It was to be events in the ever troublesome Netherlands that would now push a deeply cautious Pitt into exerting his weight in foreign affairs, and to do so in a way which would take Britain back to a far stronger position in Europe. The signing in late 1785 of a Franco-Dutch defensive alliance formalised the rapid growth of French influence in the United Provinces (corresponding approximately to the Netherlands of today), despite their head of state being the anglophile Stadtholder William V, grandson of George II. Several factors came together to boost French influence among the Dutch: Britain had gone to war with Holland in the later stages of the American War of Independence, France had just helped the Dutch to see off the ambitions of Joseph II, and an emerging middle class was increasingly dissatisfied with the weak William V, preferring to support ‘patriot’ activists whose leanings were pro-French. Sir James Harris, Ambassador to The Hague, told Carmarthen that ‘the game is entirely lost here’.
Such a development could not be ignored in London. The Dutch United Provinces were of crucial strategic significance to eighteenth-century Britain for two reasons. First, French domination of Antwerp, Amsterdam and the other ports of the Low Countries would put the entire eastern coastline of the English Channel into hostile hands during any confrontation between Britain and France. The implications for both trade and military operations were obvious. Second, Franco-Dutch cooperation could become a severe threat to British interests in India. One British diplomat had written in February 1784: ‘the great object of the French Ministry is to ruin us in the East-Indies, which they hope to accomplish by the means of the Dutch traducing Great Britain’.50 Whether or not this was true, it was a fear strongly felt.
In early 1786, Pitt agreed to the first active steps to counteract French influence, sending some £9,000 in secret-service money* to Harris, who was the only effective coordinating agent of anti-patriot and pro-Stadtholder opinion. The desperately worried Harris said he needed more, warning Carmarthen in October 1786 that ‘Holland is to be Mistress of the Republic, and France is to govern Holland.’51 But Pitt felt that matters had not yet come to a crisis, and he was, of course, negotiating the commercial treaty with France at the same time. He told Carmarthen that Harris should ‘redouble every possible effort’, but was not prepared to commit himself further. The situation continued to deteriorate, and the ever frustrated Carmarthen, claiming illness, now asked Harris to correspond directly with Pitt rather than observe the official form of going through the Foreign Secretary. The long-term effect of this precedent was to enhance the ease with which Pitt intervened in foreign affairs, but the short-term result was the one desired: to make Pitt clearer in his mind that the Dutch crisis must be faced up to. His level of interest was changed, although not at the moment his policy. Pitt wrote to Harris on 5 December 1786: ‘I conceive it impossible to think of taking any step that can commit this country to the risk of extremities … The great object now seems to be that to which I conceive you point, to endeavour to keep together a party which may act with advantage, both for their own country and for us, on some future day, if it should arrive.’52
Early 1787 saw Pitt send a further £12,000 of secret-service money to Harris, while the position continued to deteriorate. By February Harris was reporting that Amsterdam was in a ‘state of great fermentation’ and that the ‘patriotic association … has actually signed a formal convention with France’.53 He insisted that there was sufficient latent support among the population for the House of Orange, and opposed to French influence, for the French to be faced down if only Britain would be strong. On 1 May he wrote: ‘If we lose this country, France will acquire what she has always considered as the climax of her power … There is good stuff enough here to vanquish twice the strength of our opponents; and, if we will be bold enough to assume the style and tone which belong to us, I will pledge my head on the event.’54 At his request he came to brief the whole Cabinet at the end of May. In the Cabinet, Thurlow and Richmond argued against all ‘half measures’ and said Britain should prepare for full-scale war. Soon there would be newspaper reports of the Cabinet being ‘warmly and earnestly divided upon the subject of Dutch affairs’, as Pitt remained extremely cautious, acknowledging ‘the immense consequence of Holland being preserved as an Independent State’ but saying the government must ‘weigh maturely whether anything could repay the disturbing that state of growing affluence and prosperity’, which would make the country stronger to face France in the future.
The upshot was that Pitt provided Harris with a further £70,000 of what he assured the King was ‘only pecuniary assistance’. He steered his own course between a more hawkish Cabinet on the one hand, and on the other a King who was still suspicious of getting involved in anything at all. Harris thought that if Britain threatened action, ‘France would shrink from the challenge’. Pitt did not trust such assertions: he was prepared to support a strong anti-French party among the Dutch, but not to threaten war.
In the summer of 1787 the Dutch crisis reached its climax. Pitt had hoped during the parliamentary recess to see more of Britain than he had ever seen before by visiting Scotland via a house Wilberforce had taken in the Lake District, and also staying at Castle Howard in Yorkshire. Such a trip was not to happen, then or indeed ever. For at the end of June the Princess of Orange, who was made of sterner stuff than her husband William V, announced that she would go to The Hague, repossess the capital and impose a settlement on the rival factions. As she had thought likely, she was stopped by pro-French patriot troops, briefly placed under arrest and then sent packing. These events brought a new player into the game, for the Princess was the sister of Frederick William II, the new King of Prussia. He demanded an apology and assembled 20,000 troops on the frontier. The French, Prussian and British governments negotiated and hesitated, while Holland moved closer to a patriot revolution. Pitt, remaining in London for the summer, took day-to-day charge of all despatches and decisions, and sent William Grenville to The Hague in July to assess the accuracy of Harris’s reports, and then to Paris in August to try to settle matters with the French without war. These missions marked another step forward for Grenville in Pitt’s confidence, and he would increasingly emerge as a possible Foreign Secretary.
On 13 September 1787 the die was cast: the Prussian army invaded the United Provinces. Patriot forces in Holland asked France to come to their defence. All of Europe expected the French to respond. On 19 September Pitt chaired a Cabinet meeting which resolved to fit out an additional twenty-three ships of the line and to ‘augment’ the army in case of war with France. Pitt told Wilberforce: ‘things have at last come to a crisis – the French have notified their determination to give assistance to Holland which we cannot acquiesce in’.55 Now that the Prussians had brought matters to a head, Britain could be bolder and ready to fight. Within days it became clear that war would not be necessary. The patriot army fled before the Prussian advance, and by 20 September William V was back in The Hague. Amsterdam, the main site of patriot feeling, surrendered on 10 October. The pro-French activists who had planned for revolution were left with the stunned realisation that France, the most powerful nation in Europe, had not lifted a finger to come to their aid.
Such a result left Pitt triumphant. Some of his colleagues would have triggered war without an ally, at an earlier stage, while the purer isolationism of the King could have abandoned Britain’s friends in the United Provinces to French domination. Pitt had been lucky in how events turned out, but had managed events in such a way as to take advantage of his luck when it came along. He wrote to Harris at the end of September: ‘There seems but one opinion in this country on the propriety of our efforts; and if the struggle had become necessary, I believe, we should have had nothing to regret or to fear from it.’56 The threat of French military intervention had induced him to arm the fleet: the absence of such intervention said much about the growing weakness of France. While British policy had been directed from 10 Downing Street in the final months of the crisis, French
policy was subject to competing factions at their court, resulting in commitments on which they could not deliver. France was now humiliated, and for Britain the way was open to the next year’s Triple Alliance with Holland and Prussia. The years of isolation were over. Count Vorontsov, the Russian Ambassador in London, was to write: ‘The part played by England in these affairs has been brilliant and courageous, and the conduct of Mr. Pitt on this occasion is very like that which his late father pursued … How would the father have rejoiced in them had he lived on till now!’57
* * *
*Gentlemen customarily wore powdered wigs in the eighteenth century. Pitt’s legacy of taxes on powder would lead to a change in fashion in favour of natural hair.
*MPs were allowed to post letters without paying for them. They often abused the system by posting letters for other people.
*This money was drawn from a Foreign Office fund not subject to parliamentary scrutiny.
13
Insanity and Crisis
‘November 24, 1788: His Majesty passed the whole day in a perfectly maniacal state.’
MEDICAL BULLETIN, QUEEN’S LODGE, WINDSOR
‘If this lasts beyond a certain Time, it will produce the most difficult and delicate crisis imaginable in making Provision for the Government to go on.’
WILLIAM PITT, NOVEMBER 1788
WHEN PITT FINALLY had a chance to visit his mother at Burton Pynsent in December 1787 he could celebrate four years as First Lord of the Treasury and the King’s First Minister. The economic and diplomatic successes of 1786–87 had confirmed his domination of the political scene, and he could look forward to the 1788 session of Parliament with equanimity. The main events of the spring and summer of 1788 would reinforce his earlier successes: the Triple Alliance of Britain, Holland and Prussia seduced Prussia away from any new entente with France. Pitt therefore presented his fifth budget in May in triumphant mood. Announcing that he had by now repaid £2½ million of the national debt and spent £7 million on the improvement of the navy and yet still had a budget surplus without any additional taxes, he contrasted this with the ballooning budget deficit of France: ‘Our rival, therefore, who engaged in a war for the emancipation of our late colonies, which object she accomplished, and from which she projected to draw immense advantages, has failed in her ambitious calculations.’1
Pitt’s principal difficulties in the 1788 session arose once again over Indian affairs. The trial of Warren Hastings had begun in February, and it soon became clear that it would be a very long business. Having thrown Hastings overboard, Pitt declined to do the same to the former Chief Justice of India, Sir Elijah Impey, who was accused of similar crimes but whose impeachment was narrowly defeated in the Commons after he had spoken skilfully in his own defence. It was soon becoming clear to the opposition leaders that much of their time could now be consumed in the prosecution of Hastings, a course on which Burke had insisted on taking them. Sheridan was telling the Duchess of Devonshire that he wished Hastings would ‘run away, and Burke after him’.2
Pitt must have viewed these developments with satisfaction, but he himself ran into trouble over the need to pass fresh legislation concerning the responsibilities of the East India Company, always a thorny issue, since it was the one which had brought him to power in such controversial circumstances in 1783. The Directors of the Company had decided, now that fears of imminent war had receded, that it was no longer their responsibility to pay for the transport or maintenance of troops sent to protect India unless they had requested them. Pitt and Dundas insisted that such costs had always been intended to be met from the Company’s revenues. At the end of February they brought forward the India Declaratory Bill to make this clear, but thereby opened themselves to the obvious attack that, having come to power by opposing the extension of ministerial power over the East India Company, they were now extending it themselves. With some of his own supporters alarmed by this apparent about-turn, Pitt made matters worse in the debates of early March by giving one uncharacteristically poor speech and then failing to speak at all after a particularly effective attack on him by Fox. His majority fell to fifty-seven (182 to 125), which represented a moral defeat. Grenville wrote: ‘What hurt us, I believe materially, last night, was that Pitt, who had reserved himself to answer Fox, was just at the close of a very able speech of Fox’s taken so ill as not to be able to speak at all.’3 It seems he had been drinking heavily the night before with Dundas and the Duchess of Gordon: this was one of the very rare occasions when alcohol visibly affected his parliamentary abilities.
Pitt knew by now when to beat a retreat. Defeat on a matter so central to the very creation of the government would have been fatal. Within two days he was back in the Commons on his usual form, making a conciliatory speech and moving amendments to the Bill which explicitly restricted ministerial patronage over the Company. The Bill was passed, but the episode was a sharp reminder after two years of triumphs that no government could take Parliament for granted.
In the summer of 1788 Pitt began to tighten his grip on the government itself. The Cabinet he had cobbled together in desperate straits in December 1783 had been filled with grandees he needed at the time but who had often neither performed well nor become close to him personally. Steadily over the next four years he would replace them with men who were closer to him, or who had greater ability – or ideally both. In doing so, Pitt did not have the complete freedom of action, subject only to the constraints of party management, of a modem Prime Minister. He was very much the first among equals rather than the unchallenged master of the entire administration. Care had to be taken to avoid the sympathetic resignations of other Ministers if one of them were dismissed, and any new appointments needed to command at least the acquiescence of the King. Pitt’s most powerful Cabinet rival, the Lord Chancellor Lord Thurlow, was able to feel secure in office despite frequent public disagreements with Pitt because he was a particular friend of the King and had unlimited access to the Royal Closet. For Pitt to dismiss him would be extremely difficult.
Nevertheless, Pitt began from June 1788 to take opportunities as they presented themselves to create the Cabinet he really wanted. Lord Howe, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had frequently upset both his Cabinet colleagues and the government’s supporters in Parliament, most recently over navy promotions. As Parliament rose for the summer, Pitt was now able to ease him out, making a highly unusual appointment in his stead. He wrote to his mother from Downing Street on 19 June:
The Session ends most satisfactorily, and its close will be accompanied by some Events which add not a little to that satisfaction … It is no other than this, that a new arrangement in the Admiralty is, from various Circumstances, become unavoidable, that Lord Howe must be succeeded by a Landsman, and that Landsman is my Brother. I have had some doubts whether the public may not think this too much like monopoly, but that doubt is not sufficient to counterbalance the Personal Comfort which will result from it and the general advantage to the whole of our system. – You will, I am sure, be happy to hear that Lord Howe does not quit without a public mark of Honour by a fresh step in the Peerage …4
Pitt’s appointment of his elder brother, the second Earl of Chatham, to the Cabinet may seem hard to square with his general disdain for patronage and strong sense of probity. But in the eighteenth century the involvement of whole families in politics – Grenvilles, Cavendishes, Townshends – was common, and there would be due deference to the status of Chatham as the eldest son of his great father. There seems to have been very little criticism or resentment of the appointment voiced at the time. Pitt’s motives were no doubt mixed: it gave him an ally in the Cabinet and much greater control of a wayward Admiralty; it must also have assuaged any feelings of guilt he may have had towards an elder brother he had always outshone. While Pitt generally prized ability as the main factor in making promotions, he had a weakness for making exceptions for some of his nearest and dearest, Pretyman being another case in point. The result in this case
would not be a happy one. His brother suffered from the ‘two vices [of] insuperable indolence and total want of economy’,5 and was so disorganised that he would become widely known as ‘the late Lord Chatham’ long before he died. While Pitt had the satisfaction of appointing his brother to such a senior role in 1788, it meant that years later he would face the painful task of removing him.
At the same time Pitt sought to promote his old but much-derided friend Pepper Arden, then Attorney General, to the higher legal position of Master of the Rolls. This opened up a fierce turf war with Thurlow, who as head of the judiciary considered this appointment to be within his own gift. Thurlow’s threats to resign carried little weight with Pitt, who by this stage would have been glad to see the back of him. Pitt got his way. Inch by inch, he was asserting control of his administration.
Once again Pitt hoped to visit the Lake District that summer, and once again he was prevented from doing so by events overseas. Sweden had rashly attacked Russia, and he stayed in London through August to keep in touch with events. He explained to his mother the endless delays in visiting her:
Downing Street, August 29, 1788.
My Dear Mother,
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 29