The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  The only individual who comes near to the monarch in culpability for the ministerial instability of the decade is William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Pitt had been a patriot politician throughout his career, eschewing the rewards of office and the blandishments of party. He had never been easy with the politicians of the old corps. He was no party man, preferring to cultivate his pride in self-imposed, splendid isolation. Finding his imperial strategies repudiated by his cabinet colleagues in 1761, and finding no support at court, he was content to resign and to leave his reputation to public opinion and to posterity. With a patriot king on the throne there seemed much less room for a patriot minister. However, when the plans of the court began to disintegrate Pitt began to manoeuvre himself back into the political mainstream, and in doing so did much to unsettle both the Grenville and Rockingham ministries. In the summer of 1763 and again in June 1765 he was prepared to negotiate with the court and when, as in June–July 1766, the terms were acceptable he was prepared once more to form a government. The dramatic failure of his administration deprived both the monarch and the political world of a major talent, one high in public esteem which, had it been directed differently, might have strengthened rather than weakened the political fabric.

  While Chatham’s political career was demonstrating the redundancy of his habits of independent patriotism, the Marquis of Rockingham and his party were looking to the rehabilitation of party politics in the confusing and unstable politics of the 1760s. Indeed, in the early years of the decade what was left of the Whig Party was tending to fragment into its constituent connections, while the emergence of new issues, America, India, Ireland, confused earlier identities and loyalties. Even so, some continuity between the old corps of the Whigs and the party of the Marquis of Rockingham may be discerned. The old corps following of Newcastle represented the main body of the Whigs, but it was seriously weakened by the ‘Massacre of the Pelhamite Innocents’. Only about a third of former supporters of Newcastle, about 75 MPs in all, remained loyal to him. Many of the others remained in office. The magnetism of monarchy, especially at the dawn of a new reign, proved to be more powerful than the strength of loyalty to the old corps, many of whom, of course, had developed habits of loyalty to the court over years of office-holding. From this disarray, however, the core of a revived Whig Party was to emerge. By the end of the session of 1763 the number of Newcastle’s friends had increased to slightly over 100. In the winter of 1763–4 Newcastle’s younger friends began to organize themselves at Wildman’s Club in London. Between 1764 and 1766 the size of the Rockingham Party stabilized at around 100. The Rockingham Whigs were thus not a new party in 1765; they grew out of the old Newcastle connection. They accepted the Pelhamite assumptions that they represented the tradition of the Glorious Revolution and that they embodied the historic achievements of Whiggism. After all, the old Whigs had defended the constitution against a series of threats, from the Stuarts, from the Bourbons, from the Jacobites and from the Tories; they were in a very real sense its sponsors and guardians. Although the monarch was entitled to respect, it was responsible ministers, not royal favourites, who should manage the king’s government. Rockingham shared the Duke of Newcastle’s obsession with Bute’s influence and accepted most of the political assumptions of the old corps. Yet Rockingham was not just another old corps aristocrat. He was a Yorkshire magnate, who brought to a connection hitherto dominated by the southern aristocracy and its traditions of court service an invigorating blast of provincial Country opinion. During the ministry of 1765–6, indeed, Rockingham moved close to provincial mercantile opinion in the process of repealing the Stamp Act.

  The next few years of his leadership of the Rockingham Party were disastrous. On his resignation in July 1766 Rockingham advised his followers to stay in their places rather than to resign with him. He really had little alternative. He was convinced that he could exert some influence upon the fortunes of the Chatham administration if they did stay in their places. Had he called on his men to resign, they might not have responded. Even if they had resigned, their places might have been filled with friends of Bute and Chatham. For the time being, then, they stayed where they were. But when Lord Edgecumbe, a leading Rockinghamite, was dismissed in humiliating circumstances in November 1766, Rockingham at last called his men out. Between forty and fifty of his followers, preferring the fruits of office to the cold winds of opposition, refused to answer Rockingham’s call. This was a major disaster for his party. Perhaps Rockingham underestimated the attraction of Chatham, now in alliance with the monarch. Many of these men were now lost irretrievably. By the time of the general election of 1768 the size of the party, once over 100, had halved. Before the election there were 54 MPs in the Rockingham Party; after it there were perhaps 57.

  The circumstances following the dismissal of Edgecumbe may have been unfortunate for the Rockingham Party, but in losing so many men to Chatham they at least left themselves with a narrower and better defined ideological base. That so many old Pelhamites should have returned to the court, especially during the Chatham administration, should not occasion surprise. Indeed, the Rockingham Party in opposition continued to nurse its Pelhamite principles of dedication to the legacy of the Glorious Revolution, strengthened by its conviction that the new regime of Lord Bute was subversive of the constitution. Its principles were outlined by Edmund Burke5 in his Observations on a Late Publication intituled The Present State of the Nation (1769) and, more memorably, in Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (1770). Burke gathered together the ideological inheritance of the Pelhams and linked it with the anti-Bute prejudices of the Rockingham Party to fashion a new brand of Whiggism. Burke did not invent these ideas. He came to the party in 1765 as Rockingham’s secretary and entered the House of Commons a year later. His writings expressed in memorable prose the principles and prejudices of his new party, its conviction that in the reign of George III a new and unconstitutional system of government had been established. In these writings Burke expressed a version of Whiggism suitable for a party in opposition. According to Burke, Lord Bute’s personal involvement in politics was no longer the issue: it was the system of secret influence which he had established that the Rockinghams opposed. This may have had its origins in the early years of the decade but it had now fallen into more sinister hands and had, indeed, been elevated into a system of government. Only the exertions of a dedicated Whig Party could protect the rights of Parliament from the sinister purposes of the executive. Constant reiteration of these ideas lent to the activities of the Rockingham Party an identity and a consistency, whether on colonial policy, issues of domestic reform or constitutional right, which was to be their hallmark. Although the Rockinghams had an exaggerated sense of their own moral superiority, Burke had no exclusive concept of party; he believed that the Rockinghams must be prepared to work with others and participate in ‘healing coalitions’ (though not with those involved in secret influence) but insisted that the Marquis should always demand, and receive, the first place.

  The Rockingham Whigs were not the only political party to exist in the 1760s. Of the others, however, the Bedford Whigs were an office-storming faction who had enjoyed a spell of office in 1763–5. They came back into government in 1767, after which they lost their cohesion and ceased to act as a party. Those who gathered around Chatham behaved as that near self-contradiction, a non-party party. As for the Grenville Whigs, when Grenville left office in 1765 they numbered over seventy. But the party faded quite rapidly, as his erstwhile followers attached themselves to the court and to other groups. By 1768 there were only about thirty Grenville Whigs, and the party failed to survive what was always an eighteenth-century party’s greatest crisis, the death of its leader, in 1770. In this way what had always been an essentially personal connection disappeared. But the Rockingham Party survived the 1760s as the only political, as opposed to a personal, party and proceeded to survive even the death of Rockingham in 1782. Consequently, the Rockingham Party may be deemed the
only political, as opposed to personal, party in the politics of the 1760s.

  POLITICS AND PARTY, 1770–1789

  The ministry of Lord North (1770–82) represented a return to the ministerial politics of the reign of George II. It was in very few senses a victory for the more idiosyncratic ambitions of George III. North himself had been an orthodox career politician within the old corps, and a junior Lord of the Treasury between 1759 and 1766. If he had steered his career towards the court since then, he had been in very good company in so doing. His uncle was Lord Halifax, who had been President of the Board of Trade during the 1750s and a Secretary of State during Grenville’s ministry (1763–5). In the Chatham administration (1766–8) North became joint Paymaster of the Forces and, on Charles Townshend’s death in 1767, Chancellor of the Exchequer. At this juncture, North had two assets: the fact that he had kept himself clear of the factions during the first seven years of the reign, and his very considerable political ability. His economic competence, his parliamentary presence, his simple and straightforward debating style and his ability to arouse trust and loyalty marked him as a rising star. North did not play the great man, preferring a mixture of common sense, good humour and honesty. The manner of his succession to Grafton in 1770 endowed him with two additional advantages. The first was the confidence of the king. Lord North made no conditions with George III. He insisted on the inclusion or exclusion of no man. His wish devoutly to serve his country commended him to the weary and harassed king, who rewarded him with trust, loyalty and, on occasion, something approaching friendship. This does not mean that North was a cipher in the hands of an autocratic monarch. Having found a minister who had constructed a durable administration and who was capable of governing, George III wanted nothing other than to let him get on with it. Political and administrative decisions, in any case, were thus to be taken not by the monarch but by ministers at departmental and cabinet level whose decision would normally be approved by the king. The second advantage that North enjoyed, in addition, was that he led the ministry from the House of Commons. Indeed, from 1771 to 1775 North was the only cabinet minister in the House of Commons. From there he could appeal to the Country gentlemen and defend himself from the charges of the opposition. North thoroughly exploited his advantages, and was to remain in power for twelve years.

  Within weeks his ministry had established itself and repulsed the attacks of the opposition. On 31 January, on the Middlesex election issue, North won a majority of forty votes and his majorities on subsequent divisions on the issue increased. On non-party issues he showed that he was prepared to accept the occasional reverse. He did so on George Grenville’s bill to transfer the hearing of election petitions from the whole House (where party considerations usually overrode those of electoral fairness) to a parliamentary committee. On 30 March 1770 he was defeated by fifty-two votes, a defeat which he acknowledged and accepted.

  The safety of North’s ministry was further enhanced by the collapse of the unity of the opposition groups. Burke’s pamphlet, Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents, appeared in April 1770. Its public declaration of the principle of party offended Chatham, who prided himself on his independence of conduct. The two groups led by Chatham and Rockingham had been cooperating closely since the beginning of their campaign against the Grafton ministry’s policy on the Middlesex election. Their eventual failure left them divided. In the summer of 1770 Chatham, influenced by the radical mercantile elements in the capital, began to advocate the reform of the electoral system, a step that the propertied aristocracy of the Rockingham Party could never accept. Further, they were horrified when Chatham began to advocate war with Spain in the summer and autumn of 1770 in a dispute over the Falkland Islands. Among the public there was absolutely no stomach for a war for a few islands 8,000 miles away from Britain. Chatham’s extravagant attacks upon the settlement which North eventually negotiated embarrassed the Rockinghams and only served to emphasize North’s good diplomatic sense. In November the opposition was further damaged by the death of George Grenville and the subsequent acquisition of most of his supporters by the government. What was left of the unity of the opposition disappeared during the parliamentary session of 1771 on the issue of the law of libel. Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice, in recent trials had laid down the principle that the only function of juries in libel trials was to determine the fact of publication, leaving the judge to determine the issue of libel. Chatham and Rockingham were united in their wish to empower juries to determine the matter of libel, but Chatham wished to go further and to advocate an inquiry into the administration of the law. This direct and personal attack upon Mansfield, an old corps man through and through, offended Rockingham and caused personal difficulties. The Rockinghams proposed a bill that would simply change the law, but public differences with the Chathamities when the bill came before the Commons on 7 March 1771 marked the ending of the united opposition. It was not even able to take any political advantage of the Printers’ Case in 1771, perhaps the one issue during his early years on that North blundered. North’s government attempted to restrain the publication of parliamentary debates, summoning and subsequently imprisoning certain of the printers concerned. It was the enthusiastic defence of the printers by their supporters in the capital rather than the political efforts of the parliamentary opposition which freed them. For the foreseeable future, North was safe. Indeed, it was to be another eight years before his ministry faced any sort of threat from a united opposition.

  North settled down to several years of quiet administration during which he demonstrated considerable financial acumen. He was able to take full political advantage of the vigorous economic recovery of the early 1770s. In 1772 and 1773 he kept the Land Tax down to 3s. in the pound, to the delight of the Country gentlemen in Parliament. He aimed for small surpluses on the budget which he devoted to reductions of the national debt. By 1776 he had trimmed £3.5 million from the total. To fund this reduction he imposed a number of taxes on luxuries, simplified some of the more arcane features of the existing taxation system and paved the way for the more ambitious reforms of the Younger Pitt in the next decade. In the same way, the government’s handling of the latest instalment of the affairs of the East India Company commended itself to large parliamentary majorities and considerable public approval. The settlement of the company’s affairs in 1767 had never worked well; its revenues were in decline because of a trade recession and rising military costs. These problems were exacerbated by the great Bengal famine of 1769–70, and by increasing instability among the native states in India, which made possible the revival of French influence. These problems were compounded by a credit crisis in Europe which reduced the company’s affairs to confusion, inducing it to petition the government for a loan and to request that it postpone its customs payments. These territorial and financial complexities were thoroughly reviewed by the government, and a comprehensive package of measures received parliamentary approval in 1773. As North proudly announced, ‘I have endeavoured to make myself a master of the subject.’ The Loan Act issued a loan of £1.4 million to the company and limited its (hitherto over-generous) dividends. The Tea Act allowed the levy of a duty on tea and permitted its export to America. Most importantly, the Regulating Act provided for less regular elections to the court of directors (every four years in place of the annual elections which had imparted such a sense of uncertainty to Indian government) and laid down a new set of voting qualifications. These provisions required regular government involvement in the affairs of the company to prevent them from falling prey to hostile influences. The government of India was remodelled. Bengal was placed under the control of a governor general and four councillors, who were also to regulate the subsidiary presidencies of Bombay and Madras. In addition, a supreme court of justice was established in Bengal. With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to criticize these measures as allowing the company and its officers too much freedom of action. Within its own time, however, the policy was a majo
r step towards state regulation and superintendence, and probably represented the greatest degree of state intervention that contemporaries would tolerate.

  In 1774, as we have seen, the American issue disrupted the steady and quiet purpose of the North administration, and it remained to curse and to overwhelm the minister. The outbreak of war in the colonies, the involvement of France and Spain and the threatened invasion of 1779 were enough to shake the foundations of the ministry. As early as 1778 North was begging the king to release him and when he refused North plunged into depression, indecision and inactivity. By 1779 departmental heads were being left to their own devices. The government was moribund.

  By the same token, the American crisis had reinvigorated the Rockingham Party, added to its numbers (about eighty after the general election of 1780) and effected bitter confrontations in Parliament such as had not been seen since the last years of Walpole. The death of Chatham in 1778 removed the great rival to Rockingham’s ambition to lead the opposition. His successor as leader of the tiny, if talented, band of Chathamities was Shelburne. The ‘Jesuit of Berkeley Square’ was as brilliant as he was deemed untrustworthy by his contemporaries for his seemingly inconsistent attitudes. For Shelburne had politically progressive opinions; he was a radical reformer with an advanced belief in free-market economics, yet he strongly believed in monarchy and its prerogatives. He was an early advocate of American independence once the military battle had been lost, but dreamed of maintaining close economic ties. It was, therefore, with rising confidence that the opposition challenged North on the American War. Both Chathamites and Rockinghamites were dismayed at the war, appalled at the slaughter of fellow Englishmen and terrified of the consequences of a victorious war and the prospect of a restrengthened monarchy. As the architects of the Declaratory Act, the Rockingham Whigs found it difficult to oppose the war, and one that had the support of a clear majority of public opinion in its early stages. They therefore attacked the persecuting spirit which, in their opinion, had led to the war and condemned the inefficiency and corruption with which it was being conducted. For some years they advocated a policy of reconciliation but during 1778, as the consequences of Saratoga began to sink in, they began to advocate the independence of the American colonies. In February 1778 Charles James Fox, one of the party’s brightest recruits and a future leader, secured no fewer than 165 votes for a motion which opposed sending additional troops to America. By the end of the session of 1779, indeed, ministers were fending off opposition attacks with majorities that had dropped below thirty. In the summer of 1780, therefore, North tried to buy off some members of the opposition, especially the old friends of Chatham, such as Grafton and Camden, and some of the Rockinghams. By now, however, the Rockingham Party had demands of its own. These amounted to a recognition of American independence, economical reform and a substantial redistribution of offices, with Rockingham taking the lead.6 The Rockingham leaders were standing firm on Burke’s theory of party, advocating substantial changes of policy and personnel. They would only come in as a party. The king was prepared to make a few concessions in minor places but he would not hear of changes of policy. As for surrendering his prerogative of appointment to Rockingham, he would have none of it. North had to continue to shoulder the burdens of office.