It is in this light that we should consider his persistent approaches to leading figures among the opposition Whigs from 1791 onwards. He tried to bring in the Duke of Grafton, a grand old man of the Whigs, albeit one who had supported his father, in February 1791. Acting through Grenville, whose cousin Tom adhered to the opposition, he offered three Cabinet posts to the Whigs the following month. These approaches, intended to bring senior Whigs into the Cabinet and thereby to create a powerful new alignment in British politics, are generally associated with the prospect and outbreak of war, but they began early in 1791 when no major conflict was contemplated. They are also easy to link with the growing public disorder of May 1792, since that is when Pitt himself made a determined effort to recruit the ‘Portland Whigs’ or even the whole Whig Party into the government, but the care with which this was done suggests it was part of a plan. Indeed, Pitt was so persistent over a period of some three years in trying to recruit senior Whigs individually, split them as a party, or annex them collectively, and returned to this course so repeatedly despite several rebuffs, that it must have been a regular preoccupation for him throughout this time.
Pitt’s determination to recruit Whigs into the government may shed some light on his otherwise mysterious reaction to the affair of Robert Adair and his visit to St Petersburg in 1791. Adair was a friend and supporter of Fox who arrived in St Petersburg shortly after Pitt’s humiliating climbdown in the Ochakov crisis. The Russians evidently showed him key parts of their correspondence with the British government during the crisis. Adair also gave the Russians advice, not necessarily in accordance with the policy of the British government, and passed on to the Austrian Ambassador in St Petersburg a letter from the Russian Ambassador in London, discussing with him the possibility of Austria keeping Belgrade in the peace settlement. This was very much at odds with the position of the Foreign Office. Adair sent reports of all this to Fox, using a code which Fox had given him. These letters were intercepted by the Foreign Office, although it never managed to decode the enciphered sections.*
Ministers had in any case been riled that Fox had a representative in a foreign court cutting across the official British representatives. Pitt observed in the Commons that ‘better terms might have been obtained at Petersburg, had it not been for certain circumstances of notoriety hostile to the political interests of England’.15 Grenville had already observed that the idea of opposition representatives attending the courts of Europe ‘would go very near to an impeachable misdemeanour’.16 Not surprisingly, the existence of Adair’s letters to Fox containing secret codes was considered within the government to have the potential to be seriously damaging to Fox, whose actions could be depicted as little short of treason. The Foreign Office Under Secretary, James Bland Burges, discussed the matter with Pitt only days before the final Commons debates on Ochakov in February 1792, and believed that Pitt was about to reveal the letters publicly: ‘If I mistake not, on Monday the fate of the Opposite Parties in this country will finally be settled, and Mr. Fox and his Adherents for ever ruined and undone.’17
Yet Pitt made no public mention of the matter in that debate, nor ever again in his life. Five years later Bland Burges explained to Grenville that Pitt had made him promise not to mention it to anyone but the two of them, and had himself kept the copies of the letters: ‘After the meeting of Parliament, Mr. Pitt desired me to give them to him. I accordingly did so, and he locked them up in one of his own boxes; since which time I have not seen them.’18
Why did Pitt lock away the evidence that might have ruined his greatest rival? This question has tantalised his biographers, and was not resolved by Pretyman’s accusations against Adair in his Life of Pitt in 1821 or by Adair’s subsequent publication of the correspondence and his assertion that his name was not cleared only because Pitt did not bring the matter up. The most thorough analysis of the subject has been conducted by John Ehrman, who concluded that in all probability it was an act of generosity on the part of Pitt, bearing in mind the sharp reverse he had suffered when pursuing a personal matter against Fox over the Westminster Scrutiny in 1785. This must be admitted to be a possibility, although not surprisingly a politician’s mind is more cynical. Certainly there was a risk that the use of the documents might backfire for some reason, making Pitt look vindictive or stupid.
He will have weighed that risk, but he may also have concluded that a successful hounding of Fox would not serve his purposes. For one thing, there had been rumours in 1791 that George III was tiring of Pitt and looking to replace him. For Pitt, Fox was one of the principal keys to the door of Downing Street: as long as Fox was a power in the House of Commons, Pitt was indispensable to the King. Often as he might wish to wound Fox, while George III lived it would be foolish to destroy him. And with or without the King, wounding or destroying Fox made no sense if Pitt wished to bring about a realignment of political loyalties. The intention to bring the conservative Whigs into government was already in Pitt’s mind: an all-out attack on Fox’s reputation was more likely to turn Fox in their eyes into a friend to be defended or a martyr to be respected than a colleague with diverging views who could be abandoned. Furthermore, Tom Grenville’s discussions with Whig leaders embraced the possibility of Fox joining Pitt in government; they foundered on Fox’s refusal to serve under Pitt and Pitt’s refusal to leave the Treasury. It would have been the ultimate realisation of Pitt’s ambitions for Fox to serve under him in government, and for the Prince of Wales to be able to accept a Pittled government when the throne was finally his some time in the future. Such thoughts might seem fanciful in the light of the acrimonious years which had just passed, but to write them off would be to underestimate the ambition of a man who became Prime Minister at twenty-four. Nor were these hopes so unrealistic: many of the Whigs finally threw in their lot with Pitt two years later, and nearly two decades later, when the Prince finally received the powers of Regency, he maintained the heirs of Pitt in office rather than turn to the heirs of Fox.
Pitt’s suppression of the evidence which could have damaged Fox makes sense against the backdrop of his ambitions. It may be further evidence of the importance he attached to a political realignment. He intended to be in office for a long time if circumstances permitted, and it was in his nature to try to shape those circumstances by looking far ahead. The inclusion of parts of the opposition in the government would not only strengthen his personal position, but would make it more likely that he could enact many of the measures dear to his heart in the years to come. The existing government and opposition sides of politics had been thrown together by the circumstances of 1782–84, and were now an out-of-date mixture of attitudes to a long-concluded war, a distant royal coup, and party leaders at least one of whom was now dead. From Pitt’s point of view, a government shorn of Thurlow but including some of the Whigs would be more likely to make progress on issues like parliamentary reform and abolition of the slave trade, and much more likely to persuade George III to accept such things. Such a grouping would combine a belief in the continuity of British constitutional principles with a readiness to make sensible reforms in tune with the times. Coupled with the advantages of sustained peace and expanding prosperity, this would be a tantalising vision, the hope and dream of a still-young Prime Minister.
Pitt’s hopes for a political realignment and longevity in office would be realised, but in circumstances which would be the ruin of every other hope he cherished. For within days of his triumphant budget speech of February 1792, Europe began its agonising slide into the abyss.
In March a series of calamities hit European politics. Leopold II of Austria died after an illness of only a few hours, to be succeeded by his more hardline son Francis II. Austria and Prussia published their treaty of alliance and invited Russia, Saxony, Holland and Britain to join a counter-revolutionary war. The latest stage of upheaval in Paris – France would have five Foreign Ministers that year – saw the hawkish Girondin Ministers come to power. It only added to the confusion an
d tension that Gustavus III of Sweden was assassinated while attending a masked ball. Austria and France were in sharp disagreement over the rights of German Princes to shelter French émigrés outside France’s eastern frontier.
With the new French leaders believing that war would unite their people behind the Revolution, conflict was now inevitable: France declared war on Austria on 20 April. This raised the prospect of a French invasion of the Austrian Netherlands, but even so Pitt and Grenville were determined to stay out of the conflict. They resisted the friendly approaches of both sides and decided that war in the Austrian Netherlands would not require British involvement provided the neutrality of the Dutch United Provinces was respected.
Indeed, Pitt’s eyes that April were on domestic matters. It was the month of his oration on the slave trade, and a time of growing domestic agitation. Over the winter, radical and pro-reform societies had expanded greatly in membership and had begun to circulate their publications widely. The Society for Constitutional Information (SCI) sympathised with the French Revolution and included Earl Stanhope (formerly Lord Mahon) as one of its leading lights; more ominously, the London Corresponding Society (LCS) and its Sheffield equivalent were claiming many hundreds of members from industries and trades. In February Thomas Paine had published the second part of his Rights of Man, calling for revolution and the end of all hereditary government. Within weeks up to 200,000 copies were in circulation, available at sixpence each. In London, radical Whigs such as the young MP Charles Grey formed an association called the Friends of the People to push for immediate parliamentary reform. They secured a debate in the Commons for 30 April.
The debate of 30 April was a watershed for the Whig party and in the life of Pitt. The conservative Whigs declined to support Grey’s motion; Fox held his party together for the moment by supporting Grey but saying that ‘he should have hesitated’ about the timing. It was apparent to Fox that agitation for reform at this moment would spread alarm and stood no chance of success in Parliament. For the same reasons, Pitt now emphatically opposed some of the notions he had himself advocated in more settled times. Pushing for reform now, he told the Commons, could bring ‘anarchy and confusion’. He said he ‘retained his opinion of the propriety of a reform in parliament … but he confessed he was afraid, at this moment, that if agreed on by that house, the security of all the blessings we enjoyed would be shaken to the foundation’. The constitution could not be tampered with at such a time and with unforeseeable consequences, since it was ‘a monument of human wisdom, which had been hitherto the exclusive blessing of the English nation’.19 And so Pitt slammed the door on reform, not knowing he would never open it again.
Against the background of Whig division and concern about domestic stability, Pitt saw an opportunity to reconstruct the Cabinet. As it happened, the long-simmering feud with Thurlow now boiled over. The Lord Chancellor’s behaviour towards Grenville in the Lords had been increasingly rude and dismissive – he had even tried to adjourn a debate while Grenville was on his feet speaking – and he resented Pitt’s intrusion into legal appointments. For his part, Pitt had never forgotten Thurlow’s perfidy during the Regency crisis.
On 8 May, Thurlow spoke in opposition to Pitt’s views on the slave trade, not a new development in itself. It was a week later that he finally overdid it, attacking Pitt’s budget proposal for the repayment of new loans, saying that ‘the scheme is nugatory and impracticable – the inaptness of the project is equal to the vanity of the attempt’.20 As a result the proposal was very nearly defeated. For Pitt, this was the last straw. It was also the ideal opportunity to strike – George III could not possibly afford to lose Pitt on an issue affecting the financial stability and credibility of the government. Pitt’s letter to Thurlow was to the point:
Downing Street, Wednesday,
May 16, 1792.
My Lord,
I think it right to take the earliest opportunity of acquainting your Lordship that being convinced of the impossibility of His Majesty’s service being any longer carried on to advantage while Your Lordship and myself both remain in our present situations, I have felt it my duty to submit that opinion to His Majesty, humbly requesting His Majesty’s determination thereupon.
I have the honour &c.,
W. Pitt21
Thurlow had always assumed the King would protect him but George III now bowed to the inevitable, writing to Dundas that evening: ‘The Chancellor’s own penetration must convince him that however strong my personal regard, nay affection, is for him, that I must feel the removal of Mr. Pitt impossible with the good of my service. I wish therefore that the Great Seal may be delivered to me at the time most agreeable to the Lord Chancellor.’22
Thurlow was sacked, and formally left office a few weeks later. Now Pitt had the coveted post of Lord Chancellor to add to the tempting fruits he could dangle before certain of the Whigs. He was framing a Royal Proclamation which warned against ‘wicked and seditious writings’ and asked magistrates to prosecute the authors, printers and distributors of such material while preserving order and ‘due submission to the laws’. The proclamation was motivated by genuine alarm among Ministers about the entirely new situation they faced: revolutionary ideas were being circulated in a country suffering from the effects of a poor harvest while war was erupting across the Channel. It also produced, however, the happy side effect of driving a still deeper wedge into the ranks of the Whigs, some of whom thought it an unnecessary overreaction, while others thought it essential. Pitt took care throughout May to consult conservatively inclined Whig leaders such as Portland and Loughborough. He first suggested a Privy Council meeting which they could all attend together, but they saw the trap and suggested they could ‘act in concert though not in conjunction’.23 Once Thurlow had gone, Pitt offered the Lord Chancellorship to Loughborough, along with three Cabinet places and the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland for other Whigs.
For the moment Pitt had overestimated the severity of Whig divisions. To all of them he was still the unprincipled power-seeker of 1783 who had colluded with George III in removing them from their rightful place in government. While the Portland Whigs would not now oppose Pitt’s new measures, they were not yet ready for a breach with Fox, who in consequence was drawn into the discussions. As long as the Whigs continued to function as a party, Pitt’s hopes of seducing them into government were up against two powerful obstacles: Fox would not serve under Pitt, and George III would not want him anyway.
Portland tried to edge the Whigs into coalition, arguing that ‘the security of the country required it … That Pitt was of such consequence in the country, and the Prince of Wales so little respected, that we considered it as impossible … to form an administration of which Pitt was not to be a part.’24 Fox said he was prepared to join in a coalition, but not with Pitt as the nominal head of it. For Pitt this would always be a sticking point. Neither now nor in any later negotiation throughout the whole of his life would he countenance holding any government position other than First Lord of the Treasury. He probably did not imagine that Fox could be brought into the government at this point in any case, but he was so determined to impress his sincerity on Loughborough that he told him that Fox could come in later: ‘He was a little apprehensive of Fox’s opinions relative to the French Revolution, and hinted that he was afraid he had gone too far. That this was an objection to his coming at once into the Foreign Department.’25 This implied that Fox could become Foreign Secretary a little later if some of the Whigs would now take the plunge. Fox, however, was adamant that Pitt would have to give up the Treasury, and insisted on knowing whether the King had been informed of the talks, which of course he had not. Faced with no response from Pitt on these issues, the Whigs concluded, probably rightly, that his main intention was to divide them, and the negotiations broke down. Pitt decided to bide his time. He expressed his disappointment to Dundas that the Whigs would only provide ‘half support’,26 but was content for the moment to have sown fresh seeds of d
ivision among them.
This initial bout of negotiations had an interesting postscript. Portland continued to entertain the idea of a coalition with some neutral figure at the head of it, and encouraged the Duke of Leeds, Pitt’s former Foreign Secretary, to imagine himself in that role. Leeds was bold enough to visit the King on 14 August to put the idea before him, only to find to his shock and embarrassment that George III had no idea such specific talks had taken place, and was horrified by the idea of the return of the Whigs: ‘Anything Complimentary to them, but no Power!!!’27 Leeds then found himself summoned to see a frosty Pitt, who said, according to Leeds’ own account, ‘that there had been no thoughts of any alteration in the government, that circumstances did not call for it, nor did the people wish it, and that no new arrangement, either by a change or coalition, had ever been in contemplation!!!’28
Pitt would have been intensely irritated by the involvement of a former Minister he had been quite pleased to see the back of. His denial that any ‘new arrangement’ had been in contemplation was, however, stretching the truth a long way. True enough, no agreement had got to any formal stage, but the discussions had been fairly specific. In any event, Leeds was now put off the scent for good.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 37