CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE YOUNGER PITT, AND THE RECOVERY OF ENGLISH PROSPERITY.
1782-1793.
Results of the war.
When England bowed before the force of circumstances, and concluded peace with America, France, Spain, and Holland in 1783, she had touched the lowest point of weakness which had been her lot since the fifteenth century. Peace had been imposed by victorious enemies, after a fruitless struggle of eight years. English armies had grown accustomed to defeat; English fleets could barely hold their own upon the seas. Money had been spent with a lavish hand, and the National Debt was doubled. As a result of all her efforts, England had not only to surrender smaller possessions all over the world, but to witness the loss of her great Western empire, the thirteen colonies which had been the pride of her statesmen, and one of the main outlets of her commerce. A blow such as the loss of America seemed likely to be fatal to England. Not only was her prestige gone, and her pride humbled, but she was left with her finances in an apparently hopeless condition of exhaustion, and her internal politics in a state of complete disintegration. King George's great experiment in autocratic government had completely failed; he had led the nation into disaster and bankruptcy. His ministry had been struck down by the course of events, the irrefutable logic of the American war. Lord North had retired; his master had been forced to own himself beaten, and to make over the conduct of the realm to a Whig ministry. But the Rockingham cabinet was evidently a mere stop-gap. George's skilful policy of the last twenty years had so divided and broken up the Whig party, that it was difficult to reconstitute a strong cabinet from its remnants. When peace with America and France had been secured—that peace being the one great mandate which the nation had given to the Whigs—it seemed likely that the perennial jealousies of their cliques and clans would once more wreck the party, and that the king, with his steady power of intrigue, his pension list, and his power of patronage, would succeed in placing some second North in office.
Changed character of the Whigs.
The Whigs, however, were no longer their old selves. The great effect of their twelve years' exile from power had been to teach the better men of the party to detest the old methods of parliamentary corruption and family jobbery which they had learnt from Walpole and Newcastle. The Whigs had failed to realize the hatefulness of these practices when employed by themselves, but when their own engine was turned against them by the king, they began to see its shame. That the party which professed to represent the people and to forward the immortal principles of the Revolution, should ground its power on official bribery and corruption, was humiliating to the better men in the Whig camp. Hence it came that the nobler spirits among them resolved to protest against the old methods, and to claim that the victory of their party over the king in 1782 should result in something more than a distribution of the loaves and fishes of office among their partisans. Unhappily, however, much of the old leaven of corruption still hung about the Whigs, and the section which represented it was just about to perpetrate the worst piece of jobbery which their party ever committed.
Death of Lord Rockingham.—The Shelburne ministry.
The one thing in which all sections of the Whigs could agree, was dislike of the royal influence, as employed by George III. The first end, therefore, which the Rockingham cabinet set before itself, was to cut down the means of corruption which the king possessed. The pension list was diminished, no single person was to be allowed to draw more than £300, the "secret service" funds in the royal hands were cut down, and a certain number of the useless and expensive offices about the court abolished. This was all very well so far as it went, but much more was needed, and it was very uncertain how much time would be granted to the new Whig ministers to carry out further reforms. Their leader, Lord Rockingham, died suddenly in July, 1782, long ere the formal treaties of peace with France and Spain had been signed. He was a man of slender abilities, but honest and popular, and able to keep his party together. On his death the old clan rivalries of his followers burst once more into life. The king sent for Lord Shelburne, the leader of the liberal and reforming party among the Whigs, and offered him the premiership. But Shelburne was viewed with bitter dislike by many of the Whig chiefs; his sharp tongue and his love of intrigue made him many foes, and when he took office they refused to serve under him. On the mere ground of personal jealousy and resentment, the larger half of the party went into opposition and joined the Tories. Not only the old family cliques that represented the corrupt and selfish Whigs of an earlier day, but many of the younger men, who called themselves the friends of liberty and reform, took this suicidal step. Among them was Charles James Fox, the most able and open-minded man in the party, but irregular in his private life, a gambler and a lover of the bottle, somewhat tainted with the failings of a political adventurer, and too factious to be altogether honest in his actions. Fox had been a Tory in his earlier years, but had quarrelled with Lord North in 1772, and after that date had joined the opposition, become one of its chiefs, and been the first to favour peace with America.
William Pitt the younger.