Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format
Chapter 15 THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE III
UPON THE DEATH in 1732 of Thomas Howard, Eighth Duke of Norfolk and real Founder of American Freemasonry, the Norfolk title passed to Thomas’ brother Edward. In a curious way, the Ninth Duke of Norfolk played a part in the founding of the United States as well, albeit a cameo role. Sun-tzu wrote
Multiply your spies, put them everywhere, in the very Palace
of the enemy Prince; have a list of the principal Officers who are at his
service. Know their first & last names, the number of their children, their
relatives, their friends, their servants. Let nothing happen
to them that is not known to you.
Edward, Ninth Duke of Norfolk, was a regular in the crowd of
Frederick William, Prince of Wales, and his Princess, Augusta of Saxony. The
Waleses were party creatures, and an on-going disappointment to the Prince’s
father, King George II. The king resented that his son appeared not to have
inherited his craving for war – George II was the last British monarch to lead
his army into battle, which he did against the Spanish in 1739. George despised
his son’s Ignatian entourage. When Frederick William ran up an exorbitant tab
entertaining foreign ambassadors at St. James’s Palace, the king cut his
allowance, shooed the ambassadors away, and ordered the couple to move out of
St. James’s and take up a simpler residency at Leicester House.
In 1738, Augusta gave birth to a son, George William. At the age of six the
child was placed under the tutelage of a Dr. Ayscough. Like the Society of
Jesus, Ayscough did not wish the head of the Church of England well. “He is
chiefly remarkable,” says Brittanica, “as an adherent of the opposition.”
Ayscough’s role in history was to keep the future king of England, who suffered
emotionally under the ungainly squabbles dividing father and grandfather,
virtually illiterate for more than five years.
The Prince of Wales was fond of horse-racing. One afternoon in 1747, so the
official story goes, a sudden downpour of rain confined him and a handful of
friends to his tent at the Egham races. Determined to play cards, the Prince
sent Edward, Ninth Duke of Norfolk, out in the rain to find someone to make up
a whist party. The Duke returned with a strikingly handsome Scot, John Stuart,
third Earl of Bute. “Bute immediately gained the favour of the prince and
princess,” says Brittanica, “and became the leading personage at their court.”
What Britannica omits saying, along with every other source I could find on
this leading character in the formation of Anglo-American relations, is that
Bute, like Norfolk, was a secret brother of the Lodge. This fact is
ascertainable only from the keystone of the arch over Bute’s mausoleum in St.
Mary’s Cemetery at Rothesay, Isle of Bute, in the Firth of Clyde west of
Glasgow. Carved into that keystone is the familiar Masonic disembodied
all-seeing eye.
Born in 1713, educated at Eton, Bute was elected in 1737 to the representative
peerage for Scotland. He never opened his mouth in debate. When his bid for
re-election failed, he returned to the family estate on the Isle of Bute, whose
remarkably temperate climate produces a lush foliage, even palm trees. There he
indulged a passion for botany that can be experienced to this day in the
verdant grounds at Mount Rothesay. In 1745, Bute suddenly left Rothesay and
took up residence in London. The year 1745 is distinguished by the so-called
Jacobite Rebellion, another wondrous Sun-tzuan ruse in which apparent defeat
for the Society of Jesus masked a hidden victory.
The Jacobite Rebellion aimed to restore Roman Catholic rule over England by
deposing George II and placing James II’s grandson Charles Stuart, better known
as Bonnie Prince Charlie, on the throne. However, when Charlie marched on
London with a band of Scottish devotees, no Catholic politician of any
prominence would desert George II. The Rebellion was forced to abort. Charlie
escaped to France and the and the Scots were massacred. Clearly, this was a
Catholic disaster. Or was it? Such extensive Catholic support for a Protestant
king assured England that the monarchy would be forever Protestant. A Catholic
England was now an impossible dream. The Jesuits could give up. Englishmen
could now relax with them in their midst, just as Jesuits could now go about
their business without causing official alarm. The Jacobite Rebellion made
England at last… safe for the black papacy. The Jesuits secured a new cover by
blowing their cover – “blown cover as cover” in the parlance of CIA. The
Sun-Tzuan General wins whatever the circumstances.
WHEN Bute joined the court of the Prince and Princess of Wales, their son
George William was an emotional basket case. Bute lavished attention on the
lad, won his trust and admiration, became his mentor. Indeed, Bute made himself
so delightfully indispensable around Leicester House that the Prince appointed
him, in 1750, to the most intimate position on his staff, Lord of the
Bedchamber. Nothing happened in the life of the two heirs to the throne of
England that was not privy to a man under obedience to the Unknown Superior.
But in the year following Bute’s appointment, the Prince died mysteriously at
the age of forty-four. Rumors that Bute was responsible circulated for a while
and evaporated. However, gossip linking Bute romantically to Princess Augusta
never went away, even though he was husband to a devoted wife and happy family.
George II, surprisingly desolate over the Prince’s untimely death, remained an
absurdly stern grandfather to George William. Until his own death in 1760,
George II grew increasingly melancholic and disinterested in ruling. Parliament
gained strength. Bute acted the surrogate father to the future king. Caring for
the gardens at Leicester House, he inspired the boy with a lifelong interest in
botany. He encouraged him to patronize the arts – the composer Handel, though
blind, was still superintending performances of his works at the royal behest.
However, Bute did little to allay George’s tormenting fears of inadequacy.
Reinforcing himself as the ideal of conduct, the Scot nourished the boy’s self-distrust,
which would become the most prominent feature of his maturity.
Such was the context of English power when Lorenzo Ricci tipped the stones in
the Ohio valley that tumbled into a costly world war between England and
France. Six years into the war, George II died at the age of seventy-seven. He
left behind a disunited Parliament and a dysfunctional heir barely out of his
teens. George William, now King George III, fearfully turned the British Empire
over to John Stuart. Bute acted swiftly to conform to the wishes of his Unknown
Superior. He began by appointing a more compliant first lord of the Treasury,
the office later to be known as Prime Minister. Next, with secretly-funded
grants, he purchased votes from key members of Parliament widely known as “the
King’s Friends.” Under the noble pretext of achieving “a closer unity of the
British Empire under Parliament,” Bute whipped the King’s Friends into passing
a law to enforce writs of assistance across the Atlantic. These were
revenue-raising warrants issued summarily under the royal seal requiring a law
officer to take possession of lands without trial, without jury.
One does not need a doctorate in political science to know that summary
expropriation is a sure way to divide an empire, not unite it. When the writs
were enforced in Massachusetts, James Otis resigned his Advocate-General’s post
in the Court of Admiralty to preach against them “in a style of oratory,” John
Adams would later recall, “that I have never heard equalled in this or any
other country.” In July 1776, Adams would declare that the enforcement of
Bute’s writs of assistance in 1761 was “the commencement of this controversy
between Great Britain and America.” 1
Lorenzo Ricci’s War, or the Maritime War, or the French and Indian Wars, came
to an end in 1763. England was the apparent victor. Bute was sent by his
protege, George III, to negotiate a peace in Paris. Assisted by Robert Petty,
Lord Shelburne, the notorious “Jesuit of Berkeley Square,” Bute perfected the
Treaty of Paris. Under its terms England won from France all of Catholic Quebec
and the region east of the Mississippi, except for the island of New Orleans.
This was such a great territorial windfall for the colonists that North
Carolinians created Bute County in the northeastern part of the colony.2
However, Bute restricted the windfall by ordering the infamous Royal
Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited Americans from moving west of a line
drawn along the crest of the Allegheny Mountains. Most colonists viewed the
Proclamation as a scheme to imprison them between the Alleghenies and the
Atlantic. To purchasers of western real estate prior to the Treaty, it was
legalized theft. The churchgoers saw a papal advance: “With Roman Catholicism
no longer actively persecuted in England, many Americans concluded that the
mother country was about to return to Rome.”3
Prior to Lorenzo Ricci’s accession to the black papacy in 1758, the colonists
had been blissfully loyal to the mother country. Looking back on the
pre-Riccian years while testifying before the House of Commons in 1766,
Benjamin Franklin recalled that “the colonists were governed by England at the
expense only of a little pen, ink, and paper; they were led by a thread.” Yet,
with the rise of Ricci, as if in preparation for the absurdities of Bute,
radical propagandists began appearing throughout the colonies – Christopher
Gadsden in South Carolina, Cornelius Harnett in North Carolina, Patrick Henry
and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, and, in Pennsylvania, Charles Thomson. The dean
of all these propagandists was Samuel Adams, the celebrated “Father of the
American Revolution” and Freemasonry’s “dominant figure in the mobilization of
the Boston artisans and inland towns.”4 John Adams, in a letter dated February
9, 1819, framed his cousin Sam’s political activism within exactly the
seventeen years of Lorenzo Ricci’s generalate:
Samuel Adams, to my certain knowledge, from 1758 to 1775, that is, for
seventeen years, made it his constant rule to watch the rise of every brilliant
genius, to seek his acquaintance, to court his friendship, to cultivate his
natural feelings in favor of his native country, to warn him against the
hostile designs of Great Britain, and to fix his affections and reflections on
the side of his native country.
Thus, well before the advent of much to rebel against – well before Bute’s
writs of assistance and the Royal Proclamation – a propaganda of American
rebellion was being organized. At the same time, Dr. Franklin put together the
means of disseminating it. He streamlined the colonial postal system to flow
smoothly and efficiently from southern Virginia through eastern New England.
On the diplomatic front, England’s future war-making capability was stunted by
the Paris negotiations of Bute and Shelburne, which isolated England from any
possibility of forming helpful European alliances. This, in 1763, was of
negligible importance to anyone but the foreknowing and omniscient Lorenzo
Ricci. When the hour came for America to revolt for independence, and no one but
Ricci knew when that hour would come, England had to be friendlessly alone.
Having weakened England and stimulated the production of hostile, divisive
rhetoric in America, Bute resigned from public life a very unpopular man. But
the king’s mentor was not yet finished. From the shadows, Bute handpicked a new
Prime Minister, George Grenville. Grenville made a broad show of refusing to
accept office unless the king promised never again to employ Bute in office or
seek his counsel. The king promised. Pledging to give the British Empire a
thorough overhauling, Grenville then proceeded (with Bute’s secret counsel and
more money grants from the King’s Friends) to create dynamic situations that
accelerated Britain and the colonies toward divorce.
Duties were increased on colonial imports, justified by the notion that the
colonies should contribute their fair share to the increased expenses of
running an Empire much expanded by the Treaty of Paris. Higher duties
heightened smuggling activities, which in turn increased the admiralty
caseload. Americans began sniffing tyranny in the breeze.
Grenville’s new Sugar and Molasses Act enforced ruinous duties on foreign
staples necessary for rum-making. The Act reduced imports of sugar and molasses
from the French, Spanish, and Dutch West Indies, which in turn greatly reduced
the meat, fish, flour, horses and lumber which the colonies could export to the
islands. This caused a slump in colonial production. Large debts which
colonists owed to their British creditors for furniture, clothing, ironware,
pottery, jewelry, and many other articles, went unpaid. Merchants complained
that Parliament was killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Parliament’s
strange response was to prohibit the colonies from issuing paper currency to supply
their lack of gold and silver. George Grenville did, however, invite the fuming
colonists to propose suggestions for how they would like to be taxed. When the
colonists refused to dignify the invitation with a response, Parliament in
March 1765 passed, without debate or opposition, an even more infuriating
measure.
The Stamp Act required the purchasing and fixing of stamps to all colonial
deeds, leases, bills of sale, pamphlets, newspapers, advertisements, mortgages,
wills, and contracts. If duties on sugar and molasses could be considered part
of the regulation of the Empire’s trade, the Stamp Act was a tax levied by a
body thousands of miles away for the sole purpose of raising a revenue. It
affected all classes of colonist. Never before had Parliament dared to impose
such a tax. Whereas the duty on foreign molasses or antismuggling measures were
felt only by the great merchants in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or
Charleston, the Stamp Act affected a wider public. It added the price of a
stamp to the lawyer’s bill of every colonist selling a horse, making a will, or
mortgaging a house. The price of every newspaper was increased by the stated
value of the stamp attached to it.
In Massachusetts, “Britannus Americanus,” one of Sam Adams’ more than twenty
pseudonyms, charged that it was as absurd for Parliament to tax the American
people as it would be for an assembly of Americans to tax the people of
England. In Virginia, Patrick Henry cried his slogan “NO TAXATION WITHOUT
REPRESENTATION!” From the London Coffee House in Philadelphia, Charles Thomson
led a secret club of workers, teachers, merchants and professionals in
advocating the production and sales of local goods strengthened by an
intercolonial agreement not to import goods from Britain.
A month before the first stamps arrived, Sam Adams agitated Massachusetts to
hold a “Stamp Act Congress,” which convened at New York in October. The
Congress drew up a Declaration of Rights and Grievances protesting that the Act
threatened “the liberties of the colonies.” By the time the stamps arrived from
England in November, the colonists had forced most of the stamp-distributors to
resign. The merchants of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia agreed not to
import English goods, causing a decline in trade with Great Britain of about
twenty-five percent within a year. In an address before the House of Commons,
Benjamin Franklin issued his famous warning that if troops should be sent to
the colonies to enforce the Act, they “will not find a revolution there but might
very well create one.”
Grenville’s ministry suddenly fell to William Pitt and Lord Rockingham, who
repealed the Stamp Act in March. The colonies rejoiced and pledged loyalty to
George III. They hardly noticed that the King’s Friends had accompanied the
repeal with a Declaratory Act claiming “full power and authority to bind the
colonies and people of America, subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, in all
cases whatsoever.”
Regarding Patrick Henry’s objections to unfair taxation as “so much nonsense,”
Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, vowed to get “plenty of revenue
from the colonies.” In the summer of 1767, he and the King’s Friends passed
acts laying duties on glass, painters’ colors, red and white lead, paper, and
tea shipped to America. But the acts produced little revenue. By Townshend’s
own estimate, made shortly before his premature death at forty-two, the British
Treasury stood to gain no more than £40,000. The real, covert, purpose of the
Acts appears to have been not to get “plenty of revenue,” but to stimulate the
rebellious investment of colonial capital in local manufacturing.
In March of 1770, a small crowd of jeering Bostonians pelted a few British
redcoats with snowballs. The angry redcoats fired into the crowd, killing four
men, wounding several more. The town and surrounding countryside reacted in
rage to the Boston Massacre. Samuel Adams led his disciples to the mansion of
acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson and demanded the immediate deportation of the
redcoats, who wisely retreated to Castle William on the harbor. When news of
the Massacre reached England, the King’s Friends scolded Hutchinson’s “cowardly
surrender to Sam Adams’s regiments.” Thenceforth, each anniversary of the
Boston Massacre became an occasion for Adams and others to make more blistering
orations against British tyranny in favor of independence.
In 1770, Lord North, the new Prime Minister, declared the Townshend Acts were
costing more to collect than the revenue was returning to the Treasury. North
secured the repeal of all the Townshend duties, except a tax on tea of
threepence a pound to prove Parliament had authority to tax the colonies. The
colonists weren’t affected by this miniscule tax, since most of their tea was
smuggled in from Holland anyway. Feelings toward England turned amicable once
again, as colonial merchants increased orders from British firms from
£1,336,122 in 1769 to £4,200,000. Sam Adams, Patrick Henry, Charles Thomson and
Thomas Jefferson took advantage of the lull to agitate. Observing the first
anniversary of the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1771, Adams called for action
and solidarity:
It is high time for the people of this country explicitly to declare whether
they will be Freemen or Slaves. Let it be the topic of conversation in every
social Club. Let every Town assemble. Let Associations & Combinations be
everywhere set up to consult and recover our just Rights.5
Between 1770 and 1773, about the only troublesome confrontations were those
between British revenue vessels and smugglers. The colonies began producing
more. Trade was so brisk that merchants, formerly the chief opponents of
British rule, had little to protest. They turned their full attention back to
business.
And then Lorenzo Ricci nudged his weightiest boulders to date, the Religious
Right, the Protestant churchgoers. How he did this is the subject of our next
chapter.
No comments:
Post a Comment