Pitt, of course, had previously enjoyed the certainty of unopposed return in Appleby – even though, after over three years as its MP, he had still never visited the place. Yet as a teenager he had set his heart on being one of the Members for Cambridge University, and it was thence that he set out as soon as Parliament was dissolved. Embarrassingly, the Morning Herald revealed that he had written to a Cambridge voter announcing himself as a candidate for Cambridge and saying Parliament had been dissolved, in a letter dated 24 March but postmarked 23 March – before this event had taken place. But Pitt was now so popular that such trivia need not have troubled him. He refused a nomination for the City of London and, keeping the possibility of election at Bath in his back pocket, travelled with evident confidence to Cambridge. He told Wilberforce: ‘I set out this evening for Cambridge, where I expect, notwithstanding your boding, to find everything favourable. I am sure, however, to find a retreat at Bath.’33 He spent a week canvassing in Cambridge alongside his friend Lord Euston, amidst the scribbling of hurried notes to candidates across the country, and when the poll was held on 3 April Pitt received 359 votes and Euston 309, unseating the two sitting members, Townshend and Mansfield, who received 281 and 185 respectively. Both of them had opposed Pitt in the Commons in the preceding months. It was a sweet victory for Pitt, only four years after he had received 147 votes in the same constituency and come bottom of the poll. He had achieved another of his life’s ambitions, and would represent Cambridge University until the day he died.
Pitt sat down to write a polite letter declining nomination for Bath – ‘nothing but the particular circumstances of my connection with this place could have prevented my embracing an offer so flattering to my feelings’34 – then returned to Downing Street to rest and await other results. After four days of voting any majority for Fox and North in the Commons had disappeared. The early boroughs gave Pitt thirteen net gains, but it was when the counties began their elections on 6 April that the scale of his triumph became evident. Shows of hands at county meetings left veteran MPs who had backed Fox unwilling even to contest the election: Thomas Coke of Norfolk found that his ‘bringing forward one of Fox’s desperate resolutions has ruined him with all thinking men’.35 Those who did contest the election in counties such as Gloucestershire or Suffolk were overwhelmingly defeated. In Yorkshire, where the Rockingham connection should have guaranteed one of the two seats for Fox, the canvass was so overwhelmingly for Pitt that William Wilberforce and an ally were returned unopposed. Lord Fitzwilliam complained that they had been ‘beat by the ragamuffins’.36 The four most prestigious county seats in England were those of Yorkshire and Middlesex, and all of these were now in the hands of Pitt supporters. The many established MPs ejected from the Commons became known as ‘Fox’s Martyrs’.
From the City of Westminster came the news that Fox himself was struggling to hold his seat, despite the Prince of Wales parading through the streets in his colours, and the energetic campaigning of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Twenty-three days of voting elapsed before Fox moved narrowly into second place, which would have given him one of the two seats, but the voting and the campaigning continued, in perhaps the most hotly contested constituency election of the entire century. Tens of thousands of pounds were spent on each side, vast quantities of alcohol were disbursed, dinners were held for hundreds of voters at a time, street fights between supporters of the candidates became common, ‘miscreants’ who attempted to vote twice were put on the ducking stool, and an unknown number of votes were cast by people who were not really voters at all.
Fox’s supporters concentrated on defeating Sir Cecil Wray, who was considered the weaker of the two government candidates. In particular they attacked him for switching sides to join Pitt, and alleged that he wished to close Chelsea Hospital. The election literature gives a flavour of the intensity of the campaign:
To be Sold by Auction
By JUDAS ISCARIOT
At the Prerogative Arms, Westminster
CHELSEA HOSPITAL
With all the Live and Dead Stock
JUDAS ISCARIOT is extremely sorry he cannot put up for sale
PUBLIC INGRATITUDE
Having reserved that Article for Himself
Another Foxite advertisement for the election ran:
At Covent Garden
FREE ELECTION: A FARCE
Old Obstinate, by Mr. King
Admiral Broadside (first Court Candidate) Lord Hood
Judas (second Court Candidate) Sir Cecil Wray
Champion of Liberty, Mr. Fox37
The Hood and Wray campaign retaliated with advertisements for Fox in the name of Oliver Cromwell, and circulated a list of mock reasons to vote for Fox which included:
– Because Mr. Fox has never acted according to the wishes of his constituents, but treated them with every mark of contempt.
– Because Mr. Fox’s family have never robbed the public of Three Hundred and Seventy Thousand Pounds, as is maliciously asserted.38
They reacted to the involvement of the Duchess of Devonshire with a leaflet which read:
Hired for the day
SEVERAL PAIR OF RUBY POUTING LIPS OF THE FIRST QUALITY
To be kissed by rum Dukes, queer Dukes, Butchers, Dray-men, Dustmen and Chimney Sweepers39
and songs such as:
I had rather kiss my Moll than she;
With all her paint and finery;
What’s a Duchess more than woman?
We’ve sounder flesh on Portsmouth Common!40
With the beautiful Duchess steadily strengthening Fox’s position as she planted kisses on the cheeks of shopkeepers and labourers, the King went so far as to suggest to Pitt that all tactics, legal or not, should be employed: ‘Though the advance made by Mr. Fox this day can only have been by bad votes, yet similar measures must be adopted rather than let him get Returned for Westminster.’41 Strong language was employed in the pamphlets which were circulated in abundance, Fox being described in one of them as ‘the high priest of drunkenness, gaming, and every species of debauchery’.42 Fox had taken the sensible precaution of having himself returned for Kirkwall and neighbouring boroughs in Orkney (where there were a total of twelve far less troublesome voters), but he fought desperately to retain the Westminster constituency, since his defeat there would be the icing on the cake of Pitt’s victory.
By 7 May all the results were in, except for the City of Westminster, where the voting continued. It was clear that Pitt had won a huge victory, approximating to some seventy net gains, which would give him a comfortable three-figure majority in the Commons. This far exceeded the expectations of the opposition, and was probably better than Robinson’s own estimates, although the final versions of these have not survived. There had been the predictable swing to the incumbent government in closed boroughs where Treasury and royal money, along with the effects of patronage, had had their effect. Even so, less money was spent on behalf of the Crown in this election than in those of 1774 or 1780. The victory drew its size as well as its quality from larger than expected gains in the open seats where public opinion could make itself felt. In the counties, only one supporter of Fox or North was successful in an actual poll, out of the eighty seats available, although others were elected by arrangement or without a contest. The emphatic verdict wherever large numbers of voters had participated added great moral authority to the obvious statistical weight of Pitt’s victory.
The new House of Commons was due to meet on 18 May. On the morning of the seventeenth the voting in the City of Westminster was still going on after forty days. Pitt described it as ‘forty days poll, forty days riot, and forty days confusion’. In the midst of great disputes about the validity of some of the votes and with the Commons about to meet, the High Bailiff announced a result in Westminster, but granted a ‘scrutiny’ of the count to the Pittite candidate Sir Cecil Wray, whom Fox had now defeated. The figures stood at Lord Hood (who was also for Pitt) 6,694, Fox 6,234 and Wray 5,998. No Members w
ere declared returned for the City of Westminster until the scrutiny, which would involve an investigation of every vote, had taken place.
It was thus as the Member for Orkney that an enraged Fox returned to the House of Commons on 18 May. He took his seat on the opposition front bench with literally scores of the Members who had supported the Fox – North coalition now missing. Across from him, firmly seated on the Treasury bench, and with a great majority arrayed behind him, was William Pitt. Still ten days short of his twenty-fifth birthday, he was now indisputably at the helm of a nation and an empire.
PART TWO
10
Power and its Limits
‘No one who had not been an eye-witness could conceive the ascendancy which Mr. Pitt then possessed over the House of Commons.’
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE
‘He is not a great Minister. He is a great young Minister.’
THE EARL OF MANSFIELD
‘ON THE FIRST MEETING of the House of Commons, the most careless observer who had sat in the preceding Parliament could not fail to perceive, on surveying the opposition benches, how vast a diminution had taken place in that ardent, numerous, and devoted phalanx which lately surrounded Fox,’1 is how Wraxall described the scene in the Commons immediately after the 1784 election. ‘But Fox did not lose the occasion of commenting with indignant severity on the conduct of the high bailiff of Westminster; observing, not without reason, that the House, which ought to have consisted of 558 members, was incomplete, none being returned for the city which had elected him as one of its representatives.’2
The new Parliament thus began with a continuation of the election. The controversy over whether Fox should have been returned for Westminster was to rage for many months. The initial attempt of Fox and his supporters to overturn the declaration of a scrutiny was defeated by ninety-seven votes (233 to 136), while their attempt to amend the address to the King on the opening of Parliament was defeated by 168 votes (282 to 114). Lord North tried to deflate the triumphant atmosphere on the government benches by warning Pitt of ‘the mutability of ministerial greatness’, and pointing out that the number of votes cast in the House with the opposition was similar to the number so cast at the beginning of the previous Parliament – in which he was voted out as First Lord of the Treasury. In reality, the new government was far more secure in the Commons than any of its recent predecessors, but the voting figures in the first two divisions revealed an important fact for those who paused to reflect on it: Pitt’s majority was very large, but very variable. Members of Parliament who would loyally support him on a matter of government policy would not necessarily do so on other matters not central to the ability to govern, of which the Westminster scrutiny was an early example.
Pitt’s insistence that the challenge to Fox’s election at Westminster should go ahead, even though the government already enjoyed a huge majority, was later to bring him his first defeat in the new Parliament. It has been much criticised by historians as an uncharacteristic and immature act of vindictiveness based on poor judgement, but that is an armchair analysis, too distant from the intense political feelings of the spring of 1784, and asks us to expect too much of Pitt, or of almost any newly victorious leader. In order to imagine the atmosphere of the time it is necessary to remember the immense importance attached to the City of Westminster result: the government side had spent perhaps a quarter of its total national resources in that one constituency, the Prince of Wales had just held a lavish party at Carlton House to celebrate Fox’s victory, and the narrow result was widely believed to have been accompanied by major fraud. It is also the first instinct of a politician who has knocked his opponent to the ground to find some means of preventing him from getting up again.
Added to this, it must be borne in mind that relations between Pitt and Fox were now extremely poor. Pitt knew that Fox would have had him impeached if he could have mustered the votes to do so in the previous Parliament. In the opening debates, he now took pleasure in ‘sarcastically congratulating’ Fox on ‘the extent of his fame, which, spreading to the remotest corner of Great Britain, had procured his election for the Orkney and Shetland Islands’.3 With more feeling in the next session he was to describe Fox’s position as ‘a situation, in which, to the torments of baffled hope, of wounded pride, and disappointed ambition, was added the mortifying reflection, that to the improvident and intemperate use he had made of his power and influence, while they lasted, he could alone attribute the cause of all those misfortunes to which he was used, so constantly, so pathetically, but so unsuccessfully, to solicit the compassion of the house’.4 It was now a relationship of ‘great mutual asperity’,5 and Fox was to say that summer, of his own increasing absences from the House: ‘To be present at the daily or rather hourly equivocations of a young hypocrite, is at once so disgusting to observe and so infamous to tolerate, that the person who listens to them with forebearance [sic], becomes almost an accomplice in them.’6
As things turned out, it would have benefited Pitt to have ended the Westminster scrutiny forthwith. Yet to expect him to have done so would be to ask him to except himself from the general rule of politicians – that magnanimity is to be shown only when it is either inconsequential or positively hurtful to the enemy. Moreover, he did not know at this stage that the scrutiny, being so legalistic, would take many months to examine even a small proportion of the votes. In beating off another opposition challenge to the scrutiny on 8 June by seventy-eight votes, Pitt carried a motion for it to be conducted with ‘all despatch’.
In the meantime, the King had delivered his speech at the opening of Parliament, written for him by Pitt for the first time, paving the way for higher taxes ‘after a long and expensive war’ and a final resolution of Indian affairs. These two subjects would, indeed, be all that there was time to address in the short session before the August recess. In tackling them Pitt would show abilities, energy and strength of purpose which would win him much admiration. He would begin to develop and reveal the working habits which would characterise the long years in power to come. Yet the success he would enjoy and the support he would receive would perhaps lead him to think that similar success and support for a wider range of objectives was more assured than it really was.
The budget which Pitt presented in the House of Commons on 30 June 1784 was the first of at least twenty-two that he would ultimately deliver as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. His aptitude for learning rapidly and his prodigious attention to mathematics as a boy led naturally on to a mastery of financial detail which many onlookers found dazzling. Wraxall noted that ‘he performed this arduous task in a manner at once so voluminous, accurate, and masterly, as to excite universal admiration … Pitt may, indeed, be regarded as a political phenomenon not likely to recur in the lapse of many ages.’7 The following year Lady Gower would remark on ‘so perfect a knowledge of the Commerce, Funds, and Government of the Country that one must imagine, to hear him on these subjects, that he had the experience of fifty years … The Opposition even cannot help expressing Astonishment.’8
Any idea that a twenty-five-year-old could not run the country was now firmly laid to rest, all the more so because Pitt managed to combine in his budget a certain degree of boldness with a display of integrity which, together, brought a good deal of popularity. The financial position he inherited was dire. A country with annual tax revenues of about £13 million was paying £8 million a year interest on a national debt which now amounted to £234 million. The last four years of the American War had added some £80 million to that debt, and it had been further inflated by the habits of Pitt’s predecessors, who sold government stock at a nominally low interest rate but at a large discount. This kept the interest rates low, but eventually gave the lenders a very healthy return by hugely inflating the capital which would one day have to be repaid. Pitt had longer-term designs on addressing these problems, through the establishment of a Sinking Fund to repay the debt and the sale of stock at higher r
ates of interest. At this stage he had neither the time nor the financial resources to put these in place, but he did create a new system by the sale of a £6 million loan necessary that year by distributing it according to the best terms offered among sealed bids, which were opened in the presence of the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. Previous governments had often channelled the sale of government stock to their friends and supporters as a form of patronage; Pitt’s new system brought the raising of government loans up to the standards of modern times. ‘Honest Billy’ had struck again.
Even with this loan, Pitt needed to raise taxes. ‘Irksome as is my task this day,’ he told the Commons, ‘the necessities of the country call upon me not to shrink from it; and I confide in the good sense and patriotism of the people of England.’9 Rather than create controversy by a sharp increase in one tax, he chose to spread the burden over a wide range of items – hats, ribbons, paper, hackney coaches, bricks, candles, linens, calicoes, coal, gold and silver plate, imported silk, exported lead, postage rates, and shooting certificates. With the exception of the coal tax, which he withdrew within a week on finding the reaction so strongly against it, Pitt had judged matters well. The money raised allowed him to fund the new loan while concentrating on a bold reform elsewhere: to assist government revenues by tackling the thorny issue of smuggling.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 21