“What government policy towards the colonies was supposed to be”

The History of Parliament site shared Dr. Robin Eagles‘s profile of Lord North, prime minister from 1770 to nearly the end of the Revolutionary War.

The length of that term would have marked North as an unusually successful prime minister—except for one thing.

Eagles writes:

North was able to draw on a lengthy political apprenticeship. He had been returned to the Commons in his early twenties in 1754, and had become a predictably fast friend of the king, continuing the family tradition of loyal dependability. He accepted his first post in government in 1759 and from 1767 had served as chancellor of the exchequer. All of this ought, on the face of it, to have made him well prepared for the task ahead.

All of North’s good qualities – and there were plenty of them – were insufficient for a crisis of the proportions that was about to assail his administration from America. Some were out of North’s control; others stemmed from policies to which he had contributed in previous administrations.

Perhaps the biggest problem was that no one ever seemed entirely sure quite what government policy towards the colonies was supposed to be, though there should have been little doubt given the king’s own very clear determination to keep America as a British possession. North’s own response left everyone mildly confused. On one occasion, he was asked what the government plan was, only for him to reply that no one had come up with one.

Keeping the American colonies was not a plan but a goal, of course. Neither George III nor Lord North nor the other administrators contemplated what concessions they might make to achieve that goal until it was too late for compromise.