Melville had many enemies, among them not only the entire opposition but many of the Addingtonians who were now technically supporters of Pitt’s government, for he had made no secret in the later stages of Addington’s ministry of his view that its removal was essential. Nor could he rely on the support of independently-minded MPs who would weigh the matter on its merits. For Pitt, the affair must have had echoes of the row over the Archbishop of Canterbury only weeks before: if Melville were driven from office he would lose a Minister who had been a close friend and an almost indispensable member of his previous government, but it would also be a savage blow to the standing of the government he now led.
An utterly ruthless man would have thrown Melville to the wolves, shielding the rest of the government by forcing his resignation. Pitt could certainly be ruthless, and he abhorred financial irregularity, but he was also loyal to friends and too proud to give the opposition a victory. He decided to tough it out, taking the debate himself and defending his friend. Pitt may also have acted from a feeling of guilt, if a letter he had written twenty years earlier had lodged in his memory. As it happened, the services of Alexander Trotter had been recommended to Dundas by Pitt himself, at the instigation of Thomas Coutts. Pitt had written to Coutts in December 1785: ‘I have taken an opportunity of mentioning Mr. Trotter’s name to Mr. Dundas, as a person of whose character I had heard a very respectable testimony.’37 No one else may have known it, but the person who had landed Dundas with the problem was Pitt himself.
It is not surprising that the defence of financial irregularities did not come easily to Pitt. In place of the vote of censure, he proposed that the matter be referred to a Select Committee, as the Commission of Inquiry had not been able to conduct anything like a fair trial. He pointed to clear errors in the Report as evidence of the need for further investigation, and argued that ‘no defalcation, any mischief, any evil whatever’ had resulted from the admittedly improper use of money. It was a manful effort, but a far cry from his ringing speeches on Irish Union or slavery, or declarations of war. Some observers thought it ‘miserable – his powers of language even seemed to fail him in this worst of causes’.38 Towards the end of the debate, Wilberforce rose and Pitt turned to face him. ‘It required no little effort’, Wilberforce recalled, ‘to resist the fascination of that penetrating eye,’39 but resist it he did, placing, as ever, his conscience ahead of his friends in declaring his support for Whitbread’s motion. The outcome was now impossible to predict.
The vote took place in the early hours of 9 April, when the Speaker announced that there were 216 Ayes and 216 Noes. Ten minutes later a highly agitated Speaker gave his casting vote against Pitt, censuring Melville and defeating the government. Melville would have to resign.
For Pitt this was a moment of despair. For all politicians, longevity in office requires ever more energy to be consumed in defending the errors of the past, and in keeping at bay the ever-expanding ranks of the jealous, the offended and the impatient. Pitt was beginning to pay the price of his long career, and of loyalty to close friends, while neglecting to cultivate a wider circle of followers. One of his supporters, Lord Fitzharris, noted:
I sat wedged close to Pitt himself the night when we were 216 to 216; and the Speaker, Abbott (after looking as white as a sheet, and pausing for ten minutes), gave the casting vote against us. Pitt immediately put on the little cocked hat that he was in the habit of wearing when dressed for the evening, and jammed it deeply over his forehead, and I distinctly saw the tears trickling down his cheeks. We had overheard one or two, such as Colonel Wardle (of notorious memory) say they would see ‘how Billy looked after it.’ A few young ardent followers of Pitt, with myself, locked their arms together, and formed a circle, in which he moved, I believe unconsciously, out of the House; and neither the Colonel nor his friends could approach him.40
It was a time of intense pressure. Pitt would now face fresh motions for Melville’s name to be struck from the Privy Council and criminal prosecutions to be commenced. Addington (now Sidmouth), enraged by Pitt’s defence of Melville and continued closeness to him, was contemplating resignation from the Cabinet. And in the meantime a war was going on: while Pitt waited anxiously for news from St Petersburg, a group of French warships managed to get out of Toulon and enter the Atlantic. Pitt’s health was crumbling. Once again that Easter plans to visit Bath had to be abandoned. ‘Every public event of importance which crowded on Mr. Pitt’s mind’, said Farquhar, ‘produced a corresponding effect upon the body, and I felt it my duty frequently to urge the necessity of his retiring from public business altogether, but Mr. Pitt’s memorable reply was, that his Country needed his Services, and he would rather prefer to die at his Post, than desert it.’41
* * *
*Ceremonial positions in the King’s household.
*The Bourbon Prince the Duc d’Enghien was kidnapped in neutral Baden, taken to France, tried by military court and shot. Napoleon believed, with some justification, that the Prince had been plotting a royalist insurrection. His arrest on foreign soil, and his swift execution, outraged the royal courts of Europe.
27
Too Many Enemies
‘England has saved herself by her exertions and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.’
WILLIAM PITT, NOVEMBER 1805
EVEN THOUGH Britain was at war and the Armée d’Angleterre remained threateningly encamped at Boulogne, the spring of 1805 was a time of intense partisanship in British politics. In Malmesbury’s view: ‘The transactions relative to Lord Melville exceeded in party spirit and savage feeling all that I ever recollect in this country.’1 Almost alone among the opposition, Grenville stayed aloof from a controversy which would ‘add to the distractions of the country when the very foundations of its safety are shaken both within and without’.2 The strong feelings were manifested not only between government and opposition, but within the ranks of the government itself, since the evident relish with which some of the Addingtonians attacked Melville, and Pitt’s continuing warmth towards him, once again placed Pitt and Sidmouth on a course of conflict.
Sidmouth resented Pitt’s friendship with ‘a certain person [Canning] who is more imprudent and obnoxious than ever … and allowed to appear in the House of Commons more and more as the prochain ami’,3 and tried to urge Pitt – who showed little sign of wishing to discuss the matter with him – to fulfil earlier commitments to him by bringing Buckinghamshire into the Admiralty in Melville’s place. Pitt, however, was now in no mood to reward Sidmouth’s faction, and besides placed such importance on the Admiralty that he was determined to appoint a naval expert in whom he had confidence. His choice fell on the ageing Sir Charles Middleton, who as Comptroller of the Navy had been instrumental in introducing many improvements to its efficiency during Pitt’s first administration. Elevated to the peerage as Lord Barham he now duly joined the Cabinet, to Sidmouth’s distress and fury. After only three months back in government, Sidmouth considered this ‘decisive proof that my continuance in office could neither be useful to the public, nor honourable to myself’.4
Pitt’s patience with Sidmouth was probably already wearing thin, but, needing his support for the government at least for the moment, he embarked on damage limitation. He assured Sidmouth of his continued friendship, promised that Middleton’s appointment would only be temporary, and, in Sidmouth’s words, ‘that every allowance would be made for the peculiar situation of my friends on many questions that might arise, and every consideration shown to their just and admitted pretensions’.5 In other words, places in the government would eventually be found for Sidmouth’s key supporters, and in the meantime they would be given some leeway on controversial issues. Since the use of that leeway, by Hiley Addington and others, to continue to attack Melville’s conduct would make Pitt even more reluctant to admit any of them into the government, this was a compromise agreement which had self-destruction written into its terms.
Pitt’s troubles and embarrassment over
Melville were not over with the Commons defeat and Melville’s consequent resignation. When the House returned from its Easter recess, opposition MPs were in full cry for the impeachment or prosecution of Melville, for his removal from the Privy Council, and for a Select Committee to examine those parts of the report not relevant to a prosecution. Pitt had to handle the tortuous business of determining the terms of reference and the membership of the Committee – matters on which he managed to restore respectable government majorities. But on substantive issues concerning Melville he was in trouble, unable to rely on the Addingtonians or independents such as Wilberforce. He faced possible defeat on 6 May on the question of striking Melville’s name from the Privy Council, and finally, putting the survival of his government ahead of loyalty to his friend (who himself advised Pitt to give way), announced that he had already, ‘however reluctantly from private feeling, deemed it incumbent on me to propose the erasure of the noble lord’s name from the list of privy councillors’. He went on to confess that he ‘certainly felt a deep and bitter pang in being compelled to be the instrument of rendering still more severe the punishment of the noble lord. This is a feeling of which I am not ashamed. It is a feeling which I will not, which I cannot erase from my bosom. It is a feeling that nothing but my conviction of the opinion of parliament, and my sense of public duty could possibly have overcome.’6
Pitt regarded Melville not only as a long-standing friend but as one of the greatest servants of the nation. The action he had to take against him, and the knowledge that there would be more to come, seems to have distressed him deeply. Yet the way in which he bit his tongue with Sidmouth and deferred to the Commons demonstrates his instinct for political survival. Furthermore, he went on to deal patiently and courteously, for days at a time even at the height of a war, with accusations in a further Commission Report that he had himself been party to illegal transactions. He was questioned by the Commissioners of Inquiry on six occasions in May, and briefly the opposition had some hopes of following up its destruction of Melville with the ensnaring of Pitt himself. For a man whose reputation was built on integrity and financial probity, a great deal was at stake. The most difficult matter to explain was the issuing in 1796 of ‘navy bills’, a form of government debt raised by the Admiralty, without parliamentary approval and for the securing of money which was then put to secret purposes. Pitt had actually used the money as part of a complex transaction to maintain the ability of a key banker to provide government debt at a time when the Bank of England was coming under strain. By setting out the facts of the case, setting up a further Select Committee to examine the handling of such situations and arguing strongly to the Commons that the ‘violation of law’ was ‘justifiable by the particular circumstances of the case’,7 he extricated himself from the controversy. Even Fox thought it only ‘a slight delinquency’.8 Pitt’s integrity was intact, but his time, energy and health were being consumed.
Beset as he was by these difficulties, and living all the more an unhealthy life of irregular eating, inadequate sleep, constant meetings and an all too adequate supply of alcohol, Pitt retained his mental acuity and tactical good sense. Several illustrations of this were provided by the decision of Fox and Grenville to seek to embarrass the embattled Pitt by moving for Catholic emancipation, the very issue on which he had resigned four years earlier. Their motion, which went down to a heavy defeat on 13 May, caused Pitt little difficulty although it certainly took up more of his time. His conduct when he met a delegation of Irish Catholics to discuss the matter was impeccable and impressive. Although one of his visitors recalled him to be wearing ‘dirty boots, and old fashioned lank leather breaches’, he was ‘otherwise well dressed & cleanly, his hair powdered etc.’ His eyes were still ‘very busy and speaking’ although now ‘bad and ill-coloured’, and his speech ‘very direct and distinct’. He was civil but straightforward, and explained politely that the proper time for emancipation had not arrived. After telling them candidly that he would have to oppose the measure if it were brought up, he saw them to the hall ‘bowing and smiling all the way’.9 When it came to the debate, he did not attempt any contorted logic to explain why he was now opposed to something he had previously resigned over favouring, simply making it clear that ‘I remain this day of that opinion,’10 but that he had discovered the issue to be so controversial that if brought forward now ‘it would only tend to revive those animosities which I wished to extinguish’.11 The Fox—Grenville attack made no headway.
Recollections of the Catholic debate furnished a further illustration of how the teenage orator and memoriser of the 1770s was still living on in the battered Prime Minister of 1805. The debate marked the Commons debut of the fiery Irish leader Henry Grattan, who exhibited a speaking style highly demonstrative and unusual in the Commons. Fitzharris recalled that at supper afterwards, Pitt ‘gave us some specimens of passages in Grattan’s speech, in which the correctness of Pitt’s powers of imitation, both as regarded the tone and action of the speaker, was very striking, but almost less so than the display that it afforded us of the capability of his retentive memory. Whole sentences to our ears appeared to be repeated verbatim, and to have been conveyed without the loss of even an article from St. Stephen’s to Downing Street.’12 In company at least, Pitt retained his good humour and his dominance over colleagues. A few months later Malmesbury would find his explanation of the intricacies of European diplomacy ‘most minute and clear’,13 and the painter Thomas Lawrence, who saw Pitt at a gathering of Cabinet colleagues, noticed that ‘all seemed to be impressed with an awe of him. At times it appeared like Boys with their Master.’14
While these essential attributes of Pitt’s leadership remained intact, there is no doubt that the intense demands made on his weakened constitution exacerbated his long-standing vices. Wilberforce, who struggled for months to get Pitt to make an Order in Council ending the traffic in slaves to conquered Guiana – this was eventually done in September 1805, along with a prohibition on the importation of slaves to all conquered territories – considered that Pitt’s ‘procrastination … has increased to such a degree as to have become absolutely predominant’.15 His correspondence was seriously neglected, lying around in Downing Street or Walmer unattended to or even unopened. Pitt could not find the time to attend to his friends: one letter from Pretyman begins ‘we have been all greatly mortified and surprised at not hearing from you’, and another from Wellesley in India ‘I have some reason to complain of your silence’; Camden complained to Malmesbury of ‘Pitt’s want of little attentions’.16 When his private secretary William Dacres Adams asked Hester Stanhope to send some papers up from Walmer Castle she found them ‘in great confusion’, and added, ‘I wish you would ask him some day if he would like me to bring any more to town when I come, for at this moment perhaps it is difficult to say what are there he may want.’17 Pitt was simply too busy and now too tired to deal with anything he regarded as trifling, and he was more and more often in bed all morning – although frequently after sitting up all night in the Commons – and unwilling to do paperwork in the evenings. Stamina, adrenalin and willpower had always carried him through the spring and summer, the season of parliamentary sittings, while he held office. By the summer of 1805 he was managing to keep going, but he no longer had the energy or the time to oversee the work of the Cabinet in the manner of his earlier years.
The pressures of both parliamentary politics and international events early in the summer of 1805 were immense, and Pitt’s popularity in the country had declined. William Dacres Adams managed to save one letter from an infuriated member of the public which adopts a tone familiar to politicians of the present day, expressed in the language of that time:
I say Billy,
You infernal Blackguardly Son of a Thief … You Bottle Nosed … Rascal Prime Minister egad my Old Buck you’ll be getting alongside of the Devil soon but he’ll shave your Timbers for you and give you a Broadside and send you – but he will not send you to Windsor to drink
3 bottles of Wine after Dinner … while many a Poor thing cannot get Bread and all through you … and all because you suppose if there is any Riot you can call upon the Volunteers to aid and abet you … you meagre looking hound …18
As further difficult debates about Melville loomed and relations with some of the Addingtonians worsened, Pitt had to focus his mind on a tense military and diplomatic scene. In June, the French squadron which had escaped into the Mediterranean had still not been detected: Nelson had taken twelve ships of the line to the Caribbean in the search for it. The question of where the French warships would reappear or attempt to congregate was a vital one, since any loss or interruption of British command of the Channel would give Napoleon the opportunity to invade England after two years of waiting.
At the same time, Pitt maintained his tireless effort to create a new coalition against France, obstructed by the long delays in communicating across the length of Europe as well as by a good deal of military caution and mercenary haggling on the part of prospective allies. Leveson Gower agreed a preliminary treaty with Russia on 11 April, but it took over a month for news of it to reach Downing Street and it was dependent on the involvement of Austria and Prussia, contained outstanding differences over Malta, and would come into operation only after a Russian effort to achieve peaceful agreement with France. Austria was wavering and demanding heavy subsidies, Sweden likewise, and Prussia was interested in acquiring from the French possession of George III’s Electorate of Hanover – something which Pitt thought it neither right nor possible to concede.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 64