one great occasion. In the autumn of 1788 the King became insane.
The opposition, eager for office, committed the great indiscretion
of asserting that the heir apparent had, by the fundamental laws of
England, a right to be Regent with the full powers of royalty. Pitt, on
the other hand, maintained it to be the constitutional doctrine
that, when a Sovereign is, by reason of infancy, disease, or absence,
incapable of exercising the regal functions, it belongs to the Estates
of the realm to determine who shall be the vicegerent and with what
portion of the executive authority such vicegerent shall be entrusted.
A long and violent contest followed, in which Pitt was supported by the
great body of the people with as much enthusiasm as during the first
months of his administration. Tories with one voice applauded him for
defending the sick-bed of a virtuous and unhappy Sovereign against a
disloyal faction and an undutiful son. Not a few Whigs applauded him
for asserting the authority of Parliaments and the principles of the
Revolution, in opposition to a doctrine which seemed to have too much
affinity with the servile theory of indefeasible hereditary right. The
middle class, always zealous on the side of decency and the domestic
virtues, looked forward with dismay to a reign resembling that of
Charles II. The palace, which had now been, during thirty years, the
pattern of an English home, would be a public nuisance, a school of
profligacy. To the good King's repast of mutton and lemonade, despatched
at three o'clock, would succeed midnight banquets, from which the guests
would be carried home speechless. To the backgammon board at which the
good King played for a little silver with his equerries, would succeed
faro tables from which young patricians who had sate down rich would
rise up beggars. The drawing-room, from which the frown of the Queen had
repelled a whole generation of frail beauties, would now be again what
it had been in the days of Barbara Palmer and Louisa de Querouaille.
Nay, severely as the public reprobated the Prince's many illicit
attachments, his one virtuous attachment was reprobated more severely
still. Even in grave and pious circles his Protestant mistresses
gave less scandal than his Popish wife. That he must be Regent nobody
ventured to deny. But he and his friends were so unpopular that Pitt
could, with general approbation, propose to limit the powers of the
Regent by restrictions to which it would have been impossible to subject
a Prince beloved and trusted by the country. Some interested men, fully
expecting a change of administration, went over to the opposition.
But the majority, purified by these desertions, closed its ranks, and
presented a more firm array than ever to the enemy. In every division
Pitt was victorious. When at length, after a stormy interregnum of three
months, it was announced, on the very eve of the inauguration of the
Regent, that the King was himself again, the nation was wild with
delight. On the evening of the day on which His Majesty resumed his
functions, a spontaneous illumination, the most general that had ever
been seen in England, brightened the whole vast space from Highgate
to Tooting, and from Hammersmith to Greenwich. On the day on which he
returned thanks in the cathedral of his capital, all the horses
and carriages within a hundred miles of London were too few for the
multitudes which flocked to see him pass through the streets. A
second illumination followed, which was even superior to the first in
magnificence. Pitt with difficulty escaped from the tumultuous kindness
of an innumerable multitude which insisted on drawing his coach from
Saint Paul's Churchyard to Downing Street. This was the moment at
which his fame and fortune may be said to have reached the zenith. His
influence in the closet was as great as that of Carr or Villiers had
been. His dominion over the Parliament was more absolute than that
of Walpole of Pelham had been. He was at the same time as high in the
favour of the populace as ever Wilkes or Sacheverell had been.
Nothing did more to raise his character than his noble poverty. It was
well-known that, if he had been dismissed from office after more than
five years of boundless power, he would hardly have carried out with
him a sum sufficient to furnish the set of chambers in which, as he
cheerfully declared, he meant to resume the practice of the law. His
admirers, however, were by no means disposed to suffer him to depend on
daily toil for his daily bread. The voluntary contributions which were
awaiting his acceptance in the city of London alone would have sufficed
to make him a rich man. But it may be doubted whether his haughty spirit
would have stooped to accept a provision so honourably earned and so
honourably bestowed.
To such a height of power and glory had this extraordinary man risen
at twenty-nine years of age. And now the tide was on the turn. Only ten
days after the triumphal procession to Saint Paul's, the States-General
of France, after an interval of a hundred and seventy-four years, met at
Versailles.
The nature of the great Revolution which followed was long very
imperfectly understood in this country. Burke saw much further than any
of his contemporaries: but whatever his sagacity descried was refracted
and discoloured by his passions and his imagination. More than three
years elapsed before the principles of the English administration
underwent any material change. Nothing could as yet be milder or more
strictly constitutional than the minister's domestic policy. Not a
single act indicating an arbitrary temper or a jealousy of the people
could be imputed to him. He had never applied to Parliament for any
extraordinary powers. He had never used with harshness the ordinary
powers entrusted by the constitution to the executive government. Not a
single state prosecution which would even now be called oppressive had
been instituted by him. Indeed, the only oppressive state prosecution
instituted during the first eight years of his administration was that
of Stockdale, which is to be attributed not to the government, but to
the chiefs of the opposition. In office Pitt had redeemed the pledges
which he had, at his entrance into public life, given to the supporters
of parliamentary reform. He had, in 1785, brought forward a judicious
plan for the improvement of the representative system, and had prevailed
on the King, not only to refrain from talking against that plan, but to
recommend it to the Houses in a speech from the throne. (The speech with
which the King opened the session of 1785, concluded with an assurance
that His Majesty would heartily concur in every measure which could tend
to secure the true principles of the constitution. These words were
at the time understood to refer to Pitt's Reform Bill.) This attempt
failed; but there can be little doubt that, if the French Revolution
had not produced a violent reaction of public feeling, Pitt would have
performed, with little difficulty and no danger, that great work which,
at a later period, Lord Grey could accomplish only by means which for
a time loosened the very foundations of the commonwealth. When the
atrocities of the slave trade were first brought under the consideration
of Parliament, no abolitionist was more zealous than Pitt. When sickness
prevented Wilberforce from appearing in public, his place was most
efficiently supplied by his friend the minister. A humane bill, which
mitigated the horrors of the middle passage, was, in 1788, carried by
the eloquence and determined spirit of Pitt, in spite of the opposition
of some of his own colleagues; and it ought always to be remembered
to his honour that, in order to carry that bill, he kept the Houses
sitting, in spite of many murmurs, long after the business of the
government had been done, and the Appropriation Act passed. In 1791 he
cordially concurred with Fox in maintaining the sound constitutional
doctrine, that an impeachment is not terminated by a dissolution. In the
course of the same year the two great rivals contended side by side in
a far more important cause. They are fairly entitled to divide the high
honour of having added to our statute-book the inestimable law which
places the liberty of the press under the protection of juries. On
one occasion, and one alone, Pitt, during the first half of his long
administration, acted in a manner unworthy of an enlightened Whig. In
the debate on the Test Act, he stooped to gratify the master whom he
served, the university which he represented, and the great body of
clergymen and country gentlemen on whose support he rested, by talking,
with little heartiness, indeed, and with no asperity, the language of
a Tory. With this single exception, his conduct from the end of 1783 to
the middle of 1792 was that of an honest friend of civil and religious
liberty.
Nor did anything, during that period, indicate that he loved war, or
harboured any malevolent feeling against any neighbouring nation. Those
French writers who have represented him as a Hannibal sworn in childhood
by his father to bear eternal hatred to France, as having by mysterious
intrigues and lavish bribes, instigated the leading Jacobins to commit
those excesses which dishonoured the Revolution, as having been the real
author of the first coalition, know nothing of his character or of his
history. So far was he from being a deadly enemy to France, that his
laudable attempts to bring about a closer connection with that country
by means of a wise and liberal treaty of commerce brought on him the
severe censure of the opposition. He was told in the House of Commons
that he was a degenerate son, and that his partiality for the hereditary
foes of our island was enough to make his great father's bones stir
under the pavement of the Abbey.
And this man, whose name, if he had been so fortunate as to die in
1792, would now have been associated with peace, with freedom, with
philanthropy, with temperate reform, with mild and constitutional
administration, lived to associate his name with arbitrary government,
with harsh laws harshly executed, with alien bills, with gagging bills,
with suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, with cruel punishments
inflicted on some political agitators, with unjustifiable prosecutions
instituted against others, and with the most costly and most sanguinary
wars of modern times. He lived to be held up to obloquy as the stern
oppressor of England, and the indefatigable disturber of Europe. Poets,
contrasting his earlier with his later years, likened him sometimes to
the apostle who kissed in order to betray, and sometimes to the evil
angels who kept not their first estate. A satirist of great genius
introduced the fiends of Famine, Slaughter, and Fire, proclaiming that
they had received their commission from One whose name was formed of
four letters, and promising to give their employer ample proofs of
gratitude. Famine would gnaw the multitude till they should rise up
against him in madness. The demon of slaughter would impel them to tear
him from limb to limb. But Fire boasted that she alone could reward him
as he deserved, and that she would cling round him to all eternity. By
the French press and the French tribune every crime that disgraced and
every calamity that afflicted France was ascribed to the monster Pitt
and his guineas. While the Jacobins were dominant, it was he who had
corrupted the Gironde, who had raised Lyons and Bordeaux against the
Convention, who had suborned Paris to assassinate Lepelletier, and
Cecilia Regnault to assassinate Robespierre. When the Thermidorian
reaction came, all the atrocities of the Reign of Terror were imputed to
him. Collet D'Herbois and Fouquier Tinville had been his pensioners. It
was he who had hired the murderers of September, who had dictated the
pamphlets of Marat and the Carmagnoles of Barere, who had paid Lebon to
deluge Arras with blood, and Carrier to choke the Loire with corpses.
The truth is, that he liked neither war nor arbitrary government. He was
a lover of peace and freedom, driven, by a stress against which it was
hardly possible for any will or any intellect to struggle, out of the
course to which his inclinations pointed, and for which his abilities
and acquirements fitted him, and forced into a policy repugnant to his
feelings and unsuited to his talents.
The charge of apostasy is grossly unjust. A man ought no more to be
called an apostate because his opinions alter with the opinions of the
great body of his contemporaries than he ought to be called an oriental
traveller because he is always going round from west to east with the
globe and everything that is upon it. Between the spring of 1789 and the
close of 1792, the public mind of England underwent a great change. If
the change of Pitt's sentiments attracted peculiar notice, it was not
because he changed more than his neighbours; for in fact he changed less
than most of them; but because his position was far more conspicuous
than theirs, because he was, till Bonaparte appeared, the individual
who filled the greatest space in the eyes of the inhabitants of the
civilised world. During a short time the nation, and Pitt, as one of the
nation, looked with interest and approbation on the French Revolution.
But soon vast confiscations, the violent sweeping away of ancient
institutions, the domination of clubs, the barbarities of mobs maddened
by famine and hatred, produced a reaction here. The court, the nobility,
the gentry, the clergy, the manufacturers, the merchants, in short,
nineteen-twentieths of those who had good roofs over their heads and
good coats on their backs, became eager and intolerant Antijacobins.
This feeling was at least as strong among the minister's adversaries as
among his supporters. Fox in vain attempted to restrain his followers.
All his genius, all his vast personal influence, could not prevent them
from rising up against him in general mutiny. Burke set the example
of revolt; and Burke was in no long time joined by Portland, Spencer,
Fitzwilliam, Loughborough, Carlisle, Malmesbury, Windham, Elliot. In the
House of Commons, the followers of the great Whig statesman and orator
diminished from about a hundred and sixty to fifty. In the House of
Lords he had but ten or twelve adherents left. There can be no doubt
that there would have been a similar mutiny on the ministerial benches
if Pitt had obstinately resisted the general wish. Pressed at once by
his master and by his colleagues, by old friends and by old opponents,
he abandoned, slowly and reluctantly, the policy which was dear to his
heart. He laboured hard to avert the European war. When the European war
broke out, he still flattered himself that it would not be necessary for
this country to take either side. In the spring of 1792 he congratulated
the Parliament on the prospect of long and profound peace, and proved
his sincerity by proposing large remissions of taxation. Down to the end
of that year he continued to cherish the hope that England might be able
to preserve neutrality. But the passions which raged on both sides of
the Channel were not to be restrained. The republicans who ruled France
were inflamed by a fanaticism resembling that of the Mussulmans who,
with the Koran in one hand and the sword in the other, went forth,
conquering and converting, eastward to the Bay of Bengal, and westward
to the Pillars of Hercules. The higher and middle classes of England
were animated by zeal not less fiery than that of the Crusaders who
raised the cry of Deus vult at Clermont. The impulse which drove the two
nations to a collision was not to be arrested by the abilities or by the
authority of any single man. As Pitt was in front of his fellows, and
towered high above them, he seemed to lead them. But in fact he was
violently pushed on by them, and, had he held back but a little more
than he did, would have been thrust out of their way or trampled under
their feet.
He yielded to the current: and from that day his misfortunes began. The
truth is that there were only two consistent courses before him. Since
he did not choose to oppose himself, side by side with Fox, to the
public feeling, he should have taken the advice of Burke, and should
have availed himself of that feeling to the full extent. If it was
impossible to preserve peace, he should have adopted the only policy
which could lead to victory. He should have proclaimed a Holy War for
religion, morality, property, order, public law, and should have thus
opposed to the Jacobins an energy equal to their own. Unhappily he tried
to find a middle path; and he found one which united all that was
worst in both extremes. He went to war: but he would not understand the
peculiar character of that war. He was obstinately blind to the plain
fact, that he was contending against a state which was also a sect, and
that the new quarrel between England and France was of quite a different
kind from the old quarrels about colonies in America and fortresses
in the Netherlands. He had to combat frantic enthusiasm, boundless
ambition, restless activity, the wildest and most audacious spirit of
innovation; and he acted as if he had to deal with the harlots and fops
of the old Court of Versailles, with Madame de Pompadour and the Abbe
de Bernis. It was pitiable to hear him, year after year, proving to an
admiring audience that the wicked Republic was exhausted, that she could
not hold out, that her credit was gone, and her assignats were not worth
more than the paper of which they were made; as if credit was necessary
to a government of which the principle was rapine, as if Alboin could
not turn Italy into a desert till he had negotiated a loan at five
per cent., as if the exchequer bills of Attila had been at par. It was
impossible that a man who so completely mistook the nature of a contest
could carry on that contest successfully. Great as Pitt's abilities
were, his military administration was that of a driveller. He was at the
head of a nation engaged in a struggle for life and death, of a nation
eminently distinguished by all the physical and all the moral qualities
which make excellent soldiers. The resources at his command were
unlimited. The Parliament was even more ready to grant him men and money
than he was to ask for them. In such an emergency, and with such means,
such a statesman as Richelieu, as Louvois, as Chatham, as Wellesley,
would have created in a few months one of the finest armies in the
world, and would soon have discovered and brought forward generals
worthy to command such an army. Germany might have been saved by another
Blenheim; Flanders recovered by another Ramilies; another Poitiers might
have delivered the Royalist and Catholic provinces of France from a yoke
which they abhorred, and might have spread terror even to the barriers
of Paris. But the fact is, that, after eight years of war, after a vast
destruction of life, after an expenditure of wealth far exceeding the
expenditure of the American war, of the Seven Years' War, of the war
of the Austrian Succession, and of the war of the Spanish Succession,
united, the English army, under Pitt, was the laughing-stock of all
Europe. It could not boast of one single brilliant exploit. It had
never shown itself on the Continent but to be beaten, chased, forced
to re-embark, or forced to capitulate. To take some sugar island in the
West Indies, to scatter some mob of half-naked Irish peasants, such
were the most splendid victories won by the British troops under Pitt's
auspices.
The English navy no mismanagement could ruin. But during a long period
whatever mismanagement could do was done. The Earl of Chatham, without
a single qualification for high public trust, was made, by fraternal
partiality, First Lord of the Admiralty, and was kept in that great
post during two years of a war in which the very existence of the state
depended on the efficiency of the fleet. He continued to doze away and
trifle away the time which ought to have been devoted to the public
service, till the whole mercantile body, though generally disposed
to support the government, complained bitterly that our flag gave no
protection to our trade. Fortunately he was succeeded by George Earl
Spencer, one of those chiefs of the Whig party who, in the great schism
caused by the French Revolution, had followed Burke. Lord Spencer,
though inferior to many of his colleagues as an orator, was decidedly
the best administrator among them. To him it was owing that a long
and gloomy succession of days of fasting, and, most emphatically, of
humiliation, was interrupted, twice in the short space of eleven months,
by days of thanksgiving for great victories.
It may seem paradoxical to say that the incapacity which Pitt showed in
all that related to the conduct of the war is, in some sense, the most
decisive proof that he was a man of very extraordinary abilities. Yet
this is the simple truth. For assuredly one-tenth part of his errors
and disasters would have been fatal to the power and influence of any
minister who had not possessed, in the highest degree, the talents of
a parliamentary leader. While his schemes were confounded, while his
predictions were falsified, while the coalitions which he had laboured
to form were falling to pieces, while the expeditions which he had sent
forth at enormous cost were ending in rout and disgrace, while the
enemy against whom he was feebly contending was subjugating Flanders and
Brabant, the Electorate of Mentz, and the Electorate of Treves, Holland,
Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, his authority over the House of Commons was
constantly becoming more and more absolute. There was his empire. There
were his victories, his Lodi and his Arcola, his Rivoli and his Marengo.
If some great misfortune, a pitched battle lost by the allies, the
annexation of a new department to the French Republic, a sanguinary
insurrection in Ireland, a mutiny in the fleet, a panic in the city, a
run on the bank, had spread dismay through the ranks of his majority,
that dismay lasted only till he rose from the Treasury bench, drew up
his haughty head, stretched his arm with commanding gesture, and
poured forth, in deep and sonorous tones, the lofty language of
inextinguishable hope and inflexible resolution. Thus, through a long
and calamitous period, every disaster that happened without the walls of
Parliament was regularly followed by a triumph within them. At length he
had no longer an opposition to encounter. Of the great party which had
contended against him during the first eight years of his administration
more than one half now marched under his standard, with his old
competitor the Duke of Portland at their head; and the rest had, after
many vain struggles, quitted the field in despair. Fox had retired to
the shades of St Anne's Hill, and had there found, in the society of
friends whom no vicissitude could estrange from him, of a woman whom he
tenderly loved, and of the illustrious dead of Athens, of Rome, and of
Florence, ample compensation for all the misfortunes of his public
life. Session followed session with scarcely a single division. In the
eventful year 1799, the largest minority that could be mustered against
the government was twenty-five.
In Pitt's domestic policy there was at this time assuredly no want of
vigour. While he offered to French Jacobinism a resistance so feeble
that it only encouraged the evil which he wished to suppress, he put
down English Jacobinism with a strong hand. The Habeas Corpus Act
was repeatedly suspended. Public meetings were placed under severe
restraints. The government obtained from parliament power to send out
of the country aliens who were suspected of evil designs; and that power
was not suffered to be idle. Writers who propounded doctrines adverse to
monarchy and aristocracy were proscribed and punished without mercy. It
was hardly safe for a republican to avow his political creed over
his beefsteak and his bottle of port at a chop-house. The old laws of
Scotland against sedition, laws which were considered by Englishmen as
barbarous, and which a succession of governments had suffered to rust,
were now furbished up and sharpened anew. Men of cultivated minds and
polished manners were, for offences which at Westminster would have been
treated as mere misdemeanours, sent to herd with felons at Botany Bay.
Some reformers, whose opinions were extravagant, and whose language was
intemperate, but who had never dreamed of subverting the government by
physical force, were indicted for high treason, and were saved from the
gallows only by the righteous verdicts of juries. This severity was at
the time loudly applauded by alarmists whom fear had made cruel, but
will be seen in a very different light by posterity. The truth is, that
the Englishmen who wished for a revolution were, even in number,
not formidable, and in everything but number, a faction utterly
contemptible, without arms, or funds, or plans, or organisation, or
leader. There can be no doubt that Pitt, strong as he was in the
support of the great body of the nation, might easily have repressed
the turbulence of the discontented minority by firmly yet temperately
enforcing the ordinary law. Whatever vigour he showed during this
unfortunate part of his life was vigour out of place and season. He was
all feebleness and langour in his conflict with the foreign enemy who
was really to be dreaded, and reserved all his energy and resolution for
the domestic enemy who might safely have been despised.