William Pitt the Younger

IN THE SAME SERIES

General Editors: Eric J.Evans and P.D.King

Lynn Abrams Bismarck and the German Empire 1871–1918

David Arnold The Age of Discovery 1400–1600
A.L.Beier The Problem of the Poor in Tudor and
Early Stuart England
Martin Blinkhorn Democracy and Civil War in Spain
1931–1939
Martin Blinkhorn Mussolini and Fascist Italy
Robert M.Bliss Restoration England 1660–1688
Stephen Constantine Lloyd George
Stephen Constantine Social Conditions in Britain 1918–1939
Susan Doran Elizabeth I and Religion 1558–1603
Christopher Durston Charles I
Christopher Durston James I
Eric J.Evans The Great Reform Act of 1832
Eric J.Evans Political Parties in Britain 1783–1867
Eric J.Evans Sir Robert Peel
Peter Gaunt The British Wars 1637–1651
Dick Geary Hitler and Nazism
John Gooch The Unification of Italy
Alexander Grant Henry VII
M.J.Heale The American Revolution
Ruth Henig The Origins of the First World War
Ruth Henig The Origins of the Second World War
1933–1939
Ruth Henig Versailles and After 1919–1933
Ruth Henig The Weimar Republic 1919–1933
P.D.King Charlemagne
Stephen J.Lee Peter the Great
Stephen J.Lee The Thirty Years War
John Lowe Britain and Foreign Affairs 1815–1885
J.M.MacKenzie The Partition of Africa 1880–1900
John W.Mason The Cold War 1945–1991
Michael Mullett Calvin
Michael Mullett The Counter-Reformation
Michael Mullett James II and English Politics 1678–1688
Michael Mullett Luther
D.G.Newcombe Henry VIII and the English Reformation
Robert Pearce Attlee’s Labour Governments 1945–51
Gordon Phillips The Rise of the Labour Party 1893–1931
John Plowright Regency England
Hans A.Pohlsander The Emperor Constantine
Roger Price Napoleon III and the Second Empire
J.H.Shennan France before the Revolution
J.H.Shennan International Relations in Europe 1689–1789
J.H.Shennan Louis XIV
Margaret Shennan The Rise of Brandenburg-Prussia
David Shatter Augustus Caesar
David Shatter The Fall of the Roman Republic
David Shatter Nero
David Shatter Roman Britain
David Shatter Tiberius Caesar
Richard Stoneman Alexander the Great
Keith J.Stringer The Reign of Stephen
John Thorley Athenian Democracy
Geoffrey Treasure Richelieu and Mazarin
John K.Walton Chartism
John K.Walton Disraeli
John K.Walton The Second Reform Act
Michael J.Winstanley Gladstone and the Liberal Party
Michael J.Winstanley Ireland and the Land Question
1800–1922
Alan Wood The Origins of the Russian Revolution
1861–1917
Alan Wood Stalin and Stalinism
Austin Woolrych England Without a King 1649–1660
 LANCASTER PAMPHLETS

William Pitt the Younger

Eric J.Evans

London and New York

 First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
©1999 Eric J.Evans
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Evans, Eric J.,
William Pitt the Younger/Eric J.Evans.
p. cm—(Lancaster pamphlets)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
1. Pitt, William, 1759–1806. 2. Great Britain—Politics and
government—1760–1820. 3. Prime ministers—Great Britain—Biography.
I.Title. II. Series.
DA522.P6E93 1999
941.07’3’092–dc21 98–47724
ISBN 0-203-43572-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-74396-2 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-13285-1 (Print Edition)
 Contents

Foreword ix

Acknowledgements xi

Time Chart xiii

1 The Making of a Prime Minister 1

2 Pitt the Political Reformer 10

3 Pitt and the ‘National Revival’, 1783–93 17

4 Foreign and Commercial Policy, 1783–91 25

5 Pitt, Party and Monarchy 34

6 A Nation at War, 1793–1801 44

7 Pitt, Patriotism and Reform in the 1790s 54

8 The Importance of Ireland 62

9 The Closing Years, 1801–6 71

10 Conclusion and Assessment 79

Further Reading 88

vii
 Foreword

Lancaster Pamphlets offer concise and up-to-date accounts of major

historical topics, primarily for the help of students preparing for Advanced
Level examinations, though they should also be of value to those pursuing
introductory courses in universities and other institutions of higher
education. Without being all-embracing, their aims are to bring some of
the central themes or problems confronting students and teachers into
sharper focus than the textbook writer can hope to do; to provide the
reader with some of the results of recent research which the textbook may
not embody; and to stimulate thought about the whole interpretation of
the topic under discussion.

ix
 Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to my co-editor, David King, and to Jen Carr for

reading through the manuscript and for making their characteristically
careful and helpful suggestions. I am also grateful to Heather McCallum
for her patience in waiting for the delivery of this manuscript while a
Series Editor wrestled with the problems of being Head of Department.
All errors are, of course, my own responsibility.
Eric J.Evans
Lancaster
September 1998

xi
 Time Chart

1759 28 May: Pitt born at Hayes Place, south London, the second son of
William Pitt the Elder and his wife Hester Grenville
1773 Attends Cambridge University but in residence there mostly from
1776–79
1780 December: Pitt elected MP for Appleby (Westmorland), aged 21
years and 7 months; takes his seat in the Commons, January 1781
1782 July: Becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer in Shelburne’s
administration, aged 23 years and 1 month; serves throughout
Shelburne’s prime ministership, resigning with him in February
1783
1783 September:Treaty of Versailles formally gives independence to the
American colonies; 19 December: Pitt accepts George III’s
invitation to become Prime Minister, aged 24 years and 7 months;
in the early months he has no majority in the Commons
1784 March: General election gives Pitt a comfortable majority over his
main opponents, Charles James Fox and Lord North; his
government now secure; Pitt’s Commutation Act begins his
financial and taxation reforms, greatly reducing duties on tea
1785 Pitt introduces parliamentary reform bill which is defeated in the
Commons by 74 votes; no ministry introduces parliamentary
reform again until Grey in March 1831; tax on shops introduced,
but it fails to produce anticipated revenue; Pitt introduces proposals
for mutually reduced tariffs between Britain and Ireland but the
legislature of both countries reject them
1786 Pitt establishes sinking fund to reduce government debt; the Eden
Trade Treaty signed between England and France

xiii
1787 ‘Free ports’ agreement between Britain and United States begins
to rebuild trading relationship between the two countries
1788 April: Alliance with Dutch ends Britain’s diplomatic isolation in
Europe; accession of Prussia in August creates the Triple Alliance;
October: beginnings of King’s illness (often thought to be
porphyria) which rendered him incapable of discharging his duties;
the Regency crisis threatens to end Pitt’s ministry, since the Prince
of Wales was anti-Pitt
1789 February: King’s recovery ends the Regency crisis and secures
Pitt’s position; July: fall of the Bastille prison in Paris begins French
Revolution
1790 First signs of division within Foxite Whig party with publication
of Burke s Reflections on the Revolution in France; Burke and Fox
publicly fall out
1791 Publication of Part I of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man as counterblast
to Burke’s book helps to develop radical consciousness in Britain;
anti-reform activity—the Priestley Riots—in Birmingham; Pitt
declares that Britain will be neutral in any European war launched
against French revolutionaries
1792 Publication of Part II of Rights of Man; London Corresponding Society
formed; radical Whigs form Society of the Friends of the People;
Royal Proclamations against Seditious Writings indicate growing
government concern about democratic movements in Britain
1793 February: First Coalition against France signed by Britain, Prussia,
Holland, Spain and Austria; the coalition had fallen apart by 1795;
Britain declares war on France
1794 May: government suspends Habeas Corpus Amendment Act as
rising radical activity in Britain causes alarm; July: split within
opposition Whig camp widened when Duke of Portland and other
conservative Whigs join with Pitt in a pro-war and anti-reform
coalition; Pitt’s majority in the Commons and Lords now huge on
most issues
1795 Beginnings of economic crisis and rising food prices stimulate
radical and democratic organisations in many towns and cities;
much support for a ‘patriotic’ and anti-reformist line also; June-
October: unsuccessful support to counter-revolutionaries in France;
war goes badly in most areas; Holland over-run and becomes
‘Batavian Republic’; declares war on Britain; December: passage
of the ‘Two Acts’: Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings
helps to reduce numbers supporting radical societies and to drive
radicalism underground

xiv
1796 Peace talks between Britain and France fail; October: Spain enters
war against Britain; December: attempted French invasion of Britain
from Ireland fails
1797 Year of crisis in both the economy and the war; Pitt considers
resignation; February: Bank of England suspends cash payments
as British debt soars; French attempt to land in Fishguard (West
Wales) as preliminary to invasion; April—May: naval mutinies at
Spithead and the Nore; October: Admiral Duncan defeats Dutch
fleet at Camperdown; Austrians sign Treaty of Campo Formio,
leaving Britain isolated in war with French
1798 Pitt increases taxes, including taxes on newspapers in an effort
to reduce reading of ‘dangerous’ literature by the lower orders;
proposals for an income tax introduced; May: Napoleon’s
invasion of Egypt begins, reducing immediate invasion threat,
although beginning of rebellion in Ireland seemed to offer fresh
opportunities for a time; August: French fleet defeated by
Napoleon at Aboukir Bay; December: alliance with Russia
signed
1799 Income tax levied on British property owners for the first time;
June: Second Coalition against France signed by Britain, Russia,
Austria,Turkey, Portugal and Naples; this collapsed in 1801; radical
organisations, The London Corresponding Society and the
Society of United Irishmen, formally banned; Combinations Act
makes all ‘combinations in restraint of trade’ (trades unions) illegal,
though most were already outside the law anyway
1800 March: after much arm-twisting and some bribery, Act of Union
between Britain and Ireland signed; September: Britain captures
Malta; December: ‘Armed Neutrality of the North’ signed by
Russia, Sweden, Denmark and Prussia in response to Britain’s
attempt to establish rights of search on all ships
1801 14 March: after disagreement with George III over Roman Catholic
Emancipation, Pitt (aged 41 years and 9 months) resigned, to be
replaced as Prime Minister by Addington; his first ministry had
lasted for 17 years and almost 3 months; his resignation breaks up
the ‘Pittite coalition’; many of Pitt’s ministers remain in government
but others, importantly Grenville, refuse to support Addington and
move closer to Fox; March-April: British fleet defeats Danes in
reprisal for armed neutrality; October: discussions about peace
with France begin

xv
1802 March: Peace of Amiens ends the first phase of the French Wars;
for the most part, conquests between Britain and France handed
back; Pitt privately concerned at some of the terms but continues
to support Addington publicly
1803 May: war resumes; pressure on Addington, largely from FoxGrenville
coalition; Pitt finds it increasingly difficult to maintain support for
the ministry and is critical of Addington’s financial policies
1804 January-April: Addington’s ministry in ever greater trouble; King
wishes Pitt to come back into office; Pitt attempts to produce a
broader-based administration, bringing in supporters of Fox and
Grenville. George vetoes any approach to Fox; 10 May:Addington
resigns and Pitt resumes office as Prime Minister, aged 44 years
and 11 months; December: Spain declares war on Britain
1805 Pitt, his parliamentary position never so strong in his second
ministry as in his first, brings Addington (now Lord Sidmouth)
back into government; April:Treaty of St Petersburg brings Russia
into war against France; May: Dundas (now Lord Melville) forced
to resign after allegations of financial and other irregularities while
Treasurer of the Navy; his departure significantly weakens the
government; July: Addington resigns; August: Austria’s joins the
Anglo-Russian alliance to form the Third Coalition against France;
October: Napoleon defeats the Austrians at Ulm; Nelson decisively
defeats a Franco-Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar; December:
Napoleon’s decisive victory over the Austrians at Austerlitz leads
to peace between France and Austria and the collapse of the Third
Coalition
1806 23 January: Pitt dies at Bowling Green House, Putney Heath (a
house he rented), aged 46 years and 7 months; his second
administration had lasted 1 year and 8 months; in all, the younger
Pitt was Prime Minister for 18 years and 11 months, a senior
minister of George III for 19 years and 8 months, and a Member
of Parliament for 25 years and 1 month

xvi
 1
The Making of a Prime Minister

Introduction: Pitt and the popular imagination

The Younger Pitt died almost two centuries ago. Inevitably, memories of a
long-dead political leader—even one so eminent and important as Pitt—
have faded from popular consciousness. Few, other than British historians,
have much of an impression of him nowadays. Visitors to the National
Portrait Gallery in London can absorb the flattering official portrait by
John Hoppner. It shows a spare, controlled and upright figure in early
middle age, possessed of fine features and a kindly gaze. This was not the
image portrayed by contemporary cartoonists.Though they all represented
a thinness unusual in prosperous politicians of the late eighteenth century,
well used to lavish entertainment, large meals and fine wines, Pitt’s kindly
gaze was usually replaced by grave determination in portrayals by
government supporters. His many opponents in the 1790s, hostile both to
the government’s persecution of reformers and to its taxation policies,
represented him as cold, thin-lipped and almost manic in his rapacious
intensity.
Every quiz buff will know that Pitt was the youngest Prime Minister
in British history and will probably know that, unusually, he died in
office. Some will be able to recall his last words (apparently well-enough
authenticated): ‘Oh, my country! How I leave my country’—a reference
to its plight at the time of his death. Britain was locked in a long and
bloody conflict with France which was still far from resolution. Indeed,
the last confirmed report Pitt received of the war, just before his death
in January 1806, was of Napoleon’s crushing defeat of Britain’s Austrian

1
allies at Austerlitz. A few might recall from old school lessons vague
ideas about a Prime Minister allegedly ‘good in peacetime but a poor
war leader’.Those who have seen the 1942 film The Young Mr Pitt,
directed by Carol Reed and starring Robert Donat as Pitt and Robert
Morley as Charles James Fox, will retain the powerfully manipulated
image of a noble patriot who sacrificed both domestic comforts (Pitt
never married) and personal priorities (the restorer of the nation’s
finances is portrayed here as neglecting his own money needs) to provide
selfless leadership to a nation in peril. It is as well to remember that this
film was a piece of wartime propaganda. Audiences were expected to
translate William Pitt’s virtues in standing alone against the French in
the 1790s into Winston Churchill’s in doing much the same against the
Germans in the 1940s. In truth, the implied comparison was far from
exact. No one could deny either man’s patriotism but the cynic might
be inclined to suggest that the only other attribute the two war leaders
had in common was one certainly not suggested by the film: they both
drank extremely heavily.
Retained images of Pitt, however, take us little further. Some will
have in their minds the physical and emotional contrast with his great
political opponent Fox: the former lean, disciplined and good at figures,
the latter fat, emotional and much better with people. This, too, only
lightly scratches the surface of a much more complex, and multi-faceted,
reality. What is clear is that William Pitt the Younger is well worth the
effort to understand. He was Prime Minister for longer than anyone else,
except his eminent predecessor Sir Robert Walpole. His period of office
spanned perhaps the two most profoundly significant changes to have
occurred in modern history—the French Revolution, which challenged
(and eventually transformed) the political order of Europe, and the
Industrial Revolution which began in Britain at much the same time
and whose consequences eventually affected the lives of virtually every
individual on the planet. Pitt was a leader of great gifts who, at the height
of his powers, exercised a dominance over both parliament and his monarch
which very few Prime Ministers have equalled. Though very few
politicians remember it now, and he would certainly have disclaimed the
title, Pitt also has a reasonable claim to be considered the first leader of
the modern Conservative Party. Throughout his long tenure as Prime
Minister, he was also his own Chancellor of the Exchequer. The priority
implied by his dual office-holding is highly significant. No other Prime
Minister (with the possible exception of Gladstone) has ever demonstrated
such profound understanding of the nation’s changing finances over a
long period.

2
 The well-cleared path to power
No major leader was so steeped in politics from his earliest years as the
younger Pitt. He is, of course, ‘Pitt the Younger’ because of ‘Pitt the Elder’.
This Pitt, also a William, was Prime Minister when his second son was
born on 28 May 1759, the greatest year of his prime ministership, since a
string of impressive military and naval victories vindicated his bold strategy
during the so-called Seven Years’ War (1756–63).The Younger Pitt was the
fourth of five children born between 1755 and 1761. His mother, Hester,
whom the elder Pitt had married in 1754, was a Grenville, and thus a
member of an even more established Whig political family. Her three
brothers—Richard (from 1752 Earl Temple), George and James—all served
in the Pitt-Newcastle government of 1757–61, though Temple and George
Grenville later fell out with the elder Pitt. George was himself Prime
Minister from 1763 to 1765. The Grenville-Pitt connection extended
fruitfully into the next generation. George’s own son, William Wyndham
Grenville, would be a senior minister of the younger Pitt in the 1780s and
1790s, rising to be both Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary; he was
also one of Pitt’s most trusted confidants.William Grenville, indeed, was to
succeed his cousin as Prime Minister, albeit briefly, in 1806.
William was educated at home (largely because of his father’s detestation
of the brutality of Eton, his own school) before going to Cambridge University
in 1773. Here he had a number of false starts, largely due to illness, and went
into normal residence only in 1776, leaving the university in 1779. Of Pitt’s
extraordinary intellectual gifts, there is no doubt. He absorbed the political
implications of events almost as he absorbed infant milk. At the age of 7,
when told of his father’s ennoblement as Earl of Chatham, he reflected on
his subordinate position in a now aristocratic family. He informed his tutor
that ‘he was glad he was not the eldest son, but that he could serve the
country in the House of Commons like his papa’ (Ehrman, I, 6). By 1772,
Lady Chatham was writing to her husband: ‘The fineness of William’s mind
makes him enjoy with the highest pleasure what would be above the reach
of any other creature of his small age’ (Stanhope, 1, 4).
Pitt seems to have inherited looks, hard-headedness and financial acumen
alike from his mother’s side of the family. Regrettably for his family, he was
to deploy these latter two attributes much more extensively on national than
on personal affairs. His distinctive profile, the joy of so many cartoonists in
the 1790s, bears a remarkable similarity to that of his mother in the portrait
by Hudson. Lady Chatham spent most of the last years of her husband’s life
sorting out the consequences of his grandiosity and wastefulness. The elder
Pitt, who had been living extravagantly beyond his means more or less

3
consistently since leaving office in 1761, left debts of £20,000 on his death
in 1778.Though these were written off by the state, the Chatham income
proved insufficient either to allow his widow to maintain an aristocratic
lifestyle or to provide the young William with sufficient income to cover his
living expenses in Cambridge. From the late 1770s Pitt began raising loans
to sustain the family. The taste for personal borrowing never left him. He
raised almost £7,000 to buy a fine house and farm in Kent in 1785–6—a
sum which, as he acknowledged to his friend William Wilberforce, he could
ill afford (Ehrman, I, 591). On his death in 1806, parliament responded much
as it had done with his father. It voted a sum of £40,000 towards paying his
personal debts. His tangled financial affairs were not finally sorted out for a
further fifteen years (Ehrman, III, 834–5).
Early family talk that the bright second son would take up a legal career
came to little. Pitt did reside in Lincoln’s Inn for a time in 1780 but it was
always clear that his passion was politics. An appetite that was whetted in
infancy by close proximity to his father and uncles became ravenous after
he attended the highly charged parliamentary debates of 1778–80 when
Lord North’s government was being lambasted by the opposition,
particularly the Whig group led by the Marquess of Rockingham.
Pitt made an unsuccessful attempt on the parliamentary seat of
Cambridge University in 1779 but his connections and abilities ensured
that he did not have to wait long to enter parliament. A Cambridge friend,
the Marquess of Granby,—who had recently succeeded to the Dukedom
of Rutland—was politically linked to the great Cumbrian landowner and
entrepreneur Sir James Lowther. Lowther—in the way of eighteenth-
century politics—had direct control of a number of parliamentary boroughs.
He put one of them,Appleby in Westmorland, at the disposal of the younger
Pitt, all expenses paid. The few electors of that pleasant market town were
only very rarely put to the trouble of an election. No contest had been
held there since 1754; none would be held until the Great Reform Act of
1832 which erased the borough from the electoral map. The younger Pitt
was nominated in November 1780, was ‘elected’ the following month and
took his seat in the Commons in January 1781. He was just short of 22
years old. Though such rapid progress would be highly unusual in the
twentieth century, it was common enough in the eighteenth. ‘Rotten’ or
‘managed’ boroughs were a recognised route for able, well-connected
politicians of tender age to reach parliament. It gave them plenty of time to
absorb the atmosphere, learn their trade and then, in time, exercise political
leadership.
What was unusual about Pitt, however, was the speed of his progress
once inparliament. Within twenty months, he was Chancellor of the

4
Exchequer; within thirty-five, Prime Minister. Such a precipitous upward
trajectory requires explanation. It comes through a combination of two
remarkable factors: Pitt’s own abilities and the destruction of political stability
at the end of the disastrous war fought by Britain in a vain attempt to stop
the colonies of America’s eastern seaboard from claiming their
independence.
Pitt’s early parliamentary speeches made an immediate impact. His first,
on 26 February 1781, was generously applauded both by the Prime Minister,
Lord North, and by North’s most eloquent critic, Charles James Fox. Burke
is said to have remarked that, as Chatham’s son, ‘He was not a chip of [sic]
the old block; he is the old block itself’ (Ehrman, I, 52). What impressed,
apart from the delivery and an already well-honed attentiveness to the
mood of the House, was the precocious authority and mastery of subject
matter. Calm, informed authority at a time of mounting political crisis was
a prime asset. He spoke relatively rarely, making about twenty speeches
between January 1781 and July 1782, but always with effect. Henry Dundas,
a shrewd and exper ienced observer, praised his ‘first-rate
abilities…and…most persuasive eloquence’ (Ehrman, I, 55).
Another necessary attribute was Pitt’s stance as a reformer in the early
part of his career. Reform had moved steadily up the political agenda
during the prime ministership of Lord North (1770–82) and its
significance for Pitt’s career is explored in more detail in Chapter 2.
Here it need only be stated that demands for parliamentary and
administrative reform were a prime weapon in the mounting anti-
government campaign from 1778 onwards. By early 1781, when Pitt
arrived in parliament, it was clear that Lord North’s administration, which
had to that point been by far the most stable of George III’s reign, was in
serious trouble. Its parliamentary majorities were dwindling steadily and
on some high-profile issues during 1780 it had actually been defeated.
Opposition groups eagerly exploited both reverses in America and the
government’s apparent inability to handle demands from Protestants in
Ireland for greater self-government.
North’s government was undermined by its failure to control discontent
and rebellion in its two most important colonies. News of the decisive
surrender of British troops at Yorktown in October 1781 caused North to
remark ‘Oh God, it is all over’. In fact, it was not—quite. The King kept
him uncomfortably and embarrassedly in office for a further six months
while the authority of Britain’s government dwindled almost to nothing.
North’s eventual resignation in March 1782 began one of the most turbulent
two years in British parliamentary history. From it, the younger Pitt emerged,
against all expectation, as the decisive victor.

5
 Pitt inevitably ranged himself with the opposition to North, echoinghis
father’s position in the 1770s that the Prime Minister’s American policy
was misconceived and disastrous. He also spoke about the increasingly
fractious relations between King and parliament. North’s ministry was
replaced in March 1782 by a coalition of anti-North Whigs under the
Marquess of Rockingham, leader of the largest and most effective group of
Whig reformers. It contained, as Home and Foreign Secretaries respectively,
the Earl of Shelburne and Charles James Fox. Though it seems strange to
modern eyes, Pitt (at 22 years of age and with fourteen months’
parliamentary experience) was seriously considered for a ministerial post.
His status as Chatham’s son carried substantial weight and he was close to
Shelburne, who had himself come to prominence as one of the ablest of
Chatham’s supporters. Furthermore, the initial impression he had made
was, as we have seen, extremely favourable. Pitt certainly had the supreme
self-confidence to announce to the Commons in March 1782: ‘For myself,
I could not expect to form part of a new administration; but were my
doing so more within my reach, I feel myself bound to declare that I would
never accept a subordinate situation’ (Stanhope, I, 70).
Perhaps he already foresaw that the new ministry, which George III
thoroughly disliked, and which was internally divided particularly by the
rivalry and mutual dislike of Shelburne and Fox, was unlikely to last long
and that his own reputation would not be enhanced by association with it.
In fact, it was brought to a premature close by Rockingham’s sudden death
at the beginning of July. Shelburne had already been angling with the King
for a realignment of ministers which would see Fox downgraded, if not
replaced. The King speedily announced that Shelburne would be his new
Prime Minister, whereupon Fox (and most of the old Rockinghams)
resigned. The Shelburne ministry was, therefore, significantly different in
composition from the Rockingham one and Shelburne had need of new
talent to replace the experienced, if antagonistic, ministers who went out
with, or soon after, Fox. Pitt was an obvious choice and could hardly describe
the Chancellorship of the Exchequer (though the office had less prestige
then than now) as a ‘subordinate situation’.
Pitt served throughout Shelburne’s ministry, which lasted from July 1782
to February 1783. Its work was dominated by proposals for peace with the
victorious American colonies and Pitt was duly supportive of the efforts
made. It was also concerned with administrative reform and here Pitt took
a more prominent line, carrying forward Shelburne’s plans for customs
reform and for tighter controls on public offices. The bills passed the
Commons before being rejected in the Lords and they are important as an
early indication of two of Pitt’s great passions: saving government money

6
by efficient deployment of resources, and attempting to ensure
thatremuneration of offices should be on the basis of public service and
not political advantage.
Shelburne’s ministry was brought down by parliamentary arithmetic.
Fox, now clearly in charge of the Rockingham group of reformist Whigs
(although he formally deferred to the Duke of Portland), had been scheming
to bring his rival down. He calculated that, with the support of North’s
followers, he could deprive Shelburne of a parliamentary majority and
force his resignation. He was right. By early 1783, with the American issue
virtually settled, Fox and North had far less to disagree about than previously.
North’s political ambition continued to burn bright and his easy charm
made him a useful leader of a substantial parliamentary group. The two
men reached an agreement early in February and tested it out in two
motions criticising Shelburne’s government in the middle of the month.
On 24 February, Shelburne resigned.
This outcome outraged the King on at least three grounds. First, he was
by no means convinced that Shelburne had to go; in his view, the Prime
Minister could have fought on to test the durability of this new grouping.
Second, he hated Fox and most of his supporters with a passion. Third, he
had reposed absolute faith in North as his Prime Minister for almost twelve
years. A combination of interests between Foxites and Northites he thought
of as virtual treason. It was, to him, proof of the view he had held when he
came to the throne in 1760: that established politicians were motivated by
greed and personal ambition, rather than by any desire to provide good
government. For five weeks, while Britain tottered on virtually without any
government, he tried to hold back the logic of a Fox-North administration—
that ‘infamous coalition’ as he was to call it. Significantly, he turned first to
Pitt to rescue him from his difficulty. Pitt at first agreed to become Prime
Minister before having second thoughts, based on the calculation that North
would probably continue to oppose and that his own position, therefore,
could be made no stronger than Shelburne’s had latterly been.
Pitt’s decision probably reflected a deeper calculation, too. He knew
well enough how outraged the King was by the prospect of a government
led by Fox and North. If the King found no other first minister in the
meantime, he would accept it with an exceedingly ill grace and would
work to ensure that it had as difficult, and as short, a lease on power as
possible. Pitt would prefer to come into office after a discredited government
had failed, rather than before a numerically powerful coalition had been
tried. Perhaps this is to invest Pitt with too much prescience. However,
contemporaries were impressed with him. The Duke of Grafton recorded
in his diary:

7
 The good judgment of so young a man, who, not void of ambition on
this trying occasion, could refuse this splendid offer, adds much to the
lustre of the character he had acquired, for it was a temptation sufficient
to have offset the resolution of most men.
(Stanhope, I, 109–10)

The details of the Fox-North coalition (nominally headed by the Duke

of Portland) need not concern us. It concluded peace with the American
colonies and it did command majorities in the House of Commons.
However, it never had the remotest chance of winning over the King,
who, as Pitt had assumed, schemed against it from the beginning. In
December 1783 he exerted massive influence on the House of Lords to
persuade it to reject the coalition’s important bill for the government of
India.This defeat he then chose to interpret (on scant warrant) as a public
loss of confidence in the Fox-North administration, which he proceeded
summarily to dismiss. There is evidence that Pitt gave unofficial advice
to the King on how the dismissal of his hated ministry might be effected.
As in February, his first choice of replacement was Pitt, and this time Pitt
did not turn him down.
Why was Pitt the King’s choice to resolve the most substantial political
crisis of his reign? We can take it as read both that the King appreciated
Pitt’s gifts and that he recognised also that in his brief parliamentary
career he had created a universally strong impression. By December 1783,
he was disposed to believe that if any minister could extricate him from
the constitutional difficulties in which he found himself, that minister
was William Pitt. But there was much more to it than this. Both the
family name, and its political reputation, mattered. George had not always
seen eye to eye with the Earl of Chatham, especially when the latter was
in office, but Chatham did not come from that hated group of Whig
politicians which had been collectively known as the ‘Old Corps’.These
politicians George III accused of using unconstitutional stratagems to
reduce the powers of monarchy almost to nothing. He considered the
Rockingham group to be their malign successors, intent now on depriving
the monarch of the most precious power of all: his right to choose his
own ministers. Pitt was never a royal toady; indeed, he shared some of the
Rockingham concerns about royal influence, though to a milder degree.
He did, however, both recognise and respect the constitutional position
of the sovereign and he was not inclined either to bluster or to dictate to
George. He respected the convention that he was genuinely taking office
as ‘the King’s minister’, with all that the phrase implied for royal choice.

8
The irony was that, as we shall see (Chapter 5),Pitt’s own reforms would
do more long-term damage to the independent powers of the monarchy
than any of the direct constitutional confrontations of the early 1780s.
On 19 December 1783, he took office as Prime Minister and First Lord
of the Treasury.

9
 2
Pitt the Political Reformer

Reform in Opposition
In view of Pitt’s later reputation as the scourge of parliamentary reformers
(Chapter 7), it is important to stress his own early support for parliamentary
reform. Like almost all opposition politicians in the late 1770s and early
1780s, he believed that an important cause of the nation’s difficulties was
that the political system had become resistant to reform and that the King
and his courtiers had assumed excessive power. The independence of
parliament, in the reformers’ judgement, was threatened by the excessive
influence wielded there by George III and his political managers, who
placed compliant supporters in office for no better reason than that they
voted reliably the right way.
This viewpoint was elegantly encapsulated in the parliamentary motion
presented by the Chathamite MP John Dunning in April 1780: ‘that the
influence of the crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be
diminished’. Less well known, but equally important as indicating what
reformers wished to do about the situation, is the next clause.This claimed
parliamentary scrutiny of court revenues as a check on royal power:

That it is competent to this House to examine into, and to correct,

abuses in the expenditure of the civil list revenues [i.e. revenues voted
by parliament but controlled directly by the crown], as well as in every
other branch of the public revenue, whenever it shall appear expedient
to the wisdom of this House to do so.
(O’Gorman, 1975, 418)

10
One very important reason why the North government faltered so badly
in its later years was that opposition politicians convinced the large numbers
of MPs who acknowledged no party political loyalties, of the need for
reform. Support from these ‘independents’ was crucial to the stability of
government. By 1781, partly because of the activities of opposition
politicians and partly because of the growth and vitality of extra-
parliamentary organisations such as Christopher Wyvill’s ‘County
Association Movement’ and the ‘Westminster Association’, North’s
government could no longer count on such support.
Almost all Pitt’s early parliamentary speeches concerned reform in one
form or another. In May 1782, two months before coming into office
under Shelburne, he proposed a motion to investigate the prospects for
parliamentary reform. His speech reflected widespread contemporary
concerns: ‘the people were loud for a more equal representation, as one of the
most likely means to protect their country from danger, and themselves
from oppressive taxes’ (Ehrman, I, 70). This sentiment would not have
been out of place in the mouth of a Chartist democrat on a public platform
in the late 1830s or early 1840s. Other parts of the speech, however, stressed
the Chathamite legacy: concern for ‘moderation’ and a determination to
dislodge the unsightly barnacles attached to ‘a beautiful form of government’
rather than any attempt to create a new one based on ‘Vague and chimerical
speculations’. His motion was lost by only twenty votes.
Pitt’s second attempt to secure parliamentary reform took place exactly
one year later. Again, he tried to calm the more conservative spirits in the
Commons: ‘His object at present was not to innovate but rather to renew
and invigorate the spirit of the constitution, without deviating materially
from its present form’. Now, however, he presented specific proposals: to
outlaw bribery at elections; to disfranchise manifestly corrupt parliamentary
boroughs; to create a significant number of additional MPs for the counties
and larger boroughs (Evans, 1996, 398).To the Yorkshire reformer
Christopher Wyvill, he had talked two months earlier of creating at least
100 new county members. The thinking here was that county MPs were
elected by larger numbers of voters than were most borough members;
their reputation for independence of thought and action was also greater.
Pitt was not confident enough to make such a radical proposal and he also
assured members that he had no desire to increase the number of voters,
thinking this ‘subversive of liberty’ (Ehrman, I, 75).The proposal, however,
was decisively defeated—by 293 votes to 149. North’s supporters in the
new Fox-North coalition voted almost to a man against it. Those backing
Pitt included supporters of Fox, the remaining Chathamites and, significantly,
almost half the county MPs, together with a fair smattering of members

11
elected for the first time (like Pitt himself) in 1780. Pitt was probably
justified in considering that the mere passage of time would produce a
better outcome in a year or two.
All governments during the crisis of 1782–4 were reformist in some
manner but the reformers in parliament were far from united. Some were
much more concerned with what was called ‘economical reform’—cutting
out royal influence, reducing the number of crown appointees, and the
like; others were primarily parliamentary reformers. Among parliamentary
reformers, it was far easier to obtain agreement on broad principles than
on specific details. There were also the inevitable personality clashes and
rivalries born of ambition. As early as 1782, a clear breach had opened up
between Pitt and Shelburne on the one hand and the Foxites on the other.
Reform, it seemed by December 1783, was a necessary recommendation
for a minister (whatever George III might prefer) but it was by no means a
sufficient condition for successful government.

The general election of 1784

Fox believed that his dismissal by George III would backfire. His
calculation was that the manoeuvres which led up to it publicly revealed
the King’s deviousness and unconstitutional scheming. He expected that
his own brand of reform would now prove more palatable to public
opinion than that of Mr Pitt. Fox believed that it would be easy to present
the new Prime Minister as the puppet of an over-mighty monarch.
Furthermore, Fox and his allies still held a substantial parliamentary
majority.The wife of the Rockingham Whig John Crewe quickly dubbed
Pitt’s new ministry ‘the mince-pie’ administration, since it was unlikely
to see out the Christmas season (Mitchell, 1992, 67). The list of Pitt’s
ministers did not inspire confidence either; it looked especially weak in
the lower House.Those later great mainstays of Pitt’s governments, Henry
Dundas and his cousin William Grenville, were still inexperienced and
held only minor office. Meanwhile, heavyweights such as Shelburne, John
Robinson and the King’s trusted adviser and ‘fixer’ Charles Jenkinson
were excluded.
Unfortunately for Fox, what he saw as weaknesses, Pitt rapidly turned
to strengths.The absence of Shelburne strongly implied that Pitt meant
to be his own man, while the exclusion of Jenkinson neatly made the
point to independent MPs that the new Prime Minister was no royal
cipher. Pitt’s strategy in the early months of 1784 was to demonstrate
capability and authority in parliament, despite the substantial majorities
theoretically arrayed against him. After the Commons reassembled in

12
January, Pitt suffered two defeats to Foxite majorities of 39 and 54
(Mitchell, 1992, 68) but continued to govern undaunted. His authority
in the face of adversity was certainly impressive but it is likely that Fox’s
fundamental political miscalculations mattered more. Though the King
was certainly averse to having Fox back in government, Pitt was more
equivocal. Learning that many independents were touting a Fox-Pitt
coalition as the best solution to the continuing crisis, he put out one or
two tentative olive branches to Fox.The two men’s political enmity, after
all, was very recent and still had shallow roots. Both acknowledged
themselves to be reformers. A Fox-Pitt coalition in February 1784 would
have seemed much less strange than the Fox-North coalition which had
been contrived ten months earlier.
Perhaps to Pitt’s relief, however, Fox was not receptive. He saw no
reason why he should serve under the younger and far less experienced
Pitt. He also had his huge constitutional fish to fry. He was determined to
present his dismissal as proof of the King’s contempt both for the
Commons and for public opinion. His stance came close to denying
George’s right to choose his own ministers. Such a blatant constitutional
confrontation was more than many even of his own supporters could
stomach. Most of North’s supporters (though significantly not North
himself) swung over to Pitt’s side. Outside Westminster, many
parliamentary reformers—faced with an unwelcome choice between
reformist heavyweights in the Commons—also expressed a preference
for Pitt’s moderation over what they considered Fox’s extremism. In
truth, Charles James Fox was playing on a one-string fiddle and, not for
the last time in a chequered political career, his lack of perspective told
against him. Majorities for Fox dwindled rapidly during late January and
February 1784 and when, on 8 March, a motion which included the call
for Pitt’s dismissal was passed in the Commons by a single vote, it was
clear that the tide was flowing uncontrollably against him. Pitt, who had
delayed asking the King to dissolve parliament and call a general election
while he consolidated his own position and reputation, both in parliament
and in the country, now asked for a dissolution. George eagerly agreed;
parliament was dissolved on 25 March 1784.
Conspiracy theorists, common enough among Fox’s increasingly
beleaguered supporters, could see this initiative as further evidence of the
King’s evil design.They did not dispute the King’s right to dissolve parliament.
They were, however, well aware that, since the Septennial Act of 1716 had
extended the life of parliament to a maximum of seven years, premature
dissolutions had been exceedingly rare. The convention had been for
parliaments to run almost to their maximum permitted length. Only one

13
since 1715 had lasted less than five and a half years, and that had been because
the death of George I in 1727 had automatically necessi-tated a general
election. By contrast, the parliament which assembled in October 1780 lasted
only three and a half years. It was dissolved early for one purpose only: so that
Pitt, the King’s favoured minister, would be given maximum opportunity to
gain a parliamentary majority at the expense of Fox.
The plan worked. What were quickly dubbed ‘Fox’s Martyrs’ went
down to electoral defeat in droves; roughly 160 lost their seats.There is
no doubt that the King exerted maximum effort in constituencies
where he had influence to ensure their defeat, but the election was also
won for Pitt in constituencies where it was almost impossible to bribe
one’s way to victory. Pitt had significant victories in the larger
boroughs and, perhaps more unexpectedly, in many of the county
seats—not least the highly populated ones of Middlesex and Yorkshire.
Fox himself was run desperately close in Westminster, where he was
opposed by some prominent reformers. Such an outcome would not
have been possible unless Pitt had been able to present himself both as
a reformer and as a supporter of ‘clean’ government. Fox’s lurid
misrepresentation that Pitt was a pawn in the hands of an
unconstitutional monarch was widely, even contemptuously, rejected
by public opinion. Some historians have even characterised the 1784
election in terms of an emerging sense of ‘Englishness’: ‘A vote against
Fox was a vote for the National Identity and National Independence,
and a vote for Pitt was the elector’s affirmation of his own morality and
identity as a true Englishman’ (Newman, 1997, 218). This judgement is
dubious—not least because Fox’s attacks on monarchical power had a
distinctly patriotic tinge—and also pretentious, but 1784 was a
watershed just the same.
The size, and humiliation, of Fox’s defeat served to distort his political
judgement still further. Pitt was now almost as much hated as the King
while Fox’s overwhelming objective was to destroy the political influence
of George III. It was a fatally flawed strategy which unfolding events
would only serve to make still more unrealistic. It did much to ensure
that Pitt would remain Prime Minister for almost seventeen years: some
‘mince-pie’!

The parliamentary reform proposals of 1785

Pitt did not renege on his credentials as a parliamentary reformer. He told
Rev. Christopher Wyvill in March 1784 that ‘my zeal for Reform in
Parliament is by no means abated’ and then in December he would ‘exert

14
his whole power as a man, and as a minister and boldly, to carry such a melio-
rated system of representation as may place the constitution on a footing of
permanent security’ (Holland Rose, 1911, 197). In January 1785 he told
his close friend the Duke of Rutland: ‘I really think that I see more than
ever the chance of effecting a safe and temperate plan’ (Ehrman, I, 225).
He knew, of course, that the obstacles were formidable. The King did not
like parliamentary reform, though Pitt extracted a promise from him not
to oppose it openly. Many in his own government were lukewarm at best.
In the Commons, those representing the smaller boroughs feared that they
would lose their seats. Even among the reformers, many divisions surfaced.
As with proportional representation in our own day, it was much easier to
agree upon the general principle than to gain consensus for any specific
scheme. Both inside and outside parliament, the reformers were split and
these splits led to mutual distrust, particularly between Wyvill’s ‘county’
supporters and the London reformers.
Pitt’s own scheme was, by parliamentary standards, a radical one. It
proposed to persuade the thirty-six smallest boroughs to give up their
independent representation by offer ing their owners monetary
compensation. Those seats which thus became available (a maximum of
72) would be transferred to the counties and to London. This would
substantially increase the representativeness of the lower House. Pitt
also proposed to increase the electorate in the counties by allowing
copyholders and some leaseholders (as well as existing freeholders) to
vote. It was estimated that this would increase the British electorate by
about 30 per cent.
Despite Pitt’s early optimism, his bill never had much chance of success.
Pitt could not afford to make such a controversial measure an issue of
confidence in his administration.Without this, his own supporters (including
Grenville, among other ministers) did not feel any pressing need to vote
for it.The support he got was piecemeal. Fox and the Rockinghams gave it
grudging approval, while criticising the details. In addition to some personal
support, almost thirty county representatives voted for it; this was a smaller
number than had supported his earlier reform bill in 1783. He could also
claim a clear majority among members who had been elected for the first
time in 1784, which provided further evidence of the reformist temper of
the voters at an election which Fox had condemned as rigged by court
influence. None of this was remotely enough. Pitt went down to defeat by
248 votes to 174. Though the issue did not disappear—and Pitt himself
was to become one of its most powerful opponents in the 1790s—this was
as near as anyone would get for almost half a century. Few of the
parliamentary reformers of 1785 would be alive to see the next Prime

15
Minister to take up the issue, Earl Grey, achieve success in the very different
world of 1832. Pitt was not tempted to take it up again, to the chagrin of
his extra-parliamentary supporters. Ultimately, he was persuaded that other
reforms, especially in administration and finance, had higher priority and
on these he had no intention of being defeated.

16
 3
Pitt and the ‘National Revival’, 1783–93

Financial and administrative reforms

The crisis which Pitt inherited on coming into office was as much economic
as political.The value of national industrial and commercial production in
real terms, which had been increasing substantially during the eighteenth
century, fell during the 1770s. Exports declined by about 12 per cent during
the same decade. In the years 1775–84, meanwhile, the size of the national
debt increased by 91 per cent. In the first months of Pitt’s government it
stood at what all observers considered the perilously high level of £242.9
million (Holmes and Szechi, 1993, 368, 382, 388). The situation seemed
out of control; during 1783 it has been estimated that the British state ran
up a deficit of almost £11 million on an annual income of £23.5 million.
The value of government stocks went down by more than 17 per cent
during 1783, accurately reflecting declining confidence.William Grenville
reflected later that in 1783–4 ‘the nation gave way…to an almost universal
panic on the subject’ (Ehrman, I, 158).The reason for all the turbulence, of
course, was the American war which had only just ended when Pitt came
to power.
The main thrust of Pitt’s financial policy was, therefore, dictated for
him. It was necessary to cut expenditure drastically while also raising
new taxes to make good the shortfall. Pitt did both, but his temperament
inclined him to place substantial stress on a third remedy: making sure
that income theoretically due actually reached the exchequer by
promoting efficiencies in collection. This lay at the heart of perhaps his
most famous financial policy, which concerned smuggling. Smuggling

17
was at least as important to the ‘black economy’ of the 1780s as illicit
drug dealing became to that of the 1990s. It deprived the exchequer of
huge amounts of revenue. In the nature of things we cannot be sure, but
it is perfectly possible that as much as one-fifth of all imports came into
the country illegally—a fair proportion of it into the rocky coves and
sheltered inlets of the Cornish coast. Pitt’s response was massively to
reduce levels of taxation on the main goods which attracted the attention
of smugglers. This made an illegal, and therefore risky, trade much less
profitable. The tea trade was his main target. The import duty on tea was
reduced from 119 per cent to a uniform 25 per cent by a ‘Commutation
Act’ in 1784 (Evans, 1996, 26). At the same time revenue collection was
substantially simplified. In 1784, also, Pitt amended the so-called ‘Hovering
Act’ of 1780; officials could now search ships up to four leagues
(approximately twelve miles) out to sea, rather than two leagues, as before.
The incentives to smuggle were, therefore, further reduced by increased
risks of detection. In 1785–7 duties on rum, wine, and brandy were
reduced; increased legitimate consumption, however, ensured higher
revenues despite reductions in duty rates. Food and raw material imports
rose from approximately £13 million to £27 million between the mid–
1780s and the mid–1790s.
Pitt had both a tactical and a strategic purpose in his taxation policies.
Tactically, he fished around for new items to tax in order to reduce the
government deficit. Strategically, he was concerned (as his great predecessor
Sir Robert Walpole had been) to ensure that the main burden of taxes fell
on property owners rather than the lower orders. Especially in peacetime,
Hanoverian governments raised most of their revenue by indirect taxation
(i.e. placing levies on goods which were consumed rather than on income).
It was important, therefore, to lay the heaviest indirect taxes on goods
disproportionately consumed by the well-off.
This was only partly altruistic. Successive Hanoverian governments
knew that they could expect substantial popular discontent and even riot
when prices of basic necessities—such as bread—shot up unexpectedly.
Hence Pitt’s apparently quirky preference for new taxes on horses used
for pleasure, on hackney carriages, on hair-powder, on fashionable men’s
hats and on women’s ribbons. The poor could not afford equestrian
transport, were not conveyed in carriages, did not wear wigs and could
not afford to follow fashion. Pitt also modified the window tax by
introducing a new scale with larger properties paying substantially more.
Predictably, property owners responded by sacrificing a little light to a
heavy tax; they bricked up many of their windows. Humble items were
not ignored altogether. Pitt levied a tax of a halfpenny (0.2p) a pound on

18
candles, which certainly affected the poor, especially in winter time when
work tended anyway to be scarcer.
The satirists were not slow to offer their opinion on the rash of new and
heavier taxes. The following lament was put into the mouth of John Bull,
now the usual mythical embodiment of English public opinion:

One would think there’s not room one new impost to put
From the crown of the head to the sole of the foot.
Like Job, thus John Bull his condition deplores,
Very patient, indeed, and all covered with sores.
(Holland Rose, 1911, 187)

Pitt’s new taxes were by no means all successful. A requirement in 1784

for bleachers, printers and dyers to pay £2 a year for licences to trade
had to be abandoned in the face of fierce opposition. So did a projected
tax on coals .An unpopular new tax on shops was introduced in 1785 but
lasted only until 1789. Pitt had to balance immediate revenue needs for
debt reduction against overtaxing commercially important activities which
were expanding rapidly in the early stages of Britain’s industrial revolution.
Overall, Pitt probably got the balance about right. Both customs and
excise revenues increased substantially. In the years 1786–8, for example,
the amount passing through customs more than doubled, while by 1790
the yield from wines, spirits and tobacco had all increased by between 29
and 63 per cent on the levels collected when Pitt came to office (Evans,
1996, 27).
Despite the arrival of fancy, and often irksome, taxes, Pitt was not
primarily a financial innovator. He generally followed well-worn tracks.
He was, however, always looking for more efficient ways not only of
collecting money but of running the government machine as a whole.
Perhaps the most important administrative reform of all concerned India.
In 1784, Pitt returned to the issue which had been the occasion of the
Fox-North coalition’s fall. During the eighteenth century, India had become
one of the central planks of Britain’s growing commercial empire. British
administration of its Indian territories, however, remained—anachronistically
but very profitably—in the hands of the East India Company, which had
monopoly trading rights. How to govern British India had become a highly
controversial issue since victories there against the French during the Seven
Years’ War (1756–63).With increased power came increased scope for the
company to practise financial mismanagement and impropriety. In the 1770s
and early 1780s, all governments sought effective means to increase direct
government involvement in Indian affairs.

19
 Pitt’s India Act of 1784 succeeded in clipping the East India Company’s
wings. It set up a Board of Control, responsible to the Crown. On it sat
leading government figures, including Pitt himself and Grenville. Its day-
to-day work quickly became the responsibility of Henry Dundas, one of
Pitt’s ablest lieutenants. The Board could issue directives to the East India
Company, although the Company retained a considerable measure of
influence, not least over patronage appointments.The Act was a compromise
which would need further amendment. Despite improvements, it left in
the hands of a trading company substantial powers over territory which
was vital to Britain’s trade and empire.The powers of the governor-general
in Calcutta were not extended as much as had been anticipated. Fox also
argued that the new Board of Control should have been answerable to
parliament rather than to the Crown. However, the India Act began the
protracted process whereby the British government began to exercise real
authority in an area which would become in the Victorian age the ‘jewel
in the imperial crown’.
In domestic affairs, Pitt’s most important administrative financial initiative
was the creation of the so-called ‘Sinking Fund’ in 1786.This was a device
to accumulate money in order to pay off, or at least greatly reduce, the
grossly swollen National Debt.The idea was far from new. A Sinking Fund
had been in existence since 1716 and Walpole had used it with success in
the 1720s and early 1730s. The Fund was repaying debt as late as the early
1770s. Before Pitt’s day, however, the problem was that the Fund was only
rarely given priority in government financial strategy. In consequence, hard-
pressed finance ministers had tended to raid it when they needed short-
term funds rather than let the fund accumulate. The frequent wars of the
eighteenth century gave Chancellors of the Exchequer every excuse, and
debt repayments were again suspended as a matter of course while the
American war raged after 1775.
In 1772, the nonconformist minister Richard Price had published a
pamphlet on ways to reduce the National Debt. It had excited considerable
interest and certainly influenced Pitt, who began a correspondence with
him on the subject. In early 1786 he sent drafts of his proposed legislation
to Price for comment. By then Pitt was rowing with a strong tide. In
December 1783, just before he became Prime Minister, a committee set
up originally in 1778 by Lord North recommended ‘the Creation of a
Fund, to be appropriated, and invariably applied, under proper Direction,
in the gradual Diminution of the Debt’ (Ehrman, I, 260).
It was the need to secure ‘proper Direction’ which appealed to Pitt. His
own scheme was to sustain the Fund by statutory force against any resort
to ‘crisis-raiding’. It was therefore established by an Act of Parliament

20
requiring the Treasury to give priority to the Fund when making payments.
Pitt also increased taxes with the aim of ensuring that a government surplus
of £1 million could be paid out each year for reduction of the National
Debt. It was essential to Pitt’s plan that surpluses be built up by taxation
rather than by borrowing. Crucially, also, the Act placed administration of
the fund in the hands of specially appointed ‘Commissioners for Reducing
the National Debt’ to ensure optimum efficiency.
For several years, the scheme worked well. From 1786–93, the new
commissioners received £8 million and invested it, reducing the debt by
more than £10 million.The specific sums received were relatively modest;
their main importance was psychological. A government committed to the
achievement of regular surpluses inspired confidence in public finances
and thereby helped to stimulate a climate of investment.This in turn helped
the massive expansion of overseas trade during this period (see Chapter 4).
In theory, the ultimate goal of Price’s bright scheme—extinguishing the
entire National Debt—might have been achievable. The arrival of yet
another war in 1793 (see Chapter 6), and one of unprecedented cost,
however, destroyed the rationale of the Sinking Fund. By the mid–1790s
government debts were mounting alarmingly yet again.The National Debt
rose from £243 million to £359 million in the years 1793–7 (Ehrman, III,
100). In this situation, the continued requirement to transfer upwards of
£4 million a year into the Fund became a liability, although it was not
widely recognised as such at the time. Pitt continued to believe until his
death that it represented sound patriotic financial policy, which continued
to give investors confidence. Only gingerly, and slowly, was the Fund
abandoned by the Liverpool government in the 1820s.
Pitt’s administrative policies aimed at cutting out waste. Though not
specially ordered in his own business arrangements (he allowed
correspondence to go unanswered for months—sometimes longer), he was
always anxious to promote those who could help him run the governmental
and administrative machine with maximum efficiency and minimum
cost.This objective was, however, politically sensitive.The structure of politics
depended on the system of patronage. Most government offices were filled,
not on merit as demonstrated by competitive interview or examination,
but by nomination from a person of influence. In late eighteenth-century
Britain such a person would normally be either a member of the royal
court or be nominated by an aristocratic patron.
In the late 1770s and early 1780s, the Rockingham Whigs had tried to
reduce the number of patronage appointments, largely as a means of
striking at royal influence. Pitt was realistic enough to know that any
direct assault on patronage would weaken his own position—not least

21
with the King, who had, since his accession in 1760, used his powers of
appointment as an effective means of bolstering his own position against
opposition politicians. Pitt could not afford mass sackings of men who
had little work to do but who were well connected. He kept Horace
Walpole in the largely titular post of usher of Exchequer receipts until
the old man’s death in 1797 (Steven Watson, 1960, 284). Instead, Pitt
moved cautiously—promoting men of proven capability, like Richard
Frewin at Customs, and ensuring that, within the overall system, as much
as possible was done to effect rationalisation and, where possible,
economy. There were certainly some casualties. Lords Mountstuart and
Sondes of the Treasury found themselves dismissed in 1785 after Pitt
introduced a new statutory commission for auditing public accounts,
although they received the enormous sum of £7,000 a year each as
compensation. His initiative gave the Treasury greater control over what
had become a famously complex procedure, affording plenty of
opportunity for unscrupulous officials to line their own pockets. The
new system was estimated to cost only a third as much as the old. The
Board of Taxes and the Excise Board were also strengthened; financial
administration and accountability were substantially tightened. Pitt’s
Consolidated Fund Act of 1787 also greatly simplified collection
procedures and did away with most of the 103 separate Exchequer
revenue accounts (Christie, 1982, 187).
Other important initiatives included replacing the old system of payment
of fees with salaries for new appointments. The change implied a rate for
the job rather than remuneration which might not relate at all to the nature
of the task. The work of government employees was subjected to much
greater inspection. In modern parlance, their productivity went up
substantially. Important improvements to both army and naval administration
were introduced, not least by Sir Charles Middleton (later Lord Barham),
Comptroller of the Navy Office.
Pitt could not claim novelty for many of these administrative changes;
several had been projected by North, Shelburne or the Fox-North
coalition. Pitt, however, took them on, refined them and monitored their
progress closely. British government was substantially more efficient and
professional at the end of Pitt’s prime ministership than it had been at
the beginning. One important long-term political consequence of his
determination to increase efficiency was that the patronage system began
to wither. However inadvertently, Pitt’s reforms prepared the way for the
introduction of a fully professional civil service from the middle of the
nineteenth century under the prompting of another reforming Prime
Minister,William Gladstone.

22
 Assessment
How much credit should Pitt claim for the so-called ‘National Revival’?
The historian who invented this phrase as part of the tide of the first part
of his biography was in no doubt. Pitt inherited a mess, and straightened it
out. ‘The war which ended in 1783 had been carried on in a singularly
wasteful manner.’ ‘The difficulties’ which he faced in reconstructing the
nation’s finances ‘were enormous’ and if it ‘matured slowly’, Pitt’s ‘financial
genius’is nevertheless beyond dispute (Holland Rose, 1911, 179, 186, 187).
Historians in the second half of the twentieth century have been less
inclined to hero worship. It is important to put the contribution of any
individual—however able and dedicated, and the younger Pitt was both—
into a wider context.There is much about a nation’s economic performance
which cannot be commanded by the policies of its governments. Britain’s
economic growth, based in substantial measure on the massive increase of
overseas trade during the eighteenth century, had been only temporarily
checked by the American war. With the return of peace, trade—not least
with the newly independent United States—boomed once more.The value
of British exports almost doubled overall between the mid–1780s and the
mid–1790s, while those to the US increased by 125 per cent (Evans, 1996,
417). In the early stages of Britain’s industrial revolution, moreover,
manufactured goods contributed more than 80 per cent of the value of
exports. Concern about the state of the nation in 1783 was rapidly seen to
be alarmist. Pitt’s inheritance was far less sickly than it appeared at the end
of 1783.
Also, he inherited, and adapted, the ideas and policies of others. His
indebtedness to Price over the Sinking Fund has already been noted. The
partial rehabilitation of Lord North’s reputation in recent years has also
encompassed the recognition that his financial policies had important
innovative features, some of which were developed by Pitt in the 1780s.
Pitt’s most distinguished biographer concedes that

He [Pitt] was conservative in taxation—in some ways, perhaps, more

conservative than North…when it came to the point it was usually
North who had been there before him, and formed or adopted
conclusions that most nearly resembled his own.
(Ehrman, I, 277)

Pitt also learned much about finance from Shelburne.

Any balanced assessment must take account both of the basic strength
of the British economy in the 1780s and of Pitt’s indebtedness to others.
This still leaves substantial scope for recognising Pitt’s own merits.

23
Throughout his peacetime administrations, he showed remarkable sure-
footedness. He directed taxation policy and debt reduction with skill
and tenacity while his contribution to the reform of the governmental
machine was massive. As Ehrman has pointed out, he achieved so much
because he combined vision with practicality. He was able to yoke a
‘strong instinct for perfection to his equally strong instinct for the
possible’ (Ehrman, I, 323).

24
 4
Foreign and Commercial Policy, 1783–91

In search of allies
The loss of the American colonies in 1783 was widely interpreted as a
commercial disaster. It also left Britain isolated in European diplomacy. For
most of the eighteenth century. Britain had been locked into an intricate
complex of alliances. During the American war it seemed friendless in a
Europe which was beginning to resent the country’s commercial expansion
and which regarded the outcome of the American conflict as a well-merited
come-uppance. By the end of that conflict, Britain was at war with the
three great powers of western Europe: France, Spain and the United
Provinces (Holland), all of whom had joined the conflict in support of the
American colonists.
Much the most important—and long-lasting—enmity was that with
France. Since William III’s wars with Louis XIV in the 1690s, France
had been firmly installed as the national enemy. When Britain was not
actually at war with France in the eighteenth century (as it was from
1702–13, 1740–8, 1756–63 and 1778–83), it had two overriding
objectives: to ensure it prevented the French Bourbon monarchy from
exerting diplomatic supremacy on the continent of Europe, and to sustain
commercial supremacy in the Americas and in India. The second of
these seemed to have been achieved by the end of the Seven Years’ War
but the outcome of the struggle in the Americas seemed to throw
everything into doubt. In 1783, many European diplomats believed, in
Professor Christie’s words, that Britain was ‘finished’ (Christie, 1982,
193).The country, after all, had had little clout in Europe for most of

25
the time between the middle of the fifteenth century and the early
eighteenth. Its renaissance during the end of the War of the Spanish
Succession (and confirmed by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713) had been
as sudden as it had been surprising and it was perhaps understandable
from the perspective of the courts of Paris,Vienna or Madrid to consider
that the natural diplomatic order had been reasserted in 1783 with
Britain returning to a peripheral role. France’s ability to secure a
defensive alliance with the United Provinces in 1785 only seemed to
strengthen its hand.
The general, but by no means universal, assumption in Britain was
that new alliances were urgently needed. As the MP and diplomat Sir
James Harris wrote to the British Ambassador in Vienna soon after the
Pitt ministry was formed: ‘To recover our weight on the continent by
judicious alliances is the general wish of every man the least acquainted
with the interests of this country’ (Black, 1994, 13). He made this statement
in support of the view that there was no reason to expect significant
differences in an administration headed by Pitt from one headed by Fox
or North. On the other hand, the King (whose influence in foreign affairs
historians have until quite recently underplayed) was not convinced that
close European alliances in order to counter France’s ambitions were an
advantage. He preferred to avoid commitments which risked dragging
Britain into yet another war.
Pitt s foreign secretary, the Marquess of Carmarthen, had little initial
success with a plan to rehabilitate Britain in European affairs by, as he put
it to Pitt, ‘separating…that unnatural alliance:…the House of Austria
from France’ (Black, 1991, 225) and making overtures to Joseph II, the
Austrian Emperor. The complication here was George III. Hanoverian
monarchs took a keen interest in British foreign affairs; they were, after
all, Electors of Hanover and Hanover was a substantial state in northern
Germany. In 1785, acting as Elector, George joined the anti-Austrian
Fürstenbund (League of Princes) organised by Frederick the Great of
Prussia. That was enough to kill Carmarthen’s strategy.
As so often in eighteenth-century European diplomacy, however, the
situation changed quickly. First, Frederick the Great died in 1786.
Frederick, a close ally of Pitt’s father during the Seven Years’ War, had felt
betrayed by Britain in the last years of that war after Pitt had left office.
There was reason to suppose that his inexperienced successor, Frederick
William II, might prove more amenable to diplomatic overtures from
Britain once it was clear that neither country would be able to strike an
alliance with Austria. The initial problem, however, was that the new
King’s advisers were pro-French.

26
 Second, events in the United Provinces took a turn from which Britain
could benefit. The political situation there was confused. Two groups vied
for supremacy: the ‘Orangists’, supporters of the hereditary Stadtholder,
WilliamV of Orange-Nassau, and the aristocratic and pro-French ‘Patriots’.
In 1786–7 the Patriots had gained the upper hand, dramatically reducing
William’s powers in the process. William’s wife was also the new Prussian
King’s sister and in June 1787 she was arrested by the Patriots after an
initiative designed to gain extra support for her husband. She appealed for
help to both Britain and Prussia. Had France responded in support of the
Patriots, then war might have resulted. In September 1787, Pitt wrote to
William Eden, British Ambassador in Paris, that if France wanted to retain
‘predominant influence’ in the United Provinces, it would need to ‘fight for
it’ (Ehrman, I, 534).
In fact, it was the Prussians who prepared to fight. After much delay, and
diplomatic scurrying, they invaded Holland in mid-September 1787 in
support of the Orangists. They captured Amsterdam the following month
with no response from France. Britain’s own firm line in support of the
Stadtholder won it respect, however grudging, throughout Europe. It was
widely recognised as symbolising the end of Britain’s European isolation.
The practical consequence was the emergence of a Triple Alliance with
Prussia and the United Provinces during 1788. This took place in two
stages. First, Britain and the United Provinces signed a treaty of mutual
defence in April, by which they pledged to respect each other’s territories.
Second, once it had been clarified that Prussia was not interested in
supporting British maritime adventures and that Britain had no wish to
become embroiled in any central European conflicts with Austria, a defensive
alliance with Prussia followed in August.
The third factor which changed the diplomatic situation may readily
be inferred from the outcome of the Dutch crisis. It became obvious
during 1787 that France’s financial difficulties were of such magnitude
as to reduce the country’s effectiveness both at home and abroad. Britain
still had ample reason to be wary of French intentions. France’s trading
interests in the West Indies, for example, had (like Britain’s) been expanding
rapidly since the end of the American war and a real likelihood of renewed
conflict in the Caribbean existed. However, the financially stricken
monarchy of Louis XVI no longer seemed such a threat to Britain’s
north European trade through the Low Countries. Nor did it look to
form aggressive alliances with Spain and Austria.The deepening financial
and political crisis in France increased Britain’s room for diplomatic
manoeuvre.

27
 Trade
Pitt looked to commerce as the best means both of increasing national
wealth and of reducing tensions between nations. Although it would be
quite wrong to see William Pitt as some out-and-out free-trade liberal,
an eighteenth-century precursor of the laissez-faire priorities of Gladstone
or Richard Cobden, he had read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (published
1776) and found its general line of argument persuasive. He came to
believe, like Smith, that national interests were not served by trade wars
between countries which erected massive tariff barriers against the entry
of each other’s goods and employed the so-called mercantilist system
which relied upon accumulation of precious metals as a measure of a
nation’s wealth.
It is not, therefore, surprising that trade negotiations took place with no
fewer than eight European states—France, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Prussia,
Holland, Poland and the Two Sicilies—in the years 1784–92. Few produced
substantial outcomes but the importance Pitt gave them was a measure of
his priorities. Following Smith again, he saw trade expansion within Europe
as a means of making good the loss of the American colonies. Since other
European nations were seeking commercial arrangements anyway, it seemed
doubly important not to be left behind.
Much the most important outcome of this flurry of commercial activity
was the so-called Eden Trade Treaty with France, signed in 1786. It was
named after the principal negotiator,William Eden, an ambitious and highly
controversial figure who had served in junior office under North in the
1770s and early 1780s and had been a close friend of Fox. He had also played
a prominent part in parliament in helping defeat Pitt s proposals for a customs
union with Ireland in 1785 (see Chapter 8). Pitt chose him as principal
negotiator because he respected both his abilities and his knowledge of trade.
He had been a member of the Board of Trade from 1776–82 and was also
active in Indian commercial affairs.The fact that Carmarthen disliked him as
a political turncoat and an intriguer probably only increased his attraction to
Pitt. Carmarthen saw little value in the ‘present Rage for Commercial treaties’
which, he believed, would be likely to ‘sacrifice our Political Weight upon
the Continent’ (Ehrman, I, 478). In truth, Pitt and Carmarthen had little in
common and there is little evidence that the Prime Minister even had much
respect for his Foreign Secretary’s abilities.
The Eden Trade Treaty, though it promised more than time would permit
it to deliver, was, for its time, a surprisingly thoroughgoing document. It
gave subjects of France and Britain free access to each other’s country
without passports or any form of taxation. Freedom of navigation and

28
trade between the colonies of the two nations was also established. Tariffs
were significantly reduced on a range of manufactured items, including
textiles, hardware and cutlery. In what many in Britain considered a
damaging concession, French wines were allowed into Britain at the same
low rate as that levied on wines from Portugal, Britain’s oldest ally. This
effectively conferred ‘favoured-nation’ status on the French.
The treaty was heavily criticised, not least by Fox, who argued that the
concessions were incompatible with Britain’s traditional hostility to France
as the major threat alike to Britain’s commercial empire and to the balance
of power in Europe. It was a view shared by some of Pitt’s own ministers
and by manufacturers wary of increased competition. Events proved most
British fears groundless. The concession on French wines was of relatively
little commercial significance, though it was appreciated by wealthy hosts
and hostesses in London society, well used to providing lavish alcoholic
provision for their guests. Lowered French duties on British manufactured
goods, on the other hand, proved vital. Manufacturers of textile goods
during the early stages of Britain’s industrial revolution were given an
opportunity which was eagerly seized.A hostile article in the Daily Universal
Register in August 1786 had complained that ‘England and France have the
same manufactures, are vying with each other for competition’ (Black,
1994, 111).What it overlooked, however, was the greater efficiency of British
industry, and especially its more mechanised textile production, which meant
that British exports were to become much more competitive in France
than were their French counterparts in Britain. Furthermore, Pitt had insisted
that French silk imports remained subject to heavy import duties. By the
time the revolution broke out in Paris in 1789, it was clear that Britain had
had much the better of the commercial bargain. Naturally, the outbreak of
war with France in 1793 (see Chapter 6) destroyed the Eden Treaty. However,
in the short time it was in operation it provided ample evidence of the
values of trade liberalisation—at least to a country whose industrial
revolution gave it an in-built competitive advantage.

Nootka Sound and Ochakov

Pitt faced two significant diplomatic crises before the outbreak of war.The
one, though handled successfully, was of minimal long-term significance.
The other, which had a less happy outcome, was also a harbinger of major
suspicions and conflict which would resound throughout the nineteenth
century.
The incident at Nootka Sound, off what is now Vancouver Island in
western Canada, was born of Spain’s desire to retain a substantial presence

29
in North America. The country had long claimed rights over the entire
western coast of the Americas, most of the northern part of which was
entirely undeveloped and populated only by a few fishermen, traders and
trappers. In July 1789, after a number of threats to trading vessels, the
commander of a Spanish warship took possession of Nootka Sound, where
a small British settlement had been established. It took almost eight months
for the news from this remote region to reach Britain but the government’s
response was decisive.The Foreign Secretary wrote to the British consul in
Madrid that the country would vigorously assert its ‘complete right…to
visit for the purposes of trade, or to make a settlement in the district’
(Black, 1994, 234).Although diplomatic channels between Britain and Spain
remained open during the few months the crisis lasted, it was clear that
Pitt, confident in the support of parliament which voted appropriate supplies,
was prepared to go to war. Crucially, Spain could no longer rely on any
help from its ally France, now in the throes of revolution. It was thus forced
to back down, allow Britain’s claim and pay compensation.The government
s response also involved a full mobilisation of the navy.As events turned out
(see Chapter 6), this precautionary action was a valuable rehearsal for the
real struggle ahead.
The Ochakov crisis brought Britain into dispute with Russia.
Ochakov was a fortress on the northern shore of the Black Sea. Russia
captured it after a siege in 1788 during a war with the Turks which
lasted from 1787 to 1791.While negotiations for peace were in progress,
the Foreign Secretary, Carmarthen, who had now inherited a peerage
as Duke of Leeds, argued that the Triple Alliance should be invoked to
put pressure on Russia. Leeds was anxious that the increasingly delicate
balance of power in eastern Europe be not disturbed. Accordingly, in
March 1791 he presented the Russian ruler, Catherine the Great, with
an ultimatum. It demanded that, as part of the peace, Ochakov should
be returned to the Turks.When Catherine refused to comply, the British
government requested extra funds from parliament to equip the navy
for an attack upon Russia. Parliament agreed to the request with a
comfortable majority but Pitt quickly saw that parliamentary resolve
was not so firm as it had been over Nootka Sound. Charles James Fox
roused opposition forces with a splendid speech which played both on
the widespread respect for Russia which existed in many quarters of
British educated opinion, and on the lack of an obvious strategic benefit
to Britain. Why risk war over an obscure place of which few had even
heard until a few weeks before?
Perhaps more significantly, even those who did know about Ochakov
queried both its importance and Pitt’s judgement. In previous conflicts,

30
Ochakov had usually fallen quickly and it was clear that other
fortifications were of far greater significance to the Turks. Writing from
The Hague, Lord Auckland had asked Pitt in January 1791: ‘I wish you
would take occasion to…tell me your opinion of the real value and
importance of Ochakov; both in respect to the Sultan’s means of defence,
and also with respect to the commerce of the Black Sea’ (Black, 1994,
286). Convincing answers were difficult to marshal and Pitt was
becoming uncomfortably aware that his alliance with Prussia was
bringing Britain more closely into central European entanglements than
had been intended when it was signed three years earlier. By April
1791, he was ready to countermand his Foreign Secretary’s ultimatum
and let Catherine keep Ochakov. As he explained in a letter to Joseph
Ewart, the British envoy in the Prussian capital, Berlin: ‘they [Members
of Parliament] can be embarked in a War from motives of passion, but
they cannot be made to comprehend a case in which the most valuable
interests of the Country are at stake’ (Ehrman, II, 24).
The price which Pitt paid was the loss of his Foreign Secretary and a
certain loss efface. Leeds could not stomach being overruled on an initiative
he considered vital to British interests. He was also concerned at the likely
consequences of deserting Prussia. Pitt was content enough to see Leeds
go. He had held the office since the beginning of Pitt’s ministry and, in
Ehrman’s words, ‘had long been a lightweight’ (Ehrman, II, 26). In any
case, Pitt was much closer both personally and politically to his cousin
Grenville whom he rapidly advised the King to appoint in Leeds’ place.
Henry Dundas then replaced Grenville at the Home Office, leaving Pitt
with able and trusted ministers in both the most senior government offices.
The loss efface was potentially more serious. For a time, having roused
his supporters with effective speeches and having been supported by
increasingly important newspaper opinion, Fox harboured thoughts of
returning to office. He was never a man for the sustained campaign, however,
and with Pitt’s credit with the King far from exhausted, this was never a
realistic possibility. Still, at the height of the crisis, Pitt considered resignation.
He persuaded himself, however, that to resign would be to abandon the
King, leaving him without an obvious successor and ‘driving the
Government…into a state of absolute confusion’ while also (as he wrote
to Ewart), shaking ‘the whole of our system abroad’ (Ehrman, II, 31). Having
decided to ride out the crisis, Pitt survived a short-term propaganda blast
from the opposition, not least because he showed the ability to retreat from
what he quickly realised was an untenable position. Events as they unfolded
in France over the next two years meanwhile quickly made Ochakov seem
like a very small storm in a Balkan teacup.

31
 Assessment
While Ochakov was a small storm in itself, some European diplomats
recognised even then that it was also the harbinger of something bigger.
From the perspective available to European observers in 1790–1 France
appeared enfeebled by its revolution, possibly terminally. Meanwhile, Britain
had recovered swiftly from its defeat in the American war to become a
much richer and more confident nation in 1791 than had seemed possible
eight years earlier. France’s ancien régime, by contrast, had suffered first
bankruptcy, then overthrow.The enmity of a century seemed to have been
resolved in Britain’s favour. Meanwhile, Russia, under the guidance of
Catherine the Great, had become much more self-assured and aggressive.
In particular, its challenge to Turkish supremacy in the Black Sea seemed
to offer a new threat to Britain’s commercial and strategic interests in the
eastern Mediterranean. France had been the national enemy in the
eighteenth century; there was every reason to believe that Russia would
become so in the nineteenth.
Pitt glimpsed this possibility, but for much of this period he gave foreign
affairs relatively low priority. Both his temperament and his interests inclined
him to concentrate on domestic matters (see Chapter 3). He was also more
interested in trade than in diplomacy. However, he provided decisive
leadership when it was required. Having interested himself little in the
growing links between France and Holland during 1785, he wrote a long
and detailed memorandum of advice to Eden when affairs reached crisis
point in Holland in 1787. His ideas clearly owed nothing to the advice of
Carmarthen. He also took charge of negotiations with Spain over Nootka
Sound and it was he who made the decision about when to undertake a
judicious retreat over Ochakov. Neither decision pleased Leeds and the
second, as we have seen, precipitated his resignation. During his peacetime
administration, while Pitt gave only as much attention to foreign affairs as
he judged necessary, his ultimate authority was never in question.
To what extent was Britain’s stronger position in 1791 the result of
clearly defined objectives pursued through effective diplomacy, and to
what extent did it result from good fortune? Certainly, Britain did have
effective ambassadors who kept ministers well informed and were highly
respected abroad. Men like William Eden (Lord Auckland), Sir James
Harris and Joseph Ewart promoted British interests well.J.Holland Rose,
from a school of history writing grounded in decisive, unequivocal
judgements, called the diplomacy of the last two during the Dutch crisis
‘a marvel of skill’ (Holland Rose, 1911, 381). The advice provided by
Britain’s senior diplomats was usually good. Had Auckland been heeded

32
when he queried why Britain was taking such an exposed position on
Ochakov, a damaging crisis would have been averted.
Nevertheless, the direction of foreign policy was not in strong hands.
Carmarthen (Leeds) had a strong belief in alliance systems but he was
neither a strategist nor an effective negotiator. In any event, he usually
left the detailed work to others. When he did take a decisive stand, his
judgement was usually faulty. The important alliances which were made
in this period—with Holland and Prussia—were cemented more because
of events which Britain did not command than because of effective
diplomacy. Once it was clear that Britain had recovered from the American
war and that, despite expectations, its economy had not suffered, it became
a natural target for nations in search of allies. Getting Britain back into
the frequently fluctuating pattern of European alliances was, therefore, a
relatively straightforward process.

33
 5
Pitt, Party and Monarchy

No ‘party man’?
‘I do not wish…to call myself anything but an Independent Whig’ wrote the
20–year-old Pitt to the Earl of Westmorland in July 1779 (Ehrman, I, 17).
His position on this never subsequently changed. Although his letter
contained the important additional clarification: ‘Which in words is hardly
a distinction, as every one alike pretends to it’, events over the next twenty-
five years would make the ‘distinction’ important enough. Pitt’s early
indications of ‘independency’ from the hated Fox-North coalition were a
prime recommendation for George III in the winter of 1783–4 (see
Chapters 1 and 2). Like his father, Pitt was never a ‘party man’ in the sense
of preferring party organisations, structures and policies hammered out in
group discussions. He developed his own policies, presented them honestly
and authoritatively to the Commons and expected good preparation and
lucid presentation to sway the House to support his government.
Parliamentary majorities based on the success of cogent argument, of
course, was the ideal. Practical politics required both the support of the
King and at least a cadre of regular support in both houses of parliament. As
Prime Minister in the early 1780s Pitt could rely on the unvarying loyalty
of perhaps twenty-five MPs in the Commons.This was a far smaller number
than the regular opposition of Fox and North, though it had been increased
to about fifty by the end of 1788 after five years of successful government.
His authority as Prime Minister depended much more upon the selection
of competent subordinates, control of debate and support from a substantial
section of the independent members than upon any close party ties. This

34
arrangement also suited Pitt’s personality. Shy, often aloof and distinctly
‘unclubbable’ (in direct contrast to Fox), Pitt was not temperamentally
inclined to that close linkage of politics and sociability which characterised
natural ‘party men’ of the time.
The followers of Pitt, not surprisingly, began calling themselves ‘Pittites’
and, so long as Pitt retained the confidence of George III, it is not too far-
fetched to consider them almost as a ‘court party’.The impression of
organised political activity is strengthened by the Pittites’ use of newspapers
to put their ideas sympathetically into the public domain—a well-established
political ploy by the 1780s. Between 1776 and 1780 Lord North had used
the Morning Post, under the editorship of the Anglican clergyman Henry
Bate, as a ‘ministerialist’ journal providing pro-government propaganda
and vitriolic comment about the rebellious American colonies. In opposition
after 1783, the Fox-North grouping’s ‘house-journal’ was the Morning
Herald. To counter the anti-government, and increasingly democratic,
material being produced in London in the early 1790s (see Chapter 7), the
Pittites founded two newspapers, the Sun and the True Briton in 1792–3.
Both were edited by John Heriot, whose efforts were liberally subsidised
from Treasury funds (Sack, 1993, 12).

Political parties: image and reality

A good deal of political organisation took place under Pitt; we should
certainly not consider that the so-called ‘spin doctors’ and ‘image
manipulators’ of the late twentieth century had no precursors in late
eighteenth-century Britain. However, this is not to claim that a fully-
developed two-party system had emerged in British politics by this time,
with Pitt leading the government party and Fox the opposition. It is still
less valid to claim that Pitt was the Tory leader and Fox the Whig. Two
main reasons explain why the period of Fox and Pitt has been presented as
one of two-party conflict. One is historical and the other historicgraphical,
and the two are linked.
It suited the Foxites, of course, to claim that they were the ‘true’ Whigs,
the guardians of English liberties and inheritors of those benevolent men
who had destroyed the monarchical despotism of James II in the Glorious
Revolution in 1688. They characterised their opponents as ‘Tories’—as
late as the 1780s still a term of abuse for many—in the control of a malevolent
monarch. For Foxite Whigs, George III was trying to destroy the liberties
which Englishmen had won in 1688 and the younger Pitt was merely his
dupe—doing the King’s will to the damage of Britain. The Foxites thus
tried to portray a Manichean struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. In this

35
characterisation, Fox (‘good’) led a party which claimed the control of an
elected parliament over the executive, concern for the liberty of the subject,
and tolerance of diverse religious opinion. Pitt was notionally in charge of
the government party but was in reality manipulated almost as a puppet by
George III (‘evil’) who wanted to control parliament himself and trample
on Englishmen’s liberties. The ‘evil’ party also viewed the Church of
England, usually opposed to such measures of religious toleration as the
proposed repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1787 and 1789, as a
major prop to the King’s potentially despotic ‘system’.
This was, to be sure, a horribly crude characterisation but Fox believed
much of his own propaganda. A more elegant and refined version of it,
however, was to surface in nineteenth-century history books. One of
the most gifted historians of that century was the Whig politician Thomas
Babington Macaulay who served in Melbourne’s cabinet in the late
1830s and early 1840s. His famous History of England, published between
1846 and 1862, never even got as far as the Whig supremacy which
began with the Hanoverian succession in 1714. That did not stop its
Whiggish views permeating historical interpretation for at least half a
century. Whig history was essentially the story of progress and events
were often selected and presented in ways which facilitated seeing the
past as the story of a long and complex passage from a lesser to a greater
state. It was history well attuned to an imperial age when Britain was
the world’s leading industrial power, when its navy ruled the waves and
when about a third of the land mass of the globe was coloured pink to
denote British ‘ownership’.
It is easy to see how this way of looking at the past could present the
1780s and 1790s as an age of party. If history’s purpose is to explain
progress, with the implicit assumption that the current age represents
ultimate progress, then those past events which most obviously relate to
present developments are given disproportionate significance. In the long
term, it is undeniable that the main change in Britain’s system of
government was that from monarchical rule to cabinet government with
a parliamentary system. Ministers became responsible to parliament; the
monarch’s direct powers dwindled almost to nothing. Control of
parliament depended on the outcome of a power struggle between two
major political parties, each of whom competed for the approval of the
electorate
Because all these changes came about over a long period rather than
suddenly (for example, as a result of revolution), there is room for
interpretation about precisely how they happened. In the Whig
interpretation, George III was presented as a monarch who dictated policy

36
and opposed necessary change. That, after all, is exactly how opposition
Whigs in the 1770s and 1780s saw him.The Foxite Whigs of the 1780s can
also be presented as acting like a modern political party. In order to defeat
them, Pitt and his followers had to become a political party too. Thus the
political struggles of the 1780s emerge in this historiography as between
recognisably modern parties.The King, by supporting one of them (Pitt’s),
was staging a doomed rearguard action in defence of monarchical authority.
This characterisation contains elements of truth but it is too simple.
Party was certainly important. Charles Jenkinson noted just before the
general election of 1784 that ‘Mr Pitt is at the head of one party and Mr
Fox at the head of the other’ (Hill, 1985, 153). Moreover, with the election
decisively won, Pitt still found himself faced with a coherent opposition. It
was unprecedented for any eighteenth-century group to retain out of office
the support of about 130–40 MPs in the House of Commons as the Fox-
Portland-North group did until, and beyond, the next general election in
1790.To a degree, it acted like a modern party but it was far less organised
and disciplined. Not least, Fox, by far the most authoritative speaker on the
opposition side, frequently absented himself from the House; he preferred
gambling, carousing and socialising (not least with the King’s dissolute
eldest son, George, Prince of Wales) unless some big issue was under debate.
He was hardly a ‘leader of the opposition’ in the modern sense.
It is also true that George III had substantial political influence.This he
used in zealous defence of monarchical authority. He considered the
outcome of the 1784 general election as vindication of his own strategy
(see Chapter 2) at least as much as a victory for Pitt. He also remained, as
he had been since the beginning of his reign, opposed to the very idea of
party; he considered it a malign device for reducing his influence in the
political process. George was in no sense a Tory; early in the nineteenth
century he called himself ‘an old Whig’, identifying with Whig politicians
who towards the end of the reign of Queen Anne had worked to place
England more centrally within European diplomacy. He also asserted that
his model as King was William III (1689–1702), the main beneficiary of
the so-called Glorious Revolution.
He did believe, however, and with some reason, that opposition Whigs
were anxious to hack away at the royal prerogative. This he was
determined to resist. His early appointment of Tories, including some
who had in the 1740s been sympathetic to a restoration of the Stuart
monarchy (‘Jacobites’) was symptomatic of his commitment to having
what he called ‘honest’ and loyal men serve him. He was also anxious
to balance, and therefore, he hoped, neutralise the malign impact of
party. But this was a far cry from direct interference in policy-making.

37
As Linda Colley has noted, ‘There was no marked upsurge of royal
influence over the Cabinet after 1760, rather the reverse. And there was
no dramatic rise in royal interest and initiative and imperial policy’
(Colley, 1994, 207). George placed greatest store on having people he
trusted in both his court and his cabinet. Once they were there, far
from dictating policy, he relied on their judgement, interfering only
rarely. In refutation of the Foxite Whig myth, George III was no narrow
reactionary, anxious to see a return, if not to royal despotism, then at
least to royal control over policy.

Pitt and George III

For most of their relationship, the King trusted the younger Pitt and
gave him a pretty free hand. This was not because George specially
liked him. The atmosphere between the two men was polite, distanced
and reserved. In Ehrman’s words, they had ‘a guarded working
relationship’ (Ehrman III, 34). Pitt made few appearances at court and
his social skills were not tailored towards polite small-talk with the
privileged but politically insignificant. George gave Pitt generous support
on most issues for three main reasons. First, Pitt had delivered him from
humiliation, if not from chaos, in 1783–4. Second, keeping Pitt in office
seemed the best way of keeping the hated Fox out of it, while Lord
North had given up all rights to royal support by allying with Fox in
1783. Perhaps the most important reason for George’s support, however,
was his own interpretation of royal responsibility. He appointed ministers
of his choosing. He then expected to keep them in office while they
retained the support of parliament and did not jeopardise the interests
of the state. Significantly, he made no effort to halt Pitt’s administrative
reforms, even though they would have a devastating effect on the
independent powers of the monarchy in the nineteenth century (see
Chapter 3).
In fact, Pitt and George disagreed on a number of important issues.The
King did not like parliamentary reform or what to him were Wilberforce’s
wearisomely persistent attempts to abolish the slave trade. Pitt was annoyed
when George joined the Fürstenbund on behalf of Hanover without
consulting his ministers. George was equally angry when Pitt back-pedalled
on Ochakov, thus handing a propaganda victory to Catherine the Great,
for whom the King had little time (see Chapter 4). Pitt also chafed about
the need to work with Lord Chancellor Thurlow, a special favourite of the
King whom he would not be able to get rid of until 1792. During the
French wars, also, there were numerous differences over both strategy and

38
tactics. George became particularly anxious whenever Pitt seemed to be
angling for a peace treaty with the French.
Both men recognised, however, that pushing differences into full-blown
conflict was not in either’s interest. For George, the always substantial spectre
of Charles James Fox loomed; for Pitt, royal disfavour might mean loss of
office. It is significant, for example, that Pitt did not present a fresh
parliamentary reform bill after his rebuff in 1785 (Chapter 2) and that he
soft-pedalled on a number of controversial measures in deference (at least
in part) to royal sensibilities.
And yet the reason for Pitt’s resignation in 1801 was royal disapproval.
Pitt wanted Roman Catholic emancipation to accompany the Act of
Union between Britain and Ireland (see Chapter 8); George would not
have it. Why on this occasion did a difference of opinion lead to a
fundamental rift, when so many earlier disagreements had been smoothed
over? There are two main reasons. First, the King was rootedly opposed
to concessions to the Roman Catholic Church. When a similar measure
had been discussed in 1795, George had made his views known. He
believed that having Catholics in parliament would bring about ‘a total
change in the principles of government…overturning the fabric of the
Glorious Revolution’. His conclusion was unequivocal: ‘I cannot conclude
without expressing that the subject is beyond the decision of any Cabinet
of Ministers’ (Ehrman, II, 432). For the King, this was one of those rare
constitutional issues which transcended normal political debate. The
government had then not pushed the issue. George expected a similar
response to a similar initiative six years later.
The second reason, however, gives an insight into the intensely
personal considerations which often underlie great events.We have seen
that Pitt had never been personally close to George. In 1799 and 1800,
Pitt’s always punishing work schedule took him ever closer to the edge
of breakdown, and exhaustion seems to have warped his political
judgement. He took the view that more important things weighed down
a wartime prime minister than keeping the King abreast of the latest
developments. His attendance at court, never overly punctilious, now
slackened further. George felt slighted.The King did not want to dictate
policy but he was sure that a monarch had the right to be kept fully
informed about it, and comment on it. Dundas reported that the King
now felt an ‘aversion’ to Pitt (Ehrman, III, 523). The mutual allegiances
and accommodations of the past seventeen years became buried in
recrimination. The King made his own position perfectly clear in a
formal note written on 5 February 1801:

39
 I had flattered myself that, on the strong assurance I gave Mr Pitt of
keeping perfectly silent on the subject [Catholic Emancipation] whereon
we entirely differ, provided on his part he kept off any disquisition on it
for the present…we both understood our present line of conduct; but
as I unfortunately find Mr Pitt does not draw the same conclusion, I
must come to the unpleasant decision, as it will deprive me of his political
service, of acquainting him that, rather than forego what I look on as
my duty, I will without unnecessary delay attempt to make the most
creditable arrangement [for a new government].
(Stanhope, III, xxxii)

Pitt resigned because he had lost the confidence of the monarch, not that
of parliament. In a brief note beginning ‘My Dear Pitt’—an unusual
expression of intimacy from monarch to commoner in those days—the
King brought himself to express his ‘sorrow’ but only in a sentence which
made clear his expectation of the finality of the event: ‘You are closing…Your
Political Career’ (Ehrman, III, 525).

The Pitt-Portland Coalition of 1794: the origins of a

new Tory party?
Widely divergent responses to the French Revolution (see Chapter 7)
finally shattered the unity of the Whig opposition. Lord North’s own
influence had anyway declined. He became blind in 1786 and attended
parliament increasingly rarely before his death in the summer of 1792.
Though the main opposition grouping led by Fox and Portland retained
about 145 MPs after the general election of 1790, North’s personal
following had dwindled to insignificance. Of much greater importance
was the division between those who, to put matters over-simply, believed
that the French Revolution opened up genuine opportunities for
adapting the old regime by embracing radical reform, and those who
did not.
In the former camp were many of the younger Whigs, notably Grey,
Sheridan and Whitbread. Crucially, although he strove hard to keep the
party together, Fox declared that he believed reform to be the essence
of Whiggery and Pitt’s actions against personal freedom during 1792
forced him into siding with this group, despite his fears for party unity.
In the latter, and substantially larger, camp were the Duke of Portland,
Baron Loughborough, William Windham and the party’s leading
polemicist, Edmund Burke. It was Burke’s famous Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790) which had begun the process of polarisation

40
by indicating the fundamental evils to which, sooner or later, he believed
the revolution must lead. Fox broke with Burke in 1791, after which a
haemorrhaging of support began. Portland’s position was critical. He
rarely spoke in the House of Lords but he was an important political
figure with a clear view of what the Whig party should stand for. In
1785, he had written to his son that he wished to see the overthrow of
Pitt’s government and its replacement by ‘an administration composed
of men of property and talents, who…are so united in principles and
opinions as not to be led astray by popular clamour or royal favour’
(Wilkinson, 1998, 251).
As early as January 1792, leading Whigs like Earl Spencer and William
Windham were calling for the kind of restrictions on personal liberty to
check the spread of ‘French principles’ (see Chapter 7) which were
anathema to Fox. Pitt, well aware of the implications of Foxite divisions
and alert to the opportunity for political advantage, began putting feelers
out to Portland and North in the spring of 1792. The prospect of office
for some disenchanted Whigs was enhanced by the dismissal of the Lord
Chancellor,Thurlow.
These discussions came to nothing immediately but, as events in France
had ever darker implications for the old order, it became clearer that Whig
divisions would not easily be healed. In January 1793, Baron Loughborough
(who had been a Northite) became the first from the old Fox-North
grouping to join the Pitt government, accepting Thurlow’s old post which
Pitt had kept tantalisingly vacant for several months. Portland, however,
still strove for party unity. After the war with France began (see Chapter 7),
he urged that ‘the best means of serving the public and the best chance of
keeping a party together’ was to offer ‘cordial support to the war without
any declaration of hostility to Fox’ (Wilkinson, 1998, 255). In increasingly
polarised times, this was an impossible task. However, the difficulties which
Pitt experienced between 1792 and 1794 in attracting conservative Whigs
into government is powerful evidence supporting the thesis that, in the
1780s, Fox and Portland had fashioned an organisation which resembled a
modern party in many important respects.
Nevertheless, by July 1794, Pitt had succeeded in forming a coalition
with Portland which ‘might make us act together as one Great Family’
(Ehrman, II, 409) against two closely related enemies: France abroad and
the alarming spread of French principles at home. It was a genuine coalition.
Six of the thirteen cabinet posts went to the Whigs, and Portland, in
becoming Home Secretary, took one of the most senior positions. Portland
also extracted from Pitt two policy concessions important to his grouping:
clear commitment to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France

41
and movement towards greater religious toleration (Chapter 8) in Ireland.
For private consumption, also, the Portland group looked forward to entering
government in order to clean it up, and particularly to reduce royal influence.
They were thereby able to remain true to a central tenet of Rockingham
Whig faith (see Chapter 2).
Was it, however, a Tory coalition? The consensus of modern historical
opinion is against seeing it as such. John Derry notes, quite correctly, that
‘Pitt never ceased to call himself an independent Whig and those Whigs
who had been recruited to his standard did not see themselves as abandoning
their Whig principles’ (Dickinson, 1989, 51). Frank O’Gorman, one of the
leading supporters of the idea that modern parties evolved in the years
before the 1832 Reform Act rather than afterwards, argued that

The Coalition of 1794 and the series of events which led up to it…
amount to a realignment of party loyalties and a reaffirmation of the
strength of party in politics.The path to Coalition was a struggle less for
office than for the soul of the Whig party and a battle for its future.
(O’Gorman, 1982, 26–7)

He later affirmed that it was the Foxite Whigs who after 1794 ‘kept aloft
the mantle of party’ (O’Gorman, 1997, 257), suggesting that the Portland
defection was intentionally into a wartime coalition, and did not represent a
switch of allegiance from Whig to Tory. David Wilkinson’s detailed researches
into Portland’s political career add further weight to the argument that we
should see the Pitt-Portland government as a party realignment. Only a
handful of the Whigs who joined Pitt in 1794 remained loyal to Portland
when he formed his own government in 1807: ‘Support for the Portland
ministry was not based on those conservative Whig members who joined
the coalition of 1794, and there had been no substantial accession of strength’
(Wilkinson, 1998, 259).
All of this, however, may be to place too much emphasis on individuals
and not enough on policy.Whatever labels politicians attached to themselves,
it is difficult to dispute that a number of the issues at the heart of Tory
politics in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, when it
was no longer a disadvantage to acknowledge the label ‘Tory’, came to the
fore in the years after 1794. Some, interestingly, also harked back to a much
older school of early eighteenth-century Toryism.The crucial issues were:
belief that stable government could only be provided by those with property
and education and not by ‘mere numbers’; a strong preference for landed
property as somehow more ‘legitimate’ than commercial, industrial or other
forms of ‘money-based’ property; belief in monarchy as a vital prop to

42
propertied government; support for a united British nation against dangerous
‘foreign’ influences (see Chapter 7); support for the armed forces; belief in
the supremacy of the Church of England (however much Pitt may have
been personally indifferent to religion); and extreme wariness over, if not
outright opposition to, any form of religious toleration.
Many of these beliefs owe more to Pitt, and especially to the ‘Pittites’
who followed him, than they do to the Whig tradition. This is one reason
why Wilkinson calls the Coalition a ‘Pittite triumph’ rather than a ‘genuine
coalition’ (Wilkinson, 1998, 247).They would not have developed in the
way they did had it not been for the formidable strains placed on the old
system by the French Revolution and by the wars with France which
rapidly ensued.Those ideas, however, survived into the years of peace, and
were at the core of Lord Liverpool’s government (1812–27). They also
survived into the allegedly modernising ‘Conservatism’ of Sir Robert Peel.
If the Pitt-Portland coalition did not create the modern Conservative Party,
it was nevertheless profoundly important in the transition to it. Perhaps we
should conclude that the coalition was the midwife of modern Conservatism.
As the present author has written else-where:

The new Conservatism, as yet unrecognized in name and but dimly

appreciated in concept, represented a fusion of party cohesion and careful
administrative expertise, the legacy particularly of second-generation
Pittites…most of whom entered politics in the 1790s and 1800s.
(Evans, 1996, 63)

43
 6
A Nation at War, 1793–1801

The causes of war

Britain did not go to war to stamp out the evils of a French Revolution
which threatened to destroy the old political world. Far from it. The
Revolution was initially welcomed by most of the political classes. Fox and
some of his Whig allies saw it as the dawn of liberty. Pittites tended to view
it more pragmatically. The Revolution would be an important distraction
for Britain’s greatest rival. Carmarthen, Foreign Secretary when the Bastille
fell, wrote to the Duke of Dorset a fortnight later: ‘I defy the ablest Heads
in England to have planned, or its whole Wealth to have purchased, a
Situation so fatal to its Rival, as that to which France is now reduced by
her own intestine Commotions’ (Ehrman, II, 4).
This reaction was slow to change. Even after Louis XVI’s personal
situation had become precarious, leading British politicians showed no
inclination to intervene. In February 1792, Pitt’s budget speech planned
for reduced defence expenditure.The Prime Minister told the Commons,
‘unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country, when,
from the situation in Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen
years of peace than at the present moment’ (Evans, 1996, 80). As late as
November, when France had already been at war with Austria for almost
seven months and with Prussia for more than three, the Foreign Secretary,
Lord Grenville, urged Britain to keep ‘wholly and entirely aloof from
European war (Dickinson, 1989, 128).
Had the main cause of war been ideological, then Britain would have
become involved earlier than February 1793, probably in the spring or

44
summer of 1792 in support of the Prussian monarchy or the Habsburg
empire centred on Austria. Britain entered the conflict mainly for strategic
and commercial reasons. Against general expectation, the French
revolutionary armies had dramatic early successes against both the Prussians
and the Austrians. The French defeated the Austrians at the Battle of
Jemappes, just over the French border in the Austrian Netherlands (now
Belgium), early in November 1792; eight days later a French army entered
Brussels and then proceeded to occupy the whole of Belgium.This was an
obvious threat to Holland, Britain’s ally since 1788 (see Chapter 4). At the
end of November France proclaimed freedom of navigation through the
Scheldt estuary, contrary to treaties signed in 1648 and confirmed by both
France and Britain in the 1780s. Pitt and Grenville immediately instructed
Auckland, British envoy at the Hague, to tell the Dutch that there would
be ‘no hesitation as to the propriety of…assisting the Dutch Republic, as
circumstances might require against any attempt to invade its dominions
or to disturb its government’ (Ehrman, II, 208).Though Pitt had noted a
worsening situation in continental Europe since 1790, it is likely that this is
the first occasion on which he gave serious thought to British involvement
in the war. Revolutionary France now threatened the balance of power in
northern Europe and its menacing presence in the Scheldt put commercial
activity at risk also. Pitt told a French official in December 1792 that recent
events in Belgium were ‘considered as a proof of an intention [by France]
to proceed to a rupture with Holland, that a rupture with Holland…must
also lead to an immediate rupture with this country’ (Black, 1991, 240).
Ideological issues played some part, it is true. Just as French troops were
marching through the Low Countries, a new stridency and confidence
was being heard from extra-parliamentary radical groups in a number of
British cities (see Chapter 7). In the autumn of 1792, Burke cautioned that
‘English assassins of the Jacobin faction…working hard to corrupt the public
mind’ were attracting increased support. In such dangerous times ‘neutrality
does not nor cannot produce neutral effects’ (Black, 1994, 406). Since
1790, the government had considered Burke an alarmist, if not unhinged,
critic; events across the Channel now finally persuaded the British
government to agree with him. A propaganda effort against the radicals
began. At the end of the year Auckland urged:

every possible form of Proclamation to the People…. The prosperity

and opulence of England are such that, except the lowest and most
destitute class, and men of undone fortunes and desperate pursuits,
there are none would not suffer essentially in their fortunes,
occupations, comfort, in the glory, strength and well-being of their

45
 country, but above all in that sense of security which forms the sole
happiness in life, by this new species of French disease which is
spreading its contagion among us.
(Black, 1994, 423)

Desultory negotiations between Britain and France took place in

November and December 1792. Some believed that war could be
avoided since the French continued to assert that they had no
fundamental quarrel with the British. More, including Pitt and Grenville,
did not believe French protestations. Urgent preparations for war were
finally put in train. News of the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January
1793 inflamed anti-radical passions in Britain. Bishop Horsley asserted
that ‘This foul murder, and these barbarities, have filled the measure of
the guilt and infamy of France’ (Black, 1994, 446). The fact that France
actually declared war on 1 February was almost an irrelevance, though
the declaration was accompanied by a call for the British people to rise
in rebellion against their own oppressive government. Both sides by
then knew that conflict was inevitable. Soon afterwards, the Duke of
Leeds reported: ‘we are here armed up to the teeth and the people in
high spirits determined to defend the King and Country’ (Black, 1991,
242). Pitt believed that the need for defence would be short-lived.
Having failed to predict a war less than a year earlier (see above) he
now spectacularly misjudged its nature. Britain was embarking on what
would prove to be the longest war it had undertaken since the fifteenth
century and much the costliest it had yet fought.

Strategy and outcome

Britain’s attempt to defeat revolutionary France in the 1790s rested on
three strategic pillars: supporting European allies, with cash and troops,
in direct attacks on France; using the navy to pick off French colonies,
especially in the Caribbean, thus weakening its commercial base; and
offering practical aid and other forms of support to opponents of the
Revolution within France. The first two of these had been tried and
trusted during earlier wars with France during the eighteenth century
and had generally been successful. Only in the American war, when France
was able to concentrate its efforts on the Americas rather than having to
worry about enemies in Europe, had Britain come off worse. The third
strategy seemed a promising new ploy since it was well known that
important areas of France, notably in the west, were resistant to
revolutionary ideology.

46
 In many respects, therefore, Pitt relied on the lessons of the past in
tackling the struggle with France in the 1790s. The first need was to repel
French advance in the Low Countries. It was reasonable to expect Austria
(whose territory there had been invaded by France) to be a staunch ally in
this objective.The so-called First Coalition against France, signed in February
1793, seemed particularly promising since it joined Britain to Austria as
well as Prussia and Holland, allies since 1788 (see Chapter 4). Spain and
Sardinia also came into the coalition, strengthening Pitt s original belief
that the war would be a short and successful one.
The so-called ‘blue water’ strategy, which relied on Britain’s naval
strength and threatened French colonial possessions, was important for
two reasons. Not only did it open up opportunity for fresh conquest by
Britain; it also threatened to strike at the heart of France’s own economy.
Soon after the war began, Dundas, Secretary for War, spelled out the
anticipated consequence: ‘This country having captured the West Indian
Islands and destroyed their existing fleet, may long rest in peace’
(Dickinson, 1989, 150). Again, the emphasis on a short, successful war is
notable.
In pursuit of the third strategy, Pitt also anticipated rapid success. Using
Britain’s Mediterranean fleet,Admiral Hood landed troops at Toulon in August
1793 at the invitation of the counter-revolutionary inhabitants there.Toulon
was one of the most important ports in France. Pitt considered this a blow ‘in
every view the most important which could be struck towards the final
success of the war’ (Ehrman, II, 303), since it should lead to widespread
insurgency against the revolutionary government, aided by Britain’s European
allies. This proved a false hope. As late as November 1793, Grenville was
gloating that ‘Every fresh account from France brings decisive proof that the
system is drawing to its close’ (Dickinson, 1989, 158). Yet the tide turned
very quickly. Toulon was back in government hands by December and the
British fleet withdrawn.A plan to land émigré forces on Quiberon Peninsula
in southern Brittany in July 1795 had no more success.The unpalatable fact
was that the French revolutionary forces were better prepared and had higher
morale born of early success than had been expected.Worse, from the British
point of view, was the clear evidence of national consciousness. Many in
France preferred a Bourbon to a Jacobin government.They were all French,
however, and most preferred a French government—almost any French
government—to the restoration of monarchy engineered by the national
enemy. Pitt and his ministers underestimated the power of French patriotism
in the early stages of the Revolution.
Pitt also discovered that he could place less reliance on European
allies than he had anticipated. There were many reasons for this. Austria

47
and Prussia both had interests in central and eastern Europe which Britain
did not share, not least the second and third partitions of Poland from
which, with Russia, they gained much territorially in the years 1792–5.
Russia’s brief accession to the coalition in the Treaty of St Petersburg
(1794) was of no practical benefit to Britain. Austria considered its
possessions in Belgium geographically remote and difficult to defend. It
was soon negotiating to have them swapped with the much more desirable
territory of Bavaria in southern Germany. Britain had not had good
relations with Austria in the 1780s (see Chapter 4) and the alliance which
was forged out of necessity when Britain entered the war soon seemed
an unnatural one. Both Austria and Prussia, furthermore, considered British
support of their own efforts inadequate.They saw Britain as a rich nation,
well able to afford the subsidies which would help equip and maintain
them. Britain provided almost £66 million in subsidies throughout the
war years but the subsidies were ‘end-loaded’. Only about £9 million
was spent on them in the years 1793–1802 (Sherwig, 1969). Pitt’s war
strategy has been much criticised, and with some justice (see pp. 51–2),
but it is not fair to assert that he threw money recklessly at European
allies. It is doubtful in any case whether there was enough to throw.
Before the major tax reforms of the late 1790s (see p. 50), Britain had real
difficulty in raising sufficient ready cash, even when it believed that the
cash would be well spent.
Perceptions among the allies that Britain was the richest nation in
Europe led to another cause of dissent between them. For Pitt, the security
of the Low Countries was genuinely a vital matter. However, European
diplomats well versed in eighteenth-century history knew of Britain’s
frequent preference for ‘blue water’ strategies and its lack of commitment
to Europe. This was perhaps understandable when Britain was not
perceived as possessing the most powerful economy in Europe, but Britain
needed to be treated much more warily when that economy could, given
the right circumstances, make Britain and not France the main threat to
European stability.
These reasons explaining the fragility of the anti-French coalition need
also to be set against the background of continued French triumphs in the
field. Another pamphlet in this series deals with the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars. However, the speed and decisiveness of French success
in Europe can very briefly be sketched here. Holland, which had a strong
pro-French party anyway (see Chapter 4) was taken over in January 1795
and the country, which the French now called ‘the Batavian Republic’,
declared war on Britain soon after. The Prussians and the Spaniards made
peace with France in April and July 1795. After signing an aggressive treaty

48
with France in August 1796, Spain declared war on Britain two months
later. Austria continued the fight, but crushing defeats in 1796 and 1797
forced it into a disadvantageous peace with France (at Campo Formio in
October 1797) which recognised the Rhine as the eastern border of France.
After this, Britain, alone of the European powers, continued the war against
revolutionary France.A second coalition, involving Britain, Russia,Austria,
Turkey, Portugal and Naples, was formed in the last days of 1798 but it
proved to have even fewer unifying elements than the first; it, too, collapsed
within a couple of years.
As usual, the British navy mitigated the effects of military disasters.
Admiral Howe defeated the French fleet on ‘the Glorious First of June’
in 1794 but was unable to prevent vital grain consignments reaching
western France. Other important successes were won during the crisis
year of 1797 by Jervis and Nelson against the Spanish navy at Cape St
Vincent in February and by Duncan against the Dutch at Camperdown,
off the island ofTexel, in October. The navy (with Nelson prominent)
also played a crucial part in frustrating Napoleon’s triumphant progress
through Italy and North Africa in the years 1798–1801. Naval power also
proved vital when an ‘Armed Neutrality of the North’ hostile to Britain
was formed by Russia, Sweden, Denmark and Prussia in December 1800
in response to British claims to search all foreign ships and interfere with
their trade. Nelson won yet another decisive victory in April 1801, this
time against the Danish fleet anchored off Copenhagen. Despite severe
initial difficulties over recruitment, refitting and shipbuilding, therefore,
the navy had by 1801 virtually proved that, although Britain could make
little or no impression on French dominance in much of western and
southern Europe, it could defend the country against invasion while also
helping to stifle the overseas trade of enemy countries.
This does not mean that the ‘blue water’ strategy was an unalloyed
success. Its main thrust was intended to be in the West Indies, and against
French colonial possessions. Here severe logistical problems were
encountered. Britain had relatively little difficulty in capturing sugar
islands and other places of strategic or commercial importance from
France and, later, from Spain and the Dutch. In 1793–4,Tobago, the
Seychelles, Martinique, St Lucia and Guadeloupe were all captured.
Meanwhile, Jamaica, on which the French had designs, was successfully
defended. In 1795–6, Ceylon, Demerara, Essequibo and Guiana were
captured from the Dutch, Grenada from the French and Trinidad from
the Spanish.
However, the successes Britain enjoyed outside Europe in the 1790s,
especially in the West Indies, were won at a heavy price. Admiral John

49
Jervis and Lt Gen. Charles Grey were despatched to the West Indies in the
autumn of 1793 with 7,000 troops. From 1795, when British troops were
no longer of much use on the mainland of Europe, about half the British
army was despatched to the Caribbean, where it was commanded by Sir
Ralph Abercromby. Dundas was full of optimism. He told the commander
in St Domingue in September 1795: ‘You will be reinforced by an armament
which…cannot fail to carry everything before it’ (Ehrman, II, 567). He
was wrong. According to Piers Mackesy s calculations, about 89,000 troops
in all were sent to the Caribbean at this time. About 70 per cent of these
were lost, mostly to various tropical diseases, notably yellow fever (Dickinson,
1989, 160). Meanwhile, the fighting capacity of France and its allies in the
Caribbean was not destroyed.

Financial cost
The war, of course, blew all of Pitt’s peacetime financial calculations
(see Chapter 3) to smithereens. The national debt increased by about
80 per cent in the six years from 1792–8. The steady decline in the
value of government stocks told of widespread investor anxiety as loans
to the allies depleted reserves still further. For example, £4.6 million
was loaned to Austria in 1795. Until 1797, Pitt levied no new taxes but
the financial crisis of that year (which, along with the weary catalogue
of defeats, threats of invasion and desertions by allies, brought him to
the very brink of resignation) produced a change of approach. In
February 1797 the government was forced to suspend cash payments
by the Bank of England, forcing payments in ‘promissory notes’. In the
same year, he trebled the so-called ‘assessed taxes’ on luxuries like
servants and carriages.
When the immediate crisis was over, Pitt took the crucial decision to
fund wartime expenditure more by direct taxation than by loans. By
early 1798, debt repayment had ballooned to almost one-third of all
government expenditure, an intolerable long-term position (Ehrman, III,
259). Pitt’s solution was to levy a new tax on income and to phase out
the land tax, long hated by suspicious landowners who argued that ‘the
moneyed interest’ had been unwarrantably advantaged by the tax system.
Parliament was persuaded to sanction a 10 per cent (two shillings in the
pound) tax on all income in excess of £200 a year from 1799, with lower
rates from £60 to £200. It was the first ‘income tax’ in British history.
The Morning Chronicle called it ‘a daring innovation in English finance’
(Ehrman, III, 262). It remained in force until 1816, though levied at
lower rates from 1804–7, and it transformed the financial picture. It soon

50
realised between £4 million and £5 million a year, and represented
roughly 80 per cent of the value of all the new wartime taxes and about
28 per cent of all the extra money raised for the war in the years 1793–
1815 (Dickinson, 1989, 183). That it brought in so much partly reflects
the efficiency of the collection procedure. More importantly, it indicates
the extent of wealth in British society available to be tapped over a long
period to sustain the war effort. No other nation at the time could have
levied so much or sustained such a draining conflict for such a time.

Assessment: how effective a war minister was the Younger Pitt?

Pitt left office before a lull in Anglo-French hostilities was agreed at the
Treaty of Amiens in 1802. He had put out various feelers for peace himself
since 1795 but they had got nowhere, partly because of divisions within
the cabinet and royal disapproval, but mainly because before Britain
produced a real check to French ambition at the end of Napoleon s Egyptian
expedition, the enemy was not interested in negotiating anything other
than a victors peace.
The best that can be said about matters in 1802 was that Britain had not
been defeated. For that it was disproportionately grateful for the efforts of
its navy, although the ability of its middle and upper classes to raise large
sums of money was also a significant factor. Pitt was not a victorious war
leader. How much blame does he deserve for the failures of the 1790s?
Historians used to make a direct contrast between the Pitts, father and
son.The Elder Pitt was characterised as a great war leader but an indifferent,
and difficult, peacetime minister. The younger was praised for his
administrative and financial genius in peacetime and for the ‘national
revival’ of the 1780s over which he presided, but was dismissed as a
‘disastrous’ war minister. Both judgements are too crude. The Elder Pitt
had a combination of favourable circumstances both in Europe and in
the colonies which were denied to his son, not least a reliable and gifted
ally in Frederick the Great. Also, the tenacity shown after 1797 when all
the old allies had fallen by the wayside is worthy of the highest praise,
and theYounger Pitt’s determined leadership was important to this. Loyalist
opinion rallied and a sense of national purpose was evoked. After a period
in the early 1790s when government finance depended dangerously on
loans (a policy Pitt himself regretted) he put national finances on a new,
taxation-led, footing which carried it—just—through the remainder of
a very long war.
It would, however, be foolish to assert that Pitt was a good wartime
leader. A large number of basic errors were made which it is easy to

51
identify, albeit with hindsight. First, Britain entered the war unprepared
and undermanned. As Ehrman remarks, considering the situation in
February 1793: ‘The shape of that war itself had almost certainly not
been considered. Neither Pitt nor anyone else appears to have given the
matter close thought’ (Ehrman, II, 261). Second, it took Pitt and his
ministers too long to realise that their strategic concern with the situation
in north-western Europe was not shared by Britain’s main allies, Austria
and Prussia. Austria, indeed, was prepared to exchange its territories in
the Low Countries, and thus see Holland overrun, an outcome which
ran clean counter to British interests. This basic misperception was an
error of judgement which helped France to retain an advantage in the
early stages of the war.
Third, Pitt believed for too long that the war would be short. His financial
dispositions from 1793 to 1796 operated on this assumption. Much national
wealth was wasted by inadequate early financing of a war which turned
out to be very different from the one originally envisaged. Closely linked
to this, Pitt was slow to react to the frequently rapid changes in 1793–4 and
he seems not to have appreciated the need for more military and naval
training. With some outstanding exceptions, Britain’s commanders were
not of the same calibre in the 1790s as they had been in the 1750s and they
certainly could not provide instant success. Not until 1795 does it seem to
have registered that the nation was in for a long haul, and with fewer
advantages than it had originally calculated. Pitt underestimated both the
French fighting capability and France’s sense of patriotic identity.
Fourth, Pitt was not decisive in arbitrating between conflicting advice.
He could see the advantage of maintaining both a European and a colonial
strategy (see pp. 46–7). In 1799, with the allies shown to be broken reeds,
Dundas pushed strongly, first for outright victory in Egypt, whose occupation
was ‘the master key to all the commerce of the world’ (Ehrman, III, 142)
and then for British resources to be directed to areas of the world where
France, and French trade, could be damaged. Grenville, on the other hand,
believed that France would be defeated only in France. He wanted to
channel more of Britain’s land resources to an army which would support
a renewed coalition when the time came. Pitt did not offer decisive
leadership. Here, perhaps, his finely developed analytical skills were of least
value. He knew that Britain held a poor hand and he could see different
ways of playing it which might yield similar results. Experience had made
him justly suspicious both of allies and of the optimism of French counter-
revolutionaries. Not seeing an obviously preferable way forward, he usually
exercised caution. It is possible that more visceral, and decisive, leadership
would have paid higher dividends. In unpromising circumstances, a risk

52
was probably worth taking but nothing in Pitt s cerebral make-up conduced
him to gambling. He was a man whose career record until 1793 had been
one of almost unvarying, and usually very speedy, success. Few such men
take risks; they rely on their confidence and their abilities. Although Pitt
acquitted himself well enough as Britain’s war leader, the experience brought
him face to face if not with defeat, then at least with the realisation that
events were not his to command. It was a salutary lesson.

53
 7
Pitt, Patriotism and Reform in the 1790s

The British radical tradition

I retain my opinion of the propriety of a Reform in Parliament if it could be

obtained without mischief or danger. But I confess I am not sanguine enough
to hope that a Reform at this time can safely be attempted??every rational
man has two things to consider. These are the probability of success and the
risk to be run by the attempt…. I see no chance of succeeding in the attempt
in the first place; and I see great danger of anarchy and confusion in the
second.
(Stanhope, II, 152)

We cannot see without indignation, the attempts which have been made to
weaken in the minds of his majesty’s subjects, sentiments of obedience…and
attachment to the form of government.
(Evans, 1996, 72)

These two statements, the first delivered by Pitt in the Commons in 1792
and the second from the Royal Proclamation against Seditious Writings
issued in May the same year, sum up why Pitt turned against parliamentary
reform. His intellectual preference for a more rational distribution of seats
was overborne by fear of changing the old system when reform became
associated in popular imagination with democracy, republicanism and attacks
on privilege. Much the most important event triggering this association
was, of course, the French Revolution.When, from early 1793, Britain was
at war with revolutionary France, the need to protect British subjects from
‘levellers’, ‘Jacobins’ and ‘atheists’ also became a patriotic duty.

54
 An authentic English radical tradition existed well before 1789, drawing
its inspiration from the constitutional struggles with the Stuart monarchy
in the seventeenth century. Not only was the tradition reformist; some of
its supporters were democrats. In 1788, reformers held celebrations up
and down the country to commemorate the centenary of the Glorious
Revolution (O’Gorman, 1997, 242). Most did not do so in celebration
of the status quo but to sustain the reformist impulse. They called, of
course, for an increase in the franchise and a more rational distribution of
parliamentary seats, but the reformist agenda did not stop there. It also
encompassed attacks on the privileges and the conservatism of the Church
of England; campaigns for religious toleration; and continued struggle
against the ‘unrepresentative’ influence of monarchy and court. Much of
it fitted readily into the Fox-Portland opposition agenda (see Chapter 5).
Reformism was embraced by many in the middle ranks of society,
especially nonconformists, professionals, writers and intellectuals; it also
attracted a number of skilled and craft workers in London and other
leading cities. It remained pretty clearly under the control of property
owners and thus was thought to present no fundamental challenge to the
authorities.
For a brief period in 1788 it seemed that the reformist agenda would
be realised under a Whig administration headed by Charles James Fox. At
the end of October, within days of the centenary of the arrival of the
Prince of Orange (later William III) on English soil, George III endured
his first sustained period of mental instability. For several weeks it looked
as if George would be declared unfit to carry out his duties. A regency
would be needed and the Regent could only be the King’s eldest son,
George, Prince of Wales, a crony of Fox and an opponent of Pitt. The
opposition Whigs, who had always considered themselves the only true
heirs of the Glorious Revolution, anticipated a fresh period in power
when they could return to that reformist agenda unconstitutionally (or
so they thought) snatched from them by a despotic monarch in December
1783 (see Chapter 1). Only the sudden recovery of the King saved Pitt’s
government.

The impact of the French Revolution

Initially, the French Revolution was widely welcomed in most quarters
both as a decisive blow to Catholic absolutism and as a welcome check to
the aggressive designs of Britain’s most powerful enemy (Chapter 4).Within
two years, however, the situation changed utterly. Organisations committed
to democratic reform began to be formed by working people themselves.

55
The Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information was established in
1791 and the London Corresponding Society (LCS) followed in 1792.
Both were run by artisans, both were committed to the pursuit of democracy
and both sought, in the words of the LCS’s rules, ‘members unlimited’.
The word ‘corresponding’ was to be taken literally. These artisan societies
corresponded both with each other and with the French.They also published
pamphlets and organised meetings designed to spread the word. By the
end of 1792 a number of democratic organisations had been founded in
most of the large towns in England and Scotland.
Their main inspiration was Thomas Paine, whose famous book The Rights
of Man was published in two parts. The first, in 1791, was a rebuttal of the
attacks on French revolutionary ideology mounted by Edmund Burke (see
Chapter 5). Though not originally published in a cheap edition, it sold
very well. Part I played a vital role in urging radicals to ground their case
less on the corruption and illegitimate royal and aristocratic influence which
had so stained the purity of England’s ‘ancient constitution’—essentially
the Foxite position—and much more on ‘natural rights’, the distinctive
political development of the European Enlightenment. Part II, published
more cheaply in 1792, was dynamite. In addition to the arguments in favour
of democratic government, the book mounted vigorous attacks on the
very institution of aristocracy and on all forms of unearned privilege. It
also contained specific proposals to improve the lot of ordinary folk: free
education, family allowances and old-age pensions. The Rights of Man was a
book which popularised the ideas of the European Enlightenment; it spoke
directly and powerfully to self-improving skilled workers. Its message was
advancement through merit, not accident of birth. It was, furthermore,
patriotic to call for radical reform even in the face of opposition from the
authorities using ‘whips and racks’ and erecting ‘scaffolds’. As John Gale
Jones, a leading member of the LCS put it, if with lurid metaphor: ‘Are we
Britons, and is not liberty our birthright…. The holy blood of Patriotism,
streaming from the severing axe, shall carry with it the infant seeds of
Liberty’ (Thompson, 1968, 154).
Pitt, therefore, faced an ideological struggle. Like all Whigs, ‘independent’
(as he called himself) or otherwise, he believed in government on behalf of
the people but certainly not in government constructed by, or directly
answerable to, the people. He was not opposed to reform but was certain
that any reform should be controlled by the existing social and political
elite. He believed that the existing political order was a force for good and
that Painite radicals wished to overthrow it.The main differences between
radicalism in Britain in the 1790s and its earlier manifestations were, first,
that its focus had been widened and deepened by the example of France

56
and, second, that the established social elites were no longer in control of
the movement for reform. The Association of the Friends of the People
formed by Charles Grey in 1792, was an attempt to assert common interests
between the Whigs and the radical societies and to sustain the long-standing
Whig commitment to reform. It could never control the direction of reform.
What it was safe for an educated and propertied elite to debate in the
1780s became, especially after the outbreak of war in February 1793, unsafe
and threatening when proposed by corresponding societies and other
organisations supported by working people.

Repression?
Pitt’s government moved swiftly against the threat posed by these new
societies and by the publications they produced. Fresh legislation
restricting freedom of speech, writing and assembly was passed in most
parliamentary sessions from 1792 to 1801. In May and December 1792
two royal proclamations were issued against what were called ‘seditious
writings’. The Habeas Corpus Amendment Act was suspended from
May 1794 to July 1795 and suspended again from 1798–1801. The
practical effect was that the authorities could arrest anyone on suspicion
of having committed a crime and detain them indefinitely without
bringing specific charges.
Harvest failures and economic depression combined with increased
political consciousness in 1794–5 to produce the largest amount of popular
unrest in the decade. After George III’s coach was attacked as the King
went to open a new session of parliament in October 1795, Pitt introduced
new legislation, the Seditious Meetings and Treasonable Practices Acts.
Known as the ‘Two Acts’, the first prohibited the calling of political meetings
without authorisation by a magistrate and the second defined treason so
loosely that, as Fox sardonically observed, any politician advocating a measure
of parliamentary reform—however mild—was liable to arrest under its
provisions. In 1797, legislation was passed in response to two naval mutinies
at Spithead and the Nore. It strengthened penalties for attempts to
undermine allegiance to the authorities and administering unlawful oaths.
In 1798 a Defence of the Realm Act was passed which required county-
by-county information about the number of able-bodied men who would
volunteer to defend the country. In 1799 and 1800, all forms of
‘combination’ by working men in trades unions were formally prohibited.
Did all of this amount to a policy of repression? Foxite Whigs certainly
thought so, frequently complaining about the government’s unwarranted
attacks on personal liberty.They challenged the Two Acts almost clause by

57
clause in parliament. Fox called for peaceful protest against them throughout
the country in the form of petitions. More than 130,000 signatures were
collected.An important school of history writing, including J.L. and Barbara
Hammond before the First World War, G.D.H. Cole in the 1930s, and
E.P.Thompson in the 1960s, has taken a similar line. For Thompson, the
1790s were the crucial decade in the process whereby working people
discovered a distinctive voice raised in protest against the ruling elite on
their journey to becoming an ‘English Working Class’ (Thompson, 1968).
Even Pitt’s sympathetic biographer called the Seditious Meetings Bill ‘open-
endedly severe’ and the ‘anger’ with which the Two Acts were received
‘real and widespread’ (Ehrman, II, 456, 458).
There is overwhelming evidence, however, not only that government
policies to secure public order and combat the threat of radicalism were
strongly supported by the mass of propertied opinion, but that what might
be termed ‘popular conservatism’ was a significant development during the
1790s. In many towns, loyalist associations attracted far more members than
did radical ones. After 1794, armed volunteer companies were formed up
and down the land. They attracted substantial support not only from
landowners and the upper middle classes but also from far more modest
property owners, such as small shopkeepers. Radicals were frequently the
target of popular abuse and outright persecution, whether orchestrated by
local magistrates or not.The Mayor of Nottingham, for example, encouraged
anti-radical riots; he also authorised vigorous searches of houses occupied by
radicals to trace incriminating evidence (Emsley, 1985, 821).The government
developed a spy system which was increasingly active in rooting out
disaffection. In 1795, according to Thompson, the LCS ‘felt itself surrounded
by spies’ (Thompson, 1968, 179). Overall, however, Pitt’s government can
hardly be convicted of instituting a regime of terror—certainly nothing to
compare with the activities of the revolutionary regime in France in the
years 1792–4.Thompson nevertheless portrays its policies as malign:

It has been argued that the bark of the Two Acts was worse than their
bite. The death penalty was never exacted under their provisions…. It
was, of course, the bark which Pitt wanted: fear, spies, watchful magistrates
with undefined powers, the occasional example.
(Thompson, 1968, 161)

The Duke of Portland was a strongly anti-radical Home Secretary after

1794, but his resources were severely limited. The Home Office staff did
not exceed two dozen and Portland was heavily dependent on information
coming to him from fearful loyalist magistrates. The government enacted

58
repressive legislation but used it only fitfully. About 200 prosecutions for
sedition were begun in the 1790s.This was certainly a larger number than
in the 1780s but far fewer than in what might be termed the genuine reign
of terror unleashed on the Jacobites during the rebellions of 1715 and
1745–6 (Emsley, 1985, 822).
The Two Acts were, of course, passed with huge majorities by the property
owners represented in parliament. Only forty-five MPs voted against the
Treasonable Practices Bill in the Commons and only fifty-one against the
Seditious Meetings Bill.The government had no need to whip up support.
Even with only about half the members actually bothering to vote, Pitt
had majorities of around 200. Many property owners undoubtedly feared
a revolution. Even the normally phlegmatic Pitt was concerned. After a
meeting with him in November 1795, Wilberforce noted in his diary: ‘I
see that he expects a civil broil. Never was a time when so loudly called on
to prepare for the worst’ (Emsley, 1979, 48).
The Royal Proclamations against Seditious Writings in 1792 produced
about 500 loyal addresses from towns up and down the country.These had
clearly been signed not only by the magistrates, who had responsibility for
public order anyway, but also by small property owners. Petitions from
Bath, for example, had more than 5,000 signatures, those from Wakefield
and Kidderminster 1,700 (Dickinson, 1989,113).A government-sponsored
society founded by John Reeves in 1792 ‘for the Preservation of Property
against Republicans and Levellers’ has attracted much attention from
historians but it was only one of many such founded both to defend property
and to meet the challenge of the French. Perhaps as many as 2,000 were
established in the 1790s, organised usually by magistrates, Church of England
clergymen and other property owners. As Dickinson suggests, however,
ordinary people also gave their support:

Although the lower orders do not bulk large in the organising committees,
there is abundant evidence to suggest that they attended the initial meetings
setting up these associations, engaged in subsequent loyalist demonstrations,
and supported the loyalist addresses sent to the king.
(Dickinson, 1989, 115)

Patriotism
Clearly a propaganda war was going on for the soul of the nation. In the
‘conservative’ camp the choice was simple.Was the country to be governed
by educated, responsible, practical property owners and men of affairs or

59
by those without any such experience whose heads were filled with
‘theoretical speculations’ and who, at best, had been misled and misguided
by rabble-rousers and ‘levellers’ who took their marching orders from the
country’s major enemy? Though Pitt was obviously concerned with the
overall propaganda strategy, played a major part in drafting the Royal
Proclamations, sat on the so-called ‘Committee of Secrecy’ of 1794 which
marshalled evidence of a ‘Jacobin plot’ against the social and political order
which led to arrests of leading radicals, and took the lead in the campaign
to secure the Two Acts at the end of 1795, he was not usually in charge of
government propaganda. That he left to others, confident that support for
the government’s stand among property owners, and even among many
below that level, was increasing as the war progressed.
Loyalist propaganda had two main objectives: to represent radicals as
dangerous demagogues who were not to be trusted, and to wrest the use of
the word ‘patriot’ from the radicals and appropriate it for the use of those
who upheld the existing order. The most successful series of publications
in the 1790s did precisely this. Hannah Mores Cheap Repository Tracts were
a series of commonsensical rebuttals of Tom Paine, written to be distributed
by the gentry among their labourers. ‘Will Chip’ was Hannah Mores fount
of common sense. Chip easily refuted all of Paine’s supposedly half-baked
ideas and made ordinary folk feel grateful to be governed by such charitable
and enlightened rulers. Her Tracts sold about 2 million copies, compared
with 200,000 for the cheap edition of Part II of The Rights of Man. The
Suffolk Curate William Jones called on John Bull, the mythical embodiment
of Englishness, for the same purpose. His Letters from John Bull warned
against radical politics. Radicals committed ‘Treason to their King and
Ruin to their country’ (Evans, 1996, 53). One of the most successful pro-
government periodicals was Anti-Jacobin, founded in 1798 and edited in its
early years by the young George Canning, then Pitt’s Under-Secretary at
the Foreign Office. Its dominant theme was also patriotism as the proper
response to French pretensions:

For to thy Country’s foes; ’tis Thine to Claim

From Britain’s genuine sons a British fame—
Too long French manners our fair isle disgrac’d
Too long French fashions shamed our native taste.
(Evans, 1995, 226)

The King’s profile was also raised. Until 1789 George III was a highly
controversial figure in British political life. He was frequently vilified and
in 1788 it was widely believed that he had gone mad. He was now reinvented

60
and ‘marketed’ as a symbol of national unity. The old pictures, showing
him as an overweight, bucolic figure with an uncomprehending stare and
markedly lacking royal stature, disappeared except in radical cartoons. New,
flattering, portraits of him were commissioned; they frequently depicted
him as a calm, beneficent figure in military uniform. That by Francis
Bartolozzi painted in 1800 has him in a gilt frame, surrounded by cherubim,
upheld by Britannia, with the Union Flag as a shield, and guarded by a lion
(Colley, 1994, 194). In 1797, George processed through the streets of London
past a huge admiring crowd to give thanks in St Paul’s Cathedral for
important naval victories against the French, Spanish and Dutch (see Chapter
6).The anniversary of George’s accession, 25 October, began to be celebrated
as a feast day. Less flatteringly, but making the same point about national
unity, the cartoonist Richard Newton portrayed the King and William Pitt
as a single two-headed figure both staring steadfastly out against any enemy.
The cartoon is captioned ‘Head—and Brains’.
We may agree that British society became polarised as never before in
the 1790s.Whether ‘radicals’ or ‘conservatives’ emerged victorious is more
controversial. Radical apologists note that the case for parliamentary reform
and attacks on ‘corruption’ took firm root among the lower orders in this
decade. Despite widespread repression by local magistrates and by Pitt’s
hostile government, the flame of reform would never be extinguished. It
would burn ever brighter until a radical Reform Act had to be conceded
in 1832. For some, this was the beginning of a new age of ‘class
consciousness’. Other historians, increasingly numerous in recent years, see
the anti-reformers as the decisive short-term victors.The nation responded
patriotically. French ideas were both ridiculed and condemned; conservatism,
no less than radicalism, became genuinely popular in this period. Certainly,
after the legislation of 1795, radicalism was driven underground. It would
not emerge as anything like a mass movement again until the last years of
the French wars, almost a decade after Pitt’s death.The years 1794–7 were
crucial for Pitt. He fashioned a much stronger anti-radical administration
and enacted legislation which forced radical politics to the margins of
public life.After 1797, with radicalism in retreat and substantial naval victories
at last to report, Pitt could concentrate his energies far more on raising
funds to continue the war against the French.

61
 8
The Importance of Ireland

Trade and Empire

We have already seen (Chapter 5) that Roman Catholic Emancipation,
which Pitt wished to introduce as a necessary adjunct to the Act of Union
between Britain and Ireland, was the occasion of his fall from power in
1801. Ireland, however, played a much more important role in Pitt’s career
than this.Three issues were particularly significant. First, he was anxious to
establish harmonious relations with the Irish parliament. Ireland had achieved
legislative independence in domestic affairs from Shelburne’s government
in July 1782 when the British government had feared a rebellion by Irish
Protestant ‘Volunteers’, following the example of the American colonists.
Second, Ireland became an even more important part of Britain’s trading
empire after the loss of America. The concept of Empire was increasingly
important to the British ruling classes in the second half of the eighteenth
century and Ireland was now at the very core of Britain’s imperial identity.
Furthermore, Pitt inherited considerable Anglo-Irish antagonism which
posed a substantial threat to national recovery.Third, a discontented Ireland
was an open invitation as a ‘backdoor’ for Britain’s enemies. After 1793,
Pitt’s government had to be vigilant against plans for a French invasion
using Ireland as a base.
The situation in Ireland was complex. Its population when Pitt came
to power was 4 million, more than half the population of England, more
than double that of Scotland—and growing rapidly. About 80 per cent of
Ireland’s inhabitants were Roman Catholic. Most of its land, however,
was owned by Protestants, either absentee British aristocrats or the

62
descendants of the English and Scottish Presbyterian settlers of the
seventeenth century. Among the Protestants, supporters of the Church of
Ireland (the name for the Church of England in Ireland) were both socially
and politically dominant. The increasingly prosperous cattle and linen
trades were also Protestant controlled, and dislocations in the linen trade
during the American war had been one of the main reasons for the
formation of the Volunteers. Legislative independence after 1782 was, in
practice, the privilege of perhaps 10 per cent of Ireland’s population.
What would soon be called the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ was, in reality, an
Anglican ascendancy. No Presbyterians sat in the Dublin Parliament.
Catholics were totally excluded; they did not vote for the Irish parliament,
nor could they sit as MPs in Dublin.
Henry Grattan, the radical Dublin lawyer who gave his name to the
Irish parliament of 1782–a misnomer since he never came near to
controlling it—enthused about Ireland as a ‘distinct kingdom’. Its
allegiance remained to the Protestant Hanoverian monarch. Ireland would
be ‘inseparably annexed to the Crown of Great Britain’ (Ehrman, I, 196).
Grattan took it as read that this was a kingdom governed by, and primarily
for the benefit of, its Protestant elite.The so-called ‘Patriots’ he led resented
interference from Britain. They had some sense of Irishness but their
identity was in no sense ‘Gaelic’ or Catholic. ‘The political class continually
emphasised their continuity of tradition and culture with England’ (Foster,
1988, 252).Though its extent differed from region to region within Ireland,
and though there were plenty of poor Protestants in the north of the
country and some wealthy Catholics, especially in Dublin, grinding
poverty was disproportionately a Catholic experience. Opportunities for
Catholic advancement at a time of mounting national prosperity were
limited.
‘Pitt always saw England’s Irish question as a problem of economic
relations’ (Foster, 1988, 253). This judgement is understandable from an
Irish perspective but it is partial. Pitt took over discussions about the
future relationship between Britain and Ireland which had involved North,
Fox and Shelburne in the years 1779–83. All British statesmen agreed on
the increased importance which Ireland now assumed within the empire
after the departure of the American colonies. They were also agreed that
Ireland, in addition to greater internal self-government, should have access
to British trading markets at preferential rates. Out of the profits made by
Irish traders, however, a contribution should be made to the defence of
the Empire.
Pitt’s interest extended beyond ‘economic relations’ because he placed
such store on effective Anglo-Irish co-operation. He differed from his

63
immediate predecessors, however, in the thoroughgoing nature of his
proposals.These linked trade with both defence and the vested interests of
the government in Ireland in an attempt to provide ‘permanent tranquillity’
there. Though no religious zealot, and temperamentally averse to
discrimination, Pitt was prepared to consolidate Protestant domination in
Ireland. He offered the Dublin parliament ‘a prudent and temperate reform
of Parliament’ which would show regard ‘to the interests and even prejudices
of individuals who are concerned, and may unite the Protestant interest in
excluding the Catholics from any share in the representation or the government
of the country’ (Ehrman, I, 200).
Pitt’s proposals of 1785 in effect anticipated free trade between Britain
and Ireland and, from the increased benefits which Irish traders would
thereby enjoy, money for imperial defence.The theme of imperial strength
was emphasised in his speech to the Commons:

Adopt then, adopt that system of trade with Ireland that will have tended
to enrich one part of the empire without impoverishing the other, while
it gives strength to both…. Of all the objects of my political life, this is
in my opinion the most important that I shall have engaged in.
(Stanhope, I, 267–8)

The Irish hated the idea of forcible contribution to the British defence
budget, likening it ominously to George Grenville’s ill-starred proposals to
tax the American colonies in the 1760s. They also favoured positive
discrimination in favour of their own products rather than free trade with
Britain. British manufacturers were scarcely more charmed. A General
Chamber of Manufacturers was formed in March 1785 to organise against
what it saw as a new threat from Ireland, especially to England’s wool
trade. There was considerable irony in the fact that its first chairman was
the Staffordshire master potter, Josiah Wedgwood, a political reformer and
a man whose great fortune depended in no small measure on exploiting
increased trade opportunities in Europe. Assailed on both sides, Pitt
resentfully withdrew his proposals. Ehrman called this ‘Pitt’s most serious
failure in his first two years in office’ (Ehrman, I, 213). However, Anglo-
Irish relations became more harmonious on the back of substantially
increased trade in both countries. The value of Irish linen exports (mostly
to Britain) trebled in the years 1781–92 while a protective Corn Law
passed by the Dublin parliament further encouraged the production of
Irish grain for British markets. It is significant that Dublin was willing to
reduce its own tariffs to the levels agreed by the Eden Trade Treaty with
France (see Chapter 4) and also passed a Navigation Act in 1787 which

64
closely mirrored the British Act passed a year earlier (Christie, 1982, 203).
The Irish parliament was, however, prepared to use its independence on
occasion. Its majority was closer to Fox than Pitt and, in early 1789, Dublin
actually invested the Prince of Wales with the title of Regent while Pitt
was desperately playing for time in London (see Chapter 7).

Radicalism and rebellion

As in Britain, the impact of the French Revolution transformed affairs in
Ireland. It inspired reformers whose agenda went far beyond the cautious
objectives of the Volunteers. Irish Reformers had two main objectives: an
enhanced sense of separate national consciousness, and democracy. Neither
remotely appealed to parliament in either London or Dublin. Nationalism,
interestingly, was a non-sectarian cause in the 1790s.Two societies of ‘United
Irishmen’ were founded in October and November 1791. The first was
centred on Belfast and led by the Dublin lawyer Theobold Wolfe Tone; its
first adherents were mostly Presbyterian and middle-class: drapers, linen
manufacturers, shipbrokers and the like.The second, founded in Dublin by
the ironmonger and land agent Napper Tandy, was predominantly Catholic.
The societies had a common purpose.The Resolutions of the Belfast society
roundly declared:

That the weight of English influence in the government of this country

is so great, as to require a cordial union, among ALL THE PEOPLE OF
IRELAND…no reform is practicable, efficacious, or just, which does
not include Irishmen of every religious persuasion.
(Dickinson, 1989, 87)

These Irish radicals bought The Rights of Man as avidly as did their British
counterparts (see Chapter 7) and they also imbibed its severely rationalist
message. Noting that a key objective of the French revolutionaries had
been the destruction of Church power, they aimed similarly to educate the
people and reduce the influence of ‘superstition’ whether peddled by
Anglican vicars or Roman Catholic priests. Converting an illiterate peasantry
to sophisticated rationalist goals was a tall order and it is no surprise that
poor Catholics in the rural areas should react to worsening economic
conditions and food shortages with agrarian violence. Nor were they
inclined to sacrifice a lifelong allegiance to their priests because of the
power of Tom Paine s writing or the articles in Northern Star, the United
Irishmen’s newspaper, published from 1792–7.

65
 By 1792 sufficient evidence of widespread disaffection in Ireland
existed to sound alarm bells in Britain. Pitt and Dundas urged the Irish
parliament towards concessions to the majority Catholic community
which would ‘keep everything quiet for a time’ (Ehrman, II, 222). Pitt
had responded to Catholic pressure in England in 1791 by promoting a
Catholic Relief Act. This removed a string of obsolete penalties while
enabling Catholics who took an Oath of Allegiance to hold a number of
local offices and to practise as lawyers. He wished to see at least equivalent
legislation for Ireland, though preferably in extended form given the size
and disquiet of the Catholic majority there. He met with fierce resistance
from the Protestant Ascendancy. The Chief Secretary, Robert Hobert,
voiced the fears of many that political concessions to Catholics would
upset the delicate balance in the country and threaten those upon whose
loyalty the government most depended.
In the event, two Bills were passed into law, but not without much arm-
twisting of members of the Irish parliament which left a sense of lingering
resentment, even betrayal, within the Protestant Ascendancy. In 1792, Irish
Catholics were permitted to practise law, to act as school-teachers and to
employ apprentices in trade.After further agitation, the Act of 1793 allowed
Catholics to vote in parliamentary elections and to hold a number of civil
and military offices, although not the most senior or influential. Catholics
were still not permitted to become members of parliament.
One more, highly controversial, attempt to loosen political restrictions
on Roman Catholics was made in 1795.As part of the political deal brokered
between Pitt and Portland in 1794, Earl Fitzwilliam, a Portland Whig who
supported religious toleration, was appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland.
His tenure of the office was brief. Despite promising the government in
London that he would not remodel the Irish administration, he quickly
sacked the influential anti-Catholic commissioner of revenue, John Beresford,
and then clearly indicated his support for a new Catholic relief bill
introduced into the Irish parliament by Grattan. Pitt, who during a brief
lull in the agitation within Ireland had probably not been paying sufficient
attention to how Fitzwilliam was operating, was forced to order his recall.
He was replaced immediately by Pitt’s close friend, the much more amenable
Lord Camden. Pitt’s handling of the Fitzwilliam affair was one of his biggest
political misjudgements. He was open to Fox’s accusation that it represented
‘the most insulting display of the dependence of the Irish legislature’ and
proof of the country’s ‘state of degradation’ (Evans, 1996, 100). It also
alienated moderate reformers, who considered Fitzwilliam’s recall as a
betrayal of trust. Many Catholics now calculated that they had no alternative
but to support the United Irishmen. When popular agitation mounted in

66
1795 and 1796, Pitt was forced to give full support to the Protestant
Ascendancy. The Fitzwilliam episode is a significant factor in the events
which culminated in the Irish rebellion of 1798 (see p. 68).
Measures of Catholic relief could anyway not solve the major problem
of growing disaffection in Ireland. From 1793, when Britain went to war
with France, the volume of correspondence between Irish radicals and the
revolutionaries in Paris mounted alarmingly. Meanwhile, secret societies of
Catholic ‘Defenders’ and Protestant ‘Peep o’ Day boys’ perpetrated
numerous rural atrocities. Conflict between these sectarian societies grew
and in September 1795 an offshoot of the Peep o’ Day agitators formed
themselves into the Orange Order. The Order celebrated the triumph of
the Protestant William III (William of Orange) over the Catholic James II
at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and was dedicated to sustaining Protestant
supremacy by almost any means. From 1795, it was clear that—to the horror
of men like Tone—sectarianism had replaced rationalist radicalism as the
dominant force in Irish popular politics.
From Pitt’s perspective, however, the main danger from the mid–1790s
was not sectarianism but French invasion of Britain from Ireland. This
was Tone’s objective in direct negotiations with the French Directory to
support an Irish rebellion against British control. In December 1796,
more than 14,000 French troops were sent under the command of one
of the republic’s best generals, Lazare Hoche.The expedition foundered
on a combination of bad luck (including devastating storms in Bantry
Bay) and bad planning.The United Irishmen were insufficiently ready to
offer the support the French thought they would receive, which led to
mutual recrimination. Nevertheless, the very size of the French
commitment (one of the largest expeditionary forces of the war) was
indicative of the importance they attached to it.Too late, as it turned out,
the expedition gave heart to the United Irishmen, whose numbers and
menace alike increased.
The British government took over responsibility for pacifying Ireland,
though the brutal work of General Lake in Ulster in 1797–8, using
predominantly Irish militia, was almost certainly counterproductive. Its
efficient spy system penetrated many plots and hampered preparations
for rebellion, especially in the south of Ireland. Nevertheless, the United
Irishmen were able to mount some kind of insurrection, albeit disjointed,
poorly co-ordinated and weakly supported by local communities. During
May and June 1798, four separate outbreaks took place, around Dublin
and in County Antrim, County Wexford and Connacht. Government
troops dealt capably with each of them and the insurrection’s leaders,
Henry Joy McCracken and Henry Munro, were among the 1,500

67
executed as part of severe reprisals. Significantly, when a French force
led by General Humbert surrendered to the authorities at Ballinamuck
(Co. Mayo) in September, the authorities accepted the French surrender
peaceably, but they massacred about 2,000 Irish supporters of the rising.
Tone, arriving in Ireland with a small force in September long after the
main action was over, was captured and took his own life before he
could be executed. United Irish bitterness and hostility to the British
did not die with him.

Union
The immediate occasion of Pitt’s decision to end the life of the Irish
parliament was the insurrection of 1798. The very day after he heard of
the first rising, he enquired of Camden: ‘Cannot Crushing the Rebellion
be followed by an Act appointing Commissioners to treat for an Union?’
(Ehrman, III, 170). However, the insurrection only furnished ultimate
proof that the Dublin parliament could not provide the order and
tranquillity necessary for British, as well as Irish, security during a bloody
war. A number of earlier issues had progressively destroyed the Prime
Minister’s faith in the constitutional experiment begun in 1782. It might
be argued that the rebuff of his trade and defence proposals as far back
as 1785 sowed the seeds, despite the fact that they were rejected in
London as well as Dublin. Certainly, when discussions on the country
took place, he was inclined to refer to ‘the unlucky Subject of Ireland’
(Ehrman, II, 430–1). A politician accustomed to success is prone to
linger over failures, and their lessons, less than might be wise. So with
Pitt and Ireland. He had large schemes for sustaining an imperial vision
based on mutual harmony and reciprocity between the two countries.
When these were baulked, his reactions were often less than generous
or constructive.
His patience with the Ascendancy had worn thin before 1795 and
events between 1795 and 1798 were profoundly disillusioning. He believed
that a more flexible administration would have prevented the growth of
mass support for the United Irishmen and that a better informed one
would have been in a stronger position, if not to head off, then at least to
deal effectively with the constant threat of French intervention. As it was,
far too much of Britain’s increasingly stretched resources were being put
into the defence of Britain’s back door when they could have been more
effectively deployed in Europe, North Africa or the Caribbean. There is
no reason to doubt that Lord Cornwallis’s withering contempt for the
Ascendancy after he took over as Lord Lieutenant in 1798 was shared by

68
Pitt himself.When he addressed the Commons on the subject of legislative
union in January 1799 his condemnation of the old order was apparent:
‘I say also, that much of the evil which Ireland now labours under, arises
unavoidably from the condition of the Parliament of that country’
(Ehrman, III, 182).
The major obstacle to political union, of course, lay not in London
(where only twenty-five votes were cast against it in the Commons) but
in Dublin. Far too many political careers, patronage appointments and
opportunities for advancement within the Protestant Ascendancy were
at risk for there to be anything but the strongest opposition. Pitt overbore
it using not the methods of a reforming administrator or statesman but
what US politicians would later call ‘pork-barrel’ politics. Using the
enthusiastic talents of a new Chief Secretary, the young Irishman Viscount
Castlereagh, and the much older Lord Lieutenant, Lord Cornwallis, Pitt
bribed the Dublin parliament into surrendering its authority while
attempting to conciliate the Catholic majority with talk of further
concessions, and perhaps even the full emancipation which had been
denied in 1793 and 1795 (see p. 66).
Grattan s commentary on this is well known:

How did they pass the Union?

By perjury and fraud;
By slaves who sold their land for gold
As Judas sold his God.
(Ehrman, III, 187)

But he protested too much. In truth, Cornwallis and Castlereagh were only
using against it the self-same methods of patronage and acquiescence which
had cemented not only Grattan’s parliament but those which had preceded
it. Nevertheless, the cost was high.Thirteen new Irish peerages were created—
many of them going to men uncommitted to Union, though not usually
openly hostile—and four British peerages were bestowed on Irish peers.
Since only 100 Irish seats in the lower house were transferred to Westminster,
many boroughs had to be disfranchised—at an average cost to the British
exchequer of £15,000 per seat and a total cost of £1.5 million.
Opponents of Union fought a tenacious battle but an issue which had
produced virtual dead heats in January 1799 was producing parliamentary
majorities in the forties in early 1800. The Act of Union, creating ‘a
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’, received the royal assent
in July 1800 and came into operation on 1 January 1801. In addition to
the 100 MPs in the Commons, the Union added twenty-eight peers and

69
four bishops to the House of Lords. The system of government and
administration for Ireland was largely retained, with a Chief Secretary,
appointed by the Crown, acting as chief executive. Last-minute concessions
saw some tariffs remain while the Irish exchequer was not united with
the British until 1816.
The key unresolved issue, of course, was Catholic Emancipation.
Cornwallis was known to be sympathetic while, in Britain, Pitt and Dundas
both believed that a Union without emancipation would remove one of
the pillars most likely to secure the loyalty of the majority population in
Ireland. Pro-Union politicians in Ireland were generally careful to avoid
promising emancipation, though many Catholics inferred it to be a likely
consequence. The King’s position, however, was well known (see Chapter
5) and, apparently, implacable. Since Pitt could not be sure of a majority for
emancipation within his Cabinet, the King’s resolve was never tested.
Ireland’s fate was to remain yoked for more than a century in a Union that
became increasingly, and violently, unacceptable. Pitt’s vision of a harmonious
and genuinely ‘United’ kingdom was stillborn.

70
 9
The Closing Years, 1801–6

Out of office
Pitt was out of office from March 1801 to May 1804, during which time
Henry Addington held the office of Prime Minister. Although Addington
was held in high regard by Pitt, who had first recommended him to the
King as a sound replacement when he considered resignation during the
dark days of 1797 (see Chapter 6), George’s appointment of the Speaker of
the Commons excited much ribald comment. Addington was considered
as a political lightweight. Snobbish aristocrats also poured scorn on his
middle-class origins by calling him ‘the Doctor’ (his father’s occupation).
Fox saw the appointment as further proof that the King still pulled the
strings and controlled the executive. The ever-waspish George Canning
coined a characteristically cruel put-down of the new Prime Minister in
the journal The Oracle:

Pitt is to Addington
As London to Paddington.
(Stanhope, IV, 60)

Pitt hoped that the political transition would be smooth and he had no
intention of criticising the incoming ministry. He took comfort from the
fact that the new government contained a number of his own men, who
intended to follow broadly ‘Pittite’ policies. Among the heavyweights,
Portland remained, though quickly reshuffled from the Home Office to
the less important office of Lord President. The strongly anti-Catholic

71
Lord Eldon, who had been Pitt’s Attorney General, now became Lord
Chancellor. Pitt also welcomed two promotions from the younger
generation of his ministers: Hawkesbury (from 1803, Lord Liverpool)
became Foreign Secretary immediately, while Castlereagh (see Chapter
8) came into the mainstream of British politics as Secretary of the Board
of Control in 1802. Such personnel seemed to justify Pitt’s intention to
give ‘the fullest Support to the Formation and to the Ministers of any
Administration composed of Persons acting upon the same General
Principles as I had done’ (Ehrman, III, 552).
In truth, things were not so rosy.Though it could hardly be foreseen at
the time, Pitt’s resignation inaugurated a damaging period of political
instability which would encompass five ministries in eleven years. This
instability remained until Lord Liverpool, reluctantly appointed Prime
Minister by the Prince Regent in 1812, was recognised as secure at the
very end of the Napoleonic Wars. The root of the problem, which grew
during the next decade, was the division which opened up when Pitt
resigned. His two right-hand men, Dundas and Grenville, also went out
of office with him. Both were by 1801 supporters of his Catholic
Emancipation policy. Pitt’s apparently secure government had therefore,
in practice, split between pro-and anti-Catholics. Most of the former
group left office in 1801; most of the latter stayed on with Addington. As
‘Pittites’ increasingly accepted the label ‘Tory’ after Pitt’s death, the
Catholic question continued to threaten cohesion and party unity long
after their master’s death.
Pitt’s period on the backbenches was brief but eventful.The first
major issue on which he had to take a stand was the peace terms
being negotiated by the new government and which became the Treaty
of Amiens in 1802. This was severely criticised by those most opposed
to revolutionary France.Their reasoning was simple: Britain had fought
a long, expensive and arduous war, winning numerous colonial
possessions in the process. Addington’s peace returned them all, with
the exception of Trinidad and Ceylon, in exchange for what its
opponents considered only paltry concessions by the French in
mainland Europe. Windham, in particular, was apoplectic at the new
government’s supine negotiating stance. Pitt’s old Foreign Secretary,
Grenville, called it ‘most miserably defective…an act of weakness of
humiliation’ (Ehrman, III, 558). At least in public, Pitt remained loyal
to his successor. He admitted to disappointment on strategic grounds
that the Cape of Good Hope had been handed back to the Dutch.
For the rest, he suggested to the Commons that the peace refrained
from humiliating either of the main parties and was ‘prudent’. As

72
such, it might prove a lasting settlement which also protected Britain’s
essential security (Ehrman, III, 563).
Pitt’s public judgement was rapidly proved wrong, of course. Britain
returned to war with France in May 1803 and, from that point, the clamour
grew for him to return and lead the nation. Even during the brief peace,
however, Addington’s ministry was being sniped at by many of the old
Pittite connection. The most important of these was Grenville who, with
his equally impatient brothers, could not wait to bring Addington down.
Pitt’s reluctance to be stampeded into action, no less than his Olympian
position that he would consider returning to office only as Prime Minister
and only in response to the clearest summons from King and country,
caused considerable friction with his old ally.
Addington was aware that his position was weakening. He was not a
good speaker himself and his ministry could muster only limited debating
talent. He retained important advantages. He could normally count on
secure majorities in the Commons, he retained the confidence of the King,
and he suffered no loss of support in the general election of 1802.
Nevertheless, he felt vulnerable, particularly as the peace seemed more
fragile with every passing month. He was perhaps more sensitive than he
need have been. He used the breathing space afforded by the brief peace
wisely. Britain returned to war in 1803 much better prepared and more
securely defended than had been the case in 1793 (see Chapter 6).
Addington’s control of financial strategy suggested overall competence,
though Pitt’s forensic skill revealed his lack of understanding of the precise
detail. Above all, Addington felt uncomfortable with Pitt’s presence on the
sidelines.This was understandable.The two men had had a warm relationship
for much of the 1790s, but never one of equality. Pitt patronised the Speaker
of the Commons, though never maliciously or probably even intentionally.
Unable to convey authority or command in the Commons, Addington
was sure that most political insiders considered him at best a passable stop-
gap. At one point in 1802 he even suggested that Pitt return as Prime
Minister while he remained in a senior, but subordinate, capacity. Pitt refused
to countenance the idea since it would smack of ‘backstairs dealing’, would
annoy the King and would certainly demean his own reputation as national
leader. Out of office, Pitt seems to have become more sensitive about his
reputation and his place in history. He contrived to give the impression
that if the call to office were to come again, it would have to come from a
weightier figure than ‘Doctor’ Addington. Relations between the two men
inevitably soured and Pitt’s original pledge to maintain support for the
new ministry began to be tested. During 1803, he adopt an increasingly
‘oppositionist’ stance.

73
 The return of war and the return of Mr Pitt
The resumption of hostilities with France quickly weakened the Addington
administration. Soon the vultures were hovering. Fox, long absent from the
Commons, began to stir himself again.The Grenvilles continued to scheme
for Addington’s downfall, and moved ever closer to an alliance with Fox
and his supporters in order to achieve this objective. Addington himself
was conscientious but dull and the absence of patriotic orators on the
government benches in time of war told against him. Support from
independent MPs began to drain away. By contrast, Pitt was making inspiring
wartime orations. In a speech to the Commons on 22 July 1803, Pitt used
apocalyptic tones to rouse parliamentary opinion to the continuation of a
war which had already demanded so much:

We must recollect…what it is we have at stake, what it is we have to

contend for. It is for our property, it is for our liberty, it is for our
independence, nay for our existence as a nation; it is for our character, it
is for our very name as Englishmen, it is for everything dear and valuable
to man on this side of the grave.

Only Pitt’s reluctance to mount open opposition kept Addington in office

in the autumn and winter of 1803–4. Once again, Grenville suggested to
Pitt a direct assault on a ‘manifestly incapable’ government (Mitchell, 1992,
207). Once again, Pitt refused to take the bait. By January 1804, however,
he had devised his own personal strategy. He decided to attack Addington
on the subject of defence in general and naval administration in particular.
His parliamentary attacks had the desired result and by March it was clear
that the ministry could not survive. Government majorities, previously
secure, began to dwindle alarmingly in both houses. As often happened
when change was in the air, the number of MPs turning up to record their
vote in big divisions increased and majorities in the twenties when 400–50
MPs were voting in the Commons were not enough to provide political
security in wartime. By April 1804 it was clear that Addington was preparing
to give up the prime ministership. For a time, he harboured hopes that Pitt
would find a place for him in a reconstituted ministry, but was quickly
disabused. He did, however, receive the salve of a peerage, becoming
ennobled as Viscount Sidmouth.
What kind of ministry would replace Addington’s was the subject of
much speculation and gossip. Grenville, Fox and their supporters had made
most of the running against Addington during 1803 and now hoped to
reap their reward. Pitt was able to capitalise on his own hard-earned public

74
reputation as guardian of the nation’s interests in both peace and war. He
had also regained the support of the King. As the Earl of Moira reported,
with these advantages, Pitt would ‘never be subordinate in any Cabinet’
(Ehrman, III, 639). Nevertheless, he seems genuinely to have wanted to
lead a broad-based administration. The prospect of a wartime coalition
including, if not Fox, then certainly Fox’s supporters as well as Grenville, in
addition to most of those who had served in his previous government, had
a strong appeal. He produced a long memorandum in which he argued for
a ‘comprehensive system’ (Ehrman, III, 654).
The King, recently recovered from yet another bout of mental instability,
blew Pitt’s scheme apart. He threatened to withdraw any offer for Pitt to
head an administration if Fox, or even Fox’s men, came into government.
Grenville had now moved so close to Fox that both he and his supporters
considered such a precondition unacceptable. If Fox could not come in,
neither would the Grenvillites. Forced to make a choice between forming
a government with a narrower base than he wished, or considered wise,
and rejecting the King’s commission, Pitt chose to take office on the King’s
terms, rather than press his own and prolong ministerial uncertainty. The
Foxites interpreted his decision as yet one more example not only of the
King’s political influence but also of Pitt’s subservience to it.They interpreted
Pitt’s overtures to them as mere duplicity.They were wrong. Pitt’s need for
a broad-based administration exactly matched his desire to form one. He
knew that the ministry he formed in May 1804, based on his old supporters,
but shorn of Grenville and his friends, was likely to be weak. A week later
Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself Emperor of the French and prepared
to wage aggressive war. He was determined to rectify the one significant
setback to French plans in the previous decade: a successful invasion of
England. The tone of Pitt’s second administration was already set.

Coda in a minor key

John Ehrman calls Pitt’s last administration ‘An Impaired Ministry’. It is a
fair assessment and one which Pitt himself would almost certainly have
accepted. His last twenty months in office, in truth, were an unworthy
coda to what had gone before. His ministry was never secure at home. In
foreign affairs, the unceasing search for allies seemed to have been successful,
only for one of them to suffer among the most crushing and decisive of
Napoleon’s victories.
As we have seen, Addington’s ministry had not been particularly
talented. Shorn of the support of the Grenvillites, Pitt could not fashion
a significantly stronger one. Even his personal direction seemed to count

75
for less, not least because his health—never robust—had been giving rise
to growing concern since the turn of the century. From the old ministry,
Addington (now Sidmouth) departed; Portland, Camden, Eldon and
Westmorland remained. So, for a time, did Dundas (who had been
ennobled as Lord Melville in 1802).The younger Pittites were represented
by Castlereagh (at the Board of Control), Hawkesbury (Home Secretary)
and, chafing in minor office as Treasurer of the Navy, George Canning—
the most talented, but the most disenchanted, of them. Both Hawkesbury
and Castlereagh were poor speakers and the new Foreign Secretary, Lord
Harrowby, was not much better. The new ministry did not lack for level
heads and administrative ability but it was short of good debaters. It also
lacked either weight or experience in the most senior positions. A revived
and embittered opposition faced it unpersuaded of the need to continue
the war and ready to criticise Pitt’s policies for their lack of judgement
and extravagance.
By the autumn of 1804, Pitt’s Commons majorities were sometimes in
the twenties or thirties, hardly larger than Addington’s when commentators
had begun to predict his overthrow. Parliamentary arithmetic and the fact
that, as Camden put it, an uneasy government seemed to be able only to
‘scramble thro’ the Business of the Country’ (Ehrman, III, 717) lay behind
Pitt’s reluctant decision to invite Sidmouth back into government. With
him came Lord Hobart (Secretary for War in Addington’s government and
now succeeded to his father’s peerage as Earl of Buckinghamshire). Pitt
was anxious not so much for these less than starry names than for the thirty
or so parliamentary votes they brought with them.
Even these votes were won at a heavy price. Sidmouth failed to support
Pitt in early 1805 over accusations of financial impropriety levied against
Viscount Melville. These resulted from detailed enquiries about
malpractice during his unusually long tenure–1782–3 and 1784–1801–
of the office of Treasurer of the Navy. Melville had never been popular in
parliament. He was, for one thing, an able Scot at a time when the
combination aroused suspicion, or worse, in England (Colley, 1994).
Furthermore, his heavy-handed control over most of the forty-five Scottish
MPs was widely resented. His many detractors thus considered him a
particularly juicy target. A rather sordid affair, which the Foxite Whigs in
general and Samuel Whitbread, one of their most trenchant orators, in
particular enjoyed, ended with Melville’s trial by the House of Lords. He
was not to be acquitted until 1807, long after his enforced resignation
from the government, which took place in May 1805. An enfeebled and
internally divided ministry lacked the power to keep one of its most
effective, though tainted, ministers in office.

76
 It is a measure of the paucity of talent available to Pitt that Melville
was replaced by Lord Barham. As Charles Middleton he had been a
distinguished naval administrator in the 1780s, but he was now 78 years
of age. Melville’s abilities, if not his personality, were sorely missed. Even
the choice of Barham was not without damaging consequences. Pitt had
refused to appoint Sidmouth’s favoured candidate, Buckinghamshire, to
the vacancy. Sidmouth was further annoyed that, since Barham was a
relative of Melville, the appointment might suggest to backbenchers
evidence of inadequate government contrition. The consequence was
that both Sidmouth and Buckinghamshire resigned, leaving Pitt by the
autumn of 1805 no more favourably placed on the domestic front than
he had been in January.
If events at home were uncomfortable in the autumn of 1805, those
abroad were little short of disastrous, at least on the European mainland
where Napoleon’s troops were again rampant. Pitt’s foreign policy was
dominated, as in the 1790s, by the need to find reliable allies in the struggle
against France. This was a laborious, and frequently frustrating, process.
Allies were always likely to demand more than Pitt was prepared to give
and he knew, from bitter experience, that they could readily be prised
apart by an aggressive enemy. So it proved in 1805. The year had begun
promisingly. After much diplomatic scurrying, an alliance with Russia was
signed in April. By it,Tsar Alexander I promised to raise half a million men
and Britain agreed, yet again, to provide subsidies for the allies. In August,
Austria joined the coalition, though its price—a £3 million subsidy from
Britain—meant a further 3d (1¼p) on the income tax.
Money, however, could not buy victory.The late summer and autumn
saw an almost triumphal progress by Napoleon’s armies through central
Europe. Napoleon had already accepted the throne of Italy in May and
he annexed Genoa the following month. In late September, he crossed
the Rhine and in October the Danube in search of the Austrian army
under General Mack. He defeated it at Ulm in late October and, yet
more decisively, at Austerlitz at the beginning of December. Pitt’s alliance
system fell apart almost immediately.Austria signed an immediate armistice
with France. Prussia, which had been negotiating a treaty with Russia to
come into the war against France, now pulled back and, before Christmas,
signed an alliance with Napoleon. Both British and Russian troops were
in retreat.
As so often, salvation—or, as it must have seemed to Pitt at the end of
1805, welcome respite—came at sea. The one beneficial consequence of
Pitt’s alliance strategy was that Napoleon was forced to withdraw troops
massing near Boulogne for an invasion of England and put them into combat

77
against Austria.This fatally unbalanced his plans.The day after his victory at
Ulm, these lay in ruins after Nelson’s famous destruction of the Franco-
Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar. On one reading, therefore, the fateful year
1805 ended in stalemate. British subsidies notwithstanding, Napoleon’s
grip on continental Europe appeared unshakable. However, the British
navy had secured the British Isles against invasion. Britain could at least
enjoy the bleak luxury of preventing total Napoleonic victory. It was difficult,
however, to see how this essentially defensive achievement could be
converted into a British victory.
Undoubtedly, the events of the year placed yet more strain on Pitt’s
fragile constitution. He had long been prone to bouts of sickness and to
gout severe in a man of his age. Always a copious drinker, and frequently
drinking alone, his resort to port and madeira now, both for their fortifying
and their analgesic properties, only made things worse. In December 1805,
he was at fashionable Bath, taking the waters for their allegedly restorative
properties.They failed to restore. By early January 1806, he had summoned
his personal physician, Dr Walter Farqhuar, who found him ‘much emaciated,
very weak, feeble & low’ (Ehrman, III, 821). Confirmation of the Austrian
defeat at Austerlitz, which did not reach Pitt until 3 January, seemed to
have exacerbated the stomach and bowel problems which dogged him for
much of his adult life.
His return to London took four days and weakened him still further. By
mid-January his doctor’s concern had turned to alarm; those closest to him
began to realise that he was not likely to recover. His friend and old tutor,
Bishop Tomline (whom Pitt had only recently failed to have elevated to
the Archbishopric of Canterbury, in another demonstration that, in religious
matters, George III’s preferences and prejudices could still override the
views of a Prime Minister) wanted to administer holy communion on 22
January but Pitt refused, saying that he lacked the strength. Pitt’s own
religious faith was never prominent; a later age might have categorised him
as agnostic. It is not clear whether, in extremis, Pitt was evading the religious
issue. Whichever, Tomline’s offer of the rite demonstrated clearly enough
that all hope had gone. Some of Pitt’s last day was spent in dictating a will.
Characteristically for a man whose private life was often spectacularly
disorganised, such a document had not been compiled before.The younger
Pitt died in his sleep during the early hours of 23 January, at the age of 46
years and 8 months. For more than two-fifths of his life he had been Prime
Minister of Great Britain.

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 10
Conclusion and Assessment

Pitt and contemporary opinion

Pitt was 46 years old when he died. He had been directing the nation’s
affairs almost to the end and the extent of his rapid decline had not
been widely reported. News of his death therefore came as a great
shock. Grey and Canning were only two leading politicians, from
opposite ends of the Westminster spectrum, who were aghast when
they heard. When the Speaker of the House of Commons announced
consideration of a proposal to erect a memorial to him ‘The silence
was death-like, and several of the hardiest oppositionists said it was like
an electrical shock upon the House, and that they could hardly breathe’
(Ehrman, III, 830). His old rival Charles James Fox, whose own death
would occur less than eight months later, was reported as finding
‘something missing in the world—a chasm or blank that cannot be
supplied’. He had doubtless temporarily forgotten the cruel judgement
he offered when told the previous month that Pitt was very ill. He
‘should be very sorry to have Pitt escape in such a manner from the
complete disgrace that must at last befall him’ as a result of fundamentally
misjudged policies. He refused to vote for the Commons motion to
pay off Pitt s personal debts because the motion included the judgement
that Pitt had been ‘an excellent statesman’. If the motion

had been proposed to remedy these pecuniary difficulties which Mr

Pitt had incurred in the course of his political life—if it had been
proposed to do those things for his relations which his own acknowledged

79
 disinterestedness did not allow him to do…I would most willingly
consent that all this should be done in the most liberal manner.
(Stanhope, IV, 392)

Within the Westminster circle, Pitt was respected by political friend and
foe alike. In a letter written to her son on the day of Pitt’s death, the
Duchess of Devonshire repeated the by now standard Whig charge that
Pitt came into office only on the illegitimate authority of the King but her
enthusiasm for his use of the spoken word was unstinting:

Mr Pitt’s fault as an Englishman and statesman was that he came into

place against the constitution and supported himself in place by exercising
the power of the throne…his eloquence was so great he could explain
even ev’ry disaster into almost the contrary. His choice of words was
perfect, his voice beautiful, and his way of putting aside the question
when he chose, and fascinating the minds of men, extraordinary.

His old Cambridge friend, and would-be conscience,William Wilberforce,

commented on his

clear and comprehensive view of the most complicated subject in all

its relations…fairness of mind which disposes a man to follow out,
and when overtaken to recognise the truth; magnanimity, which made
him ready to change his measures when he thought the good of his
country required it…willingness to give a fair hearing to all that could
be urged against his own opinions…personal purity, disinterestedness,
integrity.
(Ehrman, III, 844–5)

We should not be entirely blinded by views expressed immediately after

an unexpected death. The Foxites may have grudgingly respected Pitt’s
abilities but they were usually happy to blacken his character. Not only had
he kept them out of office for years; they believed he had done so by being
subservient to a King who threatened the constitution. He was no true
Whig and not to be trusted. Private correspondence about him could be
caustic. For Grey, Pitt was ‘a mean low minded Dog’. For Fox, he was ‘not
a man capable of acting fairly & on a footing of equality with his Equals’
(Mitchell, 1992, 213).
The radical press (see Chapter 7), was no more charitable. One of the
most gifted of spokesmen for the poor was William Cobbett, whose Political
Register became the most popular and influential radical journal of the

80
day. Until 1804, Cobbett had been a Tory.The dyspeptic assessment which
he wrote a week after Pitt’s death may owe something to the zeal of the
recent convert to radicalism. It certainly conveys a sense of Cobbett’s
own self-importance, which only expanded with age. Cobbett does,
however, suggest (as did an increasing number of radical writings) that an
evaluation of Pitt’s contribution may depend on one’s own place in the
social hierarchy.

That he may be regretted by those who were looking up to his power

for emoluments, or for shelter, by the numerous swarm of ‘bloodsuckers
and muck-worms’; that his loss may be regretted, and deeply regretted
by these, I am far from meaning to deny; but that he is regretted by the
people of England is a falsehood which, come whence it will, never shall
pass uncontradicted by me.

In the course of a letter written to Pitt in October 1795, one of his

many attempts to dissuade Pitt from concluding a peace with France,
Edmund Burke praised the Prime Minister’s ‘much manly exertion’
and declared: ‘Everything is arduous about you’ (Stanhope, II, 321). We
cannot know whether Pitt was the more irritated by yet another lesson
from Burke about the Satanism of French revolutionaries or gratified
that one of the great political minds of the age recognised in him a
characteristic he would most have prized: self-sacrificing labours in the
national interest.
He was not so self-sacrificing as to resist defence of his honour by
duelling—the conventional, but increasingly controversial, manner of settling
disputes between gentlemen. Pitt fought a duel on Putney Heath with the
Foxite Whig George Tierney on 27 May 1798 after an unpleasant
interchange in the Commons during which Pitt had accused Tierney of
having ‘a desire to obstruct the defence of the country’ (Stanhope, III,
129). It may seem incredible that national leaders should even think of
submitting themselves to the haphazard outcome of bullet shots at twelve
paces—especially during a war. It certainly offended Wilberforce’s sense of
propriety. He had to be strongly persuaded against introducing a bill into
parliament against the principle of duels the very next week. However,
codes of honour cut across conventional criteria of prudence and wisdom.
It is worth remembering that, in much more recent times, only the personal
intervention of King George VI prevented Winston Churchill from
accompanying allied troops landing on the Normandy beaches in June
1944, an expedition which could easily have ended the then Prime
Minister’s life.

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 The Pitt legacy
For almost a generation after Pitt’s death, many eagerly appropriated the title
‘Pittite’.This partly reflected genuine regard for a great man.Those he
promoted to high office, especially from the early 1790s onwards, held him
in almost universally high esteem. The Earl of Liverpool, for example, who
had served Pitt loyally since 1793 and who would be Prime Minister from
1812–27, almost as long as his mentor, was unstinting in his admiration. He
wrote in 1814 that he always ‘endeavoured to make the Principles of Mr Pitt
the chief guide of our Political conduct’ (Sack, 1993, 89). Others used the
description not because of any particular policies but because Pitt had come
to symbolise both steadfast opposition to France and ‘French principles’ and
also support for the old order. A Pittite, therefore, was a patriot and an anti-
reformer. By ironic extension, also, since Pitt was one of the least openly
devout or ‘religious’ prime ministers of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries,
a Pittite was a supporter of orthodox religion as a secure shield against
‘Jacobinism and Atheism’. Many ‘Pittites’ held reactionary views which would
have made Pitt himself squirm with embarrassment.
Pitt’s legacy is also measured in his concern for administrative efficiency
and executive expertise. Government became more professional under him;
his was a working administration. He did not mount a frontal assault on the
patronage system, which was prone to give unmerited advancement to the
inefficient if loyal, but he starved it of oxygen by promoting on merit
where possible and by not replacing mere sinecurists. In doing so he paved
the way for both Peel and Gladstone, whose nineteenth-century
governments both earned a justified reputation for professionalism and
attention to detail. Pitt also neatly avoided one of the main traps of ‘party
governments’ in the 1780s. His parliamentary majorities, unlike theirs, were
usually grounded in the support of his fellow ministers and the votes of
backbenchers and independents keen to applaud cheap government and
debt reduction. Again, both the concern for cheap government and the
determination not to be led by party subordinates, presages the ministries
of Peel and Gladstone.
The next Prime Minister of the first rank, Sir Robert Peel, was born in
1788 and did not enter parliament until 1809. He was thus not old enough
to have learned at first hand from Pitt but he certainly copied his prime
ministerial style. Like him, he took care to develop a cadre of ministers he
could trust to do an efficient job and aimed to get business through parliament
by mastery of debate. He was also prepared, if a clash could not be avoided, to
put what he considered to be the national interest above party concerns.This
explains the collapse of the Conservatives over the repeal of the Corn Laws

82
in 1846. For Gladstone, Ireland became the great moral cause to which, if
necessary, the unity of his own party might be sacrificed.

Pitt and the historians

History has, in general, treated Pitt kindly. Earl Stanhope, who collected
together many of Pitt s political papers and speeches and linked them with
an extensive commentary published in 1862, was unstintingly and, it has to
be said, uncritically generous. Everything from Pitt’s statesmanship and
judgement to his relations with his servants comes in for praise. Here, in
lifting the veil on some smaller matters, he contrives even to make adverse
criticism into praise:

The goodness and gentleness of Mr Pitt to all those who were any way
dependent upon him formed a feature of his character.To his domestics
his indulgence was indeed carried to a most faulty extreme, since he
did not, as he ought, control their expenses or review their accounts.To
the poor families around him he was ever ready to stretch forth his
helping hand.
(Stanhope, IV, 404)

Another of his early biographers was the Earl of Rosebery, himself a Prime
Minister—though for a very much briefer period (1892–5). His assessment
was similarly unequivocal:

Pitt was endowed with mental powers of the first order; his readiness,
his apprehension, his resource were extraordinary; the daily parliamentary
demand on his brain and nerve power he met with serene and
inexhaustible affluence; his industry, administrative activity, and public
spirit were unrivalled; it was perhaps impossible to carry the force of
sheer ability further.

J.Holland Rose’s famous two-volume biography of 1911–12 is a strong

representative of the school of ‘Whig history’, both in its tendency to
intersperse narrative and analysis with moral judgements and confident
statements about ‘the needs of the age’. It is ‘Whig’ also in its tracing of
‘progress’—in this case, the progress from the confusion and demoralisation
of 1783 to the stronger, more secure government provided by Pitt:

the younger [Pitt] helped to retrieve the disasters brought on by those

who blindly disregarded the warnings of his father. In the personality of

83
 both father and son there was a stateliness that overawed ordinary mortals,
but the younger man certainly came more closely into touch with the
progressive tendencies of the age.
(Holland Rose, 1911, 32)

Sir Arthur Bryant, writing in TheYears of Endurance against the background

of WorldWar II, was similarly laudatory but stressed Pitt’s practical abilities
rather than his vision:

He was the parent of more practical reforms in administration and

political economy than almost any other English statesman…. But he
approached them with his eye, not on the horizon like a man of the
study, but always on the treacherous and broken ground at his feet.

History writing in the second half of the twentieth century tends to

eschew grand judgements in favour of reappraisals grounded in a more
detailed study of archival and published material. It is also happier dealing
with specific issues of interpretation than in painting broad confident
canvasses. Broad-brush evaluations, at least about political leaders now
long dead, have gone out of fashion. Thus, historians have recently been
less concerned with whether Pitt ‘saved the nation’ in the 1790s and
more with specific issues, such as whether Pitt’s refashioned administration
of 1794 (see Chapter 5) can be considered as the first ‘Tory’ administration
of modern times, or whether Pitt’s policies and attitudes did fundamentally
change as a result of the French Revolution. Moral judgements, when
found at all, derive disproportionately from history writing which
emphasises change generated ‘from below’. This school (whose heyday
was in the 1960s and 1970s) replaced confident certainties about the
work and characters of the great with equally confident (and, frequently,
equally misguided) generalisations about the growing popularity of
radicalism and how ‘the working class’ came into being. This school
represented Pitt as an apostate to the reform he had embraced in the
1780s. His policies in the 1790s are presented unequivocally as ‘repressive’
of the liberties of Englishmen, with ‘working people…forced into political
and social apartheid during the [French] Wars (which, incidentally, they
also had to fight). Pitt’s ‘system’ represented corruption and reaction
(Thompson, 1968, 491, 217, 507).
Reality, as so often, refuses to conform to such confident simplicities. As
we have seen, what has been presented as Pitt’s ‘repression’ in the 1790s
was widely popular, and not merely among the propertied classes (Dickinson,
1989; Colley, 1994). The latest assessment of Pitt argues that his opinions

84
underwent no fundamental shift in reaction to events in France but that he
was astute in following changes in public opinion. His transition to anti-
radicalism was both ‘reluctant’ and delayed. In his attack on the radicals in
1794 (see Chapter 5) Pitt was no convert ‘to the canons of counter-
revolutionary conservatism’. Rather he invoked national unity ‘to justify a
war effort whose diplomatic and military parameters had changed
dramatically since 1793’. Pitt ‘did not spend the 1790s or any other decade
of his life in perpetual fear of the lower orders’ (Mori, 1997, 273, 275). For
Mori, Pitt was far from an ideologically committed Prime Minister. In so
far as he thought in abstract terms, he did prefer ‘conservative concepts of
social harmony to theoretical natural rights models’ favoured by
Enlightenment thinkers. However, and perhaps surprisingly, he found much
to agree with in Tom Paine’s vision of man as a rational, improving creature,
if very little in the practical changes to which it pointed.
Ehrman’s monumental three-volume biography provides the most
detailed account of Pitt’s career which we are ever likely to possess. It is
full of fascinating detail and it is certainly not without adverse comment.
Ehrman, for example, presents Pitt as a loner who expected loyalty from
supporters and who felt that he deserved the approval of the nation for
putting the nation’s finances on a more robust footing and for his clearheaded
direction of the war. His famous ‘efficiency’, however, depended on a clear,
and arrogant, perception of priorities. In the papers discovered on his death,
for example, were found examples of letters and memoranda, some up to
twenty years old, to which he had never bothered to reply.These included
many from the King, who frequently complained that Pitt would not write
letters even to him. The Younger Pitt’s legacy, indeed, included the largest
(and most disordered) in-tray in British history.
His private finances were in a similar state of disorder. It is easy to
present such disorder as symptomatic of Pitt’s personal sacrifice to the
higher national good.The truth is more complex. Pitt was, indeed, ‘married
to his work’. No Prime Minister (with the possible exception of Margaret
Thatcher) put in more single-minded hours. Gladstone, who certainly
contributed as much, had a significantly broader religious and intellectual
hinterland than Pitt. Pitt was fascinated by finance and by ideas about trade
and he enjoyed working with figures. As Ehrman puts it, ‘he understood
the language the experts spoke, and the circumstances in which the active
economic forces of the country moved; as they in turn…recognised that
they had a knowledgeable minister in Downing Street’ (Ehrman, III, 845).
At least in part, however, Pitt devoted himself to work because he found
personal relations difficult. Even such a notoriously shy and glacial figure as
Robert Peel had warmer relations with professional colleagues than Pitt

85
and was also more at ease in the company of women. Pitt was awkward in
many social contexts and found personal relations difficult. He was as
infrequent an attender at Court as he could get away with, partly because
he found its concerns ineffably trivial and beneath him, partly because the
need to make small-talk exposed a raw inadequacy in him. The failure to
marry almost certainly reflected similar unease. He seems rarely to have
been happy and, like many who are similarly circumstanced, he resorted
too readily to compensatory drinking. This, combined with a less than
robust constitution, contributed to his premature demise.
Ehrman s biography, for all its myriad insights, is relatively reticent
with the broad picture. Pitt’s legacy is presented in characteristically
prosaic terms:

He gave a modernizing tone to the practice of government…that was

well suited to current needs, and in more developed form because a
part of the mental furniture of political generations in which the Blue
Book [the name given in the nineteenth century to a detailed
parliamentary investigation and report] came to replace the pamphlet
of his own youth.
(Ehrman, III, 845)

Presented in this light, it is very easy to see how Peel and Gladstone, like
more immediate successors such as Liverpool, could be considered ‘Pittites’.
Pitt’s concern with finance also fits contemporary historiographical analysis
of eighteenth-century Britain which has traced its development as what
John Brewer calls ‘a fiscal military state’. Pitt’s apparent fixation on finance
is entirely explicable in this context. It is more controversial, however, to
see a party political legacy. This book has argued (see Chapter 5) that the
Pitt-Portland coalition is important in the transition to modern Toryism.
So, in another context (see Chapter 7) was the appropriation of ‘Patriotism’
to the political status quo. Other historians are more sceptical. They point
to the difficult, and fractured, transition to Toryism during the early
nineteenth century when ‘Pittites’ frequently fell out among themselves,
especially on religious policy.
There is also no reason to believe that Pitt saw party in these
‘modernising’ terms. He held fast to the description ‘independent Whig’.
This, it is true, was politically convenient since it offered no threats to the
King, whose dislike for tight-knit party groupings was rooted and implacable.
Pitt was technocrat first and politician a long way second. He certainly did
not eschew the black arts of political management and propaganda. He
contributed articles to Canning’s Anti-Jacobin (see Chapter 7), for example,

86
albeit on finance. However, he usually left political management to his
subordinates, fixing his gaze from the mid–1790s on the war and on
financing the war. He was a formidable performer, almost never worsted in
parliamentary debate and nearly always on top of the business which he
considered most important.
Pitt’s deliberate preference for the tide ‘independent Whig’, which many
Foxites contemptuously rejected and which some historians have seen as
precious and anachronistic, is also revealing about his political priorities.
He was not a ‘party man’. Both his temperament and intellectual convictions
militated against close party connection. He was pragmatic rather than
ideological, believing that the mastery of a political or economic brief
counted for more than adherence to ‘grand and speculative theories’. He
also shunned what he considered the wasteful, debilitating and unnecessary
links between political allegiance and social connection which were meat
and, especially, drink to the Foxites.
His management of the war can be, and has widely been, criticised for
its over-optimism in strategy and its many failures of tactics (see Chapters
6 and 9). However, no convincing case has emerged on how things might
have been better managed overall, not least given the novelty and strength
of the forces arraigned against Britain by French revolutionary armies and,
especially, by the military genius of Napoleon.The acid test was that Britain
was not defeated in the two darkest years of the wars—1797 and 1805; in
both years Pitt was in command. As friend and foe alike recognised at the
end of January 1806, Pitt had bestridden a confusing and rapidly changing
world with authority. He was not much loved but he was enormously
respected. His legacy to the nineteenth century, if complex, was nevertheless
formidable. An unheroic and pragmatic age might readily divest itself of
over-sentimental notions about Pitt as the self-sacrificing pilot who
weathered the biggest international storm which Britain had encountered
since the fifteenth century. It is still left with a formidable leader who
deserves to be remembered as one of the four greatest Prime Ministers in
British history.

87
 Further Reading

Biographies and other studies of Pitt

One biography produced in three volumes over the course of a generation, stands
pre-eminent and will certainly remain the unchallenged work of reference and
interpretation for the forseeable future. The broad chronological break points are
1788, 1797 and 1806:

J.Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: Vol I The Years of Acclaim (Constable, London, 1969)
——, The Younger Pitt: Vol II The Reluctant Transition (Constable, London, 1983)
——, The Younger Pitt: Vol III The Consuming Struggle (Constable, London, 1996)
Other valuable works include:
A.D.Harvey, William Pitt the Younger, 1759–1806: A Bibliography (Westport, Conn.,
1989) is an admirably thorough listing of works about Pitt over almost two
centuries
J.Holland Rose, William Pitt and National Revival (Bell, London, 1911)
——, William Pitt and the Great War (Bell, London, 1912)—both of these remain
worth reading for their scholarship, though their interpretations are inevitably
dated
J.Mori, ‘William Pitt the Younger’ in R.Eccleshall and G.Walker (eds), Biographical
Dictionary of British Prime Ministers (Routledge, London, 1998a), pp. 85–94–a
valuable brief essay in introduction with a useful list of further reading
——, ‘The Political Theory ofWilliam Pitt the Younger’, History Vol. 83 (1998b),
pp. 234–48
Earl Stanhope, Life of the Right Honourable William Pitt (4 vols, Murray, London,
1861) is also indispensable as a published work of reference since it includes
extensive extracts from Pitt’s correspondence

88
 Biographies of other leading contemporary politicians
P.Jupp, Lord Grenville (Oxford University Press, 1985)—an excellent biography which
also illuminates contemporary politics authoritatively
L.G.Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford University Press, 1992)—erudite, elegant
and shrewd
M.Peters, The Elder Pitt (Addison Wesley Longman, 1998)—a valuable new study of
Pitt’s father
P.Ziegler, Addington (Collins, London, 1965)

Textbooks and general assessments

J.Black (ed.), British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt, 1742–89 (Macmillan,
London, 1984)—rather less directly on Pitt than might be hoped but a useful
chapter by Christie
I.Christie, Wars and Revolutions, Britain 1760–1815 (Arnold, London, 1982)
E.J.Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870 (2nd
edn, Addison Wesley Longman, Harlow, 1996)
G.Holmes and D.Szechi, The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-Industrial Britain, 1722–83
(Longman, London, 1993)
G.Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, 1740–1830 (Macmillan, London, 1997)
F.O’Gorman The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–
1832 (Arnold, London, 1997)
J.Steven Watson, The Reign of George III (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1960)

Studies of the political system

J.Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn,
Cambridge, 1980)
L.Colley Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (Pimlico, London, 1994)—a brilliant,
if overstated, account of the formation of national identity, with some very
useful comments on the role, and image, of George III during the age of Pitt
J.Derry, Politics in the Age of Fox, Pitt and Liverpool: Continuity and Transformation
(Macmillan, London, 1990)
H.T.Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Methuen, London, 1977)
A.D.Harvey, Britain in the Early Nineteenth Century (Batsford, London, 1978)– under-
used by most students but a very effective guide to a complex shifting period in
political allegiances
B.W.Hill, British Parliamentary Parties, 1742–1832 (Allen & Unwin, London, 1985)
F.O’Gorman, The Rise of Party in England (Allen & Unwin, London, 1975)
——, The Emergence of the BritishTwo-Party System, 1760–1832 (Arnold, London, 1982)
J.J.Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain c.1760–1832
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993)—cautions against regarding
Pitt as a Tory

89
R.Thorne (ed.), The History of Parliament:The House of Commons, 1790–1820 (History
of Parliament Trust, London, 1986)—a mine of information about politicians
and the political process

The impact of the French Revolution

H.Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Blackwell,
Oxford, 1985)
——(ed.), Britain and the French Revolution (Macmillan, London, 1989)
C.Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793–1815 (Macmillan, London, 1979)—
argues that Pitt’s government exaggerated the threat from popular radicalism in
the 1790s
——, ‘Repression, “terror” and the rule of law in England during the decade of
the French Revolution’, English Historical Review 100 (1985), pp. 801–25
E.J.Evans, ‘Englishness and Britishness: National Identities, c.1790–1870’ in A. Grant
and K.Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom? (Routledge, London 1995), pp. 223–43
F.O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (Macmillan, London, 1967)
L.Mitchell, Charles James Fox and the Disintegration of the Whig Party, 1782–1794
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1971)
J.Mori, William Pitt and the French Revolution, 1785–95 (Keele/Edinburgh University
Press, 1997)—a valuable modern study which suggests that Pitt was not much
influenced ideologically by the French Revolution
E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, London, 1968)—
classic, if controversial, account which is particularly rich on the political culture
of working people as it developed in the 1790s
D.Wilkinson, ‘The Pitt-Portland Coalition of 1794 and the Origins of the “Tory”
party’, History 83 (1998), pp. 249–64

Foreign policy and the wars with France

C.A.Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 1780–1830 (Longman, London, 1989)
Jeremy Black, A System of Ambition? British Foreign Policy, 1660–1793 (Longman,
London, 1991)
——, British Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolutions, 1783–93 (Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1994)
P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914
(Longman, London, 1993)
M.Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar & Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the
War against Revolutionary France (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987)
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (Allen Lane, London, 1976;
3rd edn, Fontana, London, 1991)
J.M.Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder: British Foreign Aid in the Wars with France,
1793–1815 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1969)

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 Ireland
M.Elliott, ‘Ireland and the French Revolution’ in H.Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the
French Revolution (Macmillan, London, 1989), pp. 83–101
R.F.Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (Penguin, London, 1988)—now the best
one-volume history of Ireland
R.Kee, The Green Flag, Vol. 1: The Most Distressful Country (Quartet, London, 1976)
R.B.McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution, 1760–1801 (Clarendon,
Oxford, 1991)

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