FOX AND PITT.
[Sidenote: 1781--Fall of the Lord North Administration]
Pitt entered public life the inheritor of a great name, the transmitter
of a great policy, at a time when the country was in difficulty and the
Government in danger. In the January of 1781 North was still in power,
was still supported by the King, had still some poor shreds of hope that
something, anything might happen to bring England well out of the
struggle with America. In the November of the same year North reeled to
his fall with the news of the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. In
those ten months Pitt had already made himself a name in the House of
Commons. He was no longer merely the son of Pitt; he was Pitt. He had
attached himself to an Opposition that was studded with splendid names,
and had proved that his presence added to its lustre. The heroes and
leaders of Opposition at Westminster welcomed him to their ranks with a
generous admiration and enthusiasm. Fox, ever ready to applaud possible
genius, soon pronounced him to be one of the first men in Parliament.
Burke hailed him, not as a chip of the old block, but as the old block
itself. The praises of Burke and of Fox were great, but they were not
undeserved. When the Ministry of Lord North fell into the dust, when the
King was compelled to accept the return of the Whigs to office, Pitt had
already gained a position which entitled him in his own eyes not to
accept office but to refuse it.
Rockingham formed a Ministry for the second time. The new Ministry was
formed of an alliance between the two armies of the Rockingham Whigs and
the Shelburne Whigs. Rockingham represented the political principles
that dated from the days of Walpole. {224} Shelburne represented, or
misrepresented, the principles that dated from the days of Chatham. The
King would very much have preferred to take Shelburne without Rockingham,
but even the King had to recognize that it was impossible to gratify his
preference. Even if Shelburne had been a much better leader than he was
he had not the following which would entitle him to form a Ministry on
his own account. And Shelburne was by no means a good leader. To the
Liberal politician of to-day Shelburne seems a much more desirable and
admirable statesman than Rockingham. Most of his political ideas were in
advance of his time, and his personal friendships prove him to have been
a man of appreciative intelligence. He had proved his courage in his
youth as a soldier at Campen and Minden; he had maintained his courage in
1780 when he faced and was wounded by the pistol of Fullarton. But his
gifts, whatever they were, were not of the quality nor the quantity to
make a leader of men. He could not form a Ministry for himself, and he
was not an element of stability in any Ministry of which he was a member.
The Administration formed by the alliance of Rockingham and Shelburne
could boast of many brilliant names, and showed itself laudably anxious
to add to their number. In an Administration which had Fox for a
Secretary of State, Burke for Paymaster-General of the Forces, and
Sheridan for Under-Secretary of State, the Vice-Treasurership of Ireland
was offered to Pitt.
[Sidenote: 1782--Fox's quarrel with Pitt]
Pitt declined the offer. He had made up his mind that he would not
accept a subordinate situation. Conscious of his ability, he was
prepared to wait. He had not to wait long. During the four agitated
months of life allowed to the Rockingham Administration Pitt
distinguished himself by a motion for reform in the representative system
which was applauded by Fox and by Sheridan, but which was defeated by
twenty votes. Peace and reform were always passions deeply seated at the
heart of Pitt; it was ironic chance that associated him hereafter so
intimately with war and with antagonism to so many methods of reform in
which he earnestly believed. When the quarrels {225} between Fox and
Shelburne over the settlement of the American war ended after
Rockingham's death in July, 1782, in the withdrawal from the Ministry of
Fox, Burke, and the majority of the Rockingham party, Pitt rightly saw
that his hour had come. Fox resigned rather than serve with Shelburne,
Pitt accepted Shelburne, and made Shelburne's political existence
possible a little longer. With the aid of Pitt, Shelburne could hold on
and let Fox go; without Pitt, Fox would have triumphed over Shelburne.
From this moment began the antagonism between Fox and Pitt which was to
last for the remainder of their too brief lives. At the age of
twenty-three Pitt found himself Chancellor of the Exchequer, and one of
the most conspicuous men in the kingdom. Fox, who was ten years older,
was defeated by the youth whose rivalry had been predicted to Fox when
the youth was yet a child.
Pitt's triumph lasted less than a year. Fox, conscious of his own great
purposes, and eager to return to office for their better advancement, was
prepared to pay a gambler's price for power. To overthrow Shelburne and
with Shelburne Pitt, he needed a pretext and an ally. The pretext was
easy to find. He had but to maintain that the terms of the peace with
America were not the best that the country had a right to expect. The
ally was easy to find and disastrous to accept. Nothing in the whole of
Fox's history is more regrettable than his unnatural alliance with Lord
North. Ever since the hour when Fox had found his true self, and had
passed from the ranks of the obedient servants of the King into the ranks
of those who devoted themselves to the principles of liberty, there had
been nothing and there could have been nothing in common between Fox and
North. Everything that Fox held most dear was detestable to North, as
North's political doctrines were now detestable to Fox. The political
enmity of the two men had been bitter in the extreme, and Fox had
assailed North with a violence which might well seem to have made any
form of political reconciliation impossible. Yet North was now the man
with whom Fox was content to throw in his lot in order to obtain the
{226} overthrow of Shelburne and of Pitt. And Fox was not alone among
great Whigs in this extraordinary transaction. He carried Burke with him
in this unholy alliance between all that was worst and all that was best
in English political life. The two men whose genius and whose eloquence
had been the most potent factors in the fall of North a year before were
now the means of bringing the discredited and defeated statesman back
again into the exercise of a power which, as none knew better than they,
he had so shamefully misused. Fox and North between them swept Shelburne
out of the field. Fox and North between them were able to force a
Coalition Ministry upon a reluctant and indignant King. The followers of
Fox and the followers of North in combination formed so numerous and so
solid a party that they were able to treat the sovereign with a lack of
ceremony to which he was little used. Fox had gone out of office rather
than admit that the right to nominate the first minister rested with the
King instead of with the Cabinet. Now that he had returned to office, he
showed his determination to act up to his principles by not permitting
the King to nominate a single minister.
[Sidenote: 1783--Fox's coalition with Lord North]
The King's contempt for North since the failure to coerce America, the
King's dislike of Fox since Fox became an advanced politician, were
deepened now into uncompromising and unscrupulous enmity by the cavalier
conduct of the coalition. The King, with his doggedness of purpose and
his readiness to use any weapons against those whom he chose to regard as
his enemies, was a serious danger even to a coalition that seemed so
formidable as the coalition between Fox and North. Fox may very well
have thought that his unjustifiable league with North would at least have
the result of giving him sufficient time and sufficient influence to
carry into effect some of those schemes for the good of the country which
he had most nearly at heart. The statesman who makes some unhappy
surrender of principle, some ignoble concession to opportunity in order
to obtain power, makes his unworthy bargain from a conviction that his
hold of office is essential to the welfare of the State, and that a
little {227} evil is excusable for a great good. The sophistry that
deceives the politician does not deceive the public. Fox gravely injured
his position with the people who loved him by stooping to the pact with
North, and he did not reap that reward of success in his own high-minded
and high-hearted purposes which could alone have excused his conduct.
The great coalition which was to stand so strong and to work such wonders
was destined to vanish like a breath after accomplishing nothing, and to
condemn Fox with all his hopes and dreams to a career of almost unbroken
opposition for the rest of his life. If anything in Fox's checkered
career could be more tragic than the degradation of his union with the
politician whom he declared to be void of every principle of honor and
honesty, it was the abiding consequences of the retribution that followed
it. Fox had fought hard and with success to live down the follies of his
youth. He had to fight harder and with far less success to live down
what the world persisted in regarding as the infamy of his association
with North.
It is difficult to realize the arguments which persuaded Fox, which
persuaded Burke, to join their forces with the fallen minister whom their
own mouths, but a little while before, had, in no measured terms,
declared to be guilty of the basest conduct and deserving of the severest
punishment. All that we know of Fox, all that we know of Burke--and it
is possible to know them almost as well as if they were the figures of
contemporary history--would seem to deny the possibility of their
condescending to any act of conscious baseness. Stained and sullied as
the youth of Fox had been with some of the more flagrant vices of a
flagrantly vicious society, his record as gambler, as spendthrift, and as
libertine seems relatively clean in comparison with this strange act of
public treason to the chosen beliefs of his manhood, of public apostasy
from those high and generous principles by whose strenuous advocacy he
had redeemed his wasted youth. Fiery as Burke's temper had often proved
itself to be, fantastic and grotesque as his obstinacy had often showed
itself in {228} clinging defiantly to some crotchet or whimsey, that
seemed to the spectator unworthy the adhesion of his great intellect, his
most eccentric action, his most erratic impulse, appeared sweetly
reasonable and serenely lucid when contrasted with the conduct that
allowed him to guide or be guided by Fox in a course that proved as
foolish as it looked disgraceful, to lead or to follow Fox into packing
cards with their arch-enemy of the American war.
On the face of it there is nothing that seems not merely to justify, but
even to palliate, the conduct of Fox and Burke. Ugly as the deed seemed
to the men of their day, to the men who believed in them, trusted them,
loved them, it seems no less ugly to those who at the distance of a
century revere their memories and cherish their teachings. One thing may
be, must be, assumed by those before whom the lives of Fox and Burke lie
bare--that men so animated by high principles, so illuminated by high
ideals, cannot deliberately, of set purpose, have sinned against the
light. They must have felt, and strongly felt, their justification for
entering on a course which was destined to prove so disastrous. Their
justification probably was the conviction, nursed if not expressed, that
to statesmen whose hands were so full of blessings, to statesmen whose
hearts were so big with splendid enterprises, a trivial show of
concession, a little paltering with the punctilio of honor, a little
eating of brave words, and a little swallowing of principle, was a small
price to pay and a price well worth paying for the immeasurable good that
England was to gather from their supremacy.
Whatever may have been the motives which induced Fox and Burke to ally
themselves with a discredited and defeated politician like Lord North,
the results of that alliance were as unsatisfactory to the high
contracting parties as the most rigid believer in poetic justice could
desire. The Coalition Ministry was unlucky enough in its enterprises to
satisfy George himself, who had talked of going back to Hanover rather
than accept its services, and had only been dissuaded from self-exile by
the sardonic reminder of Lord Thurlow that it might be easier for the
{229} King to go to Hanover than to return again to England. Burke
inaugurated his new career at the Pay Office by an unhappy act of
patronage. He insisted upon restoring to their offices two clerks, named
Powell and Bembridge, who had been removed and arraigned for
malversation, and he insisted upon defending his indefensible action in
the House of Commons with a fury that was as diverting to his opponents
as it was distracting to his colleagues. Fox, who had earned so large a
share of public admiration for his advocacy of what now would be called
liberal opinions, was naturally held responsible by the public for the
successful opposition of the Coalition Ministry to Pitt's plan of
Parliamentary reform.
[Sidenote: 1783--Legislation of the Coalition Ministry]
Pitt's proposal was not very magnificent. He asked the House to declare
that measures were highly necessary to be taken for the future prevention
of bribery and expense at elections. He urged that for the future, when
the majority of voters for any borough should be convicted of gross and
notorious corruption before a select committee of the House appointed to
try the merits of any election, such borough should be disfranchised and
the minority of voters not so convicted should be entitled to vote for
the county in which such borough should be situated. He suggested that
an addition of knights of the shire and of the representatives of the
metropolis should be made to the state of the representation. He left
the number to the discussion and consideration of the House, but for his
own part he stated that he should propose an addition of one hundred
representatives. Pitt's scheme was scarcely a splendid measure of
reform; but at least it was a measure of reform, and it met with small
mercy at the hands of the coalition, being defeated by a majority of 293
to 149. This was not an auspicious beginning for the new Ministry, and
it was scarcely surprising that many of Fox's adherents in the country
should resent his employment of the swollen forces that were practically
if not technically under his command to compass the defeat of a bill
which, however inadequate, did at least endeavor to bring about a
much-needed improvement.
{230}
The great adventure of the Coalition Ministry, the deed by which it hoped
to justify its existence, and by which indeed it has earned its only
honorable title to remembrance, was the bill which is known to the world
as Fox's India Bill. If the extending influence of England in India was
a source of pride to the English people, it was also a source of grave
responsibility. The conditions under which that influence was exercised,
the weaknesses and inadequacies of the system by which the East India
Company exercised its semi-regal authority, were becoming more apparent
with every succeeding year to the small but steadily increasing number of
persons who took a serious and intelligent interest in Indian affairs. A
series of events, to be referred to later, had served to force into a
special prominence the difficulties and the dangers of the existing state
of affairs and to fasten the attention of thinkers upon the evils that
had resulted, and the evils that must yet result from its continuance.
To mitigate those evils in the present, and to minimize them in the
future, Fox, inspired and aided by Burke's splendid knowledge of Indian
affairs, worked out a measure which was confidently expected to
substitute order for disorder and reason for unreason. In the November
of 1783, Pitt addressed a challenge to the Ministry calling upon them to
bring forward some measure securing and improving the advantages to be
derived from England's Eastern possessions, some measure not of temporary
palliation and timorous expedients, but vigorous and effectual, suited to
the magnitude, the importance, and the alarming exigencies of the case.
Fox answered this challenge by asking leave to bring in a bill "for
vesting the affairs of the East India Company in the hands of certain
commissioners for the benefit of the proprietors and the public." At the
same time Fox asked leave to bring in another bill "for the better
government of the territorial possessions and dependencies in India."
These two bills, supplementing each other, formed, in the opinion of
those who framed and who advocated them, a simple, efficient, and
responsible plan for the better administration of England's Indian {231}
dependencies. However tentative and incomplete they may now appear as a
means of dealing with a problem of such vast importance and such
far-reaching consequences, they certainly were measures the adoption of
which must have proved a gain to the country governing and to the country
governed.
[Sidenote: 1783--Fox and the affairs of India]
The measures, which, it is probable, were originally planned out by
Burke, but to which it is certain that Fox devoted all the strength of
his intellect and all the enthusiasm of his nature, were of a daring and
comprehensive character. The first proposed to make a clean sweep of the
existing state of things in India by the appointment of a Board composed
of seven commissioners to whom absolute authority over the East India
Company's property, and over the appointment or removal of holders of
offices in India, was to be intrusted for a term of four years. This
term of four years was not to be affected by any changes of
administration that might occur in England during the time. The commerce
of the Company was to be managed by a council of directors, who were
themselves entirely under the control of the seven commissioners. The
commissioners and the directors were required to lay their accounts
before the proprietors every six months, and before both Houses at the
beginning of every session. The commissioners were in the first instance
to be appointed by Parliament, that is to say, by the Ministry headed by
Fox and North; at the end of the four years they were to be appointed by
the Crown. The Court of Proprietors was to fill up the vacancies in the
council of directors. The second and less important measure dealt with
the powers of the Governor-General and Council and the conduct to be
observed towards the princes and natives of India.
The first measure was the measure of paramount importance, the measure
from which Fox and his friends hoped so much, the measure which aroused
in a very peculiar degree the anger of the King and of the King's
followers. They saw in a moment the enormous influence that the passing
of the measure would place in the hands of Fox. The names of the
commissioners were left blank {232} in the bill, but when their time came
to be filled up in committee they were all filled with the names of
followers of Fox. It was argued that were the bill to become law a set
of persons extremely obnoxious to the King would have in their hands for
a solid term of years the entire administration of India and the control
of an amount of patronage, estimated at not less than three hundred
thousand a year. This would enable them to oppose to the royal
prerogative of patronage an influence of like nature that brought with it
scarcely less than royal power. It is scarcely surprising that Pitt
should have employed all his eloquence and all his energy against what he
described as "the boldest and most unconstitutional measure ever
attempted, transferring at one stroke, in spite of all charters and
compacts, the immense patronage and influence of the East to Charles Fox
in or out of office."
[Sidenote: 1783--Henry Dundas and James Sayer]
If Pitt was the most conspicuous opponent of the India Bills, only less
conspicuous was a man who, though much Pitt's senior, was still young,
and who had already made himself prominent in the House of Commons, not
merely as a politician of general ability, but as one who took a special
interest in the affairs of India. Henry Dundas had been a characteristic
ornament of the Scottish bar, at once a skilful lawyer and an attractive
man of the world when, eight years before the existence of the Coalition
Ministry, he had come to St. Stephen's as Lord Advocate. An ambition to
shine as a statesman and an extraordinary power of application had
equipped him with the varied information that enabled him to assert
himself as an authority in many departments of national business. He had
early recognized the importance of India as a field for the powers of a
rising politician, and he had devoted to India and to Indian affairs that
tireless assiduity which permitted him at once to appear a convivial
spirit with the temperament and leisure of a man of pleasure, and a
master of profound and intricate subjects, the secret of which was only
known to those who were acquainted with his habit of early rising and his
indefatigable capacity for work in the time that he allotted to work.
When the public attention was {233} directed to India, towards the close
of the American war, and when a very general sense of indignation was
aroused by the mismanagement that lessened and that threatened to destroy
British influence in the East, Dundas came forward with the confident air
of one who was intimately acquainted with the complicated problem and who
believed himself perfectly competent to set all difficulties right. He
was the chairman of the select committee of the House of Commons
appointed to inquire into the causes of the war in the Carnatic, and he
impressed himself upon the House as an authority upon India of no mean
order, both in the report from that committee and in a bill which he
himself introduced for the purpose of dealing with the Indian question.
He did not succeed in carrying his measure, but he took care that his
knowledge of his subject increased in proportion to its growing
importance in the public view, and his ready eloquence and specious show
of information made him a very valuable ally for Pitt and a fairly
formidable opponent to Fox in the heady debates over the measures to
which the political honor of the dishonorable coalition was pledged.
The India Bill had a more serious enemy than Dundas, a more serious enemy
than Pitt so far as the immediate effect of enmity upon public opinion is
to be estimated. There was an attorney in London named James Sayer whose
private means enabled him to neglect his profession and devote himself to
the production of political caricatures and squibs. Sayer was one of the
many who believed in the rising star of Pitt, and he proved his belief by
the publication of a caricature which Fox himself is said to have
admitted gave the India Bill its severest blow in public estimation.
This caricature was called "Carlo Khan's Triumphal Entry into Leadenhall
Street." It represented Fox in the grotesque attire of a theatrical
Oriental potentate, and with a smile of conquest upon his black-haired
face, perched upon an elephant with the staring countenance of Lord
North, that was led by Burke, whose spectacled acridity was swollen with
the blowing of a trumpet from which depended a map of India. The {234}
caricature was ingenious, timely, and extraordinarily efficacious in
harming the measure and its champions. It had an enormous sale; it was
imitated and pirated far and wide. It carried to all parts of the
kingdom the conviction that Fox was aiming at nothing less than a
dictatorship of India, and it intensified the general animosity towards
the measures and the men of the Coalition Ministry more effectively than
any amount of speeches in Westminster could have done. But it had no
more power to weaken the solid majority of the Ministry in the House of
Commons than the hurried erudition of Dundas, or than what Walpole called
the "Bristol stone" of Pitt's eloquence as contrasted with the "diamond
reason" of Fox's solid sense. Neither political caricature nor popular
disapproval, neither the indignation of the King nor the opulence of the
fearful and furious East India Company, could prevent Fox from carrying
his measures in the House of Commons by means of the sheer force of
numbers that he had obtained by his unhallowed compact with North.
But the power of the new Ministry was vulnerable in another place where
the most unconstitutional weapons were employed against it. The King was
eager to avenge the affront that had, as he conceived, been put upon him
by the compulsion that had forced him to accept ministers so little to
his taste. He was prepared to stick at little in order to retaliate upon
his enemies, as he always conceived those men to be who ventured to cross
his purposes. Nothing could be done effectively to change the political
composition of the Lower House; something could be essayed with the
reasonable hope of modifying the composition of the Upper House. Lord
Temple, a second-rate statesman, whose position gave him almost
first-rate importance, was the instrument by which the King was able to
bring very effective pressure upon the peers. George wrote a letter to
Lord Temple in which he declared that he should deem those who should
vote for Fox's measure as "not only not his friends, but his enemies;"
and he added that if Lord Temple could put this in stronger words "he had
full authority to do so." With this amazing document in his {235}
possession Lord Temple went from one noble lord to another, pointing out
the unwisdom of each in pursuing a course which would constitute him an
avowed enemy of the King, and insisting upon the advantages that must
follow from the taking of the very broad hint of the royal pleasure thus
conveyed. Temple's arguments, backed by and founded upon the King's
letter, had the most satisfactory result from the King's point of view.
Peer after peer fell away from the doomed Ministry; peer after peer
hastened to prove himself one of the elect, to assert himself as a King's
friend by recording his vote against the obnoxious measure.
[Sidenote: 1783--Fall of the Coalition Ministry]
The course of action inspired by the King and acted upon by Lord Temple
was flagrantly unconstitutional even in an age which permitted to the
sovereign so much liberty of personal intervention in affairs. It was,
however, attended with complete success. The India Bills were rejected
in the House of Lords by a majority of nineteen, and this defeat, which
would not have been regarded in more recent times as fatal to a Ministry,
however fatal for the time being to the measure thus condemned, was
instantly used by the King as a pretext for ridding himself of the
advisers whose advice he detested. The King resolved to dismiss the
ministers, and to dismiss them with every circumstance of indignity that
should render their dismissal the more contemptuous. On the midnight of
the day following the final defeat of the measure in the House of Lords a
messenger delivered to the two Secretaries of State, Fox and North, a
message from the King stating that it was his Majesty's will and pleasure
that they should deliver to him the seals of their respective offices,
and that they should send them by the Under-Secretaries, Mr. Frazer and
Mr. Nepean, as a personal interview on the occasion would be disagreeable
to the King. The seals were immediately sent to Buckingham House and
were promptly handed over by the King to Lord Temple, who on the
following day sent letters of dismissal to the other members of the
Cabinet Council.
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."
When Pitt became Prime Minister the Prince of Wales was in Opposition,
because he was opposed to his father. He imagined himself to be the
friend of Fox, of Sheridan, of Burke, because Fox and Sheridan and Burke
were unpopular with the King. His career had been one of debt and
drunkenness, of mean amours and degrading pleasures, when the son of
Chatham passed from his studious youth to the control of the destinies of
England. Pitt was called upon and refused to consent to a Parliamentary
appeal to the King for the payment of the Prince's debts. Pitt could
feel no courtier's sympathy for the unnatural son, for the faithless
Florizel of foolish Perdita Robinson, for the perjured husband of Mrs.
Fitzherbert. There can be no doubt that in the December of 1785 the
Prince of Wales went through a ceremony of marriage, which could not
under the conditions constitute a legal marriage, with Mrs. Fitzherbert,
a beautiful young woman of a little more than twenty-nine years of age,
who had twice been widowed {243} and was a member of the Roman Catholic
faith. The town soon rang with gossip, and what was gossip in the
drawing-rooms threatened to become a matter for "delicate investigation"
in the House of Commons. The denial given by Fox in Parliament on the
authority of the Prince of Wales practically ended any attempt at public
inquiry, and almost broke the heart of Mrs. Fitzherbert. To her the
Prince of course promptly disavowed Fox, with whom she immediately broke
off all friendship. Fox himself, indignant at the Prince's falsehood and
at the base use which had been made of his voice, shunned the Prince's
society for a long time, which might very well have been longer. The
scandal slowly ebbed; a compromise was arrived at between the King and
his son; the King made an appeal to Parliament; and a sum of money was
voted to deal with the Prince's debts in consideration of his promises of
reform in the future.
[Sidenote: 1788--Talk of a Regency]
The Prince of Wales did not forget Pitt's attitude towards him, and the
time soon arrived in which the minister came near to feeling the force of
the Prince's anger. The health of the King was suddenly and seriously
affected. Soon after his reign began he had been afflicted by a
temporary loss of reason. The same misfortune now fell upon him in the
autumn of 1788. It became necessary to make arrangements for the
appointment of a regent, and the necessity was the cause of a fierce
Parliamentary controversy. Fox rashly insisted that the Prince of Wales
had as much right to assume the reins of government as he would have had
in the case of the death of the monarch. Pitt maintained the more
constitutional opinion that it was the privilege of Parliament to appoint
a regent and to decide what powers should be intrusted to him. However
little the knowledge may have influenced his action, Pitt knew very well
that with the appointment of the Prince of Wales as regent his own hold
of power would, for a time, come to an end. The whole question, however,
was suddenly set on one side by the unexpected recovery of the King. The
King's restoration to reason was well for the minister, and undoubtedly
well for the {244} kingdom. If Burke and Sheridan and Fox were avowedly
the Prince's friends in Parliament, his most intimate friends, those who
would be likely to prove influential in his mimic Court, were men of a
very different kind. These were such men as George Hanger, the half-mad
soldier, the "Paragon of Debauchery," as the caricaturists labelled the
Prince's "confidential friend," who having been almost everything from
captain of Hessians to coal merchant, and from recruiter for the East
India Company to inmate of a debtor's prison, ended his long and unlovely
career by declining to assume the title of Lord Coleraine, to which he
became entitled in 1814, ten years before his death. These were such men
as Charles Morris, the amiable Anacreon of Carlton House, who made better
punch and rhymed better ballads than his fellows of that convivial age,
and who had the grace to expiate the ignoble noonday of his existence by
an honorable evening. These were such men as the queer gang of
blackguards, ruffians, and rowdies who haunted Brighthelmstone, the bad
and brutal Richard Barry, the "Hellgate" Lord Barrymore; the Jockey of
Norfolk, with his hair grown gray in iniquities; Sir John Lade, whose
wife had been the mistress of a highwayman; and the worst and basest
spirit of the gang, the Duke of Queensberry. Such were the men whom the
Prince delighted to make his companions; such were the men who, if the
King's madness had persisted, would have hailed with satisfaction the
overthrow of Mr. Pitt.
It were needless to dwell further for the present upon the adventures of
the Prince of Wales, his amours, his debts, his friendships, his
fantastic pavilion at Brighton, or his unhappy marriage in April, 1795,
to his cousin, the Princess Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick.
Twenty years were to pass away before the recurrence of the King's malady
was to give his eldest son the show of power, and in those twenty years
the two political rivals--one of whom was the greatest of his allies, and
the other the greatest of his adversaries--had passed away.
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