be attributed to the eulogies of wits and poets. It might have been
naturally expected that a man of genius, of learning, of taste,
an orator whose diction was often compared to that of Tully, the
representative, too, of a great university, would have taken a peculiar
pleasure in befriending eminent writers, to whatever political party
they might have belonged. The love of literature had induced Augustus
to heap benefits on Pompeians, Somers to be the protector of nonjurors,
Harley to make the fortunes of Whigs. But it could not move Pitt to show
any favour even to Pittites. He was doubtless right in thinking that,
in general, poetry, history and philosophy ought to be suffered, like
calico and cutlery, to find their proper price in the market, and
that to teach men of letters to look habitually to the state for their
recompense is bad for the state and bad for letters. Assuredly nothing
can be more absurd or mischievous than to waste the public money in
bounties for the purpose of inducing people who ought to be weighing out
grocery or measuring out drapery to write bad or middling books. But,
though the sound rule is that authors should be left to be remunerated
by their readers, there will, in every generation, be a few exceptions
to this rule. To distinguish these special cases from the mass is an
employment well worthy of the faculties of a great and accomplished
ruler; and Pitt would assuredly have had little difficulty in finding
such cases. While he was in power, the greatest philologist of the age,
his own contemporary at Cambridge, was reduced to earn a livelihood by
the lowest literary drudgery, and to spend in writing squibs for the
_Morning Chronicle_. years to which we might have owed an all but
perfect text of the whole tragic and comic drama of Athens. {260}The
greatest historian of the age, forced by poverty to leave his country,
completed his immortal work on the shores of Lake Leman. The political
heterodoxy of Person, and the religious heterodoxy of Gibbon, may
perhaps be pleaded in defence of the minister by whom those eminent men
were neglected. But there were other cases in which no such excuse could
be set up. Scarcely had Pitt obtained possession of unbounded power when
an aged writer of the highest eminence, who had made very little by his
writings, and who was sinking into the grave under a load of infirmities
and sorrows, wanted five or six hundred pounds to enable him, during the
winter or two which might still remain to him, to draw his breath more
easily in the soft climate of Italy. Not a farthing was to be obtained;
and before Christmas the author of the English Dictionary and of the
Lives of the Poets had gasped his last in the river fog and coal smoke
of Fleet Street. A few months after the death of Johnson appeared the
Task, incomparably the best poem that any Englishman then living had
produced--a poem, too, which could hardly fail to excite in a well
constituted mind a feeling of esteem and compassion for the poet, a man
of genius and virtue, whose means were scanty, and whom the most
cruel of all the calamities incident to humanity had made incapable
of supporting himself by vigorous and sustained exertion. Nowhere had
Chatham been praised with more enthusiasm, or in verse more worthy of
the subject, than in the Task. The son of Chatham, however, contented
himself with reading and admiring the book, and left the author to
starve. The pension which, long after, enabled poor Cowper to close his
melancholy life, unmolested by duns and bailiffs, was obtained for him
by the {261}strenuous kindness of Lord Spencer. What a contrast between
the way in which Pitt acted towards Johnson and the way in which Lord
Grey acted towards his political enemy Scott, when Scott, worn out by
misfortune and disease, was advised to try the effect of the Italian
air! What a contrast between the way in which Pitt acted towards Cowper
and the way in which Burke, a poor man and out of place, acted towards
Crabbe! Even Dundas, who made no pretensions to literary taste, and was
content to be considered as a hard-headed and somewhat coarse man of
business, was, when compared with his eloquent and classically educated
friend, a Maecenas or a Leo. Dundas made Burns an exciseman, with
seventy pounds a year; and this was more than Pitt, during his long
tenure of power, did for the encouragement of letters. Even those who
may think that it is, in general, no part of the duty of a government to
reward literary merit will hardly deny that a government, which has much
lucrative church preferment in its gift, is bound, in distributing that
preferment, not to overlook divines whose writings have rendered great
service to the cause of religion. But it seems never to have occurred to
Pitt that he lay under any such obligation. All the theological works of
all the numerous bishops whom he made and translated are not, when
put together, worth fifty pages of the Horæ Paulinæ, of the Natural
Theology, or of the View of the Evidences of Christianity. But on Paley
the all-powerful minister never bestowed the smallest benefice. Artists
Pitt treated as contemptuously as writers. For painting he did simply
nothing. Sculptors, who had been selected to execute monuments voted by
Parliament, had to haunt the ante-chambers of the Treasury during many
years before {262}they could obtain a farthing from him. One of them,
after vainly soliciting the minister for payment during fourteen years,
had the courage to present a memorial to the King, and thus obtained
tardy and ungracious justice. Architects it was absolutely necessary to
employ; and the worst that could be found seem to have been employed.
Not a single fine public building of any kind or in any style was
erected during his long administration. It may be confidently affirmed
that no ruler whose abilities and attainments would bear any comparison
with his has ever shown such cold disdain for what is excellent in arts
and letters.
His first administration lasted seventeen years. That long period is
divided by a strongly marked line into two almost exactly equal parts.
The first part ended and the second began in the autumn of 1792.
Throughout both parts Pitt displayed in the highest degree the talents
of a parliamentary leader. During the first part he was a fortunate and,
in many respects, a skilful administrator. With the difficulties which
he had to encounter during the second part he was altogether incapable
of contending: but his eloquence and his perfect mastery of the tactics
of the House of Commons concealed his incapacity from the multitude.
The eight years which followed the general election of 1784 were as
tranquil and prosperous as any eight years in the whole history of
England. Neighbouring nations which had lately been in arms against
her, and which had flattered themselves that, in losing her American
colonies, she had lost a chief source of her wealth and of her power,
saw, with wonder and vexation, that she was more wealthy and more
powerful than ever. Her trade increased. Her manufactures flourished.
Her exchequer was full to overflowing.
Very {263}idle apprehensions were generally entertained, that the public
debt, though much less than a third of the debt which we now bear with
ease, would be found too heavy for the strength of the nation. Those
apprehensions might not perhaps have been easily quieted by reason. But
Pitt quieted them by a juggle. He succeeded in persuading first himself,
and then the whole nation, his opponents included, that a new sinking
fund, which, so far as it differed from former sinking funds, differed
for the worse, would, by virtue of some mysterious power of propagation
belonging to money, put into the pocket of the public creditor great
sums not taken out of the pocket of the tax-payer. The country,
terrified by a danger which was no danger, hailed with delight and
boundless confidence a remedy which was no remedy. The minister was
almost universally extolled as the greatest of financiers. Meanwhile
both the branches of the House of Bourbon found that England was as
formidable an antagonist as she had ever been. France had formed a plan
for reducing Holland to vassalage. But England interposed; and France
receded. Spain interrupted by violence the trade of our merchants with
the regions near the Oregon. But England armed; and Spain receded.
Within the island there was profound tranquillity. The King was, for the
first time, popular. During the twenty-three years which had followed
his accession he had not been loved by his subjects. His domestic
virtues were acknowledged. But it was generally thought that the good
qualities by which he was distinguished in private life were wanting to
his political character. As a Sovereign, he was resentful, unforgiving,
stubborn, cunning. Under his rule the country had sustained cruel
disgraces and disasters; and {264}every one of those disgraces and
disasters was imputed to his strong antipathies, and to his perverse
obstinacy in the wrong. One statesman after another complained that
he had been induced by royal caresses, entreaties, and promises, to
undertake the direction of affairs at a difficult conjuncture, and that,
as soon as he had, not without sullying his fame and alienating his best
friends, served the turn for which he was wanted, his ungrateful master
began to intrigue against him, and to canvass against him. Grenville,
Rockingham, Chatham, men of widely different characters, but all three
upright and high-spirited, agreed in thinking that the Prince under whom
they had successively held the highest place in the government was one
of the most insincere of mankind. His confidence was reposed, they said,
not in those known and responsible counsellors to whom he had delivered
the seals of office, but in secret advisers who stole up the back
stairs into his closet. In Parliament, his ministers, while defending
themselves against the attacks of the opposition in front, were
perpetually, at his instigation, assailed on the flank or in the rear by
a vile band of mercenaries who called themselves his friends. These
men constantly, while in possession of lucrative places in his service,
spoke and voted against bills which he had authorised the First Lord of
the Treasury or the Secretary of State to bring in. But from the day on
which Pitt was placed at the head of affairs there was an end of secret
influence. His haughty and aspiring spirit was not to be satisfied
with the mere show of power. Any attempt to undermine him at Court,
any mutinous movement among his followers in the House of Commons, was
certain to be at once put down. He had only to tender his resignation;
and he could dictate {265}his own terms. For he, and he alone, stood
between the King and the Coalition. He was therefore little less than
Mayor of the Palace. The nation loudly applauded the King for having
the wisdom to repose entire confidence in so excellent a minister. His
Majesty’s private virtues now began to produce their full effect. He
was generally regarded as the model of a respectable country gentleman,
honest, good-natured, sober, religious. He rose early: he dined
temperately: he was strictly faithful to his wife: he never missed
church; and at church he never missed a response. His people heartily
prayed that he might long reign over them; and they prayed the more
heartily because his virtues were set off to the best advantage by the
vices and follies of the Prince of Wales, who lived in close intimacy
with the chiefs of the opposition.
How strong this feeling was in the public mind appeared signally on
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
{266}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 {267}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 or 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 {268}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
davs after the triumphant 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 {269}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. (1)
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
(1) 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.
dissolution. {270}In the course of the some 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 {271}great father’s
hones 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 {272}had suborned Paris to assassinate Lepelletier,
and Cecilia Régnault to assassinate Robespierre. When the Thermidorian
reaction came, all the atrocities of the Reign of Terror were imputed to
him. Collot 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 Barrere, 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 {273}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,
Fitz-william, 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 {274}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 {275}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 Abbé 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 {276}brought forward
generals worthy to command such an army. Germany might have been saved
by another Blenheim; Flanders recovered by another Ramillies; 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 reëmbark, 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 {277}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 {278}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 {279}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 every thing 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 languor 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.
One part only of Pitt’s conduct during the last eight years {280}of
the eighteenth century deserves high praise, he was the first English
minister who formed great designs for the benefit of Ireland. The manner
in which the Roman Catholic population of that unfortunate country had
been kept down during many generations seemed to him unjust and cruel;
and it was scarcely possible for a man of his abilities not to perceive
that, in a contest against the Jacobins, the Roman Catholics were
his natural allies. Had he been able to do all that he wished, it is
probable that a wise and liberal policy would have averted the rebellion
of 1798. But the difficulties which he encountered were great, perhaps
insurmountable; and the Roman Catholics were, rather by his misfortune
than by his fault, thrown into the hands of the Jacobins. There was a
third great rising of the Irishry against the Englishry, a rising
not less formidable than the risings of 1641 and 1689. The Englishry
remained victorious; and it was necessary for Pitt, as it had been
necessary for Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange before him, to
consider how the victory should be used. It is only just to his memory
to say that he formed a scheme of policy, so grand and so simple, so
righteous and so humane, that it would alone entitle him to a high place
among statesmen. He determined to make Ireland one kingdom with England,
and, at the same time, to relieve the Roman Catholic laity from civil
disabilities, and to grant a public maintenance to the Roman Catholic
clergy. Had he been able to carry these noble designs into effect, the
Union would have been an Union indeed. It would have been inseparably
associated in the minds of the great majority of Irishmen with civil and
religious freedom; and the old Parliament in College Green would have
been regretted only {281}by a small knot of discarded jobbers and
oppressors, and would have been remembered by the body of the nation
with the loathing and contempt due to the most tyrannical and the most
corrupt assembly that had ever sate in Europe. But Pitt could execute
only one half of what he had projected. He succeeded in obtaining the
consent of the Parliaments of both kingdoms to the Union; but that
reconciliation of races and sects, without which the Union could exist
only in name, was not accomplished. He was well aware that he was likely
to find difficulties in the closet. But he flattered himself that, by
cautious and dexterous management, those difficulties might be overcome.
Unhappily, there were traitors and sycophants in high place who did
not suffer him to take his own time and his own way, but prematurely
disclosed his scheme to the King, and disclosed it in the manner most
likely to irritate and alarm a weak and diseased mind. His Majesty
absurdly imagined that his Coronation oath bound him to refuse
his assent to any bill for relieving Roman Catholics from civil
disabilities. To argue with him was impossible. Dundas tried to explain
the matter, but was told to keep his Scotch metaphysics to himself.
Pitt, and Pitt’s ablest colleagues, resigned their offices. It was
necessary that the King should make a new arrangement. But by this time
his anger and distress had brought back the malady which had, many
years before, incapacitated him for the discharge of his functions. He
actually assembled his family, read the Coronation oath to them, and
told them that, if he broke it, the Crown would immediately pass to the
House of Savoy. It was not until after an interregnum of several weeks
that he regained the full use of his small faculties, and that {282}a
ministry after his own heart was at length formed.
The materials out of which he had to construct a government were neither
solid nor splendid. To that party, weak in numbers, but strong in every
kind of talent, which was hostile to the domestic and foreign policy of
his late advisers, he could not have recourse. For that party, while it
differed from his late advisers on every point on which they had been
honoured with his approbation, cordially agreed with them as to the
single matter which had brought on them his displeasure. All that was
left to him was to call up the rear ranks of the old ministry to form
the front rank of a new ministry. In an age pre-eminently fruitful of
parliamentary talents, a cabinet was formed containing hardly a single
man who, in parliamentary talents, could be considered as even of the
second rate. The most important offices in the state were bestowed on
decorous and laborious mediocrity. Henry Addington was at the head of
the Treasury. He had been an early, indeed a hereditary, friend of Pitt,
and had by Pitt’s influence been placed, while still a young man, in the
chair of the House of Commons. He was universally admitted to have been
the best speaker that had sate in that chair since the retirement of
Onslow. But nature had not bestowed on him very vigorous faculties; and
the highly respectable situation which he had long occupied with honour
had rather unfitted than fitted him for the discharge of his new
duties. His business had been to bear himself evenly between contending
factions. He had taken no part in the war of words; and he had always
been addressed with marked deference by the great orators who thundered
against each other from his right and from his left. It was {283}not
strange that, when, for the first time, he had to encounter keen
and vigorous antagonists, who dealt hard blows without the smallest
ceremony, he should have been awkward and unready, or, that the air of
dignity and authority which he had acquired in his former post, and of
which he had not divested himself, should have made his helplessness
laughable and pitiable. Nevertheless, during many months, his power
seemed to stand firm. He was a favourite with the King, whom he
resembled in narrowness of mind, and to whom he was more obsequious than
Pitt had ever been. The nation was put into high good humour by a peace
with France. The enthusiasm with which the upper and middle, classes had
rushed into the war spent itself. Jacobinism was no longer formidable.
Everywhere there was a strong reaction against what was called the
atheistical and anarchical philosophy of the eighteenth century.
Bonaparte, now First Consul, was busied in constructing out of the ruins
of old institutions a new ecclesiastical establishment and a new
order of knighthood. That nothing less than the dominion of the
whole civilised world would satisfy his selfish ambition was not yet
suspected; nor did even wise men see any reason to doubt that he might
be as safe a neighbour as any prince of the House of Bourbon had been.
The treaty of Amiens was therefore hailed by the great body of the
English people with extravagant joy. The popularity of the minister was
for the moment immense. His want of parliamentary ability was, as yet,
of little consequence; for he had scarcely any adversary to encounter.
The old opposition, delighted by the peace, regarded him with favour.
A new opposition had indeed been formed by some of the late ministers,
{284}and was led by Grenville in the House of Lords, and by Windham in
the House of Commons. But the new opposition could scarcely muster
ten votes, and was regarded with no favour by the country. On Pitt the
ministers relied as on their firmest support. He had not, like some of
his colleagues, retired in anger. He had expressed the greatest respect
for the conscientious scruple which had taken possession of the royal
mind; and he had promised his successors all the help in his power. In
private his advice was at their service. In Parliament he took his seat
on the bench behind them; and, in more than one debate, defended them
with powers far superior to their own. The King perfectly understood the
value of such assistance. On one occasion, at the palace, he took the
old minister and the new minister aside. “If we three,” he said, “keep
together, all will go well.”
But it was hardly possible, human nature being what it is, and, more
especially, Pitt and Addington being what they were, that this union
should be durable. Pitt, conscious of superior powers, imagined that the
place which he had quitted was now occupied by a mere puppet which he
had set up, which he was to govern while he suffered it to remain,
and which he was to fling aside as soon as he wished to resume his old
position. Nor was it long before he began to pine for the power which
he had relinquished. He had been so early raised to supreme authority
in the state, and had enjoyed that authority so long, that it had become
necessary to him. In retirement his days passed heavily. He could not,
like Fox, forget the pleasures and cares of ambition in the company of
Euripides or Herodotus. Pride restrained him from intimating, even to
his dearest friends, that he wished to be again minister. {285}But
he thought it strange, almost ungrateful, that his wish had not been
divined, that it had not been anticipated, by one whom he regarded as
his deputy.
Addington, on the other hand, was by no means inclined to descend from
his high position. He was, indeed, under a delusion much resembling that
of Abon Hassan in the Arabian tale. His brain was turned by his short
and unreal Caliphate. He took his elevation quite seriously, attributed
it to his own merit, and considered himself as one of the great
triumvirate of English statesmen, as worthy to make a third with Pitt
and Fox.
Such being the feelings of the late minister and of the present
minister, a rupture was inevitable; and there was no want of persons
bent on making that rupture speedy and violent. Some of these persons
wounded Addington’s pride by representing him as a lacquey, sent to keep
a place on the Treasury bench till his master should find it convenient
to come. Others took every opportunity of praising him at Pitt’s
expense. Pitt had waged a long, a bloody, a costly, an unsuccessful
war. Addington had made peace. Pitt had suspended the constitutional
liberties of Englishmen. Under Addington those liberties were again
enjoyed. Pitt had wasted the public resources. Addington was carefully
nursing them. It was sometimes but too evident that these compliments
were not unpleasing to Addington. Pitt became cold and reserved. During
many months he remained at a distance from London. Meanwhile his
most intimate friends, in spite of his declarations that he made no
complaint, and that he had no wish for office, exerted themselves
to effect a change of ministry. His favourite disciple, George
{286}Canning, young, ardent, ambitious, with great powers and great
virtues, but with a temper too restless and a wit too satirical tor his
own happiness, was indefatigable. He spoke; he wrote; he intrigued; he
tried to induce a large number of the supporters of the government to
sign a round robin desiring a change; he made game of Addington and
of Addington’s relations in a succession of lively pasquinades. The
minister’s partisans retorted with equal acrimony, if not with equal
vivacity. Pitt could keep out of the affray only by keeping out of
politics altogether; and this it soon became impossible for him to do.
Had Napoleon, content with the first place amoung the sovereigns of the
Continent, and with a military reputation surpassing that of Marlborough
or of Turenne, devoted himself to the noble task of making France happy
by mild administration and wise legislation, our country might have
long continued to tolerate a government of fair intentions and feeble
abilities. Unhappily, the treaty of Amiens had scarcely been signed,
when the restless ambition and the insupportable insolence of the First
Consul convinced the great body of the English people that the peace, so
eagerly welcomed, was only a precarious armistice. As it became clearer
and clearer that a war for the dignity, the independence, the very
existence of the nation was at hand, men looked with increasing
uneasiness on the weak and languid cabinet which would have to contend
against an enemy who united more than the power of Lewis the Great to
more than the genius of Frederick the Great. It is true that Addington
might easily have been a better war minister than Pitt, and could not
possibly have been a worse. But Pitt had cast a spell on the public
mind. The eloquence, the judgment, {287}the calm and disdainful
firmness, which he had, during many years, displayed in Parliament,
deluded the world into the belief that he must be eminently qualified to
superintend every department of politics; and they imagined, even after
the miserable failures of Dunkirk, of Quiberon, and of the Helder, that
he was the only statesman who could cope with Bonaparte. This feeling
was nowhere stronger than among Addington’s own colleagues. The pressure
put on him was so strong that he could not help yielding to it; yet,
even in yielding, he showed how far he was from knowing his own place.
His first proposition was, that some insignificant nobleman should be
First Lord of the Treasury and nominal head of the administration, and
that the real power should be divided between Pitt and himself, who were
to be secretaries of state. Pitt, as might have been expected, refused
even to discuss such a scheme, and talked of it with bitter mirth.
“Which secretaryship was offered to you?” his friend Wilberforce asked.
“Really,” said Pitt, “I had not the curiosity to inquire.” Addington
was frightened into bidding higher. He offered to resign the Treasury
to Pitt, on condition that there should be no extensive change in the
government. But Pitt would listen to no such terms. Then came a dispute
such as often arises after negotiations orally conducted, even when the
negotiators are men of strict honour. Pitt gave one account of what had
passed; Addington gave another: and, though the discrepancies were not
such as necessarily implied any intentional violation of truth on either
side, both were greatly exasperated.
Meanwhile the quarrel with the First Consul had come to a crisis. On the
16th of May, 1803, the King {288}sent a message calling on the House of
Commons to support him in withstanding the ambitious and encroaching
policy of France; and, on the 22nd, the House took the message into
consideration.
Pitt had now been living many months in retirement. There had been a
general election since he had spoken in Parliament; and there were
two hundred members who had never heard him. It was known that on this
occasion he would be in his place; and curiosity was wound up to
the highest point. Unfortunately, the short-hand writers were, in
consequence of some mistake, shut out on that day from the gallery,
so that the newspapers contained only a very meagre report of the
proceedings. But several accounts of what passed are extant; and of
those accounts the most interesting is contained in an unpublished
letter, written by a very young member, John William Ward, afterwards
Earl of Dudley. When Pitt rose, he was received with loud cheering. At
every pause in his speech there was a burst of applause. The peroration
is said to have been one of the most animated and magnificent ever heard
in Parliament. “Pitt’s speech,” Fox wrote a few days later, “was admired
very much, and very justly. I think it was the best he ever made in that
style.” The debate was adjourned; and on the second night Fox replied
in an oration which, as the most zealous Pittites were forced to
acknowledge, left the palm of eloquence doubtful. Addington made a
pitiable appearance between the two great rivals; and it was observed
that Pitt, while exhorting the Commons to stand resolutely by the
executive government against France, said not a word indicating esteem
or friendship for the Prime Minister.
War {289}was speedily declared. The First Consul threatened to invade
England at the head of the conquerors of Belgium and Italy, and formed a
great camp near the Straits of Dover. On the other side of those Straits
the whole population of our island was ready to rise up as one man
in defence of the soil. At this conjuncture, as at some other great
conjunctures in our history, the conjuncture of 1660, for example, and
the conjuncture of 1688, there was a general disposition among honest
and patriotic men to forget old quarrels, and to regard as a friend
every person who was ready, in the existing emergency, to do his part
towards the saving of the state. A coalition of all the first, men in
the country would, at that moment, have been as popular as the coalition
of 1783 had been unpopular. Alone in the kingdom the King looked with
perfect complacency on a cabinet in which no man superior to himself in
genius was to be found, and was so far from being willing to admit all
his ablest subjects to office that he was bent on excluding them all.
A few months passed before the different parties which agreed
in regarding the government with dislike and contempt came to an
understanding with each other. But in the spring of 1804 it became
evident that the weakest of ministries would have to defend itself
against the strongest of oppositions, an opposition made up of three
oppositions, each of which would, separately, have been formidable from
ability, and which, when united, were also formidable from number. The
party which had opposed the peace, headed by Grenville and Windham,
and the party which had opposed the renewal of the war, headed by Fox,
concurred in thinking that the men now in power were {290}incapable of
either making a good peace or waging a vigorous war. Pitt had, in 1802,
spoken for peace against the party of Grenville, and had, in 1803,
spoken for war against the party of Fox. But of the capacity of the
cabinet, and especially of its chief, for the conduct of great affairs,
he thought as meanly as either Fox or Grenville. Questions were easily
found on which all the enemies of the government could act cordially
together. The unfortunate First Lord of the Treasury, who had, during
the earlier months of his administration, been supported by Pitt on
one side, and by Fox on the other, now had to answer Pitt, and to be
answered by Fox. Two sharp debates, followed by close divisions, made
him weary of his post. It was known, too, that the Upper House was even
more hostile to him than the Lower, that the Scotch representative
peers wavered, that there were signs of mutiny among the bishops. In the
cabinet itself there was discord, and, worse than discord, treachery.
It was necessary to give way: the ministry was dissolved: and the task of
forming a government was entrusted to Pitt.
Pitt was of opinion that there was now an opportunity, such as had never
before offered itself, and such as might never offer itself again, of
uniting in the public service, on honourable terms, all the eminent
talents of the kingdom. The passions to which the French Revolution had
given birth were extinct. The madness of the innovator and the madness
of the alarmist had alike had their day. Jacobinism and Anti-Jacobinism
had gone out of fashion together. The most liberal statesman did not
think that season propitious for schemes of parliamentary reform;
and the most conservative statesman could not pretend that there was
{291}any occasion for gagging bills and suspensions of the Habeas Corpus
Act. The great struggle for independence and national honour occupied
all minds; and those who were agreed as to the duty of maintaining that
struggle with vigour might well postpone to a more convenient time all
disputes about matters comparatively unimportant. Strongly impressed by
these considerations, Pitt wished to form a ministry including all the
first men in the country. The Treasury he reserved for himself; and to
Fox he proposed to assign a share of power little inferior to his own.
The plan was excellent; but the king would not hear of it. Dull,
obstinate, unforgiving, and, at that time, half mad, he positively
refused to admit Fox into his service. Anybody else, even men who had
gone as far as Fox, or further than Fox, in what his Majesty considered
as Jacobinism, Sheridan, Grey, Erskine, should be graciously received;
but Fox never. During several hours Pitt laboured in vain to reason down
this senseless antipathy. That he was perfectly sincere there can be
no doubt: but it was not enough to be sincere; he should have been
resolute. Had he declared himself determined not to take office without
Fox, the royal obstinacy would have given way, as it gave way, a
few months later, when opposed to the immutable resolution of Lord
Grenville. In an evil hour Pitt yielded. He flattered himself with the
hope that, though he consented to forego the aid of his illustrious
rival, there would still remain ample materials for the formation of an
efficient ministry. That hope was cruelly disappointed. Fox entreated
his friends to leave personal considerations out of the question, and
declared that he would support, with the utmost cordiality, an efficient
and patriotic ministry from which he {292}should be himself excluded.
Not only his friends, however, but Grenville, and Grenville’s adherents,
answered, with one voice, that the question was not personal, that a
great constitutional principle was at stake, and that they would not
take office while a man eminently qualified to render service to the
commonwealth was placed under a ban merely because he was disliked at
Court. All that was left to Pitt was to construct a government out of
the wreck of Addington’s feeble administration. The small circle of
his personal retainers furnished him with a very few useful assistants,
particularly Dundas, who had been created Viscount Melville, Lord
Harrowby, and Canning.
Such was the inauspicious manner in which Pitt entered on his second
administration. The whole history of that administration was of a piece
with the commencement. Almost every month brought some new disaster or
disgrace. To the war with France was soon added a war with Spain. The
opponents of the minister were numerous, able, and active. His most
useful coadjutors he soon lost. Sickness deprived him of the help of
Lord Harrowby. It was discovered that Lord Melville had been guilty of
highly culpable laxity in transactions relating to public money. He was
censured by the House of Commons, driven from office, ejected from the
Privy Council, and impeached of high crimes and misdemeanours. The blow
fell heavy on Pitt. It gave him, he said in Parliament, a deep pang;
and, as he uttered the word pang, his lip quivered, his voice shook, he
paused, and his hearers thought that he was about to burst into tears.
Such tears shed by Eldon would have moved nothing but laughter. Shed
by the warm-hearted and open-hearted Fox, {293}they would have moved
sympathy, but would have caused no surprise. But a tear from Pitt would
have been something portentous. He suppressed his emotion, however, and
proceeded with his usual majestic self-possession.
His difficulties compelled him to resort to various expedients. At one
time Addington was persuaded to accept office with a peerage; but he
brought no additional strength to the government. Though he went through
the form of reconciliation, it was impossible for him to forget the
past. While he remained in place he was jealous and punctilious; and he
soon retired again. At another time Pitt renewed his efforts to overcome
his master’s aversion to Fox; and it was rumoured that the King’s
obstinacy was gradually giving away. But, meanwhile, it was impossible
for the minister to conceal from the public eye the decay of his health,
and the constant anxiety which gnawed at his heart. His sleep was
broken. His food ceased to nourish him. All who passed him in the Park,
all who had interviews with him in Downing Street, saw misery written in
his face. The peculiar look which he wore during the last months of his
life was often pathetically described by Wilberforce, who used to call
it the Austerlitz look.
Still the vigour of Pitt’s intellectual faculties, and the intrepid
haughtiness of his spirit, remained unaltered. He had staked everything
on a great venture. He had succeeded in forming another mighty coalition
against the French ascendency. The united forces of Austria, Russia
and England might, he hoped, oppose an insurmountable barrier to the
ambition of the common enemy. But the genius and energy of Napoleon
prevailed. While the English troops were preparing to {294}embark for
Germany, while the Russian troops were slowly coming up from Poland, he,
with rapidity unprecedented in modern war, moved a hundred thousand men
from the shores of the Ocean to the Black Forest, and compelled a great
Austrian army to surrender at Ulm. To the first faint rumours of this
calamity Pitt would give no credit. He was irritated by the alarms of
those around him. “Do not believe a word of it,” he said: “it is all
a fiction.” The next day he received a Dutch newspaper containing the
capitulation. He knew no Dutch. It was Sunday; and the public offices
were shut. He carried the paper to Lord Malmesbury, who had been
minister in Holland; and Lord Malmesbury translated it. Pitt tried to
bear up; but the shock was too great; and he went away with death in his
face.
The news of the battle of Trafalgar arrived four days later, and seemed
for a moment to revive him. Forty-eight hours after that most glorious
and most mournful of victories had been announced to the country came
the Lord Mayor’s day; and Pitt dined at Guildhall. His popularity had
declined. But on this occasion the multitude, greatly excited by the
recent tidings, welcomed him enthusiastically, took off his horses in
Cheapside, and drew his carriage up King Street. When his health was
drunk, he returned thanks in two or three of those stately sentences of
which he had a boundless command. Several of those who heard him laid
up his words in their hearts; for they were the last words that he ever
uttered in public: “Let us hope that England, having saved herself by
her energy, may save Europe by her example.”
This was but a momentary rally. Austerlitz soon completed what Ulm had
begun. Early in December Pitt {295}had retired to Bath, in the hope that
he might there gather strength for the approaching session. While he was
languishing there on his sofa arrived the news that a decisive battle
had been fought and lost in Moravia, that the coalition was dissolved,
that the Continent was at the feet of France. He sank down under the
blow. Ten days later, he was, so emaciated that his most intimate
friends hardly knew him. He came up from Bath by slow journeys, and, on
the 11th of January, 1806, reached his villa at Putney. Parliament was
to meet on the 21st. On the 20th was to be the parliamentary dinner at
the house of the First Lord of the Treasury in Downing Street; and the
cards were already issued. But the days of the great minister were
numbered. The only chance for his life, and that a very slight chance,
was, that he should resign his office, and pass some months in profound
repose. His colleagues paid him very short visits, and carefully avoided
political conversation. But his spirit, long accustomed to dominion,
could not, even in that extremity, relinquish hopes which everybody but
himself perceived to be vain. On the day on which he was carried into
his bedroom at Putney, the Marquess Wellesley, whom he had long loved,
whom he had sent to govern India, and whose administration had been
eminently able, energetic, and successful, arrived in London after an
absence of eight years. The friends saw each other once more. There was
an affectionate meeting, and a last parting. That it was a last parting
Pitt did not seem to be aware. He fancied himself to be recovering,
talked on various subjects cheerfully, and with an unclouded mind, and
pronounced a warm and discerning eulogium on the Marquess’s brother
Arthur.
“I {296}never,” he said, “met with any military man with whom it was so
satisfactory to converse.” The excitement and exertion of this interview
were too much for the sick man. He fainted away; and Lord Wellesley left
the house, convinced that the close was fast approaching.
And now members of Parliament were fast coming up to London. The chiefs
of the opposition met for the purpose of considering the course to be
taken on the first day of the session. It was easy to guess what would
be the language of the King’s speech, and of the address which would be
moved in answer to that speech. An amendment condemning the policy of
the government had been prepared, and was to have been proposed in the
House of Commons by Lord Henry Petty, a young nobleman who had already
won for himself that place in the esteem of his country which, after the
lapse of more than half a century, he still retains. He was unwilling,
however, to come forward as the accuser of one who was incapable of
defending himself. Lord Grenville, who had been informed of Pitt’s
state by Lord Wellesley, and had been deeply affected by it, earnestly
recommended forbearance; and Fox, with characteristic generosity and
good nature, gave his voice against attacking his now helpless rival.
“Sunt lacryrmæ rerum,” he said, “et mentem mortalia tangunt.” On the
first day, therefore, there was no debate. It was rumoured that evening
that Pitt was better. But on the following morning his physicians
pronounced that there were no hopes. The commanding faculties of which
he had been too proud were beginning to fail. His old tutor and friend,
the Bishop of Lincoln, informed him of his danger, and gave such
religious advice and consolation as a confused {297}and obscured mind
could receive. Stories were told of devout sentiments fervently uttered
by the dying man. But these stories found no credit with anybody who
knew him. Wilberforce pronounced it impossible that they could be true.
“Pitt,” he added, “was a man who always said less than he thought on
such topics.” It was asserted in many after-dinner speeches, Grub Street
elegies, and academic prize poems and prize declamations, that the great
minister died exclaiming, “Oh my country!” This is a fable: but it is
true that the last words which he uttered, while he knew what he said,
were broken exclamations about the alarming state of public affairs.
He ceased to breathe on the morning of the 23rd of January, 1806, the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the day on which he first took his seat in
Parliament. He was in his forty-seventh year, and had been, during near
nineteen years, First Lord of the Treasury, and undisputed chief of
the administration. Since parliamentary government was established in
England, no English statesman has held supreme power so long. Walpole,
it is true, was first Lord of the Treasury during more than twenty
years: but it was not till Walpole had been some time First Lord of the
Treasury that he could be properly called Prime Minister.
It was moved in the House of Commons that Pitt should be honoured with a
public funeral and a monument. The motion was opposed by Fox in a speech
which deserves to be studied as a model of good taste and good feeling.
The task was the most invidious that ever an orator undertook: but
it was performed with a humanity and delicacy which were warmly
acknowledged by the mourning friends of him who was gone. The motion was
carried by 288 votes to 89.
The {298}22nd of February was fixed for the funeral. The corpse, having
lain in state during two days in the Painted Chamber, was borne with
great pomp to the northern transept of the Abbey. A splendid train of
princes, nobles, bishops, and privy councillors followed. The grave of
Pitt had been made near to the spot where his great father lay, near
also to the spot where his great rival was soon to be. The sadness of
the assistants was beyond that of ordinary mourners. For he whom they
were committing to the dust had died of sorrows and anxieties of which
none of the survivors could be altogether without a share. Wilberforce,
who carried the banner before the hearse, described the awful ceremony
with deep feeling. As the coffin descended into the earth, he said, the
eagle face of Chatham from above seemed to look down with consternation
into the dark house which was receiving all that remained of so much
power and glory.
All parties in the House of Commons readily concurred in voting forty
thousand pounds to satisfy the demands of Pitt’s creditors. Some of his
admirers seemed to consider the magnitude of his embarrassments as a
circumstance highly honourable to him; but men of sense will probably
be of a different opinion. It is far better, no doubt, that a great
minister should carry his contempt of money to excess than that he
should contaminate his hands with unlawful gain. But it is neither right
nor becoming in a man to whom the public has given an income more than
sufficient for his comfort and dignity to bequeath to that public a
great debt, the effect of mere negligence and profusion. As First Lord
of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pitt never had less
than six thousand a year, besides an excellent house. In 1792 {299}he
was forced by his royal master’s friendly importunity to accept for life
the office of Warden of the Cinque Ports, with near four thousand a year
more. He had neither wife nor child: he had no needy relations: he had
no expensive tastes: he had no long election bills. Had he given but a
quarter of an hour a week to the regulation of his household, he would
have kept his expenditure within bounds. Or, if he could not spare even
a quarter of an hour a week for that purpose, he had numerous friends,
excellent men of business, who would have been proud to act as his
stewards. One of those friends, the chief of a great commercial house in
the city, made an attempt to put the establishment in Downing Street to
rights; but in vain. He found that the waste of the servants’ hall was
almost fabulous. The quantity of butcher’s meat charged in the bills was
nine hundred-weight a week. The consumption of poultry, of fish, and of
tea was in proportion. The character of Pitt would have stood higher
if, with the disinterestedness of Pericles and of De Witt, he had united
their dignified frugality.
The memory of Pitt has been assailed, times innumerable, often justly,
often unjustly; but it has suffered much less from his assailants than
from his eulogists.
For, during many years, his name was the rallying cry of a class of
men with whom, at one of those terrible conjunctures which confound all
ordinary distinctions, he was accidentally and temporarily connected,
but to whom, on almost all great questions of principle, he was
diametrically opposed. The haters of parliamentary reform called
themselves Pittites, not choosing to remember that Pitt made three
motions for parliamentary reform, and, that, though he thought that such
a reform {300}could not safely be made while the passions excited by the
French revolution were raging, he never uttered a word indicating that
he should not be prepared at a more convenient season to bring the
question forward a fourth time. The toast of protestant ascendency was
drunk on Pitt’s birthday by a set of Pittites who could not but be aware
that Pitt had resigned his office because he could not carry Catholic
emancipation. The defenders of the Test Act called themselves Pittites,
though they could not be ignorant that Pitt had laid before George the
Third unanswerable reasons for abolishing the Test Act. The enemies of
free trade called themselves Pittites, though Pitt was far more deeply
imbued with the doctrines of Adam Smith than either Fox or Grey. The
very negro-drivers invoked the name of Pitt, whose eloquence was never
more conspicuously displayed than when he spoke of the wrongs of the
negro. This mythical Pitt, who resembles the genuine Pitt as little as
the Charlemagne of Ariosto resembles the Charlemagne of Einhard, has
had his day. History will vindicate the real man from calumny disguised
under the semblance of adulation, and will exhibit him as what he was,
a minister of great talents, honest intentions, and liberal opinions,
pre-eminently qualified, intellectually and morally, for the part of a
parliamentary leader, and capable of administering, with prudence and
moderation, the government of a prosperous and tranquil country, but
unequal to surprising and terrible emergencies, and liable, in such
emergencies, to err grievously, both on the side of weakness and on the
side of violence.