Lord Chatham, His Early Life and Connections

by Earl of Archibald Philip Primrose Rosebery

Owing to the absence, and so the presumed indifference or disapproval of Pulteney, Lord Limerick's motion was rejected by two votes. At the request of Pulteney, however, who, whether lukewarm or not, was nettled at the natural criticisms provoked by his attitude, Lord Limerick brought forward another motion of the same kind limited to the last ten years of Walpole's administration. Pulteney who, discredited outside, retained within the House 'a miraculous influence,' exerted himself to the utmost, we may be sure, but it can scarcely be doubted that the honours of the double debate rested with the vehement and untainted Pitt. It is not perhaps of much use to quote from the vague and imperfect reports of his speeches, but we can gather, at least, their general trend. One passage, at any rate, in his speech on the second motion, has been authentically preserved by Horace Walpole, for it was a compliment to himself. Horace had defended his father with a grace and filial duty that commended him to the House. Pitt, in reply, said that it was becoming in the young man to remember that he was the child of the accused, the House should remember that they were the children of their country, a flight which seems to outstep the perilous limits of the sublime.

From the summary of Pitt's two speeches we may at least gather that he had much the best of the argument on this issue, so long dead and buried. One noteworthy point, however, in his declamation against the Minister, is that he paid vindictive attention to Walpole's practice of dismissing and cashiering his opponents, by which he had himself suffered. He argued that the King might as well dispose of all the property of his subjects as of that particular form of property represented by commissions in the army; which, whether obtained by service or by purchase, were as freehold as an estate, and should be as amply secured.[139]

But, in truth, his denunciation of Walpole is much less remarkable than the poisoned shafts which, as is manifest even in the faulty report, he aimed at the King, or at Hanover, which was much the same thing. He declared that the changes were unreal, that Walpole remained Minister behind the scenes. 'Though he be removed from the Treasury,' said Pitt, 'he is not from the King's closet, nor probably will be, unless by our advice or by our sending him to a lodging at the other end of the town, where he cannot do so much harm to his country.'[140] This pointed hint at the Tower must have been greatly to the taste of his audience. Allusions to the debts of the Civil List, caused certainly not by hospitality or by expenditure on any public object, but inferentially by corruption, were artfully framed so as to cause the King the greatest possible annoyance;[141] so, too, were the innuendoes as to our foreign policy having been framed in the sole interests of Hanover. Lord Limerick's second motion was carried by seven votes, and Pitt was named on the secret committee, which, however, owing to the loyal silence of Walpole's associates, to the placing one of them in the privileged security of the House of Lords, and to the refusal of the King to allow disclosures as to the manner in which secret service money had been employed, came to a futile and inglorious end. We catch one glimpse of Pitt in its proceedings. Scrope, the doughty old Secretary of the Treasury, who had fought under Monmouth at Sedgemoor, refused to reply to the questions of the inquisitors. Pitt seems to have pushed him hard, and he was so stung that he wished to call his tormentor out. From this we may at least infer that Pitt took a leading part in the deliberations of the Committee. On the other hand, it may be noticed that he only received 259, or one more than the lowest number of votes, while the member who headed the poll scored 518, a circumstance which would seem to indicate that he had as yet no strong position in the House.

He soon had the opportunity of further exasperating the King, an opportunity of which he availed himself rather with the intemperance of resentment than with the astuteness of ambition; for he was now in declared opposition to the new Government, and as bitter against Carteret as he had been against Walpole. When Parliament met (November 16, 1742) after the recess, Pitt 'spoke like ten thousand angels,' but no trace of his speech remains. Of its spirit, however, we can judge from that which he delivered on December 10, on the vote for continuing the British troops in Flanders. Here the onslaught was against the King, and it is scarcely possible to conceive sarcasms more calculated to afflict the sovereign in his tenderest susceptibilities than those which Pitt now launched, even as we read them in an imperfect report; they are, indeed, so masterly in this way as almost to prove their authenticity. This is the first speech of real point and power delivered by Pitt of which we have any record. It may be noted in passing, that in the 'London Magazine' (one of the two newspapers that reported debates) Pitt's speech was unnoticed, while it did not appear in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' till fourteen months after it was delivered.[142]

A few specimens may give a fair idea of the power which made Pitt so dreaded.

'The troops of Hanover, whom we are now expected to pay, marched into the Low Countries, where they still remain. They marched to the place most distant from the enemy, least in danger of an attack, and most strongly fortified had an attack been designed. They have, therefore, no other claim to be paid than that they left their own country for a place of greater security. I shall not, therefore, be surprised, after such another glorious campaign ... to be told that the money of this nation cannot be more properly employed than in hiring Hanoverians to eat and sleep.'[143]

'As to Hanover,' he continues, 'we know by experience that none of the merits of that Electorate are passed over in silence.' 'It is not to be imagined that His Majesty would not have sent his proportion of troops to the Austrian army had not the temptation of greater profit been laid industriously before him.' 'It is now too apparent that this powerful, this great, this mighty nation is considered only as a province to a despicable electorate, and that, in consequence of a plan formed long ago and invariably pursued, these [Hanoverian] troops are hired only to drain us of our money.... How much reason the transactions of almost every year have given for suspecting this absurd, ungrateful, and perfidious partiality it is not necessary to declare.... To dwell upon all the instances of partiality which have been shown, and the yearly visits which have been paid to that delightful country [Hanover], to reckon up all the sums that have been spent to aggrandise and enrich it, would be an irksome and invidious task, invidious to those who are afraid to be told the truth, and irksome to those who are unwilling to hear of the dishonour and injuries of their country. I shall, however, dwell no longer on this unpleasing subject than to express my hope that we shall no longer suffer ourselves to be deceived and oppressed.'

Conceive the position. On the one side a King, born and bred in Hanover, to whom the honour and welfare of Hanover and the Hanoverians were everything, whose paradise was Hanover, who counted the days to his annual visit to Hanover as a schoolboy counts the days to his holidays, who held Hanover as his own absolute monarchy and property as compared with the limited interest and power of the British throne; a King, moreover, courted by all, whose favour was necessary for the obtaining of office; accustomed to unstinted adulation and homage. On the other, this young jackanapes, an official in the court of his detested son, declaiming against him with every art of the actor and the rhetorician, with every power of voice and eye, holding him and his Hanover up to every kind of ridicule and contempt, before an audience mainly of place-hunters and place-holders, half trembling, half chuckling, as the philippic proceeded.

Why did Pitt take this line? If he wished for office (as he undoubtedly did), it seemed madness: he was committing something like suicide. But pique, as Sir George Savile well said, 'is the spur the devil rides the noblest tempers with.' He was unquestionably angry at his exclusion from office, which he had, no doubt, been told was due to the King. He was justly indignant that the long-continued efforts which had resulted in the overthrow of Walpole's overweening power had simply resulted in the shuffle of a few offices, and that to the victors the spoil had been denied; the sole and execrable minister Walpole had been replaced by a much less sole but not less execrable minister in Carteret. All this was gall to a man who had been among the most formidable in the heat of battle. That heat was now over, and the vanquished were picnicking with a few selected victors, while Pitt and his friends were left to cool themselves on the deserted battlefield. 'They tell me,' said Lord George Bentinck, in 1846, 'that I shall save fifteen hundred a year by Free Trade. I don't care for that. What I cannot bear is being sold.' Pitt, too, could not bear being sold.

That pique and a not ignoble rage had much to do with this philippic we may well assume. But we may also surmise that his attitude was not devoid of calculation. The veto of George II. was not to be removed by deference, so he would, like another Hannibal, destroy the obstacle with vinegar. The King had been exasperated by the lambent play of Pitt's earlier insinuations; he should be made to know how Pitt had then held his hand, what thunderbolts he had kept in reserve, what unspeakable things awaited the Prince who should frown on him. 'All the things I have told you,' said Sancho Panza, 'are tarts and cheese-cakes to what remains behind.' George II. should learn that the innuendoes that Pitt had levelled at him before were tarts and cheesecakes compared to what he had the power of producing. Pitt, in a word, had made up his mind that his only means of achieving his objects was by terror. He had thrown away the scabbard. Moreover, he was appealing from the Court to the people. The Court was foreign, immoral, and unpopular: the very name of Hanover was detested. And although Pitt's actual words reached the people late or not at all, there was an echo which was audible, and made known all through the three kingdoms that there was within the walls of Parliament an intrepid, unbribed, perhaps incorruptible orator who feared the face of no man, and who was embodying in fiery words the antipathies and distrusts of the nation.