Without informing America’s French allies, Ben Franklin started to negotiate American independence.* Loyalists fled to Canada or back to Britain; the escaped slaves who had fought for the British were now in peril. Washington, marching on New York, ordered that his runaways be recaptured: ‘Some of my own slaves … may probably be in New York … I’ll be much obliged by your securing them so I may obtain them again.’ Seventeen were hunted down. It is not known how many of Jefferson’s slaves were recaptured. At the last moment, in scenes not unlike Saigon in 1975 and Kabul in 2021, Loyalists crowded on to British ships to escape. But, unlike the betrayals of Kabul 2021, the British, despite Washington’s demands to reclaim slaves, refused to renege on their promises to rescue all of them: 75,000 Loyalists, including many ex-slaves, were evacuated from New York, Savannah and Charleston.
‘Oh God,’ gasped Lord North, ‘it’s over!’ George III wanted to fight on, but North was broken.
Scorning those who asked him to take power or become king of America, Washington resigned his command and retired to Mount Vernon. ‘If he does that,’ said George, who had spent his whole reign seeking an honest politician, ‘he’ll be the greatest man in the world.’
Shaken by the debacle, George sought fresh leaders untainted by the loss of America, and turned to an unusual young man, William Pitt, second son of the victor of the Seven Years War. After Cambridge, where his friend William Wilberforce recalled, ‘No man ever indulged more freely or happily in playful facetiousness,’ Pitt arrived effortlessly in Parliament. He argued that America must be granted its freedom, and in 1782 became chancellor of the exchequer, still only twenty-three, in the short-lived government that negotiated US independence. The loss of America diminished royal power decisively, forcing George to accept an unholy alliance of North and the sybaritic radical Charles James Fox – one of the first times a British king was obliged by parliamentary votes and public opinion to accept a minister totally against his will. But he soon dismissed them.
Desperate to break the pattern of corrupt government, George offered Pitt the premiership thrice before at Christmas 1783 he accepted: wags believed that Pitt and his ‘mince-pie ministry’ would scarcely survive Christmas. But Honest Billy or William the Great – punctilious, eloquent, incorruptible, but also tightly wound, hard-drinking (prescribed booze for his nerves by his idiotic doctor, as his father had been) and asexual (he probably died a virgin) – was a sublime orator and efficient manager, demanding control of his ministers from the king. George agreed, marking the beginning of what became cabinet government under a powerful prime minister.
America was gone, but the death of the British empire was exaggerated. Politically divided, the transatlantic Anglo-states remained interconnected by culture, language, commerce and migration.* Pitt was about to appoint a new warlord in India who would found a British raj there. It happened that in the home island three extraordinary entrepreneurs were driving the changes that would propel Europe to global power and remodel the very shape of the family.
* The brutality of the American colonial war is best grasped by the bounty offered by the Massachusetts governor William Shirley for native American scalps: £40 for adult males, £20 for women and children under twelve.
* Almost an exact contemporary of Frederick the Great, born in 1711, the Qianlong Emperor was the eleven-year-old prince who had been so loved by his grandfather Kangxi. After the death of his father Yongzheng, probably of an overdose of the mercury-based Taoist elixirs that killed so many Chinese monarchs, he expanded the empire westwards into Xinjiang (New Province) to the edge of the Himalayas (wiping out the Dhungars almost completely and slaughtering Uighur Muslims after a rebellion, caused by mass rapes of Uighur women by Chinese officials) and enjoyed vast revenues from selling porcelain and tea to the EIC and other European traders while writing over 40,000 poems. But at the heart of his glory was a sadness: he never stopped loving his first wife, Lady Fuca, whose her death at thirty-six from smallpox broke his heart: ‘Ah, that ill-fated third month of spring,’ he wrote, ‘seventeen years have passed yet my grief remains unappeased.’
* In modern histories, focused narrowly on the British empire, this is usually blamed on Britain and its East India Company, and Plassey is presented as momentously important – yet the British would not control Delhi or most of India for half a century. Durrani the Afghan conqueror, who does not fit the conventional narrative of ‘Afghanistan, graveyard of empires’, is much neglected. And it was the huge Maratha empire that would now dominate most of India for many decades.
