When he sat down, the Commons rose as a body and sang the chorus of ‘Britons Strike Home’:
Britons Strike Home! Avenge your Country’s Cause!
Protect your King! Your Liberty, and Laws!
For Pitt, the rallying of the House of Commons meant the political authority to raise much heavier taxes and more troops. The man who had done everything he could for peace was now destined to be Britain’s longest-serving leader in war.
21
Caution to the Winds
‘The House will decide whether they will … make a great and unusual exertion to resist the enemy, or … leave the country open to the ruinous projects of an insolent and overbearing enemy.’
WILLIAM PITT, 4 JANUARY 17981
‘Victory is not a name strong enough for such a scene.’
NELSON, AFTER THE BATTLE OF THE NILE, AUGUST 17982
BY NOVEMBER 1797, Pitt had been to the edge of despair and sprung back from it. Finding peace unattainable and facing the possibility of abject failure in war, an outcome highly likely to have brought his career to a premature close, he rallied both himself and the nation. Hitherto he had aimed to achieve the containment of France in a war of short duration with the lightest possible burdens falling on the people of Britain. His successive but unsuccessful attempts to negotiate with the French Directory had been aimed at bringing peace before the time at which military requirements and rising taxation would change the nature of everyday life. French military prowess, and the absence of cohesion among his allies, had meant that this balanced and sometimes hesitant strategy had ended in failure.
The return of Malmesbury after the coup of September 1797 did not end the need to make strategic choices – whether to seek fresh Continental alliances, mount colonial offensives or concentrate on home defence – but it simplified the political imperatives of Pitt’s situation. There was no choice now but to abandon the search for negotiation and the early resumption of normality. The nation must make ‘a great and unusual exertion to resist the enemy’, as Pitt told the Commons on 4 January 1798, or ‘suspend all defensive precautions, and leave the country open to the ruinous projects of an insolent and overbearing enemy’.3 There was no escape now from losing many lives, spending vast sums and taking great risks. It would turn out that militarily, financially and personally, Pitt was of a mind and temperament to take them.
The first illustration of this changed approach was the budget which Pitt presented to the Commons on 24 November 1797. The national debt had grown by nearly £120 million in five years of war (an increase of nearly 50 per cent). Such an increase could not continue without ruining the financial prospects of future generations, a matter always dear to Pitt’s heart. As he explained: ‘We ought to consider how far the efforts we shall exert to preserve the blessings we enjoy will enable us to transmit the inheritance to posterity unencumbered with those burdens which would cripple their vigour and prevent them from asserting that rank in the scale of nations which their ancestors so long and so gloriously maintained.’4 In any case, loans were becoming much harder to raise, and the interest rates required were rising sharply. It was therefore necessary to collect far more in tax, but the policy of innumerable taxes on small items such as hair powder and plate glass had been pushed very near its limits. From September onwards, Pitt set to work on a fundamental change in the nature of taxation. In his customary fashion he spent many hours closeted with Rose at Holwood and then circulated draft papers to colleagues whose financial advice he respected, such as Addington and Lord Hawkesbury (formerly Robert Jenkinson).
The resulting proposal was enough of a bombshell to bring Fox scuttling back to the Commons under pressure from his distressed constituents. For Pitt now proposed to take the ‘assessed taxes’, those levied on windows, houses, servants, carriages and horses, and treble them. What is more, he suggested a graduated scale, which involved particularly huge increases for the better-off. Requiring as it did the state to know more of an individual’s circumstances and an acceptance that tax need not be levied at a flat rate, this so-called ‘Triple Assessment’ – a forerunner of income tax – was bound to be controversial. Pitt thought it affected about 800,000 people and would supply him with £8 million a year. It was a major change in both the level and the principles of taxation.
The debates raged back and forth that Christmas, with Fox attacking a measure which ‘tends to the immediate destruction of their [taxpayers’] trade, the annihilation of their fortunes, and possibly to the loss of liberty of their persons’.5 Pitt had to make certain concessions and exemptions which reduced the eventual yield of the tax to less than £5 million, but on the principle he got his way. He would come back the following April with a further budget and yet more taxes, but in the meantime Addington suggested the idea of a Voluntary Contribution to supplement the assessed taxes, which, rather like the loyalty loan of the previous year, was an unexpected success and raised over £2 million. Pitt himself subscribed £2,000 he did not have.
The success of the Voluntary Contribution was another indicator of national sentiment, which was becoming more resolute as Britain stood alone in the war. Ministers now sought to whip up antirevolutionary feeling: one vehicle by which they did so was a new weekly publication, the Anti-Jacobin. Inspired and coordinated by Canning, the Anti-Jacobin printed anonymous contributions, some of which were written by Pitt in the form of poems. This example gives the flavour of the publication:
I am a hearty Jacobin,
Who own no God, and dread no sin,
Ready to dash through thick and thin
For Freedom:
Whatever is in France, is right;
Terror and blood are my delight;
Parties with us do not excite
Enough Rage.
Out boasted Laws I hate and curse,
Bad from the first, by age grown worse,
I pant and sigh for Universal suffrage
Such propaganda was necessary in a situation in which Pitt’s popularity was by no means universal. On 19 December a Thanksgiving ceremony was held at St Paul’s in honour of the succession of naval victories, attended by the entire body politic – Royal Family, Cabinet and Houses of Parliament, as well as the naval commanders. Pitt had Pretyman deliver the sermon, and told him to make clear ‘that God, who governs the world by His providence, never interposes for the preservation of men or nations without their own exertions’.6
On the way to the cathedral Pitt was heckled and hooted at by members of the crowds who were evidently not happy with the latest exertions they had been called upon to make. When he went home that night it was thought prudent to give him an escort of cavalry. Even so, he retained his faith in the good sense and patriotism of the majority, embarking on an arming of the civilian population on a scale never known, or risked, before. Years later he would assert that ‘From an army to consist of the round bulk of the people, no man who knows the British character could have the least fear.’7 When he and Dundas appealed for more volunteers to take ‘an active part in the defence of the country’,8 and accompanied it with fresh legislation requiring the listing of all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty not involved in military activity, the number of volunteers mushroomed. By the summer of 1798 more than 100,000 armed volunteers were enrolled in hundreds of companies and associations. The British people, it seemed, were ready to make their exertions.
It was to the British people that Charles James Fox rose to make a toast on 24 January 1798 as two thousand people thronged the Crown and Anchor tavern in London in honour of his forty-ninth birthday. When the Duke of Norfolk proposed a toast to Fox’s health, he additionally coupled it with a toast to ‘Our Sovereign’s health: The Majesty of the People!’9 In the climate of the times, this was a highly controversial thing to do. A Whig toast to ‘the people’ was meant to express their attachment to the principles of 1688, but after 1789 ‘the people’ implied far more radical and egalitarian ideas, along with a sympathy with the French Revo
lution. Norfolk was therefore dismissed as Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and sacked from his command of a militia regiment.
In evident defiance of this, Fox repeated the toast at another dinner in May, creating a new storm of controversy. Government supporters sought his prosecution or reprimand, but Pitt, learning from his experience of the Westminster scrutiny in 1784, thought that such action would give Fox ‘too much consequence’.10 Nevertheless he sought the advice of Dundas on whether Fox should be reprimanded by the Speaker, and ‘If after a reprimand he offers a new insult (as he probably would at the next meeting of the Club), he might be sent to the Tower for the remainder of the Session.’11 In the end, wise counsels prevailed and it was decided merely to remove him from the Privy Council, an act performed by a delighted George III, who personally struck Fox’s name from the list. Fox had now seceded from the political system; refusing to attend the House of Commons, he sold his house in London and went into temporary retirement, leaving Pitt’s domination of the domestic landscape even stronger.
For Pitt, who had battled through Christmas without a break to ensure the passage of his budget, the spring of 1798 became an uninterrupted ferment of activity. The search for new allies was in full swing, and was already looking promising, since the Austrians were unhappy with the Treaty of Campo Formio within weeks of signing, the Tsar was becoming interested in confronting the French, and there was a new King of Prussia, Frederick William III. The incentive to create a new coalition against France was much enhanced by the fact that the French were rampaging well beyond any previous notion of their frontiers. Rome was occupied and Switzerland invaded, with the expansionist Directory aiming ‘to unite Holland, France, Switzerland, the Cisalpine and Ligurian Republics by an uninterrupted continuity of territory’.12
From the beginning of the year, Grenville was proposing a four-power alliance of Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria to take on the expansionist ambitions of the French. Pitt and Grenville were determined that any new international coalition would be more carefully coordinated and more united on its objectives than the First Coalition had been, with the explicit aims of confining France to her pre-war boundaries, and the creation of strong buffer states such as Belgium and Piedmont, guaranteed by a Quadruple Alliance. Pitt never lost his taste for seeking a permanent and all-embracing solution to the temporary problems of the day; in building a new alliance he was seeking not only to win the war but to create a sustainable system for the enforcement of peace in the future. In the years to come he would keep this objective in mind, but the negotiations in the spring of 1798 were not easy: Austro – Prussian rivalry, the future status of Belgium, and the failure of Austria to ratify the terms of her previous loan agreement with Britain were all serious obstacles. Subsidies were offered to the Prussians to no immediate avail, and for some time the Cabinet agonised over whether to make a renewed alliance with Austria alone or to hold out for the objective of a quadruple agreement. This diplomatic morass had still not been disentangled as renewed threats of internal rebellion and external attack were once again coming to a climax.
Within Britain, patriotism and repression had combined to reduce the danger posed by the radical Societies such as the LCS, and a new wave of arrests in April 1798 helped to keep them at bay. But across the Irish Sea the risk of the authorities losing control and even facing an armed and coordinated rebellion was gathering pace on a vastly greater scale. From his arrival in Dublin in 1795 after the Fitzwilliam fiasco, Camden had struggled to maintain order in the face of economic discontent, revolutionary sympathies and sectarian outrages. There was a recession in the linen trade at the same time as radical ideas spread amongst the Protestants of Ulster, while the mutual hostility of Catholics and Protestants became more explicit and more highly organised. Orange Lodges were formed, which took advantage of attempts by the authorities to suppress revolt and confiscate arms by destroying Catholic property in Ulster and driving the Catholic population to the south. Catholic reaction produced an organisation called the Defenders, along with the non-sectarian United Irishmen, which soon formed its own secret Directory and made contact with Paris. Plans were being made in early 1798 for a coordinated nationwide rebellion in conjunction with a French invasion, expected at any time. For despite the victory at Camperdown, the possibility of a major French invasion fleet evading the Royal Navy to attack the British Isles in general and Ireland in particular remained. Ships and troops were known to be massing in Brest, Dunkirk and Toulon.
Against this background, Pitt was once again forced to give much attention to internal order: the arrests in England were accompanied by attempts by the Irish authorities to smash the embryonic rebellion – many of the ringleaders were arrested at a single house in Dublin on 12 March. Pitt had always taken a liberal view of Irish affairs, but in this atmosphere of emergency his response to those in the Commons who urged ‘conciliation’ of Irish grievances was a strong one. Conciliation, he said, meant
That we should make every concession and every sacrifice to traitors and rebels, to men who are industriously propagating the most dangerous principles, engrafting upon the minds of the people the most destructive doctrines, wantonly seducing and deluding the ignorant multitude, encouraging the most criminal correspondence with the enemy, exciting the commission of treason in Ireland, under the specious pretence of parliamentary reform, and forming, in conjunction and co-operation with the professed enemy of all liberty, morality and social happiness, plans for separating that country from Great Britain, and for converting Ireland into a jacobinical republic under the wing and protection of republican France.13
On 20 April he moved once again for the suspension of Habeas Corpus, denouncing those ‘who are going on with the daring purpose of corresponding with the French’.14 To critics, this was the high-water mark of ‘Pitt’s Terror’, but to Pitt himself and the majority in Parliament it seemed that only unfailing strength could now save the country.
It was in this fevered climate that Pitt was faced in April 1798 with an agonising strategic choice. He was receiving entreaties from Baron Franz Thugut, the Austrian Chancellor, and from the Kingdom of Naples to once again send a British fleet into the Mediterranean. Since he wished to draw Austria back into the war, and to raise the morale of the Neapolitans in the face of the proximity of the French army, the logic for doing so was obvious. On the other hand, the danger of an attempted French invasion of the British Isles was high, and the removal of any naval forces to the Mediterranean would reduce the chances of intercepting it at sea.
Spencer advised him on 6 April that sufficient ships were not available to send a permanent squadron to the Mediterranean, although Lord St Vincent, currently blockading Cadiz, could ‘take a sweep round the Mediterranean and do all the mischief he can to the French navy’.15 There were clearly great risks to operating in the Mediterranean at all, which was why the navy had withdrawn from there two years before: not only could home defence be jeopardised, the force deployed there could find itself cut off if the Spanish broke out of Cadiz. But Pitt’s caution of previous years had now evaporated; for some months he had been ready to raise the stakes in his struggle. By the end of April he had decided to override the Admiralty advice, sending a fleet through the Straits of Gibraltar and necessarily removing others from the defence of Ireland. This decision has been compared to that of Winston Churchill in 1940, when tanks desperately needed for the defence of Britain in the event of a German invasion were sent instead to North Africa.16 It was indeed a comparable gamble, and it was to be even more rapidly vindicated.
Pitt focused in late April on introducing yet another budget, paying tribute to the ‘true patriotism, and distinguished zeal’17 of the many people who had made voluntary contributions, but also introducing new taxes on salt, tea and armorial bearings. Even in the sixth year of war, he retained the entire ministerial responsibility for financing the war effort as well as the overall responsibility for its strategic direction. No modern Ministe
r could conceive of carrying such burdens simultaneously, even for a short time, and the strain on any man’s physical, creative and intellectual energies of dealing with both the minutiae of finance and the operations of war on a daily basis must have been immense.
As Pitt took his budget proposals through the Commons in May, it was clear that the military storms which had been gathering that spring were about to break. On 19 May Napoleon set sail from Toulon in the company of both a fleet and an army, his destination unknown. On the same day, the authorities in Dublin succeeded in apprehending the principal remaining ringleader of the planned rebellion, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a former army officer and a cousin of Charles James Fox, who had been turned against Britain by the excesses of coercion in Ireland and had been negotiating with the French. Fitzgerald was mortally wounded in the struggle to arrest him. The authorities found among his papers detailed plans for an all-out rebellion, scheduled for four days later. A widespread rebellion did indeed now break out, but it had already been decapitated with the arrest of Fitzgerald and his co-conspirators. Without them, Dublin remained secure, and the main centres of rebellion were in Wicklow and Wexford.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 49