William Pitt the Younger: A Biography

by William Hague

  Had the battle gone the other way that day, the history of the next fifteen years would have been dramatically different. There were already many plots behind Napoleon’s back, and his power would probably not have survived a clear defeat. Instead he became the unrivalled champion of France, and the military prospects of the Second Coalition were shattered.

  News of Marengo arrived in London on 24 June. Once again, Pitt’s health was about to snap under the weight of so many pressures and disasters. He seemed to behave bizarrely at Canning’s wedding on 8 July, although he should have found it a joyous occasion, having encouraged the match, bringing Canning and his bride Joan Scott together at Walmer, and giving Canning promotion so that he was better provided for. Pitt travelled to the wedding in a carriage with the officiating clergyman, Mr Leigh, and the best man, John Frere, who recounted that a man ‘recognised Pitt and saw Mr. Leigh, who was in full canonicals, sitting opposite to him. The fellow exclaimed, “What, Billy Pitt! and with a parson too!” I said, “He thinks you are going to Tyburn to be hanged privately”; which was rather impudent of me; but Pitt was too much absorbed, I believe in thinking of the marriage, to be angry.’44 At the ceremony Pitt seemed too nervous to sign the register, suggesting that he was either distressed, ill, or much influenced by alcohol.

  By the end of July George Rose was telling Pretyman that Pitt was again unwell. He was to get little rest that summer, staying at Downing Street much of the time to deal with an increasingly difficult international situation and an alarming domestic one. The Austrians had now been forced to a truce, and in late August the French proposed a similar truce with Britain, in effect the cessation of naval operations. This was not quick enough to save the French garrison on Malta from capitulating to a British blockade on 4 September. But Pitt found the issue ‘delicate’. On the one hand a naval armistice would favour the French, and on the other Britain’s refusal to agree to it would bring new French assaults on the beleaguered Austrians. Satisfactory terms could not be agreed, but Cabinet disagreements over the prospect of a truce absorbed much of Pitt’s time, with Dundas, Canning and Windham fearing that he might be too prone to concede an unsatisfactory peace agreement now that the coalition was disintegrating.

  At home the price of wheat was reaching 120 shillings a quarter, and Pitt was writing to Addington on 8 October that ‘the question of peace or war is not in itself half so formidable as that of the scarcity with which it is necessarily combined, and for the evils and growing dangers of which I see no adequate remedy’.45 The following day he was again writing to Addington canvassing ideas for intervention in the corn markets and the punishment of unscrupulous dealers; by the next day he was more seriously ill, suffering from his ‘old Complaint in the Bowels, Loss of Appetite, & is a good deal shook; he cannot carry a Glass of Beer to his Mouth without the aid of his second Hand’.46

  It was becoming a familiar pattern: Farquhar had tried to get him to a spa in Cheltenham or Bath, but he refused. Instead, he agreed to go to Addington’s house at Woodley in Berkshire. Addington noted that Pitt needed ‘rest and consolation’.47 After a week he thought ‘he is certainly better, but I am still very far from being at ease about him’,48 and then after three weeks at Woodley: ‘Mr. Pitt’s health … is so well established as to render him fully equal to any exertions that may be required of him.’49

  Pitt had once again pulled himself together, although his close colleagues must have begun to wonder how long this could go on. When he returned to Downing Street the weight of business was unforgiving. Food riots were taking place all over the country. Pitt had followed the price of corn anxiously throughout his illness, and he disagreed sharply with the free-market-orientated Grenville about the merits of government intervention. In a classic example of his practical approach to policy-making, Pitt rejected in a Commons speech of 11 November both the idea of pure free trade and of a whole new system of regulation, in favour of improved bounties on imports and other measures to encourage economy in the use of grain:

  To go beyond the remedy which is plain, practical, sanctioned by the soundest principles, and confirmed by the surest experience, must ever be a dangerous course: – it is unsafe in the attempt, it is unworthy of a statesman in the design, to abandon the system which practice has explained and experience has confirmed, for the visionary advantages of a crude, untried theory. It is no less unsafe, no less unworthy of the active politician, to adhere to any theory, however just in its general principle, which excludes from its view those particular details, those unexpected situations, which must render the scheme of the philosophic politician in the closet inapplicable to the actual circumstances of human affairs. But, if it be unwise to be guided solely by speculative systems of political economy, surely it is something worse to draw theories of regulation from clamour and alarm.50

  Having done what it could to alleviate food shortages, the Cabinet also showed improved decisiveness on military matters, resolving to send 15,000 men to Egypt to clear out the stranded French army. On 27 November Pitt gave the Commons a spirited defence of the war: ‘Is it nothing that, having had to struggle … for our very existence as a free state, with our commerce marked out as an object of destruction, our constitution threatened, we have preserved the one unimpaired, and most materially augmented the other; and, in many particulars, increased our national wealth, as well as its glory?’51

  But the matters which had gone from bad to worse now lurched to the catastrophic. The truce between France and Austria had ended in November without a peace agreement. On 3 December the Austrians were again decisively defeated by the French at Hohenlinden, leaving Vienna exposed. By Christmas Day Austria had again sued for peace. At the same time Britain’s other major erstwhile ally, Russia, was moving into open hostility. Apparently incensed by the British occupation of Malta without provision for the restoration of the Knights of St John, Tsar Paul I gave a lead to neutral Baltic countries which had long complained of being stopped and searched by Royal Navy ships enforcing the blockade of France. To Britain, the war could not be waged without the right to search neutral shipping: Russia, Denmark and Sweden now formed the League of Armed Neutrality ‘to oblige England to allow neutral ships to pass without search’.52

  Admiral Sir Hyde Parker was told to prepare a fleet for the Baltic to assert British naval power, with Nelson to assist him. Yet again the fortunes of war had turned full circle. Britain was again alone, save for distant Turkey and the minor forces of Naples and Portugal. Napoleon was supreme in Paris and dominated western Europe, while in London Cabinet unity and prime ministerial stamina had been stretched as far as they would go.

  23

  Resignation with Hesitation

  ‘A discussion has naturally taken place, in consequence of the Union, on the question of the Catholics, and it has very lately been brought to a point which will very soon render it impossible for me to remain in my present situation.’

  WILLIAM PITT TO BISHOP TOMLINE, 6 FEBRUARY 18011

  ‘When the crew of a vessel was preparing for action, it was usual to clear the decks by throwing overboard the lumber, but he never heard of such a manoeuvre as that of throwing their great guns overboard.’

  RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN, 16 FEBRUARY 18012

  ON 2 FEBRUARY 1801 William Pitt gave the House of Commons his customary display of debating prowess. Ill and overworked he may have been, but it had been noted eighteen years before when he vomited through the Commons doorway and went on to give a brilliant oration that he possessed ‘amazing powers of mind which bodily infirmity seemed never to obscure’.3 His unscripted rebuttals of criticism had never lost their architecture of neatly arranged arguments supporting a crushingly logical conclusion. Responding that day to Grey’s opposition attack on the reasons for conflict with the League of Armed Neutrality, questioning the nature and importance of British maritime rights, Pitt said he ‘must begin with his doubts, and end with his certainties; and I cannot avoid observing that the honourable gentleman was
singularly unfortunate upon this subject, for he entertained doubts where there was not the slightest ground for hesitation, and he contrives to make up his mind to absolute certainty upon points in which both arguments and fact are decidedly against him’.4 After examining every argument of necessity and legal right, Pitt hectored the opposition: ‘The question is, whether we are to permit the navy of our enemy to be supplied and recruited – whether we are to suffer blockaded forts to be furnished with warlike stores and provisions – whether we are to suffer neutral nations, by hoisting a flag upon a sloop, or a fishing boat, to convey the treasures of South America to the harbours of Spain, or the naval stores of the Baltic to Brest or Toulon? Are these the propositions which gentlemen mean to contend for?’5 The House supported him by its usually emphatic 245 votes to sixty-three.

  It seemed like business as usual. The war continued, expeditions were underway, the budget was in an advanced state of preparation and Pitt was dominating the floor of the Commons. Although rumours were beginning to spread, many of the MPs who cheered his words that evening would have been astonished to know that two days earlier he had placed his likely resignation before the King, and that three days later it would be accepted.

  They would eventually be even more perplexed to discover that this resignation of a Prime Minister of seventeen years’ standing was over an issue not then at the forefront of parliamentary debate, and on which Pitt was not known to have trenchant views: giving Catholics the right to sit in Parliament. Dundas considered that historians would never believe that the Pitt ministry resigned on this question, and certainly many contemporaries refused to do so. Pitt’s apparently sudden departure from office has always been regarded as one of the most mysterious episodes in his entire career. It came at an unexpected time – even to himself – over a disagreement with George III which nevertheless had for some months and even years been wholly predictable, and was swiftly followed by Pitt’s disavowal of the very principle on which he had surrendered the job he loved, along with the near rescinding of his resignation a month after the event. There has been much disagreement about his motives, shrouded by the conflicting signals given off by his overworked and probably exhausted brain. Why did William Pitt, at the age of forty-one and with no alternative career or pursuits in mind, precipitately resign from the only office he ever wished to hold?

  Catholic emancipation had been the spectre at the feast of the celebrations of the Union with Ireland. Pitt had long envisaged that a further extension of the rights of Catholics, to include the right to hold public office, would be a logical corollary of the Union: it was part of binding the whole Irish population into the newly united nation, with Protestants safe from any fear of a Catholic majority in Dublin. To Pitt, it was a matter of practical politics rather than religious faith. Wilberforce had lamented many years before that Pitt had little interest in religious questions as such. He had opposed the repeal of the Test Acts in 1787, and decided in 1798 to postpone Catholic emancipation until after the Act of Union – in both cases simply because of the strength of the likely opposition from monarch, Church and conservative politicians to his liberal inclinations.

  A comprehensive and very Pitt-like solution to all of these problems was quietly put forward within the government in the summer of 1800. Both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters would be admitted to public office by the repeal of the Test Acts. At the same time the bitterly hated tithe payments to the Irish Church would be commuted into rents, while the Church of England would benefit from better pay for some of the clergy. A new oath for officeholders would recognise that revolutionary Jacobinism rather than Catholicism was now Britain’s enemy, and would require a specific rejection of revolutionary doctrine. It was a package designed to create Cabinet unity and political saleability to the wider political nation.

  In particular, Cabinet unanimity would be vital to secure the acquiescence of George III. Throughout the 1790s, Pitt had been used to getting his way when his political needs clashed with the entrenched opinions of the King: he had forced George III to dismiss Thurlow, had conducted peace negotiations with France in 1796 in spite of royal hostility, and had most recently employed Cabinet unity to overcome the King’s objections to the Egyptian expedition. He evidently assumed that, if necessary, the same trick could be performed again. If the Union was going to be a success, then religious grievances including Catholic emancipation ought to be addressed in 1801, and he accordingly summoned Cabinet Ministers together for a discussion in September 1800 before Castlereagh, the Irish Secretary, was due to return to Dublin.

  It was unfortunate for Pitt that the Lord Chancellor, Lord Loughborough, was staying with the King in Weymouth when this meeting was called. Pitt’s letter to Loughborough of 25 September apologised for proposing to shorten his holiday, but explained the necessity of discussing ‘the great question on the general state of the Catholics’ as well as the policy on the tithes and clergy.6 Since this communication enabled Loughborough to ingratiate himself with the King and sound him out on the Catholic question before attending the Cabinet meeting, it can appear in retrospect to be the action of a political innocent. But Pitt, who was of course weighed down at this point by reversals in the war and an imminent personal collapse, could not conceivably leave the Lord Chancellor out of such a meeting or conceal from him the reason for it. He had to trust in confidential communication within the Cabinet.

  Pitt thus started out on this delicate issue handicapped by a serious misjudgement of two very powerful figures. He seems to have underestimated the extent to which George III – whom he did not intend to be aware of the Cabinet discussions at this stage – would regard Catholic emancipation as an issue of an entirely different order even to the huge issues of war, peace and Cabinet appointments on which he had previously given way. To the King this was not only a political matter, but a religious and personal one, ‘beyond the decision of any Cabinet of Ministers’, as he had ominously warned years before. In his opinion, the admission of Catholics to public office would be a direct violation of his Coronation Oath to uphold the established Church. His beliefs in religion, faithfulness, duty and clarity came together to make him, on this one issue, utterly unyielding – a fact no doubt discovered in short order by Loughborough when he raised the matter before departing Weymouth for London.

  Pitt was also misjudging Loughborough himself. They had enjoyed good relations since Loughborough had been the first of the Whigs to jump ship and join Pitt upon the outbreak of war. Pitt had forgotten that a politician capable of ratting on one set of colleagues can very easily rat on another. George III was shrewder, saying on hearing the news of Loughborough’s death in 1805, ‘Then, he has not left a greater knave behind him in my dominions.’7 Loughborough later admitted telling the King of the proposed Cabinet discussion, and possibly showed him related memoranda. There can be little doubt that the two egged each other on. George III had been advised by Loughborough six years before that Catholic emancipation would indeed violate the Coronation Oath, in conflict with all other legal opinion including that of the Lord Chief Justice.

  Loughborough no doubt felt under an even greater obligation to oppose the measure having once again heard the King’s views, and he proceeded to do just that at the Cabinet meeting on 1 October. He opposed the section of the proposals dealing with Catholics, and partly as a result the meeting was indecisive. Mention having been made of the hostility of the King, Pitt undertook to speak to him ‘the moment He returned’.8 He now compounded his earlier misjudgement of George III by neglecting to do this. The rapidly deteriorating situation overseas, the continuing crisis over corn prices, his serious illness in October, and his reluctance to create a premature crisis all encouraged his habitual procrastination. It was shortly after this episode that George III commented that Pitt was ‘apt to put off laborious or disagreeable business to the last, but then, when forced to it, got through it with extraordinary rapidity’.9

  During the autumn Cabinet opposition grew t
o include Portland, Westmorland, Liverpool and Chatham, with Westmorland additionally warning the King that the matter would soon come to the fore.10 Loughborough, to be fair, continued to warn Pitt of the danger, asking him, according to Rose, ‘whether he thought it would be judicious to propose a measure of this sort, to which the King was notoriously so averse, and on which the whole bench of bishops would be against him; probably many lords from opinion, others from an inclination to follow the King; most likely, Lord Chatham, as well as others of the Cabinet, with many of his most confidential friends, such as the Speaker, the Master of the Rolls, &c’.11 The matter was still unresolved in January 1801 as Parliament, complete with a hundred Irish Members brought in by the Act of Union, prepared to meet (the Chamber of the Commons was modified to accommodate them). No specific proposals being agreed, Pitt drafted an anodyne King’s Speech which referred to ‘the great object of improving the benefits of that happy Union, which, by the blessing of Providence, has now been effected’,12 while concentrating on the need to confront the League of Armed Neutrality.

  With Parliament about to resume, Pitt called a meeting on 25 January to ascertain once again the views of the Cabinet. The meeting was called at short notice, and Chatham, Liverpool and Loughborough were all absent. This appears to have been a classic use by Pitt of prime ministerial power to control Cabinet meetings, timings, and agendas with a view to obtaining the right result. Those who attended were under the impression that it was a preliminary meeting in advance of another the next day, but given the general agreement in the absence of opponents, Pitt decided a further meeting was unnecessary. The detailed proposals, put together by Castlereagh, were generally supported, although Camden observed that ‘Mr. Pitt should proceed with the utmost caution’, given everything he had heard ‘of the King’s Opinion being so decided’.13