Burying cider, burning Bute

What happened

In March 1763 Lord Bute's government laid a tax on cider, and the tax collectors' right to enter private homes made it the most hated in the land. Cider was the drink of the West Country, home of an instinctively liberal gentry, and the whole region rose. Church bells were stilled, and thousands marched in bereavement with the symbols of freedom and mourning. In Devon, the town clerk of Exeter, Benjamin Heath, ran a county campaign of petitions and meetings, and the processions carried young apple trees and empty cider casks hung with black ribbons. Bute was hung in effigy in town after town, and large bonfires consumed his effigies. The rallying cry, spread by John Wilkes's North Briton, was "Liberty, Property, and No Excise." Above all, people refused to pay and set upon the collectors. Bute was forced out of office at the beginning of April 1763, but George Grenville pushed the tax through, and Parliament did not repeal it until 1766. Rothbard's point is what came next: the colonists eagerly watched a people beat an unjust tax with mass action, and two years later they copied it in the Stamp Act riots (CiL, p. 794).