William Pitt and national revival

by J. Holland Rose

Yet the King soon felt the domination of his will. This appeared when the royal patient refused to go to bed. As the King petulantly resisted, Willis raised his voice in commanding tones which ensured complete submission. The trust which Willis reposed in the King led him to lengths that were sharply censured. When the sufferer expressed a desire to shave himself and complained that a razor and even a knife had been withheld from him, Willis at once replied that he was sure His Majesty had too strong a sense of what he owed to God and man to make an improper use of it. He therefore brought a razor, and kept the monarch under his eye until the growth of five weeks was removed. This tactful treatment speedily wrought a marked change. Willis was far more sanguine than the other attendants.[653] In his evidence before the Committee on 9th December, he stated that the irritation was already subsiding, and that nine-tenths of his patients who had been similarly afflicted recovered, generally within three months from their first seizure.[654]

Willis’s words aroused the liveliest hopes. In vain did the Prince’s party and the physicians scoff at the assurance of the “quack” or “interloper.” The Queen and the nation believed in Willis; and his report greatly strengthened Pitt’s hands in dealing with the Regency. The more we know of the motives that influenced votes in Parliament the more we see that they turned on the opinions of the doctors. The desertion of the Duke of Queensberry to the Prince’s party was due to a long conversation which he had at Windsor with the pessimistic Dr. Warren.[655]

The conduct of the Prime Minister was cautious and tentative. On 10th December, after presenting the medical evidence, he moved the appointment of a committee to investigate precedents. At once Fox started to his feet and poured forth a vehement remonstrance. What need was there for such an inquiry? It was merely a pretext for delay. The heir-apparent was of mature age and capacity. He had as clear a right to take the reins of government and to exercise the sovereign power during the King’s illness as he would have in case of death. Parliament had only to determine when he had the right to exercise it; and as short a time as possible should elapse before the Prince assumed the sovereignty.

Here, as so often, Fox marred his case by his impetuosity. Pitt watched him narrowly, and remarked exultantly to his neighbour: “I’ll un-Whig the gentleman for the rest of his life.” With eyes flashing defiance, he denounced his assertions of the right of the Prince to assume the Regency as a breach of the constitution, implying as they did that the House could not even deliberate on the question. They must therefore in the first place assert their own rights.

Fox at once rose, not to soften, but to emphasize his previous statements. He questioned whether Parliament had the power of legislating at all until the royal power were made good. Now that the King had been admitted to be incapable, their assembly was a Convention, not a Parliament. He next asserted that the Regency belonged of right to the Prince of Wales during the civil death of the King; and “that it could not be more legally his by the ordinary and natural demise of the Crown.” This was tantamount to saying that English law recognized lunacy as death, in which case an heir could at once possess the property of a lunatic father, and a wife be divorced from an insane husband. Of course this is not so.[656] Fox concluded by asserting that, if Parliament arrogated to itself the power of nominating the Regent, it would act “contrary to the spirit of the constitution and would be guilty of treason.”

Pitt, on the contrary, affirmed that the Prince had no such claim to the Regency as would supersede the right of either House to deliberate on the subject. He even ventured on the startling assertion that apart from the decision of Parliament “the Prince of Wales had no more right (speaking of strict right) to assume the government than any other individual subject of the country.”[657] This phrase is generally quoted without the qualifying clause, which materially alters it. Pitt surely did not mean to deny the priority of the claim of the Prince, but rather to affirm the supreme authority of Parliament; the statement, however was undeniably over-strained. In the main he carried the House with him. In vain did Burke declaim against Pitt, styling him a self-constituted competitor with the Prince. “Burke is Folly personified,” wrote Sir William Young on 22nd December, “but shaking his cap and bells under the laurel of genius.”[658] The sense of the House was clearly with the Prime Minister, and the committee of inquiry was appointed.

At the outset, then, Fox and his friends strained their contentions to breaking-point. In a technical sense their arguments could be justified by reference to the dead past; but they were out of touch with the living present. Fox himself had admitted that no precedent could be found for this problem. A practical statesman would therefore have sought to adapt the English constitution (which is a growing organism, not a body of rigid rules) to the needs of the present crisis. By his eager declarations he left this course open for Pitt to take; and that great parliamentarian took it with masterly power. He resolved to base his case on the decisions arrived at in the Revolution of a century earlier which had affirmed the ascendancy of Parliament in all questions relating to a vacancy in the Crown or a disputed succession. Men said that he was becoming a Republican, and Fox a Tory.[659] Fortunately he had to do with singularly indiscreet opponents. After Fox had prejudiced the Prince’s cause, Sheridan rushed in to mar its prospects still further. In the debate of 12th December he ventured to remind Pitt of the danger of provoking the assertion of the Prince’s claim to the Regency. Never did Sheridan’s hatred of Pitt betray him into a more disastrous blunder.[660] His adversary at once turned it to account:

I have now [he said] an additional reason for asserting the authority of the House and defining the boundaries of “Right,” when the deliberative faculties of Parliament are invaded and an indecent menace is thrown out to awe and influence our proceedings. In the discussion of the question I trust the House will do its duty in spite of any threat that may be thrown out. Men who feel their native freedom will not submit to a threat, however high the authority from which it may come.[661]

We must here pause in order to notice the allegations of Mr. Lecky against Pitt. That distinguished historian asserted that the conduct of the Prime Minister towards the Prince “was from the first as haughty and unconciliatory as possible”; he claims that the plan of a Regency should have been submitted to the Prince before it was laid before Parliament; further, that, in defiance of the expressed wish of the Prince, “Pitt insisted on bringing the question of the Prince’s right to a formal issue and obtaining a vote denying it.”[662] It is difficult to see on what grounds this indictment rests. Surely it was the duty of the Privy Council and Parliament first to hear the medical evidence and to decide whether the need for the Regency existed. That was the purport of the debate of 10th December, the details of which prove conclusively that it was Fox who first, and in a most defiant way, brought up the question of the Prince’s right to assume the Regency. Pitt, in a temperate and non-committal speech, had moved for a “Committee of Inquiry,” whereupon the Whig leader flung down the gauntlet for the Prince; and two days later Sheridan uttered his threat.[663] Their auditors must have inferred that they acted with the sanction of Carlton House. In any case, the Prince’s friends, not Pitt, provoked the conflict. When the glove was twice cast down, the Prime Minister could do nothing else but take it up and insist on having that question disposed of; otherwise Parliament might as well have dissolved outright. We may admit, however, that the intemperate conduct of Fox and Sheridan led Pitt to assert the authority of Parliament with somewhat more stringency than the case warranted.

To the contention, that the Prince ought first to have been consulted on the proposed measure, I may reply that such a course would have implied his right to dictate his terms to Parliament; and that was the very question which Pitt wished to probe by the Committee of Inquiry. Further, the historian’s assertion, that Pitt laid the Regency plan before Parliament before submitting it to the Prince, is disproved by the contents of Pitt’s letter of 15th December, published in full by Bishop Tomline.[664] In it the Prime Minister expressed his regret that his words and intentions had been misrepresented to His Royal Highness; for on several occasions he had offered to wait on him but had received an answer that he (the Prince) had no instructions for him. He denied the accuracy of the report that he was about on the morrow to submit to Parliament his plan for the Regency. His motion merely affirmed the right of Parliament to deliberate on the present emergency; but the course of the recent debate had compelled him to outline his ideas. They were these: that the Regency should be vested in the Prince, with the power of freely choosing his Ministers, unrestrained by any Council. He had declined, and begged still to decline, to detail the other powers, because the House might reject his opinions as to its right to deliberate on the present crisis. If he gained its approval, he would be honoured by the Prince’s permission to state to him the opinions which, after due inquiry, Ministers were able to form on the further proposals that might be submitted to Parliament.