“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? 

Josiah Quincy’s Fellow Travelers

Once his ship was safely clear of Salem harbor, Josiah Quincy, Jr., must have come up to enjoy the sea air. One of the benefits of his voyage to Britain was supposed to be relief from his tuberculosis.

I suspect his presence startled his fellow passengers aboard the Boston Packet. In his diary of the trip, Quincy listed those men this way:

With us went passengers Messrs. W. Hyslop and son; Dr. Paine and Rufus Chandler, Esq., of Worcester; Mr. Higginson, of Salem, and Mr. Sylvester Oliver, son of the late Lieutenant-Governor. Some of us might say, “Nos dulcia linquimus arva,” [We abandon our sweet fields] while others were obliged to mourn, “Nos patriam fugimus.” [We fly from our country]

Those Latin tags appear together in Virgil’s first Eclogue. Quincy evidently thought one applied to some of the men and one to the rest.

Who were those fellow travelers?

William Hyslop (1714–1796) was a merchant of Scottish descent, close to the Rev. Charles Chauncy and involved in missionizing charities. By 1774 he was “liveing out of town,” as Jane Mecom wrote, in a Brookline house he bought from Dr. Zabdiel Boylston. (Mecom had asked Hyslop to carry a letter to her brother in London, Benjamin Franklin, but he’d forgotten.) Hyslop’s son traveling with him was probably William Hyslop (1753–1792).

Hyslop appears to have been stranded in Britain by the outbreak of war. In May 1778 he wrote to John Adams from London to say he had “not heard from his Wife, Family, and other Friends at B—— since the 21st of September last” and was “impatiently waiting for a favourable opportunity to return to his Family and Friends from whom he has been so long involuntarily absent.” He probably didn’t want to be counted among the “absentees”; if so, the state might assume he was a Loyalist and confiscate his property.

Hyslop eventually did return to his family and property. He funded a school building for Brookline in 1793, and the town still has a road named for him.

Dr. William Paine (1750–1833, shown above) and Rufus Chandler (1747–1823) were both Harvard-educated young professionals, Paine a physician-apothecary and Chandler a lawyer. Their families were also related. They had been building genteel lives in Worcester until they sided with the Crown in the town’s increasingly Whiggish politics.

In August 1774, “near 3000 people” visited Paine’s father, Timothy Paine, to express their displeasure at him accepting a seat on the mandamus Council. The next month, over 4,500 Worcester County Patriots turned out to close the courts where Chandler worked. The two men decided they were better off visiting London.

Paine and Chandler returned to Massachusetts in the spring of 1775, landing in Salem in May only to find that there was a war under way and they were on the wrong side of the lines. They quickly moved into Boston and took stock of their situations.

Paine sailed back to Britain, where he bought and wheedled a medical degree and an appointment as apothecary for Gen. Sir William Howe’s army in 1776. During the early 1780s he held some offices in Nova Scotia. But in 1787, Paine came back to Massachusetts and rebuilt his upper-class life.

Chandler stayed in Boston through the siege, evacuated to Halifax with his wife, and then spent most of the war years in New York City. He tried to establish a lucrative legal practice in Halifax and Annapolis Royal, but eventually gave up and moved to London for his final decades.

Stephen Higginson (1743–1828) had become a merchant in Salem after spending a decade as a young ship’s captain. During this trip to London, the House of Commons invited him to testify about how the fishermen of Massachusetts would respond to a proposed new law. Higginson’s answers didn’t endear him to all his Essex County neighbors, and Salem’s committee of safety had to ask the Massachusetts Provincial Congress to vouch for him in June 1775.

Higginson repaired his reputation well enough, particularly by financing privateers, that toward the end of the war he became one of Massachusetts’s delegates to the Continental Congress. During the Shays Rebellion, he helped to lead the militia that Gov. James Bowdoin sent to quell the unrest, and he was a strong Federalist in the early republic.

Finally, Brinley Sylvester Oliver (1755–1828) was indeed a son of Massachusetts’s late lieutenant governor, Andrew Oliver. His mother died in March 1773, his father a year later, just before he graduated from Harvard College. Oliver started attending Anglican services, a sign of his alienation from the Massachusetts society of his ancestors.

Syvlester Oliver was also a nephew of former governor Thomas Hutchinson, who greeted him warmly in London and loaned him £150. Eventually he gained the rank of purser in the Royal Navy and a Loyalist pension. He saw naval action against the French, including at the Battle of Trafalgar. Oliver died in London, a fairly wealthy man.

TOMORROW: Arriving in London.