Chapter 15 THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE III Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format
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.”
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.
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