INTRODUCTION: Imperial Odyssey
This tablet, dedicated to the memory of Henry and Elizabeth Hulton, is located in the west entrance lobby of St. Mary’s Church in Andover, Hampshire. The Hultons’ five sons intended it as a tribute to their loving parents. Originally placed in the old Norman era St. Mary’s Church built on this site, it was hung in the new St. Mary’s that replaced it in the 1840s. The dates for Henry are off. He actually died in his 60th year, on 12 February 1790. Photo by the author.
No other Odysseus will ever return to you.
That man and I are one, the man you see . . .
here after many hardships,
endless wanderings, after twenty years
I have come home to native ground at last.
“I was no sooner arrived at those years, when it becomes expedient for every prudent person to think of his future establishment,” Henry Hulton wrote in one of his memoirs, “than I found I had to enter life without the support of friends, and under the disadvantages of a narrow fortune.”
Hulton did not set the opening scene of his autobiographical tale as pithily as Charles Dickens might have, but the point came through: he had not been born into a life of ease; he earned what he had. He wanted his sons to appreciate that they had been blessed with more advantages than he, so they ought to pay heed. He overcame adversity that they had been spared, but they would face challenges of their own and they must be able to rise to the occasion. He intended to show them how with vignettes from his own career.
It was advice that his own father, Edward, who died in April 1731, did not live long enough to offer. Henry had been born the preceding June, the youngest of five children, four boys and one girl. John, the firstborn, in 1720, had been followed by Samuel in 1722 and Edward in 1724. Ann was three-and-a-half years older than Henry.
Innocent Abroad
What little we know about Hulton’s early life we learn only from Hulton himself. Of his childhood he said simply that his widowed mother—“pious,” “sensible” and, notably, “indulgent”—raised him to be virtuous and kind, presumably as a Presbyterian, though at some point he later became an Anglican. Having passed through what he called a “common course of education,” which most likely meant being taught by a private tutor with other boys of his age and station, he did not enter into an apprenticeship to learn a trade. Instead, as befitted his family’s improved status, he went to live with his older brother John, who had done well as a Liverpool merchant. There the boy was supposed to learn how to make his way in the world of men.
Henry did learn the basics of business but the counting house held limited appeal. His heart lay elsewhere. At age twenty-one, when he should have been ready to go out on his own, he was still undecided on his course in life. He “thirsted for enterprize, and adventure, and glowed with a desire” of doing something for his “own honor, and the service” of his country.
All seemed to be arranged when Henry sailed across the channel in June 1751 and awaited the arrival of his new partner, a passing acquaintance at best. Gildart never arrived. He decided not to go but it was February of the following year before Henry received a letter telling him that the deal had fallen through. By then Henry had lost whatever excitement he carried with him to the Continent. The French that he studied before leaving proved not to be quite the lingua franca he had expected and, under the circumstances, learning German came slowly. The British expatriates Henry lived among formed an ethnic enclave in Hamburg, diplomatically protected by extraterritoriality and exempt from local taxes or laws regulating religious services. Socially they kept to themselves.
His luck finally changed when he was befriended by a “little deformed Gentleman” named de Ruling, who struck up a conversation with him in English after observing him reading London newspapers in a coffeehouse.
Johan von Walmoden spent almost all of his time in Germany. His mother, by contrast, passed many of her days in London, with apartments at both Kensington Palace and St. James. She had met George II in Hanover in 1735 and Johan was born just a year later. All assumed that the king, not Walmoden’s husband, was the father. Walmoden knew of the liaison, accepted favors to look the other way and did not seek a divorce until 1740. By then George II’s queen, Caroline, had died, so Amelia Maria von Walmoden, nee von Wendt, was reborn as a naturalized subject of the British crown and elevated to the peerage as Countess of Yarmouth. She stayed with the king until his death in 1760. He supposedly forswore his other mistresses for her and the Countess became a fixture in the court, both in London and in Hanover. She was astute enough not to overplay her hand and even members of the cabinet, from the early period with Walpole to later years with Pitt and Newcastle, understood that she could be a useful ally and dangerous enemy.
Hulton made a conscious choice about how he would try to get ahead when he importuned Walmoden for aid. Whatever air of naiveté he had about him that he wanted to preserve, it would have to be balanced with the skills of realpolitik and he would have to be a fast learner to have any chance of preferment. He could play, even be, the innocent at court, but that innocence could turn disingenuous with time—and Hulton was determined not to be a mere poseur. In his mind, at least, he succeeded.
When the king and Walmoden’s mother came to Hanover for a summer stay in the palace at Herrenhausen, Hulton moved to Hanover from Brunswick to be close by in case the opportunity arose where he could be introduced to the right person—which for him, Walmoden determined, was the Duke of Newcastle. Cabinet minister and master of political maneuver, Newcastle had become accustomed to being at the center of power. He and Hulton met; the Duke appeared approachable enough. Hulton “had frequent occasions of paying” his “respects to his Grace, who was always in a hurry, and put me off with general assurances.”
So October 1752 found Hulton in London. Newcastle promised nothing and did not appear inclined to give anything. He was cordial and yet artfully aloof, moving too quickly during this levee or that fete to grant Hulton a formal interview. Hulton went home to Liverpool the following spring, empty-handed, still with no clear future. For the next several years his life would revolve around the comings and goings of the royal court, which could move to Hanover in the summer and back to London in the Fall. In the reminiscences written for his sons he chose this as the lesson they ought to learn from his repeated frustrations:
In the course of my private life I have strug[g]led through many difficulties; and had occasion for a great deal of management and oeconomy, before I entered upon office. In publick business, I have had a life of combat, of labour, and lost; and through the whole have found very little of favor, protection, and support. Others, with my opportunities, might have improved them more to their worldly advantage; but I have the consolation to reflect, that I have passed thus far through the storm and have not made shipwreck of faith, and a good conscience, and I have a pleasure in a relation of these difficulties I have passed through, as the perusal of my story may be of benefit to my children, and animate them to persevere with fortitude, in their Christian course.
There is suffering and then there is suffering. Hulton, after a year in Liverpool where he may have been content to live off his trust and his brother’s generosity, eased the pain of his disappointment by taking a shorter, cheaper version of the grand tour.
Hulton must have begun to wonder if he was jinxed: his traveling companion died from a fever brought on by a severe case of gout. Hulton buried his friend in Lyons—after bribing Catholic priests to inter a Protestant in their churchyard—and went back to London, hoping again to become part of the fall court.
At long last he succeeded, but only after “being kept in expectation for several months.”
So after four-and-a-half years of delay Hulton had at last begun to quench his “thirst” for “enterprize and adventure.” Back at the beginning he had considered going to the West Indies and then decided against the journey—too far away, in a tropical clime that took many an Englishman to his grave. In the interim he had learned the importance of making the right connections and choosing the right moments to try to get ahead in a world where the few who were privileged over the many proceeded at their own pace, almost oblivious to those beneath them. He was never reduced to dire straits, never had to face the blunt truth expressed in aphorisms about beggars being choosers—because he never had to beg and he always had options from which to choose. But, having set his course on public service by court appointment, he could not afford to say no to anything reasonable just yet.
For someone who lectured his sons on the need for a good work ethic he did remarkably little work over these years. The men and women who took care of his daily needs may well have envied his, to their eyes, relaxed lifestyle. He no doubt saw it differently. It was easier to watch his social betters to see what they had that he still lacked, instead of glancing toward his social inferiors to see how little they had—an obliviousness to the plight of the poor that would not be cured by four years in the slave culture of Antigua. Like so many of his contemporaries in the master class he seemed to worry more about what slavery did to whites than to blacks. Hence his sympathy for the long-suffering wives of planters whose husbands fathered children among their slaves and yet pretended that nothing of the sort went on among them.
Antigua, first settled by the English in 1632, is one of the Leeward Islands. Partly volcanic, partly coral in form, the island’s highest point is just over thirteen hundred feet above sea level. Virtually all of the trees had been cleared away long before Hulton arrived. There were no natural springs on the island: no tropical rain, no fresh water. Just over fifty miles in circumference, with only sixty or seventy thousand acres of arable land, Antigua could never surpass a Jamaica in commercial importance but it did come to rival a similarlysized Barbados in generating wealth. With well over half its land devoted to sugar production it turned a profit for the planters and therefore, again in theory, the empire. There were perhaps 35,000 people on the island, one in ten white, the other nine black, with some of mixed blood. Basically all of the blacks were slaves employed in the sugar industry—the raising and cutting of cane, refining of sugar, and processing of molasses and rum. There was a small but thriving merchant community and the island had its own legislative assembly. The compact town of St. John’s acted as the capital and the governor of all the Leewards—Nevis, Montserrat, St. Kitt’s, and other islands close by—resided there as well. At any given time there could be a couple of regiments of regulars stationed on the island and the Royal Navy used it as a port of call.
It is very difficult to get a sense of Hulton as agent of empire on Antigua. As comptroller he was expected to work with the collector. Both were in turn expected to coordinate the activities of inspectors who worked the docks at St. John’s and Parham, the two ports for legitimate trade on the island. Having the comptroller and collector be one in the same, as was the case before Hulton’s arrival, increased the likelihood that corruption—never completely eliminated—could become too problematical. Smuggling was endemic in the sugar islands and potentially threatening to the British as the French began to exceed them in production. The French sugar makers could also sell at a lower price and for a variety of reasons, from more fertile soil to smaller, more efficiently-run plantations, to having greater diversification so that they were less dependent on imports of foodstuffs.
Hulton had crossed over by convoy because the undeclared war that erupted between France and Britain in the forests of western Pennsylvania was about to become official. They feared they were going to be overtaken by French warships when they set out; they did not stop after making a landfall at Barbados for the same reason.
What, exactly, Hulton did to crack down on smuggling is not very clear. How many hours he spent performing his duties is not clear either. On such a small island with such a small population, it might appear to have been a simple enough task. After all, St. John’s and Parham, with just five miles separating them, were a short horse ride or long walk apart. But then again a clever smuggler and conniving merchant could find ways to evade detection and an underground economy most certainly existed—but on how large a scale and at what expense to the mercantilistic empire cannot be known.
The official correspondence for these years is sketchy; so is the personal. Hulton’s earliest surviving letter from Antigua was written very late in his four years on the island. It talked not of his duties but of his boredom, his feeling that he was wasting away in exile. “I would not wish any one who feels as I do, to experience what I have done,” he complained to a friend back in Liverpool. “I look back on past scenes wherein I was happy, but they will no more return; before me the prospect is dreary.”
What he recorded later for his sons was for their character formation, not his retrospective view of the empire, so the focus was on individuals and their behaviors as object lessons. Some people were examples of what not to be, others were examples to be emulated. The dissipated and corrupt collector served as Hulton’s first bad example and he was followed by others. The good examples were those who lived in moderation—literally necessary for survival in the island’s climate, figuratively necessary for his sons in any social environment.
Hulton arrived with a cold from the voyage and developed a low-grade fever upon landing which lingered for months, but other than that he remained healthy. He developed his own regimen, up early in the morning and to bed early in the evening; exercise, including a morning ride, and frequent bathing; a large meal at midday with only a light supper at night, washed down with water more often than wine. He did not exhaust himself in too many social rounds with Antigua’s tiny circle of elites, fearing that those who danced and drank into the wee hours, exhausted and perspiring when they finally went to sleep, were inviting fever and then death. He kept up his reading—James Robertson’s history of Scotland and Edward Montagu’s survey of ancient republics were two recently published books that he mentioned—so that he could be a good conversationalist as well as intellectually engaged. Equally important, he learned to be a good listener, thereby ingratiating himself with the few men of letters on the island. “The attention of a young Disciple flatters their understandings,” he advised his sons, “and the conversation of such men, is the most easy and agreeable way that a young man can receive instruction.”
You must not think my dear Children, that I mention any characters as a record of their crimes or misfortunes, but as a lesson to you: let your minds be ever impressed with a sacred regard to truth, in words, and actions, be assured, that without the practise of integrity, you cannot obtain the divine favour: that industry, prudence, and oeconomy, are necessary to worldly success, and to the enabling You to put your benevolent dispositions into practise. Vanity and ostentation will urge people to actions that have the semblance of virtue. They may be profuse without being generous; and hospitable, without benevolent affections. Such characters will be applauded by the vain, the dissipated, and luxurious; but the sensible and worthy part of mankind, who examine into the motives of actions, will bestow their approbation on the character, only as it appears to act conformably to truth in the circumstances in which it is placed, and the relation in which it stands to those around it.
Hulton emphasized the need for a man to choose his friends and associates wisely, to keep his own counsel, to speak in confidence only to those of proven trust. He was astute enough to realize that by diagraming a formula for success he needed to show how it had worked in his own life if he were to have any credibility with his sons as they grew older. And so he did, writing his life story in fine luck and pluck fashion, using an autobiographical style later made famous by Benjamin Franklin.
The moral of Hulton’s Antigua tale unfolds chronologically: soon after arriving he made friends with a well-placed islander who would eventually smooth his way when he returned to London. The islander in question was Samuel Martin, wealthy planter and powerful politician. Speaker of the House in the Assembly, he stood at the center of Antigua’s social life. “He was a Gentleman of universal knowledge, of great politeness, and good manners,” Hulton informed his sons approvingly, “easy to live with, very communicative, and agreeably instructive, of strict morals, and a religious Man.”
Knowing that the younger Martin was leery of officer seekers, the older Martin made his attachment to Hulton emphatic. Reading between the lines, he was cautioning his son not to make a virtue into a vice by becoming too fastidious, turning away all who sought his favor. Hulton “is indeed a truly good man,” Martin stressed, a devoted friend who had eased his aging and a dedicated public servant as comptroller. He wished Hulton had opportunities in the Indies more worthy of his talents. So highly did he think of him, he told his son, that if Britain took any nearby island from the French in the war then winding down he would do what he could to set him up with a prestigious office and a plantation of his own.
The younger Martin had not lived on the island for any length of time since he was a boy. He had passed on to the Inner Temple after Cambridge and he sat in Parliament for Camelford, a borough in Cornwall. Connected to the Earl of Bute politically, he did not stand out in Commons; rather, he threw his energy into his post as secretary to the lords of the Treasury. Called by two later historians a “joyless man, solitary and self-centred,” he never married.
Fortune had just smiled on Hulton because he returned to London in October 1760 at an otherwise inopportune moment. George II died as Hulton arrived and consequently the Countess of Yarmouth and her son could have done little for him, even if they had been inclined to help. Hulton went to Newcastle first and received the usual noncommital response. His West Indian connection made all the difference. He was given another chance to prove himself, another shot at a better post and a new beginning.
He nonetheless trekked to Germany with some trepidation, fearing that failure there was very likely, which would end his hopes of rising any higher in government service. But then again, if he turned down the new post he would be expected to return to Antigua—a “dreary prospect”—and if he refused to do that, he might never be offered anything consequential again. “The heart grows callous and suspicious from frequent disappointments,” he lamented to a friend as he contemplated the choices before him, “and is unwilling to expose itself to fresh pain by connections that may only prove the disingenuity and ingratitude of human nature.”
Hulton had been reluctant to recross the channel with good reason. He was about to spend two and a half very trying years on the Continent, arriving in April 1761 and not leaving until September 1763. He made sure that his sons knew how demanding the work was, but how important it had been that he stuck to it.
Hulton became one of those who profited from the war, though in a different way. He and Cuthbert impressed men in government, including Newcastle, who was kept informed of what they were encountering in Germany. They continued until they were recalled in the summer of 1763. Investigations would drag on for years.
Harried Servant
A new office of plantations clerk had been created under the customs board, a branch of the Treasury;
The chief financial officers of the kingdom, the lords of the Treasury, had started the imperial reform movement by complaining to the privy council, which in turn reported their complaints to the crown. With the king’s endorsement and with Parliament preparing to enact legislation for the king’s approval, all officials charged with enforcing the Navigation Acts were called to their posts, in anticipation of new laws and tighter enforcement, applicable to the entire empire but aimed at the mainland colonies of North America in particular. “We find, that the Revenue arising therefrom is very small and inconsiderable having in no degree increased with the Commerce of those Countries,” the Treasury lords reported to the Council, “and is not yet sufficient to defray a fourth Part of the Expence necessary for collecting it.” Moreover, they were convinced “that through Neglect, Connivance and Fraud” the revenue from those colonies “is impaired” and commerce “is diverted from its natural course,” making the “wise laws” behind the navigation system useless.
Samuel Martin had left the Treasury but he continued to watch out for Hulton and helped him avoid being ordered back to Antigua. Technically speaking Hulton had been on an extended leave from his duties as comptroller there. He must have been flattered that the customs commissioners, upon nominating him, expressed “especial Trust & Confidence” in his “Ability[,] Care and Fidelity.” He secured his new post, which he would hold “at the king’s pleasure,”
Grenville did not contrive a new theory of empire. The commercial regulations that marked his ministry were an extension of older laws going back a century, to 1663 and even earlier, when trade in the empire was legislatively channeled from one destination to another, in ships owned and sailed by subjects of the crown and citizens of the empire—just as Hakluyt had envisioned. Customs inspectors were patrolling colonial American docks as agents of the Treasury by the 1670s; vice-admiralty judges began hearing smuggling cases at nearly the same moment. But there had been very little that was systematic in these earlier manifestations of the navigation system. Grenville wanted new laws and stricter enforcement to bring practice more into line with theory. His timing was poor and his choice of taxes unwise. He miscalculated the economic and political fallout that his program would produce, but his brand of mercantilism was not malicious by intent.
Hulton, on the fringe of imperial regulation in Antigua, was now at the center. He worked out of the custom house on the north bank of the Thames, to the east of London bridge and west of the Tower, caught in the din of fishmongers, commercial agents, and river traffic. Seeking escape for his after-hours, he took up residence several miles away on George Street in Westminster. There, on the western edge of urban sprawl, his sister, Ann, came down from Chester to keep house for him. Unmarried and increasingly devoted to her younger brother, she was concerned that he had not recovered from the stress he endured on the continent and that he would soon be drained by new demands. “The task they have set him seems to be,” she wrote a friend back home, “after combating ye knaves in G[ermany], to find em in America and ye West Indies.”
After spending a Christmas holiday with Ann in Bath, Henry set to the task before him, prodigious as it was. He was expected to coordinate communication between London and customs officials in North America and the West Indies, and was authorized “to lay his observations thereupon” before the customs commissioners, who could in turn pass them to the Treasury. It was a short step from the Treasury to other officials at Whitehall and parliamentary leaders at Westminster. But then the administrative apparatus was in such disarray that establishing a regular correspondence—and, in effect, instituting a bureaucratic chain of command—proved a formidable task, with letters passing back and forth over the breadth of the Atlantic sometimes taking six months to complete a circuit. Hulton did his best to routinize communications that were haphazard and reporting that was irregular.
England’s commercial policy was slow in the making; it never reached the stage of exact definition, even in the days of its greatest influence; and it can be understood only by a study of its principles in operation over a period of one hundred and fifty years. In its relation to the colonies in America, it was never an exact system, except in a few fundamental particulars. Rather it was a modus operandi for the purpose of meeting the needs of a growing and expanding state. It followed rather than directed commercial enterprise, and as the nation grew in stature it adapted itself to that nation’s changing needs.
The challenges Hulton faced were compounded by other irritations: the job was not exactly what he thought it would be, the salary was reduced by a tax that he thought he should not have to pay, and the ministry pursued policies with which he disagreed. Hulton was miffed that he ended up as the plantations “clerk” rather than the plantations “secretary,” a change in designation that took place after he accepted the post. The customs commissioners decided to have only one secretary in their office, although Hulton as head “clerk” would have a staff of other clerks to assist him. Perhaps the commissioners did so at the urging of the existing secretary so that he, not Hulton, could continue to receive whatever legal fees were charged in connection with the office. Fees, as Hulton knew from his years on Antigua, were as crucial—and as controversial—to the navigation system as tax rates. Many of those who held their appointments through the customs commission subsisted on those fees, which, for the lowest paid—men far lower on the scale than Hulton—could bring in considerably more than their salaries, if they were paid any salary at all. Understandably, fees were yet another source of friction between the agents of empire and those they policed.
Worse, as Hulton discovered, his salary would be subject to the land tax even though it was paid through the customs commission. He had received £300 per year as comptroller on Antigua, a salary, boosted somewhat by fees, that had been treated as exempt from the land tax in England and local taxes on the island. Normally those in the customs service posted abroad did not pay domestic taxes because their offices were tied to revenue generated outside the kingdom. As Hulton saw it he fell into the same category, residence in England notwithstanding. His new annual salary of £500 would be reduced by £90 to cover the land tax. Since he would be working much harder at his new post than the old, in his view that meant he was actually working for less even though technically being paid more. Hulton protested to the Treasury for an exemption from the land tax. Despite securing a finding in his favor by the attorney general, it appears that the dispute lingered and the Treasury lords did not decide one way or the other before the post was eliminated.
Nor was Hulton necessarily comfortable with the policies he was expected to help enforce. He did not disagree with Grenville’s desire to reform the system; just the opposite. He knew from firsthand experience that some Navigation Acts on the books were inadequate and should be replaced: thus he could see the need for the 1764 American Revenue Act, commonly called the Sugar Act, to replace the Molasses Act that had stood since 1733. In Hulton’s opinion that earlier act had been the unfortunate result of lobbying by West India planters. “Instead of operating as a fund of Revenue” it had become a “source of Smug[g]ling and corruption.” Those who were supposed to enforce the law actually acted in collusion with those who broke it, which “introduced a depravity of Morals, and alienated the Subjects from their duty to Government.”
The Officers for the receipt of this Revenue were appointed, and the Ministry were pleased with the prospect of a considerable aid, by means of this new duty. But the first object of establishing authority, and respect to government had been neglected. Ignorant of the State of the Colonies, they rushed into a measure which from the Constitutions of the several Governments, they could not support against the clamours, and opposition of the people. The consequence is well known. From this time a spirit of resistance was adopted in America against all Revenue Laws; and the authority of Parliament, which at first was questioned, became to be in general denied; and any means to avoid, or prevent the execution of those Laws, was deemed right.
However skeptical Hulton may have been about the Stamp Act at the moment it became law, he did not make his doubts public. He went about his job, sending out dispatches from his superiors and gathering responses from the colonies as they trickled back to London. If he offered advice on policy to the ministers at Treasury or subministers in customs, he did so guardedly, veteran as he had become of court politics. Knowing when to speak and when to hold his tongue was by now second nature.
Natural as his circumspection was then about imperial politics, it is somewhat odd that Hulton wrote so little later for his sons about the most important personal decision he made during these years, stating simply: “In the month of Sept. 1766 I was married to your Mother, at which time I was confident my Establishment would continue in London.”
Elizabeth, like her new husband, probably expected to live a comfortable life in greater London. That was not to be. In just over a year Henry would end one job and begin another—over three thousand miles away. Hulton recognized he was asking much of her when he reluctantly accepted another post, a post requiring them to traverse the Atlantic for North America. “It was very severe to me to be compelled to remove to a remote part of the World,” he reminisced, “and to occasion her to withdraw herself from all her friends,” and, he might have added, to be informed of this when she was pregnant with their first child.
Hulton may have felt that he had no choice. His position as plantations clerk was about to be eliminated after four years, in yet another wave of imperial reform. The prime mover this time around was Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer in a ministry headed nominally by William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham. Though a crown appointee rather than a true civil servant and therefore serving at the king’s pleasure, Hulton, like other bureaucrats, could expect to keep his job if he did it well and did not offend the wrong people. He had held onto his clerkship through Grenville’s ministry, then Rockingham’s, and was continuing on as Pitt’s got underway. But with Pitt incapacitated, Townshend became the dominant force in the ministry, and he was determined to bring his own brand of reform. That included terminating Hulton’s old job, though not because of anything that Hulton himself had done or failed to do. Townshend had met Hulton; he talked with him about reforms that he and like-minded parliamentary colleagues had mulled over. As Hulton recalled it, Townshend
sent for me, and told me of their intention and desired I would consider what goods it might be proper to lay a duty on in America. I answered him, Sir, before you lay any fresh duties in America, it might be best to see those well collected that are already laid. Why, are they not says he[?] No Sir, the Duties on Sugar, Wines, and Molasses, are not. Well, says he, we shall appoint a Board of Commissioners, and more Officers to see to the better management of the Revenue in that Country.
The next thing Hulton knew the office of plantations clerk had been closed, a new American Board of Customs had been formed in its place, and he was one of five men named to it. He did not seek or even want the post. It would be at the same salary as the one eliminated and he would have to relocate his new family across the ocean in a strange land, an expensive proposition taking him into a potential minefield. His new post would be paired with a spate of new taxes that could be counted upon to irritate the very people he was being sent to live among.
The new American-based board had actually been suggested by the customs commission itself, perhaps at Townshend’s instigation, even though that meant surrendering some of its own power.
The original report did not designate a place for the commissioners to take up residence. By the time that the American board was formally created—on 14 September 1767—Boston had been decided upon. That in itself was a signal that great change was intended, that Whitehall had effectively thrown down the gauntlet and taken up the challenge for a contest between imperial authority and provincial autonomy at the very heart of resistance to the navigation system.
Heretofore the men of the customs service had been unable to keep revenue ahead of costs. Annual overhead, mostly in the form of salaries, accounted for more than monies collected. The vast majority of men on the payroll were from the colonies, not the mother country. They virtually monopolized the lower paid posts. The full panoply of officials in Boston before the commission’s creation—comptroller and collector, surveyor and searchers, weighers and gaugers, landwaiters and tidesmen—had accounted for roughly £1000 annually in salaries. Creation of the new board better than trebled those costs. The commissioners alone added £2500 to the total for the Boston area, and close to another £1000 was allocated for a secretary, a cashier, clerks for both of them, and two inspectors general. Then there was the solicitor and his clerks, who accounted for another £200 or so.
Robinson was already in Boston when the board was formed; so was John Temple, one of the other board members. Robinson hailed from England and Temple, though Bostonborn, had spent years in the mother country trying to position himself in society through family ties to the Grenvilles. Hulton made the voyage across with the remaining two appointees, William Burch, a fellow Englishman, and Charles Paxton, a Massachusetts man then in London.
Hulton’s complaints about Temple were proof enough that problems came as much from within the customs service as from without, from the board itself as well as subordinate customs officials unhappy with new rules and new faces. “‘Tis said, these Commissioners, are resolved to make all the Officers do their Duty Strictly” because “New Brooms sweep clean” complained a New Yorker not looking forward to change.
But malice is difficult to find among the men at Whitehall and Westminster who formulated American policy in the 1760s. Foolishness is easier to spot, but it was foolishness in trying to better manage something old rather than in attempting to try something new. There was never a clear dividing line between the desire to regulate trade and the desire to raise revenue. Both impulses were present from the beginning.
And yet modern scholarship has shown that the idea of a reciprocal empire, where mother country and colonies would each benefit from the relationship, was not so skewed after all. The colonial economy had grown at an even faster pace than that of England. For some sectors of the economy that growth was despite membership in the empire; for others it was only because of it.
Even Hulton’s high salary grated on some nerves, as did other perquisites to the job. As a case in point, Hulton was made “principal deputy receiver” for the Greenwich hospital tax in June 1768. With that he became a multiple officeholder and therefore susceptible to the sort of criticism directed repeatedly at lieutenant governor cum chief justice Thomas Hutchinson. The tax was used to support a hospital in Greenwich, England, for sick or injured seamen. Part of the funding came from a six pence per month tax on seamen’s salaries, a rate set by Parliament in 1696 and applied to the colonies since 1729. Hulton did not go out to collect the tax himself; rather, he paid others in the customs service to do it for him at fifty-two colonial ports, from Georgia to New Hampshire, from Quebec to Nova Scotia. He was allowed a 10% commission on all funds collected, which in a good year could bring him over £200—a tidy sum.
Not surprisingly, seamen in the colonies did not like paying the tax or dealing with those officials who collected it. Wages routinely went underreported or were not reported at all. Some fishermen—notably in Marblehead and Salem—refused to pay altogether, contending that they were not sailors in the sense intended by Parliament. When the board replaced the collector for the port of Salem, in part because he was not collecting the tax, the press cried foul, complaining that it was a tax on a hospital local sailors would never use and it was being pushed by a man who profited directly from its collection.
For aggrieved colonists the hospital tax was yet another example of imperial reaching into provincial pockets. Navigation acts—the sole focus of most historical studies—came and went; fees were a constant. They were split among various officials, commonly the collector, comptroller, and lesser officials, by task. They added a profit incentive to enforcement only slightly less irritating to local merchants than similar practices—and for considerably more money—used in the vice-admiralty system.
Disputes within the imperial ranks could cut even closer than royal governors versus customs officials. Hulton had had glimpses of divisions within the customs service when he was plantations clerk. Yet another of the ironies of what followed once he arrived in Boston is that he and John Temple, their many disagreements notwithstanding, could agree on one thing: when possible, it is better to soothe than to offend. All the same it was impossible to please everyone, although Hulton apparently tried to do just that. Thomas Hutchinson, for one, thought him just the man for a difficult job. Upon meeting Hulton after his arrival in Boston, Hutchinson described him as “sensible” and prudent” and as “well calculated for the post at the present times as can be.”
Perhaps Hulton’s attempts to placate all parties made it impossible for him to get along with a strong-willed, unforgiving man like Temple, who was determined to clear opponents from his path. Hulton would not—could not, really—take Temple’s side in his longrunning dispute with Governor Bernard. The customs commissioners and Treasury lords, had they paid attention, would have seen that, if they were going to name Temple to the new board, they ought to send Bernard elsewhere. There was bad blood between them; they would not work together as agents of empire. Temple had been trying to get Bernard removed since 1764, alleging that he was corrupt, that he and a minor customs official were guilty of profiteering and blackmail. Temple succeeded in getting the minor official fired; Bernard was another matter.
Bernard refused to be cowed and held onto the governor’s chair, even though he knew that his power was ebbing. He would have been happy to leave the Bay Colony—but not until he had a post equal to his ambition. In private he urged bold imperial reform. In public he was more timid. Hulton found his ideas appealing and was convinced that, had London listened, things might have gone differently. Whether Bernard was on the right reform track is now moot. He was scarcely able to save himself. Having arrived in Massachusetts after serving as governor of New Jersey, initially Bernard, an Englishman, had gotten on well with the various political factions in the province. By the onset of the Stamp Act crisis five years later he had become increasingly marginalized. His own councillors voted consistently against him and sided with the lower house of the assembly when disputes arose pitting executive against legislative power. Those councillors were chosen by the house, not the governor, not the crown. Bernard had the authority to prorogue a legislative session. He could even dissolve the assembly and call for an election before reconvening it. But exercising his authority could cost him his power, so he had to proceed carefully.
Town politics compounded his problems.
Hulton may well have wondered if it was not already too late when he came ashore on the morning of 5 November 1767, his ship having dropped anchor in Boston harbor the night before. He had said his goodbye to Elizabeth just as she was regaining her strength from the birth of Thomas. She would join him the following June, with Thomas, a servant or two, and with Henry’s sister, Ann, who lived with them for virtually the entire time they were in Massachusetts. To Ann fell many of the duties of running a household once Henry purchased a farm in Brookline. She had stayed with the family in town for nearly a year before then, in their rented house. If Henry had been able to purchase something in Boston proper he might never have gone into the countryside. He was only able to purchase the farm through a third party. Had he made the offer himself, he might have been rebuffed, as he was in Boston whenever he tried to buy real estate there.
For once disappointment in one setting had brought opportunity in another. As in London, Hulton was able to set up a household removed from the hustle and bustle of city life. According to Ann, “My Brother lives on a spot of Earth which he calls his own,” one so satisfying to him and Elizabeth “that they would not chus to change it for any other spot in New England.”
Henry and Elizabeth brought three more sons into the world during their Massachusetts years: Henry, born in Boston in May 1769, with Edward and Preston following in October 1771 and October 1773, both at the house in Brookline.
Although finding food and shelter suitable to their tastes was a challenge the entire trip, they never went without. The most they roughed it was a four-day period passing back down Lake George, where once they had to put ashore and sleep in a tent made from the batteau’s sail, eating cold food, shivering through an even colder rain, not changing their clothes for days on end. They were never in any particular danger except those inherent to such travels—real enough, and Henry was rightly impressed with Elizabeth’s fortitude. She “supported all her difficulties with great spirit,” he reported proudly.
Much of what he saw pleased him—the land more than the people. “It is amazing how rapidly the back parts of this Country are settling, and with what little means of living people sit down in the inhospitable woods,” he marveled.
Hulton’s pride as an Englishman, his pride as servant of the crown and agent of empire, would color his view of all things American, whether in Canada or Massachusetts. There were those moments when he could see himself as both English and American, and believe that he had found a new home within the same expansive imperial community. “I Bless God my family have been and are well and enjoy every blessing this can afford,” he wrote in one of his more peaceful moments at Brookline.
You have seen the World in the polished, we, in its rude State. You have gone over the Boasted remains of Antiquity, and observed the Conscious pride of those who demand respect from the lustre of their descent, and glory in what they have been. We have seen the face of nature as it was left at the flood; uncleared, and uncultivated and mankind in a state of equality. But tho’ we cannot glory in heroic actions or claim the honours of an illustrious Ancestry, yet do not think that we are without an imaginary superiority, that we do not pride ourselves in the possession of advantages over others. Happy delusion! Where are the people, or where is the mortal, that has not a little fund of this self-flattery? That cannot place himself in some point of view, where he can look down upon others? This gratification to pride, is a most comfortable cordial, and makes the wretched support many evils—but what say you, is your boast? Why we boast a glorious Independency. We look on the rest of the World as Slaves, and despise titles, and honour. And as we cannot glory in what we have been we pride ourselves in what we shall be. The little island of Great Britain is a small inconsiderable spot. We shall be the Empire of the World, and give Law to the nations.
When Hulton wrote “we” he really meant “they.” He did not share their boosterish self-confidence that they were destined to lead, that even the mother country herself ought to—and someday would—bow before them. Although he could appreciate the raw energy so evident in Massachusetts he was more ambivalent about the lack of polish he saw there: on the one hand, he found the honesty and directness of many people refreshing; on the other, he wished for some happy medium between the artfulness of self-styled sophisticates and the artlessness of the common sort. And it was the common sort, with the complicity of their social betters, who made his life as a customs commissioner so miserable. Inability to do the job he was sent to do gnawed at him, causing anxieties that he had never felt on Antigua. Although those anxieties did not match what he had experienced in Germany,
Hulton’s short trips around southern New England and long excursion into Canada were also an escape from the cares, even the dangers, of office. All of the commissioners but Temple felt the pressure. John Robinson had had to look over his shoulder even before he was named to the board.
Hulton would never be beaten by street toughs, never be tarred and feathered by a mob. Others in the customs service—dozens of others—would not be so lucky. They suffered all of the pain and humiliation that accompanies such physical abuse.
Henry, with Elizabeth and Ann, did not leave Castle William until after the troops finally arrived in October. Hulton and his colleagues did their work there as best they could. Only Temple went back and forth to town with any regularity. He alone among them had left his family in Boston proper. With the troops’s coming, anti-board rhetoric intensified. Hulton was relieved to have soldiers about, although they did not act as a police force and “the temper of the people is not changed.”
The two regiments that had arrived in October 1768 were reinforced by another two some months later. Because the town seemed peaceful enough those additional regiments left the following fall—but not before Francis Bernard, who did not to wait to be relieved before sailing away. Hutchinson would have to act in Bernard’s stead for two years until he had the governor’s office formally bestowed on him. Hulton and the other commissioners were disappointed to see Bernard leave; doubly so to see half of the troops depart. Hulton predicted no good would come of it. The Boston “massacre” of 5 March 1770 fulfilled his direst prophecies, when soldiers slew civilians in a burst of violence that had been building for days. Captain Thomas Preston and eight enlisted men were subsequently tried for murder before Massachusetts judges and jurors. All but two of them were acquitted, and those who were convicted were found guilty of manslaughter, not murder. During the many months they were held in the Boston town jail awaiting trial they feared for their lives. “But the injury to the commissioners of the customs was greater,” wrote Thomas Hutchinson later, “not merely as it respected their character in England, but as it tended to expose them to the resentment and wrath of the people of the town.”
John Robinson, who had wanted a leave for months, sailed to London at Hulton’s urging to report on the deteriorating state of affairs.
Paul Revere’s engraving of British troops landing at the Long Wharf on 1 October 1768. Christian Remick apparently drew the scene in 1769, which Revere engraved on a copper plate the next year. Given the caption describing the troops marching “with insolent Parade” into town, the seemingly polite inscription to the Earl of Hillsborough was probably a bit of sarcasm. Hancock’s dock, complete with buildings and ships at anchor, is to the right. The town house stands at the end of the long row of buildings leading off the wharf. Faneuil Hall is the second prominent structure to its right. The largest of the British warships, the 50 gun HMS Romney, is to the right of the wharf’s end. Critics of imperial policy blamed Hulton and the other commissioners for the troops’ presence. Courtesy of The American Antiquarian Society
Town leaders, by contrast, decried the commissioners for their actions, for being the cause of imperial unrest. The confiscation of Hancock’s Liberty, the arrival of troops, the incident on King’s Street, all were offered as proof that conspiracy was afoot and evil abounded. “No period since the perilous times of our venerable Fathers had worn a more gloomy and melancholy aspect,” the townsmen lamented, and Britain’s CONSTITUTION seems fast tottering into fatal & inevitable ruin.”
Hulton and Burch had returned in May, Burch picking up his family at Hulton’s and going back to Dorchester, Hulton resuming life in Brookline. “My family are in good health and our situation would be agreeable enough if these people would suffer us to live in peace,” he wrote, “but contention and broil seem necessary to the existence of a Bostonian and indeed our present circumstances are very critical and alarming, as our lives and properties depend on the caprice of our Sovereign Lords the people.”
Hulton’s suspicions about Temple are a crucial indicator of the board’s sorry state.
Ultimately Temple was taken off the board and replaced with Benjamin Hallowell, Boston’s comptroller. By then it was late 1770 and Temple had given up completely on the others—and they on him. Their final break had been building since 1769, when a majority of the board voted to remove Samuel Venner as secretary and replace him with Richard Reeve, who had been the board’s clerk. Venner had come over from London; Reeve was from Boston. The majority decided that Venner was siding with Temple, whereas they considered Reeve loyal to them. Temple interpreted Venner’s removal as the first step toward eliminating him and he was quite likely right. Temple complained that Reeve did not keep him informed of board business and board meetings, and that the other commissioners were behind it. When he did meet with the others, it could involve firing people he had hired and hiring replacements to whom he objected—fruitlessly.
Venner protested to the Treasury that the board exceeded its authority in removing him, since he too had a crown appointment.
Such was the disordered state of affairs for the American board by early 1769. The Treasury lords were at a loss, unsure what to do about such squabbling. They chided the board for removing Venner, which was beyond their authority—so Venner was right. But then, given the circumstances, they did not order that he be reinstated—so he would not receive satisfaction. Although they did not recommend to the king that Temple be removed, they did tell the board that dissenting opinions did not need to be recorded, which would be one way of silencing him. Furthermore, if anyone on the board courted “Popularity by a factious Opposition to the Opinions of their Associates,” then the lords would recommend that that person be removed by the king—which of course only reinforced the determination of Hulton and the other three board members to have Temple removed. Criticizing the board for poor reporting and an apparent decline in revenue from the Navigation Acts, the Treasury lords’s secretary also tossed out this sop: “My Lords are not insensible to the Difficulties with which You have been surrounded, & the Opposition You have had to encounter since your first landing in America.”
They could appreciate that an underfunded and overextended customs service could not be expected to tick on like clockwork. Friction between the component parts was inevitable.
After much fact-gathering and venting on the floor of the Lords and the Commons, Parliament had sputtered and fumed but did little more than exchange resolutions with legislators in Massachusetts. Parliament issued its resolution in February 1769; the Massachusetts assembly responded in June; Parliament refused to acknowledge its response. Just as reports from the American board of customs were vital to the case against Bostonians made in Parliament, the presence of the board in Boston was part of the case presented in Boston against Parliament.
Sadly for Hulton, he and the other board members had been caught in the middle of a dispute not of their making and yet they could hardly stand apart from it.
Francis Bernard’s ambivalence about them exemplified the problem. Bernard did not see what he could do to assist the customs service before the board’s arrival; the board’s presence only made matters worse, though he was careful not to cast any aspersions on its members (except for his longtime rival John Temple). Like John Robinson he testified before the Privy Council. There he lamented that customs officers were unable to perform their duties unless they had troops and fleets at their back. Often, after they seized a suspect cargo, crowds would form and stage a “rescue,” whisking off whatever the officials had confiscated, by brute force if necessary, so that there would be no evidence should a prosecution be attempted. “The officers of the Customs grew very indifferent about making Seizures” as a result, Bernard concluded.
What Bernard did not say was that the commissioners’ repeated requests for assistance had further complicated his already complex role as governor. In the wake of the Liberty affair they begged him to send for the regulars. He responded that he had to have the Council’s approval before doing so—which, by that point, he knew he would never receive. When Hulton asked if the board could go to the Castle for sanctuary, Bernard went along with him, while at the same time making it clear to Hulton—and to his political opponents—that he did not think conditions in the town were all that dangerous.
It was not that Bernard disliked Hulton—he was, after all, a godfather to one of his sons
Perhaps that was because he had finally been conditioned to accept rather than attempt to change the people and their ways. In the first months after the commissioners arrived they had complained bitterly to whoever would listen about the incessant smuggling, the general ignoring of the Navigation Acts, and the abuse of customs officials. How, they wondered aloud, could Boston’s leading men stand idly by while Paxton was burned in effigy? How could London do nothing when a Connecticut court ruled writs of assistance unconstitutional? Thomas Hutchinson, whose Boston home had been utterly gutted by a mob in the Stamp Act crisis, commented too knowingly that
The Commissioners of the Customs make great complaints of the insufficiency of the laws in being for preventing illicit trade and I suppose have made the necessary representations. On the other hand the people think the laws already in force to be very grievous and very unwillingly submit to the execution of them. It is very disagreeable to be under constant apprehensions of danger and I know of no way of avoiding it but by an unjustifiable compliance with the prevailing principles.
Hutchinson lamented having to choose between standing on principle and risking one’s safety or setting principle aside in order to avoid harm. Hulton eventually understood that he faced that very dilemma, and that he might have to reconcile himself to a situation that he did not like but could not change. “When I was assaulted in my house 3 years ago at midnight I got no relief by my complaints,” he sighed in the fall of 1773, “and when I was pelted by the Mob this last summer I took it quietly, and said nothing, and I am told they now say I am such a patient[,] quiet Gentleman, they will trouble me no more.”
Hulton spoke more truthfully than he knew when he commented in the summer of 1771 that all was quiet and “the people will continue so long as they are allowed to disavow the authority of Great Britain with impunity.”
As a function of survival—political if not literal—the men of the customs service had learned to live in a legal gray area before the commissioners arrived in 1767. Sometimes they enforced the law; sometimes they did not. That behavior did not change; the commissioners themselves even adopted it. One could contend that a similar dynamic plays itself out in every society, where the legally permissible is ultimately determined by what is socially acceptable. Understanding that truism is necessary before pondering the problems peculiar to empire.
One Massachusetts resident professing to be a friend to government wrote Thomas Hutchinson early in 1770, concerned that “pride and ambition” were driving the colonists down a road to revolution that they did not really want to travel. “I wish the Board of Commissioners were dissolved, coud the dutys be collected without ’em,” and “I cant see why they may’nt,” he added. “If the revenue Act be repeal’d, I suppose there will be an end of them.”
Hulton had fled to Castle William for the third and final time a couple of weeks before the tea party—in anticipation of being in danger, not because he had come under real attack. Admiral Montagu, naval commander on the scene, assured the Treasury lords that he would assist the commissioners should they ask for his aid.
They made that final departure, taking what personal effects they could, in October 1774. Elizabeth, the boys, Ann, and eventually the servants—a half-dozen or so—joined Henry at a rented house in Boston. Hulton, Burch, and Hallowell lived essentially cheek by jowl. They had hoped that the Treasury would supplement their salaries to cover their increased expenses and decreased revenue from the customs. They petitioned the Lords to “give Us such relief in future, as may encourage Us to persevere with chearfulness and zeal in the execution of our duty.”
With his prospects looking ever bleaker, Henry assumed that the end had come, that he and his family would go elsewhere. “We are anxious for our future destination, as there seems no prospect of peace and comfort, on this Continent for some time to come.”
He had developed a siege mentality long before any real siege began. He had begun to detach himself from public affairs months before and only went through the motions of doing his job—like dozens of other imperials officials, no doubt. He thought that the board might be recalled to London; it was not. With the closing of Boston as a port in the summer of 1774 he had shifted the board’s meetings to Salem, and then back to Boston again in response to events in the countryside.
After nearly sixteen months of being huddled in Boston, Hulton, his family, and their servants boarded a ship bound for Halifax. From there they would go to England—and soon, they hoped. Some emigrés like the Hultons were leaving their new home to return to their old one. Many more were leaving the only home they had ever known. In the journal Henry had been keeping for some months he made an anguished entry for March 10th, when he thought his ship would set sail. The passion expressed there in his private despair is very different from the dispassionate, ironic tone he had taken for so long in discussing the downward spiral of public events.
What accumulation of distress! A severe season! A pressing foe! Hundreds of people to be crammed on board each Vessel, without seamen to navigate them, or provision to support the passengers on the Voyage. Oh! The heart racking pains of every parent; the ruin of fortune; the shipwreck of property not attended to: go we must, and fly from the wrath of Man, unprovided against the rude elements, trusting only in an Almighty protection for our deliverance . . . taking a last farewell of my dwelling, and shipwrecked substance, which I was obliged to abandon, I cast a look on my old faithful dog Argus; he seemed to know, and sympathize in my distress, and drew tears from my Eyes.
Hulton did not sail out of Boston harbor that day. His leave-taking would be prolonged because nothing seemed to be going quite right—a somehow fitting close to his years in Massachusetts. What little baggage beyond personal effects the family had taken from Brookline had been stowed aboard a schooner and sloop belonging to the customs service. Virtually all of the men who had been part of the service in and around Boston were joining the exodus, or had gone already. Hulton’s own ship, built for carrying army supplies, was refitted with berths for the trip up the coast to Halifax. Seamen were at such a premium that the captain had to settle for some marines to have enough hands to get under way. The marines broke into the liquor stock, got hopelessly drunk, and had to be removed and replacements found from among the sailors of other vessels in the convoy being assembled off Nantasket. This must have frayed nerves already worn by dislocation and a long winter under siege. For five days before boarding ship the members of the household had waited anxiously in Boston, with intermittent artillery barrages causing them to fear that an assault would be launched before they could get away, all the negotiations for a peaceful evacuation notwithstanding. Once they were aboard it still took their convoy over two weeks to ready itself, wintry weather turning fair, then wintry again. Fatigued by the events of the preceding months as well as the voyage itself, the Hultons and other evacuees put into Halifax on April 2nd.
It would be another three months before they could secure passage on a ship bound for England—this, even with Hulton’s political connections. Hulton, at least, had been able to find a place to stay in town almost as soon as they arrived. Others less fortunate had to remain on the ships that carried them. Though safely ashore the Hultons paid a premium to sleep on a hardwood floor, with no bedding.
We feel ourselves very happy in being once more in our native land; of which blessing no one can be sufficiently sensible who has not lived out of it, and I wish all murmurers to make the experiment, especially if they are sons of liberty: that they may enjoy the sweets of it for a while under the Boston Demagogues. I am persuaded that in no Country in no period of time, there was ever a state of society, in which the people were so improved, so generally comfortable and happy, as in the present one of Great Britain.
Country Gentleman
It took the Hultons the better part of a year to get settled. They spent a few days in Kensington at the home of Elizabeth’s younger sister Alice, who was married to the Reverend Whitley Heald. They then shifted to Westminster and the Berkeley Square townhouse of Elizabeth’s older brother, Jacob, who had inherited the Preston family estate when his father, Isaac, died in May 1768. After that Henry and Elizabeth were back in Kensington, renting a house from the prominent physician Sir George Baker until Henry could find something more permanent—but not in London. He was “desirous to get down into the Country,” as Ann put it.
In the fall, Henry and Elizabeth took a long vacation at Beeston Hall, Jacob Preston’s seat in Norfolk. It appears that Henry had not been to Beeston before, when Isaac Preston, Elizabeth’s father, was still alive. Jacob Preston was in the midst of renovations, both to his grounds and to the manor house.
Seeing what his brother-in-law was doing at Beeston Hall most likely stirred Henry’s desire to do something similar, to be a man of good fortune and refined pleasures, living at ease—but productively and responsibly—on the land. He did not have the wherewithal to be a Jacob Preston, but he could make himself an approximation of what had long been an ideal. He had already had glimpses of how it might be when he was on his farm in Brookline. Despite having to leave so much behind in Massachusetts he was hardly impoverished. Still, he had to be careful. Although he continued on as deputy receiver of funds for the Greenwich hospital tax from the colonies, the spread of war and end of royal government from the Maine country to Florida meant that there was less and less collected for him to receive. Likewise, though he kept his post and salary as a member of the American board of customs, he was paid from the proceeds of Navigation Acts and those proceeds dried up with the war. He still had other assets—cash, property—that he had before he and Elizabeth married, and whatever Elizabeth brought with her, but he would have to keep his ambitions modest.
It became clear enough to Hulton that he would not be appointed to any new office. Perhaps knowing that London held no opportunities for him reinforced his desire to spurn society there, and to retire from the government service that had defined his life to that point. The countryside, he decided, “comports more with my temper, and fortune.” He had had his fill of the “worthless and vain,” of “the arts and intrigues of designing men.”
Henry and Elizabeth had enough time and money to make a leisurely trip out to Wells, leave instructions with workmen renovating the house, tour southern Wales, and purchase furniture in Bath and Bristol. The two older boys traveled with them to Burcott; the two younger followed some time later in the care of their maids.
He was in perfect health, and good spirits, when we parted, and the next evening he returned from Dinner quite hearty, but suddenly expired at nine o’clock. He was a Man, bold, rude, and uncultured, but of very strong natural parts: had the talent to make himself useful to great Men. To the World he sacrificed, took advantage of extraordinary opportunities, and amassed a prodigious fortune, but with all his affairs wretched. He built a pallace, of which he had no enjoyment, for he lived without domestic consolation, the sure consequence of unprincipled attachment.
Hulton did not particularly lament Taylor’s passing. Hearing that his old benefactor on Antigua, Colonel Samuel Martin, had died caused considerably more sorrow. Remembering Martin took him back to another friendship from his earlier years, David Cuthbert, his fellow commissioner in Germany during the Seven Years War. Cuthbert’s “spirit and fortitude were unequalled,” he recalled fondly, and Martin had “shone with distinguished lustre,” standing out “amidst the impurity and profligacy of the West Indies.”
For Hulton there was also joy to balance the sorrow. “I am more settled, retired, and at my ease, than I have been for some years past,”
Blissamore Hall, as viewed from the edge of the ha-ha separating the house from an adjoining pasture. Known as Blissmore Hall in Hulton’s era, the core of the house appears to date from the early 17th century. There have been various additions and renovations since that time, all of which have added to the Hall’s charm. Photo by the author. By permission of Lady Jennie Bland.
Money worries meant that Hulton enjoyed something less than an arcadian idyll. The farm he leased at Hippenscombe did not produce enough in cash crops for him not to worry about money; Blissmore may well have cost more in rent than it generated in revenue. In Massachusetts during peak years he had earned well over £700 annually from his commissioner’s salary and his cut of the Greenwich hospital tax. The £80 or so it cost him annually just to rent Blissmore Hall
Hulton traveled back and forth to London—staying for several months at least, on one occasion, trying to work out something more permanent for himself and his “brother commissioners.” That Lord North, head of the government, declined to give him an audience was an indication of what a political and financial liability the board had become, though no one in the ministry would be tactless enough to say so publicly. The commissioners’ salaries were paid through April 1780 but “nothing was then determined as to our future provision.”
While Hulton sought his pension he also looked to the loyalist claims commission for compensation. His long spells in London, lingering about, seeking audiences, anxious for good news, took him to the commission as often as it did to the Treasury. An old friend from Massachusetts, in London to settle his own accounts, crossed Hulton’s path. Though glad to see him Hulton seemed “much dejected & whines & cants like a Methodist Preacher.”
The Hultons were like thousands of others who lost virtually everything that they left behind when they fled the colonies.
Hulton was one of only two Brookline residents to lose his property in this fashion. Hulton’s thirty-acre farm, with buildings, was sold in 1781 for $1220 in paper money, local currency.
Henry Hulton, William Burch, Benjamin Hallowell, and John Robinson all ended up in England—as did well over five thousand others from the rebellious colonies. Other than attempting to make sure that his “brother” commissioners received the pay they were due, Hulton had almost no contact with them. There were no reunions, no regular correspondence. They were not determined to maintain a shared identity based on a failed past. As Englishmen who had never severed ties with home, Hulton, Burch, and Robinson could be more easily absorbed within the culture than those who truly were coming to a strange land, a mother country in name only. Transplanted loyalists did not comprise, or even seek to form, a distinctive subculture.
Hulton did not assiduously trace the progress of the fighting, hoping that a British success here, an American reversal there, would mean that he might be able to go back to Massachusetts or to some other outpost of empire. He put all of that behind him when he left London, in a conscious effort to withdraw from public life. There is in his surviving letters a determination to rise above the pettiness of the world, to develop a broader perspective, looking beyond the expansion of empires and rise of nations.
We are here in peace and retirement, and know little of what passes in the World, and happy for Us in these distracted times, that We are somewhat removed from the fury of the storm. Alas! The prospect is gloomy, and I fear the issue of these publick calamities. Who would have imagined the progress of this rebellion, and present state of affairs? Rapid are the advances of Commercial nations towards their Summit of glory, but short is the duration of their Splendour. The internal corruption that great commerce produces, would soon urge a Nation to its decline, without the ingratitude of its Colonies. But there is an hand unseen that directs the whole; and it is no wonder that He should make wicked nations the instruments of each other’s punishments.
Hulton instead immersed himself in household affairs, taking particular pleasure in the upbringing of his sons. There were now five: Elizabeth delivered George in September 1778, when the family lived in Burcott. Young George’s Aunt Ann and Uncle Jacob, Elizabeth’s brother, were there the next month for the christening.
Elizabeth was at Henry’s side to the end. He died in February 1790, a few months shy of his sixtieth birthday, when their oldest son, Thomas, was in his early twenties and youngest, George, was not yet in his teens. She continued alone what she and Henry had started together, keeping a comfortable home and seeing her boys on to manhood. Henry made her the “sole executrix” of his will.
St. Mary’s Church in Andover, Hampshire, from the southeast corner. It stands as a splendid example of the once-popular Victorian Gothic style and is well-maintained, with an active congregation. When Hulton was interred another St. Mary’s stood on the spot. The inscribed stone slab covering Hulton’s burial vault then formed part of the chancel floor. When the new St. Mary’s was built in the 1840s with a floor at a higher elevation, the old floor was turned into a crypt as part of the foundation, separated from the new floor by a low ceiling. Photo by the author.
Thomas had done well for himself, aided by parents and an uncle who combined a concern for his future with a desire to preserve family wealth and station. He and Edward enrolled at Caius College, Cambridge—two university men, whose father had never had such an opportunity. Thomas entered Caius in 1787, in time for his father to enjoy the moment; Edward was admitted just a week after his father’s death. Unlike Thomas, who left before taking a degree—expected behavior of someone destined for the landed gentry—Edward earned a bachelor’s and master’s before beginning a long and distinguished career as a member of the Anglican clergy.
Henry Hulton would have been proud that he had sons who entered honorable professions, that they stayed close to their mother, and that they in turn had children who made their mark in the world. He would have been pleased that Hultons and Prestons formed family ties that would last many years, with Hultons who made their way to Norfolk and Prestons who moved to Hampshire. And he would have been touched to know that when his son Henry lost a child in infancy, Henry chose to have that child buried with his grandparents. The three were placed together in a vault at St. Mary’s Church, Andover, where they remain to this day.
Imperial Reformer
Had Henry Hulton not become an agent of empire his thoughts would most likely have never turned to imperial reform. His interests had lain elsewhere—until he left England. His insularity until that point was typical of Britons during his age and not so different from Americans of a later generation who cannot be bothered to know much of the wider world. He contemplated the empire’s internal workings because he had been caught up in them. That his thoughts grew out of his experience in no sense diminishes their importance. True enough, he expressed no profound ideas, he offered no unique insights. Indeed, he sounded very much like other reform-minded Britons—more prominent then, better remembered now—when he discussed the problems of empire. But appreciating what he had to say does not require any specious claim for originality; rather, the fact that so much of what he said echoed others is a reminder that the empire did not crumble because no one had ever imagined that it could. On the contrary; anticipating that very outcome drove most of the policies whose failures Hulton witnessed firsthand, sometimes as participant, other times as observer.
He knew that he had stepped into a difficult situation when he set forth to Boston. The “Account” that he wrote after returning to England was obviously tinged by hindsight as well as experience. Nonetheless, most of the opinions that he expressed there, after the fact, had already been formed when he was still in Massachusetts. Even before leaving England, as plantations clerk he had well understood the unpopularity of the Stamp Act and the dangerously mixed message sent by its repeal. When taking his post as a customs commissioner he knew that the American board was joined inseparably with the Townshend duties—in real terms, as new tax legislation was tied to stricter enforcement, and in symbolic terms among those colonists looking for proof of a plot hatched in London to subvert their rights. The escalation of antipathy, as demonstrated in the Liberty affair, led to soldiers being garrisoned among civilians and dire warnings from George III that the empire teetered on the edge of catastrophe, something the king had not done in the Stamp Act crisis. Opening a new session of Parliament in November 1768 he contrasted imperial affairs at that moment with how they had stood at the close of the previous session. Then the colonies were showing a “just sense of their Duty”; now, by contrast the “Spirit of Faction” had taken hold again. Boston especially appeared “to be in a State of Disobedience to all Law and Government.” Town leaders had “proceeded to Measures subversive of the Constitution” that “manifest a Disposition to throw off their Dependence on Great Britain.”
This was the frightening prospect looming before Henry Hulton of Brookline, Massachusetts, royal commissioner of the customs, because if disaster did happen he would in some sense have to account for it and, rightly or not, possibly even accept responsibility for it. There was a fatalistic side to him that considered a break inevitable, that concluded there was nothing he or anyone else could do to prevent it. And yet he could not allow himself to slip into historical determinism, to think that social courses are irreversible—that, where one policy failed, no other could succeed. We can see his uneasy juxtaposition of future as fixed and future as malleable in a letter that he wrote in 1772, when, for the moment, crisis had passed.
The people in this Country I believe are more at their ease than the peasantry in any other. They are the proprietors of the soil they cultivate; they know no subjection to great Lords; and enjoy the benefits of protection from a Government whose authority they are always disputing. Independency was the principle the first settlers set out upon, when they quitted England to cultivate the wilds of America: and the same spirit is continued in their descendants. And from the immense Country that remains to be cleared, and settled, and the mildness of the British Government, it is probable they will be several ages before they are brought into that state of order, and subordination that prevails in European nations.
Hulton seems in this passage to have started as Crèvecoeur on the American character and turned into Tocqueville on the American future before reverting into a Grenvillesque defender of the British empire. He blamed the colonists for being too stubbornly provincial. But then he conceded that the mother country had contributed to their delinquency by being too permissive. The basic problem was not their obstreperous behavior; rather, it was the state of mind behind it. They had been allowed to turn what were intended to be privileges into rights—mistaken notions that needed to be corrected. For Henry Hulton, social psychologist as social engineer, the first priority had to be to change minds and hearts; proper actions could only flow from proper thoughts. Thus his advice to Townshend before being named to the customs board that no new duties be introduced until it was proved that the old duties could be collected. “The authority of Government should be well established, before it is proposed to raise a Revenue from any people.”
Even though Hulton had his doubts about the colonial social compact, he made the political contract his starting point for change. “The form of Government in this Country is too much of the Democratic to allow proper vigor to the executive branch,” Hulton declared after having lived in Massachusetts for the better part of a year.
The notion of a plan—of the plan—was alluring, at least in the abstract. “One steady plan pursued a little while would convince the people that the nation would not give up its authority,” claimed Thomas Hutchinson.
In letters back to England, Bernard had started pushing for structural reform soon after taking his post as governor of Massachusetts. He considered all of the existing forms flawed, whether they be in proprietary colonies like Maryland and Pennsylvania, colonies like Rhode Island and Connecticut that were all but self-governing, or others—the majority, actually—that were in some sense “royal” because governors and other key officials were crown appointees. Massachusetts was the logical starting point; changes made there first could then be extended elsewhere.
In the case of Massachusetts he contended that at the very least the governor’s council ought to be appointed by the crown rather than selected by the members of the lower house of the assembly, as stipulated in the 1691 charter. He also contended that local leaders ought to be brought under more effective control.
Lest Bernard be dismissed as a venomous hardliner, it should be pointed out that he coupled a tightening of government with a loosening of the navigation system. Attempts to squeeze foreign trade out altogether were as foolish as they were impossible, he emphasized. Lemons and wine were smuggled in constantly from Portugal, laws to the contrary notwithstanding. Everyone knew it, no one tried to stop it, so change the trade laws that excluded them. He faulted Parliament for listening too long to an over-influential West Indies lobby, in 1733 with the Molasses Act, and again in 1764 with the new Sugar Act. More attention needed to be paid to North America, whose products were increasing at a rapid rate. Parliament would be wiser to encourage American economic enterprise rather than restrict it, passing legislation better attuned to an empire with ever-expanding markets.
Even so, Bernard should not be given too much credit. He was hardly a visionary who saw farther or looked deeper. In a fit of pique during the Stamp Act crisis he wrote confidants that Americans ought to be given some seats in Parliament to silence their protests about taxation without representation. But then he concluded that thirty seats “should be sufficient” for the North American mainland colonies and fifteen for the West Indies—all in the House of Commons, none in the House of Lords. “Take them at their Words let them send Representatives for the present Time & for the present Purposes.”
Bernard was almost cavalier in his disregard for American arguments; he was utterly unrealistic if he thought his plan could have worked. He would in fact abandon it eventually, not, he wrote defensively, because it had been inherently unworkable, but because the moment had passed.
There would be many desperate plans to stave off military confrontation through political tinkering, whether it be by granting the colonists more autonomy through their own legislatures, giving them seats in Parliament, or creating something in-between. None had much appeal on either side of the Atlantic.
After many more centuries shall have rolled away, long after we who are now bustling upon the stage of life, shall have been received to the bosom of mother earth, and our names are forgotten, the colonies may be so far increased as to have the balance of wealth, numbers and power in their favour, the good of the empire make it necessary to fix the seat of government here; and some future GEORGE, equally the friend of mankind with him that now sways the British sceptre, may cross the Atlantic, and rule Great-Britain by an American parliament.
Leonard accepted reluctantly what his revolutionary adversaries embraced enthusiastically. Henry Hulton could not do either. He had looked beyond the constitutional issues and the political disputes, searching for the social core. In finding it—if he did in fact find it—he also found how hard it would be to alter. Americans had, he feared, opened the Pandora’s box of democratic politics. For him republicanism could too easily devolve into mindless egalitarianism, where resentment against being kept in one’s place might lead inadvertently to a society where no one had a sense of belonging—where people were more alone, more powerless than ever before, all in the name of equality. His ambivalence about such a society unfolding in the future would be shared by Tocqueville in a later generation; it would even be shared by some of his erstwhile opponents among the Revolutionary generation, once they had founded their new nation.