“—— shorn of his beams.”
The stocks fell; the Common Council voted the Freedom of the City both to Pitt and Legge;[1] Sir John Barnard alone gave a negative. Allen of Bath procured them the same honour from thence; and for some weeks it rained gold boxes: Chester, Worcester, Norwich, Bedford, Salisbury, Yarmouth, Tewkesbury, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Stirling, and other populous and chief towns following the example. Exeter, with singular affectation, sent boxes of heart of oak. On the other hand, a paper was affixed to the gate of St. James’s, with these words, “A Secretary of State much wanted; honesty not necessary; no principles will be treated with.”
Such venom was not likely to bias Newcastle to Mr. Fox. It was the King’s wish that they should unite; and many messages passed; but in vain. It was pretended that the Duke had promised his Majesty never to join Pitt, unless by command. The King said, he would abdicate sooner than give him such command; and complaining bitterly of his ingratitude; imputing to him a refusal made by Lord Duplin to be made Chancellor of the Exchequer; and his leaving his Majesty at the mercy of Mr. Pitt, by not uniting with Fox. His Grace, who scrupled not to wipe out one imputation by deserving another, wrote a penitential letter, and sent it by Munchausen, lamenting his disgrace, after so many years of service, and hoping, when the inquiries should be at an end, that he might again have admission to the closet, where he should be ready to protest and promise whatever his Majesty expected. He had scarcely written this letter, but he laboured anew to obstruct the junction of his friends with Fox. In general, they outran his intentions: Lord Lincoln hated Fox; the little tools feared him. Murray and Hume Campbell and Arundel sincerely wished to bring them together.
The Princess, who looked on any settlement in which Fox was concerned as an establishment of the Duke’s power, frowned on the new revolution; and though Fox made very humble overtures to Leicester House, they were flatly rejected. Pitt grew less and less austere to Newcastle; and now, when this vain man was arrived at the period of detected misgovernment with regard to his country, of ingratitude and disobedience to his master, of caprice, duplicity, and irresolution towards all factions; when under prosecution by Parliament, and frowned on by his sovereign; at this instant were the hopes, the vows of all men addressed to him! The outcast of the Ministry, the scorn of the Court, the jest of the people, was the arbiter of Britain: her King, her patriots, her factions, waited to see into what scale he would fling his influence!
In the meantime, the inquiries began, April 19th. I shall give but a summary account of them: it would be ridiculous to enter into the detail of a pantomime, from which nothing was intended, expected, or produced. The Townshends pretended to be managers against the Ministers: Hume Campbell and Lord Royston acted with spirit and sense for their friends: Ellis was agent for Fox. The latter himself meddled a little, pointing out where inconveniences might arrive to Government from probing intelligence too nicely. The examination began with reading all the papers in order; intelligence, letters, orders, &c. But no kind of check had been held over the offices from whence the materials came. The clerks had been left at liberty to omit, abridge, secrete, what they pleased. No questions were asked, no proofs of authenticity demanded, no witnesses examined; and, for fear of discovering our channels of intelligence, no names were inserted in the extracts. And as the offices had been suffered to curtail at their discretion, so they had had as impartial liberty to send as much useless and perplexing lumber as they could amass. The very dates of the letters filled three and twenty sheets of paper! All this was read over in a hurry, yet was so tiresome, that before half a day was wasted, the House was almost empty. Yet three or four hundred men were supposed to extract a judgment from so crude and slovenly a process!
Pitt, it was expected, would take advantage of illness, and not appear. But he refined on that old finesse; and pretending to wave the care of a broken constitution, when his country demanded his service, and as a pledge of his sincerity in the scrutiny, he came to the discussion in all the studied apparatus of a theatric valetudinarian. The weather was unseasonably warm; yet he was dressed in an old coat and waistcoat of beaver laced with gold: over that, a red surtout, the right arm lined with fur, and appendent with many black ribands, to indicate his inability of drawing it over his right arm, which hung in a crape sling, but which, in the warmth of speaking, he drew out with unlucky activity, and brandished as usual. On his legs were riding stockings. In short, no aspiring Cardinal ever coughed for the Tiara with more specious debility. This mummery was covered over with candour: he acquiesced in every softening term proposed by the advocates of the late criminals: his justice shrunk behind apprehensions of personality: moderation was the sole virtue of a censor. The loss of Minorca he avowed he meant to charge on the whole Government—for the whole Government could not be punished. On the second day, indeed, he trespassed a little upon all these gentle virtues, and threatened to secede, and publish to the world the iniquity of the majority: but recollecting how much more useful to him the majority might be than the world, he recomposed himself, and was content that the majority should be responsible for whatever defects the public might find in the judgment given by the House.
George Townshend proposed several resolutions: the drift of all was to show that the Administration had chosen to believe a threatened invasion on Great Britain, rather than a design on Minorca. These motions were contested, modified, balanced, by appendent questions proposed by the Courtiers. Henley, the Attorney-General, scrupled not in the very outset to propose approbation. Pitt said he should prefer printing the examination, and leaving the public to judge for themselves. Hume Campbell pleaded that such procedure in the House of Commons would be abdicating their share of Government. The Ministerial party endeavoured, though with ostentatious decency, to load the late Admiral; but in general their arguments tended to nothing but to prove that Minorca had been lost by the common course of office. The questions of the Opposition were corrected till all sting was taken out of them; and still others were coupled to them, that made the votes of the House seem a mere set of questions and answers, in which the whole advantage remained to the respondent.
These things passed not without divisions, but as the majority felt itself a majority, it was not modest; it stated roundly in favour of its principals. Yet on the last day of the Committee, the Courtiers moving a resolution, that no greater force could have been sent to the Mediterranean under Mr. Byng, Triumph itself blushed at so palpable a falsehood, and the victorious majority shrunk to 78, many retiring, and many of the more independent sort joining the minority. By this might be seen what Mr. Pitt had in his power, had he exerted himself. The alarm, however, was so great, that a conclusive vote of acquittal, nay, of approbation, which it had been determined should be proposed by Lord Granby and Lord George Cavendish, was dropped with evident marks of dismay; and the late Cabinet, to their great disappointment, were forced to sit down contented, without receiving the thanks of the House of Commons for the loss of Minorca.
The conclusion of the inquiries, however, from which at least it had been supposed a new Administration would arise, facilitated nothing. No approbation given pointed out nobody as deserving power again: nobody being stigmatized, nobody seemed excluded. Pitt had declined triumph, consequently had gained none. A field of negotiation was still open, till three men who knew, hated, and could not trust one another, might settle some such plan of agreement as would still leave those who should unite the hopes and the prospect of betraying or overpowering their new allies.
In the meantime, as if to show how long a great nation can carry on itself without any Government, there were no Ministers, even in the midst of a formidable war, but those baby politicians, the Duke of Devonshire and Lord Holderness: the former with much importance declaring, that he would retain the Treasury but till some new system should be completed: yet he was delighted with the plaything of power, and wished his holidays might be protracted. For the King himself, his very office seemed annihilated. While the three factions were caballing, he had not even an option. Whatever Administration should be settled, he was to receive when presented to him. Lord Mansfield held the Seals of the Exchequer pro tempore; and the House of Commons was so devoid of a Minister, that the office of proposing the Ways and Means devolved on Nugent, one of the Lords of the Treasury.