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(In this widely acclaimed study, Charles Townshend reexami...)
In this widely acclaimed study, Charles Townshend reexamines the historical circumstances that generated violence as a habitual part of political dialogue in Ireland. Drawing on an extensive range of original sources, he describes and analyzes the crucial relationship between the use of terror and intimidation by resistance groups and the efforts of government to impose authority by force.
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He was born on August 28, 1725, the son of Charles, 3rd Viscount Townshend, who married Audrey (d. 1788), daughter and heiress of Edward Harrison of Ball's Park, near Hertford, a lady who rivalled her son in brilliancy of wit and frankness of expression.
He received his education education in Leiden and Oxford. At the Dutch university, where he matriculated on the 27th of October 1745, he associated with a small knot of English youths, afterwards well known in various circles of life, among whom were Dowdeswell, his subsequent rival in politics, Wilkes, the witty and unprincipled reformer, and Alexander Carlyle, the genial Scotchman, who devotes some of the pages of his Autobiography to chronicling their sayings and their doings.
In 1747 he was elected to Parliament. As a member of the Board of Trade from 1749 to 1754, he showed an interest in increasing British powers of taxation and control over the colonies. In 1754 and 1755 he served on the Board of Admiralty. He was secretary at war in 1761–62 and paymaster general from May 1765 to July 1766, when he became chancellor of the Exchequer in the ministry of William Pitt the Elder. Soon Pitt became severely ill, and Townshend assumed effective control of the administration.
Townshend proved to be financially brilliant and determined but devoid of sound political judgment. He was renowned as an orator whose speeches to the House of Commons were remembered for their wit and recklessness, most notably the “Champagne Speech” of May 8, 1767. In his last official act before his death, he obtained passage (June–July 1767) of the four resolutions that became known as the Townshend Acts, which threatened American colonial traditions of self-government and imposed revenue duties on a number of items necessary to the colonies. The provision that customs revenue would be used to pay officials caused concern among the colonists because it reduced the dependence of such officials on the colonial assemblies. Townshend estimated that the acts would produce the insignificant sum of £40, 000 for the British Treasury. Shrewder observers correctly prophesied that they would lead to the loss of the colonies.
(In this widely acclaimed study, Charles Townshend reexami...)
In 1755 he married Caroline Campbell, the eldest daughter of the 2nd duke of Argyll.
