“Who was to pay the fidler”?
And yet there is contemporaneous support for one point of that story, which might have been the seed it grew from.
On 23 December, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote to his ally Israel Williams about the event. That letter said:
Because a number of Gentlemen, who without their knowledge, the East India Company made the Consignees of 400 Chests of Tea would not send it back again, which was absolutely out of their power, they have forced them to fly to the Castle [for] refuge and then have destroyed the property [commi]tted to their care. Such barbarity none of the Aboriginals were ever guilty of.That last remark echoes how Hewes would quote Montagu:
The Admiral asked some of them next moring who was to pay the fidler.
“Well, boys, you have had a fine pleasant evening for your Indian caper—havn’t you? But mind, you have got to pay the fiddler yet!”We also have a Massachusetts source from 1833 saying that Adm. Montagu was on Griffin’s Wharf the morning after the tea went into the harbor, complaining about what the Bostonians had done. (I’ll share that account soon.)
Thus, it’s quite plausible that Montagu asked “who was to pay the fidler” on Griffin’s Wharf the day after the Tea Party, locals who heard him told others, and Hewes incorporated the phrase into his stories of the night, jiggering the details.
Lendell Pitt’s reputed response to the admiral appears to be an example of staircase wit—what Hewes (and his audience) wished someone had a chance to say back to a royal official.
Such scholars of the Tea Party as Benjamin Woods Labaree and Benjamin Carp have recreated events this way, putting Montagu on the wharf on 17 December but not the night before.
Other accounts, built more from tradition than from analyzing early sources, continue to repeat Hewes’s anecdote—as does Johnny Tremain. So it will be with us for a while yet.
2 comments:
The following is my opinion only, and not intended for offense. :)
So, Adm Montagu was on the wharf the day after demanding that someone "had to pay the fiddler." But Montagu may have said it the night before as well. Your version is certainly plausible, for it's common to look back several years prior and get some of the facts jiggered. But, I certainly believe Montagu was motivated to put himself in the best light possible with his superiors--it being his career! His version that you quoted last article is laden with trying to allay blame from himself. He implies (italics) that he was on the ship without saying it, and that's significant. He lays blame on countless others for not informing him. And another important implication he states is that his only option would be to use canon fire on civilians. Not use marines. It's more plausible that Montagu lied about being on land than it is that Hewes lied to me. Hewes version gives multiple specific details....which can be mixed up in both Hewes telling and Thatchers understanding of what was said, but the fact that he's so detailed, even stating who said what as well as Montagu's physical actions like raising/closing the window, makes his version more believable to me. It's equally plausible that his Tory friend owned more than one place, like a guest house or rental, or another friend of his Tory friend where they both might stay. Or Thatcher may have confused the "end of the wharf" details given by Hewes as well.
If Hewes version is true, it doesn't necessarily mean that Montagu knew what those "Indians" had been doing as they sneaked past his house painted in coal. He may have had the conversation that night, or early morning, as they walked by without knowing the cause of the concealment. And when Pitts was bold in his response, and with many like minded men also obviously up to no good, he thought his personal safety more important than picking a fight, especially if he had no marines with him at the time. Perhaps a female companion at the second residence of his friend would cause him to be without his entourage, and give further motivation not to divulge his presense nearby to his superiors.
It's hard to sparse the intricacies of the puzzle, but I'm not converted to Montagu's version.
That’s a lot of speculation—Coffin owning another property that’s not in any real-estate records, Montagu having a “female companion,” Hewes’s story sixty years after the fact being accurate in details while Montagu’s report the day afterward being completely unreliable.
We know one of Hewes’s stories about the Tea Party, in which he found himself working alongside John Hancock to break open crates of tea, is bunk. A contemporaneous witness puts Hancock in Old South during the operation on Griffin’s Wharf. Hewes’s story is detailed and dramatic, but that doesn’t make it true.
Given the totality of the evidence, I think that Hewes’s anecdote about yelling back at the admiral immediately after destroying the tea was similarly dramatized for his post-Revolutionary audiences. Hewes’s recollections seem most reliable, and often have the most documentary support, when he was describing events that his listeners didn’t have preconceived notions about. In this case, it’s interesting that we can see a seed for the Montagu exchange in the words Hutchinson quoted.
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