I have been every day, for I know not how long, hoping to be able to tell you the day when I should have the happiness of seeing you at Burton; but, as too often has happened, every day has brought some fresh incident to put it off. – This week would, I believe have pretty nearly enabled me to speak positively, but an accidental cold (which has no other inconvenience than a swelled face and the impossibility of going to St. James’s) will oblige me to defer till next week the conclusion of business which I hoped to have got rid of this. – The exact time, and the interval for which I can be at liberty, must at all events depend upon News from abroad, where so many things are going on, that although we have every reason to be certain that no consequences can arise otherwise than favourable to us, a good deal of watching is necessary. – My hope was to have been able to make a pretty long stay at once whenever I reach Burton; but even if that should not be the case, I can do it at twice, and I am pretty sure of a good deal of leisure in the course of the interval before Parliament meets …6
He made it to Somerset in September, but later in the autumn the leisure he had hoped for would be cut brutally short. By now, Pitt had mastered Parliament, transformed the national finances and outfaced mighty France – with all the popularity and reputation these achievements had brought; yet within weeks he would be fighting for his political life amidst one of the most dramatic crises in the history of Britain. For in October the King fell ill, and by 5 November it seemed that George III, King of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, Elector of Hanover and ruler of an empire, had gone quite mad.
George III, now aged fifty, was obsessed with maintaining his health, driving his servants to exhaustion or exasperation with the incessant regularity and restless energy of his exercise regime. He rose early in the mornings, rode before breakfast, ate simple meals without an excess of wine and dealt assiduously with his correspondence. A simple stroll could cover twelve miles, and if the Queen journeyed in her coach, he would often prefer to ride alongside it. Such physical discipline was probably encouraged by the serious illnesses he had suffered in the early 1760s shortly after ascending the throne. There had been sufficient concern at the time to warrant the passing of the Regency Act of 1765, which provided for a Council of Members of the Royal Family in the event of the King dying while his children were still young. Since that time, either because of his disciplined lifestyle or in spite of it, he had escaped serious illness. He had been lucky enough too to escape assassination in 1786 when a middle-aged woman tried to stab him as he stepped out of his carriage. The thin knife failed to penetrate his waistcoat: the King went on to his levée ‘with the most perfect composure’, and the woman went on to a mental hospital for the rest of her life.
In the summer of 1788, as Pitt waited in London for news from the Baltic, the King and Queen went to the spa waters of Cheltenham to assist George’s recovery from a ‘bilious fever’ he had suffered in June. He celebrated his apparent return to health with a tour of western England, visiting farms, houses and churches. At times his behaviour seemed a little over-excited and eccentric, such as when he beat time to Handel’s Messiah in Worcester Cathedral as if conducting an orchestra, and woke up the Dean before dawn to insist on looking round the cathedral, but at the time this did not cause undue alarm. It was only when he was back at Windsor in October that he fell visibly ill again. To his great distress he found he could not do his work, writing to Pitt: ‘I am afraid Mr. Pitt will perceive I am not quite in a situation to write at present, but I thought it better even to write as loosely as I have here than to lett [sic] the box return without an answer to his letter.’7
On 22 October the King became enraged with his doctor, who noted: ‘I wrote a note to Mr. Pitt immediately on my return to London, and informed him that I had just left the King in an agitation of spirits nearly bordering on delirium.’8 The King’s efforts to carry on as usual with his levée on 24 October had the effect of adding to the growing sense of alarm rather than dampening it. He knew there was something wrong with him, saying to the Duke of York in the days that followed, ‘I wish to God I may die, for I am going to be mad.’ By 5 November he had become violent and deranged, seizing the Prince of Wales by the collar and hurling him against a wall during dinner at Windsor. Rumours of his condition spread rapidly, with government stock falling on the markets amidst a widespread belief that he was dying.
Suddenly Pitt had to face a political crisis of the first order. Not only did he have the responsibility of giving calm leadership to the country while such rumours were rampant, but he also faced the imminent prospect of political doom. If the King died, the Prince of Wales would immediately become King George IV, and there was little doubt that he would dismiss Pitt, install Fox, and call a general election with all the powers of patronage and the Treasury deployed on the side of the Whigs. The independents and country gentlemen would then desert Pitt in droves, and even his great personal popularity would not be sufficient to keep him in power. On the other hand, if the King was insane and stayed insane, a Regent would have to be appointed. The Regent would inevitably be the heir to the throne, so the Prince of Wales would enjoy the power to turf out the government anyway. Small wonder that Pitt wrote to Pretyman: ‘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.’9
As the days passed, it became clear that the King was not dying, but neither was he getting better. While the Archbishop of Canterbury prepared special prayers for the King’s health to be said in every church, the medical bulletin sent to Pitt by a team of physicians headed by Dr Warren offered little hope:
Nov. 6 … The King’s delirium has continued through the whole day. Nov. 10 … H.M.… is very incoherent … Nov. 12 … H.M. talked in a quiet but incoherent way the whole night … Nov. 15 … H.M. has been deranged the whole day, in a quiet and apparently happy way to himself. Nov. 18 … H.M. had a good night, but the disorder remains unabated … Nov. 22 … H.M. is entirely deranged this morning in a quiet good humoured way … Nov. 24 … His Majesty passed the whole day in a perfectly maniacal state …10
The nation’s leaders and royalty united in expressing their grief and concern for the King. Yet in the political world such public sentiments are inevitably accompanied by private but rapid calculations on the consequences for everyone else. An unexpected crisis of great magnitude invariably throws a powerful searchlight onto human personalities, and the events of the weeks that followed would leave us with defining memories of the key players. Among them would be the ‘rats’: MPs and peers whose loyalty to Pitt evaporated as his loss of power seemed imminent. Their behaviour would threaten his control of Parliament at a critical time, and they would include among their number his most senior colleague, Thurlow himself. Then there would be the presumptuous, who believed that power would now fall into their hands like an apple from a tree, and whose overconfidence would lead them into error, the Prince of Wales and Charles James Fox among them. There would also be the disorganised, who worked on the division of the spoils rather than presenting a coherent argument in the meantime, namely the Whig opposition. Perhaps most of all the searchlight falls on Pitt himself, who emerged at his most brilliant, with every ounce of debating prowess and political skill he possessed being much required and well displayed. His triumph against all expectation would bring, in the words of the great historian Macaulay, ‘the moment at which his fame and fortune may be said to have reached the zenith’.11
Pitt’s most pressing need was for time, since only time offered any hope of the King recovering before a Regency could be declared. He was able to obtain the first instalment of this by adjourning Parliament for two weeks as soon as it met on 20 November, assisted by the continued absence of Fox, who was frantically returning across Europe from an extended sojourn in Italy with Mrs Armistead. His other need was to get the best possible medical attention for the King. Pitt’s first step in this respect was to bring in Dr Anthony Addingt
on, the very man who had prescribed plenty of port for him fifteen years before, and who had the added merit of having once maintained a lunatic asylum. In contrast to the gloomy prognostications of Dr Warren, Addington thought that the King could recover, and this view was further strengthened after the arrival on the scene in early December of Dr Francis Willis, who was brought in by the Queen because of his long experience in treating mental disorders. In the coming weeks the diverging medical opinions of Warren and Willis would assume huge political importance: the greater the chances of the King recovering, the easier it would be for Pitt to advance the argument that strict limitations should be imposed on the power of a Regent. If the limitations were sufficiently tight, Pitt could hamstring the Prince and the Whigs even while they held power, and thus both protect the King’s position and maximise the chances of a political comeback for himself.
The idea of such limitations would not go down well with the Prince of Wales himself, who had now taken over the management of the Royal Household despite bitter arguments with the Queen. At first the Prince showed every sign of deep concern about his father. He called Pitt to see him on 8 November, but made no mention of the political situation. According to Grenville, Pitt was treated ‘with civility, but nothing more’. Having received no indication from the Prince that he would wish them to continue in office as they were, the Cabinet discussed during November whether they would be prepared to form a coalition government with the Whigs if asked to do so. George Rose described the scene:
Mr. Pitt desired to ascertain the opinions of the members of the Cabinet respecting the propriety or expediency of joining the opposition, if it should be in their choice, under any circumstances whatever. He put the question directly to the Chancellor [Thurlow], who said he considered it an abstract question, and could not answer it distinctly. Mr. Pitt said it was a plain question, – Would his Lordship join with the opposite party under any circumstances? to which he would give no answer. Other members, by their silence, more than anything else, left an impression on Mr. Pitt’s mind that they were impressed with an idea that a junction of some sort might be expedient for the country, but his own determination was fixed beyond all possibility of being shaken – not to entertain the idea of a junction at all.12
Pitt had decided to stand as he was or to fall. He was now a proud man, who had not ascended to the pinnacle of power and popularity in order to negotiate for a job in a government he did not control. He may also have had a genuine concern, referred to by Rose, about what the King would feel if he recovered his sanity only to find that his allies were now in cahoots with his enemies. Pitt’s direct questioning of Thurlow suggests that he already knew his Lord Chancellor was playing a double game. Once the King’s insanity was plain, Thurlow was attentive to the Prince of Wales and entered into negotiations with the opposition, which in the absence of Fox were masterminded by Sheridan. The gist of the deal they constructed seems to have been that Thurlow would help from within the government to minimise any restrictions on the Regency, and in return would be retained as Lord Chancellor when the opposition duly came to power. This negotiation hit a snag, since it involved the ditching of the obvious Whig candidate for Lord Chancellor, Lord Loughborough. The prospect of this horrified a confused and ill-informed Fox when he finally returned to London in late November, but the discussions between Thurlow and the opposition continued. Thurlow even innocently asked the Cabinet ‘if anybody knew the colour of Mr. Fox’s chaise, in order to form a guess from them whether it had been seen on the road to Windsor’, while in reality he was actively engaged in negotiating with Fox’s colleagues.13 Pitt did not confront him directly, but carefully excluded him from the making of any arrangements for the Regency.
In the meantime, the Whigs were becoming impatient and very confident. As the Prince of Wales was telling his brother that their father was now ‘a compleat lunatick’,14 Fox was telling him that ‘Your Royal Highness would be … sure of enjoying the situation that belongs to you in a few weeks.’15 They preoccupied themselves with discussion of a new Cabinet: should Grey or Cavendish be Chancellor of the Exchequer? Would the Duke of Portland return as nominal head of the government, assuming that Fox would be a Secretary of State? It did not help their cause that these discussions became so advanced that on 28 November the Morning Post was able to print a list of those who would hold office in the new administration. Much as one Whig, Sir Gilbert Elliot, might warn them against ‘this triumphant sort of conversation, especially before the battle is won, or even fought’, the impatience and frustration of the Whigs after five years in opposition were boiling over by the time the King’s condition had lasted a month. Lord Loughborough was even asserting that the Prince of Wales could simply take over the government by going to Parliament and announcing that he had done so. Another argued that it was ‘just as if the King were dead’.16 While the Whigs ached for Parliament to meet, the Prince himself returned from Windsor to London and spent his evenings drinking and gambling in Brooks’s, a fact which soon became widely known.
The Whigs suffered additionally from a serious lack of cohesion. Key grandees such as Portland and Devonshire were away from London when the King fell ill, Fox missed the start of the crisis and was repeatedly ill himself throughout the course of it, Sheridan was busy ingratiating himself with the Prince, and Burke was steadily losing patience with the rest of them for failing to do their homework on the historical precedents and the nature of the King’s illness. In Downing Street, by contrast, one man was bending every fibre of his mind to out-manoeuvring them all. Pitt had visited the King himself several times in November, and had evidently been distressed by what he saw. He was instrumental in getting the King moved to the more restful atmosphere of Kew, where the doctors thought there would be a better chance of recovery than at Windsor. On 3 December Pitt joined the other members of the Privy Council to examine the physicians on oath about the King’s ability to conduct business and the prospects for his recovery. They were unanimous that he could not carry out any business, but all except Warren thought that he might one day recover. As it happened, the King now had a better spell, and the arrival of Dr Willis gave further hope. While Willis came armed with a straitjacket and three strong assistants, he was also prepared to let the King do certain things prohibited by the other physicians, such as use a razor, in return for good behaviour. The King could sometimes converse perfectly well, as when he remarked on Willis having moved from the Church to the medical profession: ‘You have quitted a profession I have always loved, & you have Embraced one I most heartily detest.’17 Most of the time, however, he remained erratic, as when he shook hands with a tree believing it to be the King of Prussia. Overall, Pitt could have taken some comfort from the medical reports as Parliament gathered in early December, but he still faced a formidable challenge. Behind the scenes, Thurlow was assuring Sheridan that he was a man of no party – ‘and to a man of your discernment that is saying enough’.18
Pitt now took every step possible to use up time. On 4 December he set up a Commons Committee to question the doctors, and five days passed before the meeting could be held. Once again the doctors were divided, Warren now being seen as the ‘opposition’ doctor and Willis as the ‘government’ doctor. Willis asserted that he had seen ten patients with a similar condition, and nine of them had gone on to recover. The King was actually suffering from what twentieth-century doctors would diagnose as acute intermittent porphyria. As its name suggests, this condition can come and go, but it was not remotely understood or identified at the time. The presumption of an imminent Regency therefore remained. When the Commons met for the first full debate on the matter on 10 December, lists of the prospective Whig government were circulating widely.
In the history of the long rivalry between Pitt and Fox, covering twenty-three years of debates on the floor of the House of Commons, the debate of 10 December 1788 stands out as a classic. In many ways the circumstances mirrored those of early 1784, when Pitt first entered offic
e and clung to it: Pitt showing calm patience and playing for time in the face of adversity, while Fox and his colleagues commenced with huge advantages and steadily threw them away.
Pitt rose on 10 December to deliver a speech typically methodical and reasonable, no doubt irritatingly so in the minds of his opponents. There were ‘steps to be taken as preliminaries’ to the discussion of what to do about the King’s illness, and they were ‘such as he could not conceive likely to create any difference of opinion’. Pitt wished the House to have ‘the advantage of the wisdom of their ancestors to guide their proceedings’, and therefore moved for the appointment of another Committee to examine the relevant precedents. This course of action had two advantages: it would take up more time, and it would reveal that in previous cases, such as the madness of Henry VI in 1454, restrictions had been imposed on the power of Regents.
Such a motion did nothing but goad an opposition keen to get on with the actual handover of power. To them, the examination of precedents the most recent of which was more than three hundred years old was nothing other than deliberate time-wasting. The confidence and sweeping assertiveness of Fox’s reply was as characteristic of him as the minute attention to the power of detail was of Pitt. Fox had spent most of the time since his belated return from the Continent feeling seriously ill and trying to reassert his authority in his own party. He was bored by technical details at the best of times, and would have wanted in any case to find some all-purpose argument which would frustrate Pitt’s attempts to impose restrictions on a Regency. A convenient argument was indeed to hand: that the complete incapacity of the King was equivalent to his death, at least for the time being, and the powers and majesty of the throne should therefore pass to his heir. Fox ‘had no hesitation’, he therefore announced, ‘in declaring it as his decided opinion, that His royal highness the Prince of Wales had as clear, as express a right to assume the reins of government, and exercise the powers of sovereignty during the continuance of the illness and incapacity with which it had pleased God to afflict his Majesty, as in the case of his Majesty’s having undergone a natural and perfect demise’.19
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 30