Lord Chatham, His Early Life and Connections

by Earl of Archibald Philip Primrose Rosebery

Pitt took the matter philosophically. 'I should not be a little vain,' he writes, 'to be the object of the hatred of a minister, hated even by those who call themselves his friends.'[112] But to his slender means the loss of his pay was not unimportant, and this fact perhaps explains his accepting an office ill-suited to his temperament. In September 1737, the Prince of Wales, in consequence of his crazy and insolent conduct at the time of his wife's confinement, was ordered to leave St. James' Palace. He retired first to Kew, and then to Norfolk House in St. James' Square, which thus became the birthplace of George III. The King's displeasure also caused some resignations in the Prince's household; and, smarting under this disgrace, Frederick found it no doubt agreeable to take advantage of these vacancies to attach to his household two active young members of the Opposition, whose appointment would be profoundly distasteful to his father. Few could be more repugnant to the King than Pitt, the ex-cornet, and Lyttelton his seconder. Moreover, Pitt was already intimate and influential with the Prince.[113] So Lyttelton became private secretary to Frederick, and Pitt a groom of his bedchamber. These appointments would, in the ordinary course, be submitted for the sanction of the King, but the alienation between father and son was so acute that it is probable that no communication was made. Pitt held this post for seven years, resigning it in 1744; and the salary was no doubt of sensible assistance to his meagre income during this period.

Pitt's second speech (in 1737) was also on the Prince of Wales's affairs. George II., who lost no opportunity of displaying publicly his hatred to his son, and who as Prince of Wales had received a fixed income of 100,000l. a year, gave the Prince on his marriage an allowance at pleasure of 50,000l. The Prince, who owed his father but scant duty and affection, was persuaded by his advisers to apply to Parliament for the same annuity that his father, when in his situation, had received. This proceeding violently incensed the King; but he was induced to send an official message to his son, promising to convert the present voluntary allowance into a fixed income, and to settle some provision on the Princess. The Prince replied that the matter was now out of his hands. The offer, in effect, was not particularly alluring, as the allowance could never have been withdrawn, and a settlement on the Princess ought to have been made at the time of her marriage. It is indeed difficult, given the circumstances, to blame Frederick's unfilial conduct in this matter. He had a colourable claim to an income double that which was given him by the King; the King had ampler means of paying it than had been possessed by George I.; and the Prince had nothing to hope from the unconstrained bounty of his father; he was indeed under his father's ban. So the motion was brought before the House, and Pitt made a speech, which Thackeray, his insipid biographer, declares to have been most masterly, but which is nowhere preserved. We know nothing of it, but it is safe to presume that it was a good speech. These efforts and his household appointment made him a prominent figure in the Prince's party. He was beginning to be talked about. He had been sneered at by the Government paper, the 'Gazetteer,' and defended by Bolingbroke's organ, the 'Craftsman.' This seems the first glimmering of his note, and is therefore worthy of remark. Nothing is so difficult as to trace in a biography the several degrees by which eminence has been reached; seldom are the slow degrees of the ladder recorded. Here it is at least possible to mark the first and second steps. The first event, that brought Pitt into notice was the deprivation of his commission: the second indication of his growing power is apparent in the laboured sneers of the 'Gazetteer' at the young man's long neck and slender body, for it would not have been worth while to direct these gibes against one who was not formidable.

Pitt's next speech was less successful. It was in support of a reduction of the standing army from 17,400 to 12,000. The contention seems almost incredible when it is considered that Pitt and his party were calling on the ministry to avenge the ill-treatment of British subjects by Spain. But, however inconsistent, it was probably deemed a popular move. Jealousy and dislike of standing armies was still strong among the people. Lord Hervey had told the Queen in 1735, 'that there was certainly nothing so odious to men of all ranks and classes in this country as troops,' and that 'as a standing army was the thing in the world that was most disliked in this country, so the reduction of any part of it was a measure that always made any prince more popular than any other he could take.'[114] Walpole had then maintained that the army should never be reduced below 18,000 men in view of the constant menace of the disputed succession, the turbulent character of the nation, and the necessity of a strong position in foreign affairs.[115] In this debate of 1738 he took much the same line. This sane view, as it was the policy of the Minister, was furiously combated by the young bloods of the Opposition. Lyttelton did not shrink from using the childish argument that a standing army weakened us abroad, as it made foreign governments believe that there must be violent dissensions in the country which it was kept to control. A taunt had in the course of debate been levelled at placemen; and Pitt, as a member of the Prince's household, vindicated the independence of officials, directing as he passed a shaft at the three hundred thick or thin supporters of the Government who were always so singularly unanimous on all political questions. The army, he said, was the chief cause of the national discontents, and yet these discontents were alleged as the chief cause for maintaining the army. Then he made the criticism so familiar to English public men even now, that the army cost three times as much proportionally to its size as the armies of France and Germany. On the question of disbanding troops, he took a strangely unsympathetic line. The officers would be put on half-pay, which was as high as full-pay elsewhere. And as for the private soldiers, 'I must think,' he said, 'they have no claim for any greater reward than the pay they have already received, nor should I think we were guilty of the least ingratitude if they were all turned adrift to-morrow morning.'[116] Pitt, it was obvious, had some distance to compass before he should become a popular leader. That he should have pressed at all for the reduction of the small standing army in the midst of an irresistible clamour for war is another proof of the heedless rhetoric of ambitious youth.

While the young patriots were thus endeavouring to reduce the army, war was brewing with Spain. Our traders were constantly encroaching on her rights and monopolies in the New World. There was a perpetual smuggling invasion of the Spanish settlements in America on the part of the British, and a rigorous defence by right of search on the part of the Spaniards. There can be little doubt that the British merchants were in the wrong. But trade has neither conscience nor bowels, and monopolies of commerce are the fair quarry of the freebooting merchant. The Spaniards, on their side, were not delicate or merciful in exercising their undoubted right of search; so our countrymen, to conceal their own infractions of treaty and to stir up hostility to Spain, spared no methods or exertions to rouse popular indignation against their enemies. Little less than the tortures of the Inquisition were alleged. 'Seventy of our brave sailors are now in chains in Spain! our countrymen in chains and slaves to the Spaniards!' exclaimed an enthusiastic alderman: 'is not this enough to fire the coldest?'[117] The notorious Jenkins now appeared on the scene with an ear in cotton-wool, which he alleged to have been torn from his head by a Spaniard, with an intimation that the mutilator would gladly serve our King in the same way. Alderman Beckford, who brought Jenkins forward, afterwards declared that if any member had lifted up Jenkins's wig, he would have found both ears whole and complete.[118] Others averred that though he had lost his ear, he had lost it in the pillory.

The Spaniards, not to be outdone, recorded the sufferings of two of their nobles, who, captured by our British filibusters, had been compelled to devour their own noses.[119] It was alleged, too, that English pirates swarmed, and that Spaniards were publicly sold as slaves in British colonies.[120] But these allegations, though probably neither more nor less veracious than the others, had no currency in England, while the story of the suffering Jenkins ran through England like wildfire. A bombastic utterance was coined for him by some political Tadpole, and rang through the land. None cared to inquire into the right or the wrong of the imprisonments, or to investigate the other side of the question, and there were none to present it if they did. 'Britons in Spanish prisons' was a sufficient cry, and swept the nation off its feet. Walpole, always too contemptuous of popular passion, had presented to Parliament a convention with Spain, which regulated most of the points at issue between them, except that which lay nearest the heart of his people, the right of search; and his brother Horace moved, in a long and laudatory speech, an address of thanks to the Crown for this agreement. This roused the Prince's young men. Lyttelton, indeed, spoke ostentatiously as the Prince's mouthpiece. 'I know who hears me,' he said, alluding to his master's presence in the gallery, 'and for that reason I speak,'[121] Pitt and Grenville also spoke, and they are described in a contemporary account as 'three or four young gentlemen who took great personal liberties.' Another letter says that Pitt 'spoke very well, but very abusively.' However imperfectly his speech may be reported, it has much of that energy of declamatory invective which is part of the tradition connected with his name. Of this the peroration is a sufficient example. 'This convention, Sir, I think from my heart is nothing but a stipulation for national ignominy; an illusory expedient to baffle the resentment of the nation; a truce without a suspension of hostilities on the part of Spain; on the part of England, a suspension, as to Georgia, of the first law of nature, self-preservation and self-defence; a surrender of the right of England to the mercy of plenipotentiaries; and in this infinitely highest and sacred point, future security, not only inadequate, but directly repugnant to the resolutions of Parliament, and the gracious promise from the throne. The complaints of your despairing merchants, the voice of England have condemned it. Be the guilt of it on the adviser. God forbid that the Committee should share the guilt by approving it.'[122] This was undoubtedly the first speech in which Pitt made a real mark as an orator, and of this a proof remains in the fact that it is recorded that Sir R. Walpole took notes of it as it proceeded.[123]

The debate and its unsuccessful division were followed by that abortive and disastrous form of protest known as a secession. Wyndham announced it in a speech of solemn acrimony. It failed, as all such secessions do. It has been said by a veteran politician that 'a secession of a party from parliament is so obvious a failure in both duty and prudence that a benevolent looker-on will always recommend to the seceder to get to his place as well and as fast as he can.'[124] A secession does not appeal to the country, which regards it as an exhibition of baffled ill-temper, while it leaves the House at the mercy of the Ministry. This retirement of his enemies was therefore hailed by Walpole as an unexpected stroke of good fortune. Prompt repentance, as usual, overtook the seceders, and the usual difficulty as to returning with dignity and consistency. In November they had to slink back without much of either.

It is not easy to discover whether Pitt was among the seceders, though it seems improbable, as Lyttelton, one of his closest allies, remained to repeat the strange parallel contention of the Opposition that the army should be reduced and war declared against Spain.

The national wish for war was at any rate soon gratified. Though Walpole had carried resolutions approving of his convention, the growing fury of the nation could not be dammed by his meagre majority of twenty-eight. When the negotiations between Spain and Great Britain were resumed, Spain absolutely refused to abandon the right of search. To the English this was the main point, and Walpole knew that war was now inevitable. Whether he as minister could or should, in spite of his convictions, carry it out was another matter. He decided that he could, and war was declared on October 29, 1739.

The enthusiasm of the nation was frantic. The heralds, on proceeding to the city to read the formal declaration, were attended by a great procession. The Prince of Wales did not disdain to take part in it, or to pause at Temple Bar to drink a public toast to the war. All the church bells of the capital were set ringing. The Minister, as he heard the clang, bitterly remarked that they might ring the bells now, but that they would soon wring their hands. This is a truth that may be uttered with justice at the beginning of all hostilities, and in this case there were many opportunities for wringing hands; for, with the exception of the truce of Aix-la-Chapelle, Britain was not at peace from now (1739) till 1763. But Walpole's cynical pun did not embody the spirit which gives confidence to a nation, or in which a great Minister would begin a just or necessary war. Walpole was, no doubt, convinced that this one was neither just nor necessary. Moreover, he hated all war as a needless complication which deranged finance and held out prospects and opportunities for a Pretender. He knew, too, that he was a Minister of peace, and that he was not likely to shine in war. He had indeed been Secretary at War, but then he had the guarantee of a Marlborough in the field; his function had been to serve and supply a supreme captain. But there was nothing now to give him the same confidence. He felt, he knew that he was out of place as a director of wars. Close to him, unsuspected as yet, was the most successful War Minister that this country has ever seen. For on the benches over against him sate Pitt, who was to revel in warfare and find his true vocation in directing it; but his time was not come. Afterwards, when it had arrived, he was to repent and recant his opposition on this occasion, and pay homage to Walpole. None, indeed, of the leaders in opposition to Walpole attempted afterwards to justify their conduct in this business.

That Minister meanwhile moodily prepared to carry out the wishes of the country, and no doubt excused himself for his humiliating compliance by the thought that if he did not some one else would, with less economy and more danger to the State. He is said to have tendered his resignation, but even were this true it could only be, in view of the King's relations to himself and the Opposition, a matter of form. He uttered his own self-condemnation: 'I dare not do what is right.'