“We spoke considerably upon the sentiments of Americans”

On 19 Nov 1774, Josiah Quincy, Jr., the young Whig lawyer from Massachusetts, sat down with Lord North, the prime minister, to discuss the crisis in America.

Quincy left a detailed account of the meeting in his diary of his London trip:

Early this morning Jonathan [sic] Williams Esqr. waited upon me with the Compliments of Lord North, and his request to see me this morning. I went about half past 9 oClock . . . . After a short time his Lordship sent for Mr. Williams and myself into his Apartment. His reception was polite and with a chearfull affability.

His Lordship soon enquired into the state in which I left American affairs. I gave him my sentiments upon them[,] together with what I took to be the cause of most of our political evils—gross misrepresentation and falsehood.

His Lordship replied he did not doubt there had been much, but added that very honest [men] frequently gave a wrong state of matters through mistake[,] prejudice, prepossessions and byasses of one kind or other.

I conceded the possibility of this, but further added, that it would be happy if none of those who had given accounts relative to America had varied from known truth from worse motives.

Quincy was voicing the Boston Whig position that Boston’s strict adherence to the British constitution had been grossly misrepresented by Gov. Francis Bernard, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver, and others.

He didn’t know that Lord North consulted with Hutchinson regularly and obviously trusted his judgment. And he didn’t pick up on the prime minister’s nudge about “very honest [men]” being misunderstood, instead continuing to point to the possibility of “worse motives.”

The two men discussed the Boston Port Bill, the destruction of the tea, and the Gaspee investigation, but soon ascended into the political and constitutional principles behind those disputes. “We spoke considerably upon the sentiments of Americans of the rights claimed by Parliament to tax,” Quincy wrote.

Quincy noted that he “should have said more had not his Lordship’s propensity to converse, been incompatible with a full indulgence of my own loquacity.” The meeting lasted nearly two hours, “many Letters and messages” being brought to the prime minister all that time, while he insisted that Quincy didn’t have to leave.

Lord North appears to have been exceedingly polite—“His Lordship several times smiled and once seem[ed] touched,” Quincy wrote. At the end of their conversation Lord North told his visitor “He hoped the air of the Island would contribute to my health.”

TOMORROW: A meeting with the secretary of state.