The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  Between 1789 and 1794 Pitt’s ministry was gradually remodelled. The Whig opposition was seriously divided by the French Revolution, a development which worked strongly to Pitt’s advantage. The publication of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790 marked his public challenge to the enthusiasm with which Fox had greeted the revolution. For some time, however, such differences remained differences of opinion and had little or no effect on political conduct. When in May 1791 Fox and Burke formally ended their political friendship during a tearful scene in the House of Commons, it was a parting of friends and had little immediate impact on the cohesion on the Whig Party. Indeed, during these early years of the decade the French Revolution seemed of less political importance than the expansionism of Russia in the Black Sea region. Indeed, the debates of May 1791 which saw the ending of the friendship of Burke and Fox coincided with crucial debates on this issue. The opposition cheerfully trounced Pitt in debate, especially in view of the resignation of his Foreign Secretary, the Duke of Leeds. At a time when the government was in serious disarray, division in the Whig Party seemed of trivial importance.

  In 1792, however, those divisions began not only to intensify but also to affect the daily conduct of politics. The formation of the Association of the Friends of the People in April was a public repudiation of Burke’s alarmist opinions. Although Fox did not join the association, men like Portland and Fitzwilliam,24 senior figures on the conservative wing of the party and men much influenced by Burke’s views, began to worry lest Fox lose control of the reformers in the party. Indeed, as the radical tide flowed ever more strongly in 1792, they began to show concern lest the old Whig Party itself might start to act as a vehicle for the circulation of radical, and even revolutionary, opinions. Charles James Fox’s reiterated belief – that Britain had more to fear from the influence of George III than from the French Revolution – seemed to many to be irresponsible and self-indulgent. Seeing what was happening to the Whig Party, William Pitt did not hesitate to drive his knife into the wounds of his opponents. He consulted the Portland group on the proclamation of May 1792 and began to tantalize senior members in opposition with hints of office and preferment. Yet so long as Fox continued to have the will to keep his party united there was still a chance that the Whig Party might survive intact. When Pitt called out the militia in December 1792 it was too much for Fox. Incensed by what he took to be Pitt’s willingness to play party politics with the nation’s security, he at last came off the fence, declared for reform and the reformers and proceeded to defend the French Revolution. Although Fox did not publicly support parliamentary reform until May 1793, his historic decision had been made. Slowly, the old Whig Party was being prised apart by the pressure of events. In January 1793 Lord Loughborough25 deserted the opposition to accept the office of Lord Chancellor. It was the first serious breach, and a sign of what was to come. In the same month about 30 MPs, led by Burke and William Windham,26 deserted the opposition to form a ‘third party’, uneasily positioned between government and opposition. Even now, however, party loyalty and abiding suspicion of Pitt kept the bulk of Whig Party members from uniting with the ministry; indeed, the main body of the party still remained loyal to Fox. But this situation could not possibly last. Fox opposed the war against France. To advocate peace with a regicide republic which was proclaiming the cause of revolution throughout Europe was too much even for Fox’s closest friends. If this were not enough, he at last threw in his lot with the Friends of the People. On Charles Grey’s motion for reform on 7 May 1793, to the horror of the conservative wing of his party, Fox came out for reform. The split within the Whig Party was humiliatingly reflected in the division of 282 votes against Grey’s motion and the paltry 41 in favour.

  As the military crisis that Britain faced in Europe deepened so the need to strengthen Pitt’s administration became more apparent. Fox’s motion on 17 June 1793 for peace with France only served to underline the impossibility of keeping his party together. By the end of the year the conservative Whigs had separated from Fox. Pitt set himself to win them over to his government. When he decided in May 1794 to establish a Committee of Secrecy to consider further measures to be taken against the radicals, he consulted them and sought their assistance. In July 1794 they negotiated a coalition with Pitt in which they took five out of thirteen cabinet posts.27 Amidst much talk of the Whig Party’s new role in cleansing the government from within, they won assurances from Pitt on the objectives of the war and the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, and they were promised the government of Ireland with vague hints that they might introduce measures of reform there. Pitt, however, retained overall control of the government and kept direction of the war in the hands of the triumvirate of himself, Dundas and Grenville. Reconstructed in this manner, Pitt’s government, in coalition with the Portland Whigs, continued until 1801.

  The Foxite Whigs now stood apart from the political consensus created by the coalition. They managed to stabilize their numbers at around sixty and even, eventually, to increase them slightly to around eighty in the early years of the new century. They began to outline a coherent set of political objectives of their own which has often been credited with the ideological title of ‘Foxite Whiggism’. During the next three years they were to demonstrate their commitment to peace and reform on a variety of issues. Fox was a savage critic of Pitt’s war aims, believing that he was going much further than the security of Britain demanded in seeking to dictate to France the form of her government. Fox suspected that Pitt was using patronage and influence, swollen by the demands of war, to build up a power base for himself. Furthermore, Fox had always been a keen supporter of civil and religious freedom and he had been opposed to religious tests for civil offices. He was moving steadily in the direction of Catholic emancipation, a position which he was to adopt in the early years of the new century. Like two-thirds of his party, Fox was now an open advocate of parliamentary reform but his commitment was qualified, restricted only to household suffrage and a modest redistribution of seats. In any case, parliamentary reform was, in the circumstances of the 1790s a long-term aim. Meanwhile, he distinguished himself by his commitment to free speech. He was a stern critic of the government’s prosecution of Scottish and English radicals in 1793 and 1794, and in 1795 the Foxites attacked the Two Acts with magnificent oratory and commendable persistence, dividing Parliament repeatedly but in vain. Indeed, these liberal attitudes, together with Fox’s Libel Act of 1792 (which gave juries the right to decide whether material was libellous instead of, as previously, whether the person accused had actually written the disputed matter), have led some historians to depict the Foxite Whigs as the ancestors of the nineteenth-century Liberal Party. To what extent can this claim be justified?

  For all his faults, his personal resentments and his distorted exaggerations, Charles James Fox remains a towering figure, especially in his great years of 1794–6, professing a consistent and idiosyncratic, if sometimes misguided, version of Whiggism which was to have a long life ahead of it. The Foxite Whigs, furthermore, kept aloft the mantle of party and proclaimed the need for unity and principle in politics. They related their own struggles to those of earlier generations of Whigs and imagined themselves in an ancestry which stretched back to the Glorious Revolution. In this Whig interpretation of British history the Foxite Whig Party, like its predecessors, was fighting the battle for freedom against a repressive government and an authoritarian monarch.

  However, not all nineteenth-century liberals took their inspiration from Foxite Whiggism. They may have found some anticipations of their political and religious radicalism (although Foxite Whiggism is essentially a secular philosophy) but not their economic radicalism. Furthermore, Fox was a man of his time and in 1794 had been active in politics for over two decades. His mindset was securely rooted in the opposition politics of the later eighteenth century. Although his philosophy had in many respects advanced far ahead of them, Fox remained in many ways a prisoner of t
he Whig legends of the Rockingham Party. Although he instinctively welcomed the French Revolution as a blessing to humanity, his initial postulate was the Rockinghamite belief that the influence of the crown lay at the root of the nation’s ills. In this sense, and in the aristocratic origins of almost half of their members, the Foxites were much closer to Rockingham than they were to Gladstone. Indeed, a sustained comparison of the Foxite and Rockingham Whigs is most instructive: both were aristocratic Whig parties, advocated the principle and practice of party and opposed popular wars; both spent most of their lives in opposition, hostile to George Ill’s men and measures; both achieved office for only brief periods, unable to sustain themselves in the unfriendly courts and cabinets of George III. Fox was no democrat. He was an eighteenth-century Whig; his was the classic Whig objective of maintaining the balance of the constitution between the twin evils of royal absolutism and popular licence. He had the political limitations, too, of the eighteenth-century Whig. After the failure of Charles Grey’s reform motion in 179728 he and his party seceded from Parliament. There seemed no other practical plan of action. They had stated their case on the war, on reform, on freedom of speech, on royal influence. They could do no more. The Rockingham Whigs had practised secession in 1776 when they, too, had been consigned to the margins of politics, opposing a popular war and having exhausted the legitimate political expedients available to them. All that could be done in such circumstances was to wait on events. In the event, the Foxites waited a long time, until the fall of Pitt in 1801 raised both the political temperature and their own political expectations.

  It was not through the activities of the Foxite Whigs, however, that the government which had ruled Britain since 1783 finally came to its end. The fall of Pitt in 1801 occurred on an issue of constitutional principle. Pitt had let it be understood even before the Union with Ireland in 1800 that he would pursue the issue of Catholic emancipation throughout Britain.29 To this, however, the king would not agree. Pitt, promised never to raise the issue again in the king’s lifetime, and although he had not given a specific and formal promise to the Catholic community in Britain, felt that he had no alternative but to resign. He may have done so because of internal disputes within the government on the conduct of war but it is more likely that Pitt felt that his reputation upon an important issue was at stake, Pitt being incapable of resolving the alternative claims of continental, land war and maritime and commercial war. There is in addition evidence of Pitt’s mental and physical decline after nearly two decades of office and eight years of largely unsuccessful warfare. On Catholic emancipation, moreover, it is often forgotten that George III reflected majority opinion not only within the cabinet but also in the political nation. There may also have been another reason for the king’s willingness to part with the minister. Pitt was nothing if not high-handed: he had in recent years treated the cabinet as his own and he had taken the king’s consent to measures for granted. Indeed, only Dundas, Grenville and Windham came out with Pitt in 1801. The ministerial crisis may just have been the king’s way of restoring a measure of royal influence over cabinet decisions. The political crisis of 1801 thus marks the continuing importance of the monarch in politics, and starkly demonstrates the need for ministers to have his confidence. It was not just Pitt, however, who was sacrificed upon the altar of the king’s conscience but – although no one could know it in 1801 – ministerial stability. A succession of five weak ministries in the next eleven years was the unintended consequence of the fall of Pitt.

  The reasons for ministerial instability in these years were partly personal and partly structural. The coalition which had governed Britain in the 1790s was fragmenting. The old Pittite coalition of the 1790s was now divided into three groups: those led by Pitt, Grenville and Addington. The permutations were complicated. Pitt still had 50–60 followers after his resignation, Addington 30–40, Grenville 20–30 (later in the decade a fourth group, led by Canning, appeared which consisted of 10–15 MPs). It took eleven years for three of these groups to unite their forces under Lord Liverpool. Pitt disapproved of Addington’s policy of disarmament and was a lukewarm supporter of Catholic emancipation. Like Pitt, Grenville opposed disarmament but was a strong supporter of emancipation. Fox, however, remained a political force and enjoyed the leadership of a sizeable and united party. Fox, however, supported both the policy of disarmament and that of emancipation. Numbers, as well as policy, hindered unity. In a House of Commons of 658 after the Act of Union, the Court and Treasury group of slightly over 200 was not a sufficient basis for government. To achieve a reliable majority several of the political groups needed to unite together and then proceed to give firm leadership to the Court and Treasury group. They also needed to rally the independents, around 70–80 of whom could still be identified in the House of Commons.

  Pitt was replaced by the king’s first choice, Henry Addington, the speaker of the House of Commons. Addington patched up a cabinet which included prominent anti-Catholics like Chatham, Eldon, Hawkesbury (later Lord Liverpool) and Portland and a number of rising politicians, including Castlereagh after 1802,30 but the ministry stood in awe of Pitt, on whose sufferance it existed for three years. The ministry was not without its achievements. It successfully negotiated the Treaty of Amiens and managed the quiet general election of 1802. It passed the Army of Reserve Act of 1803, which produced a modest increase in the number of regular troops, and the Militia Acts of 1802 and 1803, which provided for the raising of 70,000 men for home defence by ballot. Addington had further positive achievements in the sphere of finance, including a ‘property tax’, really an income tax, of 5 per cent on annual incomes of over £150. By the spring of 1804, however, the renewal of the war was endangering the government. Addington was no war minister and was already faced with the ‘New Opposition’ led by Grenville, Pitt’s erstwhile foreign minister, and including two of Fox’s earlier friends, Fitzwilliam and Spencer, all united in their hostility to the Treaty of Amiens. Grenville, in particular, was emerging from Pitt’s shadow and advocating a more vigorous prosecution of the war by a national coalition. Even Fox supported renewing the war against France. He had been sympathetic to the cause of the French Revolution in the 1790s because he imagined its cause to be the cause of liberty. But Napoleon was a bullying imperialist, more interested in conquest than in freedom. In 1804 Fox and Grenville, agreed on their hostility to Addington’s peace policy and united by a common belief in Catholic emancipation, negotiated a coalition. At the same time, Pitt withdrew his support for Addington’s government. On its collapse in 1804 he returned to office.

  Pitt’s second and last ministry was to be a tragic disappointment. It coincided with the great invasion scare of 1804–5 and was thus accompanied by a wave of patriotic sentiment. But it had serious political weaknesses. Deprived of Grenville’s support, his ministry was no more secure than Addington’s had been. Pitt managed to bring Addington back into office in early 1805 as Lord Sidmouth, but this was a doubtful benefit. Indeed, it was Sidmouth’s own investigation that revealed the corruption and financial irregularities of which Dundas, now Lord Melville, had been guilty when he had been Treasurer of the Navy. Amidst mounting rumours in 1805, Melville was forced to resign. Pitt was sorely distressed by his loyal colleague’s embarrassment. By the end of the year his health was in ruins, and in January 1806 he died. Ill will between the followers of Pitt and those of Addington crippled the prospects of shoring up the government and George III had perforce to find another.

  Pitt was succeeded by the ‘Ministry of all the Talents’, a coalition of Grenville and his group, Fox and his followers and Sidmouth and his friends in which Grenville held the Treasury. The ministry represented a reunion of the older, aristocratic Whigs, such as Spencer and Windham, with Fox and with the newer generation of Foxite Whigs such as Grey and Erskine. The Pittites sat on the opposition benches. The only feasible alternative to the ‘Talents’, a coalition ministry of the old Pittites and old Addingtonions, was ruled out by S
idmouth himself. The king had no stomach for a repeat of the great constitutional battles of 1783–4 and he quietly allowed Fox to take office. He had no need to worry about the possibility of great political and constitutional changes; the politicians were too divided. The one great reform achieved during the lifetime of the ‘Talents’, the abolition of the slave trade, was not a government measure. Indeed, the ‘Talents’ was not a reforming administration at all. The power of Grenville and Sidmouth prevented Fox from actually taking any measures to reduce the influence of the crown, the source of all the nation’s ills (as he had been telling the country for over two decades). Fox’s promise to make the peace with Napoleon, a peace which he had been promising for years, stumbled on the obstacle of Napoleon’s indifference. William Windham’s proposals to recruit soldiers for seven-year periods and to reduce expenditure on the Volunteer regiments were controversial but hardly the stuff of which political reputations were made. In general, the ministry was a great disappointment to the reformers. The ‘Talents’ were perhaps fortunate that the old Pittite Party could not bring itself to go into systematic opposition. Lacking unified leadership – Canning, Castlereagh, Hawkesbury and Perceval all had a claim to Pitt’s mantle of leadership – the opposition to the ‘Talents’ cut a sorry figure. Fox’s death in September 1806 was a terrible blow, and weakened the ministry in the Commons. More seriously, the government’s decision to make some concessions to the newly formed Catholic Association in Ireland was an understandable attempt to head off serious discontent in Ireland, but it fell foul of the king. At first, the government gave the impression that only the lower appointments in the army would be opened to Catholics, but then it appeared to extend the privilege up to the rank of general. This, the king could just about stomach. But when he realized that the government wished to extend these provisions to the navy he was implacable. Concerned that the ministers were threatening his freedom to act consistently with the promise in his Coronation Oath to maintain the Protestant religion, and strengthened in his views by the opinions of Sidmouth, he demanded that the ministers promise not to raise the Catholic issue in the future. On their refusal he removed them from office.