The ultimate storm in a teacup

Almost 250 years ago, the Boston Tea Party left George III in hot water

In 2019, Alex Morgan, a player for the US women’s soccer team, celebrated scoring against England by raising an imaginary cup of tea to her lips, complete with outstretched little finger.

Most English viewers took this as a dig at our national drink and our la-di-da ways. More detailed theories abounded.

One, put forward on a football website of the sort that exists to analyse everything about the game with the zeal of French philosophers discussing existentialism, was that it was ‘a reference to the Boston Tea Party – a significant event in American history’.

The same source placed this in the category of ‘Possible explanations that don’t involve making a mockery of English culture’.

Up to a point. Describing the Boston Tea Party as a significant event in American history is a bit like describing the Battle of Hastings as a significant event in Norman history. It was, but it mattered to the other side, too.

And the idea that invoking the Tea Party wouldn’t mock the English ignores the fact that the event itself, 250 years ago, in December 1773, was calculated to mock – and then some.

It was – as one Bostonian, Josiah Quincy, Jr, warned 5,000 or so of his fellow citizens, gathered that night at the Old South Meeting Hall – an act likely to ‘bring on the most trying and terrific struggle this country ever saw’.

Some historical events, such as the Boston Massacre of 1770 (death toll –five, which would barely make the evening news in the US today), have acquired historical names that exaggerate their severity.

The opposite is true in the case of the Tea Party. It sounds like a lark, particularly when you learn that the people who took part dressed as Native American Mohawks and blackened their faces with soot.

If we describe what happened as a group of men dumping some tea into a harbour, that doesn’t really do justice to the Tea Party either.

Imagine that a group from Just Stop Oil managed to get on to three container ships and spend the next three hours dumping cars into the sea, with the authorities apparently powerless to stop them. The circumstances are different, of course, but no one would view what was happening as a joke.

What had steered the Bostonians to an act they knew very well might lead to war? Historians have spent the past two and a half centuries debating that, and the short answer is it’s complicated.

Explanations can still be divided into two camps. There are those who focus on the tea, and those who focus on what the tea stood for.

The first group concludes that, though mismanaged by the British, the whole thing was a tragic misunderstanding.

It wasn’t helped by the fact that it was in the interests of many on the American side, who either were tea-smugglers or benefited from tea-smuggling, to make sure the new consignment of tea, arriving from England under the auspices of the East India Company, never made it to market.

They weren’t really bothered by the threepence-per-pound duty, a tax out of which the colonial government would be financed. Even with it, the tea would undercut the stuff being illegally imported through the Dutch, and break their business model.

But seeing the Tea Party as a kind of Mafia hit ignores the real swelling of ideological objection to being governed without representation by a power thousands of miles away.

Yes, there were, in the words of one historian, J C D Clark, ‘colonial slaveowners … colonial merchant smugglers, colonial Dissenters, colonial debtors, and colonial land speculators’ among those ‘with an interest in emancipation from British policy’.

But they, and the less venal people who joined them in their protest, were able to attach themselves to a powerful, and ultimately incontrovertible, idea, powerfully expressed in the Boston Pamphlet, published in 1772: ‘The British Parliament have assumed the powers of legislation for the colonies in all cases whatsoever, without obtaining the consent of the inhabitants.’

The tea – and the purpose of the tax on it, to pay for that unconsented government – represented tyranny. Tipping it into the sea was an ideological act, not a criminal one.

One of the many ways in which the British and the colonists misunderstood each other was in the latter’s focus on George III. He was constantly appealed to about – or decried as responsible for – American policy, which was in fact governed by his Prime Minister, Lord North.

Still, when Elizabeth II visited Boston during the 200th-anniversary celebrations of American Independence in 1976, she was greeted as redressing ‘the tyrannical reputation of her greatgreat-great-great-grandfather’.

Since the musical Hamilton has re-established that reputation, perhaps George’s great-great-great-great-greatgrandson Charles will be called upon in three years’ time to do it all again.

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