Читать книгу William Pitt the Younger: A Biography - William Hague - Страница 13

‘The enemy carried two advanced redoubts by storm … my situation now becomes very critical; we dare not show a gun to their old batteries, and I expect that their new ones will open tomorrow morning … the safety of the place is therefore so precarious that I cannot recommend that the fleet and army should run great risque in endeavouring to save us.’

LORD CORNWALLIS, 15 OCTOBER 1781

‘Those persons who have for some time conducted the public affairs are no longer His Majesty’s Ministers.’

LORD NORTH, 20 MARCH 1782

MUCH OF THE FIGHTING between British troops and American colonists had been concentrated in and around the northern American states, but at the end of 1779 the British Commander-in-Chief, Sir Henry Clinton, had embarked on a new strategy. By launching a sudden offensive in the Deep South, the British would take the Americans by surprise, encourage what was believed to be a large number of colonists in that area still loyal to the Crown, and do so before further French reinforcements could arrive in the course of 1780. Landing in the Carolinas with 7,600 men early in the new year, Clinton accomplished his initial objectives. With the capture of Charleston after a protracted siege in May, he dealt a heavy blow to the rebels. In the summer he returned to his principal base in New York, leaving four thousand British troops in the south under the command of Lord Cornwallis, a rival general with whom Clinton’s relations were severely strained.

For much of the next year, the American war seemed to have sunk into stalemate. Where fighting took place, the British were generally the technical victors, but this rarely improved their ability to hold on to territory, since lines of communication were so difficult; neither did it bring the war any nearer to a conclusion, as most of the population remained hostile. The operations conducted by Cornwallis in the south were a good example of this. A full year of manoeuvring and skirmishes culminated in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina in March 1781, where Cornwallis inflicted severe losses on the Americans but his own army was left too weak to follow up the advantage. The American General he defeated, Nathanael Greene, commented, ‘We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.’

Complacency and confusion brought the ruin of British strategy in the summer of 1781. Clinton was afraid that the Americans under George Washington and the French forces under Lafayette would combine against him in New York. As a result he was unwilling to send any reinforcements to Cornwallis, and sometimes asked for troops to be sent back. In addition, Clinton believed, on the basis of intelligence reports, that 1781 would be the last year in which France would make any serious effort to help the Americans, and that consequently there was a good deal to be said for simply sitting tight. The summer passed with confusing and bad-tempered messages being sent back and forth between Clinton and Cornwallis: the confusion was compounded not only by Clinton’s uncertain instructions to his subordinate, but also by his messages sometimes arriving in the wrong order.

Clinton’s caution was to lead to catastrophe. Washington and Lafayette were not combining against him in the north-east, but against Cornwallis as he marched north through Virginia, and their decision to do so would bring them final victory in the war. At the beginning of October 1781, as he fortified the town of Yorktown on Chesapeake Bay, Cornwallis had fewer than nine thousand troops to face at least 16,000 French and Americans. Within days his position was desperate, and on 15 October he wrote to Clinton: ‘the safety of the place is therefore so precarious that I cannot recommend that the fleet and army should run great risque in endeavouring to save us’.¹ Clinton now realised the gravity of the position: ‘I see this in so serious a light that I dare not look at it’.

On 17 October Clinton belatedly set sail from New York with a fleet and a small army to relieve the siege of Yorktown. Five days later they arrived at the approaches to Chesapeake Bay, where they came across a small boat carrying three people who told them that the battle was already over. On the very day that the relieving force had left New York, Cornwallis had surrendered. The ships turned round and headed back to New York. The war was lost.²

Across the Atlantic, Members of Parliament had no inkling that the war was approaching its climax. After spending the summer on the Western Circuit Pitt passed some weeks with his mother at Burton Pynsent, where the visitors included Pretyman. A letter to his mother written from Dorset gives us some insight into his life at the time, and a reminder of his dislike of society parties:

Kingston Hall, Oct. 7, 1781.

My Dear Mother

I have delayed writing to you longer than I intended, which I hope is of little Consequence, as Harriot will have brought you all the News I could have sent – an account of that stupid Fête at Fonthill,^* which, take it all together, was, I think, as ill imagined, and as indifferently conducted, as anything of the sort need be … By meeting Lord Shelburne and Lord Camden, We were pressed to make a second Visit to Bowood, which, from the addition of Colonel Barré and Mr. Dunning, was a very pleasant party. – Since that Time I have been waging war, with increasing success, on Pheasants and Partridges – I shall continue Hostilities, I believe, about a week longer, and then prepare for the opening of another sort of campaign in Westminster Hall. Parliament, I am very glad to hear, is not to meet till the 27th of Novr, which will allow me a good deal more leisure than I expected.³

Pitt’s reference to a ‘campaign’ in Westminster Hall meant that he was intending to do further legal work in the courts there that autumn. The visit to Bowood was for a meeting of the small Chathamite party, which continued to maintain a separate identity from the main opposition grouping of Rockingham and Fox, and was now planning for the session ahead. They were not exactly in high spirits about it, as Lord Camden’s letter of 8 November to Thomas Walpole shows: ‘You may be anxious to know whether I shall take any part in the House. I protest I do not know. Our opposition is scattered and runs wild in both houses under no leader. God knows how all this will end.’⁴ Although Cornwallis had surrendered three weeks earlier, news of this had not yet arrived in London. The government circulated its supporters with a routine request to attend the autumn session, and the opposition made little effort to mobilise its supporters, being unaware of any new opportunity.

It was on the morning of Sunday, 25 November 1781, only two days before the opening of Parliament, that the first news of the defeat at Yorktown arrived in London, by means of a messenger sent from Falmouth to Lord George Germain’s house in Pall Mall. Lord George got into a hackney coach, collected two other Ministers, and proceeded to take the news to Lord North at 10 Downing Street. North was said to have reacted ‘as he would have taken a ball in his breast … he opened his arms, exclaiming wildly, as he paced up and down the apartment during a few minutes, “O God! it is all over!” Words which he repeated many times under emotions of the deepest consternation and distress.’⁵

Sure enough, Yorktown would bring the fall of the North government, but it did not do so immediately. The King’s reaction to the news was characteristically unyielding: ‘I trust that neither Lord George Germain nor any member of the Cabinet will suppose that it makes the smallest alteration in those principles of my conduct which have directed me in past time and which will always continue to animate me under every event in the prosecution of the present contest.’⁶

Ministers were more despondent, but played for time by announcing that the war would go on, although offensive operations would no longer be conducted. The opposition, unprepared for the calamity, lacked the numbers to turn out the Ministers, but mobilised its supporters as quickly as it could. The administration beat off the initial opposition onslaught on 12 December by forty-one votes (220 to 179), but with increasing signs of divisions among Ministers about the future of the war.

Pitt was at the forefront of the efforts to expose ministerial disunity and uncertainty, and in these weeks proved himself a formidable parliamentary operator. He rose to speak on the second day of the session, and Wraxall described the scene:

In a speech of extraordinary energy (throughout the course of which he contrived with great ability to blend professions of devoted attachment to the person of the King with the severest accusation of his Ministers), he fully confirmed the high opinion of his judgement and parliamentary talents already entertained throughout the country … He concluded by calling on Ministers to state without circumlocution or deception what were their intentions as to the further prosecution of the American war, and to give some general idea of the manner in which it was henceforward to be pursued. A sort of pause took place when he resumed his seat, while the eyes of all present were directed towards the Treasury bench …⁷

With North and Germain declining to answer Pitt directly, Dundas took to his feet. He insisted that the war would not necessarily be continued, and implied disagreement in the Cabinet, all of which gave Pitt a great debating victory.

On 14 December Pitt was again on his feet denouncing the incapacity of Ministers when he spotted a three-way conversation taking place on the government benches between Lord George Germain, who remained what would now be called a hawk on continuing the war, Lord North, who had become decidedly dovish, and a third Minister, Welbore Ellis. Pitt paused in his speech and, drawing a parallel with the Greek characters of the Trojan War, said: ‘I shall wait till the unanimity is better settled, and until the sage Nestor of the Treasury Bench has brought to an agreement the Agamemnon and the Achilles of the American War.’ In the light of all we know about Pitt’s education, it may be no surprise that he could easily make a spontaneous classical allusion, but it came as an impressive revelation to the House of Commons. In Wraxall’s words once again, ‘its effect was electric, not only on the individuals to whom it was personally directed, but on the whole audience. The two Ministers and the Treasurer of the Navy in some confusion resumed their former attitudes. We cannot sufficiently appreciate or admire the perfect self-possession which, while addressing a crowded House of Commons, could dictate to a youth of little more than two-and-twenty so masterly an allusion. The conclusion of his speech breathed not a little of the spirit of his deceased father, while he seemed to launch the vengeance or the indignation of a suffering and exhausted nation on the heads of Ministers.’⁸

Pitt’s parliamentary reputation was now reaching the stratosphere. Horace Walpole wrote of the same speech: ‘Another remarkable day; the army was to be voted. William Pitt took to pieces Lord North’s pretended declarations and exposed them with the most amazing logical abilities, exceeding all the abilities he had already shown and making men doubt whether he would not prove superior even to Charles Fox.’⁹ Fox nonetheless remained a generous colleague on the opposition benches, referring to Pitt as his ‘Honourable Friend’ and saying, as the MP Sir Samuel Romilly recorded in his memoirs, ‘in an exaggerated strain of panegyric … he could no longer lament the loss of Lord Chatham, for he was again living in his son, with all his virtues and all his talents … He is likely soon to take precedence of all our orators.’¹⁰

By now North had come to the conclusion that peace must be made irrespective of the consequences, and Germain was increasingly isolated in the Cabinet. Even so, the view of the majority of Ministers was not put into effect because they were unwilling to impose their views on an intransigent King. Dundas pressed for the removal of Germain from the Cabinet, along with Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, in order to reunite the government and remove the opposition’s most attractive targets. As ever, North prevaricated. Eventually, when the House returned from its Christmas recess on 21 January 1782, his hand was forced by Dundas and the Paymaster General, Richard Rigby. They declared that they would not attend the House of Commons so long as Germain remained in office, a threat sufficiently potent, given the influence of Dundas over the Scottish seats, to bring down the government.¹¹ By the end of January it was announced that Germain would be leaving the government and going to the Lords as Lord Sackville.

The departure of Germain was not accompanied by any change or clarification of policy, and the opposition, predictably, was now beginning to throw everything in its armoury at Sandwich. North had only staved off the collapse of his administration rather than rescued it. The government was tottering to its doom. The Commons was thronged with Members ready for the annual ‘call of the House’ and the opposition was fully mobilised. Most important of all, those independents and county Members who had supported North began to peel away. Pitt enjoyed himself to the full, speaking regularly against the government, performing the role for which he had been trained in the environment to which he was most suited. Yet even in the thick of these battles he took great care to mark himself out as a different type of politician, free of any base or corruptible motives, and always at a safe distance from the main party groupings.

While joining in the opposition onslaught on Lord Sandwich on 24 January, Pitt said, according to Pretyman, that he ‘supported the motion from motives of a public nature, and from those motives only. He was too young to be supposed capable of entertaining any personal enmity against the earl of Sandwich; and he trusted that when he should be less young it would appear that he had early determined, in the most solemn manner, never to suffer any private or personal consideration whatever to influence his public conduct at any one moment of his life.’¹² Such a statement by a young Member, carrying as it does the implication of a long future career, would in today’s House of Commons be regarded as unbelievably pompous and pretentious. Coming as it did from Pitt, the son of Chatham and already one of the foremost debaters of the House, Members seem to have taken it in their stride. It marks a major difference in attitude between Pitt and his future rival Fox. Pitt’s statement of 24 January is something that Fox, who was often motivated by personal friendships above political consistency, is most unlikely ever to have said. While the two men applied themselves energetically to bringing the government to its knees in the early weeks of 1782, it would have been apparent to a shrewd observer that not only the style but also the content of their speeches was subtly different. Wraxall noted that ‘no man who attentively considered the different spirit which animated their speeches whenever the sovereign became indirectly the subject of their animadversion could fail to remark their widely dissimilar line of conduct’.¹³ Fox, who the previous year had privately described the King as a ‘blockhead’,¹⁴ ‘designated or characterised him [the King], in fact, as under the dominion of resentment, unfeeling, implacable, and only satiated by the continuance of war against his former subjects … more as a tyrant and an oppressor than as … the guardian of a limited constitution’.¹⁵ Pitt, by contrast, ‘repressed any intemperate expressions and personally spared the Sovereign. He separated the King from his weak or evil counsellors; admitted the purity of intention by which he was ever impelled; professed ardent attachment to the person as well as to the family of the reigning Monarch and declared that it would be best manifested by exposing the delusion that had been practised on him.’ In this respect, of course, it was Fox rather than Pitt who was unusual. For an opposition politician to burn his boats so completely with the monarch was clearly foolhardy, but Fox was given to impulses and had decided that in any case he would soon be able to force himself into office. Pitt, still at the start of his career, was playing a longer game, and the content of these speeches was the first sign that he was both more calculating and more consistently ambitious than his future rival. In addition, while Pitt had learnt from his father to be suspicious and wary of the King, he had also acquired at his father’s knee a healthy contempt for the great Whig magnates such as Rockingham, with whom Fox was in close alliance. While Pitt believed that the corrupting influence of the Crown had grown too extensive, he also knew that it would not be consistent with maintaining a balanced constitution to put the King’s most essential powers into the hands of the Whig aristocracy.

These fundamental differences in temperament and outlook would do much to account for the total breach between Pitt and Fox which was now not far away, but for the moment they joined in pouring their verbal firepower into the stricken vessel which the North administration had become. On 27 February, with the county Members voting overwhelmingly against North, the government was defeated by nineteen votes (234 to 215) in a packed House on a motion which called for the end of the war in America. Desperate consideration was given to recruiting opposition figures to the government, including an idea put forward by Dundas of bringing in Lowther, Rutland and Pitt and their friends with offers of honours and junior ministerial posts. It is unlikely that such attempts would have succeeded even had they been made, and in any case the opposition benches were now massing to deliver the final blow. On 8 March a motion of no confidence in the government was defeated by only ten votes, with Pitt acting as a teller for the opposition.^* In excitement he wrote to his mother the following day: ‘I came to town yesterday in time for a very good debate; and a division which, though not victorious, is as encouraging as possible – 216 against 226, on a question leading directly to removal, is a force that can hardly fail.’

Pitt was right. Both sides strove to bring their maximum numbers to bear in the next debate on 15 March. This followed weeks of ‘the most violent exertions on both sides’.¹⁶ Now ‘every artifice of party was used by the Opposition to encourage their friends and to terrify or hold out to popular odium the adherents of Administration. Lists were published and disseminated through the kingdom, containing the names of the members who voted on each question … it produced … a powerful effect on weak or timid individuals.’¹⁷ This time the government clung on by only nine votes (236 to 227). No eighteenth-century government could remain in office if its majority on a question of confidence was in single figures and declining. With a further debate set for 20 March, North prepared to resign. He advised the King to send for Rockingham and Shelburne, to which the King replied: ‘My sentiments of honour will not permit me to send for any of the Leaders of Opposition and personally treat with them.’¹⁸

Despite the King’s protestations, North knew his support was sliding further and that he had no option. On the afternoon of 20 March he arrived at the House of Commons and attempted to speak, but was drowned out by a furious opposition who thought he was trying to prevent the debate from taking place, and insisted that the opposition spokesman Lord Surrey should have the floor. After extensive points of order, in which Pitt once again took part, North was eventually given the floor, assuring the House that ‘those persons who had for some time conducted the public affairs, were no longer His Majesty’s Ministers. They were no longer to be considered as men holding the reins of government and transacting measures of state, but merely remaining to do their official duty, till other Ministers were appointed to take their places.’¹⁹

As ever, North retained his sense of humour. Members had anticipated a long sitting, and huddled around the entrance of the House of Commons waiting for their carriages to be brought as the snow fell around them. Lord North had his carriage waiting. ‘Good night, gentlemen,’ he said to them cheerily, ‘you see what it is to be in the secret.’ At last he had been able to give up the burden he had wanted to shed for so long. For George III, however, the worst of his nightmares had come true.

Defeat at the hands of the American colonists was to have a massive impact on the politics, society and trade of Great Britain. The prime focus of Britain’s empire would now move to the Caribbean, and India would play an ever larger role in its affairs. Relations with the new United States of America would centre on trade, despite the contribution of trading disagreements to the outbreak of war in the first place, with a vast expansion of commerce between Britain and its former colonies which would be crucial to British success in almost all subsequent major wars. In the immediate aftermath of the war, a wounded Britain would pursue a relatively cautious and risk-averse foreign policy. And in those same short years, the seeds of British hostility to slavery, planted by promises of freedom made to slaves during the fighting in America, would grow rapidly into British leadership of the efforts to abolish the slave trade.

In domestic politics, dissatisfaction with the pursuit and handling of the war would bring to a high pitch the demand for constitutional change by means of parliamentary reform, although it would not be many years before a conservative reaction set in. Pitt would make the campaign for such reform his personal crusade for some three years after the North government fell. Equally important, the war had revealed that the British state was ill-equipped to deal with the growing military, political and financial complexity of major conflict. A Cabinet system which relied on the separate relationships of individual Ministers with the King, and had no member who would actually admit to the title of Prime Minister and freely interfere with other departments, was no way to produce a consistent or effective strategy in times of crisis. A figure such as Chatham could dominate his colleagues and give aggressive direction to warmaking at the height of the Seven Years’ War, but a more diffident figure such as Lord North provided no central point of coordination or control.

Beneath Cabinet level, the finance and administration of government departments were certainly inefficient and corrupt, moving even Lord North himself in 1780 to set up a statutory commission to examine the public accounts. The stage was set for far-reaching reform of the practices of British government by any future set of Ministers who had the confidence and the power systematically to set about it.

The fall of Lord North was not to produce such a government. It was, of course, abundantly clear that the King would now have to accept into ministerial posts the politicians who had hitherto made up the opposition and who for years had denounced the war, the North administration, and often by implication the King himself. George III’s repugnance at promoting such people was extreme, and he had rejected all previous attempts to recruit the Rockingham Whigs to office because of the demands they presented. Unsurprisingly, these demands had included recognition of American independence, the appointment of large numbers of opposition politicians to positions in the government and the Royal Household, and serious economical reform. The King had no regard for Rockingham, along with the deepest possible dislike of Fox, and felt utterly humiliated by the prospect of having to treat with them. He churlishly accused Lord North of deserting him, privately threatened to abdicate, and drew up a message to Parliament which referred to his leaving the country ‘for ever’.²⁰

Evidently reflecting that there were worse things than being King of England even without its American colonies, George in the end allowed the intransigent side of his character to be tempered by the manipulative abilities he also possessed. While the Rockingham Whigs exulted in Westminster about the spoils of office which would now be coming their way, and Fox openly and regularly referred to the King as ‘Satan’,²¹ George resolved to make their arrival in government as uncomfortable as possible. First, he refused to have any direct negotiations with the Rockinghams, and instead conducted negotiations through the smaller of the opposition groupings led by Shelburne. Secondly, he denied the Rockinghams any general ability to create new peerages and honours, while showering honours upon the Shelburnites: John Dunning, who conducted the initial negotiations, became Lord Ashburton with a pension of £4,000 a year for life; Colonel Barré became Treasurer of the Navy with a life pension of £3,200 a year – to give only the two most obvious examples. As a result ‘inextinguishable jealousies arose, and mutual distrust manifested itself on every occasion’.²² Thirdly, he insisted on retaining the Lord Chancellor, Lord Thurlow, from the previous administration when the new Cabinet was formed. Dundas also continued in office as Lord Advocate.

It seems that initially the King even asked Shelburne rather than Rockingham to head the new government, but with Rockingham having far greater numbers in the Commons, Shelburne declined to do so. The Cabinet that was thus formed included Rockingham as First Lord of the Treasury, Shelburne and Charles James Fox as Secretaries of State (Fox responsible for foreign affairs and Shelburne for home and colonial affairs), Pitt’s friend Lord Camden as President of the Council, and Lord John Cavendish as Chancellor of the Exchequer. While the King had to accept a complete reversal of policy, in that all these Ministers sought peace with America, he had succeeded in creating a divided administration. As Lord John Russell later observed: ‘Two parties were made in the Ministry, one of which looked to the favour of the Court, not to the support of the country … The composition of the Rockingham Ministry was a masterpiece of royal skill.’²³

When the House of Commons met again on 8 April 1782, the leading figures sat on the side opposite that to which they had grown accustomed for many years. In the eighteenth century this meant not only a change of position but a change of costume – since Ministers wore court dress – and Wraxall speaks of astonishment at them ‘emerging from their obscure lodgings, or coming down from Brooks’s … now ornamented with the appendages of full dress, or returning from Court decorated with swords, lace, and hair powder … some degree of ridicule attached to this sudden metamorphosis, which afforded subject for conversation, no less than food for mirth’.

Pitt would now sit on the government, rather than the opposition, side of the House, but he was not included among the Ministers who took their place on the front bench in court dress. In early March he had made in the Commons what seemed to many a rash and presumptuous declaration: ‘For myself, I could not expect to form part of a new administration; but were my doing so more within my reach, I feel myself bound to declare that I never would accept a subordinate situation.’²⁴ At the age of twenty-two he was declaring, in other words, that he would serve as a senior Minister in the Cabinet or not serve in a new government at all. Many commentators found this too much to take, even from the son of Chatham who had become an accomplished debater. Horace Walpole described it as ‘so arrogant a declaration from a boy who had gained no experience from, nor ever enjoyed even the lowest post in any office, and who for half a dozen orations, extraordinary indeed, but no evidence of capacity for business, presumed himself fit for command, proved that he was a boy, and a very ambitious and a very vain one. The moment he sat down he was aware of his folly, and said he could bite his tongue out for what he had uttered.’²⁵

It has indeed been claimed that as soon as Pitt made this statement he thought he had gone too far, and consulted Admiral Keppel, who was sitting near him, for advice about making a clarification. On the other hand, it would have been wholly uncharacteristic of him to make a major statement of his own ambitions without thinking about it carefully in advance, and we have the assurance of Pretyman that he had decided to make this statement some days before. We cannot know for sure who was right, or whether Pitt was responding to rumours or negotiations and trying to elevate himself in the pecking order of a new administration. We can judge, however, that his statement is wholly consistent with his view of himself and his approach to politics. He already had immense confidence in his own abilities, but even more important he was determined to succeed on the basis of those abilities and not through attachment to a large party or a more senior political figure. He could only preserve the independence and incorruptibility for which he wished to be known by either being in an office so senior that he had freedom of action, or being out of office where he could say what he wished. Office in a more junior position would have turned him into the sort of politician he did not want to be, dependent on the patronage of others and having to accept a party line which he would have no role in determining. It seems likely, therefore, that his statement of March 1782, however grating on many of his listeners, was absolutely deliberate. Certainly his resolve in sticking to it was to be put to an immediate test. Shelburne put to Rockingham the case for giving Pitt a senior position, but it does not seem to have been high among his priorities, and he had already secured a disproportionate share of other positions. Instead, Pitt was offered the Vice-Treasurership of Ireland, outside the Cabinet but the position his father had first held in government, and one which carried a very generous salary of £5,000 a year, probably nine or ten times his income at the time. He refused it. When the elder Pitt had accepted this office he was frustrated from more than a decade in opposition; the younger Pitt was prepared to wait.

Pitt was not a Minister in the new government, but he now had the opportunity to pursue an objective dear to the hearts of many who had opposed the former government: parliamentary reform. The movement of population over the centuries meant that by the late eighteenth century some large towns had no representation in Parliament of their own, while other places with almost no people at all were represented by two Members. The war in America had provided fertile ground for the belief that reform was essential to the good governing of the country, since it was assumed that MPs in closer touch with a wider range of people would have been less inclined to tolerate its continuation. Associations were formed around the country to campaign for the redistribution of parliamentary representation, and variously calling for the abolition of the most rotten boroughs, an increase in the number of county Members, and triennial rather than septennial Parliaments. The most prominent of these were the Westminster Association, with which Fox had associated himself as he adopted a more populist position on these issues in 1780; the Kent Association, of which Pitt’s brother-in-law Lord Mahon was a leading light; and the Yorkshire Association, led by the Reverend Christopher Wyvill of Constable Burton in North Yorkshire. Wyvill and his Yorkshire colleagues were to prove formidable campaigners, all the more so since they resisted more radical demands such as a wide extension of the franchise, were prepared to compromise on the issue of shorter Parliaments, and included the solid body of the country gentry of one of the major county seats of the land. Pitt’s many attempts to introduce parliamentary reform from 1782 onwards were heavily influenced by Wyvill, although nominally he was more closely attached to the Kent Association, to whose committee he had been elected in October 1780.

With the formation of a government more friendly to reform, the Duke of Richmond, now a member of the Cabinet as Master General of the Ordnance, hosted a meeting of the leading reformers in late April to consider how to seek parliamentary approval for reform as rapidly as possible. It was decided that Pitt had the necessary ability and respect in the Commons to lead the case for reform. He gave notice in the House that on Tuesday, 7 May he would ‘move for a Select Committee to take into consideration the present state of the representation of the Commons of England’.²⁶

It was necessary caution on behalf of Pitt and the reformers to call for a Select Committee inquiry rather than to present a specific programme of reform. For all the fact that the new administration was sympathetic to the idea in principle, it would still be a tall order to get Members of Parliament to vote for changes which would do many of them out of their seats, and even Ministers themselves were divided. With the exception of Fox, the prime interest of the Rockingham Whigs had always been in economical reform, with the objective of diminishing the influence of the Crown at the expense of the Whig aristocracy, not in parliamentary reform, which had the objective of providing a fairer basis for the system of power which the aristocracy operated. Rockingham himself was not an enthusiast, and Burke was frankly opposed, although Fox appears to have persuaded him to absent himself on the occasion of Pitt’s speech.

The House was crowded on 7 May, not so much with Members as with a huge crowd attempting to enter the Public Gallery, which had to be locked after an hour. Pitt set out the case for reform in a speech lasting an hour and a half. First, he praised the new government: ‘the ministers had declared their virtuous resolution of supporting the king’s government by means more honourable, as well as more permanent, than corruption; and the nation had confidence in the declarations of men who had so invariably proved themselves the friends of freedom, and the animated supporters of an equal and fair system of representation’.²⁷ He went on to lament what had happened to the British constitution:

That beautiful frame of government, which had made us the envy and admiration of mankind, in which the people were entitled to hold so distinguished a share, was so far dwindled and departed from its original purity, as that the representatives ceased, in a great degree, to be connected with the people. It was the essence of the constitution, that the people had a share in the government by the means of representation; and its excellence and permanency was calculated to consist in this representation, having been designed to be equal, easy, practicable, and complete. When it ceased to be so; when the representative ceased to have connection with the constituent, and was either dependent on the crown or the aristocracy, there was a defect in the frame of representation, and it was not innovation, but recovery of constitution, to repair it.²⁸

This was very much the spirit in which Pitt, Wyvill and the moderate reformers campaigned. They were not seeking a radical change to bring in a wider measure of what we now regard as a genuine democracy, nor were they consciously starting down any road which would lead 150 years later to universal suffrage and more or less equal representation. They simply wished to rectify the imbalances which had arisen over time so that parliamentary representation recovered some of its respectability, authority and independence. There were boroughs, Pitt claimed,

which had now in fact no actual existence, but in the return of members to the house. They had no existence in property, in population, in trade, in weight … Another set of boroughs and towns, in the lofty possession of English freedom, claimed to themselves the right of bringing their votes to market. They had no other market, no other property, and no other stake in the country, than the property and price which they procured for their votes. Such boroughs were the most dangerous of all others. So far from consulting the interests of their country in the choice which they made, they held out their borough to the best purchaser, and in fact, they belonged more to the Nabob of Arcot than they did to the people of Great-Britain … Such boroughs … were sources of corruption; they gave rise to an inundation of corrupt wealth, and corrupt members, who had no regard nor connection, either for or with the people of this kingdom.²⁹

Pitt attacked the argument that the constitution could not be changed, saying he was afraid ‘that the reverence and the enthusiasm which Englishmen entertained for the constitution, would, if not suddenly prevented, be the means of destroying it; for such was their enthusiasm, that they would not even remove its defects, for fear of touching its beauty’.³⁰

Pitt’s motion was supported by the veteran Alderman Sawbridge and by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the famous Covent Garden playwright who was also a new MP, but opposed by his own cousin Thomas Pitt of Bocconoc. Appropriately enough for someone who elected himself as Member of Old Sarum, Thomas pointed out that equality of representation never was nor could have been the basis on which their ancestors meant to erect the liberties of England, or they would never have allowed ‘the little county of Rutland to send as many members to that assembly as Yorkshire or Devon’.³¹

This was to be the majority view. When the ‘orders of the day’ were moved to cut short further debate on Pitt’s motion, 161 voted aye, and Pitt and Fox led 141 in voting no. Pitt was disappointed, writing to his mother: ‘The failure of my motion was rather unexpected, and might perhaps have been prevented if so strong an Opposition had been foreseen. I believe it is a very small party that is heartily for it,’³² but other reformers took heart from the narrow defeat, certainly not suspecting that this was the closest they would come to parliamentary reform for half a century. A further meeting of reformers was held at the Thatched House Tavern in St James’s Street on 18 May, calling for a new wave of petitions from across the country, and Pitt and Wyvill resolved to continue to work closely together.

Even as this meeting took place the obstacles to meaningful reform were becoming ever clearer. On 17 May Alderman Sawbridge moved a motion for shortening the duration of parliaments, still set at seven years. He was supported by both Pitt and Fox, but Burke could no longer restrain himself. As Sheridan later described it to a friend: ‘On Friday last Burke acquitted himself with the most magnanimous indiscretion, attacked W. Pitt in a scream of passion, and swore Parliament was and always had been precisely what it ought to be, and that all people who thought of reforming it wanted to overturn the Constitution.’³³ If Pitt needed any further reminding that the Rockingham Whigs did not share his attachment to genuine reform, he certainly received it the following month when a further plank of reform was opposed by Fox himself. On 19 June Lord Mahon introduced a Bill for combating bribery at elections, only to find that Fox opposed it and succeeded in removing many of the proposed penalties in it as being too severe. Mahon withdrew the Bill in disgust. ‘This was,’ Pretyman tells us, ‘I believe, the first question upon which they [Pitt and Fox] happened to differ before any separation took place between them. I must, however, remark that although they had hitherto acted together in Parliament, there had been no intimacy or confidential intercourse between them.’

Fox had always been courteous and generous to Pitt. But by the end of June 1782, with Fox and the new government approaching a major crisis, Pitt owed them nothing.

Dundas was always a perceptive observer of events. ‘Unless they change their idea of government, and personal behaviour to the King,’ he said of the new government, in which he continued as Lord Advocate, ‘I do not believe they will remain three months.’³⁴ He would turn out to be exactly correct, and however arrogant Pitt’s refusal to hold a junior office may have seemed, he would lose nothing from standing apart from the intense feuding and personal enmities which characterised the short-lived Rockingham administration.

Rockingham himself had two great strengths: he was consistent and principled in his Whig views, and among the Whigs he was foremost in wealth and connections. From his vast mansion of Wentworth Woodhouse^* his influence upon the rest of the landed Whig aristocracy radiated across the land. These strengths had helped him to maintain the Whigs as a forceful opposition party through the 1770s and to hold them in readiness as an alternative government. But once he was in office as First Lord of the Treasury they were more than outweighed by his weaknesses: inexperience in government, timidity in arbitrating between fractious Ministers, and a bodily constitution which was not up to the strain. He was indecisive and forgetful, better known for his interests in racing, farming and horse-breeding than for having strong opinions about most political issues. George III thought that he ‘never appeared to him to have a decided opinion about things’.³⁵ This was a government held together by its leader rather than driven forward by him.

The single most important change in British politics brought about under the Rockingham government was the legislative independence granted to the Irish Parliament in May 1782, but this was in no way a premeditated act. Irish opinion was united behind the fiery politician Henry Grattan, who seized the chance to demand home rule provided by the coincidence of a new government in London, military defeat overseas, and the existence of 100,000 armed Irish Volunteers who had been set up to defend the country in the absence of British troops. While the new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Portland, pleaded in vain for time, Grattan made the most of his advantage, backed by the threat of force, and the Ministers gave in. For the moment the issue was settled, but time would show that the discontents of Ireland had been appeased but not resolved.

The change of government meant peace negotiations to end the war with America, and separately with France, Spain and Holland, would now begin. Major operations on the American mainland may have been over, but Britain and the Continental powers continued to battle for a stronger negotiating position. The Spanish were determined to retake Gibraltar, ceded to Britain in 1713, and in the West Indies the British and French fleets manoeuvred among their colonies. From there in late May came news of a devastating British victory. On 12 April, only three weeks after Lord North had left office in the shadow of military humiliation, Admiral Rodney decisively defeated the French fleet near Dominica, and in doing so restored Britain’s naval superiority and saved the West Indian colonies. A nation that had begun to despair of recovering its domination of the oceans now rejoiced: ‘The capital and the country were thrown into a delirium of joy.’³⁶

While Rodney’s great victory elated the country, it only served to exacerbate the differences over the peace negotiations between the two Secretaries of State, Fox and Shelburne. The conflict between these two men was at the heart of the intense rivalries which would pull the government apart. Shelburne had been flattered by George III, who had clearly wanted him to be the head of the government if only Fox and the other Rockingham Whigs would allow it. Fox, for his part, had no shortage of reasons for distrusting Shelburne, both personal and political. For one thing they were cousins, and ‘an old prejudice’ between the two branches of the family had remained active for decades.³⁷ Probably still more offensive to Fox was that after all the work he had done and the speeches he had given to turn out the North ministry, it was Shelburne who had acquired the lion’s share of the spoils and could often outvote him in the Cabinet. Added to this poisonous mixture was an issue of real substance between them: Fox believed that the independence of America should be granted unconditionally, while Shelburne felt that it should be contingent on the satisfactory conclusion of a treaty with America’s European allies. Since Shelburne, as Home and Colonial Secretary, had responsibility for the negotiations with America, while Fox, as Foreign Secretary, had responsibility for the negotiations with European enemies, there were two Ministers with two different policies responsible for the same interrelated set of negotiations. The composition of the Rockingham ministry thus provided the perfect recipe for mistrust, bitterness and eventual chaos.

The Cabinet had agreed to the unconditional independence of America, but Shelburne, possibly emboldened by Rodney’s victory, continued to pursue his own plans and sent his own representative, Richard Oswald, to the negotiations in Paris behind Fox’s back. Fox was enraged by ‘this duplicity of conduct’,³⁸ believing that Shelburne was deliberately undermining the negotiations or seeking to bring down the government in concert with the King. By the end of June Fox was trying to bring matters to a head in the Cabinet and to have the policy decided one way or the other, even if it meant the ‘absolute rupture’³⁹ of the government. The feud had reached its peak, but the climactic meetings of the Rockingham Cabinet were to take place without Rockingham himself. At the beginning of June, according to Wraxall, ‘when he rose to address the House [of Lords], he declared that he felt himself so severely indisposed as to be almost incapable of uttering a word … “The disorder universally prevalent afflicts me so violently, that at times I am not completely in possession of myself.”’⁴⁰ It is hard to imagine a modern Prime Minister making such a disarmingly honest admission. In any event, he took to his bed and was still there as his Ministers squared up to each other at the end of June.

Pitt, in the meantime, occasionally busied himself on the back benches while planning a summer on the Western Circuit to improve his finances. He was also anxious that his mother’s annuity, long since in arrears, should be paid by the government. On 27 June he wrote from Lincoln’s Inn to his mother:

My brother tells me he has mentioned to you that Ld Rockingham is ill, wch is unfortunately in the way of any thing more at present; but Ld S[helburne]. told me yesterday that Ld R. had expressed himself as wishing to do something that might give you a security for the future. You are very good in thinking of communicating any share of what I am sure your own occasions may demand entire; mine are not so pressing but that they will wait very tolerably at present; and I shall expect that Westminster Hall will in good time supply all that is wanting.

The Circuit begins on Tuesday sen’night.^* I hope to call in my way westward, if not certainly in my return; and I shall undoubtedly be able to make some stay after it is over, tho’ my plan for the remainder of the summer is not quite settled … Lord Rockingham’s very precarious state occasions a great deal of suspense, and if it ends ill, may, I am afraid, produce a great deal of confusion …⁴¹

The plans Pitt was making to visit his mother and join the Western Circuit would be abandoned only a few days after he wrote this letter. At a Cabinet meeting on 30 June to discuss the peace negotiations Fox was outvoted. If he had resigned as Secretary of State that day it would have been seen as a resignation on a matter of principle. By delaying in order to consult his friends it was to become seen as a matter of pique. For at 11.30 in the morning of 1 July 1782 Charles Watson-Wentworth, second Marquis of Rockingham and First Lord of the Treasury, breathed his last. The one man who had held the government together was gone, and his body was scarcely cold before the battle over his successor was joined in earnest.

^*The seat of William Beckford, the rich, eccentric and flamboyant son of the late William Beckford, who had been Lord Mayor of London and an ally of Chatham.

^*In the House of Commons, then as now, the votes are counted by two Members from each side who act as ‘tellers’ and who are not themselves included in the voting figures.

^*Wentworth Woodhouse, near Rotherham, remains to this day the largest private house in Britain.

^*The term ‘se’nnight’, meaning one week, was still in common usage at this time.