Читать книгу William Pitt the Younger: A Biography - William Hague - Страница 17

‘The country calls aloud to me that I should defend this castle; and I am determined therefore that I WILL defend it.’

WILLIAM PITT, FEBRUARY 1784

‘It was a struggle between George the Third’s sceptre and Mr. Fox’s tongue.’

SAMUEL JOHNSON

PITT HAD NO CHANCE to savour being First Lord of the Treasury at the age of twenty-four. He worked without pause through the Christmas of 1783 to bolster his precarious position. He knew that in two weeks’ time he would be facing a House of Commons in which he at present had no majority, and that all the other great parliamentary speakers of the age – Fox, Burke, North, Sheridan – would be arrayed against him. The burden of defeating them would rest entirely with him, and if he failed, so would the blame.

Pitt employed all the tools at his command. From his earliest hours as Prime Minister he showed the cool ruthlessness which characterises those politicians who are capable of seizing power and keeping it. For all his difficulty in finding credible Ministers he had no compunction in shirking those who might have brought seniority, but whom he considered liabilities. One of these was Charles Jenkinson, who was so close to the King that his inclusion would have cast doubt on Pitt’s denial that he had been part of a plot. More significantly, he excluded Shelburne, his former patron and leader, who had brought him into his last government as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shelburne, as a former First Lord of the Treasury, had great seniority and acknowledged abilities, but he was unpopular and Pitt had not enjoyed working with him. He found himself excluded. The absence of any previous head of an administration in his government helped to underline the fact that Pitt alone was in charge. As Dundas observed: ‘This young man does not choose to suffer it to be doubtfull who is the effectual Minister.’¹

Next, with the ready cooperation of George III, Pitt opened the floodgates of government patronage which had been locked tightly shut during the Fox – North administration. Thomas Pitt received a peerage, and Sir James Lowther was promised an earldom. Several other borough patrons received peerages. The promise of a peerage to the second son of the Duke of Northumberland was followed by six of the seven MPs under his control switching sides to support the new government. Lord Weymouth switched sides when his brother received a peerage. One MP who was in acute financial difficulty was granted a royal pension for his wife, and promptly became a Pitt supporter. Others who held minor offices at the disposal of the King or his Ministers were careful to change their allegiance, and those who declined to do so found themselves dismissed. The father of Pitt’s friend Edward Eliot suddenly became Lord Eliot. He controlled six seats in Cornwall which would now vote differently in any general election. One MP received a letter from Lord Sydney saying that Pitt ‘would be happy to know if there are any wishes of yours that he can meet or promote’.² ‘They are crying peerages about the streets in barrows,’ said Horace Walpole, and the Duke of Portland noted that the powers of the Crown had been ‘let loose without reserve’.³ Throughout his career Pitt would be bored by endless requests for minor preferment, but when he needed to use patronage to obtain serious support in a crisis he did not believe in half measures.

The King himself joined in the effort, bringing the full weight of the throne to bear on peers who controlled seats in the House of Commons but had not voted the right way in December. He caused the Duke of Newcastle to change sides, leading three of his six MPs to support Pitt and the others to abstain or resign. By the turn of the year Pitt could feel a little more optimistic. He had not written to his mother for seven weeks (and does not seem to have done so again for another eleven), but she had evidently been encouraging him that he was doing the right thing. On 30 December he wrote: ‘You will easily believe it is not from inclination I have been silent so long … Things are in general more promising than they have been, but in the uncertainty of effect the Persuasion of not being wrong is, as you say, the best Circumstance and Enough; tho’ there is satisfaction in the Hopes at least of something more.’⁴ He wrote from his brother’s house in Berkeley Square, having had no time to move back into Downing Street.

Each day Robinson would calculate the level of support in the Commons as the flow of patronage took effect; he would himself later be rewarded by the elevation of his son-in-law, Lord Abergavenny, to an earldom. His initially pessimistic assessment was transformed in the early days of January to showing a small majority for Pitt, and by 10 January he even reckoned that Pitt might have 240 supporters against 196 opponents, with thirty-six of the remaining ninety-six classed as ‘very hopeful’.⁵

We do not know whether Pitt believed what were becoming wildly inflated figures, but it seems that Fox did believe similarly optimistic ones on the other side, and was betting at Brooks’s on a three-figure majority against Pitt. Lord North spent the recess giving generous dinner parties to keep the opposition’s troops in line, and Fox remained confident, having talked before Christmas of ‘the weakness of young men in accepting offices under the present circumstances of affairs, and he mentioned their youth as the only possible excuse for their rashness’.⁶

There was no doubting that Pitt had made progress during the Christmas break, but if he had the impression that he would now have command of the House of Commons he was rapidly disabused of it when he arrived to be sworn in once again as the Member for Appleby on 12 January 1784. The House was packed, with the Public Gallery ‘holding as many persons as ever were wedged together’.⁷ Fox had already been on his feet demanding a Committee to inquire into the State of the Nation, and was able to deny Pitt the floor when he sought to read a message from the King. He denounced the ‘secret influence’ by which the India Bill had been wrecked, and demanded to know whether the House could debate in freedom or was under threat of dissolution in a manner reminiscent of the Stuart Kings before the Civil War.

When Pitt was finally allowed to respond to the furious attack he adopted the tactics which would become characteristic of his approach to the long debates of the next two months. His method was simple: he offered no defence of the means by which the government had been changed, since he denied knowledge of them; he was as uninformative as possible about the likelihood of an election; and he bluntly refused to leave office. At all times he kept calm, Wraxall describing him as ‘The Minister, who in sullen majesty or in contumelious silence heard unmoved their clamorous denunciations seated calmly on the Treasury bench … Always preserving the command of himself, he was never led into deviations from caution and prudence.’⁸ He rebutted the charge of relying on ‘secret influence’ in a manner of high contempt for the accusation:

I came up no back stairs. When I was sent for by my Sovereign to know whether I would accept of office, I necessarily went to the Royal Closet. I know of no secret influence, and I hope that my own integrity would be my guardian against that danger … Little did I think to be ever charged in this House with being the tool and abettor of secret influence. The novelty of the imputation only renders it so much the more contemptible. This is the only answer I shall ever deign to make on the subject, and I wish the House to bear it in their mind, and judge of my future conduct by my present declaration: the integrity of my own heart, and the probity of all my public, as well as my private principles, shall always be my sources of action.⁹

In claiming that he would act with integrity and in accordance with his principles, Pitt was telling the truth as well as contrasting himself with the sacrificing of principles when the Fox – North coalition was created. He was building up the image of himself as an independent figure who had come to the aid of the King and the nation, an image which would soon operate dramatically to his advantage. But in claiming no knowledge of secret influence or of the ‘back stairs’ he was once again not telling the whole truth. He was not an innocent bystander who happened to be in touch with the King on the day the government fell. To have admitted the full truth would have been cataclysmic: instead he turned his denial to advantage. As John Cannon noted in his book The Fox–North Coalition (1969): ‘It was the lie of a master, perfect of its kind, superb in its insolence, and totally successful; its very unctuousness carried the war into the enemy’s camp, smearing them as the purveyors of shabby slanders and cheap rumours.’¹⁰

The simplicity and audaciousness of Pitt’s tactics would bring success. But as MPs voted on the night of 12 January, he found that he still faced a solid, even though reduced, opposition majority. He was defeated by thirty-nine votes (232 to 193) on a Committee on the State of the Nation, by fifty-four votes on a motion attacking the ‘unconstitutional abuse of the name of the King’, and had to let through a whole string of motions designed to make a dissolution more difficult by postponing the consideration of vital Bills and forbidding the government to spend money once Parliament was dissolved. On his first day facing the House of Commons, the twenty-four-year-old Prime Minister had taken a battering.

The following day found Ministers demoralised. A government defeat by thirty-nine votes was, one of them thought, ‘sufficient to have made prudent men despair of their undertaking’. Carmarthen noted that the Cabinet meeting that day found that it would be difficult to surmount the obstacles being created to a dissolution, and ‘at the same time it appeared impossible to go on with the public business with the H. of Commons against us … Mr. Pitt even hinted at giving the thing up; this however was represented to him by us all as betraying both the Crown and people, as well as highly disgraceful to ourselves personally.’¹¹