The new cabinet consisted of Portland, who was little more than a figure-head; North and Fox, secretaries of state; Stormont, president of the council; Carlisle, privy seal; Lord John Cavendish, chancellor of the exchequer; and Keppel, first lord of the admiralty. All except Stormont belonged to the party of Fox, the dominant partner in the coalition. The great seal was placed in commission. Burke again became paymaster, and Sheridan was secretary to the treasury. George was determined not to give his confidence to the ministers who had thus thrust themselves upon him, and to get rid of them as soon as possible. Fox applied himself assiduously to the duties of office, as indeed he did during the Rockingham administration, and strove in vain to overcome the king's dislike by deferential behaviour. George's hostility was strengthened by the friendship between Fox and the Prince of Wales. The prince's habits were dissolute and extravagant; he was an undutiful son, and the king a somewhat unforgiving father. He violently espoused the cause of the coalition, and George is said to have called the government "my son's ministry". It was time to provide him with a separate establishment, and Fox promised him that he would ask parliament for £100,000 a year. The majority of the cabinet thought the sum too large. The king was of the same opinion, and did not wish his son to be independent of all parental control. He therefore offered him an allowance of £50,000 from the civil list. Fox was unwilling to disappoint the prince, and the dismissal of the ministers seemed certain. They were saved by the prince's acceptance of the king's offer, in addition to the revenues of the duchy of Cornwall which amounted to £12,000 a year; and parliament had only to vote him £60,000 for his debts and present expenses. The question of parliamentary reform was again brought forward by Pitt. As before, he urged that reform would prevent the crown from again exercising corrupt influence in parliament. He proposed as resolutions that the number of county and metropolitan members should be increased, suggesting an increase of at least a hundred, and that for the future any borough which was found by a committee of the house to be grossly corrupt should be disfranchised. This, he believed, would gradually reduce the number of members to what it then was, and would purify elections. North opposed the motion, Fox spoke in favour of it, though he wished that it had gone further. It was lost by 293 to 149. The public was no longer so eager for reform as in 1780.[174] Sawbridge's annual motion for shortening the duration of parliament was lost by 121 to 56.
WARREN HASTINGS IN INDIA.
Indian affairs demanded immediate legislation. The company's charter was renewed in 1781; a new arrangement was made as to its dividends and its payments to the state, and its political transactions were placed more completely under ministerial control. Two committees were also appointed by the house of commons to inquire into its administration. Of one of these Burke was the most active member, and Dundas, then holding office under North, was chairman of the other. In 1782 Dundas moved resolutions condemning the company's administration; the Rockingham ministry took the matter up, and the house voted that Warren Hastings, the governor-general, should be recalled. The directors agreed, but on Rockingham's death the proprietors refused their assent. North's regulating act of 1773 worked badly. From 1774 to 1780 Hastings was thwarted in council by three of the four councillors sent out by the ministers, and specially by Francis, the reputed author of the Junius letters, who opposed him with extreme rancour. Hastings fought a duel with him in 1779 and wounded him; he returned to England, and Hastings gained a majority in the council. The Madras council also quarrelled with their governor, Lord Pigot; he was arrested by their order and died in confinement. Other difficulties arose from the independent action of the minor governments of Bombay and Madras, and from the indefinite character of the powers of the supreme court of judicature. Administrative abuses existed, and the extreme financial difficulties caused by the wars with the Maráthás, Haidar Alí, and the French, drove Hastings to adopt some high-handed measures. The Rockingham whigs were adverse to him, and Burke, whose generous emotions were roused by any tale of oppression, applied himself to collecting evidence against him, which his fervid imagination magnified and distorted.
Hastings guided the affairs of India through a period of extreme danger; preserved the empire, brought order out of anarchy in every branch of the administration, and won the esteem and confidence of the subject people, the army, and the civil service. His task was not merely to govern well, but to provide dividends out of revenue, and his work was criticised by the company with reference to its pecuniary results as well as its political wisdom. In Bengal he abolished Clive's mischievous dual system, and administered the province through English officials; he reformed the collection of the revenue, and he effected large economies by reducing the enormous pension of the nawáb, who under his new system was spared the expenses of government, and by withholding the tribute to the emperor, who was a mere puppet in the hands of the Maráthás. While governor of Bengal he allied himself with the Muhammadan states on the frontier, and specially with Oudh, which he wished to make a barrier against Maráthá invasion. He took Allahábád and Kora from the emperor, or rather from the Maráthás, and made them over to Shujá-ud-Daulá, the wazír of Oudh, and partly to raise money for the company, and partly as a matter of policy he accepted the wazír's offer of forty lakhs of rupees for the loan of British troops to help him conquer the Rohillás, an Afghan tribe which had lately settled in those districts and was intriguing with the Maráthás. The conquest was carried out in Eastern fashion in 1774, and the wazír's cruelties, which were grossly exaggerated, were laid to Hastings's charge. The overthrow of the Rohillás was advantageous to the British rule; but though the council at Calcutta thought the bargain highly profitable to the company, the hiring out of British troops to serve as subsidiaries to an Asiatic potentate was a deplorable mistake. Another charge brought against Hastings concerned the execution of Nanda-Kumár (Nuncomar), a rascally Bráhman, who, after Hastings was appointed governor-general, helped his opponents in the council by bringing charges against him. Nanda-Kumár was hanged for a private forgery, after a patient trial in the supreme court. His death was highly convenient to Hastings, but there is no evidence that he had anything to do with the prosecution or sentence.[175]
FOX'S INDIA BILLS.
During the Maráthá war, a tributary chief, Chait Singh, rájá of Benares, neglected to perform the demands made upon him, and showed a dangerously independent spirit. In 1781 Hastings imposed an enormous fine upon him; he revolted and was defeated, and his estates were confiscated and given to a kinsman. Though the rájá's conduct was contumacious, Hastings seems to have acted with undue severity. He was pressed for money, and left the rájá no choice between paying a very large sum and losing his estates. Difficulties increased, and he called on Asaf-ud-Daulá, then nawáb wazír of Oudh, to pay his heavy arrears of debt to the company. The begams, the mother and widow of the late nawáb, had a vast treasure which should have belonged to the state. Hastings was informed that these powerful ladies were helping Chait Singh; it was necessary to get money from the wazír, and he bade him force the ladies to give up their treasure. The resident at Lucknow brought up some troops; the begams' palace at Faizábád was blockaded, and their eunuch-ministers imprisoned and maltreated until the resident obtained enough to liquidate the wazír's debt. The wazír threw the odium of this transaction on the English. Hastings defended his conduct as just and politic. He was not directly responsible for the severe measures adopted by the wazír, but it was certainly not a matter in which the British governor-general and his officers should have taken any part. His conduct in this matter as well as towards the Benares rájá was misrepresented and used against him in England.
The refusal of the proprietors to recall Hastings was highly displeasing to the commons, and a petition from the company for relief from some obligations imposed in 1781 gave occasion to parliament again to interfere in its affairs. In April, 1783, Dundas, who was then in opposition to the coalition ministry, proposed a bill for the government of India. His plan was to render the governor-general more independent of his council, to subordinate more completely the inferior governments to the government of Bengal, to change the uncertain tenure of the zamíndárs into hereditary possession, to recall Hastings, and to appoint some noble, like Cornwallis, as his successor. As the government promised to bring in an India bill the next session, he allowed his bill to drop. When parliament reassembled in November, Fox brought in two bills, which were largely prepared by Burke, one affecting the constitution of the company, the other its administration in India. The first vested the management of the territories, revenue, and commerce of the company in seven commissioners, named in the bill, for four years, with power to appoint and remove all officers of the company. After that term Fox suggested that the crown should nominate the commissioners, and meanwhile was to appoint to vacancies. Commercial transactions were to be managed by a subordinate board chosen by parliament from among the larger proprietors. The second bill abolished all monopolies in India, prohibited the acceptance of presents, and gave native landlords an hereditary estate. The objections urged against the first bill by the opposition, and chiefly by Pitt, Grenville, and Dundas, were grounded on its violation of the company's charter, and its tendency to vest the patronage of India in the existing ministry. Fox ably defended the bill, and Burke, in an eloquent speech, depicted, with much exaggeration, the injustice which, he maintained, the millions of India had suffered during Hastings's administration, and argued that the delinquencies of the company justified the violation of its charter.
It was, however, the political side of the bill which chiefly roused opposition. All seven commissioners belonged to Fox's party. For four years it vested in his nominees "all the patronage of the East". Pitt declared that it created "a new and enormous influence"; Grenville that "the treasures of India like a flood would sweep away our liberties". Fox was accused of making himself "King of Bengal," and a caricature represents him as Carlo Khan entering Leadenhall street on an elephant which has the face of North and is led by Burke. All this was party exaggeration; the bill was a genuine attempt to benefit the natives of India, and would not probably have had any really serious consequences in England, though the control of the Indian patronage for four years would have strengthened Fox's party, and, if it had afterwards been vested in the crown, would have given some opportunity for the exercise of corrupt influence by ministers. The king was waiting for an opportunity to get rid of the coalition ministry, and Thurlow and Temple easily excited his jealousy for the prerogative by telling him that the bill would deprive him of half his power and disable him for the rest of his life. His influence in the commons was diminished by recent legislation, and there the bill was carried by two to one. Before the second reading in the lords he gave Temple a card authorising him to say that, whoever voted for the bill "would be considered by him as an enemy". This soon became known, and, on December 17, the commons voted by 153 to 80 that it was now necessary to declare that to report the king's opinion on any question pending in parliament with a view to influence votes is a high crime and misdemeanour. Nevertheless the king's unconstitutional move was successful; the lords rejected the bill. The next night George ordered the secretaries of state to send back their seals, for he would not receive them personally, and the coalition ministry was dismissed. Pitt at once accepted the offices of first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer.
PITT FORMS A MINISTRY.
He was then in his twenty-fifth year. Extraordinary difficulties faced him: the opposition of a large majority of the commons, led by Fox, a master of debate, and strong in men of ability and experience, and the discredit attaching to the king's unconstitutional action to which he owed his position. He found it difficult to form a ministry, for few were willing to join him in a struggle in which victory seemed hopeless. Shelburne, his former leader, he would not invite, for he could not endure his habitually enigmatic conduct. Temple, an instigator and the agent of the king's action, became secretary of state, but immediately resigned owing apparently to a personal offence. The new cabinet consisted only of Lords Sydney (Thomas Townshend) and Carmarthen, secretaries for the home and foreign departments; Gower, president of the council; Rutland, privy seal; Thurlow, chancellor; and Howe, first lord of the admiralty; besides Pitt who alone among them sat in the commons. Richmond again became master of the ordnance and a little later re-entered the cabinet. Dundas was treasurer of the navy. Pitt's acceptance of office was regarded by the opposition as a "boyish freak"; his ministry was "a mince-pie administration which would end with the Christmas holidays".[176]