Pitt was optimistic that the strength of opposition in the Commons would now be ‘less than threatened’. He was wrong. Fox took the opportunity to denounce the proposals for freer trade, seeing a chance to create hostility to Pitt. Two opposition politicians with strong business connections, Lord Sheffield and William Eden, began to mobilise opposition to the resolutions. With the assistance of Josiah Wedgwood and his powerful interests in the pottery industry they argued that equality of trade between Britain and Ireland would seriously disadvantage their domestic industries. The Irish had cheaper labour and lower taxes, and English manufacturers would therefore be undermined. By early March demands from businesses for the extensive amendment of the resolutions were beginning to make themselves felt in Parliament. Pitt was forced to start thinking of concessions, and it was at this very point that a so-far compliant House of Commons began to rebel.
While Pitt’s mind was absorbed in the intricacies of Irish trade, the much-disputed Westminster scrutiny had dragged on. It was indeed being discovered that many votes had been fraudulently cast – in the parishes of St Margaret and St John ‘400 persons had voted, as inhabitants of those parishes, not one of whom could be found to exist’25 – but the fraud was fairly evenly spread among the candidates, and had so far made no difference to the result. The heavy employment of lawyers meant the whole process was costing many thousands of pounds, with protracted examination of every vote. It was thought that if it continued at this pace, the process would not be completed for a good two years. Furthermore, for most observers and even participants the passions of the previous year’s election had now cooled. Politics was moving on to other issues, and Fox was in any case able to sit in Parliament. Even Pitt’s supporters were finding the continuation of the scrutiny embarrassing, Wraxall describing it in his memoirs as ‘one of the strongest acts of Ministerial oppression and persecution which I have witnessed’,26 despite having voted for it himself.
By late February the government was able to win a division authorising the scrutiny to carry on by only nine votes. Fox knew how to pull the heartstrings even of his enemies, saying of Pitt, ‘I was always prepared to find in him a formidable rival, who in the race of glory would leave me far behind; but I believed him incapable of descending to be my persecutor.’27 The scrutiny, he said, was ‘obviously intended to weary out my friends by expense. A sum of £30,000 a year will be swallowed up on the two sides. My own last shilling may soon be got at, for I am poor. Yet in such a cause I will lay down my last shilling.’28 Pitt’s normally supportive back benchers could stand it no longer. On 3 March, when Fox’s supporters again moved that ‘an immediate return’ should be made for the City of Westminster, many of Pitt’s habitual supporters abstained, allowing Fox to win by thirty-eight votes (162 to 124). The following day he and Lord Hood were declared elected for the City of Westminster.
For Pitt this was a nasty shock. The House of Commons might be happy to sustain him in government, but that did not mean it would always do his bidding. With his attention focused elsewhere, he had not been sufficiently in touch with parliamentary opinion to know that a defeat was heading his way. Now he had not only appeared vindictive, he had been defeated as well. The defeat in no way imperilled his government, and when Fox tried to follow up his success by moving that the records of the proceedings against him be expunged from the journals of the House he was heavily defeated by 105 votes (242 to 137). The MPs knew what they were doing: ‘They wished to control and to restrain, but had no desire to overturn the Administration.’29
This sudden defeat intensified the pressure on Pitt as he tried to defend his Irish proposals, and delayed his plans to bring parliamentary reform before the House. Nevertheless, he now proceeded with his attempt to enact the cherished dream of his earlier years: a reform of elections to the House of Commons which would make them more representative of the shifting population of the country. He had been keeping his cards close to his chest on this subject all through 1784, but in early December he summoned Wyvill to Downing Street, causing him to abandon his plans for a long foreign tour in favour of working on a new plan for reform. Wyvill thought the prospects of success were ‘improved beyond our utmost expectations’.30 Pitt too was suffering from his natural over-optimism, writing to Rutland on 12 January: ‘I really think that I see more than ever the chance of effecting a safe and temperate plan, and I think its success as essential to the credit, if not the stability, of the present administration, as it is to the good government of the country hereafter.’31
The plan evolved by Pitt and Wyvill was indeed ‘temperate’, involving a small extension of the right to vote and the disenfranchising of thirty-six rotten boroughs, with their seventy-two seats being reallocated to the largest counties and the Cities of London and Westminster. £1 million was to be used to sugar the pill, by actually buying out those who had interests in the boroughs concerned. By keeping his proposals modest, Pitt thought he had a chance of finally bringing about some change to a centuries-old system which many people still regarded as inviolable. He also prepared the ground carefully with the most senior of those people, George III himself. Conscious that the King was implacably opposed to such reform, and mindful of the process by which he had himself come to power, Pitt was careful to ensure that there would be no royal intervention to obstruct his legislation. In a letter to the King on 19 March he raised ‘the possibility of the Measure being rejected by the weight of those who are supposed to be connected with Government’. He implied that such a thing would bring about his resignation, saying that it ‘might weaken and dissolve the Public confidence, and in doing so would render every future effort in Your Majesty’s service but too probably fruitless and ineffectual’.32 The King replied that: ‘Though I have ever thought it unfortunate that He had early engaged himself in this measure … out of personal regard to Him I would avoid giving any opinion to any one on the opening of the door to Parliamentary Reform except to Him.’33
With that key flank secure, Pitt did everything he could to muster support among his friends. Dundas, who had always opposed reform until his close alliance with Pitt, was once again implored to support it – and would be much taunted for agreeing to do so. Pitt wrote to Wilberforce in Nice asking him to come back to Westminster to assist him and speak in the debate. But MPs knew that the King disliked reform, and that senior members of the Cabinet such as Thurlow were opposed to it. Some of them thought Pitt was bringing it forward for the sake of consistency rather than out of conviction. And, not knowing where a process of reform might ultimately lead, many of them decided to stay safely with the existing system, and, in saving themselves, for a second time in two months to see themselves as saving Pitt from himself.
It was thus to a sceptical House that Pitt outlined his plans on 18 April 1785. He said that no one ‘reverenced the venerable fabric’ of the constitution more than he did, ‘but all mankind knew that the best institutions, like human bodies, carried in themselves the seeds of decay and corruption; and therefore he thought himself justifiable in proposing remedies against this corruption, which the frame of the Constitution must necessarily experience in the lapse of years’. The whole force of the argument as he presented it was that reform was in keeping with British history rather than in conflict with it: ‘If we looked back to our history, we should find that the brightest periods of its glory and triumph were those in which the House of Commons had the most complete confidence in their Ministers, and the people of England the most complete confidence in the House of Commons. The purity of representation was the only true and permanent source of such confidence.’ Now he wanted to ‘re-establish such a relation’, and Members should not be alarmed by ‘unnecessary’ fears. ‘Nothing was so hurtful to improvement as the fear of being carried farther than the principle upon which a person set out.’34
The House listened in respectful but ominous silence. One observer wrote: ‘He was heard indeed, with great attention, but with that sort of civil attention which peo
ple give to a person who has a good claim to be heard, but with whom the hearers are determined to disagree, and though there were nearer 500 than 450 in the House, I never saw them behave so quiet, and yet so apparently determined.’35 In the lobbies, MPs who often supported Pitt muttered that they wished he would ‘keep clear of this absurd business’. Fox gave nominal support to the idea of reform, while criticising the details and leaving his friends to vote against Pitt for the sake of opposition. Once again, it was Lord North who gave a highly effective Commons performance in response to Pitt’s speech. He drew attention to a glaring weakness, which was that despite all the efforts to arouse popular support for the reform proposals, very few petitions had been received. ‘What are we to infer from this circumstance? Is it apathy in the people? We were taught to believe that all England would with one voice support the plan for amending the national representation. Well may I exclaim with the man in the “Rehearsal”,* “What horrid sound of silence doth assail mine ear!”’36
With the controversies of the war receding and national prosperity on the increase, Wyvill had indeed found it difficult to drum up the expressions of popular support that Pitt had needed. One hundred and seventy-four MPs supported Pitt in the vote that night, but 248, including most of the opposition and some of his own close allies such as Rose and Grenville, voted against him. Parliamentary reform was just not going to happen in that generation. To Pitt it was deeply discouraging. Wilberforce captured the mood in Downing Street in his diary: ‘Terribly disappointed and beat. Extremely fatigued. – spoke extremely ill, but commended. Called at Pitt’s – met poor Wyvill.’37 Pitt was learning that being in office was not always the same as being in power.
Why could such a generally popular Minister with a large majority in the Commons not carry a proposal so dear to his heart? The reality was that an eighteenth-century Prime Minister did not possess the tools of party discipline available to his more recent counterparts. Pitt’s supporters did not constitute a ‘party’ in any sense we would recognise, except that they generally supported the idea of Pitt being the head of government. They were not elected on any manifesto or programme, and were made up of a disparate mixture of ‘Pittites’, ‘King’s friends’ and fairly independent country gentlemen. Moreover, in the eighteenth century the passing of legislation was not regarded as part of the fundamental business of government. Just because an MP supported a particular set of Ministers in carrying on His Majesty’s Government did not mean that he would necessarily support them in changing the law. Thus a matter such as parliamentary reform was regarded as a question of individual opinion and conscience, rather as twenty-first-century MPs would regard a vote on capital punishment or abortion, and not remotely as a question affecting confidence in the government. Pitt was therefore no more able to insist on parliamentary approval of his reform proposals than Margaret Thatcher would be able two hundred years later to insist on the return of the death penalty. He was almost alone in seeing it as a question fundamental to what he wanted to achieve.
Pitt was deeply disappointed both by this setback and by his defeat in the Westminster scrutiny. In both cases over-optimism and a degree of obstinacy had led him to defeat. In neither case had he foreseen it. Whether or not he was unnerved by this experience, he certainly made a large number of concessions on other subjects in the weeks that followed. In his second budget, on 9 May 1785, he could point to increasing revenues and vastly reduced smuggling as a result of his measures of the year before, and to come still nearer to balancing the books he proposed some further tax increases on such items as servants, shops, gloves and pawnbrokers’ licences. The proposal to impose for the first time a tax on the employment of female servants caused much ribaldry at Pitt’s expense, along with aspersions directed at his own lack of knowledge of women (the subject of a later chapter). More seriously, the tax on the rents of retail shops caused riots outside 10 Downing Street, where Pitt was burnt in effigy, and the newly formed General Chamber of Manufacturers, which was already campaigning against his Irish proposals, forced the repeal in April of the tax on linens and calicoes which he had imposed the previous year. For all the success of his general approach to finance, and the compelling logic of his Irish propositions, Pitt now found himself seriously on the defensive, with the string of defeats already undermining his authority.
By the time he came to put the Irish resolutions to the Commons in detail in May, he had found it necessary to make so many exceptions and modifications that instead of eleven resolutions there were now twenty. Special provisions were to be made concerning fishing, the copyright of books, patents, and trade in various parts of the world: Irish ships would not be able to trade beyond the Cape of Good Hope, nor import goods from the West Indies, unless they were the produce of the colonies. The original simple solution was scarcely recognisable, with Wedgwood writing happily: ‘He has now brought into the house a system so much altered, and with so many additions, that it may be called a new one … and in every one of these, new alterations and amendments are made before it passes.’38
The task of getting the same set of proposals through two Parliaments, one sitting in Dublin and the other in London, was proving extremely difficult. The original concession on the Irish contribution to defence inserted in Dublin had now been struck out in Westminster. With the multitude of amendments and qualifications attached to them, the resolutions passed comfortably through the Commons at the end of May, with Pitt putting a brave face on all the changes, saying that they were ‘perfectly consistent’ with the general plan. But Fox and the other opponents of both his government and his Irish policy were cleverly concentrating on his most vulnerable point: that the resolutions as amended in Westminster still had to be carried through the Parliament in Dublin. Fox, who was enjoying his sudden popularity with Manchester manufacturers, also argued that the requirements being set in Westminster were taking away from the Irish the legislative independence they had been granted in 1782: ‘I will not barter English commerce for Irish slavery.’39 The opposition of Irish politicians to the proposals designed to benefit their country grew sharply.
Once again, Pitt seemed to underestimate the danger, telling Rutland when the resolutions passed the Lords in July that the session had been ‘in all respects triumphant’. But on 13 August Orde’s motion to begin consideration of the resolutions in the Dublin Parliament was carried by the Irish House of Commons by only nineteen votes, revealing that any detailed examination of them would be hopeless. The whole laudable and idealistic project, which had occupied so much of Pitt’s thoughts and time for a full year, now had to be abandoned. There was no way of getting the two Parliaments to vote for the same policy. Pitt was stoical in defeat, writing to Rutland: ‘We have the satisfaction of having proposed a system which I believe will not be discredited even by its failure, and we must wait times and seasons for carrying it into effect … I believe the time will yet come when we shall see all our views realized in both countries, and for the advantage of both.’40 However brave a face he might put on it, a policy he regarded as of central importance had been totally frustrated, with no hope of reviving it in the near future.
The end of the parliamentary session in the summer of 1785 must have come as a relief to Pitt. As he travelled to Burton Pynsent that August to visit his mother he would have known that he was still highly regarded and secure in office, but that his inexperience had shown. The Earl of Mansfield had commented with some force, ‘He is not a great Minister. He is a great young Minister.’41 It was now more than a year since Pitt’s sweeping victory in the 1784 election, and the policies he proposed in his first year of office reveal much about his political views. Although some of his proposals had been radical in nature, his intention in every field, from finance to the constitution to Irish trade, was to bring about practical rather than revolutionary change. Not only was his mind naturally attuned to searching for workable remedies to complex problems, it was also his political instinct to seek improvements to the est
ablished order of things rather than to overturn that order.
It would be easy, in the terminology of today’s political ideas, to think of Pitt’s reduction in tea duties in favour of the window tax as a deliberate move to what would now be called more ‘progressive’ taxation, or to see his proposals for parliamentary reform as the starting point from which to advance to equal representation and universal suffrage, but he would not have thought of his policies in these terms. The view has often been expressed that Pitt was more ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ in his early years in office, and more ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary’ in later years in a time of war. The alternative explanation, that he sought throughout the maintenance of a balanced constitution and a general increase in prosperity, and later changed his approach in dramatically changed circumstances, is much more likely to be the one that he himself would recognise. The terms ‘left wing’ or ‘right wing’ had not yet come into existence, and Pitt would not have seen himself as moving along a spectrum of political positions. The changes he made to taxation were designed to bring the budget nearer to balance, rather than to redistribute income as an end in itself. Similarly, his proposals for parliamentary reform were designed to permit the main features of the electoral system to continue more credibly, not to initiate a movement towards what is now referred to as democracy.
An understanding of this is crucial to appreciating why Pitt could persist in calling himself an ‘independent Whig’ while being regarded for the two hundred years after his death as the founder of what became the nineteenth-century Tory Party. When he called himself a Whig he meant he was a defender of the constitutional balance between King and Parliament arrived at in 1688. History knows him as a Tory because of his emphasis on evolutionary change, his belief in the maintenance of the principal institutions of the country and the policies pursued by his allies after his death.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 23