Читать книгу William Pitt the Younger: A Biography - William Hague - Страница 15
7 Brief Exuberance
Оглавление‘I am clear Mr. Pitt means to play false.’
KING GEORGE III, MARCH 1783
‘I had thought, from the first formation of the coalition, that Mr. Pitt was extinguished nearly for life as a politician, and wished to see him at the Bar again, under a conviction that his transcendent abilities would soon raise him to great eminence in his profession.’
GEORGE ROSE, SECRETARY TO THE TREASURY, IN 1783
THE DEFEAT OF SHELBURNE, and the happy translation of Townshend to the Upper House as Lord Sydney, meant that there was only one person left who could both hold his own in Parliament and did not belong to the Fox—North alliance. Twenty-three he might be, but after his speech on that Friday night, 21 February 1783, his reputation for ability and integrity stood high. It did not take long for those who had burnt their boats with Fox and North to alight on Pitt as the only available life-raft. Shelburne raised the idea on the Sunday, and on the Monday morning, 24 February, Dundas wrote to Shelburne:
My Dear Lord,
I cannot refrain from troubling your Lordship with a few lines upon a subject of the most serious importance; and the particular ground of my addressing you arises from the words which dropped from you yesterday morning relative to Mr. Pitt. I did not pay much attention to them when you uttered them, but I have revolved them seriously and candidly in the course of the day yesterday, and I completely satisfied my own mind that, young as he is, the appointment of him to the Government of the country is the only step that can be taken in the present moment attended with the most distant chance of rearing up the Government of this country … He is perfectly new ground, against whom no opposition can arise except what may be expected from the desperation of that lately allied faction, which I am satisfied will likewise gradually decline till at last it will consist only of that insolent aristocratical band who assume to themselves the prerogative of appointing the rulers of the kingdom. I repeat it again that I am certain the experiment will succeed if His Majesty will try it.1
From Pitt’s first arrival in Parliament Henry Dundas had admired his abilities. In declaring himself an enthusiast for Pitt to lead the government, Dundas was opening a quarter of a century of close friendship and steadfast allegiance. Forty-one years old, Dundas had been trained to drink and to argue at the Scottish Bar. Many of Westminster’s aristocrats would have found him coarse or dogmatic, but he always showed courage, a readiness for rough debate, fierce loyalty, and a gift for building a political machine based on patronage and rewards. His objective was the exercise of power rather than to take the leading role for himself. It would turn out that he and Pitt could find in each other precisely the qualities each of them needed in their ally: Pitt could supply oratory, intellect and integrity, while Dundas could bring cunning, solid votes and the arts of the political fixer.
The leading members of the defeated government looked around at each other and came to the same conclusion as Dundas. The only chance of frustrating the opposition was to present as head of the government someone relatively new, completely untainted, and possessed of an ability to win over the House of Commons. Extraordinary though it might be on grounds of age, they could muster no alternative. Both Shelburne and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Thurlow, concurred with the advice of Dundas and put it to the King. George III, who had determined with regard to Fox that he ‘would never employ him again’, was ready for anything provided it meant that Fox would not be returning to power. On the afternoon of Monday, 24 February 1783 William Pitt was summoned to the King and, three months before his twenty-fourth birthday, became by far the youngest person before or since to be invited to accept the office of First Lord of the Treasury and, in effect, Prime Minister.
The temptation must have been great. He was young, but he had known no other life, and had prepared from infancy to lead the political life of the nation. Even if he tried and failed, he would have held the highest office in the land, acquired its status, and could for the rest of his life be an alternative to whoever held it. As Horace Walpole put it: ‘The offer was no doubt dazzling, and so far worth accepting, as to obtain the chariot for a day, was glorious at his age, and to one so ambitious. It was placing him at the head of a party, – a rank which he must always preserve, in or out of place.’2
Pitt also knew that the government had been defeated by only seventeen votes three nights before, and that opposition MPs had been fired up with the objective of removing Lord Shelburne rather than himself. He was no doubt still savouring the adrenalin of his triumphant speech of defiance. All the indications are that his first thought was that he could do it.
At 6.30 p.m. George III wrote to Thurlow that he had made the offer to Pitt, who had ‘received it with a spirit and inclination that makes me think he will not decline though he has very properly desired time to weigh so momentous a step’.3 The King was optimistic that he would be rescued from disaster; Pitt had clearly given him cause to think that was likely. But tempted though he was, Pitt was not dazzled. Several times he had seen his father reject the invitation of the King to lead a government, and once he had watched him accept it and then regret it. It appears that over the following hours he weighed the options coolly. On the one hand, his Sovereign and ministerial colleagues wished him to accept the challenge. Many Members of Parliament concurred, despairing of the whole previous generation of political leaders – ‘Of all the public characters of this devoted country (Mr. Pitt alone excepted) there is not a man who has, or who deserves, the nation’s confidence,’ wrote Sir Samuel Romilly the following month.4 The object on offer was also unmistakably his principal ambition. Yet on the other hand, he had watched the King forsake his father, and owed him little; and many of the colleagues urging him on were entering the evening of their political careers, while his was at its dawn. It would do nothing for his future to please his fellow Ministers but look ridiculous by being First Lord of the Treasury for a week. In the uneasy constitutional balance of the eighteenth century, the King could nominate whom he wished to lead a government, but the House of Commons could reject his choice.
Pitt’s decision therefore came down to a matter of arithmetic, meticulously analysed and coldly assessed. Long into the night he sat with Dundas, going down the list of Members of Parliament and assessing their attitudes. It is not known how much port might have assisted the initial calculations, but it seems they were not wholly unfavourable. The following morning Dundas wrote to his brother in Edinburgh, telling him of the secret while urging him to keep it:
I was with him [Pitt] all last night, and Mr. Rigby and I have been with him all this morning, going through the state of the House of Commons. I have little doubt that he will announce himself Minister to-morrow, and I have as little doubt that the effects of it upon the House of Commons will be instantly felt. Not a human being has a suspicion of the plan, except those in the immediate confidence of it. It will create an universal consternation in the allied camp the moment it is known. Still, secrecy!5
At 9.30 that morning Pitt wrote to his mother, evidently wishing she was there to assist him.
My Dear Mother,
I wished more than I can express to see you yesterday. I will, if possible, find a moment today to tell you the state of things and learn your opinion. In the meantime the substance is, that our friends, almost universally, are eager for our going on, only without Lord Shelburne, and are sanguine in the expectation of success – Lord Shelburne himself most warmly so. The King, when I went in yesterday, pressed me in the strongest manner to take Lord Shelburne’s place, and insisted on my not declining it till I had taken time to consider. You see the importance of the decision I must speedily make. I feel all the difficulties of the undertaking and am by no means in love with the object. On the other hand, I think myself bound not to desert a system in which I am engaged, if probable means can be shown of carrying it on with credit. On this general state of it I should wish anxiously to know what is the inclination of your mind. I must endeavour to estimate more particularly the probable issue by talking with those who know most of the opinions of men in detail. The great article to decide by seems that of numbers.
Your ever dutiful and affectionate W Pitt
The secret did not last long, and by the evening of the twenty-fifth rumours of Pitt accepting office were sweeping Westminster. For two more days he weighed the matter, perhaps waiting for parliamentary support to be manifested once the news was well known. In the absence of that ‘he seemed averse, thinking he will not be supported in the House of Commons’.6 By the evening of the twenty-sixth, Pitt was telling the King that only the ‘moral certainty’ of a majority in the Commons would satisfy him that he could become First Lord. Dundas made a last effort to persuade him, assuring him that Lord North could be persuaded to desist from active opposition, thus tipping the balance. He believed Pitt was now persuaded. But just as the entreaties of the unfortunate Dundas had inadvertently helped push North into his pact with Fox, so his pleading with Pitt helped to highlight the crux of the decision, with the opposite effect to that intended. On the afternoon of Thursday, 27 February Pitt wrote to Dundas that what he had told him that morning ‘seemed to remove all doubt of my finding a majority in Parliament, and on the first view of it, joined to my sincere desire not to decline the call of my friends, removed at the same time my objections to accepting the Treasury’. But he said he had now reconsidered matters and his final decision was ‘directly contrary’, for this reason: ‘I see that the main and almost only ground of reliance would be this, that Lord North and his friends would not continue in a combination to oppose … Such a reliance is too precarious to act on. But above all, in point of honour to my own feelings, I cannot form an administration trusting to the hope that it will be supported, or even will not be opposed, by Lord North, whatever the influence may be that determines his conduct.’ For all Pitt’s earlier insistence that personal factors would never sway him, at no time could he bring himself to make any concession to cooperation with Lord North. This, he said, had ‘unalterably determined’ him to decline the King’s invitation. ‘I have to beg’, he finished by writing to a distraught Dundas, ‘a thousand pardons for being the occasion of your having so much trouble in vain.’7
In Dundas, Pitt had acquired a valuable ally who would stand by him for the rest of his life, but his decision that afternoon left his new lieutenant exasperated and demoralised, all the more so because he was assembling a dinner for leading peers and MPs that night for ‘hailing the new Minister’.8 Dundas told his brother, ‘How it will all end, God only knows. I don’t think I shall give myself any more trouble in the matter.’9 While Dundas explained the adverse turn of events to his disappointed dinner guests, Pitt proceeded to a long and difficult audience with the King. George III must have remembered the truculent refusal of Chatham to accept office on many occasions as he came up against the trenchant refusal of another Pitt. ‘Nothing’, the King wrote to Shelburne, ‘could get him to depart from the ground he took, that nothing less than a moral certainty of a majority in the House of Commons could make him undertake the task; for that it would be dishonourable not to succeed, if attempted.’10
For the third time in twelve months Westminster was enveloped by complete confusion as to who would next form the government of the country. When the Commons reassembled to hear details of the new government, they found no such government was in the making, although Pitt was still in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He would devote himself in the coming days to presenting and arguing for a Bill to provide for freer trade with America, leaving the King to renew his struggle to find a government that he thought he could live with. George sent first for Lord Gower, who could not muster enough support in the House of Commons, and then for Lord North, in an attempt to divide him from Fox. North refused the Treasury for himself, said he could support Pitt from the sidelines (the very thing Pitt would not rely on), and otherwise favoured his coalition with Fox. A struggle now commenced between George III and Fox which both saw, correctly, as being of major constitutional importance. The King decided he could only have North back in office with Fox alongside him if they would agree to serve under an independent figure, ‘a peer not connected with any of the strong parties that distract this kingdom’.11 This would greatly reduce the power of the Fox—North coalition, and would preserve the King’s prerogative of nominating his own First Minister. Fox, by contrast, wished to impose the Duke of Portland as First Lord of the Treasury, just as he had tried to do the previous July. This would put effective power into Fox’s own hands, and demonstrate that the ultimate decision on the composition and leadership of the government lay in the House of Commons. In the political parlance of the day, this was ‘storming the closet’.*
Given that North could not or would not serve without Fox, and that between them they commanded majority support in the Commons, there now arose a serious constitutional crisis. The wishes of the King and the opinions of a firm majority in Parliament were in direct conflict. For the King this was a far graver situation than the governmental crises of the previous year. When giving office to Rockingham, he had managed to sow division in the government at the outset and to maintain a loyal faction within it. This time he was presented with a previously agreed coalition which insisted on having its way and would not so easily be fooled again.
As the month of March wore on the King thrashed about for a way to avoid the inevitable, and the country had no effective government. Gower now bizarrely suggested turning to Thomas Pitt, Pitt’s cousin and veteran Member for Old Sarum, to form an administration. The King was prepared to try even this, asking for ‘Mr. Thomas Pitt or Mr. Thomas anybody’.12 Disappointingly for the embattled monarch, yet another Pitt showed sound self-knowledge, pronouncing himself ‘totaly [sic] unequal to public business, but most certainly unequal to a task like this’. Instead he recommended allowing the coalition to take office but withholding all royal favours from it, and warned the King that things were now getting dangerous, that this could be the most important decision of his reign, and that ‘every symptom of a distempered state seemed to prognosticate the danger of some convulsions if the temper of the times was not managed with prudence’.13
The King was not yet ready for prudence. He again talked of abdicating, and once more turned to Lord Gower to form a government, a project which, as before, turned out to be hopeless. By 12 March George was in his last ditch, sending for North and agreeing that Portland could be First Lord of the Treasury, and then trying to play the two of them off against each other while being as uncooperative as possible. The next ten days were taken up with highly complex negotiations, during which the King exasperated Portland by refusing to discuss the provisional appointment of Ministers until he could see the whole list, and the Fox and North parties fell out with each other over who was to have which jobs.
Even greater confusion would now commence. On 20 March Portland informed the King that the coalition could not after all agree on the composition of a government, largely because of the King’s insistence on trying to insert Lords Stormont and Thurlow into the Cabinet. Facing disaster, the Fox—North parties decided that night to swallow the pill and accept the appointment of Stormont, and the following day Portland was finally able to present an agreed list of the Cabinet to the King. George, however, had already seen a chance of rescue, and after Portland’s previous visit had written a one-line letter to Pitt:
Queen’s House, March 20 1783.
Mr. Pitt, I desire you will come here immediately.
G.R.14
Incredibly, the whole negotiation with Pitt now began again. Pitt saw the King and then met Dundas and Rutland. They agreed that if the coalition really could not sort itself out ‘he would accept of the Government, and make an administration … But he insisted to have the secret kept, because he was determined to have it distinctly ascertained before going again to the King, that North and Fox … had quarrelled among themselves about the division of the spoils.’ Since the coalition had, however, now ‘yielded the point in dispute’ to the King, it assumed that the Portland—Fox—North government would now take office. Despite this, George III continued to implore Pitt to take office and rescue him. Pitt wavered. Historians have found it difficult to explain his actions over the subsequent few days. The Commons was due to meet again on 24 March, and Fox and North looked forward to the House being resolute in their support. In the meantime, however, Pitt maintained his negotiations with the King, who therefore continued to defy the coalition and the Commons. At two o’clock in the morning on the day the Commons was to meet, Pitt summoned Dundas from his bed for urgent discussions. Dundas wrote to his presumably bewildered brother, ‘I flatter myself Mr. Pitt will kiss hands as First Lord of the Treasury on Wednesday next.’15 It was now Monday: Pitt and the King clearly had evolved a plan between them. The King wrote to Thurlow that ‘after every sort of chicanery from the Coalition’ he had broken off further negotiations ‘with the consent of Mr. Pitt’,16 and that he now expected him to take office. But whatever Pitt expected to happen in the House that afternoon to cement the arrangement did not come to pass. He seems to have been waiting for significant numbers in the Commons to ask him to take on the government. Unfortunately, while he waited for a lead from them, they awaited a lead from him. Most of the partisan Members of the House were in any case firmly committed to Fox and North, and the remainder were now confused by Pitt’s own speech.
He attacked the Fox—North coalition effectively: ‘there may be a seeming harmony while their interests point the same road, but only a similarity of ideas can render political friendships permanent’,17 and ‘Gentlemen talked of forgiving animosities and altering their political opinions with as much ease as they could change their gloves,’18 but the substance of his speech only fed the uncertainty. He did not directly oppose a motion for an address to the King demanding the formation of an administration, while some of his possible allies did oppose it, and although he stated that he knew of no arrangement for a new administration, he later said ‘he had some reason to imagine an administration would be formed, if not in one, at least, in two or three days’.19 Some Members thought that ‘the whole of Mr. Pitt’s conduct was inexplicable’.20 Walpole called it ‘a long, guarded, and fluctuating speech’.21
In fact, Pitt was waiting for a great expression of support from the benches of the Commons. The King hoped that if Pitt said ‘that every man attached to this Constitution must stand forth … that He will meet with an applause that cannot fail to give him every encouragement’.22 Pitt himself later explained to Carmarthen that ‘he had in the debate on Monday … purposely endeavoured to collect the real wishes of the independent part of the House’, but had not found ‘any reason to expect a substantial support from thence’.23 He had thus been on a public fishing expedition in the House of Commons that day, but had found no one biting on the line. As a result he wrote to the King the next day ‘with infinite pain’, explaining that ‘it is utterly impossible for Him, after the fullest consideration of the actual situation of what passed yesterday in the House of Commons, to think of undertaking, under such circumstances, the Situation which Your Majesty has had the condescension and Goodness to propose to him’.24 It was the first demonstration of an enduring trait in Pitt’s character: his need to show his disinterestedness and dignity meant that he sought power by acclamation rather than being seen to grasp for it.
Pitt’s reputation does not appear to have been damaged by this fiasco, and it must be remembered that the details of his negotiations with the King were not widely known. Furthermore, while his speech of 24 March failed to produce a wave of enthusiasm for him to lead the government, it added to his reputation for integrity and independence, since he could easily have thrown in his lot with the Fox—North coalition instead. He was pressed by them to continue in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in a new government, and Wraxall observed that ‘it rested with him to have composed one of the new triumvirate … aided by a judgement far beyond his years’, he rejected ‘the seductive proposition’.25 More generally, of Pitt’s refusal to lead a government the Duke of Grafton commented: ‘The good judgement of so young a man, who, not void of ambition, on this trying occasion, could refuse this splendid offer, adds much to the lustre of the character he had acquired, for it was a temptation sufficient to have over-set the resolution of most men.’26
Still more important for the future, the fact that so much had turned on Pitt’s actions underlined the point that he was the only alternative to the men about to take office. Of course this was no consolation to the now utterly despairing King. He sent Pitt the following letter:
Windsor
March 25th 4.35 p.m.
Mr. Pitt,
I am much hurt to find you are determined to decline at an hour when those who have any regard for the Constitution as established by law ought to stand forth against the most daring and most unprincipled faction that the annals of this Kingdom ever produced.
GR27
He now drafted his speech of abdication, ending: ‘May I to the latest hour of my Life, though now resolved for ever to quit this Island, have the Comfort of hearing that the Endeavours of My Son, though they cannot be more sincere than Mine have been for the Prosperity of Great Britain, may be crowned with better success.’28 Once again, he did not carry out this threat. Thurlow reminded him that Kings could find it very easy to leave their country but very difficult ever to come back, James II being a case in point. On 31 March Pitt gave a valedictory speech to the Commons as Chancellor of the Exchequer, declaring that he was ‘unconnected with any party whatever; that he should keep himself reserved, and act with which ever side he thought did right’.29 On 2 April, Fox, North and their colleagues arrived to take office and kiss the King’s hand. As Fox did so, Lord John Townshend noticed the King ‘turn back his ears and eyes just like the horse at Astley’s [riding school] when the tailor he had determined to throw was getting on him’.30
The closet had been stormed. Fox was now triumphant, back in office as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, with an acquiescent Whig grandee, the Duke of Portland, as First Lord of the Treasury and Lord North as Secretary of State for the Home Department. Lord John Cavendish, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer before Pitt, resumed his former position. The coalition had succeeded in refusing to accept Lord Thurlow as Lord Chancellor, but as George III would not accept anyone else the position was simply left vacant.
The relations of this government with the King were not good, and never would be. Fox cheerfully observed that the King ‘will dye soon & that will be best of all’.31 George adopted a royal version of working to rule, and simply refused to grant any peerages or other honours at the request of his new Ministers, making it impossible for them to send Lord North to the Upper House as they wished. As they took office, the King wrote to Pitt’s cousin Earl Temple:
I shall most certainly refuse any honours that may be asked by them; I trust the eyes of the Nation will soon be opened as my sorrow may prove fatal to my health if I remain long in this thraldom; I trust You will be steady in Your attachment to Me and ready to join other honest Men in watching the conduct of this unnatural Combination, and I hope many months will not elapse before the Grenvilles, the Pitts and other men of abilities and character will relieve Me from a Situation that nothing but the supposition that no other means remained of preventing the public finances from being materially affected would have compelled me to submit to.32
Rarely in history has a monarch been so utterly determined to overthrow the government acting in his name. In achieving that objective, the King and his fellow conspirators, the Lords Temple and Thurlow, knew that Pitt was a vital instrument. They could well have interpreted the events of March 1783 as showing that Pitt could not be relied upon. But more importantly, the same events had shown that no alternative government to the Fox—North coalition could hold its own in the House of Commons without Pitt at its head. No one else had even come close to rescuing the King. These events had therefore strengthened Pitt’s position should any ‘accident’ befall the administration. So while some, such as George Rose, believed that ‘Mr. Pitt was extinguished nearly for life as a politician’,33 others thought the outlook for him was distinctly promising. By June bets were being laid at Brooks’s Club that Pitt or Temple would be Prime Minister by Christmas, with odds of four to one against.34
Pitt himself moved quickly out of Downing Street, and developed the habit of staying with his friends in Wimbledon. He seemed genuinely relaxed about leaving office. One of the puzzles about Pitt is whether his protestations of caring little whether or not he was in government – ‘I had no great desire to come in and shall have no great reluctance to go out’ – represented his genuine feelings or were an affectation to enhance the impression of an independent character. Honest though he had often proved himself to be, we know from his assertion on 24 March that he knew of ‘no arrangement’ for a new administration, when he was in full negotiation with the King, that he was not always truthful when trying to demonstrate his independence of action. A far more glaring example of this would become apparent when the stakes were even higher. It is also obvious that he was prepared to fight hard to retain office or to acquire it. He must have known, looking around him in the House of Commons, that he merited high office, and that he was one of the very few people actually capable of governing the country.
Three factors would seem to have combined to make Pitt at this stage in his career both ambitious for office and yet relaxed about the gaining or losing of it. The first was this very sense of meritocratic superiority. Shortly after Pitt became Prime Minister, Wraxall wrote his famous account of his personal style:
in his manners, Pitt, if not repulsive, was cold, stiff, and without suavity or amenity. He seemed never to invite approach or to encourage acquaintance, though when addressed he could be polite, communicative, and occasionally gracious … From the instant that Pitt entered the doorway of the House of Commons, he advanced up the floor with a quick and firm step, his head erect and thrown back, looking neither to the right nor to the left, nor favouring with a nod or a glance any of the individuals seated on either side, among whom many who possessed five thousand pounds a year would have been gratified even by so slight a mark of attention. It was not thus that Lord North or Fox treated Parliament, nor from them would Parliament have so patiently endured it; but Pitt seemed made to guide and to command, even more than to persuade or to convince, the assembly that he addressed.35
His immense intellectual self-confidence was combined with a second factor: the expectation that his hour would come. In part this was the natural feeling of a young man who had advanced far in politics at an early age. Old politicians have the advantage of seeing events in the perspective of the past, but young ones have the satisfaction of accepting events in the perspective of the future. The elder Pitt had lived for seventy years. As an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-three the younger Pitt could look forward to decades of pre-eminence in politics among colleagues still unborn. More immediately, he would undoubtedly have known from his cousin Temple and his own dealings with the King of the iron determination of George III to change the government when he could. Perhaps this explains one of Wraxall’s other observations, that Pitt ‘even while seated on the Opposition bench, appeared to anticipate his speedy return to power as certain, and only to wait for the occasion presenting itself to resume his former functions’.36
Such calculations would have reinforced Pitt’s confidence even in defeat, but there is a third factor which is also of great significance. His achievements to date helped to put him at the centre of a small circle of talented or loyal friends whose friendship sustained him when in office, but all the more so when out of it. Wilberforce recalled that after Pitt’s defiant speech of 21 February, ‘I remember our all going to Mr. Pitt’s from the House of Commons after our defeat about eight in the morning, where a dinner had been waiting for us from eleven or twelve the preceding night, and where we all laughed heartily.’37 On the day of his resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pitt joined Wilberforce for supper at Goostree’s and they stayed up much of the night. Pitt and his friends then descended on the house Wilberforce had inherited in Wimbledon, then a village in rural Surrey and a seven-mile ride from Westminster. Wilberforce’s diary recorded: ‘Delicious day, – lounged morning at Wimbledon with friends, foining* at night, and run about the garden for an hour or two.’38 Wilberforce’s house had eight or nine bedrooms* and a large garden. He explained that ‘Mr. Pitt, who was remarkably fond of sleeping in the country, and would often go out of town for that purpose as late as eleven or twelve o’clock at night, slept at Wimbolton for two or three months together.’39
Notwithstanding the fact that he had recently held one of the highest offices in the land, Pitt briefly found that spring and summer the exuberance of youth. Thomas Orde, MP for Aylesbury and one of Pitt’s circle, soon to become Chief Secretary of Ireland, was expected by Lord Shelburne to report to him on what Pitt was up to, and wrote: ‘He passes, as usual, most of his time with his young Friends in a Society sometimes very lively – Some little excess happen’d lately at Wimbledon … In the Evening some of the Neighbours were alarmed with noises at their doors, but Nobody, I believe, has made any reflection upon a mere frolic – it has only been pleasantly remarked, that the Rioters were headed by Master P. – late Chancellor of the Ex—, and Master Arden, late Sollicitor Genl.’40 Wilberforce’s diary that summer reads: ‘Sunday July 6th, Wimbledon. Persuaded Pitt and Pepper [Arden] to church. July 11th. Fine hot day. Went on water with Pitt and Eliot fishing. Came back, dined, walked evening. Eliot went home. Pitt stayed.’
Pitt’s behaviour among friends was the polar opposite of the icy coldness which Wraxall had observed. The explanation given by Wilberforce for this contrast is that Pitt was the ‘shyest man’ he ever knew: ‘great natural shyness … and even awkwardness … often produced effects for which pride was falsely charged on him’.41 Pitt is himself meant to have said to Wilberforce, ‘I am the shyest man alive.’42 Yet with these friends he threw off his restraints, writing to Wilberforce one afternoon from the Commons: ‘Eliot, Arden and I will be with you before curfew and expect an early meal of peas and strawberries.’43 One of the friends, Dudley Ryder, the future Earl of Harrowby, found one morning that the expensive hat he had worn to the opera the previous night had been cut up by Pitt and scattered over the flowerbeds.
The same spirit infected their proceedings everywhere. Harriot Pitt wrote one evening that she could hardly write for the noise of their laughter, and the MP George Selwyn noted one night in 1782: ‘When I left the House, I left in one room a party of young men, who made me, from their life and spirit, wish for one night to be twenty. There was a table full of them drinking – young Pitt, Lord Euston, Berkley, North &c. &c. singing and laughing à gorge déployée.’44
Pitt’s friends revered him. Wilberforce said of his humour: ‘Mr. Pitt was systematically witty … the others were often run away with by their wit. Mr. Pitt was always master of his. He could turn it to any end or object he desired.’45 Later in his career they would come to regard him as ‘something between God and Man’.46 This was in spite of his unprepossessing appearance. Pitt’s niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, would write many years later that ‘Mr. Pitt’s was not a face that gave one the idea of a clever man. As he walked through the park, you would have taken him for a poet, or some such person, thin, tall, and rather awkward; looking upwards as if his ideas were en air and not remarking what was passing around him.’47 All agreed that only his eyes gave force to his appearance: they ‘lent animation to his other features … they lighted up and became strongly intelligent’,48 and ‘lighted up in a manner quite surprising. It was something that seemed to dart from within his head, and you might see sparks coming from them,’49 even though he often ‘had a sort of slovenly or negligent look’. Outside the House of Commons he seemed to lack presence, being ungainly and with little in the way of elegance or polished manners. Yet in the House of Commons, this strange-looking young man was the principal opposition to what His Majesty reluctantly called his government.
Pitt now had a political following as well as a circle of friends. Dundas had become a permanent lieutenant, and the Marquis of Carmarthen wrote that ‘I am proud to own my conduct should be regulated by yours.’ Thomas Pitt observed of the King that ‘it was to him alone that we must look up … when the moment should be ripe for it’.50 Pitt’s chosen style of opposition was judicious, displaying ‘neither an illiberal, a vindictive, nor an undistinguishing resistance to Ministerial measures’.51 Riding to and fro from Wimbledon, he was regularly on his feet in the Commons. In April he exchanged sharp words with Ministers over the disadvantageous terms on which they had raised a loan – the Ministers argued that Pitt’s delay in leaving office had left them in a difficult situation. Later in the session he brought forward the Bills on which he had worked as Chancellor, principally directed at removing waste from government departments. One of these was defeated in the Commons, and the other in the Lords. Pitt was not impressed by successors who did not have the political will or the concern for public money to carry his measures through.
It was once again to parliamentary reform that he directed his greatest efforts in the spring of 1783, and on which he suffered his most severe disappointment. On 7 May, the anniversary of his narrowly defeated motion to set up a Select Committee on parliamentary reform, he brought to the Commons a more specific plan to prevent bribery at elections, to disenfranchise boroughs guilty of corruption, and to add a hundred new Members for London and the counties. He had agreed with Wyvill a moderate approach to reform, rejecting in his speech any idea of universal suffrage and stressing that he only wished to correct ‘a deviation from the principles of that happy constitution under which the people of England had so long flourished’. He had real hopes for success, and the added bonus of advancing a course on which Fox and North were clearly divided. But Wyvill had hoped that Pitt would be proposing reform as a senior Minister; now this was not to be, and powerful forces were stacked against them. MPs turned out to be more hostile to a specific plan of reform than they were reassured by it; public apathy seemed more apparent than enthusiasm as the petitions and addresses failed to flow in the numbers needed; and while Fox gave nominal support to Pitt’s motion, North opposed it in a brilliant speech which maximised the vote against it. The vote went 293 to 149 against reform. Pitt wrote to his mother: ‘My defeat was much more complete than I expected.’
Fox had been civil to Pitt in the early weeks of the new government, no doubt with a possible view to recruiting him to it and disabling the opposition. There can be little doubt, however, that as Pitt watched Fox participate in a government which failed to argue for parliamentary reform, failed to deliver further economical reform, and failed to improve upon the peace terms which it had formerly denounced, he felt his breach with Fox was complete. And very soon the King would again put temptation in his way.
On 12 August 1783 George, Prince of Wales would come of age, requiring the creation of his own establishment and household. The attempt to settle his financial affairs would come within an ace of destroying the Fox – North administration within three months of it taking office. True to Hanoverian tradition, the Prince of Wales was developing a personality the precise opposite of that of his father, the King. In his late teens he had become a notorious philanderer, beginning at the age of sixteen by seducing one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour and going on to have a string of mistresses, at least two of whom he passed on to Charles James Fox. At Brooks’s Club and elsewhere he socialised with the very politicians whom his father detested. As the King put it: ‘The Prince of Wales on the smallest reflection must feel that I have little reason to approve of any part of his conduct for the last three years; his neglect of every religious duty is notorious; his want of common civility to the Queen and me, not less so; besides his total disobedience of every injunction.’52
Fox succeeded in persuading the other Ministers that his friend the Prince should be granted an income of £100,000 per annum, a proposition the Duke of Portland then had to put to the King, along with the information that the Prince had already run up debts of £29,000. George III responded: ‘It is impossible for me to find words expressive enough of my utter indignation and astonishment at the letter I have just received from the Duke of Portland.’ Continuing the explosions for several days, the King proposed £50,000 per annum instead. The government was paralysed, and when the Commons assembled to hear Fox make a statement on the matter he was not able to say anything at all. Not knowing what to do, Portland was surprised to find a little later, on 18 June, that the King had apparently mellowed in his attitude, and the Prince was induced to accept a compromise: £50,000 a year and the paying off of debts of £60,000, along with a dutiful exchange of letters between father and son.
The King had not actually mellowed; he had merely calculated the political odds. In the interim he had consulted Temple, telling him that he had ‘decided to resist this attempt [the £100,000 proposal], and to push the consequences to their full extent, and to try the spirit of the Parliament and of the people upon it’;53 but Temple advised him that it would be difficult to form a new administration if Ministers were dismissed on such a pretext. The King decided to bide his time but to take further soundings, possibly in order to be readier for the next such occasion. Thurlow was sent to sound out Pitt on the strength of his commitment to parliamentary reform, which the King opposed, and his readiness to make a bid for power with the support of the Crown. Pitt responded that he would take office, but on his own terms, as he made clear to Temple: ‘I stated in general that if the King’s feelings did not point strongly to a change, it was not what we sought. But that if they did, and we could form a permanent system, consistent with our principles, and on public ground, we should not decline it. I reminded him how much I was personally pledged to Parliamentary reform on the principles I had publicly explained, which I should support on every seasonable occasion.’54
Pitt was not ready to abandon the ideals of independence and integrity on which he had set his heart. He did want office, but knew he did not need to trade his opinions in order to get it, also telling Temple, ‘I think … what has passed will not tend to delay our having the offer whenever things are ripe for it.’55
Since it was now July, and Parliament was rising for the summer, there was no prospect of matters ‘ripening’ in the next few months. On 22 July Pitt wrote to his mother from his brother’s house in Savile Street: ‘I resume at last my pen, tho’ with no other Reason than ought to have made me do so every day for this month past. I can indeed hardly make out how that period has slid away, in which I have done little else but ride backwards and forwards between Wimbledon and London, and meditate plans for the summer, till I find the summer half over before I have begun to put any in execution.’56 In early August he was writing from newly fashionable Brighthelmstone, to which he had gone to take ‘some dips’. ‘By all I learnt before I left London, I now think things may possibly go thro’ the rest of the summer as they are, tho’ much longer there is every reason to believe, they will not.’57 In early September he was in Dorset at the house of Henry Bankes, meeting up with Eliot and Wilberforce. The short-sighted Wilberforce was teased for nearly shooting Pitt while aiming at some partridges, but we do not know how close he came to disabling the next Prime Minister.
Wilberforce, Eliot and Pitt had decided to visit France for the early autumn. Before doing so Pitt attended the King’s levée at St James’s. Ever in close touch with Temple, Pitt reported to him: ‘I am still inclined to believe … that the King does not like to hazard dismissing the present Ministry till he has found some ostensible ground of complaint, or till he sees the disposition of Parliament next Session … I am just returned from St. James’s … The King was gracious as usual, and he inquired as to the time of my stay [in France] in a manner which I rather thought significant.’58
Pitt thus departed for France knowing that he might once again be called upon to form a government at any time when he got back. Proximity to political power, however, did anything but bring efficiency to his travelling arrangements. When the three friends met at Sittingbourne ready to cross the Channel they found that each had expected the others to provide the letters of introduction necessary to travel comfortably in a foreign country. Upon receiving a last-minute letter introducing them to a Monsieur Coustier, they headed for his house at Rheims, only to find that he was a grocer with a small shop and one room behind it. ‘For a few days we lived very comfortably together,’ wrote Wilberforce, ‘but no French was learned except from the grammar, we not having a single French acquaintance. At length we desired our friend the épicier to mention us to the Lieutenant of the Police.’59 The policeman thought they were spies, seeing that they were in ‘wretched lodgings’ and had no attendants, but told the local Abbé that these three young men claimed to be ‘grands seigneurs’, and one of them the son of the great Earl of Chatham. Soon Pitt was writing to Harriot: ‘Tomorrow we are to dine at a magnificent Palace of the Archbishop’s … and as a French Abbé is not proverbial for silence, we have an opportunity of hearing something of the language.’60 Pitt learned French quickly, his ear being ‘quick for every sound but music’. He enjoyed the political discussions, telling the Abbé that the first part of the British constitution to decline would be ‘the prerogative of the King and the authority of the House of Peers’. But in a week of staying with the Archbishop, politics was far from their sole concern. Wilberforce noted: ‘N.B. Archbishops in England are not like Archevêques in France; these last are jolly fellows of about forty years of age, who play at billiards, &c. like other people.’61
With news of their presence in France now spreading before them, the three friends went on to Paris, and then on to the vicinity of the French court assembled in Fontainebleau. They were presented to Louis XVI, ‘a clumsy strange figure in immense boots’. Wilberforce describes being ‘every evening at the parties of one or other of the French Ministers, in whose apartments we also dined – the Queen being always among the company present in the evening, and mixing in conversation with the greatest affability’.62 Pitt had a lively time with the Queen, Marie Antoinette, who made fun of the manner of his arrival in France and repeatedly teased him about whether he had heard lately from the grocer. ‘Mr. Pitt,’ Wilberforce reported, ‘though his imperfect knowledge of French prevented his doing justice to his sentiments, was yet able to give some impression of his superior powers.’ Pitt’s ability to learn quickly and to charm people of every kind in private company was thoroughly on display on the visit to France. He behaved throughout with relaxed good humour, even when the French ‘crowded around Pitt in shoals … he behaved with great spirit although he was sometimes a little bored when they talked to him about the parliamentary reform’.
A second Pitt trait visible on this visit was his lack of interest in proposals of marriage. He was offered the hand of the seventeen-year-old daughter of the fabulously wealthy Jacques Necker, a highly ambitious French politician who would play a significant role in the events of the Revolution. According to Wilberforce: ‘It was suggested to the late Lord Camden by Mr. Walpole, a particular friend of M. Necker’s, that if Mr. Pitt should be disposed to offer his hand to Mademoiselle N … such was the respect entertained for him by M. and Madame Necker, that he had no doubt the proposal would be accepted.’63 It is said that Pitt responded, ‘I am already married to my country,’ but, perhaps fortunately, no definite record of this remains.*
Even on this journey Pitt was more interested in making alliances of another kind: it was another attribute of his that he was a shrewd political talent-spotter. George Rose, the highly able former Secretary to the Treasury, was also travelling in France at the time:
I received a letter from Mr. Pitt at Rheims, desiring I would stay at Paris till he could get to me, which he said he would do as soon as possible. On our meeting, the conversation was quite confidential. In the course of it I found he was as little disposed to future connexion with Lord Shelburne as myself, and he manifested an earnest desire for a permanent and close intimacy with me … Having hesitated only from a consciousness of my own insignificance as to any essential service I could render him … I gave him my hand with a warm and consenting heart. From that moment I considered myself as inalienable from Mr. Pitt, and on that feeling I acted most sacredly to the last hour of his invaluable life.64
Pitt’s thoughts were on planning for a government. With Parliament due to resume on 11 November, he had intended to return to England in late October. On 22 October a special messenger arrived from London, asking him to return immediately. Who sent the messenger is not known, but between George III, Temple and Thurlow the cogs of a conspiracy against the government were turning once again. Pitt had enjoyed his summer of youthful play, from the garden at Wimbledon to the forest of Fontainebleau. He had experienced for six months a relatively carefree existence. On 22 October 1783, the clatter of hooves in a French courtyard brought it forever to an end.
*This expression arose from the King’s use of a small room, ‘the closet’, for meetings with Ministers.
*Fencing with a weapon designed for thrusting or lunging – but in this context meaning verbal fencing.
*One of these rooms was known as ‘Pitt’s room’ until the demolition of the house in 1958.
*Instead she married the Swedish Ambassador in Paris, becoming Madame de Staël. She became a powerful intellectual force in European politics, a friend of Goethe and an antagonist of Napoleon. If Pitt had married her it would have made a formidable combination.