William Pitt the Younger: A Biography

by William Hague

  Pitt’s reference to a ‘campaign’ in Westminster Hall meant that he was intending to do further legal work in the courts there that autumn. The visit to Bowood was for a meeting of the small Chathamite party, which continued to maintain a separate identity from the main opposition grouping of Rockingham and Fox, and was now planning for the session ahead. They were not exactly in high spirits about it, as Lord Camden’s letter of 8 November to Thomas Walpole shows: ‘You may be anxious to know whether I shall take any part in the House. I protest I do not know. Our opposition is scattered and runs wild in both houses under no leader. God knows how all this will end.’4 Although Cornwallis had surrendered three weeks earlier, news of this had not yet arrived in London. The government circulated its supporters with a routine request to attend the autumn session, and the opposition made little effort to mobilise its supporters, being unaware of any new opportunity.

  It was on the morning of Sunday, 25 November 1781, only two days before the opening of Parliament, that the first news of the defeat at Yorktown arrived in London, by means of a messenger sent from Falmouth to Lord George Germain’s house in Pall Mall. Lord George got into a hackney coach, collected two other Ministers, and proceeded to take the news to Lord North at 10 Downing Street. North was said to have reacted ‘as he would have taken a ball in his breast … he opened his arms, exclaiming wildly, as he paced up and down the apartment during a few minutes, “O God! it is all over!” Words which he repeated many times under emotions of the deepest consternation and distress.’5

  Sure enough, Yorktown would bring the fall of the North government, but it did not do so immediately. The King’s reaction to the news was characteristically unyielding: ‘I trust that neither Lord George Germain nor any member of the Cabinet will suppose that it makes the smallest alteration in those principles of my conduct which have directed me in past time and which will always continue to animate me under every event in the prosecution of the present contest.’6

  Ministers were more despondent, but played for time by announcing that the war would go on, although offensive operations would no longer be conducted. The opposition, unprepared for the calamity, lacked the numbers to turn out the Ministers, but mobilised its supporters as quickly as it could. The administration beat off the initial opposition onslaught on 12 December by forty-one votes (220 to 179), but with increasing signs of divisions among Ministers about the future of the war.

  Pitt was at the forefront of the efforts to expose ministerial disunity and uncertainty, and in these weeks proved himself a formidable parliamentary operator. He rose to speak on the second day of the session, and Wraxall described the scene:

  In a speech of extraordinary energy (throughout the course of which he contrived with great ability to blend professions of devoted attachment to the person of the King with the severest accusation of his Ministers), he fully confirmed the high opinion of his judgement and parliamentary talents already entertained throughout the country … He concluded by calling on Ministers to state without circumlocution or deception what were their intentions as to the further prosecution of the American war, and to give some general idea of the manner in which it was henceforward to be pursued. A sort of pause took place when he resumed his seat, while the eyes of all present were directed towards the Treasury bench …7

  With North and Germain declining to answer Pitt directly, Dundas took to his feet. He insisted that the war would not necessarily be continued, and implied disagreement in the Cabinet, all of which gave Pitt a great debating victory.

  On 14 December Pitt was again on his feet denouncing the incapacity of Ministers when he spotted a three-way conversation taking place on the government benches between Lord George Germain, who remained what would now be called a hawk on continuing the war, Lord North, who had become decidedly dovish, and a third Minister, Welbore Ellis. Pitt paused in his speech and, drawing a parallel with the Greek characters of the Trojan War, said: ‘I shall wait till the unanimity is better settled, and until the sage Nestor of the Treasury Bench has brought to an agreement the Agamemnon and the Achilles of the American War.’ In the light of all we know about Pitt’s education, it may be no surprise that he could easily make a spontaneous classical allusion, but it came as an impressive revelation to the House of Commons. In Wraxall’s words once again, ‘its effect was electric, not only on the individuals to whom it was personally directed, but on the whole audience. The two Ministers and the Treasurer of the Navy in some confusion resumed their former attitudes. We cannot sufficiently appreciate or admire the perfect self-possession which, while addressing a crowded House of Commons, could dictate to a youth of little more than two-and-twenty so masterly an allusion. The conclusion of his speech breathed not a little of the spirit of his deceased father, while he seemed to launch the vengeance or the indignation of a suffering and exhausted nation on the heads of Ministers.’8

  Pitt’s parliamentary reputation was now reaching the stratosphere. Horace Walpole wrote of the same speech: ‘Another remarkable day; the army was to be voted. William Pitt took to pieces Lord North’s pretended declarations and exposed them with the most amazing logical abilities, exceeding all the abilities he had already shown and making men doubt whether he would not prove superior even to Charles Fox.’9 Fox nonetheless remained a generous colleague on the opposition benches, referring to Pitt as his ‘Honourable Friend’ and saying, as the MP Sir Samuel Romilly recorded in his memoirs, ‘in an exaggerated strain of panegyric … he could no longer lament the loss of Lord Chatham, for he was again living in his son, with all his virtues and all his talents … He is likely soon to take precedence of all our orators.’10

  By now North had come to the conclusion that peace must be made irrespective of the consequences, and Germain was increasingly isolated in the Cabinet. Even so, the view of the majority of Ministers was not put into effect because they were unwilling to impose their views on an intransigent King. Dundas pressed for the removal of Germain from the Cabinet, along with Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, in order to reunite the government and remove the opposition’s most attractive targets. As ever, North prevaricated. Eventually, when the House returned from its Christmas recess on 21 January 1782, his hand was forced by Dundas and the Paymaster General, Richard Rigby. They declared that they would not attend the House of Commons so long as Germain remained in office, a threat sufficiently potent, given the influence of Dundas over the Scottish seats, to bring down the government.11 By the end of January it was announced that Germain would be leaving the government and going to the Lords as Lord Sackville.

  The departure of Germain was not accompanied by any change or clarification of policy, and the opposition, predictably, was now beginning to throw everything in its armoury at Sandwich. North had only staved off the collapse of his administration rather than rescued it. The government was tottering to its doom. The Commons was thronged with Members ready for the annual ‘call of the House’ and the opposition was fully mobilised. Most important of all, those independents and county Members who had supported North began to peel away. Pitt enjoyed himself to the full, speaking regularly against the government, performing the role for which he had been trained in the environment to which he was most suited. Yet even in the thick of these battles he took great care to mark himself out as a different type of politician, free of any base or corruptible motives, and always at a safe distance from the main party groupings.

  While joining in the opposition onslaught on Lord Sandwich on 24 January, Pitt said, according to Pretyman, that he ‘supported the motion from motives of a public nature, and from those motives only. He was too young to be supposed capable of entertaining any personal enmity against the earl of Sandwich; and he trusted that when he should be less young it would appear that he had early determined, in the most solemn manner, never to suffer any private or personal consideration whatever to influence his public conduct at any one moment of his life.’12 Such a statement by a young Member, carrying as it does t
he implication of a long future career, would in today’s House of Commons be regarded as unbelievably pompous and pretentious. Coming as it did from Pitt, the son of Chatham and already one of the foremost debaters of the House, Members seem to have taken it in their stride. It marks a major difference in attitude between Pitt and his future rival Fox. Pitt’s statement of 24 January is something that Fox, who was often motivated by personal friendships above political consistency, is most unlikely ever to have said. While the two men applied themselves energetically to bringing the government to its knees in the early weeks of 1782, it would have been apparent to a shrewd observer that not only the style but also the content of their speeches was subtly different. Wraxall noted that ‘no man who attentively considered the different spirit which animated their speeches whenever the sovereign became indirectly the subject of their animadversion could fail to remark their widely dissimilar line of conduct’.13 Fox, who the previous year had privately described the King as a ‘blockhead’,14 ‘designated or characterised him [the King], in fact, as under the dominion of resentment, unfeeling, implacable, and only satiated by the continuance of war against his former subjects … more as a tyrant and an oppressor than as … the guardian of a limited constitution’.15 Pitt, by contrast, ‘repressed any intemperate expressions and personally spared the Sovereign. He separated the King from his weak or evil counsellors; admitted the purity of intention by which he was ever impelled; professed ardent attachment to the person as well as to the family of the reigning Monarch and declared that it would be best manifested by exposing the delusion that had been practised on him.’ In this respect, of course, it was Fox rather than Pitt who was unusual. For an opposition politician to burn his boats so completely with the monarch was clearly foolhardy, but Fox was given to impulses and had decided that in any case he would soon be able to force himself into office. Pitt, still at the start of his career, was playing a longer game, and the content of these speeches was the first sign that he was both more calculating and more consistently ambitious than his future rival. In addition, while Pitt had learnt from his father to be suspicious and wary of the King, he had also acquired at his father’s knee a healthy contempt for the great Whig magnates such as Rockingham, with whom Fox was in close alliance. While Pitt believed that the corrupting influence of the Crown had grown too extensive, he also knew that it would not be consistent with maintaining a balanced constitution to put the King’s most essential powers into the hands of the Whig aristocracy.

  These fundamental differences in temperament and outlook would do much to account for the total breach between Pitt and Fox which was now not far away, but for the moment they joined in pouring their verbal firepower into the stricken vessel which the North administration had become. On 27 February, with the county Members voting overwhelmingly against North, the government was defeated by nineteen votes (234 to 215) in a packed House on a motion which called for the end of the war in America. Desperate consideration was given to recruiting opposition figures to the government, including an idea put forward by Dundas of bringing in Lowther, Rutland and Pitt and their friends with offers of honours and junior ministerial posts. It is unlikely that such attempts would have succeeded even had they been made, and in any case the opposition benches were now massing to deliver the final blow. On 8 March a motion of no confidence in the government was defeated by only ten votes, with Pitt acting as a teller for the opposition.* In excitement he wrote to his mother the following day: ‘I came to town yesterday in time for a very good debate; and a division which, though not victorious, is as encouraging as possible – 216 against 226, on a question leading directly to removal, is a force that can hardly fail.’

  Pitt was right. Both sides strove to bring their maximum numbers to bear in the next debate on 15 March. This followed weeks of ‘the most violent exertions on both sides’.16 Now ‘every artifice of party was used by the Opposition to encourage their friends and to terrify or hold out to popular odium the adherents of Administration. Lists were published and disseminated through the kingdom, containing the names of the members who voted on each question … it produced … a powerful effect on weak or timid individuals.’17 This time the government clung on by only nine votes (236 to 227). No eighteenth-century government could remain in office if its majority on a question of confidence was in single figures and declining. With a further debate set for 20 March, North prepared to resign. He advised the King to send for Rockingham and Shelburne, to which the King replied: ‘My sentiments of honour will not permit me to send for any of the Leaders of Opposition and personally treat with them.’18

  Despite the King’s protestations, North knew his support was sliding further and that he had no option. On the afternoon of 20 March he arrived at the House of Commons and attempted to speak, but was drowned out by a furious opposition who thought he was trying to prevent the debate from taking place, and insisted that the opposition spokesman Lord Surrey should have the floor. After extensive points of order, in which Pitt once again took part, North was eventually given the floor, assuring the House that ‘those persons who had for some time conducted the public affairs, were no longer His Majesty’s Ministers. They were no longer to be considered as men holding the reins of government and transacting measures of state, but merely remaining to do their official duty, till other Ministers were appointed to take their places.’19

  As ever, North retained his sense of humour. Members had anticipated a long sitting, and huddled around the entrance of the House of Commons waiting for their carriages to be brought as the snow fell around them. Lord North had his carriage waiting. ‘Good night, gentlemen,’ he said to them cheerily, ‘you see what it is to be in the secret.’ At last he had been able to give up the burden he had wanted to shed for so long. For George III, however, the worst of his nightmares had come true.

  Defeat at the hands of the American colonists was to have a massive impact on the politics, society and trade of Great Britain. The prime focus of Britain’s empire would now move to the Caribbean, and India would play an ever larger role in its affairs. Relations with the new United States of America would centre on trade, despite the contribution of trading disagreements to the outbreak of war in the first place, with a vast expansion of commerce between Britain and its former colonies which would be crucial to British success in almost all subsequent major wars. In the immediate aftermath of the war, a wounded Britain would pursue a relatively cautious and risk-averse foreign policy. And in those same short years, the seeds of British hostility to slavery, planted by promises of freedom made to slaves during the fighting in America, would grow rapidly into British leadership of the efforts to abolish the slave trade.

  In domestic politics, dissatisfaction with the pursuit and handling of the war would bring to a high pitch the demand for constitutional change by means of parliamentary reform, although it would not be many years before a conservative reaction set in. Pitt would make the campaign for such reform his personal crusade for some three years after the North government fell. Equally important, the war had revealed that the British state was ill-equipped to deal with the growing military, political and financial complexity of major conflict. A Cabinet system which relied on the separate relationships of individual Ministers with the King, and had no member who would actually admit to the title of Prime Minister and freely interfere with other departments, was no way to produce a consistent or effective strategy in times of crisis. A figure such as Chatham could dominate his colleagues and give aggressive direction to warmaking at the height of the Seven Years’ War, but a more diffident figure such as Lord North provided no central point of coordination or control.

  Beneath Cabinet level, the finance and administration of government departments were certainly inefficient and corrupt, moving even Lord North himself in 1780 to set up a statutory commission to examine the public accounts. The stage was set for far-reaching reform of the practices of British government by any future set of Ministers who had the confidence
and the power systematically to set about it.

  The fall of Lord North was not to produce such a government. It was, of course, abundantly clear that the King would now have to accept into ministerial posts the politicians who had hitherto made up the opposition and who for years had denounced the war, the North administration, and often by implication the King himself. George III’s repugnance at promoting such people was extreme, and he had rejected all previous attempts to recruit the Rockingham Whigs to office because of the demands they presented. Unsurprisingly, these demands had included recognition of American independence, the appointment of large numbers of opposition politicians to positions in the government and the Royal Household, and serious economical reform. The King had no regard for Rockingham, along with the deepest possible dislike of Fox, and felt utterly humiliated by the prospect of having to treat with them. He churlishly accused Lord North of deserting him, privately threatened to abdicate, and drew up a message to Parliament which referred to his leaving the country ‘for ever’.20

  Evidently reflecting that there were worse things than being King of England even without its American colonies, George in the end allowed the intransigent side of his character to be tempered by the manipulative abilities he also possessed. While the Rockingham Whigs exulted in Westminster about the spoils of office which would now be coming their way, and Fox openly and regularly referred to the King as ‘Satan’,21 George resolved to make their arrival in government as uncomfortable as possible. First, he refused to have any direct negotiations with the Rockinghams, and instead conducted negotiations through the smaller of the opposition groupings led by Shelburne. Secondly, he denied the Rockinghams any general ability to create new peerages and honours, while showering honours upon the Shelburnites: John Dunning, who conducted the initial negotiations, became Lord Ashburton with a pension of £4,000 a year for life; Colonel Barré became Treasurer of the Navy with a life pension of £3,200 a year – to give only the two most obvious examples. As a result ‘inextinguishable jealousies arose, and mutual distrust manifested itself on every occasion’.22 Thirdly, he insisted on retaining the Lord Chancellor, Lord Thurlow, from the previous administration when the new Cabinet was formed. Dundas also continued in office as Lord Advocate.