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‘Our new Board of Treasury has just begun to enter on business; and tho’ I do not know that it is of the most entertaining sort, it does not seem likely to be very fatiguing … Lord North will, I hope, in a very little while make room for me in Downing Street, which is the best summer Town House possible.’

WILLIAM PITT, CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER, 16 JULY 1782

‘W. Pitt Secretary of State! and Lord Shelburne Premier! Surely the first cannot be qualified for such an office, and the last is, in my opinion, little to be depended upon.’

LORD MORNINGTON, 12 July 1782¹

THE UNEASY COALITION which had surrounded Rockingham was rent asunder within hours of his death. Fox had been on the brink of resigning, but seeing a chance to acquire genuine control of the government, nominated the Duke of Portland as First Lord of the Treasury. Portland was another traditional Whig aristocrat, now forty-four years old, but more suited to ministerial office and more dedicated to politics than Rockingham had been. He was known for ‘integrity, ability, and firmness’,² but certainly not for oratory or inspiration. Fox’s intention in putting Portland forward was that one less than totally effectual Whig magnate would succeed another, and Fox, while disqualified from being First Lord of the Treasury himself because of the intense animosity between him and the King, would be in charge. George III, however, was no laggard when he saw an opportunity for which he had been waiting. Having failed even to enquire about the health of the dying Rockingham in the preceding weeks, the King wrote to Shelburne immediately on receiving news of his death, offering him the leadership of the government ‘with the fullest political confidence’.³ Oddly enough, the Rockingham Whigs were the grouping most caught by surprise by the death of their leader, probably because physicians had forecast his recovery, while their rivals were immediately ready for action. One of them wrote: ‘All is confusion at present, for as his friends from the declaration of his physicians did not think him in immediate danger the blow is the severer. Nobody at present can say who will be the successor … C. Fox’s idea at five o’clock this afternoon was in case His Majesty would not put the Duke of Richmond at the head of the Treasury to put the Duke of Portland there … they will not hear at this present moment of Shelburne …’⁴

Hear of it or not, the Whigs were presented with a fait accompli. Shelburne was to be First Lord of the Treasury, provided he could assemble a government around him. With Parliament about to break for the summer recess he would then have several months in which to fortify his parliamentary position. A new stage of confusion now reigned over who would serve under Shelburne. Fox consulted his friends about resigning, while the King took the unusual step on 3 July of speaking to each Cabinet Minister individually to explain that Shelburne would head the administration. According to Shelburne, ‘Mr. Fox, spoke to the K. rather in a strong way & seemed surprised to find that His M. dare have any opinion of his own.’⁵ The newspapers of the time demonstrate the bewilderingly rapid changes in the situation. The Morning Chronicle of 2 July printed a leaked list of the potential new government, with William Pitt as Treasurer of the Navy (a position outside the Cabinet and one he would have been unlikely to accept); by 6 July Fox is reported to have resigned and Pitt to be on his way to being a Secretary of State; and on 9 July it was said that Fox would be in the government after all, as Chancellor. In fact, on 4 July Fox had handed in his seals of office to the King and had ‘an angry Conversation’ with Shelburne. He could not bear to serve under the ministerial rival who he believed had spent the last three months undermining him.

While controversy raged around Fox, the undaunted Shelburne set about bringing Pitt into the government. Without Fox in the Cabinet, a powerful House of Commons debater would be needed in the front rank of the administration, and Pitt was one of the few men answering to that description. In addition, Shelburne regarded Pitt as one of his supporters and someone with very similar views to himself. He had tried to include him in the government at a more junior level only three months before. Now the need, and the opening, were clear. Fox himself, in one of his last friendly conversations with Pitt, said to him after Rockingham’s death: ‘They look to you; without you they cannot succeed; with you I know not whether they will or no.’ ‘If’, replied Pitt, ‘they reckon upon me, they may find themselves mistaken.’ In recounting this to others, Fox is said to have added presciently: ‘I believe they do reckon on Pitt, and I believe they will not be mistaken.’⁶

It may be that Pitt had not fully absorbed the possible consequences of Rockingham’s death on the day it happened. Perhaps more likely is that he was still rather in awe of Fox, and was keeping all his options open. Overnight reflection and the possibility of high office soon led him to be tempted. He wrote to his mother on 2 July: ‘With regard to myself, I believe the arrangement may be of a sort in which I may, and probably ought to take a part.’⁷ By 5 July he was writing: ‘Fox has chosen to resign, on no Ground that I can learn but Lord Shelburne being placed at the Treasury … My lot will be either at the Treasury as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or in the Home department as Secretary of State. The arrangement cannot be finally settled till tomorrow or next day; but every thing promises as well as possible in such circumstances. Mr. Townshend certainly makes part of this fresh arrangement, and probably in a more forward post, which is to me an infinite satisfaction.’⁸

This was a reference to Thomas Townshend, the only other Member of the House of Commons likely to occupy one of the top positions in the government. While the negotiations continued about who would occupy exactly which post, all attention remained on Fox, who now began to realise that he had gravely damaged his political career.

As a Secretary of State, Fox had felt seriously undermined by Shelburne, and had differed with him on a major aspect of policy. While he therefore had good grounds for resignation upon Shelburne becoming First Lord, these points were not widely appreciated even by other members of the government. Thus while Burke joined Fox in resigning, the senior members of the government saw no reason not to stay put in the Cabinet. The differences of opinion over the peace negotiations were not public knowledge, and for a politician openly to attack the backstairs influence of the King would have been going too far in the eighteenth century, at least until the great crisis which was still a year and a half away. The fact that Fox negotiated about the possibility of staying in the government for two or three days in the belief that Shelburne might accept his American policy (which he subsequently did) strengthened the perception that there was no good reason why he should not have carried on in the government. His uncle the Duke of Richmond remained in the Cabinet, saying he could ‘see no reason at present for suspecting that the Measures on which we came in will not be pursued, and under this persuasion I think it would be very wrong not to support this Ministry merely because Lord Shelburne is at the Treasury’.⁹

Seeing that he was losing the argument and was believed to have resigned out of personal animosity, Fox sought to explain himself in the Commons on 9 July, but probably made matters worse by the vituperative nature of his attack on Shelburne. He said of the new First Lord and his colleagues that ‘they would abandon fifty principles for the sake of power, and forget fifty promises when they were no longer requisite to their ends … and he expected to see that, in a very short time they would be joined by those men whom that House had precipitated from their seats’.¹⁰

The prediction he was making was that Shelburne would now form an alliance with Lord North. This was particularly unfortunate, since it was exactly what Fox himself would proceed to do the following year. Among those who took exception to the intemperate nature of Fox’s attacks on Shelburne was Pitt. Seated on the government front bench for the first time, although not yet officially in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pitt now had a stake in the success of Shelburne and the isolation of Fox. For all the ostensibly friendly relations between them over the previous years, he seems to have had no hesitation in adding to Fox’s wounds with a thrust of his own rapier:

The Right Honourable Secretary assures us, that it was with the sole view of preventing dissensions in the Cabinet he retired from office. I believe him, because he solemnly declares it; otherwise I should have attributed his resignation to a baulk in struggling for power. If, however, he so much disliked Lord Shelburne’s political principles or opinions, why did he ever consent to act with that nobleman as a colleague? And if he only suspected Lord Shelburne of feeling averse to the measures which he thought necessary to be adopted, it was his duty to have called a Cabinet Council, and there to have ascertained the fact before he took the hasty resolution of throwing up his employment.¹¹

In vain did Fox protest that he had indeed called a meeting of the Cabinet to try to settle differences. The death of Rockingham and the evident anger of Fox at the elevation of Shelburne had obscured the original point of his resignation. By 10 July, as a new writ was moved for an election in Appleby to confirm Pitt’s position in the Commons as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the dust settled on a remarkable ten days in the politics of the eighteenth century. The events of early July 1782 amplified the appearance of Fox as a politician whose brilliance was flawed by rashness and personal enmity. The King could now say that his experience of Fox had ‘finally determined me never to employ him again’.¹² The same events led to Pitt becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer and one of the most senior members of the British government at the age of twenty-three. Above all, the fact that Pitt had accepted office in the same circumstances as those in which Fox had rejected it would have lasting consequences for themselves and the country for the rest of their lives. The two most eloquent Members of the House of Commons had hitherto spoken from the same side of the House. Now they would never do so again.

Pitt’s re-election for Appleby was, of course, a formality. Given Lowther’s influence, he once again had no opponents. Not having to trouble himself with the election, and the House of Commons entering on its recess, he was able to contemplate his new situation with some leisure. The position of Chancellor of the Exchequer was a senior one in the government, but not as powerful as would normally be the case today. Its origins go back to the beginning of the twelfth century, when a chequered table was used for calculating expenditure and receipts. In the thirteenth century, the official responsible for making such calculations became known as the Chancellor of the Exchequer. By Pitt’s time, the Chancellor ranked second in the Treasury after the First Lord, an arrangement still nominally intact in the twenty-first century. Since the position of Prime Minister was far less well developed than today, however (and was not yet an official title), the First Lord was likely to concentrate much more heavily than now on Treasury business, and the Chancellor was not regarded as the Treasury’s departmental head.

Although he was in the Cabinet, Pitt had therefore not acquired extensive administrative power. He had ended up as Chancellor because at least three other people had turned it down in the game of Cabinet musical chairs between 1 and 10 July, and it was clear that the position he had been given had had to fit in with the demands of others. As Chancellor he would have a seat on the Treasury Board, with another seat given to his friend Edward Eliot, but Shelburne intended to be an activist First Lord with a firm grip on Treasury matters. Pitt’s role and power within the government would expand in due course, but only because he was indispensable to it in the House of Commons. Other than Townshend, nominally senior to him as a Secretary of State but a less effective speaker, General Conway and Dundas, who survived yet another change of government as Lord Advocate but remained outside the Cabinet, Pitt was the only spokesman in the House of Commons of a government which did not enjoy a majority. The other members of the Cabinet were all in the Lords: Shelburne himself as First Lord, Lord Grantham as a Secretary of State, Lord Thurlow yet again as Lord Chancellor, Lord Keppel as First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Camden as President of the Council, the Duke of Grafton as Lord Privy Seal and the Duke of Richmond as Master General of the Ordnance.

These grand figures of eighteenth-century politics – great landowners, political veterans or military experts – seemed happy to accept among their number in the Cabinet a young man who, for all his antecedents and abilities, was nevertheless a penniless twenty-three-year-old with no previous experience of office. More than two hundred years later, British Cabinets are no longer dominated by the aristocracy, but it would be impossible in practice for any twenty-three-year-old to achieve Cabinet rank, and would in any case be universally regarded as inappropriate. Sure enough, Pitt would receive some criticism on grounds of his youth, and a great deal more on becoming First Lord of the Treasury only eighteen months later. Yet at this point in history, for such a young person to enjoy such a high rank was regarded as unusual rather than ludicrous.

How was it that opinion in the eighteenth century could accept youthful seniority to an extent inconceivable two centuries later? Part of the explanation for Pitt’s rapid rise lies, of course, in the unusual circumstances of 1782. One group of politicians had left office because of defeat in the war; now another group had left because of arguments over the peace: the system was literally running out of talented material. But more generally, politics in the eighteenth century was more of a younger man’s game. We have already seen that fully a hundred MPs in the early 1780s were under the age of thirty. Ability, family connections, and the sometimes early retirement or death of senior colleagues allowed some of them to rise more rapidly than could be the case in modern politics. Pitt was not alone in reaching senior office in his twenties. Charles James Fox was an MP at the age of nineteen and a Lord of the Admiralty at twenty-four. At the time of his dramatic resignation as a Secretary of State in 1782 he was still only thirty-three. Another leading Whig of the coming years, Charles Grey, became an MP at twenty-two and was a leading opposition spokesman throughout his twenties. On Pitt’s own death in 1806, the new government would include Lord Henry Petty as Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-six. For a politician to hold Cabinet rank or its equivalent in his twenties during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century was therefore uncommon, but not unknown.

Attitudes to age and power were bound to be different from today in a period when immense and absolute power was wielded throughout Europe by monarchs who were themselves very young. Maria Theresa had assumed the throne of Austria and precipitated the War of the Austrian Succession at the age of twenty-three in 1740. Her successor Joseph II, on the throne in the 1780s, had been co-Regent at the age of twenty-four. Of the other great monarchs of Europe at the time Pitt took office as Chancellor, Louis XVI of France had become King at the age of twenty, Frederick the Great King of Prussia at twenty-eight, Catherine the Great Empress of Russia at thirty-three, and Gustavus III King of Sweden at twenty-five. George III himself, albeit without the absolute power of his fellow monarchs, had ascended to the throne at twenty-two. At a time when inheritance was more widely prized, it was easier to believe that the offspring of great leaders could themselves take on the burdens of leadership at an early age. There seems no doubt that Pitt was a beneficiary of that belief, and his early oratorical performances had strengthened its applicability to him.

A final consideration in the eighteenth-century acceptance of youthful success is that the number of young prodigies in many disparate fields was far greater than it is today. Perhaps the greater risk of early death produced an impulse to young brilliance, and certainly the intensive use of private tutors added to it: Alexander Pope wrote his first verses aged twelve, and was famous at twenty-three; Henry Fielding’s plays were being performed in London when he was twenty-one; Adam Smith was a Professor of Logic at twenty-eight; the evangelist George Whitfield was preaching to crowds of tens of thousands in London when aged twenty-five; Isaac Newton had commenced his revolutionary advances in science in the previous century at the age of twenty-five; and Mozart had composed symphonies when eight years old and completed tours of Europe at the ripe old age of fifteen. If a young man seemed brilliant enough he would be accepted, indulged and given patronage, and so it was with William Pitt.

Pitt had never had a spacious residence in London, having become accustomed to staying in his rooms at Lincoln’s Inn or at his brother’s house in Grafton Street. Since Shelburne preferred to stay in his house in Berkeley Square rather than move into the Downing Street house given by King George II in the 1730s to the incumbent First Lord of the Treasury, Pitt was able to look forward to moving in there instead. Lord North had lived there for many years as First Lord of the Treasury, and had been in no hurry to move out upon losing his job. Pitt wrote to his mother on 16 July:

Our new Board of Treasury has just begun to enter on business; and tho’ I do not know that it is of the most entertaining sort, it does not seem likely to be very fatiguing. In all other respects my situation most perfectly satisfies, and more than satisfies me, and I think promises every thing that is agreeable … Lord North will, I hope, in a very little while make room for me in Downing Street, which is the best summer Town House possible.⁸

The residence in question was one of fifteen terraced houses erected in the 1680s along the northern side of Downing Street. They were of poor quality, with inadequate foundations, but one of them was linked in the 1730s with the impressive house behind it, overlooking Horseguards Parade and originally built for the Countess of Lichfield, daughter of Charles II. The house was originally No. 5 Downing Street, and it was only three years before Pitt moved in that it was renumbered No. 10. Little did those who carried out the renumbering suspect that they were changing the vocabulary and symbolism of power in Britain for centuries to come. In August 1782 Pitt moved in. Although his initial occupation of No. 10 would last only eight months, he would go on to live there for by far the greater part of his adult life, and for longer than any other person since. It is not surprising that to begin with he found it a huge place: ‘I expect to be comfortably settled in the course of this week,’ he wrote on 30 July, ‘in a part of my vast, awkward house.’⁹

He benefited from the construction of a new vaulted kitchen and from a series of major repairs in 1766 which resulted in many of the characteristic features recognisable today: the lamp above the door, the lion’s-head doorknocker, and the black-and-white chequerboard floor in the entrance hall. Other alterations, such as the creation of the modem Cabinet Room, would take place later in his tenure, in 1796. Externally, Downing Street at that time still had terraced houses along the other side from No. 10, as the new Foreign Office building was not constructed until the 1860s. It would have looked and seemed much more like a normal street, albeit a well-to-do one, and for Pitt it provided the great advantage of a short walk or ride to the Houses of Parliament.

In the summer of 1782 Britain was still at war, and Ministers found it difficult to get away from London despite the parliamentary recess. Pitt managed to go shooting briefly in September, and described his lifestyle in a letter to his mother:

My dear Mother,

I am much obliged to you for your letter, which I received yesterday on my return from Cheveley, where I had been for two days. A short visit for such a distance; but as my brother was going there, I thought it worth the exertion, and it was very well repaid by a great deal of Air and Exercise in shooting, and the finest weather in the world. The finest part of all indeed is a fine east wind, which, as the fleet is just sailed for Gibraltar, is worth every thing. I assure you I do not forget the lessons I have so long followed, of riding in spite of Business; tho’ I indeed want it less than ever, as I was never so perfectly well. All I have to do now is to be done quite at my own Hours, being merely to prepare for the busy season; which is very necessary to be done, but which at the same time is not a close Confinement. We are labouring at all sorts of official Reform, for which there is a very ample Field, and in which I believe we shall have some success.

Downing Street, Thursday Sept. 12 [1782]¹⁵

Incredibly by today’s standards, Pitt as Chancellor of the Exchequer did not need any dedicated officials of his own. He explained to his mother that his secretary was an army friend of his brother, but since the job had no duties but that of receiving about £400 a year, ‘no profession is unfit for it’. Otherwise, ‘I have not yet any private secretary, nor do I perceive, at least as yet, any occasion for it.’¹⁶

The standards of ministerial conduct were also rather different from those expected today: Pitt’s sister Harriot was soon expecting him to find a job for a friend, and his mother evidently looked to him to rectify the arrears in the payment of her annuity. Pitt showed early on the characteristics which would be with him throughout his ministerial life and would mark him out from other politicians of the time: his sense of propriety, which in this instance made him reluctant to push his mother’s case while Lord Shelburne was dealing with it, and a lack of interest in the lesser forms of patronage which led him to tell his sister that he would do what he could for her friend, but ‘of all the secrets of my office I have in this short time learnt the least about Patronage’.¹⁷ He was always embarrassed when pressed to deal with minor issues by acquaintances or relatives, sending on one such to Shelburne with the note: ‘Mr. Pitt cannot help forwarding this trifling request.’¹⁸

Pitt attended the Treasury Board conscientiously, and worked on two specific schemes of reform which would be put to Parliament the following year. One was to streamline and clean up the operation of the Customs, abolishing sinecure positions granted for life and discontinuing fees on business done. The other measure was intended to regulate public offices, stopping the sale of positions and the abuse of perquisites, which resulted, for example, in the large-scale theft of government stationery. But although Pitt appears to have worked diligently, he did not become an intimate colleague or confidant of the First Lord, Lord Shelburne.

By all accounts, Shelburne was a difficult person to get to know or like. He was clever and hardworking, and intellectually attracted to much the same causes as Pitt, favouring economical and parliamentary reform, peace treaties which emphasised the enhancement of free trade, a liberal commercial settlement with Ireland, and the creation of a new Sinking Fund to repay the national debt. Like Pitt he was a disciple of Adam Smith, who had recently provided the intellectual framework for advocates of free trade. Yet for all his qualities, Shelburne was never generally trusted. He had a sound grasp of diplomacy, trade and finance, but did not understand the psychology of his individual colleagues, who found that he was too remote, too critical, or at other times too given to flattery for his sincerity to be accepted. George Rose, who became Secretary to the Treasury that summer and who would subsequently be one of Pitt’s closest colleagues, described Shelburne in his diaries as ‘sometimes passionate or unreasonable, occasionally betraying suspicions of others entirely groundless, and at other times offensively flattering. I have frequently been puzzled to decide which part of his conduct was least to be tolerated.’¹⁹ Shelburne, he said, had ‘a suspicion of almost anyone he had intercourse with, a want of sincerity, and a habit of listening to every tale-bearer who would give him intelligence or news of any sort’.²⁰ Even worse for the new government, Shelburne’s public character bore out this private assessment. Before the Lords had risen for the summer, Shelburne had claimed that Fox had never raised his differences over policy towards America in the Cabinet. Fox demanded a retraction, and Lord Derby the following day accused Shelburne in the Lords of ‘a direct deviation from the truth’. Shelburne’s pathetic reply was that ‘he made no such assertion; but he had certainly said, that “in his opinion” that was the cause, and the exclusive cause; but he had not asserted it as a fact’.²¹ In August, Christopher Wyvill was very pleased to receive a letter from Shelburne saying that he would ‘deal nobly’ with the reform ideas of the Yorkshire Association, but soon afterwards when Shelburne realised that many Ministers were opposed to parliamentary reform he had to tell Wyvill that his letter was meant ‘as a communication to you personally’,²² and not as a statement of government policy. The impression spread that this First Minister could not be trusted.

Far and away the most important task of the Shelburne government was to conduct the peace negotiations in Paris. Within weeks of taking charge, Shelburne was forced to concede the point on which Fox had tried to insist: the unequivocal acknowledgement of American independence. Previously he had pursued his ideal of the American colonies remaining in some form of association with Great Britain while being granted extensive territory towards the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, some of it provided from Canada. Finally dropping the idea of any such association, he now concluded with the colonies by the end of November the preliminary articles of peace which gave them both the territory they desired and the acknowledgement of their complete independence. The settlement with America allowed Britain to drive a far harder bargain with France and Spain, including on the vital issue of the Spanish claim to Gibraltar. In September the Spaniards had attacked Gibraltar but met with a crushing defeat. Shelburne and the King were inclined to exchange Gibraltar for Puerto Rico or West Florida, but too much blood had now been spilled in the defence of the Rock for British opinion willingly to give it up. This was a view shared by many senior Ministers, probably including Pitt, and Shelburne was only able to maintain unity in the Cabinet by the unusual device of not calling it together for a meeting.

It was in the middle of these disagreements and negotiations, with the preliminaries of peace with America signed on 30 November but the negotiations with the European powers still underway, that Parliament assembled in early December. With both Fox and North, along with their followers, on the opposition benches, the government’s position was precarious, and much would ride on Pitt’s ability to put its case in the Commons. Observers had expected Shelburne to use the recess to bring some of the opposition forces into the government’s ranks and thereby secure a majority. But ‘on the opening of the session, it soon … became evident that no such Ministerial approximation had taken place, and the Administration relied for support upon its own proper strength or ability’.²³ Historians have estimated the strength of the parliamentary factions that Christmas at 140 MPs behind Shelburne (including the ‘King’s friends’), 120 followers of North, and ninety supporters of Fox.²⁴ The government was thus heavily outnumbered unless all the independents came to its aid.

There were several reasons why Shelburne had done nothing to strengthen his government when he had the opportunity. The first was that he did not understand the House of Commons, and had taken some highly speculative and wildly over-optimistic assessments of the numbers from the normally reliable government official John Robinson as facts. He wrote to one colleague that he would have the support of ‘almost all the property of the Country, and that he did not believe his opponents in the H. of Commons would exceed 60’.²⁵ The second reason was that although Shelburne himself could not countenance negotiating once again with Fox, Pitt would under no circumstances serve alongside Lord North, and any alliance with an opposition grouping would therefore make the existing government difficult to hold together. At least, Shelburne assured himself, Fox and North were such long-standing opponents that they could not join forces against him.

The government that met in Parliament that winter was therefore hamstrung, overconfident, and preoccupied with its own differences over the peace negotiations. Within days it was under pressure. On the opening day, Shelburne was asked whether the peace terms with America would stand whatever happened in the European negotiations, to which he replied: ‘This offer is not irrevocable; if France does not agree to peace, the offer ceases.’²⁶ On the following day, when Fox raised this in the Commons, all the Ministers present gave an answer diametrically opposite to that of their leader, with Pitt twice insisting that the agreement with America was unconditional. Shelburne was now in difficulties, with the King asking him to persuade Pitt to recant his ‘mistake’, but with Pitt sticking to his honest reply, declaring that ‘on mature consideration, and he persisted in it … recognition could not be revoked, even if the present treaty should go off’.²⁷

Shelburne was on the brink of a successful negotiation in Paris, but he had embarrassed his government and alienated more of his colleagues. Ministers found that they were shut out of the peace negotiations, and by the end of January 1783 both Keppel and Richmond resigned. The government was thus in grave difficulties as it prepared to present the final outcome of the negotiations to Parliament on 27 January, with a debate arranged for 17 February. In the final articles of peace, the French gained Tobago and St Lucia, but had to hand back all their other conquests. Britain recognised Spanish control of Minorca and the Floridas, but kept Gibraltar. The Dutch recovered Trincomalee in Ceylon, but had to accept free navigation by British ships in the East Indies. Given all the circumstances it was not a dishonourable settlement, and Shelburne was proud of the fact that it laid the foundations for the expansion of trade with both America and the Continent. Sadly for him, the parliamentary position of his government was now so perilous that the merits of his peace proposals were lost amidst the scramble for power of February 1783.

The morale of government supporters was low as both Houses gathered on 17 February to debate the preliminaries of peace. Ministers tabled a modest motion expressing ‘satisfaction’ at a settlement which offered ‘perfect reconciliation and friendship’, but try as he might Pitt could not persuade William Grenville, his cousin and future Foreign Secretary, to second the motion; William Wilberforce agreed to do so instead. Even as Parliament met, the government’s disintegration gathered pace. The Duke of Grafton, upon hearing that Richmond’s seat in the Cabinet would be taken by Pitt’s friend the young Duke of Rutland, without prior consultation with himself, resigned on the spot. Rutland was to have the unusual distinction of turning up to his first Cabinet meeting on the same day that the government resigned. A senior resignation on the day of a vital debate was bad enough, but as government Members entered the Commons they witnessed a spectacle far more ominous: Charles James Fox and Lord North were sitting together on the opposition front bench.

In the preceding days two of the most dedicated enemies in eighteenth-century politics had buried their differences and come together. Fox had actually opened contact with North the previous July, only days after denouncing Shelburne on the grounds that he might do the same. On 14 February North and Fox had met, agreeing to differ on parliamentary reform, with Fox promising to make no further attacks on the influence of the Crown. It seems that he was prepared to pay any price in order to ditch Shelburne and defeat the machinations of the King. If necessary he would denounce the results of the peace negotiations, on which he had himself been working the previous year with no prospect of achieving a better result.

The Ministers had realised in early February that their situation was desperate. Pitt had persuaded Shelburne to let him approach Fox with a view to bringing him back within the government. On 11 February he had called on Fox at his house off St James’s Street. Fox asked whether Shelburne would remain First Lord of the Treasury. Pitt said he would. Fox said that ‘It was impossible for him to belong to any administration of which lord Shelburne was the head.’ Pitt responded that ‘if that was his determination, it would be useless for him to enter into any farther discussion’, as ‘he did not come to betray lord Shelburne’, and left.²⁸ Pretyman observed: ‘This was, I believe, the last time Mr. Pitt was in a private room with Mr. Fox; and from this period may be dated that political hostility, which continued through the remainder of their lives.’²⁹

The only hope now of saving the government was the recruitment of Lord North. But Pitt ‘inflexibly refused’ to sit in the Cabinet with the man who ‘had precipitated Great Britain into disgrace as well as debt’.³⁰ In desperation Dundas approached North anyway at least for support, implying that North might be subject to impeachment if he did not support the government on the peace treaty. Dundas told North’s friend William Adam, ‘If Lord Shelburne resigns, Fox and Pitt may yet come together and dissolve Parliament, and there will be an end of Lord North. I see no means of preventing this but Lord North’s support of the Address.’³¹ This threat may have finally pushed North into doing the exact opposite, teaming up with Fox in order to get back into power. Whatever the underlying motives. Fox and North now joined forces. With the Lords approving the peace proposals by the alarmingly narrow majority of seventy-two to fifty-nine, North and Fox joined to savage them in the Commons. Fox attacked ‘the sacrifice of our chief possessions in America, Asia and Africa’, saying, ‘If ever the situation of a country required a coalition of parties … it is that of the present.’³² In response to incredulous attacks on his ‘unnatural junction’ with Lord North, he said, ‘It is neither wise nor noble to keep up animosities forever … My friendships are perpetual, my enmities are not so.’³³

Pitt had to reply to the debate. It was four o’clock in the morning, and he was tired. In one of his less effective speeches he argued that ‘the clamours excited against the peace were loud in proportion to their injustice; and it was generally the case, that where men complained without cause, they complained without temper’.³⁴ He attacked the ‘unnatural alliance’ of Fox and North, saying it was ‘undoubtedly to be reckoned among the wonders of the age’,³⁵ but made a mistake by also attacking Sheridan, telling him to reserve his talents for the stage. Sheridan rose immediately afterwards to say that ‘If ever I again engage in the composition he alludes to, I may be tempted … to attempt an improvement on one of Ben Jonson’s best characters, the character of the Angry Boy in the Alchymist.’³⁶

Wounded by this devastating retort, Pitt and his colleagues were in any case on the way to defeat. The Commons divided 224 to 208 against them. Pitt wrote from Downing Street to his mother at a quarter to seven in the morning: ‘You are, I hope, enough used to such things in the political world as changes, not to be much surprised at the result of our business at the House of Commons … The two standards of Lord North and Fox produced 224 against us, 208 for us. This I think decisive … we should at least leave the field with honour. I am just going to bed, and I am perfectly well in spite of fatigue.’

The government had received a mortal blow, and before Shelburne could attempt any recovery Fox and North prepared the coup de grâce, tabling a fresh motion for 21 February saying that the concessions to Britain’s enemies were ‘greater than they were entitled to’. This second debate covered much the same ground as the first, but after his lacklustre speech on the Monday, Pitt turned up on the Friday to give a two-and-three-quarter-hour speech that ranks as one of the finest he ever delivered. This was in spite of being taken ill, and ‘actually holding Solomon’s porch door [the door between the Chamber of the Commons and the Members’ Lobby] open with one hand, while vomiting during Fox’s speech to whom he was to reply’.^37* Knowing that the government was doomed and his own reputation rather dimmed from his previous performance, he gathered himself up to denounce the Fox – North coalition and to set out his own attitude to politics and office. After a long justification of the peace proposals he defended Shelburne, saying the debate originated ‘rather in an inclination to force the Earl of Shelburne from the treasury, than in any real conviction that ministers deserve censure for the concessions they have made’.³⁸ He tore into Lord North: ‘Whatever appears dishonourable or inadequate in the peace … is strictly chargeable to the noble lord in the blue ribbon [North], whose profusion of the public’s money, whose notorious temerity and obstinacy in prosecuting the war which originated in his pernicious and oppressive policy, and whose utter incapacity to fill the station he occupied, rendered peace of any description indispensable to the preservation of the state.’³⁹

Pitt raged against the Fox – North alliance: ‘It is the Earl of Shelburne alone whom the movers of this question are desired to wound. This is the object which had raised this storm of faction; this is the aim of the unnatural coalition to which I have alluded. If, however, the baneful alliance is not already formed, if this ill-omened marriage is not already solemnised, I know a just and lawful impediment, and, in the name of the public safety, I here forbid the banns!’

With an eye on the future, Pitt set out his own approach to office, saying that if the government was voted out he would

confidently repair, as to an adequate asylum from all the clamour which interested faction can raise. I was not very eager to come in, and shall have no great reluctance to go out, whenever the public are disposed to dismiss me from their service. It has been the great object of my short official existence to do the duties of my station with all the ability and address in my power, and with a fidelity and honour which should bear me up, and give me confidence, under every possible contingency or disappointment … High situation, and great influence, are desirable objects to most men, and objects which I am not ashamed to pursue, which I am even solicitous to possess, whenever they can be acquired with honour, and retained with dignity. On these respectable conditions, I am not less ambitious to be great and powerful than it is natural for a young man, with such brilliant examples before him [his father], to be. But even these objects I am not beneath relinquishing, the moment my duty to my country, my character, and my friends, renders such a sacrifice indispensable. Then I hope to retire, not disappointed, but triumphant; triumphant in the conviction that my talents, humble as they are, have been earnestly, zealously, and strenuously employed …⁴⁰

When in opposition in the future, he said, he would behave entirely differently from the opposition of that day: ‘I will not mimic the parade of the honourable gentleman [Fox] in avowing an indiscriminate opposition to whoever may be appointed to succeed. I will march out with no warlike, no hostile, no menacing protestations; but hoping the new administration will have no other object in view than the real and substantial welfare of the community at large.’⁴¹ And calling on the memory of his father, he said: ‘My earliest impressions were in favour of the noblest and most disinterested modes of serving the public: these impressions are still dear, and will, I hope, remain for ever dear to my heart: I will cherish them as a legacy infinitely more valuable than the greatest inheritance.’⁴²

Wraxall commented: ‘those who heard Mr. Pitt address the House … cannot easily forget the impression made upon his audience by a speech that might be said to unite all the powers of argument, eloquence, and impassioned declamation’. The speech did much for Pitt’s reputation, and according to one opposition MP, Thomas Pelham, it was ‘unanimously acknowledged … to be the finest speech that ever was made in Parliament’.⁴³ Against the united opposition, however, it could not win the vote. The government again went down to defeat, this time by 207 to 190, and the Shelburne ministry was finished. On 23 February Shelburne announced his resignation, and on the twenty-fourth he delivered it to George III. He asked the King to raise Thomas Townshend to the peerage, to which the King agreed, and Townshend subsequently became Lord Sydney.^* This left William Pitt as the most senior member of the administration in the House of Commons. As the King and the supporters of the government looked in desperation for some final means of preventing the Fox – North coalition from coming to power, Pitt was suddenly the obvious and only person with a chance of leading any alternative government. Shelburne would now suggest to the King that a twenty-three-year-old Member of Parliament be invited to become Prime Minister, and Dundas would work furiously to bring it about. It is testimony to the extraordinary nature of both the situation and the individual that the King would agree to do so, and that the twenty-three-year-old would have the presence of mind to say no.

^*It is possible that this incident occurred on the Monday, in which case it would help to explain Pitt’s inferior speech on that occasion.

^*Townshend earlier toyed with the title of Lord Sydenham, and his decision not to adopt that name was to be of lasting importance to the people of Australia, since a few years later Sydney was to be named after him.