Historians have argued for two hundred years about Pitt’s apparent change of mind. Why did he throw Hastings to the wolves? Hastings and others blamed Dundas for converting him over breakfast on the day of the debate. It was argued that Dundas was seeking to thwart the King and to destroy Hastings’ influence at the same time. Pitt was thought by others to be destroying Hastings as a possible rival, or, in a particularly Machiavellian move, to be deliberately letting the opposition tie itself up with the impeachment for years to come. None of these theories holds much water. Hastings was not conceivably a rival to Pitt in British politics, and Pitt could not have known that the trial would take so long. Another theory, that he did not realise how influential his own vote would be, is even less convincing: after all his recent defeats he would not knowingly have supported a lost cause.
The truth seems to be that Pitt was acting in line with his own vision of himself as a figure of independence and integrity, particularly when it came to financial matters, with the added incentive of political calculation thrown in. Wilberforce himself had no doubt of Pitt’s motives, saying many years after Pitt’s death: ‘Oh how little justice was done to Pitt on Warren Hastings business! People were asking, what could make Pitt support him on this point and on that, as if he was acting from political motives; whereas he was always weighing in every particular whether Hastings had exceeded the discretionary power lodged in him … He paid as much impartial attention as if he were a jury-man.’33 From what we know of Pitt this is believable. He always hated financial misconduct, and had cut his political teeth condemning abuses of power. He cannot have failed to notice, however, that on this matter there was a particular political advantage to displaying the independent judgement in which he in any case believed. Fox had tried to push him into a trap; Pitt’s vote against Hastings made the trap fall uselessly to one side. The opposition could not now lay the blame for every arbitrary act recently committed in India at Pitt’s door.
Pitt had also discovered that at least one major plank of his original reforming agenda, parliamentary reform, could not proceed, and that this was hugely satisfactory to the King, Thurlow and others of the old guard. His actions on Hastings asserted his political independence from this group, and meant he could not be attacked as their creature. The neatness of Pitt’s apparently inexplicable volte face lay in the fact that he neither expressed the view that the opposition was right, nor left them any ground on which to attack him. Pitt the shining model of integrity was utterly intact, but Pitt the Prime Minister had also asserted his power. Happy is the politician who can serve both his main objectives with a single act, however mysterious it may appear to others.
At the end of 1786 Pitt was still trying to coax Edward Eliot out of the seclusion into which Harriot’s death had sunk him. He wrote to his mother:
Downing Street, Nov. 13, 1786.
My Dear Mother,
Having been all the morning in the Court of Exchequer, I have not yet seen my Brother; but Eliot and I are both going to dine there; which I am very glad to do on many accounts, and I reckon it is a step gained for Eliot. I flatter myself he has even made some progress in these two days, and I dare say will, in a little while, more and more. To-morrow I hope to get to Holwood, where I am impatient to look at my works. I must carry there however only my passion for planting, and leave that of cutting entirely to Burton.34
Pitt’s confidence was boosted by his experience of 1786 as a hugely successful year. At the beginning of it Orde had written that ‘this will be a Session of Tryal for Mr. Pitt, and that He will now be shaken, or his Stability confirmed’.35 Yet by early 1787 Wraxall could write: ‘Pitt had attained at this time to an almost unexampled height of Ministerial favour and popularity.’36 In 1787 he was soon following up his advantage with further financial reforms. Once again taking up an idea first examined in the early 1780s, he decided on a massive simplification of government accounting. As successive governments had sanctioned expenditure or loans for different purposes, the Treasury had by now accumulated 103 separate accounts, each of which had to be kept separate from the rest. This was not just an internal inconvenience: traders found that goods subject to Customs and Excise duties were liable for payments into dozens of different accounts, creating work for the officials and major potential for fraud. In February 1787 Pitt produced yet another dazzling tour de force on financial matters which, it was said, ‘might challenge the annals of Parliament to produce a finer specimen of financial eloquence’.37 He proposed to base the Treasury on a single Consolidated Fund, abolishing a myriad of existing duties and substituting for them a completely new schedule. To effect this, he introduced no fewer than 2,537 separate resolutions into the House of Commons, appearing in complete command of the smallest detail. This time even the opposition was awestruck. Burke rose and expressed the thanks of the country, saying he would not ‘content myself with a sullen acquiescence, but will bear testimony to the masterly and perspicuous manner in which a plan has been developed which promises accommodation to the merchant combined with augmentation and advantage to the revenue’.38
Pitt was somewhat less successful when he tried serious reform of the administrative machinery of government, bedevilled as it was with sinecures and other appointments which were regarded as ‘freehold’ and therefore held for life. Having failed in his attempt to bring about the outright abolition of some sinecures after his first term as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1783, he now opted for the simpler approach of leaving positions vacant as they arose, thereby reducing expenditure. He strengthened the Excise at the expense of the Customs, ended the abuse of franking of letters by MPs (which was costing £40,000 a year),* but got into a drawn-out battle with Post Office officials over his insistence on introducing mail coaches and higher postal rates as the basis of a more efficient postal service. His system eventually proved successful, but the recriminations and bitterness partly sparked by Pitt’s rather high-handed intervention carried on for a good ten years.
A far more popular interest was the finances of the Royal Family, and in particular those of the Prince of Wales, which were again reaching crisis point in 1787. The previous year Pitt had asked Parliament to write off arrears on the Civil List of £210,000, and in return, ever keen to control major items of expenditure, had insisted on statements of royal expenditure in future. By 1787, however, the Prince of Wales alone had run up debts totalling £370,000. The King refused to contemplate paying them unless given an itemised list of how they were incurred, which the Prince refused to provide. With King and heir once again at daggers drawn, the credibility of the monarchy required Pitt and Dundas to negotiate between them. Pitt himself had to go to Carlton House to see the Prince, a political intimate and drinking companion of his opponents, in order to suggest a solution. This was eventually agreed: the Prince provided details of his finances, Pitt asked the Commons for an additional £221,000, and the King agreed to provide a further £10,000 a year to his son from the Civil List. The Prince was, of course, literally a heartbeat from becoming King George IV (although as it turned out he had a further thirty-three years to wait), and Pitt may have been mindful of the need to improve relations with the future King. If so he would be disappointed, but in any event he acted correctly and with the reputation of the monarchy in mind.
Parliamentary discussion of the payments to the Prince brought serious embarrassment to the opposition when the rumour that he had secretly married his mistress Mrs Fitzherbert surfaced on the floor of the House. The couple had indeed secretly married in December 1785, and done so illegally, since they did not have the King’s consent. The Prince had assured Fox at the time that there was not ‘any ground for these reports’ of such a marriage. Remembering this, Fox now stood up in the Commons to say that the marriage ‘never did happen in any way whatsoever; and was from the beginning a base and malicious falsehood’,39 adding that he spoke ‘from direct authority’. When Mrs Fitzherbert read these remarks in her morning newspaper at Carlton House she w
as outraged. Caught between a lie and a furious wife, the Prince decided to keep the wife and abandon the lie, telling Sheridan to go down to the Commons and admit as much.
The incident created major strains among the opposition, the Prince’s secretary saying in 1788 that ‘the Prince was afraid of Fox, and that his opinion of Mr. Pitt was much altered since the negotiation on the subject of his debts … and that this coolness to Fox was much increased by Mrs FitzHerbert, who never would forgive his public declaration on her subject in the House of Commons, and had taken every opportunity of alienating the Prince’s mind from him’.40 As it turned out, when the Regency crisis erupted later that year, Fox and the Prince would still prove to be keen allies. But before then, Pitt had to deal with the first major foreign-policy crisis of his career, and another delicate issue at home.
It is clear that Wilberforce considered Pitt to have given little reflection to religious matters. On one occasion he prevailed on Pitt to join him in listening to a sermon by a noted evangelical preacher, Richard Cecil, evidently hoping that it would stir Pitt into a stronger commitment to religion. He was disappointed when Pitt turned to him on the way out of the church and said, ‘You know, Wilberforce, I have not the slightest idea what that man has been talking about.’41 When a delegation of Dissenting Protestants, who were not part of the established Church, came to see him in January 1787 to put their case for repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts which debarred them from a wide range of public offices, he gave them a polite hearing but no sign of enthusiastic support. The champion of parliamentary, financial and administrative reform was not about to add the extension of religious toleration to his favourite causes.
On the face of it, Pitt would have been a natural supporter of the Dissenters’ cause, and he had received strong support from them in the 1784 general election on the basis of his enthusiasm for parliamentary reform. Their grievance was a powerful one. The Corporation Act of 1661 required members of municipal corporations to have taken the sacrament in the Church of England, and the Test Act of 1672 placed a similar requirement on those holding any civil office or a commission in the army or navy: these Acts were designed to keep Catholics out of office at a time, as Pretyman put it, ‘when the conduct of the king upon the throne justified a strong suspicion that he was inclined to popery’.42 Although the effects of the Acts had been partly mitigated since 1727 by annual Indemnity Acts, as well as by irregular enforcement, a sense of grievance at the anomalous and inconsistent results was powerfully felt. It was possible, for instance, for a Dissenter to sit in Parliament for a borough in which he could not be a member of the corporation. While some corporations seemed to draw most of their membership from Dissenters, others had used the test acts vindictively: in the 1740s the City of London had introduced heavy fines for refusing to take public office, and then nominated for office Dissenters who could not accept it.
To reform such laws would have been in tune with the more rationalist and tolerant attitudes of the late eighteenth century, but Pitt drew back from doing so. The Anglican Church was powerful, and not likely to be in ready agreement with the removal of its privileges; many people, and they would have included Pretyman and Wilberforce with their abundant opportunities to influence Pitt, were opposed to any weakening of the connection between Church and state. Others suspected the motives of more radical non-conformist opinion, particularly in the aftermath of the American War, and feared this could open the door to the advancement of more secular and revolutionary views. Pitt consulted the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Moore, who found that only two of the sixteen Bishops who attended a meeting on this subject favoured reform.
Pitt must have known what answer he would receive from the Bishops, but it was as well to seek their opinion, since he would have had little chance of carrying reform against the combined opposition of the Church, the King and the more conservative Members of Parliament. He was not prepared to risk another defeat over a matter which failed to stir his own conscience and which seemed to make little practical difference to most people’s lives. As a result, when the repeal of the Acts was moved on 28 March 1787, Pitt followed the now ageing and blind Lord North, to whom he paid his first noticeable tribute, in asking the Commons to preserve the status quo. ‘Were we’, he argued, ‘to yield on this occasion, the fears of the members of the Church of England would be roused, and their apprehensions are not to be treated lightly. It must, as I contend, be conceded to me that an Established Church is necessary … no means can be devised of admitting the moderate part of the dissenters and excluding the violent; the bulwark must be kept up against all.’43 Pitt found that opposition to reforms was safer ground than proposing them: the pleas of the Dissenters were rejected by 176 votes to ninety-eight. Pitt would lead the Commons in delivering a similar verdict in future years; moderately so in 1789, and impatiently and emphatically so as the French Revolution gathered pace in 1790.
With an unwanted confrontation thus avoided, and financial reforms successfully carried through, Pitt was in the fortunate position of being able to bring the parliamentary session of 1787 to an unusually early end on 30 May. By then he was being forced to bring his mind to bear on events overseas more urgently than at any time in his experience. It would mark his transition from a youthful financial expert to a serious player in the power struggles of Continental Europe.
The ignominious end of the American War had left Britain friendless and isolated in European affairs. France, Spain and Holland had all fought against her in the later stages of the war; defeat meant she was despised in the rest of Europe’s most powerful courts. The Emperor Joseph II of Austria considered Britain ‘fallen entirely and forever … descended to the status of a second-rank power, like Sweden or Denmark’.44 British leaders found their isolation entirely appropriate, with George III writing to Carmarthen in July 1784: ‘Till I see this Country in a situation more respectable as to Army, Navy, and Finances, I cannot think anything that may draw us into troubled waters either safe or rational.’45
At that stage, Pitt’s views were similar to those of the King. While maintaining and rebuilding the navy, his policy was to concentrate on economic recovery and to stay clear of foreign entanglements. In August 1785 he had written to Rutland: ‘let peace continue for five years, and we shall again look any Power in Europe in the face’.46 His concentration on the nation’s finances was bearing fruit, and by the end of 1785 he could not only contemplate a budget surplus but a sharp rise in the price of government securities, or consols as they were then known. Britain was becoming dramatically more creditworthy. Pitt was not uninterested in foreign affairs, but in the first three years of his leadership of the government they were not his prime focus. In a British Cabinet of this time, a First Lord of the Treasury could involve himself in foreign affairs if he so wished, but the vast majority of overseas business would have been handled by the Foreign Secretary, in this case the Marquis of Carmarthen, who conducted his own correspondence with the King without necessarily involving the First Lord in the day-to-day details.
As Foreign Secretary, Carmarthen was far more concerned than either Pitt or George III about Britain’s lack of powerful allies, writing to Pitt on 9 June 1784: ‘Were it possible for England to be permitted to remain perfectly quiet and undisturbed … no one could hesitate a moment to adopt that system of tranquillity … I cannot however by any means flatter myself with the hopes of our being permitted to pursue so salutary a plan.’47 Some kind of alliance was necessary to ‘secure to this country a prospect of remaining unmolested by France’.48 In particular, he sought to restore the British alliance with Habsburg Austria, still one of the great military and political powers of Europe, with vast lands and population in the east as well as strategically important territory in northern Italy and present-day Belgium. This consideration induced Britain in 1784 to hover on the Austrian side of their furious argument with the Dutch over fortresses in the Netherlands and the navigation of the Scheldt, which the Dutch had been able
to close to shipping in order to ruin Antwerp as a major port while Amsterdam prospered. Carmarthen’s hopes of an Austrian alliance were to be frustrated in 1785: Pitt and George III were cautious about making any worthwhile commitment to an ally. The Austrians presumably saw little to be gained from it, and George III in any case antagonised Joseph II by completely separate action in his capacity as Elector of Hanover.
British Ministers took no part in George III’s actions as head of state of Hanover, but to other Continental powers it was impossible to separate his actions as head of state of one country from the behaviour of the other. By signing the Fürstenbund pact between Hanover, Prussia and Saxony to oppose the Austrian ambition of quite literally swapping the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, George III fired the final torpedo into the sinking hopes of an Anglo—Austrian alliance. Carmarthen complained bitterly that Britain had now become unknowingly ‘involved in a German quarrel’, upsetting the Russians as well as the Austrians and thus depriving Britain of any ally big enough to counterbalance France, but the general weakness and poor reputation of Britain at the time were also major factors in the failure of his diplomacy. Sir Robert Murray Keith, the British envoy to Vienna, said at the end of 1785 that ‘England seems to be almost entirely out of the question … and matters … must take a new and more favourable turn, before she can again resume her place and weight amongst the nations of Europe.’49
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 28