History of the English People, Volume VII / The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767

by John Richard Green

The King's friends.

It was only slowly indeed that the party as a whole swung round to a steady support of the Government; and in the nation at large the old Toryism was still for some years to show itself in opposition to the Crown. But from the first the Tory nobles and gentry came in one by one; and their action told at once on the complexion of English politics. Their withdrawal from public affairs had left them untouched by the progress of political ideas since the Revolution of 1688, and when they returned to political life it was to invest the new sovereign with all the reverence which they had bestowed on the Stuarts. In this return of the Tories therefore a "King's party" was ready made to his hand; but George was able to strengthen it by a vigorous exertion of the power and influence which was still left to the Crown. All promotion in the Church, all advancement in the army, a great number of places in the civil administration and about the court, were still at the king's disposal. If this vast mass of patronage had been practically usurped by the ministers of his predecessors, it was resumed and firmly held by George the Third; and the character of the House of Commons made patronage a powerful engine in its management. George had one of Walpole's weapons in his hands, and he used it with unscrupulous energy to break up the party which Walpole had held so long together. The Whigs were still indeed a great power. "Long possession of government, vast property, obligations of favours given and received, connexion of office, ties of blood, of alliance, of friendship, the name of Whigs dear to the majority of the people, the zeal early begun and steadily continued to the royal family, all these together," says Burke justly, "formed a body of power in the nation." But George the Third saw that the Whigs were divided among themselves by the factious spirit which springs from a long hold of office, and that they were weakened by the rising contempt with which the country at large regarded the selfishness and corruption of its representatives.

Pitt and the Whigs.

More than thirty years before, the statesmen of the day had figured on the stage as highwaymen and pickpockets. And now that statesmen were represented by hoary jobbers such as Newcastle, the public contempt was fiercer than ever, and men turned sickened from the intrigues and corruption of party to a young sovereign who aired himself in a character which Bolingbroke had invented, as a Patriot King. Had Pitt and Newcastle held together indeed, supported as the one was by the commercial classes, the other by the Whig families and the whole machinery of Parliamentary management, George must have struggled in vain. But the ministry was already disunited. The bulk of the party drew day by day further from Pitt. Attached as they were to peace by the traditions of Walpole, dismayed at the enormous expenditure, and haughty with the pride of a ruling oligarchy, the Whigs were in silent revolt against the war and the supremacy of the Great Commoner. It was against their will that he rejected proposals of peace from France which would have secured to England all her conquests on the terms of a desertion of Prussia, and that his steady support enabled Frederick still to hold out against the terrible exhaustion of an unequal struggle. The campaign of 1760 indeed was one of the grandest efforts of Frederick's genius. Foiled in an attempt on Dresden, he again saved Silesia by a victory at Liegnitz and hurled back an advance of Daun by a victory at Torgau: while Ferdinand of Brunswick held his ground as of old along the Weser. But even victories drained Frederick's strength. Men and money alike failed him. It was impossible for him to strike another great blow, and the ring of enemies again closed slowly round him. His one remaining hope lay in the support of Pitt, and triumphant as his policy had been, Pitt was tottering to his fall.

Pitt resigns.

The envy and resentment of the minister's colleagues at his undisguised supremacy gave the young king an easy means of realizing his schemes. George had hardly mounted the throne when he made his influence felt in the ministry by forcing it to accept a Court favourite, the Earl of Bute, as Secretary of State. Bute had long been his counsellor, and though his temper and abilities were those of a gentleman usher, he was forced into the Cabinet. The new drift of affairs was seen in the instant desertion from Pitt of the two ablest of his adherents, George Grenville and Charles Townshend, who attached themselves from this moment to the rising favourite. It was seen yet more when Bute pressed for peace. As Bute was known to be his master's mouthpiece, a peace party at once appeared in the Cabinet itself, and it was only a majority of one that approved Pitt's refusal to negotiate with France. "He is madder than ever," was Bute's comment on this refusal in his correspondence with the king; "he has no thought of abandoning the Continent." Conscious indeed as he was of the king's temper and of the temper of his colleagues, Pitt showed no signs of giving way. So far was he from any thought of peace that he proposed at this moment a vast extension of the war. In 1761 he learned the signature of a treaty which brought into force the Family Compact between the Courts of Paris and Madrid, and of a special convention which bound the last to declare war on England at the close of the year. Pitt proposed to anticipate the blow by an instant seizure of the treasure fleet which was on its way from the Indies to Cadiz, and for whose safe arrival alone the Spanish Court was deferring its action. He would have followed up the blow by occupying the Isthmus of Panama, and by an attack on the Spanish dominions in the New World. It was almost with exultation that he saw the danger which had threatened her ever since the Peace of Utrecht break at last upon England. His proud sense of the national strength never let him doubt for a moment of her triumph over the foes that had leagued against her. "This is the moment," he exclaimed to his colleagues, "for humbling the whole House of Bourbon." But the Cabinet shrank from plans so vast and daring; and the Duke of Newcastle, who had never forgiven Pitt for forcing himself into power and for excluding him from the real control of affairs, was backed in his resistance by the bulk of the Whigs. The king openly supported them, and Pitt with his brother-in-law Lord Temple found themselves alone. Pitt did not blind himself to the real character of the struggle. The question, as he felt, was not merely one of peace or war, it was whether the new force of opinion which had borne him into office and kept him there was to govern England or no. It was this which made him stake all on the decision of the Cabinet. "If I cannot in this instance prevail," he ended his appeal, "this shall be the last time I will sit in the Council. Called to office by the voice of the people, to whom I conceive myself accountable for my conduct, I will not remain in a situation which renders me responsible for measures I am no longer allowed to guide." His proposals were rejected; and the resignation of his post, which followed in October 1761, changed the face of European affairs.

George breaks with the Whigs.

"Pitt disgraced!" wrote a French philosopher, "it is worth two victories to us!" Frederick on the other hand was almost driven to despair. But George saw in the removal of his powerful minister an opening for the realization of his long-cherished plans. The Whigs had looked on Pitt's retirement as the restoration of their rule, unbroken by the popular forces to which it had been driven during his ministry to bow. His declaration that he had been "called to office by the voice of the people, to whom I conceive myself accountable," had been met with indignant scorn by his fellow-ministers. "When the gentleman talks of being responsible to the people," retorted Lord Granville, the Lord Carteret of earlier days, "he talks the language of the House of Commons, and forgets that at this board he is only responsible to the King." But his appeal was heard by the people at large. When the dismissed statesman went to Guildhall the Londoners hung on his carriage-wheels, hugged his footmen, and even kissed his horses. Their break with Pitt was in fact the death-blow of the Whigs. In betraying him to the king they had only put themselves in George's power; and so great was the unpopularity of the ministry that the king was able to deliver his longed-for stroke at a party that he hated even more than Pitt. Newcastle found he had freed himself from the great statesman only to be driven from office by a series of studied mortifications from his young master; and the more powerful of his Whig colleagues followed him into retirement. George saw himself triumphant over the two great forces which had hampered the free action of the Crown, "the power which arose," in Burke's words, "from popularity, and the power which arose from political connexion"; and the rise of Lord Bute to the post of First Minister marked the triumph of the king.

The Peace.

Bute took office simply as an agent of the king's will; and the first resolve of George the Third was to end the war. In the spring of 1762 Frederick, who still held his ground stubbornly against fate, was brought to the brink of ruin by a withdrawal of the English subsidies; it was in fact only his dogged resolution and a sudden change in the policy of Russia, which followed on the death of his enemy the Czarina Elizabeth, that enabled him at last to retire from the struggle in the Treaty of Hubertsberg without the loss of an inch of territory. George and Lord Bute had already purchased peace at a very different price. With a shameless indifference to the national honour they not only deserted Frederick but they offered to negotiate a peace for him on the basis of a cession of Silesia to Maria Theresa and East Prussia to the Czarina. The issue of the strife with Spain saved England from humiliation such as this. Pitt's policy of instant attack had been justified by a Spanish declaration of war three weeks after his fall; and the year 1762 saw triumphs which vindicated his confidence in the issue of the new struggle. Martinico, the strongest and wealthiest of the French West Indian possessions, was conquered at the opening of the year, and its conquest was followed by those of Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent. In the summer the reduction of Havana brought with it the gain of the rich Spanish colony of Cuba. The Philippines, the wealthiest of the Spanish colonies in the Pacific, yielded to a British fleet. It was these losses that brought about the Peace of Paris in February 1763. So eager was Bute to end the war that he bought peace by restoring all that the last year's triumphs had given him. In Europe he contented himself with the recovery of Minorca, while he restored Martinico to France, and Cuba and the Philippines to Spain. The real gains of Britain were in India and America. In the first the French abandoned all right to any military settlement. From the second they wholly withdrew. To England they gave up Canada, Nova Scotia, and Louisiana as far as the Mississippi, while they resigned the rest of that province to Spain, in compensation for its surrender of Florida to the British Crown.