“I fancied his errand here was to inflame the people”

On 17 Nov 1774, the day that Josiah Quincy, Jr., arrived in London, nineteen-year-old Brinley Sylvester Oliver went to the London house of his uncle, Thomas Hutchinson, to say hello and deliver letters. Oliver had sailed from Salem on the Boston Packet, the same ship that carried Quincy.

The former governor wasn’t home, so Oliver left a note, name-dropping his fellow passengers, and came back the next morning.

Among the letters Sylvester Oliver had brought were some from Gen. Thomas Gage to the government, and Hutchinson sent those on immediately. (Part of running a worldwide empire was asking a teenager to hand-deliver official and sensitive documents to his retired uncle, who would then forward them on to the right government office.) Hutchinson quizzed his nephew about “Quincy’s business,” but the young man knew nothing.

Soon the under-secretary of state at the American department, John Pownall, sent for Hutchinson “upon an affair of very great importance.” The former governor called a cab and hurried to Whitehall. Pownall’s news was:

General Gage had wrote that there was a person unknown, supposed to be going over in Lyde [i.e., on the Boston Packet], upon a bad design, some said to Holland, and that young Mr. Oliver, who was a passenger in the same ship, would probably be able to give some account of him; and therefore Ld. North had desired Pownall to examine Mr. O.

Quincy had managed to hide from Gage’s administration that he was sailing to Britain, but the governor found out that someone from the Boston Whigs was taking a trip. And then Gage sent that news to London on the same ship that carried Quincy.

Hutchinson told Pownall that his nephew knew nothing of Quincy’s plans but invited the under-secretary to dinner to talk with the young man himself. Oliver’s intelligence must had been unimpressive because Pownall “was convinced at dinner that it was best to make no public or particular inquiry.”

On 19 November, Hutchinson sat down with Lord North to share his responses to the various news from New England. Among other things, the prime minister reported that “Quincy had desired to see him, and that he was determined to allow it; but he wished to know what he was.”

Hutchinson described his briefing for the prime minister this way in his diary:

I informed him he [Quincy] was a lawyer, as inflamatory in Town Meetings, &c., as almost any of the party: that I fancied his errand here was to inflame the people by his newspaper pieces, and in every other way possible; and to give information to those at Boston, of the same spirit and party, what was doing here, and whether they were in danger.

In a letter written that same day, Hutchinson said of Quincy:

I gave his Lordship his just character and acquainted him that he called upon Doctor F[ranklin]. the first day after he landed, and brought recomendatory letters to [John] Wilkes; and I had reason to believe republished a piece in the Public Ledger of to-day; so that his Lordship will be able to make a shrewd guess what will be his principal business

Quincy’s journal said nothing about the Public Ledger that week, and he surely would have recorded placing an essay or seeing his own words in that newspaper. But Hutchinson recalled Quincy’s 1760s newspaper essays as “Hyperion” and his “infamous” instructions on behalf of the Boston town meeting in 1770, writing then that Quincy wanted to be “a Successor to [James] Otis and it is much if he does not run mad also.”

TOMORROW: Who wanted the meeting most?