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the seeds of the future War of
Independence had already been sown. The imposition of a stamp duty in the
previous year was deeply resented, even by Americans who were otherwise
sympathetic to the Crown. Benjamin Franklin, who would later be one of the drafters
of the Declaration of Independence, and would
bring the French into the war in 1778, first emerged as a leading American spokesman
when he successfully appealed to the
House of Commons for a repeal of the
Stamp Act. However, in repealing the act, the British parliament asserted its
right to impose direct taxation anywhere in the empire, and it was the tax on
tea which would eventually bring America into direct conflict with
the home country.
On Feb 6
1770 the Sons of Liberty erected a “liberty pole” in New York, in defiance of British troops
who had previously torn down four other “liberty poles”. John Vardill
satirised this act in his The
Procession, with the Standard Faction, which he set to the tune of Yankee
Doodle. Although it has previously been thought that the version of Yankee
Doodle we know today originated as a revolutionary song of 1775 or 1776, it
has more recently been suggested that it originated as a loyalist song,
composed by John Vardill, and was only
adopted by the rebels after their first successes in battle in 1775.
The first of
the many classical “trademark” pseudonyms employed by John Vardill when writing
political propaganda appears to have been Poplicola ( the name of
a Roman consul who is said to have
been a friend of the people). Under
the name Poplicola, John Vardill wrote
in support of British taxes,
particularly the tax on tea, support which caused him to be vilified by
colonists with rebel leanings. In 1775
the Bostonian poet Trumbull included a
mention of Vardill in his modern epic poem McFingal
Vardill that poetic zealot
I view a lawn bedizen’d Prelate
While mitres fall, as ‘t is there duty,
On heads of Chandler
and Auchmuty.
(Chandler
and Auchmuty were both Kings College loyalists, Auchmuty later joining the
British Army and eventually becoming Commander- in- Chief of the British
forces in Ireland).
Also in 1775, Vardill appeared in a rare early American satirical engraving
of the Boston Tea Party. Titled Liberty
Triumphant or the Downfall of Oppression, the engraving shows John
Vardill, alias Poplicola, among the protagonists. Facing the defiant Indian
bows was the British party, headed by the Prime Minister, Lord North, John
Vardill being dressed in academic
regalia and in conversation with the Chairman of the East India Company. The
bubble above Poplicola’s head shows
Vardill saying to the chairman I
prostituted my reason and conscience to serve you and therefore am entitled to some reward, to which the
reply was if we had succeeded you would have been
provided for. While the engraving
was not intended to be a compliment to John Vardill, it does illustrate the
exalted political circles in which the young John Vardill moved. Only two
years after the Boston Tea Party he would have an office in Downing Street,
from where he would advise the British Prime Minister and his cabinet
colleagues about the progress of the
war in America.
His contemporaries appear to have
regarded John Vardill as one of the most brilliant students of his generation
and, in 1773, at the age of 21, he was appointed to the position of Professor
of Natural Law at Kings
College. One of his
students was John Parke Custis, step-son of George Washington, and a
courteous letter written by George Washington from Mount Vernon in December
1773, and now in the Library of
Congress, thanked Vardill for providing him with a report on his step-son’s
progress. On the following day, colonists dressed as Indians threw a valuable
cargo of tea belonging to the East India company into Boston harbour. The colonists and the home
country were now on a
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