The defects of France and Spain on the sea were not in ships but in men.The invasion of England was not improbable and then less than a score of years might give France both avenging justice for her recent humiliation and safety for her future.Britain should lose America, she should lose India, she should pay in a hundred ways for her past triumphs, for the arrogance of Pitt, who had declared that he would so reduce France that she should never again rise.The future should belong not to Britain but to France.Thus it was that fervent patriotism argued after the defeat of Burgoyne.Frederick the Great told his ambassador at Paris to urge upon France that she had now a chance to strike England which might never again come.France need not, he said, fear his enmity, for he was as likely to help England as the devil to help a Christian.Whatever doubts Vergennes may have entertained about an open alliance with America were now swept away.The treaty of friendship with America was signed on February 6, 1778.On the 13th of March the French ambassador in London told the British Government, with studied insolence of tone, that the United States were by their own declaration independent.Only a few weeks earlier the British ministry had said that there was no prospect of any foreign intervention to help the Americans and now in the most galling manner France told George III the one thing to which he would not listen, that a great part of his sovereignty was gone.Each country withdrew its ambassador and war quickly followed.
France had not tried to make a hard bargain with the Americans.
She demanded nothing for herself and agreed not even to ask for the restoration of Canada.She required only that America should never restore the King's sovereignty in order to secure peace.
Certain sections of opinion in America were suspicious of France.
Was she not the old enemy who had so long harassed the frontiers of New England and New York? If George III was a despot what of Louis XVI, who had not even an elected Parliament to restrain him? Washington himself was distrustful of France and months after the alliance had been concluded he uttered the warning that hatred of England must not lead to over-confidence in France."No nation," he said, "is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interests." France, he thought, must desire to recover Canada, so recently lost.He did not wish to see a great military power on the northern frontier of the United States.This would be to confirm the jeer of the Loyalists that the alliance was a case of the wooden horse in Troy; the old enemy would come back in the guise of a friend and would then prove to be master and bring the colonies under a servitude compared with which the British supremacy would seem indeed mild.
The intervention of France brought a cruel embarrassment to the Whig patriot in England.He could rejoice and mourn with American patriots because he believed that their cause was his own.It was as much the interest of Norfolk as of Massachusetts that the new despotism of a king, who ruled through a corrupt Parliament, should be destroyed.It was, however, another matter when France took a share in the fight.France fought less for freedom than for revenge, and the Englishman who, like Coke of Norfolk, could daily toast Washington as the greatest of men could not link that name with Louis XVI or with his minister Vergennes.The currents of the past are too swift and intricate to be measured exactly by the observer who stands on the shore of the present, but it is arguable that the Whigs might soon have brought about peace in England had it not been for the intervention of France.No serious person any longer thought that taxation could be enforced upon America or that the colonies should be anything but free in regulating their own affairs.George III himself said that he who declared the taxing of America to be worth what it cost was "more fit for Bedlam than a seat in the Senate." The one concession Britain was not yet prepared to make was Independence.But Burke and many other Whigs were ready now for this, though Chatham still believed it would be the ruin of the British Empire.
Chatham, however, was all for conciliation, and it is not hard to imagine a group of wise men chosen from both sides, men British in blood and outlook, sitting round a table and reaching an agreement to result in a real independence for America and a real unity with Great Britain.A century and a quarter later a bitter war with an alien race in South Africa was followed by a result even more astounding.The surrender of Burgoyne had made the Prime Minister, Lord North, weary of his position.He had never been in sympathy with the King's policy and since the bad news had come in December he had pondered some radical step which should end the war.On February 17, 1778, before the treaty of friendship between the United States and France had been made public, North startled the House of Commons by introducing a bill repealing the tax on tea, renouncing forever the right to tax America, and nullifying those changes in the constitution of Massachusetts which had so rankled in the minds of its people.Acommission with full powers to negotiate peace would proceed at once to America and it might suspend at its discretion, and thus really repeal, any act touching America passed since 1763.
North had taken a sharp turn.The Whig clothes had been stolen by a Tory Prime Minister and if he wished to stay in office the Whigs had not the votes to turn him out.His supporters would accept almost anything in order to dish the Whigs.They swallowed now the bill, and it became law, but at the same time came, too, the war with France.It united the Tories; it divided the Whigs.
