When the House of Commons met, under conditions of {236} keen excitement, Fox and North took their seats on the Front Opposition Bench with their vast majority behind them eager to retaliate upon the King, who had defied their voices and insulted their leaders. A young member, Mr. Richard Pepper Arden, rose in his place and moved a new writ for the borough of Appleby, in the room of the Right Honorable William Pitt, who had accepted the office of First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. We are told that this motion was received with loud and general laughter by the Opposition, who regarded Pitt's conduct as a piece of foolhardy presumption. And indeed at first Pitt's position seemed difficult in the extreme. It was hard to form a Government in the face of a hostile majority in the Commons, and in the Lords Pitt's perplexity was increased by Lord Temple's sudden and sullen resignation of the office to which he had been so newly appointed. Various reasons have been given for Temple's mysterious and petulant behavior. Some have thought that he resigned because he was in favor of an immediate dissolution, while Pitt was opposed to such a step. Others believe that he was eager for some high mark of royal favor, possibly a dukedom, which was refused by the King and not warmly advocated by Pitt. In spite of all obstacles, however, Pitt succeeded in forming a Ministry, the best he could manage under the conditions. To Shelburne he offered nothing, and this omission adds a mystery greater than that of Temple's resignation to Pitt's administration. It must have surprised Shelburne, as it surprised every observer then and since. Pitt has been accused of ingratitude to the man who had been his father's friend and to whom he himself had owed so short a time before the leadership of the House of Commons. But Pitt was not ungrateful. He was merely astute. He read Shelburne as perhaps no other of his contemporaries was able to read him, and he gauged him at his true value or want of value. Shelburne's glittering unreality, his showy unreliability, were to have no place in Pitt's scheme of things. Abandoned by Temple, abandoning Shelburne, Pitt went his own way, doing the best he could in the face {237} of tremendous odds and doing it very well. One of his first acts of office was to bring in an India Bill of his own, which was decisively defeated in the Commons. For some months Pitt fought his hard and thankless fight as a minister with a minority behind him. At last, in the end of March, he saw his opportunity for a dissolution and resolved to take it. A singular episode threatened to delay his purpose. [Sidenote: 1784—The disappearance of the Great Seal] The Great Seal of England was stolen from the house of the Lord Chancellor in Great Ormond Street, and was never recovered. It may have been purloined by some political partisan who believed, as James the Second believed, that by making away with the Great Seal he could effectively embarrass his opponents. But this "curious manoeuvre," as Pitt himself called it, was nullified by the promptitude with which another Great Seal was made.
The result of the dissolution was as gratifying to Pitt as it was disastrous to Fox. More than one hundred and sixty of Fox's friends lost their seats and earned instead the sobriquet of Fox's Martyrs, and Fox himself had very great difficulty in getting elected for the new Parliament. So ended the unfortunate episode of the Coalition Ministry. Much as Fox had suffered from the sins of youth, he was destined to suffer even more from this error of his manhood. For the rest of his life, save for a few months towards its close, he was destined to remain out of office, conscious of the great deeds he would have done and denied the power to do them, while his antagonist Pitt lived through long years of office, long years that were as eventful as any years and more eventful than most years in the history of the country. Fox had run up a great debt for a little power. He had paltered with his honor, with his principles, with his public utterances; he had staked more than he had a right to stake on success, and he had lost, utterly and hopelessly. If every error in life has to be paid for sooner or later, the price due from Fox for his apostasy was very promptly demanded and was very heavy.
It is to be regretted that Pitt began his long period of authority by an attempt as stubborn as it was ungenerous to keep his great rival out of public life. The election for {238} Fox's constituency of Westminster was one of the fiercest conflicts in English history. Every effort was made to drive Fox out, every effort to put him in. Beautiful women—whom Pitt described as "women of the people," in parody of the name they gave to Fox of "the man of the people"—bribed voters with kisses, while the friends of Pitt rallied every man they could muster to the polling booths. Fox was returned, but the unconstitutional conduct of the High Bailiff in granting the request of the defeated candidate, Sir Cecil Wray, for a scrutiny, and in refusing to make a return till the scrutiny was effected, might have deprived Westminster for a season of any Parliamentary representation, and would have kept Fox out of Parliament altogether if he had not been returned for the Kirkwall Borough through the friendship of Sir Thomas Dundas. Pitt unfortunately backed up the action of the High Bailiff with a vehemence of zeal that suggested rancor, and that failed of its purpose. Fox was in the Commons to defend himself and his cause, and he did defend himself with an eloquence that even he never surpassed, and that gave its additional glory to its ultimate success.
[Sidenote: 1784—Pitt as a financier]
However the generosity or the taste of Pitt's conduct towards Fox in this instance might be questioned, there could be no question as to the rare ability he soon made proof of as a statesman and as a financier. During his few and troubled months of office before the dissolution, he had introduced an India Bill to take the place of that of Fox, which the King and the Lords had shattered. This Bill had been defeated by a majority of eight. He now introduced what was practically the same measure, and carried it triumphantly by a majority of more than two hundred. It established that Board of Control and that double system of government which existed, with some modifications, until the Act of 1858, following upon the Indian Mutiny, effected a radical revolution in the administration of India. The enemies of Pitt's measure declared that its abuse of patronage was as flagrant as and more enduring than that proposed by Fox, and for a long time public discontent {239} expressed itself loudly against the extreme favor that was shown to Scotchmen in the filling up of appointments.
The financial affairs of the country called for a bold hand and found it. Lord North had muddled the finances of England almost as completely and almost as hopelessly as contemporary French financiers were muddling the finances of France. Pitt faced something that was not altogether unlike financial chaos with a courage which was well and with a genius which was better. The picturesque institution of smuggling, capitalized by wealth and rank in London, and profitably employing some forty thousand adventurous spirits, withered before the spell of Pitt's dexterous manipulations. A window tax compensated for a lightened tea duty that made smuggling merely a ridiculous waste of time, and its most sinister effect may still be noticed here and there in England in the hideous imitations of windows painted on to the walls of houses to support a grotesque idea of harmony, without incurring the expense of an actual aperture for light and air. Pitt raised the loans necessary to meet the yawning deficit and to minimize the floating debt, and he astonished his world by introducing the amazing elements of absolute honesty and admirable publicity into the transaction. The principle of patronage that had made previous loans a scandalous source of corruption was gallantly thrown overboard; and the new minister announced to the general amazement that the new loans would be contracted for with those who offered the lowest terms in public competition. A glittering variety of new taxes, handled with the dexterity of a conjuror, and extracting sources of revenue from sources untaxed and very justifiably taxable, rounded off a series of financial proposals that inaugurated brilliantly his administration, and that had their abiding effect upon the welfare of the country. The crown of his financial fame was his plan for the redemption of the National Debt introduced in 1786. His plan was based on the comparatively familiar idea of a sinking fund. Up to the time of Pitt's proposal, however, such sinking fund as might exist in a time of peace was always liable to be taken over and {240} made use of by the Government in a time of war. Pitt's plan was to form a sinking fund which should be made inalienable by an Act of Parliament until the Act creating it should be repealed by another Act of Parliament. For this purpose Pitt created a Board of Commissioners consisting of the Speaker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Master of the Rolls, the Accountant-General, and the Governor and Deputy-Governor of the Bank of England. To this independent and distinguished body of men the sum of one million sterling was to be handed over annually for the gradual redemption of the existing debt by the purchase of stock.
The story of Pitt's early administration was not all a record of success. For the last time, and unsuccessfully, he attempted to bring about a Parliamentary reform. For the first time, and no less unsuccessfully, he tried to bring about that better understanding between England and Ireland which it was his merit always to desire, and his misfortune never to accomplish. In spite of his genius, his eloquence, and his popularity, his position in the House of Commons was in a sense precarious. It was not merely that he had the bad luck to be opposed by such a galaxy of ability as has perhaps never before or since dazzled from the benches of Opposition the eyes of any minister of Pitt's intellectual power. To be fought against relentlessly, tirelessly, by a Sheridan, a Burke, and a Fox would have been bad enough for a statesman at the head of a large and reliable majority and enjoying the uncheckered confidence of his sovereign. But Pitt did not enjoy the uncheckered confidence of the King, and Pitt's majority was not reliable. Lord Rosebery quotes an analysis of the House of Commons dated May 1, 1788, recently discovered among the papers of one of Pitt's private secretaries, which serves to show how uncertain Pitt's position was, and how fluctuating the elements upon which he had to depend for his political existence. In this document the "Party of the Crown"—an ominous term—is set down as consisting of 185 members, including "all those who would probably support his Majesty's Government under any minister not {241} peculiarly unpopular." No less than 108 members are set down as "independent or unconnected;" the party ascribed to Fox musters 138, while that of Pitt is only estimated at 52, with the minimizing comment that "of this party, were there a new Parliament, and Mr. P. no longer to continue minister, not above twenty would be returned." In the face of difficulties like these Pitt stood practically alone. His was no Ministry "of All the Talents;" the ranks of the Ministry did not represent, even in a lesser degree, the rich variety of ability that made the Opposition so formidable.
[Sidenote: 1788—Prince George Augustus Frederick]
If the King was at best but a lukewarm supporter of his splendid minister, the heir to the throne was the minister's very warm and persistent enemy. When Pitt came to power the Prince of Wales was, and had been for some time, a conspicuous figure in society, a fitful element in political life, and a subject of considerable scandal to the public mind. George the Third was not the kind of man to be happy with or to bring happiness to his children. Possessed of many of those virtues which are supposed to make for domestic peace, he nevertheless failed signally to attach to himself the affection of his children. One and all, they left him as soon as they could, came back to him as seldom as they could. The King's idea of firmness was always a more or less aggravated form of tyranny, and he reaped in loneliness the harvest of his early harshness. Between his eldest son and himself there soon arose and long continued that feud between the reigning sovereign and his heir which seemed traditional in the House of Hanover.
George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, has many claims to be regarded as perhaps the worst, and as certainly the most worthless, prince of his House. Something was to be excused in the son of such a father; some wild oats were surely to be sown in the soil of a childhood so dully and so sourly cultivated. But no severity of early surroundings will explain or palliate the unlovely mixture of folly and of falseness, of debauchery, vulgarity, profligacy, and baseness, which were the most conspicuous {242} characteristics of the Prince's nature. The malignant enemy of his unhappy father, the treacherous lover, the perjured friend, a heartless fop, a soulless sot, the most ungentlemanly First Gentleman of Europe, his memory baffles the efforts of the sycophant and paralyzes the anger of the satirist. Genius has wasted itself again and again in the attempt fittingly to describe him. To Byron he became "the fourth of the fools and oppressors called George." Moore immortalized his "nothingness" as a "sick epicure's dream, incoherent and gross." Leigh Hunt went to prison for calling him a "fat Adonis of fifty." Landor, in an epigram on himself and his royal namesakes as bitter as four biting lines could be, could find nothing more bitter than to record his descent from earth, and thankfulness to Heaven that with him the Georges had come to an end. Thackeray abandoned in despair the task of doing justice to his existence. "I own I once used to think it would be good sport to pursue him, fasten on him, and pull him down. But now I am ashamed to mount and lay good dogs on, to summon a full field, and then to hunt the poor game."