William Pitt the Younger: A Biography

by William Hague

  It seems that initially the King even asked Shelburne rather than Rockingham to head the new government, but with Rockingham having far greater numbers in the Commons, Shelburne declined to do so. The Cabinet that was thus formed included Rockingham as First Lord of the Treasury, Shelburne and Charles James Fox as Secretaries of State (Fox responsible for foreign affairs and Shelburne for home and colonial affairs), Pitt’s friend Lord Camden as President of the Council, and Lord John Cavendish as Chancellor of the Exchequer. While the King had to accept a complete reversal of policy, in that all these Ministers sought peace with America, he had succeeded in creating a divided administration. As Lord John Russell later observed: ‘Two parties were made in the Ministry, one of which looked to the favour of the Court, not to the support of the country … The composition of the Rockingham Ministry was a masterpiece of royal skill.’23

  When the House of Commons met again on 8 April 1782, the leading figures sat on the side opposite that to which they had grown accustomed for many years. In the eighteenth century this meant not only a change of position but a change of costume – since Ministers wore court dress – and Wraxall speaks of astonishment at them ‘emerging from their obscure lodgings, or coming down from Brooks’s … now ornamented with the appendages of full dress, or returning from Court decorated with swords, lace, and hair powder … some degree of ridicule attached to this sudden metamorphosis, which afforded subject for conversation, no less than food for mirth’.

  Pitt would now sit on the government, rather than the opposition, side of the House, but he was not included among the Ministers who took their place on the front bench in court dress. In early March he had made in the Commons what seemed to many a rash and presumptuous declaration: ‘For myself, I could not expect to form part of a new administration; but were my doing so more within my reach, I feel myself bound to declare that I never would accept a subordinate situation.’24 At the age of twenty-two he was declaring, in other words, that he would serve as a senior Minister in the Cabinet or not serve in a new government at all. Many commentators found this too much to take, even from the son of Chatham who had become an accomplished debater. Horace Walpole described it as ‘so arrogant a declaration from a boy who had gained no experience from, nor ever enjoyed even the lowest post in any office, and who for half a dozen orations, extraordinary indeed, but no evidence of capacity for business, presumed himself fit for command, proved that he was a boy, and a very ambitious and a very vain one. The moment he sat down he was aware of his folly, and said he could bite his tongue out for what he had uttered.’25

  It has indeed been claimed that as soon as Pitt made this statement he thought he had gone too far, and consulted Admiral Keppel, who was sitting near him, for advice about making a clarification. On the other hand, it would have been wholly uncharacteristic of him to make a major statement of his own ambitions without thinking about it carefully in advance, and we have the assurance of Pretyman that he had decided to make this statement some days before. We cannot know for sure who was right, or whether Pitt was responding to rumours or negotiations and trying to elevate himself in the pecking order of a new administration. We can judge, however, that his statement is wholly consistent with his view of himself and his approach to politics. He already had immense confidence in his own abilities, but even more important he was determined to succeed on the basis of those abilities and not through attachment to a large party or a more senior political figure. He could only preserve the independence and incorruptibility for which he wished to be known by either being in an office so senior that he had freedom of action, or being out of office where he could say what he wished. Office in a more junior position would have turned him into the sort of politician he did not want to be, dependent on the patronage of others and having to accept a party line which he would have no role in determining. It seems likely, therefore, that his statement of March 1782, however grating on many of his listeners, was absolutely deliberate. Certainly his resolve in sticking to it was to be put to an immediate test. Shelburne put to Rockingham the case for giving Pitt a senior position, but it does not seem to have been high among his priorities, and he had already secured a disproportionate share of other positions. Instead, Pitt was offered the Vice-Treasurership of Ireland, outside the Cabinet but the position his father had first held in government, and one which carried a very generous salary of £5,000 a year, probably nine or ten times his income at the time. He refused it. When the elder Pitt had accepted this office he was frustrated from more than a decade in opposition; the younger Pitt was prepared to wait.

  Pitt was not a Minister in the new government, but he now had the opportunity to pursue an objective dear to the hearts of many who had opposed the former government: parliamentary reform. The movement of population over the centuries meant that by the late eighteenth century some large towns had no representation in Parliament of their own, while other places with almost no people at all were represented by two Members. The war in America had provided fertile ground for the belief that reform was essential to the good governing of the country, since it was assumed that MPs in closer touch with a wider range of people would have been less inclined to tolerate its continuation. Associations were formed around the country to campaign for the redistribution of parliamentary representation, and variously calling for the abolition of the most rotten boroughs, an increase in the number of county Members, and triennial rather than septennial Parliaments. The most prominent of these were the Westminster Association, with which Fox had associated himself as he adopted a more populist position on these issues in 1780; the Kent Association, of which Pitt’s brother-in-law Lord Mahon was a leading light; and the Yorkshire Association, led by the Reverend Christopher Wyvill of Constable Burton in North Yorkshire. Wyvill and his Yorkshire colleagues were to prove formidable campaigners, all the more so since they resisted more radical demands such as a wide extension of the franchise, were prepared to compromise on the issue of shorter Parliaments, and included the solid body of the country gentry of one of the major county seats of the land. Pitt’s many attempts to introduce parliamentary reform from 1782 onwards were heavily influenced by Wyvill, although nominally he was more closely attached to the Kent Association, to whose committee he had been elected in October 1780.

  With the formation of a government more friendly to reform, the Duke of Richmond, now a member of the Cabinet as Master General of the Ordnance, hosted a meeting of the leading reformers in late April to consider how to seek parliamentary approval for reform as rapidly as possible. It was decided that Pitt had the necessary ability and respect in the Commons to lead the case for reform. He gave notice in the House that on Tuesday, 7 May he would ‘move for a Select Committee to take into consideration the present state of the representation of the Commons of England’.26

  It was necessary caution on behalf of Pitt and the reformers to call for a Select Committee inquiry rather than to present a specific programme of reform. For all the fact that the new administration was sympathetic to the idea in principle, it would still be a tall order to get Members of Parliament to vote for changes which would do many of them out of their seats, and even Ministers themselves were divided. With the exception of Fox, the prime interest of the Rockingham Whigs had always been in economical reform, with the objective of diminishing the influence of the Crown at the expense of the Whig aristocracy, not in parliamentary reform, which had the objective of providing a fairer basis for the system of power which the aristocracy operated. Rockingham himself was not an enthusiast, and Burke was frankly opposed, although Fox appears to have persuaded him to absent himself on the occasion of Pitt’s speech.

  The House was crowded on 7 May, not so much with Members as with a huge crowd attempting to enter the Public Gallery, which had to be locked after an hour. Pitt set out the case for reform in a speech lasting an hour and a half. First, he praised the new government: ‘the ministers had declared their virtuous resolution of supporting the king’s gover
nment by means more honourable, as well as more permanent, than corruption; and the nation had confidence in the declarations of men who had so invariably proved themselves the friends of freedom, and the animated supporters of an equal and fair system of representation’.27 He went on to lament what had happened to the British constitution:

  That beautiful frame of government, which had made us the envy and admiration of mankind, in which the people were entitled to hold so distinguished a share, was so far dwindled and departed from its original purity, as that the representatives ceased, in a great degree, to be connected with the people. It was the essence of the constitution, that the people had a share in the government by the means of representation; and its excellence and permanency was calculated to consist in this representation, having been designed to be equal, easy, practicable, and complete. When it ceased to be so; when the representative ceased to have connection with the constituent, and was either dependent on the crown or the aristocracy, there was a defect in the frame of representation, and it was not innovation, but recovery of constitution, to repair it.28

  This was very much the spirit in which Pitt, Wyvill and the moderate reformers campaigned. They were not seeking a radical change to bring in a wider measure of what we now regard as a genuine democracy, nor were they consciously starting down any road which would lead 150 years later to universal suffrage and more or less equal representation. They simply wished to rectify the imbalances which had arisen over time so that parliamentary representation recovered some of its respectability, authority and independence. There were boroughs, Pitt claimed,

  which had now in fact no actual existence, but in the return of members to the house. They had no existence in property, in population, in trade, in weight … Another set of boroughs and towns, in the lofty possession of English freedom, claimed to themselves the right of bringing their votes to market. They had no other market, no other property, and no other stake in the country, than the property and price which they procured for their votes. Such boroughs were the most dangerous of all others. So far from consulting the interests of their country in the choice which they made, they held out their borough to the best purchaser, and in fact, they belonged more to the Nabob of Arcot than they did to the people of Great-Britain … Such boroughs … were sources of corruption; they gave rise to an inundation of corrupt wealth, and corrupt members, who had no regard nor connection, either for or with the people of this kingdom.29

  Pitt attacked the argument that the constitution could not be changed, saying he was afraid ‘that the reverence and the enthusiasm which Englishmen entertained for the constitution, would, if not suddenly prevented, be the means of destroying it; for such was their enthusiasm, that they would not even remove its defects, for fear of touching its beauty’.30

  Pitt’s motion was supported by the veteran Alderman Sawbridge and by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the famous Covent Garden playwright who was also a new MP, but opposed by his own cousin Thomas Pitt of Bocconoc. Appropriately enough for someone who elected himself as Member of Old Sarum, Thomas pointed out that equality of representation never was nor could have been the basis on which their ancestors meant to erect the liberties of England, or they would never have allowed ‘the little county of Rutland to send as many members to that assembly as Yorkshire or Devon’.31

  This was to be the majority view. When the ‘orders of the day’ were moved to cut short further debate on Pitt’s motion, 161 voted aye, and Pitt and Fox led 141 in voting no. Pitt was disappointed, writing to his mother: ‘The failure of my motion was rather unexpected, and might perhaps have been prevented if so strong an Opposition had been foreseen. I believe it is a very small party that is heartily for it,’32 but other reformers took heart from the narrow defeat, certainly not suspecting that this was the closest they would come to parliamentary reform for half a century. A further meeting of reformers was held at the Thatched House Tavern in St James’s Street on 18 May, calling for a new wave of petitions from across the country, and Pitt and Wyvill resolved to continue to work closely together.

  Even as this meeting took place the obstacles to meaningful reform were becoming ever clearer. On 17 May Alderman Sawbridge moved a motion for shortening the duration of parliaments, still set at seven years. He was supported by both Pitt and Fox, but Burke could no longer restrain himself. As Sheridan later described it to a friend: ‘On Friday last Burke acquitted himself with the most magnanimous indiscretion, attacked W. Pitt in a scream of passion, and swore Parliament was and always had been precisely what it ought to be, and that all people who thought of reforming it wanted to overturn the Constitution.’33 If Pitt needed any further reminding that the Rockingham Whigs did not share his attachment to genuine reform, he certainly received it the following month when a further plank of reform was opposed by Fox himself. On 19 June Lord Mahon introduced a Bill for combating bribery at elections, only to find that Fox opposed it and succeeded in removing many of the proposed penalties in it as being too severe. Mahon withdrew the Bill in disgust. ‘This was,’ Pretyman tells us, ‘I believe, the first question upon which they [Pitt and Fox] happened to differ before any separation took place between them. I must, however, remark that although they had hitherto acted together in Parliament, there had been no intimacy or confidential intercourse between them.’

  Fox had always been courteous and generous to Pitt. But by the end of June 1782, with Fox and the new government approaching a major crisis, Pitt owed them nothing.

  Dundas was always a perceptive observer of events. ‘Unless they change their idea of government, and personal behaviour to the King,’ he said of the new government, in which he continued as Lord Advocate, ‘I do not believe they will remain three months.’34 He would turn out to be exactly correct, and however arrogant Pitt’s refusal to hold a junior office may have seemed, he would lose nothing from standing apart from the intense feuding and personal enmities which characterised the short-lived Rockingham administration.

  Rockingham himself had two great strengths: he was consistent and principled in his Whig views, and among the Whigs he was foremost in wealth and connections. From his vast mansion of Wentworth Woodhouse* his influence upon the rest of the landed Whig aristocracy radiated across the land. These strengths had helped him to maintain the Whigs as a forceful opposition party through the 1770s and to hold them in readiness as an alternative government. But once he was in office as First Lord of the Treasury they were more than outweighed by his weaknesses: inexperience in government, timidity in arbitrating between fractious Ministers, and a bodily constitution which was not up to the strain. He was indecisive and forgetful, better known for his interests in racing, farming and horse-breeding than for having strong opinions about most political issues. George III thought that he ‘never appeared to him to have a decided opinion about things’.35 This was a government held together by its leader rather than driven forward by him.

  The single most important change in British politics brought about under the Rockingham government was the legislative independence granted to the Irish Parliament in May 1782, but this was in no way a premeditated act. Irish opinion was united behind the fiery politician Henry Grattan, who seized the chance to demand home rule provided by the coincidence of a new government in London, military defeat overseas, and the existence of 100,000 armed Irish Volunteers who had been set up to defend the country in the absence of British troops. While the new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Portland, pleaded in vain for time, Grattan made the most of his advantage, backed by the threat of force, and the Ministers gave in. For the moment the issue was settled, but time would show that the discontents of Ireland had been appeased but not resolved.

  The change of government meant peace negotiations to end the war with America, and separately with France, Spain and Holland, would now begin. Major operations on the American mainland may have been over, but Britain and the Continental powers continued to battle for a stronger negotiating position. The Spanish w
ere determined to retake Gibraltar, ceded to Britain in 1713, and in the West Indies the British and French fleets manoeuvred among their colonies. From there in late May came news of a devastating British victory. On 12 April, only three weeks after Lord North had left office in the shadow of military humiliation, Admiral Rodney decisively defeated the French fleet near Dominica, and in doing so restored Britain’s naval superiority and saved the West Indian colonies. A nation that had begun to despair of recovering its domination of the oceans now rejoiced: ‘The capital and the country were thrown into a delirium of joy.’36

  While Rodney’s great victory elated the country, it only served to exacerbate the differences over the peace negotiations between the two Secretaries of State, Fox and Shelburne. The conflict between these two men was at the heart of the intense rivalries which would pull the government apart. Shelburne had been flattered by George III, who had clearly wanted him to be the head of the government if only Fox and the other Rockingham Whigs would allow it. Fox, for his part, had no shortage of reasons for distrusting Shelburne, both personal and political. For one thing they were cousins, and ‘an old prejudice’ between the two branches of the family had remained active for decades.37 Probably still more offensive to Fox was that after all the work he had done and the speeches he had given to turn out the North ministry, it was Shelburne who had acquired the lion’s share of the spoils and could often outvote him in the Cabinet. Added to this poisonous mixture was an issue of real substance between them: Fox believed that the independence of America should be granted unconditionally, while Shelburne felt that it should be contingent on the satisfactory conclusion of a treaty with America’s European allies. Since Shelburne, as Home and Colonial Secretary, had responsibility for the negotiations with America, while Fox, as Foreign Secretary, had responsibility for the negotiations with European enemies, there were two Ministers with two different policies responsible for the same interrelated set of negotiations. The composition of the Rockingham ministry thus provided the perfect recipe for mistrust, bitterness and eventual chaos.