William Pitt the Younger: A Biography

by William Hague

  Pitt’s willing involvement confirmed the advice that George III had been given that ‘certain persons’ were ready ‘to receive the burthen’. On the same day the King gave Temple a card which stated:

  His Majesty allowed Earl Temple to say, that whoever voted for the India Bill was not only not his friend, but would be considered by him as an enemy; and if these words were not strong enough, Earl Temple might use whatever words he might deem stronger and more to the purpose.14

  The die was cast.

  The King now summoned the Archbishop of Canterbury and told him to vote the opposite way on the India Bill to his previous disposition, an instruction to which the Archbishop dutifully adhered. Meanwhile, Temple made widespread and effective use of the royal card residing in his pocket. Confusion mounted rapidly: some of the King’s friends took Temple’s word on the King’s opinions, others refused to believe it. Ministers were caught completely unprepared. Portland, the nominal head of the government, ‘did not believe this report for some time as His Majesty had never expressed to him the slightest disinclination to give the Bill his full support, & even on the Friday when the Duke was with him did not give him the least hint of what had passed with Lord Temple’.15 News of the King’s views continued to spread, while both sides avoided discussing it publicly – the opposition because it would be accused of complicity in an unconstitutional manoeuvre, and the government because it did not want the rumour to be confirmed.

  As the Lords debated the Bill on 15 December, and Fox and Pitt watched from the Bar of the House, Fox still expected a majority of twenty-five. George Rose even overheard one government supporter saying to another, ‘I wish I were as sure of the kingdom of heaven as I am of our carrying the Bill this evening.’16 In fact, the King’s intervention had caused at least twenty-seven members of the Lords to change sides, and late that night they inflicted their first defeat on the Bill, by eighty-seven votes to seventy-nine. Fox was outraged, writing to his mistress Mrs Armistead: ‘We are beat in the H. of Lds by such treachery on the part of the King & such meanness on the part of his friends in the H. of Lds as one could not expect even from him or them.’17 Two days later, on 17 December, both Houses met for the climactic debates. In the House of Lords the India Bill was formally and finally thrown out by an increased opposition majority of nineteen. Down the corridor in the House of Commons, government supporters raged against the actions of the opposition, arguing that if people other than Ministers influenced the actions of the King, then Ministers were placed in an impossible position. They passed a resolution that to report any opinion of the King in order to influence debates was ‘a high crime and misdemeanour’, and another launching an inquiry to begin the following week. Fox thundered forth his denunciation of what had happened: ‘The deliberations of this evening must decide whether we are to be henceforward free men or slaves; whether this House is the palladium of liberty or the engine of despotism; whether we are prospectively to exercise any functions of our own, or to become the mere echo of secret influence.’ The Lords, he said, had ‘forfeited by their conduct every claim to the character of gentlemen, and degraded the characteristic independence of the peerage as well as vilified the British Legislature in the eyes of all Europe’.18

  While it was clear to all involved that the King’s intervention in the House of Lords had been decisive, it was of huge importance to Pitt and his colleagues that they were not implicated in a conspiracy to use ‘secret influence’ and to encourage arguably unconstitutional action. Temple had become trapped in verbal contortions in the Lords when questioned on his role, and had ended by owning up to a meeting with the King, while not confirming what was said. Pitt, the prize now within his grasp, took an approach that was far simpler, as well as ruthlessly dishonest. The rumour, he said, was simply ‘the lie of the day’, and he could not believe that such importance had been ‘ever before imparted to mere rumour and hearsay’. Throughout the controversies of the coming months he would maintain that he knew of no plan to unseat the previous government, an assertion believed by many of his contemporaries and all of his earliest biographers for many decades after his death.

  On 18 December Pitt and Temple had audiences with the King. Pitt indicated his readiness to take office at the head of a new government, and at midnight that night Portland, Fox and North were meeting together when messengers arrived from the King asking them to surrender their seals of office. ‘I choose this method,’ the King wrote to North, ‘as Audiences on such occasions must be unpleasant.’19 On Friday, 19 December 1783 a packed House of Commons watched as Pitt’s friend Pepper Arden rose and moved a new writ for an election in the Borough of Appleby: ‘In the room of the Rt Hon William Pitt, who, since his election, has accepted the office of First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer.’* The massed ranks of the supporters of the Fox – North coalition, now gathering on the opposition benches, burst into laughter. For one thing, they were laughing at Arden’s high-pitched voice, and for another at the appointment of a twenty-four-year-old to be the First Minister of the Kingdom. More ominously, they were laughing with confidence. As Fox put it: ‘We are so strong … I think we shall destroy them almost as soon as they are formed.’ Pitt would become Prime Minister with a large majority of the House of Commons determined to force his immediate removal.

  Why did Pitt decide to take office in December 1783, having refused to do so earlier in the year? He had previously ruled it out on the grounds that he could not be sure of a majority in the House of Commons, and that was as true now as it had been before. What had changed?

  There were two major differences between this situation and his previous opportunities to lead a government. The first was that the likely balance of power between Pitt as Prime Minister on the one hand and George III on the other had changed. Had Pitt taken office in March 1783, he would have done so at the whim of the King, and to a large extent as a creature of the King’s making. Having made him, the King could have unmade him, by trying to dictate policy, control appointments, or at some stage dismissing him and turning back to Lord North, or even Shelburne, or some other figure who could cobble together an administration. The circumstances of December 1783 were quite different. The King had declared political war on a majority of the House of Commons and on almost all its senior figures, including the entire parties of Charles James Fox and Lord North. The abuse of royal power he had perpetrated was now under ferocious attack in that assembly. In this situation, it was not merely desirable to George III that Pitt should lead the government; it was indispensable to him. He literally could not do without the one man who could take on all comers in the House of Commons and at the very least hold his own. And such was the enmity now created between the King and the new opposition that he would not be able to let them back into office for a very long time, thus securing Pitt’s position for the future, if only he could get through the first few months. Pitt knew all this, and he also knew that if he could succeed in outwitting the hostile majority in the Commons and somehow entrench himself in office, his achievement would have been so great that his political following would be strong and his authority hard to challenge.

  It was because of these realities that Pitt was able to take office on his own terms in a manner he could not have insisted upon earlier that year. He had made clear in the summer that he would only serve as First Lord of the Treasury if he could pursue his cherished goal of parliamentary reform, a project to which George III was unremittingly hostile. Now indeed he took office with the apparent understanding that although he could not expect the King and other diehard traditionalists such as Thurlow actually to support parliamentary reform, they would not actively prevent him from bringing it forward. Hence Pitt could take charge in Downing Street knowing that he had a large measure of freedom of action, and that the King’s need to keep him in office would allow him to maintain that freedom.

  The second major difference between March and December 1783 was that matters had truly come to a he
ad. Pitt’s attack on the India Bill as ‘the exercise of tyranny’ had been wild exaggeration, but there is no doubt that the successful passage of the Bill would have helped to cement the Fox – North coalition into power, and brought a great deal of valuable patronage under their control. If the government was not thrown out now, it might be much harder to do so later. A ready pretext might not easily recur, and the combination of powerful conspirators who brought about the coup in the House of Lords that December might have disintegrated if it was not put to use. Since Pitt was only twenty-four it would be an exaggeration to say that this was ‘now or never’, but he must have recognised that it might be ‘now or not for a very long time’. The stakes were high enough for the risk to be worth taking.

  And risk it was. Given the constitutional precedents and conventions prevailing at the time, no substantive defence of the King’s action was possible. From 1688 onwards it had been understood that the King would operate only through his Ministers, who could then be held accountable in Parliament and who needed a majority in the House of Commons to support them. Now the King had acted through other politicians in order to depose his Ministers, and had proceeded to appoint a new government to which a majority of the House of Commons was clearly opposed. It is no wonder that Fox and the Whigs railed against this outrage: not only had they been deprived of office, but the constitutional settlement they had been brought up to believe was sacrosanct had been comprehensively violated. Wraxall admitted that the King’s action ‘appears at first sight subversive of every principle of political freedom’, but went on to make the one real defence, albeit in exaggerated language, of what the King had done: ‘We must, however, candidly allow that he was not bound to observe any measures of scrupulous delicacy with men who had entered his Cabinet by violence, who held him in bondage, and who meditated to render that bondage perpetual.’20 In other words, the constitution was breaking down, and the Ministers were themselves violating it by proposing greatly to extend their own power, an action against which the King had to defend himself.

  It would turn out that a great majority of opinion in the country would agree with this latter defence of the King, and would give strong support to his actions and his new Prime Minister, notwithstanding the fact that he had broken all the rules. George III would join a long line of political rulers, which now stretches from Julius Caesar to Charles de Gaulle, in succeeding in taking unconstitutional action because he enjoyed great popular support for it. But this was far from apparent to the King’s friends as Pitt’s appointment was announced on 19 December, and the opposition benches rocked with laughter. Those who contemplated joining Pitt in office had to reckon with the likelihood that when the Commons met again in January it would vote them straight out of office with endless motions of no confidence and a refusal to authorise taxes. It would not take many weeks for a Commons majority to make the governing of the country impossible, which was the whole reason governments required a majority in the House of Commons in the first place. Worse still, the talk of ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’ raised the possibility of the impeachment of those who took office in these circumstances, and trials conducted by Parliament.

  Veterans of politics blanched when faced with such prospects. It was the hope of many, evidently including Temple, that Pitt would ask the King to dissolve Parliament and call an immediate general election, in which all the advantages of incumbency and Treasury money would rest with Pitt and the King’s friends. Certainly this is what Fox and North expected him to do. He did not do so. There were several reasons for this. First, an eighteenth-century general election needed ‘preparation’, with careful arrangement of candidates and money. There had been no time to do this. Second, a Land Tax Bill had to be enacted by early January for the public finances to be secure. Third, the Parliament had four years yet to run, and early dissolutions were deeply unpopular with many independent and county Members who would face the huge expense of an early election. Pitt needed their support, and an election could have pushed them into hostility without depriving them of their seats. Fourth, a general election in the middle of a session, let alone in the middle of a Parliament, was without precedent since 1688 other than on the death of a monarch, and would add further to the doubtful constitutional basis of all that had gone before.

  The most effective way, albeit an extremely difficult and hazardous one, to show that the new government was legitimate, was to win over a majority in the existing House of Commons. If that proved impossible, and the opposition succeeded in rendering government inoperable, then at least there would be a more convincing pretext for a general election, and opinion would be more likely to rally to the new government. Pitt’s strategy was therefore to construct a government from among the few people willing to serve, to attempt to win over a majority of the Commons by taking on the opposition, to tempt the opposition into intemperate measures if it continued in the majority, and then to call an election if really necessary, by which time opinion in the country would be more solidly on his side.

  Fox’s strategy was also to avoid a dissolution, since that would bring the full weight of government influence on to Pitt’s side in an election. He would not immediately supply the pretext for an election by ‘stopping the supplies’, but he would take every other measure to humiliate Pitt and vote down whatever policies the new government attempted.

  The stage was set for one of the great political confrontations of British history.

  The early days of the battle were not auspicious for Pitt. He first attempted to cut through all the problems by sending a mutual friend, Lord Spencer, to ask Fox to join the government, but without Lord North and without the India Bill as proposed. A confident Fox turned this down flat. Two days after taking office Pitt received a body blow when Temple, who had taken office on 19 December as a Secretary of State, resigned on the twenty-first. Historians have never been able to agree on why he did so. Wraxall and other contemporary commentators thought it was because Pitt would not dissolve Parliament. Stanhope thought it was because the King had not recognised Temple’s previous service as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland or his recent services by elevating him to a dukedom. The explanation given by his brother, William Grenville, in the House of Commons at the time was that he wished to be ‘ready to meet any charge that shall be brought against him’, and would be able to ‘answer for his conduct whenever he shall hear the charge’.21 This has a ring of truth. Ministerial resignations usually take place for more than one reason, and it is likely that Temple simply took fright at the difficulty of the whole situation, with the added fear that he might be impeached. Dundas, eagerly taking office as Treasurer of the Navy, thought Temple was a ‘dammed dolter-headed coward’, and the King was still referring to ‘his base conduct’ six years later. Whatever the reason for it, this resignation left Pitt terribly exposed, deprived of his leading colleague and senior spokesman in the Lords. Pretyman recalled that: ‘This was the only event, of a public nature, which I ever knew disturb Mr. Pitt’s rest, while he continued in good health. Lord Temple’s resignation was determined upon at a late hour in the evening of the 21st; and when I went into Mr. Pitt’s bedroom the next morning he told me, that he had not had a moment’s sleep. He expressed great uneasiness at the state of public affairs; at the same time declaring his fixed resolution not to abandon the situation he had undertaken, but to make the best stand in his power, though very doubtful of the result.’22

  By the morning of Tuesday, 23 December, Wilberforce was writing in his journal: ‘Morning Pitt’s … Pitt nobly firm … Cabinet formed.’23 It was indeed formed, but it was not very distinguished. Senior figures who had held high office in the past such as Lord Camden and the Duke of Grafton declined to take part in this risky enterprise. Pitt was able to form a small Cabinet of seven members, including himself: the conspirator Lord Thurlow back as Lord Chancellor, the trusty Gower as President of the Council, Pitt’s young friend the Duke of Rutland as Lord Privy Seal, Admiral Lord Howe as First Lord of t
he Admiralty and, as Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, Lord Sydney and the Marquis of Carmarthen. The latter two held the two highest offices after Pitt and Thurlow, but were considered by William Grenville, who would one day succeed each of them, as ‘unequal to the most ordinary business of their own offices’.24 Hardly any of the others could make an effective speech, and all of them except Pitt were in the House of Lords: the huge burden of debating in the House of Commons would fall almost entirely on Pitt himself.

  At the more junior levels of the government Pitt relied on bringing in his young friends, with George Rose and Tom Steele as Secretaries to the Treasury, Henry Dundas as Treasurer of the Navy, William Grenville and Lord Mulgrave as Paymasters of the Forces and Richard Pepper Arden as Solicitor General. The list was completed by the Duke of Richmond as Master General of the Ordnance (he would later agree to join the Cabinet in the same role), Lloyd Kenyon as Attorney General and Sir George Yonge as Secretary at War.

  This list of undistinguished peers and youthful companions was not immediately impressive. One commentator noted that the main attribute of the new government was its collective capacity for drink. Sir Gilbert Elliot dismissed the Ministers as ‘a set of children playing at ministers [who] must be sent back to school, and in a few days all will have returned to its former course’.25 Of the many commentaries writing off the chances of the new government the most famous came from Fox’s friend Mrs Crewe, who said to Wilberforce: ‘Well, he [Pitt] may do what he likes during the holidays, but it will be only a mince-pie administration, depend on it.’26 William Eden, at that stage still a political opponent, wrote that ‘They are in desperate straits even for Old men and Boys to accept situations.’27 Pitt’s youth was again derided, with his opponents composing a jingle called ‘Billy’s Too Young to Drive Us’, and even Robinson, now advising him on the parliamentary numbers, describing him as ‘a delicate high spirited mind, beset by Boys, Theoreticks and prejudiced persons’.28 Pitt’s position was seen as weak by most observers, and hopeless by some. As the Commons rose for the Christmas recess, Fox allowed the Land Tax Bill to pass, but in return extracted a promise that Parliament was not about to be dissolved. It would convene again on 12 January 1784. The battle for supremacy would then commence on the floor of the House of Commons.