Of Augustus and Rome
The poets still warble,
How he found it of brick
And left it of marble.
So of Pitt and of England
Men may say without vapour,
How he found it of gold
And left it of paper.5
For all the criticism, Pitt’s experience and decisiveness in financial matters must have helped the restoration of confidence in the markets. Certainly his measures were vindicated: within a short time credit was expanding once again, the government was able to raise fresh loans, a Commons Committee of Inquiry found the Bank’s finances to be in rather better shape than suspected, and the convertibility of notes into specie was eventually restored. A new copper coinage was introduced later that year, and long-term reforms of the Royal Mint and the eventual (but well into the next century) introduction of silver coins were set in train. Britain’s two great advantages in its contest with France were the prowess of its navy and the vast capacity and creditworthiness of its financial system. Whatever Pitt’s failings as a war leader, he was adept at leveraging both of these assets.
Indeed, throughout March he was once again working on a new loan to Austria as part of the effort to keep her in the war. Having witnessed the French subjugate most of western Europe over the previous four years, Pitt and his colleagues were extremely apprehensive about Britain facing France alone. On 4 April he resisted (by 266 votes to eighty-seven) an attack on his latest proposal to provide a subsidy of £3.5 million to Austria: ‘It cannot be a measure of economy to abandon the plan of availing ourselves of the co-operation of his imperial majesty by contributing money to his assistance. When we consider the amount of the expense, and the magnitude of the service, there is no ground of comparison between them!’6
Over the next few days Pitt explained to George III that it was once again necessary to seek a negotiated peace, given ‘the extreme difficulty of providing even now for the pressing and indispensable exigencies of the public service’, and that a unilateral peace between France and Austria ‘would produce a pressure on this country which ought by all possible means to be avoided’.7 The King was reluctant to contemplate yet another attempt at treating with the French, but the Cabinet was unanimous. Grenville doubted that Britain had the will to fight alone, and Pitt worried that such a war could not be sustained financially. There were rumours that the Dutch, now allies of France, were preparing an invasion force, and all prospect of successful land operations against the French had disappeared. In the West Indies, British forces had done well in capturing Trinidad from the Spanish in February, but were racked by massive casualties from disease – from which at least 50,000 British soldiers would die in the West Indies between 1793 and 1802, many times more than were killed by enemy action.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that Pitt and his colleagues decided on a renewed bid for peace, with the coordinated involvement of Austria and the mediation of Russia. Accordingly, a Foreign Office official, George Hammond, was despatched to Vienna in early April. As so often with the slow-moving communication of the eighteenth century, it was already too late. Hammond arrived in Vienna on 30 April: on 18 April the Austrians had signed a peace agreement with Napoleon at Leoben. This would lead later in the year to the Treaty of Campo Formio, which represented a huge strategic victory for France but a sop for Austria: the map of northern Italy was redrawn around the Cisalpine republic dominated by France; the Austrian Netherlands and many Mediterranean islands were ceded to the French; in addition the Venetian republic was destroyed and Venice awarded to the Austrians. Austria was out of the war. As the Dutch prepared a hostile fleet, and Napoleon returned to France to head the ‘Army of England’, Britain stood alone.
By any standards the circumstances of April 1797 constituted a major crisis in the life of the British nation and the career of William Pitt. But between the middle of April and the beginning of June a new and previously unsuspected circumstance would arise which would compound the crisis to make it the most alarming then imaginable. The one remaining guarantor of Britain’s territorial integrity and independence was the navy. On 15 April the Channel Fleet at Spithead in Hampshire, the main assembling point for vessels based at Portsmouth, was ordered to sea. On 16 April, Easter Sunday, it refused. The Royal Navy had mutinied.
The trouble had been brewing for some weeks. In March, Lord Howe, who was still the sailors’ favourite Admiral, received some letters of complaint from within the navy while he was taking the waters at Bath. These pointed out that the army and militia had recently received an increase in their allowances; navy seamen by contrast had received no pay rise since the reign of Charles II, over a hundred years before. Furthermore, their pay was often in arrears, and merchant seamen were paid many times more. No doubt those who had fought in the only major victories Britain had experienced during the war to that date felt their efforts were not being recognised.
The letters to Howe disappeared into the bureaucracy of the Admiralty, while the widespread resentment simmered across the fleet. When Lord Bridport, who had succeeded Howe at Spithead, hoisted the signal to sail, the seamen on the latter’s former flagship the Queen Charlotte gave three cheers of defiance, an example followed by the rest of the fleet. The mutiny which now developed was, at least in its initial stages, a wonderfully British affair. The men made clear that they would sail if the French put to sea, but not otherwise until their demands were met. These demands, communicated to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Earl Spencer, when he hastened to Portsmouth after consultation with Pitt, were not unreasonable. The seamen wanted improved pay, better rations, improved care for the sick and wounded, fairer distribution of prize money, and less frequent confinement on board when in harbour. Thirty-two delegates were elected from the sixteen ships in question to present these demands; while some officers were held hostage they were not harmed, and in the meantime the orderliness and readiness of the fleet were maintained. It was probably the best-behaved mutiny in history.
Nevertheless, a mutiny it was, and given the situation it did not take the government long to conclude that it should make concessions to it. There was one dangerous moment during the negotiations when Admiral Gardner lost his temper with one of the delegates, seized him by the collar and threatened to have all the delegates hanged. Instead it was the Admiral who was sent ashore, while Pitt accepted Spencer’s requests to grant much of what the seamen demanded. A pay rise would be recommended to Parliament, rations properly made up, and George III agreed to pardon the men for their mutiny.
Viewed from London, it seemed that the mutiny had been settled. Preparations were begun to pass the necessary regulations and vote the extra money (totalling £536,000 in a full year) necessary to meet the agreement. With matters apparently under control, Pitt got on with presenting his budget on 26 April. After the success of the loyalty loan in December and the restoration of confidence in the financial system in March, he was able once again to raise a large loan. As had become usual in the years of war, he accompanied this with a miscellany of tax increases in order to pay the interest and maintain payments into the Sinking Fund. He expressed his sorrow at the financial situation, saying it was ‘impossible for me not to feel considerable regret, and great personal disappointment in being compelled, however reluctantly, to propose an addition to the ample and large provision already made, towards defraying the expenses of the country in a wide and calamitous war, and increase the present burthens which are borne with unexampled patience by all ranks of the community’.8 He went on to announce an increase in stamp duty and in the tax on newspapers. Some of the other increases illustrate how he was attempting to keep the war going by scrabbling around for an accumulation of tiny amounts: a change in the tax on advertisements was to bring in an extra £20,000, the regulation of stamps on attorney’s certificates would bring in £15,000, and a new tax on ornamental plate would bring in £30,000. It was to be the last time that Pitt could finance the conflict witho
ut a massive and widespread rise in taxation; his fear that this would make the war politically unsustainable was a major factor in maintaining his determination to try once again for peace.
Pitt made clear at the time of the budget that seamen’s pay would be increased, but there was a short delay before the money was officially voted and other aspects of the agreement ratified. George III was critical of the delay: ‘it would be idle to lament that the measures for increasing … pay have been delayed for two weeks coming forward in Parliament’.9 To Ministers, the implementation of the agreement within a couple of weeks probably seemed like acting with lightning speed, but to the seamen themselves, who had risked their necks in confronting their officers and government, the delay was inexplicable – however much else the House of Commons might have to do. Rumours began to spread in the fleet that the government was going back on the deal and that the ringleaders would be arrested. Opposition MPs were happy to stir the pot in Parliament, giving notice of a vote of censure because of the delay.
On 9 May Pitt duly brought in a Bill to increase seamen’s allowances, which was passed through the Commons in a single day. The vote of censure was the next day defeated by 237 to sixty-three. On 7 May, however, the mutiny had started all over again. This time the Channel Fleet put their officers ashore and sailed off to St Helens, an anchorage off the Isle of Wight. Within days there was also trouble in ships based at Plymouth and Weymouth, and in the North Sea Fleet based at Yarmouth and the Nore (an anchorage in the Thames Estuary near the mouth of the river Medway, and a holding area for the vast number of vessels entering and leaving the Thames). Once again, Admiral Lord Howe was sent to the rescue. Pitt despatched him to Portsmouth from London despite him suffering agonies of gout, and he was then rowed around the fleet to assure them that all was well and the agreement was indeed being implemented. Indeed, a further concession was made: officers would not return to ships whose crews had made written complaints of being mistreated by them. By mid-May Howe had brought the Channel Fleet once again under control. The crews expressed their regret (again), all concerned were pardoned (again), Howe and the crews’ delegates enjoyed sumptuous dinners together and ‘Rule Britannia’ was sung around the fleet. On this occasion no time was wasted in getting the crews out of port and into action: on 17 May the Channel Fleet obeyed its orders to put to sea.
The fleet at the Nore received the same assurances on the seventeenth as had been given to the fleet at St Helens, but a different combination of personalities and circumstances was at work there. Howe could not be sent to two places at once, and the seamen at the Nore were led by a well-educated rabble-rouser by the name of Richard Parker who had joined the navy after emerging from a debtors’ prison. Parker’s motives were more political than the straightforward grievances of the men of the Channel Fleet, as he evidently sympathised with revolutionary ideas. He also set up more of an alternative command, insisting that he be called ‘President’ or sometimes ‘Rear Admiral’, while holding meetings in the state cabin of the Sandwich, the flagship of Vice Admiral Buckner. Parker’s mutineers demanded additional concessions, including an end to punishments for recaptured deserters and the removal of a much wider swathe of officers; they also positioned their vessels to make ready for a blockade of London, and drew to their cause the majority of ships at Yarmouth, which were essential to prevent a Dutch invasion.
The scale, motives and strategic location of the mutiny at the Nore presented Pitt with the gravest crisis he had ever confronted. In the last week of May, almost every possible misfortune seemed to join together in a confluence of disaster. It was known definitively that the Austrians had made peace with France, the fleet at the Nore was exchanging artillery fire with the army at Tilbury, disorder was breaking out in the army itself among the artillery stationed at Woolwich, the ships meant to guard against the Dutch invasion were refusing to do so, the opposition were mounting a renewed push for parliamentary reform on the floor of the Commons, and the Cabinet was racked with division over the next effort to make peace.
The events of a single day, 26 May, illustrate the pressure Pitt was under. Having spent the previous day deciding how to deal with the latest mutiny, he woke to hear artillery fire in the distance: Wilberforce’s journal records: ‘Pitt awaked by Woolwich artillery riot, and went out to Cabinet’10 It was at that Cabinet meeting that Ministers decided to proceed on the assumption that the Austrians had abandoned them. At the same time, government stocks had fallen to their lowest ever level, and there were reports of ‘the soldiery rising’.11 News was being received of Dutch troops preparing for an invasion, and the naval mutiny continued out of control. Yet Pitt had to spend the whole of the late afternoon and evening of that day in the House of Commons, fighting off a renewed opposition motion to bring in parliamentary reform. As it turned out, this was the last throw of an utterly disillusioned opposition, who felt their arguments were ignored by the vast majority of MPs. Fox indicated that he would soon withdraw from parliamentary debate: ‘I certainly think that I need not devote much of it [time] to fruitless exertions and to idle talk in this House.’12
Despite the parlous situation on every front, Pitt gave a lengthy speech of trenchant opposition to the reform he had once championed. The House must ‘consider the danger of introducing an evil of a much greater magnitude than that we are now desirous to repair’; it would not be prudent ‘to give an opening for those principles which aim at nothing less than the total annihilation of the constitution’.13 He defended himself against the charge of having changed his mind: ‘Whatever may have been my former opinion, am I to be told that I am inconsistent, if I feel that it is expedient to forgo the advantage which any alteration may be calculated to produce, rather than afford an inlet to principles with which no compromise can be made,’14 and he ridiculed Fox for having claimed public opinion was on his side but having made no progress in the previous year’s general election: ‘The right honourable gentleman, the house will recollect, was accustomed to assert last session of parliament, with equal boldness and vehemence as now, that the sense of the country was against the system of Ministers. Good God! Where can the honourable gentlemen have lived? In what remote corner of the country can he have passed his time?’15 Canning thought the speech ‘flat’, but Pitt’s ability to engage in detailed and effective debate at such a moment suggests he kept calm even in this extreme crisis. Whatever he felt inside, he would have known that the slightest indication of a loss of nerve on his part could have brought the collapse of all financial, political and military confidence.
A story of this period was often told by Earl Spencer to illustrate Pitt’s cool nature. As Lord Stanhope described it: ‘On a subsequent night there had come from the fleet tidings of especial urgency. Lord Spencer thought it requisite to go at once to Downing Street and consult the Prime Minister. Pitt being roused from his slumbers, sat up in bed, heard the case, and gave his instructions. Lord Spencer took leave and withdrew. But no sooner had he reached the end of the street than he remembered one more point which he omitted to state. Accordingly he returned to Pitt’s house, and desired to be shown up a second time to Pitt’s chamber. There after so brief an interval he found Pitt as before, buried in profound repose.’16
Whether or not such sound sleep was the product of a calm nature or complete exhaustion we do not know, but Pitt’s response to the continuing mutiny was certainly decisive and effective. He regarded the time for concessions as over. Pay rises were given to the army, supplies to the rebellious fleet were cut off and gun batteries assembled to confront them, and the navigational buoys and beacons at the mouth of the Thames were removed. He introduced two Emergency Bills specifying severe penalties on anyone exciting sedition in the services or communicating with mutineers. The death penalty was to be imposed on anyone assisting them. Meanwhile, the heroic Admiral Duncan sailed off to maintain his blockade of the entire Dutch navy with only his flagship and one other vessel. By regularly signalling to his non-existent fleet he
maintained the fiction that the rest of the British ships were just over the horizon.
By early June the ships involved in the mutiny were beginning to slip away quietly and return to their official stations. Faced with a powerful show of force, and possibly realising they had overstated their demands and made a mistake in following Parker, the seamen steadily chose to call it a day. When Parker finally decided to take the Sandwich and any other remaining ships over to the enemy, the crews decided to surrender both the ships and the ringleaders to the authorities. This time there was to be no pardon. Twenty-three of them were executed: on 30 June Parker was hanged from the yardarm of the Sandwich.
The mutiny was truly over, but it had been a close-run thing in which initially poor intelligence and the neglect of legitimate grievances had brought the nation to the brink of catastrophe. Once faced with the crisis Pitt had reacted with great wisdom, making concessions to reasonable complaints but acting to crush a revolt which was taken too far. Even so, he and the Cabinet had experienced a scare sufficient to convince them that matters could not go on like this. Pitt would declare in private that it was ‘his duty as an English Minister and a Christian to use every effort to stop so bloody and wasting a war’.17 He believed Britain needed peace. The only alternative was to ask the country to make the financial and political commitment to an intensified war.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 47