The Cabinet had agreed to the unconditional independence of America, but Shelburne, possibly emboldened by Rodney’s victory, continued to pursue his own plans and sent his own representative, Richard Oswald, to the negotiations in Paris behind Fox’s back. Fox was enraged by ‘this duplicity of conduct’,38 believing that Shelburne was deliberately undermining the negotiations or seeking to bring down the government in concert with the King. By the end of June Fox was trying to bring matters to a head in the Cabinet and to have the policy decided one way or the other, even if it meant the ‘absolute rupture’39 of the government. The feud had reached its peak, but the climactic meetings of the Rockingham Cabinet were to take place without Rockingham himself. At the beginning of June, according to Wraxall, ‘when he rose to address the House [of Lords], he declared that he felt himself so severely indisposed as to be almost incapable of uttering a word … “The disorder universally prevalent afflicts me so violently, that at times I am not completely in possession of myself.”’40 It is hard to imagine a modern Prime Minister making such a disarmingly honest admission. In any event, he took to his bed and was still there as his Ministers squared up to each other at the end of June.
Pitt, in the meantime, occasionally busied himself on the back benches while planning a summer on the Western Circuit to improve his finances. He was also anxious that his mother’s annuity, long since in arrears, should be paid by the government. On 27 June he wrote from Lincoln’s Inn to his mother:
My brother tells me he has mentioned to you that Ld Rockingham is ill, wch is unfortunately in the way of any thing more at present; but Ld S[helburne]. told me yesterday that Ld R. had expressed himself as wishing to do something that might give you a security for the future. You are very good in thinking of communicating any share of what I am sure your own occasions may demand entire; mine are not so pressing but that they will wait very tolerably at present; and I shall expect that Westminster Hall will in good time supply all that is wanting.
The Circuit begins on Tuesday sen’night.* I hope to call in my way westward, if not certainly in my return; and I shall undoubtedly be able to make some stay after it is over, tho’ my plan for the remainder of the summer is not quite settled … Lord Rockingham’s very precarious state occasions a great deal of suspense, and if it ends ill, may, I am afraid, produce a great deal of confusion …41
The plans Pitt was making to visit his mother and join the Western Circuit would be abandoned only a few days after he wrote this letter. At a Cabinet meeting on 30 June to discuss the peace negotiations Fox was outvoted. If he had resigned as Secretary of State that day it would have been seen as a resignation on a matter of principle. By delaying in order to consult his friends it was to become seen as a matter of pique. For at 11.30 in the morning of 1 July 1782 Charles Watson-Wentworth, second Marquis of Rockingham and First Lord of the Treasury, breathed his last. The one man who had held the government together was gone, and his body was scarcely cold before the battle over his successor was joined in earnest.
* * *
*The seat of William Beckford, the rich, eccentric and flamboyant son of the late William Beckford, who had been Lord Mayor of London and an ally of Chatham.
*In the House of Commons, then as now, the votes are counted by two Members from each side who act as ‘tellers’ and who are not themselves included in the voting figures.
*Wentworth Woodhouse, near Rotherham, remains to this day the largest private house in Britain.
*The term ‘se’nnight’, meaning one week, was still in common usage at this time.
6
The Youngest Chancellor
‘Our new Board of Treasury has just begun to enter on business; and tho’ I do not know that it is of the most entertaining sort, it does not seem likely to be very fatiguing … Lord North will, I hope, in a very little while make room for me in Downing Street, which is the best summer Town House possible.’
WILLIAM PITT, CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER, 16 JULY 1782
‘W. Pitt Secretary of State! and Lord Shelburne Premier! Surely the first cannot be qualified for such an office, and the last is, in my opinion, little to be depended upon.’
LORD MORNINGTON, 12 July 17821
THE UNEASY COALITION which had surrounded Rockingham was rent asunder within hours of his death. Fox had been on the brink of resigning, but seeing a chance to acquire genuine control of the government, nominated the Duke of Portland as First Lord of the Treasury. Portland was another traditional Whig aristocrat, now forty-four years old, but more suited to ministerial office and more dedicated to politics than Rockingham had been. He was known for ‘integrity, ability, and firmness’,2 but certainly not for oratory or inspiration. Fox’s intention in putting Portland forward was that one less than totally effectual Whig magnate would succeed another, and Fox, while disqualified from being First Lord of the Treasury himself because of the intense animosity between him and the King, would be in charge. George III, however, was no laggard when he saw an opportunity for which he had been waiting. Having failed even to enquire about the health of the dying Rockingham in the preceding weeks, the King wrote to Shelburne immediately on receiving news of his death, offering him the leadership of the government ‘with the fullest political confidence’.3 Oddly enough, the Rockingham Whigs were the grouping most caught by surprise by the death of their leader, probably because physicians had forecast his recovery, while their rivals were immediately ready for action. One of them wrote: ‘All is confusion at present, for as his friends from the declaration of his physicians did not think him in immediate danger the blow is the severer. Nobody at present can say who will be the successor … C. Fox’s idea at five o’clock this afternoon was in case His Majesty would not put the Duke of Richmond at the head of the Treasury to put the Duke of Portland there … they will not hear at this present moment of Shelburne …’4
Hear of it or not, the Whigs were presented with a fait accompli. Shelburne was to be First Lord of the Treasury, provided he could assemble a government around him. With Parliament about to break for the summer recess he would then have several months in which to fortify his parliamentary position. A new stage of confusion now reigned over who would serve under Shelburne. Fox consulted his friends about resigning, while the King took the unusual step on 3 July of speaking to each Cabinet Minister individually to explain that Shelburne would head the administration. According to Shelburne, ‘Mr. Fox, spoke to the K. rather in a strong way & seemed surprised to find that His M. dare have any opinion of his own.’5 The newspapers of the time demonstrate the bewilderingly rapid changes in the situation. The Morning Chronicle of 2 July printed a leaked list of the potential new government, with William Pitt as Treasurer of the Navy (a position outside the Cabinet and one he would have been unlikely to accept); by 6 July Fox is reported to have resigned and Pitt to be on his way to being a Secretary of State; and on 9 July it was said that Fox would be in the government after all, as Chancellor. In fact, on 4 July Fox had handed in his seals of office to the King and had ‘an angry Conversation’ with Shelburne. He could not bear to serve under the ministerial rival who he believed had spent the last three months undermining him.
While controversy raged around Fox, the undaunted Shelburne set about bringing Pitt into the government. Without Fox in the Cabinet, a powerful House of Commons debater would be needed in the front rank of the administration, and Pitt was one of the few men answering to that description. In addition, Shelburne regarded Pitt as one of his supporters and someone with very similar views to himself. He had tried to include him in the government at a more junior level only three months before. Now the need, and the opening, were clear. Fox himself, in one of his last friendly conversations with Pitt, said to him after Rockingham’s death: ‘They look to you; without you they cannot succeed; with you I know not whether they will or no.’ ‘If’, replied Pitt, ‘they reckon upon me, they may find themselves mistaken.’ In recounting this to others, Fox is said to have added presciently: �
��I believe they do reckon on Pitt, and I believe they will not be mistaken.’6
It may be that Pitt had not fully absorbed the possible consequences of Rockingham’s death on the day it happened. Perhaps more likely is that he was still rather in awe of Fox, and was keeping all his options open. Overnight reflection and the possibility of high office soon led him to be tempted. He wrote to his mother on 2 July: ‘With regard to myself, I believe the arrangement may be of a sort in which I may, and probably ought to take a part.’7 By 5 July he was writing: ‘Fox has chosen to resign, on no Ground that I can learn but Lord Shelburne being placed at the Treasury … My lot will be either at the Treasury as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or in the Home department as Secretary of State. The arrangement cannot be finally settled till tomorrow or next day; but every thing promises as well as possible in such circumstances. Mr. Townshend certainly makes part of this fresh arrangement, and probably in a more forward post, which is to me an infinite satisfaction.’8
This was a reference to Thomas Townshend, the only other Member of the House of Commons likely to occupy one of the top positions in the government. While the negotiations continued about who would occupy exactly which post, all attention remained on Fox, who now began to realise that he had gravely damaged his political career.
As a Secretary of State, Fox had felt seriously undermined by Shelburne, and had differed with him on a major aspect of policy. While he therefore had good grounds for resignation upon Shelburne becoming First Lord, these points were not widely appreciated even by other members of the government. Thus while Burke joined Fox in resigning, the senior members of the government saw no reason not to stay put in the Cabinet. The differences of opinion over the peace negotiations were not public knowledge, and for a politician openly to attack the backstairs influence of the King would have been going too far in the eighteenth century, at least until the great crisis which was still a year and a half away. The fact that Fox negotiated about the possibility of staying in the government for two or three days in the belief that Shelburne might accept his American policy (which he subsequently did) strengthened the perception that there was no good reason why he should not have carried on in the government. His uncle the Duke of Richmond remained in the Cabinet, saying he could ‘see no reason at present for suspecting that the Measures on which we came in will not be pursued, and under this persuasion I think it would be very wrong not to support this Ministry merely because Lord Shelburne is at the Treasury’.9
Seeing that he was losing the argument and was believed to have resigned out of personal animosity, Fox sought to explain himself in the Commons on 9 July, but probably made matters worse by the vituperative nature of his attack on Shelburne. He said of the new First Lord and his colleagues that ‘they would abandon fifty principles for the sake of power, and forget fifty promises when they were no longer requisite to their ends … and he expected to see that, in a very short time they would be joined by those men whom that House had precipitated from their seats’.10
The prediction he was making was that Shelburne would now form an alliance with Lord North. This was particularly unfortunate, since it was exactly what Fox himself would proceed to do the following year. Among those who took exception to the intemperate nature of Fox’s attacks on Shelburne was Pitt. Seated on the government front bench for the first time, although not yet officially in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pitt now had a stake in the success of Shelburne and the isolation of Fox. For all the ostensibly friendly relations between them over the previous years, he seems to have had no hesitation in adding to Fox’s wounds with a thrust of his own rapier:
The Right Honourable Secretary assures us, that it was with the sole view of preventing dissensions in the Cabinet he retired from office. I believe him, because he solemnly declares it; otherwise I should have attributed his resignation to a baulk in struggling for power. If, however, he so much disliked Lord Shelburne’s political principles or opinions, why did he ever consent to act with that nobleman as a colleague? And if he only suspected Lord Shelburne of feeling averse to the measures which he thought necessary to be adopted, it was his duty to have called a Cabinet Council, and there to have ascertained the fact before he took the hasty resolution of throwing up his employment.11
In vain did Fox protest that he had indeed called a meeting of the Cabinet to try to settle differences. The death of Rockingham and the evident anger of Fox at the elevation of Shelburne had obscured the original point of his resignation. By 10 July, as a new writ was moved for an election in Appleby to confirm Pitt’s position in the Commons as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the dust settled on a remarkable ten days in the politics of the eighteenth century. The events of early July 1782 amplified the appearance of Fox as a politician whose brilliance was flawed by rashness and personal enmity. The King could now say that his experience of Fox had ‘finally determined me never to employ him again’.12 The same events led to Pitt becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer and one of the most senior members of the British government at the age of twenty-three. Above all, the fact that Pitt had accepted office in the same circumstances as those in which Fox had rejected it would have lasting consequences for themselves and the country for the rest of their lives. The two most eloquent Members of the House of Commons had hitherto spoken from the same side of the House. Now they would never do so again.
Pitt’s re-election for Appleby was, of course, a formality. Given Lowther’s influence, he once again had no opponents. Not having to trouble himself with the election, and the House of Commons entering on its recess, he was able to contemplate his new situation with some leisure. The position of Chancellor of the Exchequer was a senior one in the government, but not as powerful as would normally be the case today. Its origins go back to the beginning of the twelfth century, when a chequered table was used for calculating expenditure and receipts. In the thirteenth century, the official responsible for making such calculations became known as the Chancellor of the Exchequer. By Pitt’s time, the Chancellor ranked second in the Treasury after the First Lord, an arrangement still nominally intact in the twenty-first century. Since the position of Prime Minister was far less well developed than today, however (and was not yet an official title), the First Lord was likely to concentrate much more heavily than now on Treasury business, and the Chancellor was not regarded as the Treasury’s departmental head.
Although he was in the Cabinet, Pitt had therefore not acquired extensive administrative power. He had ended up as Chancellor because at least three other people had turned it down in the game of Cabinet musical chairs between 1 and 10 July, and it was clear that the position he had been given had had to fit in with the demands of others. As Chancellor he would have a seat on the Treasury Board, with another seat given to his friend Edward Eliot, but Shelburne intended to be an activist First Lord with a firm grip on Treasury matters. Pitt’s role and power within the government would expand in due course, but only because he was indispensable to it in the House of Commons. Other than Townshend, nominally senior to him as a Secretary of State but a less effective speaker, General Conway and Dundas, who survived yet another change of government as Lord Advocate but remained outside the Cabinet, Pitt was the only spokesman in the House of Commons of a government which did not enjoy a majority. The other members of the Cabinet were all in the Lords: Shelburne himself as First Lord, Lord Grantham as a Secretary of State, Lord Thurlow yet again as Lord Chancellor, Lord Keppel as First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Camden as President of the Council, the Duke of Grafton as Lord Privy Seal and the Duke of Richmond as Master General of the Ordnance.
These grand figures of eighteenth-century politics – great landowners, political veterans or military experts – seemed happy to accept among their number in the Cabinet a young man who, for all his antecedents and abilities, was nevertheless a penniless twenty-three-year-old with no previous experience of office. More than two hundred years later, British Cabinets are no longer dominated by the aristocra
cy, but it would be impossible in practice for any twenty-three-year-old to achieve Cabinet rank, and would in any case be universally regarded as inappropriate. Sure enough, Pitt would receive some criticism on grounds of his youth, and a great deal more on becoming First Lord of the Treasury only eighteen months later. Yet at this point in history, for such a young person to enjoy such a high rank was regarded as unusual rather than ludicrous.
How was it that opinion in the eighteenth century could accept youthful seniority to an extent inconceivable two centuries later? Part of the explanation for Pitt’s rapid rise lies, of course, in the unusual circumstances of 1782. One group of politicians had left office because of defeat in the war; now another group had left because of arguments over the peace: the system was literally running out of talented material. But more generally, politics in the eighteenth century was more of a younger man’s game. We have already seen that fully a hundred MPs in the early 1780s were under the age of thirty. Ability, family connections, and the sometimes early retirement or death of senior colleagues allowed some of them to rise more rapidly than could be the case in modern politics. Pitt was not alone in reaching senior office in his twenties. Charles James Fox was an MP at the age of nineteen and a Lord of the Admiralty at twenty-four. At the time of his dramatic resignation as a Secretary of State in 1782 he was still only thirty-three. Another leading Whig of the coming years, Charles Grey, became an MP at twenty-two and was a leading opposition spokesman throughout his twenties. On Pitt’s own death in 1806, the new government would include Lord Henry Petty as Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-six. For a politician to hold Cabinet rank or its equivalent in his twenties during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century was therefore uncommon, but not unknown.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 12