughby Bertie, 4th earl of Abingdon. Charles Lennox, 3rd duke of Richmond, also took a ‘radical’ Whig stance both in 1775 and for the following 30 years, and remained one of the most frequent, and forceful, speakers for the opposition.

A third, was Thomas Howard, 3rd earl of Effingham, who was summed up by Horace Walpole as ‘a rough soldier, of no sound sense [Walpole’s Last Journals, i. 439]. As a captain in the 22nd Foot Regiment, Effingham had adopted a pro-American stance as early as 1774. On his estates near Rotherham, he built a hunting lodge which he dubbed Boston Castle, where he forbade the drinking of tea, in honour of the Boston Tea Party.

Throughout the spring of 1775 Effingham acted with the opposition, acting as a teller for the minority in three of the eight divisions. On 18 May the government sought to block an opposition motion that a memorial from the New York Assembly should be read out. Effingham intervened, but quickly turned away from the technical procedural issues with which the House was embroiled. He made clear his sympathy with the colonists, declaring ‘Whatever has been done by the Americans I must deem the mere consequence of our unjust demands’. He predicted imminent bloodshed (which, of course, had already occurred), for all it would take was ‘a nothing to cause the sword to be drawn and to plunge the whole country into all the horrors of blood, flames and parricide’. He then turned to himself. Speaking of his love for the military life, he confessed that he now found himself bound to resign his commission in the Army, as:

‘the only method of avoiding the guilt of enslaving my country and embruing my hands in the blood of her sons. When the duties of a soldier and a citizen become inconsistent, I shall always think myself obliged to sink the character of the solider in that of the citizen, till such time as those duties shall again, by the malice of our real enemies, become united’. [John Almon, Parliamentary Register, vol. 2 (1774-5). 154-56].

Effingham was briefly the toast of the country for his act of self-sacrifice. Walpole was asked, ‘Was there ever anything ancient or modern better either in sentiment or language than [Effingham’s] late speech?’. [Walpole Corresp., xxviii. 208-9] Although Walpole thought that Effingham ‘was a wild sort of head’, he admitted the intervention had been ‘very sensible’. [Walpole’s Last Journals, i. 466] Effingham was apparently a bit of a showman. It was widely reported that in a dramatic conclusion, he flung his sword clattering down on to the floor of the House.

Effingham’s speech was the last in this particular debate, and at 8.30 at night the House rejected hearing the memorial from New York. Parliament was prorogued a week later, about the time news of the armed confrontation at Lexington reached Britain. That changed everything, and although the Second Continental Congress made one last-ditch effort at peace with its ‘Olive Branch Petition’ of 8 July, the king rejected it out of hand. On 1 August he issued a royal proclamation declaring that the colonists were ‘engaged in open and avowed rebellion’. The declaration left Britain and the American colonists formally at war.

CGDL

Further reading:
John Almon, The Parliamentary Register, vol. 2, (1775)
Frank O’Gorman, ‘The Parliamentary Opposition to the Government’s American Policy, 1760-1782’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the American Revolution (1998), pp. 97-123
Alison Olson, The Radical Duke: The Career and Correspondence of Charles Lennox, 3rd duke of Richmond (1961)

On 6 March 1725, Pope Benedict XIII (1724-30) was roused from a period of private prayer with the news that ‘Queen’ Clementina, consort of the exiled James Edward Stuart (to his Jacobite supporters, James III and VIII) had given birth to a son in the Palazzo Muti in Rome. In spite of James and Benedict having decidedly tricky relations, the Pope hurried over to greet the new infant and promptly baptized him Henry Benedict (along with perhaps as many as ten other names).

Unlike his older brother, Charles Edward, Henry Benedict has attracted comparatively little attention. This is hardly surprising given his reputation for caution and his eminently sensible decision not to follow his brother to Scotland in 1745. Instead, it was left to Henry to undertake the thankless but necessary task of remaining in France, rallying support, while Charles tried and failed to regain a crown, and ultimately to organize a ship to rescue the by then rather battered Young Chevalier after his months hiding in the heather.

The failure of the 45 Rebellion no doubt confirmed Henry in his view that further escapades were ill-advised, and helped convince him to follow an alternative path. In 1747, he made the momentous decision to enter the church and was fast-tracked through the clerical ranks, emerging as a Cardinal that summer. It was by no means welcome to his family, though James seems to have become reconciled to it sooner than Charles, writing to ‘My dearest Carluccio’ that he was:

Fully convinced of the sincerity and solidity of his vocation; I should think it a resisting of the will of God, and acting directly against my conscience, if I should pretend to constrain him in a matter which so nearly concerns him. [Kelly, 36]

It seems, in any case, that Henry’s decision was not wholly a surprise, and that plans may have been afoot to have him made a cardinal as far back as 1740. [Corp, 225] James was not minded to agree to a suggestion by Pope Benedict XIV (1740-58) that Henry be made Cardinal Protector of England, Scotland or Ireland, [Corp, 232] though the British press reported that ‘when’ the exiled dynasty was back in possession, Henry was to be sent as Papal Legate. [St James’s Evening Post, 25-28 July 1747]

Henry’s decision to abandon a potential military career did not prevent him from being an occasional focus for disloyalty in England. His birthday, the year after he entered the church, was celebrated by five inebriated students of Balliol College, Oxford, with minor hooliganism committed against staunchly Whig Exeter College, while one of them shouted out ‘God bless King James, God damn King George’. Two of the ringleaders were later sentenced to two years in prison for their actions. [Monod, 276-7]

In stark contrast to his undergraduate fan club, Henry appears to have set about his new vocation with studied seriousness. That he had not altogether forsaken his position as a claimant to the British throne is indicated, though, by his decision to issue a medal with his image on it following the death of his father in 1766, even though Charles (Charles III to the Jacobites) chose not to bother. The same medal was then reissued 22 years later, after Charles’s death, when Henry became (again, according to the Jacobite succession) Henry IX. On the reverse was a diplomatically worded Latin motto, taken from Peter’s first epistle: ‘Non desideriis hominum, sed voluntate dei’, which as Monod observes ‘was so inoffensive as to lack any real seditious import’. [Monod, 88, 91]

As the medal demonstrated, while Henry chose not to do anything to encourage rebellion against his cousin, George III, he was keen to insist on his royal status and to keep up certain rites and standards. Insisting on wearing ermine was one, but perhaps most important, he persisted with the family tradition of ‘touching’ for scrofula, issuing special tokens for people afflicted with the condition. His brother, Charles had touched at least one sufferer while in Edinburgh in 1745 [Brogan, 213, 217]

If Henry trod a cautious path from his entry into the church through to his own ‘succession’ on Charles’s demise, he was unable to prepare for the dramatic changes ushered in by the French revolution. In 1796, Bonaparte invaded Italy, and Pope Pius VI (1775-99) was forced to hand over vast sums to prevent widespread pillaging in and around Rome. Henry made his own contribution by parting with a ruby, once the property of his maternal family, worth an estimated £60,000. [Kelly, 97] The following year, a new invasion force proved less willing to be bought off, and Henry became an exile twice over – quitting his villa outside Rome for Messina, thence to Corfu before finally returning to the Italian peninsula and settling in Venice.

It was there, that the cardinal’s journey in some ways came full circle. Having spent his whole life a representative of a rival dynasty to the ruling Hanoverians, it was to his cousins that Henry was ultimately indebted for saving him from penury. Thanks to an intercession from Cardinal Borgia, contact was made with a sympathetic Catholic gentleman in England, whose contacts ultimately passed the petition for assistance to the king. Advised by William Pitt that Henry ‘the last relick of an Illustrious Family’ was now ‘reduced to a state of distress which bordered on wretchedness’, George concurred that something needed to be done and through Lord Minto, ambassador at Vienna, he offered Henry an annual pension of £4,000. [Hampshire/Portsmouth Telegraph, 30 Dec. 1799] Acknowledging the king’s ‘noble way of thinking’, Henry accepted.

Having been saved from eking out his final days in a state of poverty, Henry was able to focus on the Conclave, summoned following Pius VI’s death in August 1799, and which convened in Venice from the winter of 1799 through to the spring of 1800. While there had been various reports in the British press late the previous year of efforts being made ‘to seat Cardinal York in the Papal Chair’, he seems never to have been a serious candidate for the papacy himself. [Hampshire/Portsmouth Telegraph, 9 Dec. 1799] Rather, it was left to him to play a supporting role in the eventual election of Cardinal Chiaramonti as Pope Pius VII (1800-23). Later that year, he was able to stage a return to Rome, where he lived out his remaining days in comparative luxury.

To the very end, Henry maintained the careful course he had always navigated. In his will of 1802, signed (rather optimistically) Henry Roi, he repeated an earlier declaration that the de jure succession to the British throne lay (after him) with the reigning king of Sardinia. However, on his death five years later he was also careful to acknowledge the assistance he had received from his Hanoverian cousins by returning to George, Prince of Wales, some of the regalia carried overseas by his grandfather, James II and VII, almost 120 years earlier.

RDEE

Further Reading:
Stephen Brogan, The Royal Touch in Early Modern England (2015)
Edward Corp, The Stuarts in Italy, 1719-1766: A Royal Court in Permanent Exile (2011)
Bernard Kelly, Life of Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York (1899)
Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English people, 1688-1788 (1989)

At the beginning of 1775, pretty much every British politician agreed that something needed to be done about America, with many eager to find a way to reconcile both parties [Bradley, 19-20]. What they could not agree on, was how. Since the ending of the Seven Years War in 1763, relations between Britain and the American colonies had been difficult. In the aftermath of the war, there were large numbers of troops stationed in America, which annoyed many colonists, who viewed the presence of a standing army as a threat to their liberties. Matters became worse when George Grenville’s administration imposed the 1764 sugar duty and 1765 Stamp Act as a way of helping to pay for the colonies’ defence. In the aftermath of the latter, nine colonies convened the ‘Anti-Stamp Act Congress’ to condemn the ‘manifest tendency to subvert’ their rights and liberties. [Duffy]

Repeal of the acts by the Rockingham administration in 1766 went some way towards resetting relations, but it was to prove a very brief lull. The Townshend duties of 1767 ramped up tensions once more and in March 1770 matters boiled over with the Boston Massacre. Three years later, in response to Britain granting the East India Company a monopoly on supplying tea to the colonies, a group of patriots in disguise boarded several ships in the harbour at Boston and dumped their cargo of tea into the water, in the so-called Boston Tea Party. This in turn led to more punitive action from Britain with the ‘Coercive’ or ‘Intolerable’ acts, which were aimed at punishing the state of Massachusetts for its involvement.

It was in this context, that on 1 February 1775, William Pitt the Elder, now in the Lords as earl of Chatham, rose to his feet to propose a Provisional Act for settling relations with America. Throughout the ongoing crisis Chatham and his followers maintained a consistent approach, sitting in between the government of Lord North, and the opposition Whig grouping led by the marquess of Rockingham, by arguing for a middle way in approaching the problem. America should remain a colony of Britain, it was contended, but its concerns should be addressed and concessions offered to help stabilize relations.

Chatham’s speech on 1 February, set out in detail his plans for how this might be achieved. He hoped that ‘true reconcilement’ would ‘avert impending calamities’ and the accord ‘stand an everlasting monument of clemency and magnanimity in the benignant father of his people’. In answer to those who thought he was offering the colonies too much by way of concession, he insisted it was ‘a bill of assertion’, stating clearly an ongoing relationship between mother country and colonies, in which Parliament would retain supremacy.

Well-known for his fiery (and often very lengthy) harangues, Chatham had couched his speech in terms of moderation and compromise, but after the proposed bill was laid on the table an immediate intervention by the earl of Sandwich ‘instantly changed this appearance of concession on the part of the administration’. Sandwich objected that the Americans had already committed acts of rebellion and turned on Chatham for introducing a measure which ‘was no less unparliamentary than unprecedented’.

Over the course of a debate that engrossed the Lords until almost ten o’clock at night and featured at least eleven lengthy speeches, the honours appeared relatively evenly matched. Speaking in support of Chatham was the gaunt figure of Lord Lyttelton, who praised him for his extensive knowledge and his good intentions and who, although not agreeing with everything Chatham was proposing, argued that his effort deserved a much kinder reception than Sandwich had given it. Lyttelton was then followed by an ‘extremely animated’ Lord Shelburne, one of Chatham’s principal acolytes, who feared that the interruption of supplies of corn that was one result of the collapse in relations between Britain and America, would lead to widespread rioting. He concluded with a start warning:

Think, then, in time; Ireland naked and defenceless, England in an uproar from one end to the other for want of bread, and destitute of employment.

Not all of Chatham’s erstwhile colleagues were so supportive. The duke of Grafton, who had served with Chatham when prime minister and succeeded him in the office, complained about the ‘very unparliamentary manner in which the noble earl had hurried the bill into the House’. He also found fault with Chatham lumping so many different themes together within the one bill. They ought, he felt, to have been treated separately. His intervention later attracted a rebuke from Chatham, who was amused at being accused of rushing the bill into Parliament, when the crisis called for swift action, which he argued the government was incapable of doing.

After Sandwich, probably the fiercest critic of Chatham’s propositions from the government side came from Earl Gower, who was said to have risen to his feet ‘in a great heat, and condemned the bill in the warmest terms’. He was particularly irritated by what he perceived as Chatham’s decision to sanction the ‘traitorous proceedings of the [American] congress already held’ but also his suggestion that it be legalized ‘by ordaining that another shall be held on the 9th of May next’. When Chatham rose to answer Gower’s criticisms, Gower could not stop himself from making further interventions as the atmosphere in the Lords collapsed into general name-calling. Chatham’s final contribution to the day’s mud-slinging was to accuse the ministry’s conduct over the past few years of demonstrating:

one continued series of weakness, temerity, despotism, ignorance, futility, negligence, blundering, and the most notorious servility, incapacity, and corruption…

The final contributions of the day were attempts at moderation by the duke of Manchester and Chatham’s cousin, Earl Temple. Manchester feared that a civil war would end in the destruction of the empire, as had happened in the case of Rome and wished only ‘that one sober view should be taken of the great question, before perhaps we blindly rushed into a scene of confusion and civil strife’. Temple, meanwhile, pointed the finger of blame for the current problems at the repeal of the Stamp Act, but most of all appealed to the Lords not to reject out of hand Chatham’s propositions, which he believed were thoroughly well intentioned.

In spite of Temple’s last minute effort to persuade his colleagues to grant time to Chatham’s ideas, when the House divided the government secured a sizeable majority, voting to reject the bill by 68 to 32. A few days later, on 9 February, Massachusetts was declared to be in a state of rebellion. It was, of course, just the beginning of an affair that would ultimately result in all-out war a few months later.

RDEE

Further Reading:

James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England (1986)

Cobbett, Parliamentary History xviii (1774-1777)

Michael Duffy, ‘Contested Empires, 1756-1815’ in Paul Langford, ed. The Eighteenth Century (2002)

In July 1599 the mayor and aldermen of Hull complained to the Privy Council that five ships from their town had been seized by Christian IV, king of Denmark-Norway, while fishing near ‘Wardhouse’ (Vardøhus), a fortress off Vardo, on the north Norwegian coast. Their crews had been placed in irons, and some of the seamen were allegedly tortured. Four of the ships were detained as prizes, while the fifth was sent back to England with a message that no-one was to fish in Danish-Norwegian waters without licence. Hull’s governors were incensed. Even though Hull’s ships had long fished off the Norwegian coast, many of the town’s merchants now faced financial ruin. Moreover Christian’s aggressive actions, if left unchecked, threatened the English trade route to Muscovy. The harsh treatment meted out to the Hull fishermen was undoubtedly due to the fact that Christian IV was then trying to assert his authority over northern Norway. He was engaged in a territorial dispute with Muscovy, which claimed that Vardo and the surrounding Lapp country belonged to the Tsar.

Naturally both the queen, Elizabeth I, and the Privy Council sympathized with Hull’s complaint and agreed to intervene. However, as neither England nor Denmark employed a resident ambassador in the other’s capital, it took several months and the dispatch of a special ambassador to Copenhagen to arrange a meeting to discuss the dispute. Eventually, over the winter of 1599/1600, it was agreed that commissioners from both countries would meet on neutral ground the following Easter. The place chosen was Emden, a quasi-autonomous city in north-western Germany which enjoyed the protection of the neighbouring Dutch Republic. In March 1600, with the conference now imminent, Elizabeth selected three delegates to attend this conference. Unsurprisingly, two were civil lawyers experienced in maritime law, Dr Christopher Parkins and Richard Swale. However, the third figure chosen, and the nominal head of the mission, was a leading churchman, Richard Bancroft, the 45-year old bishop of London.

Perhaps no one was more astonished by Bancroft’s selection for this mission than Bancroft himself. Quite apart from the fact that he had never been abroad and lacked both diplomatic experience and expertise in the civil law, he was the first bishop chosen to serve on a diplomatic mission since Thomas Thirlby, bishop of Ely, had been included on the delegation which negotiated the 1559 treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis. Since her accession in 1558, Elizabeth had broken with the practice of the past and largely restricted prelates to their ecclesiastical duties. The only exceptions to this rule were her appointment of Thomas Young, archbishop of York as lord president of the council in the North in 1564 and the addition of John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, to the Privy Council in 1586.

Elizabeth’s reasons for choosing Bancroft remain unknown. She may have thought that, as a Protestant bishop with well-known anti-Calvinist leanings, he would be acceptable to the Lutheran Danes. However, why choose a bishop at all? Would not a nobleman have been preferable? The answer to this question is probably ‘yes’. But by the late 1590s the queen was having difficulty in finding noblemen capable of performing diplomatic missions, as many peers were either not up to the task or simply lacked the means to subsidise the cost of an official embassy. Bancroft, by contrast, was shrewd and capable, the bane of radical puritans. Moreover, he had neither wife nor children to support and an annual income of more than £1,100 at his disposal. Elizabeth’s only concern was not the depth of Bancroft’s pockets but his notorious thriftiness. For that reason, she reminded him that, as leader of the Emden mission, he would be expected to ‘keep a bountiful house’.

Bancroft was not in the least bit pleased to have been selected for this mission and initially pleaded inexperience and a ‘tertian ague’ (malaria) to avoid having to go. However, once it became clear the queen would not budge, he threw himself into the task with his customary vigour. Determined to make a good impression, he decided to take with him a 40-strong entourage and a large amount of plate, which he borrowed, with the queen’s permission, from the Jewel House. He also got himself admitted to membership of Doctors’ Commons, the professional body to which all leading civil lawyers belonged, presumably in order to improve his credentials in the eyes of the Danes.

Bancroft and his two fellow commissioners sailed from Gravesend on 18 April 1600. However, a persistent easterly wind meant that as late as the 29th they were still at Queenborough, in north Kent. By the time they reached Emden on 10 May the Danish commissioners were on the point of departure, their commission being about to expire, having awaited the English delegation for more than a month. Thoroughly angry, the Danes refused to confer with the newly arrived delegates unless the English rowed out to their ship, an offer which Bancroft and his colleagues rejected as humiliating. Eventually the English were forced to relent, whereupon one of their number, perhaps Bancroft himself, took to the water. On seeing this the Danes immediately spread sail and departed.

In the immediate aftermath of this fiasco, the English delegates were obliged to return home empty-handed. As a result, the governors of Hull had no choice but to renew their suit for redress later that same year. The queen did not blame Bancroft for the ignominious failure of his mission, though, but rather thanked him for undertaking the journey.

In the aftermath of this, his first and only diplomatic mission, Bancroft managed to retrieve something from the wreckage. During his short time at Emden, he had succeeded in cultivating some useful contacts in the town, where he was evidently wined and dined. Consequently, over the next few years, he was able to keep the queen’s chief minister, Sir Robert Cecil, informed of events in north-west Germany, a not unimportant service in an era when reliable news was often in short supply. Bancroft may have derived a further benefit from his trip to Emden. According to the newsletter-writer John Chamberlain, a well-informed observer, he did not return to England with his two colleagues but instead travelled alone and incognito through the United Provinces. This raises the intriguing but hitherto unconsidered possibility that Bancroft, who liked to study his religious enemies up close, used the opportunity of this unplanned adventure to witness Dutch Calvinist practices at first hand. Whatever the truth of the matter, Bancroft’s trip to Emden is notable as being the last occasion on which a bishop headed a diplomatic mission until 1712-13, when John Robinson, bishop of Bristol, represented Great Britain at the Congress of Utrecht.

ADT

Further reading:

P. Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge, 2013)

S.B. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London, 1962)

Although neither of these studies discusses it, Bancroft’s trip to Emden will feature in the biography now in preparation for our volumes on the Elizabethan House of Lords. For the bishop’s later career, see also his entry in The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (Cambridge, 2021).

With refugee crises and immigration back in the news, Dr Vivienne Larminie, assistant editor of our Commons 1640-1660 section, considers how these issues impacted on the character of the House of Commons nearly 400 years ago…

Business involving immigrants and refugees was not uncommon in mid-seventeenth century Parliaments. Petitions for naturalization, the trading rights of ‘stranger’ merchants, provision for destitute fugitives arriving in England and sending relief for those fleeing atrocity abroad – all received attention during this period. As noted in a previous post, a significant proportion of MPs had had experience of education and travel abroad, giving them international perspectives with which to approach such issues. Others had overseas commercial interests. But in addition to that, a number of MPs were of fairly recent immigrant descent, some had married foreign wives, and a few were foreign-born.

In the second category, for instance, was William Gibbs, goldsmith and MP for Suffolk, who had been married at the French Church, Threadneedle Street, to Fleurie, daughter of a man from Rouen and widow of a man from Lyon. In the last category was Westminster resident William Wheler, whose English father had traded partly from Middleburg in Zeeland and who had a Dutch brother-in-law. First elected to Parliament in the autumn of 1640 to sit for Westbury in Wiltshire, William had been naturalized only the previous year, at the age of about 39. The pronounced piety revealed in his membership of the vestry of St Margaret, Westminster, and his tireless activity on religious matters in the Commons evidently owed a good deal to his upbringing in the Netherlands.

In contrast, there were a few MPs who had left their origins far behind. Sir Martin Lumley, elected to sit for Essex in 1641, was a great-grandson of Domingo Lomelyne, who had left the port of Genoa to become a jester at the court of Henry VIII. As the family anglicised their name and prospered, Sir Martin’s father had been a member of the high-status Drapers’ Company and served as lord mayor of London in 1623-4, while the future MP himself moved further up the social scale, becoming a country gentleman. But there was, even here, a faint evocation of his roots when in 1642 he became briefly a member of the Commons Committee of the Navy and Customs when it discussed the supply of timber for shipbuilding. Meanwhile the family of Stephen Phesant, twice Member for Huntingdonshire in the 1650s, had arrived in London from Venice at about the same time as Lomelyne, but took a different path to success. Like the Caesar clan, from nearby Treviso and Padua, they established themselves as a dynasty of lawyers, accustoming themselves to a very different legal system (common law) to the one they had left behind (civil law).

For these migrant families, the primary motivation was probably the search for employment or pursuit of mercantile opportunities, but for many the trigger was flight from religious persecution, even if economic considerations were not entirely absent. The most common foreign ancestors of MPs at this period were Protestant refugees – Flemings and Walloons from the Habsburg-ruled southern Netherlands (now Belgium) and other Huguenots escaping the religious civil wars that blighted later sixteenth century France.

Often, as with Lumley, such ancestry was obscured by a very English-sounding surname. Thus, Cornish brothers Piers Edgcumbe and Richard Edgcumbe were grandsons of Sir Thomas Coteel, born in Antwerp, and his wife, born in Augsburg [see also Thomas Coteel]; William James’s grandfathers were Roger van Haestracht from Cleve, near Utrecht, and Henry Kule from Bremen; Joachim Matthews’ paternal grandfather was burgomaster of Helven in the duchy of Brabant. Meanwhile, Abraham Johnson was the son of Anne Verake of Bailleul in Flanders and a saymaker of Colchester, where many refugees had brought their skills to the local cloth trade, and future royalist Henry Killigrew was the son of a Cornish diplomat and Jaél de Peigne, a Frenchwoman naturalised in 1601 and a patron of internationally renowned Huguenot refugee scholar Isaac Casaubon. Others’ foreign origins were in plain sight. If the parentage of Southwark dyer and MP Peter De Lannoy is sometimes obscured in the record under the spelling Delaney, appreciation of his quarter of London soon corrects that, and there is no mistaking the antecedents of Sir John Wittewronge. Baptized at the Dutch church, Austin Friars in 1618, his parents were a brewer from Ghent and the daughter of a merchant from Antwerp and Rotterdam. Nearly fifty years later Wittewronge wrote down for the benefit of their descendants a dramatic story of their escape from religious persecution, emigration to England and worldly success in their new country.

Such origins are to be found not just among the more self-effacing MPs. Regicide John Barkstead was the son of a London goldsmith whose family had come from Germany via Staffordshire. The maternal grandfather of Michael Oldisworth, who was right-hand man to Philip Herbert, 4th earl of Pembroke, an attentive father-in-law to another regicide, Edmund Ludlowe, and an influential figure in the later 1640s and early 1650s, was an Antwerp-born merchant. The family of Samuel Vassall, a stalwart of the Commons’ executive committees in the 1640s, were Huguenots who had fled Normandy.

Perhaps most intriguing are the roots of the most prolific diarist of – and vital source for the proceedings of – the Long Parliament, Sir Simonds D’Ewes. His great-grandfather Adrian D’Ewes was a religious refugee from the Netherlands who died in England in 1551 apparently without ever being naturalized – a disconcerting fact established by Simonds after exhaustive search. The latter’s antiquarian interests, his fascination with the Protestant Dutch and his puritanism, nurtured by this and by native East Anglian piety, shaped his view of contemporary politics and his contribution to Parliament.

VL

Biographies or further biographies of John Barkstead, Peter De Lannoy, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Piers Edgcumbe, Richard Edgcumbe, William Gibbs, William James, Abraham Johnson, Henry Killigrew, Sir Martin Lumley, Joachim Matthews, Michael Oldisworth, Stephen Phesant, Samuel Vassall and Sir John Wittewronge are being prepared by the Commons 1640-1660 project.

In the winter of 1748 two British peers presented themselves to the French authorities. Having explained that they were the designated hostages nominated to stand surety for certain provisions of the recently settled Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, they were conveyed to Paris, where they were introduced at court in their formal role as ‘otages’. They then settled into what was to turn out to be a remarkably enjoyable, if not trouble-free, period of detention, a high-point of which (for them) was no doubt a dinner tête-à-tête with Louis XV held in his private ‘alcove’.

News of the deal struck between France, Britain and the States General (the Netherlands) had first been made public in Parliament on 13 May 1748. On that day, both Houses had assembled to hear the king’s speech bringing the current session to a close, the main thrust of the address being the announcement of the conclusion of the peace talks with France. George II, who had achieved in the course of the campaign the distinction of becoming the last British king to lead his own troops into battle [https://historyofparliament.com/2018/10/11/his-presence-contributed-greatly-to-the-success-of-the-day-george-ii-king-and-soldier/], was at pains to justify the deal that had been settled:

In this important Transaction, my great Views have been steadily to adhere to the true Interests of Europe, to pursue and maintain those of my own Kingdoms in particular, and to procure for my Allies the best Terms and Conditions that the Events of a War, in some Parts unsuccessful, did admit.

Considered by both sides little more than a breathing space, the basis of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, as described by the king in his speech, was ‘a general Restitution of Conquests made, during the War, on all sides.’

I hope soon to see this necessary Work brought to Perfection, with the Concurrence of all my Allies, with whom it is my firm Intention to cultivate the most perfect Harmony, and to cement and strengthen, if possible, the Ties of our ancient Union and Friendship, in such a manner as may render the Peace secure and durable. [CJ xxv. 660]

Parliament may have been informed of the outlines of the Treaty earlier in the summer, but it was not until November that full details of the Treaty finally made it into the press, with several newspapers carrying full listings of the articles. Some of the stipulations were fairly obscure, notably one undertaking that the kings of France and Britain, alongside the States General would do their best to overcome ‘Differences that have arisen on the subject of the great mastership of the Order of the Golden Fleece’. Others were more contentious, in particular the undertaking that both sides would restore most of the territories taken in the course of the conflict. By this France agreed to hand over Madras to the British, while Britain agreed to the return of the fortress of Louisburg on Cape Breton, the seizing of which had been one of the (few) major successes of the war. Surrendering the strategic fortress was bad enough, but one additional concession proved especially galling to the British delegation. To ensure that the British honoured their side of the agreement the French insisted that two noble hostages (the requirement that they should be peers only very slightly disguised by the terminology ‘persons of Rank and Distinction’) should be sent to Paris while Cape Breton was evacuated. This was controversial enough in itself but British political and popular opinion was infuriated that the agreement was not reciprocal. Annoyance at large was reflected in one letter submitted by ‘A Briton’ published in the Westminster Journal and New Weekly Miscellany on 12 November, which suggested (in unison with the paper’s editorial policy):

if Hostages are to be sent to France, no Men are so proper for such an Embassy as those who submitted to the Condition of making it. I do not think… our Neg[otiato]rs had a Right to stipulate for the Captivity of the meanest Briton, much less for two Britons of the first Distinction, other than themselves or their Employers.

There was also a significant parliamentary angle to the demand as it was feared that agreeing to it might be an infringement of privilege. Some even questioned (in harmony with the author of the newspaper letter) whether such an undertaking was legal. The duke of Richmond queried to his friend the duke of Newcastle:

“how you will be able to satisfy the Court of France upon the two hostage peers I don’t know, nor do I conceive you can by law agree to it; if you could I should fancy a couple of Scotch peers might be found that would not be sorry to go.” [Richmond Newcastle Correspondence, ed. McCann, p.276]

There was plenty about the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle that disappointed the ministers who signed it off, but for Newcastle the article referring to the hostages was ‘The only disagreeable thing in the whole’. The eventual solution was to send two peers, who were not strictly speaking members of Parliament. The first was Charles Cathcart, 9th Lord Cathcart, a Scots peer, and member of the duke of Cumberland’s entourage, who had not yet been elected a representative peer, so had no role within Parliament. The second was George Augustus Yelverton, 2nd earl of Sussex, who had not taken his seat in the Lords as he was still underage and so was thus also (technically) not a member.

While some disgusted commentators may have reeled at Britain’s supine willingness to give in to French demands, for Cathcart and Sussex the experience was largely pleasurable with one of their principal preoccupations proving whether they might secure from the government extra supplies to help them with their round of entertaining. Their only major difficulty was in avoiding the Young Pretender (Charles Edward Stuart), who appeared to enjoy appearing in Parisian society at unpredictable moments and ‘they could not help thinking that all this was done to affront and mortify them’.

Sussex and Cathcart were to remain in France beyond the terms of their captivity. At the close of August 1749, the French announced their satisfaction that Cape Breton had been cleared of British personnel, but it was not until the end of October that the two men returned to London, having taken advantage of an invitation to enjoy their liberty for some time longer in France. Their conveyance back to England was aboard the appositely named sloop, The Charming Peggy. Both went on to have careers in the Lords, Sussex taking his seat not long after his arrival on 16 November 1749, while Cathcart had to wait for his election as a representative peer in November 1752 before finally claiming his place on 11 January 1753. As predicted, Aix-la-Chapelle failed to provide a lasting solution to Anglo-French rivalries, which ignited once more the following decade in what was to come to be known as the Seven Years’ War.

RDEE

Further Reading

Reed Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (1993)

Robin Eagles, ‘ “The Only Disagreeable Thing in the whole”: the selection and experience of the British Hostages for the delivery of Cape Breton in Paris, 1748-49’, in Kathleen Hardesty Doig and Dorothy Medlin (ed.) British-French Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century (2007)

J.M. Sosin, ‘Louisburg and the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 14 (1957)

Sometime after 9:30 PM on 21 November, 1938, towards the end of a two and a half hour House of Commons debate on ‘Racial, Religious and Political Minorities’, the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, announced the Government’s willingness to admit an unspecified number of unaccompanied Jewish and ‘non-Aryan’ children into the UK declaring, ‘here is the chance of taking the young generation of a great people; here is a chance of mitigating to some extent the terrible sufferings of their parents and their friends’ (‘Racial Religious and Political Minorities’, Hansard, HC 21 Nov 1938, Col 1464). In a mere 500 words, Hoare set in motion what would become the most celebrated and mythologised refugee movement in modern British history, the Kindertransport.

The debate that night began with a long speech by a tireless defender of refugees, Philip Noel Baker, who pleaded passionately for the British government to alleviate the suffering of Jews and others who were being persecuted in the Third Reich. This theme was taken up by Samuel Hammersley, who argued that the British Empire was uniquely positioned to absorb the majority of those who were desperate to get out of Germany and advised that Parliament ought to ‘look upon this problem of 500,000 refugees in Germany as just another practical problem which British statesmanship is called upon to consider and to solve.’ Geoffrey Mander spoke next, asking that the Home Secretary look into establishing temporary camps in Britain to receive large numbers of refugees, and proposing that the Aliens Act be amended, for ‘It was never intended to exclude political exiles’. He believed that there was ‘a case for making it very much easier for refugees…to come to this country…by a relaxation of the rules’.

One after another, for over two hours, members of Parliament stood up and expressed their unanimous sympathy and support for these refugees, offering various suggestions for receiving and housing them in the UK and abroad; yet, at the end of the debate, the only concrete policy shift the Home Secretary had been willing to concede was the admittance of a bloc of unaccompanied minor children—the only group of refugees to be granted a waiver from the restrictions of the Aliens Act and the visa procedures that had been imposed in early 1938. Hoare made it clear that though he was opposed to setting quotas of any kind, there was to be no large movement of refugees to the United Kingdom, Palestine or the Dominions, and that applications for asylum would continue to be dealt with on a case by case basis, despite the huge backlog that such a policy had created. Only unaccompanied children could be dealt with ‘in large numbers, provided they were sponsored by responsible bodies and responsible individuals’.

In the eighty years since that night, the Kindertransport, often mischaracterised as a government-sponsored scheme, has become enclosed within a simplified narrative of rescue and salvation, and a revisiting of the debate’s actual context and the limited terms of the Home Secretary’s concession can provide a corrective to such mythologizing. It is important to note that the Home Secretary confined his brief remarks announcing the child migration scheme to two subjects: the limitations of the government’s involvement and the parents of the children who would be allowed to come to the UK. In contrast to notions of a grand humanitarian gesture on the part of the government, Samuel Hoare made it absolutely clear that the children could only be accommodated if their maintenance was privately guaranteed ‘without any harm to our own population’ and that the Home Office would do nothing more than ‘to give the necessary visas and to facilitate their entry into this country’. He also made it clear that the children’s parents and families were not to receive similarly favourable treatment, but remain subject to the stringent immigration policies that various members of Parliament had that very evening begged the Home Secretary to amend.

Samuel Hoare was not unaware of the controversies that a policy of welcoming children but not their families entailed. It is notable that he used the phrase ‘to some extent’ when outlining how his children’s migration proposal might ‘mitigate…the terrible sufferings of their parents’, and he acknowledged what a ‘terrible dilemma it was to the Jewish parents in Germany to have to choose between sending their children to a foreign country, into the unknown, and continuing to live in the terrible conditions to which they are now reduced in Germany’. However, he told the assembled members, he had received assurances from a Quaker relief worker that German Jewish parents ‘were almost unanimously in favour of facing this parting with their children and taking the risks of their children going to a foreign country, rather than keeping them with them to face the unknown dangers with which they are faced in Germany’. Based upon such declarations, Hoare stated, ‘we shall put no obstacle in the way of children coming here’.

This Parliamentary debate and the subsequent fundraising and organising that resulted in the bringing over of 10,000 or so children over the next eleven months garnered widespread contemporary publicity, but the children’s movement was overtaken by the momentous realities of the Second World War and virtually forgotten in the years that followed. It was not until its ‘rediscovery’ in the late 1980s, amidst a wider emerging interest in the Holocaust, that the mass emigration of Jewish child refugees in the late in 1930s even became known as the Kindertransport. This re-awakening coincided with an embrace of oral and testimonial history more generally, and the resulting explosion of Kinder life-story telling has tended to dominate the historiography of the movement.

In the past few years a concentrated academic and scholarly interest has begun to focus on the Kindertransport, bringing with it a re-evaluation of its origins, operation and outcomes, and a critical examination of the distortions and mythologies that have grown up around its celebration, commemoration and re-telling. This reassessment has been brought into sharp focus by a revival of the idealised images of the Kindertransport in the context of recent debates on refugees and unaccompanied child migration. The eightieth anniversary of the debate that set the child migration movement in motion is a good time to revisit its context and terms, using it as a springboard for engaging in a more clear-eyed discussion of the both the Kindertransport and the wider immigration policies in which it was situated—policies that saved the lives of thousands of children but separated the majority of the children from their parents permanently.

JCN

Dr Jennifer Craig-Norton is an Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute, University of Southampton, UK. Her publications include the forthcoming book, The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory (Indiana University Press, 2019) and Migrant Histories and Historiographies: Essays in honour of Colin Holmes (Routledge Studies in Radical History and Politics, 2018), co-edited with Christhard Hoffman and Tony Kushner.

Ahead of our conference and public lecture at Keele University on 22 November to mark the 75th anniversary of the death of History of Parliament founder, Josiah C. Wedgwood, and the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport debate, we hear from Lesley Urbach of the Remembering Eleanor Rathbone Group about Wedgwood’s role in assisting Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe…

Twenty-two days after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, Josiah Wedgwood, Labour Member of Parliament for Newcastle-under-Lyme, observed in a question to the Home Secretary that

our ancestors allowed the Huguenots to come into this country … without any damage to our country or our reputation. Will he be prepared to give an equally felicitous asylum to the persecuted victims of Nazi terrorism in Germany? (Hansard, 21 Feb. 1933)

On this occasion he asked on behalf of the German socialists who were being persecuted under the Nazi regime. He was told what became a stock answer to such requests, ‘that aliens are only allowed to come in for residence if their settlement here is consonant with the interests of this country’. Wedgwood disagreed strongly with this response, telling the House in July 1933, ‘what we must always put first is a principle based upon humanity and justice. If you put the State first, you can justify any crime in the past and any crime in the future’.

German socialists were not the only persecuted group in Nazi Germany about which Wedgwood addressed Parliament. He first raised the issue of persecuted Jews in early April 1933. He asked the Colonial Secretary to relax the restrictions on emigration to Palestine to provide refuge to persecuted German Jews. For the next ten years, he continued to assert that Palestine was a very suitable place of refuge for Jews from Nazi-controlled Europe, as well as suggesting the colonies as a possible place of emigration. His first contribution on the matter of Jewish refugees being allowed to settle in Britain came during the adjournment debate on 13 April 1933,

Let English people see whether they, too, cannot receive these people into their family to make a home here, and to show that whatever the Prussian Aryan may feel about the Jews, or the peace-mongers or even the Socialists, we in this country realise the value of brains and the duty of hospitality to the oppressed.

On 22 May, he received no answer to his question to the Home Secretary,

is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the position of the Jews in Germany is daily getting worse, and are we to understand that the British Government is going to do nothing to help the people who are being persecuted in Germany to escape from that country?

Two years later Wedgwood asked the Foreign Secretary what action was being considered by the government to deal with the increasing hardships of Jews in Germany.

Joshua Stein comments on Wedgwood’s ceaseless nature in the face of adversity when it came to campaigning on the behalf of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, which he continued to do until his death in July 1943. The nature of his pleas, however, changed from general requests to help Jews (and socialists) to asking for visas on behalf of individuals as the war drew nearer. His last appeal before the start of the war, for a visa for Frau Lasmann, who was destitute in Poland after being expelled from Germany, was rejected.  During the early part of the war he was one of the leaders of the campaign against the internment of refugees from Germany and Austria.

Wedgwood was never likely to succeed in his efforts to persuade the government to allow Jews and socialists refuge in Britain. Britain’s immigration policy, established by the 1905 Aliens Act and the 1919 Aliens Restrictions Amendment Act, ruled out the entry of aliens for permanent settlement and there was no legal obligation for the government to admit refugees. Post-1933, there were several conditions for the granting of refuge including: the applicant’s ability to sustain themselves without recourse to public funds; prospects for re-emigration; and Home Office discretion. The only people allowed permanent entry were those whose presence offered some benefit to the country or people with strong personal or compassionate grounds.

Entry did not become easier as persecution grew in Germany and spread to Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. However, certain additional categories of people were allowed temporary asylum, such as unaccompanied children and those adults willing to be domestic servants. Britain’s national interests remained a priority ahead of humanitarianism. While Wedgwood believed that their ‘principal duty … [was] to save Jews from the persecution in Germany’ (Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 27 Mar. 1939), it was not, and never became, a central preoccupation of the Government, however passionate his speeches were. The tenacity of Wedgwood’s campaigning for Jewish refugees reflects a dogged determination that is evident in all of his campaigning during his exceptionally active political career. Stein suggests that his persistence helped to establish a climate whereby it became more acceptable to help the Jews.

A Foreign Office official described Wedgwood as being hopelessly unbalanced on the subject of supporting the Jews, while the United Jewry Fellowship referred to him as ‘one of their greatest non-Jewish friends in the British Parliament’ (‘Honoured by Jews’ Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, 7 Mar. 1935). His niece C. V. Wedgwood described him in The Last of the Radicals as ‘the man who will take all risks, the man who will never consider any other aspects of the question save that of justice is essential to society. In an old and cautious society such men are rare and precious’. But perhaps the last word should be left with Wedgwood from a letter to his daughter at the end of the 1930s, ‘I shall remain intolerant of cruelty, injustice and error … If the individual “resists not evil”, bows down to power and authority … then only tyrants prosper while civilisation and humanity decay’.

LU

Further Reading:

• Joshua Stein, Our Great Solicitor (1992)
• C. V. Wedgwood, The Last of the Radicals (1951)
• Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933-1948 (2000)
• Josiah C. Wedgwood, Memoirs of a Fighting Life (1941)
• Wedgwood’s papers can be found at Keele University Library

Join us at Keele Hall, Keele University on 22 November at 18.45 for our free public lecture (click link for info and free tickets), reception and private viewing of our touring exhibition. 

Here you can see the exhibition (funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and its players) at Newcastle-under-Lyme Library.