or so badly wounded that he cannot support himself?" "Nothing of the sort, thank God," rejoined the knight; "but he is in so hot an engagement that he has great need of your help." The king answered, "Now, sir Thomas, return back to those that sent you, and tell them from me, not to send again for me this day, or expect that I shall come, let what will happen, as long as my son has life; and say, that I command them to let the boy win his spurs; for I am determined if it please God, that all the glory and honor of this day shall be given to him, and to those into whose care I have intrusted him." The knight returned to his lords, and related the king's answer, which mightily encouraged them, and made them repent they had ever sent such a message.

It is a certain fact, that sir Godfrey de Harcourt, who was in the prince's battalion, having been told by some of the English, that they had seen the banner of his brother engaged in the battle against him, was exceedingly anxious to save him; but he was too late, for he was left dead on the field, and so was the earl of Aumarle his nephew. On the other hand, the earls of Alençon and of Flanders were fighting lustily under their banners, and with their own people; but they could not resist the force of the English, and were there slain, as well as many other knights and squires that were attending on or accompanying them. The earl of Blois, nephew to the king of France, and the duke of Lorraine, his brother-in-law, with their troops, made a gallant defence; but they were rounded by a troop of English and Welsh, and slain in spite of their prow

ess.

sur

The earl of St. Pol and the earl of Auxerre were also killed, as well as many

others. Late after vespers, the king of France had not more about him than sixty men, every one included. Sir John of Hainault, who was of the number, had once remounted the king; for his horse had been killed under him by an arrow: he said to the king, "Sir, retreat while you have an opportunity, and do not expose yourself so simply: if you have lost this battle, another time you will be the conqueror." After he had said this, he took the bridle of the king's horse, and led him off by force; for he had before entreated of him to retire. The king rode on until he came to the castle of La Broyes, where he found the gates shut, for it was very dark. The king ordered the governor of it to be summoned: he came upon the battlements, and asked who it was that called at such an hour? The king answered, "Open, open, governor; it is the fortune of France." The governor, hearing the king's voice, immediately descended, opened the gate, and let down the bridge. The king and his company entered the castle; but he had only with him five barons, sir John of Hainault, the lord Charles of Montmorency, the lord of Beaujeu, the lord of Aubigny, and the lord of Montfort. The king would not bury himself in such a place as that, but, having taken some refreshments, set out again with his attendants about midnight, and rode on, under the direction of guides who were well acquainted with the country, until, about daybreak, he came to Amiens, where he halted. This Saturday the English never quitted their ranks in pursuit of any one, but remained on the field, guarding their position, and defending themselves against all who attacked them. The battle was ended at the hour of vespers.

IT CANNOT of course be denied that in America, and most of all in New England, enmity to the claims of the Revenue was active and universal. The origin of that enmity lay far back in history. It has been observed by a writer, who knew his subject well, that the part which the merchants and shipowners of the Northern colonies played in the contest with the home Government has been understated both as regards the importance of their action, and the breadth and justice of the motives by which it was inspired. They had been born into the inheritance of a cruel wrong, which was more deeply felt as the forces that govern trade came to be better understood, and in some cases were for the first time discovered. Cromwell, with an insight beyond his age, had refused to fetter and discourage the infant commerce of America; and under the Commonwealth that commerce grew fast towards prosperous maturity. But a Stuart was no sooner on the throne than the British Parliament entered on a course of selfish legislation which killed. the direct maritime trade between our dependencies and foreign ports, and, (to borrow the words of an eminent historian,2) deliberately crushed every form of colonial manufacture which could possibly compete with the manufactures of England.

The traditional resentment against such injustice, kept alive by the continuing and ever-increasing material injury which it

From The American Revolution by Sir George Trevelyan, Bart. Published by Longmans, Green and Co. Reprinted by permission.

2William E. H. Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century.

inflicted, arrayed, men of all classes, creeds, and parties in opposition to the interests of the Exchequer, and to the officers by whom those interests were guarded. A gentleman of New York says, in a letter written shortly after the American Revolution broke out: "I fix all the blame of these proceedings on the Presbyterians. You would ask whether no Church of England people were among them. Yes, there were; to their eternal shame be it spoken. But in general they were interested either as smugglers of tea, or as being overburdened with dry goods they knew not how to pay for." Thomas Hancock, the uncle of John Hancock, to whom, oblivious of political divergences, he left most of his property, was an ardent royalist and a declared Tory. He was reputed to be worth that comfortable amount of money which his contemporaries, in the phrase used by Pope and Arbuthnot, still called a plum. Hancock had made the better part of his fortune by importing contraband tea from Holland, and supplying it to the mess-tables of the army and navy. Considering that it was to people holding his political opinions that the Crown lawyers would resort if they had occasion to pack a jury, it is not difficult to compute their chances of securing a conviction on a charge of evading the Revenue. Whenever a gauger or tide-waiter was found tripping, the Court-house overflowed in every quarter with triumphant emotion. About the period of Preston's trial, John Adams argued a suit for a penalty against a Custom-house officer for taking greater fees than those allowed by law: and, in his own estimation, he ar gued it very indifferently. He won his

se; and in the enthusiasm of the moent, somewhat to his amusement and et more to his disgust, he was overhelmed with assurances that he had outone all his own previous efforts, and would thenceforward rank as an equal of he greatest orator that ever spoke in Rome or Athens.

For ten years past, ever since George Grenville's influence began to be felt n the distant parts of the Empire, the laims of the Revenue had been enforced with unwonted rigor, which in the summer of 1771 assumed an aggressive and exasperating character. Sandwich, who had succeeded Hawke at the Admiralty, had appointed an officer with his own surname, and, (as it is superfluous to state,) of his own party, to command the powerful squadron now stationed in American waters. Admiral Montagu, who came fresh from hearing the inner mind of the Bedfords as expressed in the confidence of the punch-bowl, was always ready to make known his opinion of New England and its inhabitants in epithets which, on a well-ordered man-of-war, were seldom heard abaft the mast. In comparison with him, (so it was said,) an American freeholder, living in a log-house twenty feet square, was a well-bred and polite man. To make matters worse, the Admiral's lady was as much too fine as the Admiral himself was coarse. "She is very full," wrote Adams, "of her remarks at the assembly and the concert. 'Can this lady afford the jewels and dresses she wears?' 'Oh, that my son should come to dance with a mantuamaker!'" Between them they encouraged, in those officers whom their example swayed, a tone of arrogance and incivility foreign indeed to a noble service.

The Navy, like every profession, has its bad bargains; and the lieutenant in command of the schooner Gaspee, which was watching the coast of Rhode Island, set himself to the task of translating the

First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1763-1765). Hated in America for his revenue measures, especially the Stamp Act.

language used on the quarter-deck of the flagship into overt acts. He stopped and searched vessels without adequate pretext, seized goods illegally, and fired at the market boats as they entered Newport harbor. He treated the farmers on the islands much as the Saracens in the Middle Ages treated the coast population of Italy, cutting down their trees for fuel, and taking their sheep when his crew ran short of fresh meat. The injured parties made their voices heard; and the case was laid before the Admiral, who approved the conduct of his subordinate officer, and announced that, as sure as any people from Newport attempted to rescue a vessel, he would hang them as pirates. It was a foolish answer as addressed to men who were not longsuffering, nor particular as to their methods of righting a grievance; and they resolved that, if it came to a hanging matter, it should be for a sheep, and not for a lamb. At the first convenient opportunity they boarded the royal schooner, set the crew on shore, and burned the vessel to the water's edge. A terrible commotion followed. Thurlow, in his capacity as Attorney-General, denounced. the crime as of a deeper dye than piracy, and reported that the whole business was of five times the magnitude of the Stamp. Act. By a Royal order in Council the authorities of Rhode Island were commanded to deliver the culprits into the hands of the Admiral, with a view of their being tried in London. But before. the crew of a Providence fishing-boat could be arraigned at the Old Bailey," and hanged in chains in the Essex marshes, they had first to be got out of Narragansett Bay; and Stephen Hopkins, the old Chief Justice of Rhode Island, refused to lend his sanction to their arrest in face of the destiny which awaited them. Admiral Montagu himself, right for once, acknowledged that British Acts of Parliament, at any rate such Acts as the revived statute of Henry the Eighth,

2 Criminal court of London with prison adjoining.

-would never go down in America unless forced by the point of the sword. And the estimable and amiable Dartmouth, who now was Secretary of the Colonies, contrived to hush up a difficulty which, as he was told by a wise and friendly correspondent, if it had been pressed to an extreme issue, "would have set the continent into a fresh flame."

It was too much to expect that Sandwich and Thurlow would sit quiet under their defeat. There was no use in having the law, good or bad, on their side if those who interpreted and administered it in America were independent of their influence and dictation. The members of that Cabinet were never slow to make up a prescription for anything which they regarded as a disease in the body politic; and, as usual, they tried it first on Massachusetts. It was arranged that her judges should henceforward have their salaries paid by the Crown, and not by the Colony. Samuel Adams discerned the threatening nature of the proposal itself, and foresaw the grave perils involved in the principle which lay beneath it. At his instigation the patriots of Boston invited all the townships of the province to establish Committees of Correspondence for the purpose of guarding their chartered rights, and adjured every legislative body throughout America to aid them in repelling an invasion which, if it succeeded in their own case, undoubtedly would be directed in turn. against all their neighbors. Massachusetts rose to the call; and the Assembly of Virginia, with the political instinct which seldom misled it, took prompt and courageous action; but in other quarters the response was neither hearty nor universal. The spirit which had defeated the Stamp Act could not be aroused at short notice and on a partial issue; and friends and adversaries alike knew that the threatened colony, if things came to the worst, must be prepared to rely mainly upon herself.

There was, however, good reason to doubt whether the mother-country was in the temper to fight so paltry a matter

to such a bitter end. England, outside Parliament and within it, was tired of bullying and coercing men who after all were Englishmen, whose case rested or honored English precedents, and was as serted and maintained by honest English methods. Never was a community, (as the men of Massachusetts pathetically complained,) so long and so pitilessly assailed with malicious abuse as theirs had been during the past two years by enemies in London and within their own borders. The reaction now set in; and a large and increasing section of the English nation watched with respect, and often with sympathy, a resistance conducted on strict constitutional lines to that which, even as seen from England, looked very like a deliberate system of small-minded and vexatious tyranny. In July 1773, Franklin addressed a letter from London to Thomas Cushing, then Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly. "With regard," he said, "to the sentiments of people in general here concerning America, I must say that we have among them many friends and well-wishers. The Dissenters are all for us, and many of the merchants and manufacturers. There seems to be, even among the country gentlemen, a growing sense of our importance, a disapprobation of the harsh measures with which we have been treated, and a wish that some means might be found of perfect reconcilation."

Under such circumstances it would have seemed impossible that a Ministry could rise to such a height of perverted ingenuity as to deliver Massachusetts from her isolation; to unite all the colonies in sudden, hot, and implacable disaffection towards the Crown; and to drive them into courses which would shock the pride and alienate the goodwill of England. But even that feat proved to be within the resources of statesmanship. Foremost among the questions of the day at Westminster was the condition of the East India Company, which now stood on the verge of bankruptcy. The home Government came forward handsomely with a large

oan on easy terms, and a pledge not to nsist on an annual tribute of four hundred thousand pounds which India had somehow contrived to pay, in spite of her leficits, into the British exchequer. But, over and above these palliatives, the Cabinet had at its disposal the means of relieving the famous Corporation from all its embarrassments. There lay stored in the warehouses tea and other Indian goods to the value of four millions, which had been in course of accumulation ever since the Company, not by its own fault, had lost a most promising customer. The American colonies, making a protest against their fiscal wrongs in a form which had its attractions for a thrifty people, had supplied themselves with smuggled tea from France, Denmark, Sweden, and especially from Holland; and those foreign merchants who had been tempted into the trade soon learned to accompany their consignments of tea with other sorts of Oriental produce. The Custom-house officers reckoned that Indian goods, which paid nothing to the Treasury and brought no profit to the Company, found their way into America to the amount of half a million in money every twelvemonth.

The opportunity was golden, and without alloy. If Ministers could bring themselves to adopt the suggestion made by the East Indian Directors, and advise a willing House of Commons to repeal the Tea-duty, they would by one and the same straightforward and easy operation, choke up the underground channels along which commerce had begun to flow, pacify the colonies, and save the East India Company. The demand of the American market for tea was already enormous. The most portable and easily prepared of beverages, it was then used in the backwoods of the West as lavishly as now in the Australian bush. In more settled districts the quantity absorbed on all occasions of ceremony is incredible to a generation which has ceased to rejoice. and to mourn in large companies, and at great cost. The legislative assembly of more than one colony had passed sumptu

ary laws to keep the friends of the deceased from drinking his widow and orphans out of house and home; and whatever the gentlemen, who drove and rode in to a funeral from thirty miles round, were in the habit of drinking, the ladies drank tea. The very Indians, in default of something stronger, took it twice a day; and however much attached they might be to their Great Father beyond the water, it must not be supposed that they made special arrangements in order to ensure that he had been paid his dues on the article which they consumed. If only the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a few heartfelt sentences of frank retraction and retraction and cordial welcome, had thrown completely open the door of the Custom-house which already was ajar, all would have been well, then and thereafter. Before Parliament was many sessions older, America, (after a less questionable fashion than the expression, when used in an English budget speech, usually implies,) would have drunk the East India Company out of all its difficulties.

A course which went direct to the right point was not of a nature to find favor with George the Third and his Ministers. They adopted by preference a plan under which the East India Company was allowed a drawback of the whole Tea-duty then payable in England, while the Exchequer continued to claim the three-pence on the pound which was paid, (or, to speak more exactly, left unpaid,) in America. Their object was such as every one who ran a boatload of smuggled goods between Penobscot Bay, and the mouth of the Savannah River, could read. This wise scheme, (so Franklin put it,) was to take off as much duty in England as would make the Company's tea cheaper in America than any which foreigners could supply; and at the same time to maintain the duty in America, and thus keep alive the right of Parliament to tax the colonies. "They have no idea," he wrote, "that any people can act from any other principle but that of interest; and they believe that threepence