William Pitt and national revival

by J. Holland Rose

Wilberforce, with his usual power of hitting off a situation, declared that the Fox-North Coalition inherited the defects of its progenitors, the violence of Fox and the corruption of North. This was the general opinion. As for George III, he raged against this unnatural union. He could not mention the subject without falling into the flurried incoherent kind of talk which afterwards marked the on-coming of attacks of lunacy. Private hatred of Fox, as the man who led astray the Prince of Wales into the equally odious paths of gambling and political opposition, fed the King’s animosity against the Whig orator as the foe of the constitution. But the vials of his wrath were poured forth on North, for his betrayal of the royal confidence lavished on him for a decade. On 1st April, George III informed Temple that he hoped the nation’s eyes would soon be opened, and that the Pitts and Grenvilles would deliver him from the thraldom of the Coalition. For the present, he would certainly refuse to grant any honours asked for by the new Ministry.[159] As the greed of the Coalition was notorious, the situation thus became piquant in the extreme. Amusement at the irony of the situation must have helped, in Pitt’s case, to lighten the disappointment of retiring from office. Certainly he was never downcast. Wilberforce’s journal shows him to have been a frequent and a joyous visitor to Wimbledon. This was the time of the spring-sowing of the flower-beds of Lauriston House with the fragments of Ryder’s opera hat. (See [Chapter XII.])

Other and more practical fruits of his hopefulness were his efforts for Parliamentary Reform, clouded over though that cause was by the alliance of Whigs and the former “King’s Friends.” Acting not as a partisan (for, just before resigning office, he informed the House that he belonged to no party), he introduced a motion on 7th May for the Reform of Parliament. On this occasion London and Kent seemed to take an interest in the motion, and the approaches to St. Stephen’s as well as the galleries were thronged by petitioners in favour of Reform. The freeholders of Kent, the householders of the Tower Hamlets, and the electors of Westminster (the last headed by Fox!), came in great numbers to give weight to their petitions. Horace Walpole noted that Kent and Essex had joined the Quintuple Alliance (i.e., of counties) in favour of Reform.[160]

In due course Pitt rose to bring in his motion. He claimed that the disasters of the past years had at length caused the people “to turn their eyes inward on themselves” to find out the cause of the evil. No one could now doubt that the radical fault in the constitution was the secret influence of the Crown as exerted on the House of Commons. For the redress of this evil three plans had been proposed, first, the extension of the franchise to every man—a proposal which he scouted as both impracticable and even undesirable, seeing that the minority must then hold themselves to be slaves to the majority. (It is difficult to follow Pitt here; for every electoral system implies a majority and minority; and hardship arises only when the majority is subservient to the minority—as was the case in 1783.) Their forefathers, he added, had never contemplated giving a vote to every man, and the scheme was “a mere speculative proposition that may be good in theory but which it would be absurd and chimerical to endeavour to reduce to practice.” These words should be noted. For they refute the slander that Pitt “ratted” from the cause of Reform in and after 1790, when it was based on the Jacobin theory of universal suffrage, which he had always repudiated.

Pitt’s second proposal of Reform was to abolish the “rotten boroughs.” He confessed that they were “deformities” in our system, but he felt that they could not be removed without endangering the whole pile. The third proposal seemed to him far better, namely, to add a number of members for the counties and the metropolis. He summed up his contentions in three Resolutions: (1) for the prevention of bribery and undue expense at elections; (2) the disfranchisement of boroughs where corruption was proven; (3) an addition to members of counties and of the metropolis. The details of these proposals were to be specified in a Bill, if the Resolutions were carried. They met with support from Fox, while their very limited character, which Sheridan ridiculed, commended them to Dundas and Thomas Pitt, who previously had opposed Reform.[161] As a pledge of his sincerity, Thomas Pitt offered to surrender his rights over the parliamentary borough of Old Sarum.

All was of no avail. North, Colonel Luttrell, Lord Mulgrave, and others declaimed against any change in the glorious constitution. The House by a majority of one hundred and forty-four reprobated the dangerous spirit of innovation which was abroad. Doubtless the demoralization of the Whigs made defeat inevitable. Pitt himself spoke with less than his usual effectiveness; and the absence of petitions from the new manufacturing towns showed that the country at large cared little for the question. This apathy seems to us unaccountable until we remember that Manchester, Leeds, and Halifax tamely suffered Richard Cromwell to annul the act of enfranchisement which the great Oliver had bestowed upon them. Evidently the age-long torpor still lay upon the land.

In the rest of the session, Pitt brought in measures for effecting retrenchment in the public offices. He commented on such abuses as the following: that the chief clerk of the navy office received a salary of £250 a year, but ten times that amount in gifts, and other clerks in the same proportion. The Secretary of the Post Office raised his salary of £500 to a total of £3,000 by a 2½ per cent. charge on all packets—a curiously cumbrous method of redress. The expense of stationery at the office of Lord North during his term at the Treasury was £1,300 a year, one item being £340 for whip-cord! By careful economies Pitt hoped to save the nation £40,000 a year. The debate was rendered remarkable by a speech from Burke. The great man was smarting under the censure of the House for reinstating two dishonest officials, and had betrayed the Celtic sensitiveness of his nature by drearily ranting until Fox and Sheridan fairly pulled him to his seat. He now rallied Pitt on “prying into the little perquisites of little men in little offices, while he suffered the greatest abuses to exist in the offices under his eye. He seemed to have that nice olfactory nerve which could smell a ball of horsedung a thousand miles off, but which was not affected by the stench of a dunghill under his very window.” Burke, however, failed to substantiate the latter part of his malodorous simile. The measure passed the Commons, only to perish in the Lords. Keppel denied that there were any abuses at the Admiralty; the Duke of Portland opined that Pitt’s reforms would cost as much as they saved; and Stormont declared that they would be highly inconvenient.[162] The same fate befell a measure, which Pitt warmly supported, for lessening expenses at elections.

In his speech on Lord John Cavendish’s Budget, Pitt showed a practical knowledge of finance which enabled him trenchantly to expose the weak points of his successor’s proposals; and he further pointed out the best means for launching a loan on the most favourable terms. His reputation gained in solidity during the session; and if his speeches, after the great effort of 21st February, lacked brilliance, they exhibited his capacity and his grasp of affairs.

Ministers, on the other hand, lost ground, owing to their own blunders and the widening of the gulf between their discordant sections. A case in point was their treatment of the question of the allowance for the Prince of Wales. As will appear later more in detail, the relations between the King and the Prince were already so strained that the Ministry—“my son’s Ministry,” the King sometimes called it—must have known the question to be thorny. The tastes of George III being as frugal as those of his son were extravagant, a clear understanding with the King seemed the first essential to a settlement. Yet Fox and his supporters in the Cabinet prevailed on the other Ministers, rather reluctantly, to allot the sum of £100,000 a year to the Prince, and that, too, without consulting the King. According to Horace Walpole, the proposal came to light during a casual conversation between the King and the Duke of Portland on 11th June. The account given in the “Fox Memorials” seems, however, to convict George III of inconsistency.[163] In any case, he angrily declaimed against the proposal, as showing that Ministers, despite their professions of economy, “were ready to sacrifice the public interests to the wishes of an ill-advised young man”; he declared his readiness to allow the Prince £50,000 a year from the Civil List, so as not to burden the public. This was the sum which he himself had received as Prince of Wales; and he held strong ground in proposing to support his bachelor son on a similar allowance.

This was the mine sprung upon the Ministry on 16th June. It promised to end their existence; and Fox believed that the King would seize the opportunity to dismiss Ministers, dissolve Parliament, and appeal to the country on the cry of economy, paternal authority, and no mischief-making between father and son. Doubtless he would have done so but for the very speedy compliance of the Prince of Wales with his expressed wishes—an act of submission due less to the filial devotion of the Prince than to his desire to save his favourite from a crushing defeat at the polls. Ultimately, on 23rd June, the House agreed to vote the sum of £60,000 for the present needs of the Prince, as regards debts and the furnishing of Carlton House, and £50,000 a year out of the Civil List. The incident led to some regrettable complications. Fox seems to have attributed the King’s sudden anger to an intrigue of Pitt, whom he dubbed “an unscrupulous opposer.”[164] Further, the Prince thenceforth more than ever looked on his father and the opponents of Fox as his own personal enemies, in that they bound him down to an insufficient allowance, which he felt no scruple in exceeding. The wretched business of the Prince of Wales’s debts, and even that of the Regency, resulted in no small measure from the bad blood engendered in the strife of June 1783.

The King, also, as we can now see by the new light which the Dropmore Papers have thrown on events, watched the course of affairs more closely than ever in order to pave the way to office for the Pitts and Grenvilles. But his rancour did not blunt his prudence. He was resolved not to exchange one set of masters for another. If Pitt came in, it must be on terms favourable to the Crown. George saw Temple after his abandonment of the cares of State at Dublin Castle, and soon began to sound him and Pitt as to their ideas on a future Ministry.[165]