William Pitt the Younger: A Biography
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Napoleon’s proclamation of himself as hereditary Emperor, and the French kidnap and murder of the young Duc d’Enghien,* had brought Tsar Alexander to consider renewing the war against France. Throughout 1804 talks between London and St Petersburg centred on possible joint operations to expel the French from southern Italy and on the potential size of British subsidies to Russia. Given their previous experiences at the hands of Napoleon, Britain’s potential allies were initially unimpressed with the £5 million Pitt set aside for all of them – Austria, Prussia and Sweden included. The importance Pitt attached to securing a Russian alliance was demonstrated that autumn when he sent Lord Granville Leveson Gower, a personal friend and the son of the Marquis of Stafford, to St Petersburg as the new ambassador. This had the additional merit of removing Leveson Gower from the clutches of an infatuated Lady Hester Stanhope, but there is no suggestion that Pitt’s motives for the appointment were anything other than political.
While diplomacy moved ponderously forward – Leveson Gower would finally secure a preliminary treaty with the Tsar in April 1805 – the war was widening closer to home. Since Napoleon looked to Spain for finance and naval assistance, British spies kept a careful watch on Spanish shipping movements. Amidst rising tension, the Cabinet decided in September to intercept a Spanish convoy in the Atlantic carrying a huge quantity of gold bullion and detain it until satisfactory assurances were received from Madrid. Such a plan was difficult to execute in practice: the Spanish ships defended themselves, unsuccessfully and with heavy loss of life, and in December Spain declared war on Britain. Pitt was unapologetic, and in Parliament the following February would adamantly defend the pre-emptive British action: ‘Suppose we had suffered these two millions of treasure to go into Cadiz, and from thence, as of course it would, to the coffers of France; suppose the two fleets of France and Spain had joined … Suppose we had come to parliament to be excused for having relaxed our efforts … What would have been the language … [of the opposition] if we were to throw ourselves on the lenity of the House?’21
War with Spain had almost certainly been inevitable, and Pitt’s actions matched the aggressive spirit with which he wanted to wage the contest (as well as being true to the legacy of his father, who had left the Cabinet in 1761 over its refusal to make a pre-emptive attack on Spain). Yet they underlined the need for allies as Pitt struggled for the third time in twelve years to create a coalition against France. At the same time, he knew it was vital to strengthen the government by bringing at least one element of the opposition on board. With Portland ill, Melville past his prime and Camden sometimes timid, Pitt needed no reminding that it was important to bolster his Cabinet as well as to add to his majority. As in the early 1790s, his plan to do so did not lack ambition. From July to November 1804 he made concerted efforts to bring the Fox and Grenville parties into government either in part or in their entirety, and to achieve a parallel reconciliation of George III with the Prince of Wales. If successful, it would have amounted to nothing less than a coalition of all the bitterest enemies of the previous quarter of a century, and a coming together of almost the whole political establishment.
It was typical of Pitt to pursue such a sweeping solution, but also not unusual that his brilliant conception was frustrated by the simple inadequacies of human nature. It took all the efforts of Pitt and Eldon on the one side, and Moira and Tierney on the other, to get the King and his son to observe the barest civilities towards each other. The Prince pulled out at the last minute from a carefully arranged meeting of reconciliation in August, and withdrew from an arrangement painstakingly concocted by Pitt and Moira for the King to oversee the education of the eight-year-old Princess Charlotte, heir presumptive to the throne. It was late November before George III and the Prince actually met and were polite to each other, but the progress in their relationship had been far too slight for them to get onto the subject of bringing together their favourite politicians in some enduring rapprochement. In the absence of that, the King’s veto on Fox was maintained, thereby ensuring the continued exclusion of Grenville and such figures as Spencer and Windham as well. The King, who explained that ‘what he did not forget he could not forgive’,22 told Rose at the end of September that he could not ‘admit Mr. Fox into his councils, even at the hazard of a civil war’.23 Pitt attempted that autumn to pick off some of the opposition individually, as he had done with some success in 1793, offering jobs to Moira and Tierney, but in the absence of broader harmony the bait was not taken.
The failure of this renewed effort to create a broader government must have been a great disappointment to Pitt, since it maintained his precarious dependence on the health of George III and threw him back on the only other option available for the strengthening of his ministry in the short term. The King had secretly hoped that Pitt and Addington would patch up their differences: Pitt now needed the support of Addington and the roughly sixty MPs who took their lead from him. Even this was a delicate operation, requiring the revitalisation of a severed friendship and the placating of existing members of the government who would be disgusted by Addington’s return to the Cabinet. Pitt steeled himself to this task in early December 1804, having put off the opening of the next session of Parliament until January. The Foreign Secretary, Harrowby, had been injured in a fall, and while Canning eagerly volunteered to take on his duties, Pitt for the moment refrained from filling the position so that he had a spare place in the Cabinet for the forthcoming negotiations.
With Hawkesbury as go-between, Pitt and Addington were brought together on 24 December, and apparently resumed their friendship with charming but suspicious ease. For all his contempt for Addington, Pitt could always respond to political necessity, and entered the room with the words ‘I rejoice to take you by the hand again.’24 In any case, Pitt probably felt little dislike of Addington as a person, but had rather been affronted by Addington becoming Prime Minister, even at his own behest. Now Pitt was careful to build a ceiling on Addington’s career into the framework of their new relationship: the offer to him to join the Cabinet as President of the Council was coupled with an insistence that he go to the House of Lords. Whatever happened thereafter, Pitt would at least have removed one rival from the Commons. Addington, a less calculating and always good-natured man, eventually accepted this stipulation in return for a Cabinet post for his ally the Earl of Buckinghamshire, and promises of lesser positions for his key supporters. He was reluctant to leave the Commons, but on 14 January 1805 it was announced that, ennobled as Lord Sidmouth, he would take over from Portland as President of the Council, with Buckinghamshire becoming Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in place of Mulgrave, who moved up into the vacant position of Foreign Secretary.
For the moment, Pitt’s government was strengthened. Both he and Addington earnestly professed to the rest of the world the genuine nature of the reconciliation. Addington, who had probably never shaken from his psychological make-up the need for Pitt’s approval, wrote that Pitt’s conduct had ‘convinced me that it is his ardent wish, as God knows it is mine, that past differences should be forgotten and that our future conduct may manifest perfect coincidence of opinion, and the re-establishment of former intimacy’.25 Wilberforce found Pitt bridling at the idea that the friendship was not real, saying as they walked in St James’s Park, ‘I think they are a little hard upon us in finding fault with our making it up again, when we have been friends from our childhood, and our fathers were so before us, while they say nothing to Grenville for uniting with Fox, though they have been fighting all their lives.’26
There was no doubt something genuine in these protestations, but it would also have been impossible for either man to forget entirely the harsh words of the previous years. Pitt had only turned to Addington as a last resort, and Addington had been known to comment on Pitt’s ‘ungovernable passion for power and pre-eminence’.27 Hawkesbury’s warning that ‘the Devil will be at work to separate you, as he was before’28 was well founded: tension between their r
espective acolytes would soon resurface. Canning was deeply offended by the deal done without his knowledge, and some long-standing Pitt supporters, such as the Marquis of Stafford, who controlled half a dozen parliamentary seats, took serious umbrage. As usual it fell to Sheridan to highlight Pitt’s predicament with wicked humour: ‘Lest the government should become too full of vigour from his support, he thought proper to beckon back some of the weakness of the former administration … the administration would be too brilliant and dazzle the House, unless he called back a certain part of the mist and fog of the last administration to render it tolerable to the eye.’29
Pitt had done the only thing he could to give temporary strength to his government while simultaneously striving for the much-sought Russian alliance. Having set aside for the second year running the intention of going to Bath for the restoration of his health, he spent the new year constructing a response to a fresh peace overture from Napoleon. The British response stated that negotiation could only take place in consultation with other Continental powers – meaning in particular the Russians. It was followed by the despatch to Leveson Gower on 21 January 1805 of a state paper which became a cornerstone of British foreign policy, much of which was drafted in Pitt’s own hand. In advocating ‘At the Restoration of Peace, a general agreement and Guarantee for the mutual protection and security of the different Powers, and for reestablishing a general System of Public Law in Europe’,30 the paper built on Pitt and Grenville’s ideas from the 1790s for a comprehensive solution to European wars, and was the basis, long after Pitt’s death, for the British negotiating position at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. There would be a new system of ‘Solidarity and Permanence’ under which the main powers would protect each other against aggression; Britain and Russia would ‘take an active Part’ in maintaining the peace; France would be reduced to her original frontiers while the ability of the small states on her borders to resist aggression would be enhanced – Sardinia, Austria, Prussia and Holland would all gain territory in place of helpless smaller states, with Dutch independence fully re-established.
Pitt’s ‘Memorandum on the Deliverance and Security of Europe’ has become a famous illustration of the idea of ‘balance of power’. In proposing considerable territorial rearrangement he showed ‘no special tenderness to nationality’,31 but typically sought a lasting and all-embracing solution to the problems which had plagued him. Once again he was demonstrating his extraordinary staying power. Beleagured as he might be, his strengthened majority and mastery of foreign policy shows him in January 1805 to be purposeful, successful, dignified and in control. It is the last moment at which we glimpse Pitt as he wanted us to know him.
In late January 1805 a visitor to Windsor was shocked to hear the sound of loud and angry voices in the Royal Closet. Inside, Pitt and George III, who had always cloaked their many disagreements in charming and felicitous language, were engaged in a furious row. The cause was the death on 18 January of John Moore, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the resulting need to appoint a new head of the Anglican Church. The King had long intended that Manners Sutton, the Bishop of Norwich, would be elevated to this role, and it is possible that Pitt had even agreed to this at an earlier stage. But more recently Pitt had decided to put forward his oldest friend, George Pretyman, Bishop Tomline of Lincoln and Dean of St Paul’s, partly at the behest of Pretyman himself. It is hard to think that Pitt was anything other than at fault in pressing this appointment: two hundred years later such a move would certainly be denounced as ‘cronyism’. Pretyman was not without his qualifications, but no one could seriously believe that Pitt would have so strongly advanced his cause had he not been a close friend.
How was it then that Pitt was so determined, and was driven to the point of fury in the King’s presence, to get his way on behalf of his friend? The answer lies partly in his personal loyalty to one or two exceptional friends or relatives whom he would favour irrespective of their merits – Pretyman and Chatham being the outstanding examples. But it lies too in his attitude to patronage, in which he was careful to distinguish between political appointments such as Ministers, where a job he regarded as important needed doing, and elevations within the Church or the peerage, in which he had little interest other than as an occasional means of reinforcing his political position. Part of the power of a First Lord of the Treasury lay in his control of such patronage. He did not therefore care so much who was appointed – although in Pretyman’s case he obviously did – as who dictated the appointment, for on that the credibility and standing of his administration partly depended. Pitt was therefore doubly angered that he could not only not fulfil his promise to his friend, but would also suffer a demonstration of political weakness. The King’s refusal to accept his nomination defied precedent, and, Pitt complained, ‘will certainly not be understood by the public, in any other light than as a decisive mark of your Majesty’s not honouring him with that degree of weight and confidence which his predecessors have enjoyed’.32 He even suggested the possibility of his resignation, but George III was no fool. Pitt could not credibly resign as Prime Minister just because he was not allowed to make his best friend the Archbishop of Canterbury. Manners Sutton became the Archbishop, and Pitt had to calm down.
There is an amusing exchange of letters among Pitt’s papers which illustrates the eagerness with which Church of England Bishops sought the patronage of the First Lord of the Treasury. A new Bishop of Norwich was now required, and Pitt received the following letter from the Bishop of Bristol:
Sir,
I have heard from so many quarters that you have been kind enough to think of recommending me to His Majesty to succeed to the vacant See of Norwich that I can no longer refrain expressing my gratitude to you, if such is your intention & of informing you that by so doing, you will be conferring a lasting obligation upon me, which I shall ever have a pride in acknowledging.
Pitt replied the same day with:
My Lord,
In answer to the letter which I have just had the honour of receiving from your Lordship, I am sorry to be under the necessity of acquainting your Lordship that the Report which has reached you respecting the See of Norwich has arisen without my knowledge, and that I can not have the satisfaction of promoting your wishes.33
In February 1805 Pitt could at least reap some dividends from bringing the Addingtonians onto his side. Assailed by the opposition that month over the Spanish war and continued difficulties in military recruitment, he was able to beat off its attacks by far larger majorities than those of the previous summer. On 18 February he presented what would be the last of his many budgets to the Commons: another loan of £20 million and further tax increases on salt, horses, legacies, postal charges and property. Disturbingly, however, some of the more minor tax measures did not get through the House, and Pitt was sometimes tetchy in debates, at least once coming off worst to the formidable Sheridan, who launched a devastating attack on his conduct towards Addington:
If I had come down to the house and described the noble lord as the fittest man in the country to fill the office of chancellor of the exchequer because it was a convenient step to my own safety, in retiring from a situation which I had grossly abused and which I could no longer fill with honour and security;—… If, when I saw an opening to my own return to power, I had entered into a combination with others, whom I meant also to betray, from the sole lust of power and office, in order to remove him;—and if … I had then treated with ridicule and contempt the very man whom I had before held up to the choice of my Sovereign … then, indeed, I should have merited the contempt and execration of all good men.34
Such an attack demonstrates the unremitting hostility which faced Pitt on the opposition benches. Even though the country was at war, he could expect no quarter or benefit of the doubt from them. Furthermore their opportunity to strike him hard was at last arriving. On 18 March Wilberforce was with Pitt when he received an envelope he had been anxiously awaiting. ‘I shall never forget’, re
corded Wilberforce ‘the way in which he seized it, and how eagerly he looked into the leaves without waiting even to cut them open.’35
The document in question was the Tenth Report of the Commission of Naval Inquiry. This wide-ranging inquiry into the management of the navy had been set up by Earl St Vincent in 1802, and had so far published a series of worthy but fairly innocuous reports. The Tenth Report, however, contained direct and serious criticism of the conduct of Dundas, now Lord Melville, as Treasurer of the Navy in the 1790s in Pitt’s earlier administration. It transpired that Alexander Trotter, the Admiralty Paymaster, had used funds intended for the navy in his private transactions, albeit without any eventual loss to the public purse. Melville, it seemed, had turned a blind eye to these practices and might sometimes, albeit unwittingly, have been in possession of some of the money in question himself.
Speculation by Ministers with public money had been commonplace in the mid-eighteenth century, as noted in earlier chapters. Rules were enacted against this in the 1780s, and by 1805 the Treasury’s more effective management of funds had rendered it extremely difficult. Trotter, and Melville by implication, had been caught between the corrupt standards of one generation and the particular rules of the next, rather like Italian politicians arraigned in the late twentieth century for misdemeanours which had only just ceased to be widespread. For all the fact that Melville had been burdened with far weightier responsibilities at the time, and had almost certainly not knowingly or actually defrauded anyone, opposition politicians sensed a chance to do great damage to the ministry. The motion tabled for debate on 8 April 1805 by the radical MP Samuel Whitbread attacked Melville for acting ‘in a manner inconsistent with his duty, and incompatible with those securities which the legislature has provided for the proper application of the public money’.36