Conclusion

The reception of institutions of government and English law has dominated the historiography of Empire and continues to animate post-imperial national history into the twentieth century.

Focusing upon the historical nexus of prerogative and office disrupts the simplicity of this reading, as this chapter has shown, by looking in particular at the ways in which imperial authorities drew increasingly yet pragmatically upon the feudal land prerogative striving for fuller and more centralised con­trol of the endemic disorder surrounding access to land in the colonies. This was the cause of bushfires aplenty, each of which had enough combustibility singly or in any combination to set the continent on fire and as eventually oc­curred in the American Revolution. The constant effort to assert imperial au­thority within the highly inflammable politics of access to land occurred through prerogative and the protocols of office that, in the end, could not con­tain the stampede across the continent. While all of this was watched on with some regret in London, still feelings in government there were shaped by an inflexible optimism in the powers of instruction, rather than legislation, to ex­tinguish the frontier’s flames.

In this frame, Sir William Johnson may be seen as an exemplar par excel­lence of prerogative and office and as an individual who used his status both to prevent at least the extremities of the stampede and its consequence for First Nations whilst also being part of its running. Obedience was one of the key precepts of office, reflected, in Johnson’s case, in the careful way in which he commenced public proceedings by reference to the commission, instruction, or despatch to which a gathering was directed. He was careful also to record such references. Office, Johnson knew, was inherently performative.

The Royal Proclamation 1763 issued in expectation it would be heeded. This came not from the nature of the instrument itself, which most knew could have no originating force, but from its expression of the wishes of King George iii.

Johnson’s engagement with authority of all sorts was carefully crafted, whether dealing with his superiors, those he regarded of equal status, or others not of it. Those engagements form the entirety of the prolific records we have of him, most of which have come from him. The self-fashioning that attended Johnson’s inhabitation of the milieu of authority that constituted his life and his manoeuvring between the public/private divide of Anglo-American culture in the early modern period.^[1108] He understood the source of his authority, how in any particular relation it was situating him, and how to use this situating to best effect. Johnson grasped and made himself the embodiment of royal au­thority (that is, of the prerogative) and of office. He is its reporter in his fullest and elaborate voice when he is speaking upwards and rendering careful and detailed accounts for his superiors. Having obtained a direct line to the Secre­tary of State in 1758, the tone and content of his communications to officers that he was evidently regarding as his equals was courteous without the obse­quiousness he showed London but also with the bluff and levelling frankness of the mess hall.

The American tale is one of the failure of prerogative and office but it is also a tale of the conditions in which they were apt to operate effectively. Not sim­ple loyalism but a single hierarchy of authority was necessary. The relative au­tonomy of the legislature and judiciary in a colony like New York was not con­ducive of this. Johnson both saw and exemplified this reality, not only through the studied selflessness he brought to the display and overt exercise of author­ity, but also for his condemnation of its absence elsewhere. His attack on colo­nial legislatures and colonial lawyers was essentially a Ciceronian one - their manifest lack of virtue and brazen self-interest in the exercise of civil authority. Always careful to situate his conduct of office in the ostensible terms of com­mon good and obedience, he also raised personal interest in the meekest and most apologetic language, condemning these groups for their inability to ar­ticulate their position selflessly and act accordingly^[1109] He saw danger in this overt and brazen self-regard, notably in relation to First Nations who shared with imperial officeholders a sense of common identity lacking in the colonial officeholders. His Tory instincts thus drew him towards a tribal people who could do what the colonists manifestly could not - to subordinate self-interest to the authority of the community.

And a closing observation that sees these episodes in terms of a Longue Duree of Borrowing, a term used to describe the travelling of languages of dis­course and associated concepts across and amongst empires particularly those apt to appear in discursive practices surrounding the assertion and exercise of imperial authority.^[1110] To figures of authority within the Empire feudalism had an obvious appeal of a sort that is apparent in the episodes described in this essay. Feudalism was famously a term devised by the legal antiquarian Henry Spelman at a time when Englishmen of the early seventeenth century were discovering that theirs had been a â€?feudal society' of a sort that much of Europe remained. There came the growing realization that the â€?common law was above all a law regulating the tenure of land, and the rules of tenure it con­tained presupposed the existence of those military and feudal tenures which had been imported by the Normans...'^{[1111] [1112] This was a feudal past that was power­fully and pervasively present. Henry vιιι had tried to revive and perpetuate the tenure of knight service in capite to make wardship a source of revenue84 pro­ducing a form of grievance spanning Magna Carta 1215 through the Civil War and on Restoration the swift passage of the Tenures Abolition Act (1660). Its trappings inhabited the common law and animated constitutional politics of the time as an origination of prerogative or, for those Englishmen who resisted the enlargement of royal power, an appeal to pre-feudal time under the perfect liberties of the Germanic forest.}