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The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria cover

The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria

Chapter 389: CLAIMS OF THE AMERICAN ROYALISTS, ETC.
By Edward Farr
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The volume traces British political, parliamentary, and military developments from the accession of George III through the early nineteenth century, chronicling changes of ministry and cabinet, debates over colonial taxation and the American conflict, parliamentary controversies involving figures such as Wilkes and Warren Hastings, questions of Catholic relief and slave-trade abolition, and responses to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, including major naval and continental campaigns, the union with Ireland, and domestic legislation on finance, civil liberties, and parliamentary reform.

CLAIMS OF THE AMERICAN ROYALISTS, ETC.

At the conclusion of peace, commissioners had been appointed to inquire into the losses of the American loyalists, and during this session Pitt submitted to the house a plan of liquidation. The loyalists were divided by him into three classes: those who resided in America at the beginning of the war, and from motives of duty to their sovereign had abandoned their estates and property; those who at the commencement of the war had been resident in England, and consequently had not been driven from America; and those who having enjoyed places or exercised professions in America, were compelled to leave that country by the war. Pitt rested their claims on the ground of national generosity and compassion, rather than of strict justice; and he proposed to pay to the two first classes the whole of their claims, if they did not exceed £10,000 and beyond that sum, to deduct from them a per centage, greater in the case of the second class than in the first; and to the third class he proposed to allow pensions, proportionate to the incomes which they had relinquished; those whose incomes had not exceeded four hundred pounds, receiving one half, by way of annuity. A sum amounting to about £1,340,000 was voted for this purpose. Pitt also, with the entire concurrence of the house, settled the case of the East Florida claimants, who had been obliged to quit their habitations and property, when their country was ceded to Spain. As their losses had arisen from the voluntary act of government, Pitt thought that they should be indemnified for their losses, and the sum of £113,952 was voted to them. Another measure of mercy was a bill for granting to the Earl of Newburgh, grandson of Charles Radcliffe, beheaded in 1746, for his share in the rebellion of 1715, a clear rent-charge of £2,500 out of the estates forfeited by the said Charles Radcliffe, and his brother James, third Earl of Derwentwater, who forfeited his life on the same account in 1710, which estates had been settled upon Greenwich Hospital. This bill afforded great relief to an amiable and deserving nobleman.