The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  In October 1760 Lord Bute, then Groom of the Stole, was appointed by the king to the cabinet, and it was at once made clear that it was he, rather than Pitt and Newcastle, who had the king’s ear, and thus his confidence. In March 1761 Bute became Secretary of State for the Northern Department, an appointment which terrified Newcastle that his own services, and those of his friends, might be dispensed with. Pitt was equally concerned. He was already annoyed at Bute’s pretensions; he disapproved of the court’s desire to bring the war to a conclusion, and deplored its willingness to abandon Frederick the Great to his European enemies. When Pitt and his brother-in-law, Temple, advocated a pre-emptive strike against Spain in the summer of 1761 they were outvoted in cabinet, and resigned. The Duke of Newcastle was now at the mercy of the court. The duke was distressed to find that he had no voice in the appointments of Lord Egremont and the Duke of Bedford to replace Pitt and Temple. The reconstruction of Newcastle’s ministry was completed when George Grenville became leader of the House of Commons. The loan from the City for 1762 had only been forthcoming on the general understanding that war against Spain would not occur, but on 2 January 1762 the cabinet declared war. Worse still for Newcastle, the government now wished to reduce the subsidy to Frederick the Great. The architect and spokesman of European alliances for almost forty years could not accept this and in May Newcastle resigned, for the moment leaving most of his followers in their offices. Lord Bute became First Lord of the Treasury.

  The dissolution of the administration which had won the greatest war in the history of Britain now gave way to a succession of five short-lived, weak and divided governments in an almost unprecedented display of ministerial instability. To this instability George III and, of course, his ‘dearest friend’, Lord Bute, undoubtedly contributed. While they had no sinister designs on the constitution, their inexperience and their miscalculations aggravated the structural changes in the political situation which we have already noticed. At the end of 1762 the Bute ministry presented the Peace Preliminaries to Parliament. On this critical test of confidence Newcastle’s friends opposed the government. In the ‘Massacre of the Pelhamite Innocents’ in the months following December 1762 many of the old corps were purged from office. This action was to be almost fatal to the prospects of maintaining stable government for almost a decade. For several decades these civil servants and office-holders, or ‘King’s Friends’ as they were commonly termed in these decades, had usually, and willingly, followed the political line of the first minister who also had the confidence of the king: Walpole, Pelham and Pitt. To unite the ‘King’s Friends’, to fashion a ministerial majority and thus to maintain any sort of government would now require unusual exertions. Bute lacked the experience and the political will to achieve these objectives. So did his successors. As for the king, George III was constantly suspicious of George Grenville (1763–5); he had little liking for the friends of Newcastle when they returned to office in the first Rockingham ministry (1765–6); his early enthusiasm for Pitt (promoted to the peerage as Lord Chatham) did not survive more than a few months of the Chatham administration (1766–8); and it was difficult for the king to warm to the hapless, weak and unfortunate leader of the Grafton administration (1768–70). Only with the coming to power of Lord North in 1770 did the king once again find a minister in whom he could trust, and only then could the loyalty of the ‘King’s Friends’ to the ministers once more be relied upon.

  For the moment, however, Bute was in office, Pitt was sulking in opposition to the peace, and Newcastle’s old corps had been overthrown. The king appeared to have destroyed his opponents. Yet just when he had attained the summit of success, Bute’s nerve cracked. He had been wilting under public criticism of the peace treaty and at the widespread popular ridicule of him, his nationality and his status as a royal favourite. In April 1763 he resigned, negotiating on his departure from office the personnel of the Grenville administration.

  Nevertheless, Bute’s status thereafter became – to the friends of Newcastle at least – more rather than less alarming. Bute openly retained the king’s confidence and friendship but without public office and public responsibility. He was, in the terminology of the time, ‘minister behind the curtain’, dispensing his ‘secret influence’. By the end of 1763 the friends of Newcastle had embroidered this myth of Lord Bute’s influence into a more general charge against the court that the humiliation of the old corps had been part of a settled plan since the start of the reign to destroy Whiggism, reduce the aristocracy to subservience and elevate the standard of prerogative. All of this was taken to be a deliberate and dangerous attack on the constitution. Government by royal favourite would diminish the independence of Parliament which, packed with royal sycophants, would be incapable of fulfilling its historic role as a check upon the power of the executive. This set of misguided accusations amounted to a retrospective, and very partial, explanation for the dismal political fortunes of the Newcastle Whigs in the early 1760s. The great merit of the myth of Lord Bute’s secret influence, however, was that it was marvellously flexible: it could explain any failure which might beset the friends of Newcastle, any setback, any reverse. It could even explain any abuse of government, any misuse of power.

  Meanwhile, the administration of George Grenville (1763–5) was wrestling with the great issues of colonial taxation to general domestic approval. Indeed, the ministry had much in its favour, not least the great administrative and financial competence of its leading minister. The Grenville Whigs had spent much of the previous decade in opposition, and Grenville had kept his distance from the Pelhams. His undoubted financial ability and his wish to reform and reduce government expenditure made him popular with the Country gentlemen in Parliament. These assets, together with his political weight and his stature in the House of Commons, might have raised the prospect of many years in power. His ministry, however, suffered from two serious weaknesses, one of which he overcame, the other to which he succumbed.

  The first was his government’s attitude towards John Wilkes; the second was his relationship with the king. His ministry’s high-handed use of general warrants to silence the journalist and critic John Wilkes aroused a fury of opposition and tested its majorities in Parliament to the limit. Grenville, however, rode out the storm of protest and on the decisive division on 17 February 1764 enjoyed a majority of fourteen. It was enough to vindicate his policy. Subsequently the tide of opposition receded and Grenville was safe in Parliament. The second danger to Grenville came less from Parliament than from the court. To ensure that Bute would not meddle further in politics, Grenville insisted that the king should no longer consult the favourite, and he demanded control of all appointments to offices. He was determined to establish his own position in the opinion of the political nation and he had no intention of becoming a creature of the court. He was appalled at the king’s decision to award Stuart Mackenzie, Bute’s brother, the office of Scottish Privy Seal for life, and with it considerable influence in Scottish patronage. Grenville was determined that such an event would never recur. Now Grenville watched the king’s every move with suspicion. The king, quite understandably, resented these restrictions upon his freedom of action and, in spite of his minister’s feelings, continued to consult Bute. Early in 1765 the king fell ill with porphyria, the illness which was later to engulf him entirely. Porphyria is a physical, hereditary condition which inflicts such pain that the sufferer endures symptoms which can sometimes be taken for insanity.2 On his recovery the king was determined to rid himself of Grenville and to provide for the succession with a Regency Bill. Insisting that he reserve to himself the right to name the head of a regency council in the event of his own indisposition, he was reluctant to name a regent in the event of his death. His preference for the queen over the Duke of York, his brother and the obvious candidate in the male hereditary line, as regent in the event of his death was more contentious. The king, however, wished to conceal these embarrassing stipulations from his minister and, indeed, fro
m the public lest they cause a major and divisive dynastic conflict as well as an even bigger political sensation. Instead of trusting and consulting his ministers, the king was exercising extremely questionable discretionary powers. The minister thought the worst. Grenville’s suspicions that Bute was behind these vitally important political and constitutional decisions knew no bounds. He tried to make the king promise to take advice only from his ministers, but such an understanding could not possibly provide the basis for a stable administration. George III had no wish to be bound to his ministers as his predecessor had been. In desperation the king put out feelers to Pitt. These met with no response, and the king was driven into the arms of the friends of the Duke of Newcastle.

  The families of the Whig connections which had ruled Hanoverian Britain in the previous two reigns returned to office in the summer of 1765. The great achievement of the Rockingham ministry (1765–6) was its solution, albeit temporary, of the colonial problem. The repeal of the Stamp Act together with the Declaratory Act composed, at least for a time, the worst of the controversies surrounding taxation and sovereignty, but did so at the cost of severely weakening the administration. Rockingham’s policy was opposed on the one side by the Grenville and Bedford faction, who had been responsible for the Stamp Act in the first place, and on the other by William Pitt. Pitt clung to a belief in Parliament’s right to impose indirect taxation, but he opposed the Stamp Act because it violated the principle of ‘No taxation without representation’. To complicate matters further, the ‘King’s Friends’, who had originally supported the Stamp Act, were divided. Some of them looked to Bute and the policies towards America upheld by Bute and Grenville; others looked to Rockingham and Newcastle. On the great parliamentary tests of opinion on the Stamp Act early in 1766, therefore, some voted with but some voted against the government. The Rockingham Whigs, as they had now become, were as suspicious of the influence of Bute as George Grenville had been, and demanded that offending office-holders be punished. George III was unwilling to discipline recalcitrant placemen for voting in accordance with their consciences on a policy which they had only recently adopted. Rockingham was furious with the king and pessimistic about the prospects of his administration. Believing that the ministry could survive only with Pitt’s support, he had little alternative but to resign in the summer of 1766 when Pitt refused to come to his aid.

  The Chatham administration (1766–8) was a further attempt by George III to establish a stable administration, one that enjoyed both the confidence of the king and the support of Parliament and public. George III expected much of the new ministry and started to recycle some of his earlier opinions about destroying party. By now he was desperate, confiding to Bute in May that ‘if I am to continue the life of agitation I have these three years there will be a Council of Regency to assist in that undertaking’. Pitt by now was anxious to oblige the king, assuring him that he too wished to destroy faction and see the best men of all parties in office. It would be necessary to take the Rockingham administration as the basis of the new one, but in time he would transform it into an instrument of virtue and efficiency. Pitt of all people, however, lacked the conciliatory arts which such a lofty enterprise demanded, and he quite failed to soften existing political resentments and personal differences. He was determined to play an Olympian role, to use others as the instruments of the great enterprise and to govern through remote control. This is why he accepted only the office of Lord Privy Seal, without executive responsibilities. The details of government he delegated to the Duke of Grafton, who became First Lord of the Treasury, and to the two secretaries, Shelburne and Townshend.3 However, his decision to go to the Lords and accept the earldom of Chatham lost him much of that patriotic, public support on which his reputation for honesty and independence had rested for a decade. His decision to take a peerage caused a sensation at the time and is still difficult to justify. If he had enjoyed the services of a Duke of Newcastle, as he had during the great wartime ministry, it is just possible that his ill-thought-out scheme would have worked. But his decision to go the Lords had two serious consequences. It left the ministry exposed in the Commons – Townshend was brilliant but unreliable and Conway4 lacked both debating strength and personal confidence – and it left the ‘King’s Friends’ there desperate for strong leadership. Almost as soon as it was established, therefore, the ministry was drained of the strength and momentum which it so badly needed. Much was said about making war on party – indeed, some attempt was made to include men of all parties – but the ministry to end party was soon looking to the parties for support.

  From the beginning, then, there was little prospect that the plans of the court might succeed. That prospect soon diminished further. From January 1767 Chatham was ill with nervous exhaustion, perhaps even a form of nervous collapse. He was absent from London for long periods and incapable of imparting order and discipline to his broad-based administration. He plunged into depression, deepened by Frederick the Great’s refusal to revive the Anglo-Prussian alliance. A sample of what was to come was the ambush that the government walked into when it moved to keep the Land Tax at the wartime level of 4s. in the pound. in 1767. The opposition parties, those of Rockingham, Grenville and Bedford, ganged together and on 27 February, by a majority of 206 to 188, voted to reduce the tax to 3s. in the pound. This was sheer opportunism. More important were the two other great issues of the 1767 session: America and India. On these Chatham had little to contribute. He was deeply concerned about Charles Townshend’s policy of taxation in America but did little to dissuade him. He was perhaps fortunate that Rockingham and Grenville were unable to unite their forces to defeat the policy. On the problems of the East India Company, moreover, his wishes were to a large degree thwarted. After the conquests of the Seven Years’ War, it was by now urgently necessary to establish an effective structure for the government of India and for the regulation of the East India Company. A financial crisis in the affairs of the company in 1766 had brought the matter to a head. Chatham’s solution to the Indian problem, characteristically, was to bring all Indian territory under royal sovereignty; it could then be leased out to the company as a preliminary to resolving its financial problems. Rockingham and Grenville, unusually in alliance, were horrified at this apparent attack on the chartered rights of the company. The eventual solution, reached in 1767, was for the company to continue to enjoy its commercial and territorial privileges on condition that it restrict speculative investments in its stock and pay £400,000 per annum to the Exchequer. This solution patched up the problem but it hardly amounted to the resounding imperial gesture which Lord Chatham had envisaged. He now became totally indifferent to the fate of his ministry, leaving responsibility in the hands of the weak and increasingly desperate Grafton. In an attempt to strengthen the government, therefore, the king unenthusiastically approved negotiations with the opposition parties in the summer of 1767. The discussions proved to be fruitless. Both Grenville and Rockingham demanded the leadership of a future ministry for themselves. The king would not even acknowledge that the existing administration was at an end. Although these negotiations failed, the Bedford Whigs entered the ministry before the end of the year, a sure and symbolic sign that the ministry to end party could now only continue with the aid of one of the parties. The Bedfords were small in numbers but disciplined and talented. Moreover, on America and on reform issues their opinions coincided with those of the king. They were to be a valuable acquisition.

  By this time the Duke of Grafton was in effective charge of the administration, although Chatham’s formal decision to retire did not come until the summer of 1768. By bringing in the Bedfords Grafton had broadened the basis of the government, but it remained an uneasy coalition of Chathamites, old Rockinghamites and the Bedford Whigs. The death of Charles Townshend in September 1767, however, enabled him to attach the rapidly rising star of Lord North to the ministry, as Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was to be unfortunate for the ministry’s prospects that it ha
d to encounter the public hostility aroused by the issue of John Wilkes and the Middlesex election, his expulsion from the House of Commons in February 1769 and his subsequent re-elections. The ministry’s decision to seat Wilkes’s defeated opponent for the constituency aroused popular fury. Could a government be allowed to overturn the expressed wishes of electors and thus make a nonsense of the representative principle? A nationwide petitioning campaign in 1769 demanded the dissolution of Parliament and fresh elections. Chatham came out of retirement to line up with the Rockinghams and the Grenvilles. At this the Chathamites in the government wavered and began to resign. In January 1770 Grafton was succeeded by Lord North.

  The first ten years of the reign had been years of acute ministerial instability. The accession of a new king, the repercussions of a great war and the ending of Tory proscription were bound to have extensive political consequences. Furthermore, with the disappearance of the old party distinctions politics had entered a new era in which established political routines were no longer useful guides to conduct. The structure of politics was more complicated, and thus potentially more unstable, than in the previous reign. But these were not the only reasons for the failure of the ministries of the 1760s to repeat the success of Walpole and Henry Pelham. George Grenville was the only first minister between Henry Pelham and Lord North both to lead the Treasury and to sit in the House of Commons, an inestimable political advantage. Furthermore, the king must accept part of the responsibility for the ministerial instability of the decade. His own political prejudices and his predilection for his own opinions and preferences had much to do with the end of the Pitt–Newcastle ministry and with the fall of the Grenville and Rockingham ministries. He had a wider choice of ministers than his grandfather, but he completely failed to exploit this advantage. He did little to cement the unity of any of the administrations of the 1760s. There were new issues in politics, to be sure, those of colonial rights and radical reform, but these did not impinge greatly upon the survival of governments until the end of the decade.