IX. REFORM
Unblest by Virtue, Government a league Becomes, a circling junto of the great To rob by law; Religion mild, a yoke To tame the stooping soul, a trick of State To mask their rapine, and to share their prey.
THOMSON, Liberty.
The distempers of monarchy were the great subjects of apprehension and redress in the last century; in this, the distempers of Parliament.--BURKE, Thoughts on the present Discontents.
The experience of statesmen has generally led them to link together the question of retrenchment with that of Reform. The connection between these two topics indeed lies in the nature of things. The brunt of taxation has in the past fallen on the middle and artisan classes; and where they have only a small share in the government, the spending departments are apt to run riot. Under an oligarchy or plutocracy the Government is likely to become a close preserve for the benefit of landless younger sons, the preservation of great estates being thus assured by means which lower the public services to the level of eleemosynary institutions. Whenever the mass of taxpayers gains political power, it will insist on efficiency and economy; or, at the worst, it will claim that the unprivileged shall also have an entry into the domain of Government. In either case, the result will be not unlike that which happens in a household where the husband sleepily pays and the wife lavishly spends. When the rude awakening comes, the spending department will probably yield to the power that holds the purse. The ultima ratio of husbands and Parliaments is, after all, much the same. On the other hand, if the House of Commons represents little more than the rent-receiving classes, what hope is there that it will draw the purse strings? Whence it comes about that economists have for the most part pleaded for a truly representative system.
As we have seen, Pitt had twice brought forward the question of the Reform of Parliament, and had twice suffered defeat. The need of caution was obvious; and this explains his conduct in begging that veteran reformer, Alderman Sawbridge, not to press his motion on this subject in the short session of May–August 1784. The Prime Minister, however, promised to bring it before the House of Commons early in the following session.[261] Some surprise was therefore felt on the opening day, 25th January 1785, when the King’s Speech contained no promise more definite than that he would concur in every measure which would “secure the true principles of the constitution.”[262] Pitt himself, while admitting that the King’s Speech might in that House be assumed to be the speech of the chief Minister, stated that it was impossible to include in it a reference to that topic. The inference was obvious, that the King objected to its inclusion in the speech.
For Pitt’s interest in the subject certainly had not cooled. In the spring of 1784 he had assured the Rev. Christopher Wyvill and the Yorkshire Association of his devotion to the cause in the following as yet unpublished letter.
London, March 11, 1784.[263]
GENTLEMEN,
I consider myself greatly obliged to you for the favour of your letter, which I received upon the 6th instant. I beg leave to assure you that my zeal for Reform in Parliament is by no means abated, and that I will ever exert my best endeavours to accomplish that important object.
(Signed) W. PITT.
Further, on 27th December 1784 he stated to Wyvill his intention to bring forward a Reform Bill as early as possible in the next session, and that he would “exert his whole power and credit as a man, and as a minister, honestly and boldly, to carry such a meliorated system of representation as may place the constitution on a footing of permanent security.”[264] This at least was the version of his words which Wyvill at once circulated to Reform Committees throughout the country. With a belated access of prudence, he added a postscript, urging that it must in no case be published; but some foolish friend or wise opponent bruited it abroad, with the result that members of the House now contrasted his eagerness for Reform with his inability to secure any mention of it in the King’s Speech. He might declare that the subject was the nearest to his heart, and that nothing but its complexity prevented him sketching an outline of his proposal; but members drew their own conclusions. North made a skilful use of Wyvill’s letter, but elicited from Pitt no definite disclaimer of the words quoted from it. Indeed Pitt afterwards assured Wyvill that those words well expressed his thoughts.[265]
Pitt judged that it would be best to proceed circumspectly in the matter of Reform, perhaps because he wished the affair of Wyvill’s letter to blow over, or because he had obstacles to face in his Cabinet. Owing to these or other causes he decided to give precedence to his resolutions for according greater freedom of trade to Ireland, which will be dealt with in another chapter; and not until 18 April 1785 did he bring before Parliament the subject of parliamentary Reform. The delay was unfortunate, for the trading classes were by this time ruffled by proposals which promised to bring in the products of Irish cheap labour.
Meanwhile Pitt drew up a draft scheme of Reform and sent it to Wyvill for his perusal. He proposed to set aside a sum of somewhat more than £1,000,000 in order to indemnify electors in nomination boroughs, provided that two-thirds of their total number should agree to forego their right of sending members to Parliament. In that case the borough should be disfranchised, the electors receiving compensation by a Parliamentary Committee after due examination of their claims. The seats thus vacated were to be added to counties or to districts of the larger counties. Pitt also hinted at the enfranchisement of certain suburban areas of London, and suggested that notoriously corrupt boroughs (such as Shoreham and Cricklade) should be disfranchised without compensation, their electoral powers being transferred to counties. He further proposed to widen the county franchise by admitting copyholders of 40 shillings a year and leaseholders whose leases had a certain term yet to run.[266]
These suggestions strike us as strangely cramped, except in the matter of copyholds, which were dealt with more generously than in Earl Grey’s Bill of 1831. The proposals for disfranchising the pocket boroughs resemble a political auction, Pitt dangling a million before the potwallers of Gatton, Grampound, Castle Rising, etc., as the sole means of endowing the great counties with political power, and of enabling Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield to find articulate utterance. Wyvill in 1797 noted that these towns formed a part of Pitt’s scheme of enfranchisement; but the Prime Minister does not seem in 1785 to have ventured distinctly to formulate so revolutionary a proposal. In the draft of a preamble to his Bill he suggested the advisability of enlarging the electorate in the case of several towns such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Winchester, where the Corporation or the Guild Merchant alone returned the members of Parliament.
These draft proposals reveal the caution, not to say nervousness, with which Pitt approached this great subject; and the same characteristics appear in the speech of 18th April 1785 in which he introduced his measure. While lacking glow and enthusiasm, it was instinct with moderation and persuasiveness. He started with the assumption that the House of Commons ought to be “an Assembly freely elected, between whom and the mass of the people there was the closest union and most perfect sympathy”; but he proceeded to allay the fears of those who, like Burke, saw in any change a death-blow to the constitution, by disclaiming “vague and unlimited notions.” He desired, he said, “a sober and practicable scheme which should have for its basis the original principle of representation.” He then showed how that principle had been warped by time and Court intrigues. Sometimes method was discoverable, and he cited a case that occurred shortly after the Restoration when, after the disfranchisement of 72 boroughs, 36 of them regained their rights on petition, but the 36 others, having decreased in size, remained without representatives. Therefore, by the discretionary powers of the Crown to grant, or to withhold, representation, there was a clear recognition of the principle that the chief towns, not the decayed towns, should return members to Parliament. Who, he asked, was the truer supporter of the constitution? He who sought to preserve the mere form of it, or he who preferred its substance and essence to the empty shell? Coming next to the outlines of his scheme, he declared that he would change neither the proportion of Scottish to English members, as settled by the Act of Union of 1707, nor the numbers of the House. All that he aimed at for the present was to disenfranchise 36 decayed boroughs and to assign their 72 members to the counties which most needed a larger representation, as also to London and Westminster.
Moderation such as this implies timidity. Moreover this was not all. As we have seen, Pitt did not intend to carry out this reform by compulsion; and he now declared that, recognizing as he did the monetary value of the franchises of these decayed boroughs, he proposed to form a fund whence they might gain compensation for this undoubted loss. Very skilfully he introduced this novel proposal by deprecating the “squeamish and maiden coyness” which members affected in speaking there on a topic which they frankly discussed outside the House. For himself he faced the fact that the right of returning two members to Parliament had a certain monetary value, and he therefore offered a due indemnity. Further, if in the future any other decayed borough should wish to surrender its franchise “on an adequate consideration,” he proposed to facilitate such a surrender, and to allot the two seats to any district or town that seemed most to need the franchise. Finally he desired to widen the electorate in the counties by including copyholders, whose property was as secure as, sometimes more secure than, that of the freeholders.[267]
Such were the proposals. They were brought forward at a time when Pitt had suffered in the opinion of the House, first by his obstinacy in persevering with the Westminster election scrutiny, and, secondly, by the Irish Commercial Resolutions. Members were therefore in an unsettled state of mind, and an eye-witness describes them as listening to the Prime Minister “with that sort of civil attention which people give to a person who has a good claim to be heard, but with whom the hearers are determined to disagree.” The same witness, Daniel Pulteney, found that most of Pitt’s friends “lamented that he would not keep clear of this absurd business--this Yorkshire system of Reform.”[268]
Despite this chilling reception, Pitt set forth his proposals “with the attractions of a most seductive eloquence.” Such is the testimony of Wraxall, which by itself would tend to refute the venomous assertion that Pitt was not in earnest. The contrary is proved by his words and deeds. At Christmastide 1784 he begged Wilberforce to return from the south of France in order to work in the cause of Reform; and on 12th January 1785 he wrote to the Duke of Rutland in these terms: “I really think that I see more than ever the chance of effecting a safe and temperate plan [of Reform], and I think its success as essential to the credit, if not to the stability, of the present administration, as it is to the good government of the country hereafter.”[269] Further, it is certain that those ardent reformers, Robert Smith (afterwards Lord Carrington) and Wyvill, had no doubt of his earnestness. The latter stated in his letters that Pitt was striving his hardest to arouse interest in the Reform of Parliament.[270]
There is also ground for thinking that the King had privately assured him that, though he regretted his advocacy of Reform, no word of his should influence any one against that measure. Wraxall, who voted against Pitt, admits that his plan of Reform was highly attractive in theory--a phrase which leaves us wondering what would have been the practical scheme of reform after which this earth-born soul was dimly groping.[271] Even Burke, who saw mortal danger to the body politic in the removal of the smallest rag of antiquity, complimented the Minister on the skill with which he had sought to make the change palateable to all parties. None the less did that fervid Celt consider the whole plan an ignis fatuus, calculated to mislead and bewilder. Herein Burke for once voiced the feelings of the country gentry who thought the fate of the constitution bound up with the maintenance of the rotten boroughs. The speeches of Duncombe and Wilberforce in support of the measure were poor and rambling. Dundas, an unwilling convert to Reform, had nothing better to say than that he highly approved the principle of compensation.
The chief arguments against the measure were those of North, Fox, and Bankes. The first declared that the country cared not a jot for Reform. Birmingham had not petitioned for it. One of the members for Suffolk, who sought advice from his constituents, had received no instructions from them. The effort to get up a Reform meeting in London had resulted in the attendance of only three hundred persons; and the outcome of similar efforts in the provinces might be summed up in the line from “The Rehearsal”:
What horrid sound of silence doth assail mine ear?
As for Fox, though he voted with Pitt, he did his best to defeat the measure. He wittily explained the silence of the people by their alarm at Pitt’s Irish Resolutions; for when on the point of emigrating from a land on the brink of ruin, why should they trouble about its constitution? Further, he stoutly objected to the award of any indemnity to the owners of pocket boroughs. The same point was shrewdly pressed by Bankes. The measure, he said, was absurd on the face of it. For why declare against the whole principle of the traffic in such boroughs, and yet proceed to allow liberal compensation to the traffickers? The argument was more clever than sound, as appeared in 1834 when Parliament awarded £20,000,000 to slave-owners. The taunt also came with an ill grace from the owner and representative of Corfe Castle; but it cut Pitt to the quick. He immediately arose and avowed that the remark wounded him deeply on account of his long friendship with the speaker; the point touched was a tender one; but the evil was such that it must be cured, and it could be cured in no other way than the present. And so, in this mood of “Et tu, Brute,” Pitt and his friends withdrew into the lobby, and soon learned that his third attempt to redress the glaring ills of the representation had been defeated by 248 votes to 174.
The blow was crushing and final as regards Parliamentary Reform in that age. The storms of the French Revolution and the mightier subterranean forces of the Industrial Revolution were to work upon the old order of things before the governing classes of England were brought to see the need of renovation; and when the change came in 1832, it was not until the nation had drawn near to the verge of civil war. In 1785 the transition would have been peaceful and progressive. Pitt was content to work by permissive methods, and to leave open the decision as to which of the rising industrial towns should gain the franchise as it was sold by the decaying boroughs. Such a mode of advance seems to us that of a snail, and marked by a trail of slime. But we must remember that the brains of that generation worked very slowly on political questions; for in truth they had to do with a society which was to ours almost as a lake is to a torrent. Further, it is noteworthy that the offer to buy out the pocket boroughs was the chief recommendation of Pitt’s measure to the House of Commons. Burke praised him for thus gilding his pill; and Dundas’s chief plea for the measure was that it did not outrage “the sacred inheritance of property.” Alone among Pitt’s supporters Bankes reprobated these bartering methods. The attitude of the House should be remembered, as it bears on the question how far Pitt was justified in buying off the opposition of the Irish borough-holders and others who suffered by the Act of Union of 1800.
Could Pitt have taken any further steps to ensure the passing of his Reform Bill? Mr. Lecky, followed in this by lesser historians, has maintained the affirmative. He avers that, by making it a ministerial measure, Pitt could have brought to bear on it all the influence of party discipline.[272] To this it may be replied that Pitt’s majority, though large, was very independent. As will appear in the next chapter, we find him writing that he could not then count on the support of many of his followers from one day to another. They had floated together from the wreckage of the Fox and North parties, and had as yet gained no distinct cohesion, except such as arose from admiration of him. Further, he strained this feeling too severely in the session of 1785 by his harsh treatment of Fox over the Westminster election, and by pressing on three unpopular measures, namely, the Irish Resolutions (22nd February), the fortification of Portsmouth and Plymouth (14th March), and Parliamentary Reform (18th April). Sooner or later he suffered defeat on all these proposals. Yet it is clear that his followers did not intend to drive him from office, but merely to teach him caution. In this they succeeded only too well. Thereafter he acted far more warily; and, except in the Warren Hastings’ case, and in the French Commercial Treaty, he for some time showed little of that power of initiative which marked the early part of the session of 1785. The fact is to be regretted; but the need of caution is manifest when we remember that a single irretrievable blunder would have entailed a Fox-North Ministry with all the discords and confusion that must have come in its train. Even zealous reformers, while regretting that Pitt did not persevere with Reform, continued to prefer him to Fox and North. This appears in a letter written by Major Cartwright at the close of the year 1788. On the news of the mental derangement of George III, that veteran reformer wrote to Wilberforce: “I very much fear that the King’s present derangement is likely to produce other derangements not for the public benefit. I hope we are not to be sold to the Coalition faction. Mr. Fox is, I see, arrived, and cabal, I doubt not, is labouring with redoubled zeal under his direction to overturn the present Government.”[273] The distrust felt for Fox after his union with North survived in full force even in 1788. Their accession to power, and the triumph of the Prince of Wales, were looked on as the worst of all political evils. This, I repeat, explains and justifies the determination of Pitt to continue in office.
But other reasons must also have influenced his decision to shelve the question of Reform at least for the present. His Cabinet was too divided on it to warrant his risking its existence on a proposal which had always been rejected. The marvel was that a Prime Minister should bring it forward. Further, if we may judge from George III’s letter of 20th March, the active though secret opposition of the King was averted only by Pitt giving an unmistakable hint that he would resign if it were used against the measure.[274] Having secured the King’s neutrality, Pitt could hardly go further and leave his sovereign in the lurch by breaking up his Cabinet on a question on which he alone of the executive Government felt strongly.
Another possible alternative was that he himself should resign. But this again would almost certainly have involved the fall of an Administration of which he was the keystone. It is also noteworthy that the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, whether collective or personal, had not then been definitely established. Cabinets and individual Ministers resigned on points of honour, or when they held that the Government could no longer be satisfactorily carried on. But neither of these cases had arisen. The Government of the country obviously could go on as well as before. True, a legislative proposal of great importance had been rejected; but it cannot be too clearly stated that in that century the chief work of Government was to govern, not to pass new laws. Far on in the next century the main business of a Cabinet came to be the proposing and carrying through of new measures; but this idea was foreign to that more stationary age; and probably everyone would have accused Pitt of deserting his post had he resigned owing to his inability to carry a legislative enactment of a very debatable character. Walpole has not been blamed because he held to office despite his failure to carry his very important Excise Bill.
Again, why should Pitt have persevered with the cause of Reform? Despite all the efforts of Wyvill and the Associations, only eight petitions had been sent up to the House in favour of it. The taunts of North as to the apathy of the country were unanswerable. No voice was heard in protest against the rejection of the measure; and the judgement of Wilberforce was that of practically all reformers, that, after Pitt’s failure, Reform was hopeless.[275] Wyvill himself, in a pamphlet written amidst the excitements of 1793, admitted that Pitt’s measure received little attention in 1785, and soon fell into oblivion--a fact which he explained by the complete satisfaction which the nation then felt with its new Ministry. Here we have the true explanation, furnished by the man who had his hand on the nation’s pulse. Wyvill saw that the practical character of the reforms already carried by Pitt had reconciled the people even to rotten boroughs. He also stated that the proposals of 1785 did not go far enough to satisfy many reformers, but that they aroused the bitter hostility of the boroughmongers. There, indeed, was the gist of the difficulty. The boroughmongers carried the House with them; and it was impossible at that period to stir up a national enthusiasm which would brush aside the fears of the timid and the sophistries of the corrupt. Only under the overpowering impulse of 1832 could the House be brought to pass sentence against itself. Because Grey and Russell carried a Reform Bill nearly half a century later, is Pitt to be blamed for abandoning, after the third attempt, a measure which aroused invincible opposition in Parliament, and only the most languid interest in the nation at large?
Further, be it noted that the conduct of Fox had irretrievably damaged the cause of Reform. His union with Lord North had split in twain the party of progress; and we have the testimony of an ardent young reformer, Francis Place, that that unprincipled union dealt a death blow to the London Society for promoting Constitutional Information, the last expiring effort of which was to publish a volume of political tracts in the year 1784.[276] Not until the year 1791 was this useful society revived, and then owing to the impulses set in motion by French democracy.
Finally, it is noteworthy that Pitt gave his support to a smaller measure of Reform brought forward in the session of 1786 by Earl Stanhope. That nobleman had persuaded Wilberforce to widen the scope of a proposal which the member for Yorkshire had first designed for that county alone. It provided for the registration of all freeholders and the holding of the poll in several places at the same time. Pitt spoke warmly for the Bill as tending to remedy the chief defects in the county representation, and he expressed the hope that at some future time the whole of the representation would undergo the same improvements (15th May). Despite the opposition of Grenville and Powys, leave was granted to bring in the measure by 98 votes to 22. Though Stanhope emphatically declared in the Lords that the summary rejection of a Bill affecting the Commons would be an act of “unutterable indecency,” the Peers rejected the measure by 38 votes to 15.[277]
This was the last effort made by Pitt’s friends and supporters to improve the old system. For the present, Reform had come to an impasse. Even practical little proposals which passed the Commons were doomed to failure in the Lords; and it was clear that nothing short of a convulsion would open up a passage. The events that followed tended to discredit the cause of progress. As will appear in Chapter XIV, the violence of the Dutch democrats threatened to wreck their constitution, to degrade the position of the Prince of Orange, and to make their country a footstool of the French monarchy. Pitt perforce took the side of the Prince; and this question, together with the torpor of the populace, served by degrees to detach the young statesman from uncompromising reformers like Stanhope and Wyvill.
* * * * *
The defection or apathy of many of his friends in the session of 1785 was undoubtedly a severe blow to Pitt. It sounded the death-knell of his earlier idealism, and led him on, somewhat dazed, to a time marked by compromise and a tendency to rely upon “influence.” Daniel Pulteney noted, when he saw him in the park on the day following the rebuff, that he was in deep sorrow.[278] That was natural in a man who had hoped to arouse the nation to a vivid interest in good government, and suddenly found himself headed back to the old paths. The shock must have been the greater as he had been guided by what I have termed his bookish outlook on life.
Pulteney, as a man of the world, pointed out to his patron, the Duke of Rutland, this defect in the young Prime Minister: “This system of Pitt’s, to act upon general ideas of the propriety or wisdom of a measure, without attending enough to the means by which it can be best and most happily introduced--I mean, knowing the general opinion of the House at the time--must, I foresee, involve him in time in one or other of these difficulties,” namely, the rash introduction of a measure, or its abandonment through a sudden access of distrust. Again he says that Pitt is very much “fettered in his conduct on great affairs. From a very partial and confined knowledge of the world, he is too full of caution and suspicions where there does not exist the shadow of a pretext for them; and, from having no immediate intercourse with the generality of the House of Commons here, he is as ignorant of their opinions on particular questions as if he was Minister of another country.” He then states that, when Pitt suddenly came to see the facts of the case, he was apt to be unduly despondent and to bring forward only those questions on which he was sure of a majority. He concludes that this habit of “acting only on abstract principles” would greatly embarrass him; but that he might expect long to continue in power, because “whenever he was to quit, I think no Ministry, not founded on corruption, could stand against him.”[279]
This estimate, by a practical politician, though marked by a desire to depreciate Pitt and exalt the Duke of Rutland, goes far towards explaining the symptoms of change which are thereafter noticeable in Pitt’s career. It shows us Pitt, not a superb parliamentarian dominating men and affairs from the outset, but rather an idealist, almost a doctrinaire, who hoped to lead his majority at his will by the inspiring power of lofty principles, but now and again found that he had to do, not with Humanity, but with humdrum men. We see him in the midst of his upward gazings, disconcerted by the force of material interests, and driven thenceforth to pay more attention to the prejudices of his party.
First in importance among the expedients to which he was driven after the spring of 1785 was the use of “influence.” As was shown in the Introduction, that word, when used in a political sense, denoted the system of rewards or coercion whereby the King and his Prime Minister assured the triumph of their policy. Peerages, bishoprics, judgeships, magistracies, sinecures and gaugerships, were the dainties held out by every Ministry in order to keep their sleek following close to heel and thin the ranks of the lean and hungry Opposition. Peerages alone counted for much; for we find Pitt writing, during the Fox-North Ministry of 1783, that the King’s determination not to create a single peer during their term of office must sooner or later be fatal to them. Government by rewards and exclusions was looked upon as the natural order of things; but up to the session of 1785 Pitt used “influence” sparingly. At a later date Wilberforce ventured on the very questionable assertion that Pitt’s command over Parliament after the General Election of 1784 was so great that he might have governed by “principle” and have dispensed with “influence.” He expressed, however, his admiration of him for refusing to associate with trading politicians, a connection which, even in the hours of recreation, was certain to bring defilement.[280]
Pitt, as we have seen, never stooped to associate with jobbers, but he seems to have decided, after the severe rebuffs of February–April 1785, to use “influence” more and more. We notice in his letters to the Duke of Rutland and Orde several injunctions as to the management of members in the Irish Parliament; and he sought to conciliate waverers by other means, such as the abandonment of those clauses of the Irish Resolutions which were most obnoxious to British traders, and an almost lavish use of honours and places. This last expedient he adopted unwillingly; for on 19th July 1785 he wrote to the Duke of Rutland that circumstances compelled him to recommend a larger addition to the British peerage than he liked, and that he was very desirous not to increase it farther than was absolutely necessary.[281] This shows that his hand was forced either by his colleagues or by the exigencies of the time. Possibly the promises of peerages had to be made in order to secure the passing of the Irish Resolutions even in their modified form. It is humiliating to reflect that this descent from a higher to a lower level of policy thenceforth secured him a majority which followed his lead, except on the isolated questions of the fortification of Portsmouth and Plymouth, and of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the latter of which he left entirely open.
* * * * *
It will be convenient to consider here the question of the fortification of the chief national dockyards, as it shows the determination of the Prime Minister to secure economy and efficiency in the public services. As we have seen, his great aim was to carry out a work of revival in every sphere of the nation’s life. When thwarted in one direction he did not relax his energies, but turned them into new channels. On the rejection of the Irish Resolutions, he urged the Duke of Rutland to seek out the most practicable means of healing the discontent in that island. Above all he suggested an alleviation in the matter of tithe (then the most flagrant of all material grievances), if possible, with the assent of the (Protestant) Established Church.[282] Similarly in the cause of Free Trade, when foiled by Anglo-Irish jealousies, he turned towards France; and, after discovering the impossibility of carrying out his aim for the regeneration of Parliament, he vindicated the claims of morality in the administration of India. Finally, it is a crowning proof of the many-sidedness and practical character of his efforts that, amidst all his strivings to reduce the National Debt, he sought to strengthen the nation’s defences.
Despite the many distractions of the years 1785–1786, he devoted much care and thought to the navy. Already, in 1784, he had instituted a Parliamentary inquiry into the state of the fleet and the dockyards, which brought to light many defects and pointed the way to remedies. His anxiety respecting the first line of defence also led him to keep the number of seamen at 18,000, a higher total than ever was known in time of peace; and he allotted the large sum of £2,400,000 for the building of warships by contract. Further, he sought to stop the corruption which was rife in the dockyards and the naval service.
The letter which Sir Charles Middleton (afterwards Lord Barham) wrote to him on 24th August 1786 reveals an astounding state of affairs. From his official knowledge he declared--
The principle of our dockyards at present is a total disregard to public œconomy in all its branches; and it is so rooted in the professional officers that they cannot divest themselves of it when brought into higher stations. They have so many relatives and dependants, too, in the dockyards, that can only be served by countenancing and promoting improper expences, that they never lose an opportunity of supporting them when in their power, and on this account ought to have as small a voice as possible in creating them.[283]
In this and other letters to Pitt, Middleton expressed his belief that much might be done to check these evils by the help of a firm and upright Minister. Probably this appeal from a patriotic and hard-working official sharpened the attention which Pitt bestowed on naval affairs. We know from the notes of Sir T. Byam Martin that Pitt frequently visited the Navy Office in order to discuss business details with the Comptroller, and by his commanding ability left the impression that he might have been all his life engaged on naval affairs. In particular he used to inspect the reports of the building and repairing of the ships-of-the-line.--“He also (wrote Martin) desired to have a periodical statement from the Comptroller of the state of the fleet, wisely holding that officer responsible personally to him without any regard to the Board.” The results of this impulse given by one master mind were speedily seen. More work was got out of the dockyards, and twenty-four new sail-of-the-line were forthcoming from private yards in the years 1783–1790. Thus, by the time of the Spanish war-scare in 1790, ninety-three line-of-battle ships were ready for commission.[284] The crises of the years 1786–1788 had also been so serious that they might speedily have led to war had not Britain’s first line of defence been invincible.
In regard to the proposal to strengthen the defences of Portsmouth and Plymouth, Pitt was less fortunate. The proposal really came from the Duke of Richmond, Master of the Ordnance, who was far from popular--a fact which perhaps influenced the votes of members. Though Pitt and other Ministers adduced excellent reasons for not leaving those vital points in their present weak state, he did not carry the House of Commons with him. After an exciting debate, which lasted till 7 a.m. of 28th February 1786, the numbers on a division were found to be exactly equal. Then there arose a shout such as had not been heard since the memorable vote which wrecked Lord North’s Ministry. At once all eyes turned to the Speaker, Cornwall. He declared that he was too exhausted to give his reasons for his vote, but he would merely declare that the “Noes” had it. Wraxall states that the sense of the House was against Pitt, the country gentlemen especially disliking the addition of £700,000 to the next year’s expenses.[285] One of the arguments of the Opposition seems to us curious. It was urged that the fortification of the two towns in question might be the beginning of a despotic system which would undermine the liberties of Englishmen. While treating this argument with the contempt it deserved, Pitt declared that he bowed before the feeling of the House. The commencement of huge works at Cherbourg later in the year must have caused qualms even to the watch-dogs of the constitution.
Some of the more eager Whigs called out for him to resign, it being the third time in twenty-two months that he had failed to carry an important measure. We may, however, point out that the proposal emanated from the Duke of Richmond; and there is the curious fact that Courtenay during the debate of 20th March 1789 asserted that the plan was merely the Duke’s, and had not come from the Royal Engineers. He was also not contradicted.[286] Further, it should be noticed that though Pitt made the proposal his own, Dundas and others of his Cabinet were known to dislike it. There is the final consideration already dwelt on, that the custom which requires a Ministry to resign on the rejection of any important measure, had not yet crystallized into a rule.
This was the last severe check which Pitt sustained in Parliament for many years. The fact that he suffered as many as three in twenty-two months with little or no diminution of prestige shows that his majority really trusted him and had no desire to put Fox and North in power. That alternative was out of the question, as Fox knew, even when he twitted his rival with being kept in office solely by the royal favour.
Nevertheless in the years following 1785 we notice a distinct weakening in Pitt’s progressive tendencies. Whig though he was in his inmost convictions, he drifted slowly but surely towards the Tory position. Fortunately for him, the folly of his rivals in the year 1784, and again in the Regency crisis of 1788–9, enabled him to link the cause of the King with that of the nation. But these occasions were exceptional. It is never safe to owe a triumph to the mistakes of opponents amidst unusual conditions. For mistakes will be made good; and in the whirl of life circumstances will arise which range men and parties according to elemental principles.
* * * * *
Even before the French Revolution tested the strength of Pitt’s reforming convictions, there came a question which acted as a touchstone. This was the proposal to repeal the Corporation and Test Acts of the reign of Charles II. Those measures had excluded from office in Corporations, or under Government, all who would not receive the Sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. By this ban a large body of intelligent and loyal citizens were thrust out of the pale of political and civic preferment; and though the Toleration Act and Annual Acts of Indemnity screened them from actual persecution, their position was yet one of hardship. Certain bodies had not scrupled to make money out of their conscientious objections. As is well known, the Corporation of the City of London hit upon the plan of augmenting the building fund of their new Mansion House by passing a by-law in 1748 fining any Londoner who refused to serve when presented for nomination as Sheriff, and then proposing rich Nonconformists for that office. Not until 1767 did the able pronouncement of Lord Mansfield in the Upper House secure the rejection of this odious device. Thenceforth Nonconformists secured immunity from fines for refusing to serve in offices that were barred by the test of the Sacrament.
Nevertheless their position was far from enviable. By the freaks of insular logic Protestant Dissenters were allowed to vote in parliamentary elections and even to sit in the House of Commons; but though they had a share in the making and amending of laws, they could hold no office in a Corporation, or any of the great London Companies; commissions in the army, navy, and offices in other public services were also legally closed to them. Severe penalties hung over the head of any one who, in reliance on the annual Act of Indemnity, ventured to infringe any of these singular enactments. Public opinion approved this exclusiveness; and an anecdote told of that humorous mass of intolerance, Dr. Johnson, shows that prejudice was still keen in the circles which he frequented. He, Sir Robert Chambers, and John Scott (the future Lord Eldon), were walking in the gardens of New Inn Hall at Oxford, when Chambers began picking up snails and throwing them into the next garden. Johnson sharply rebuked him for this boorish act, until there came the soothing explanation that the neighbour was a Dissenter.--“Oh,” said the Doctor, “if so, Chambers, toss away, toss away as hard as you can.”[287]
The choice blend of Anglicanism and culture discernible in Chambers and Johnson, might be seen elsewhere than in the seat of learning on the Isis. It was the rule in the rural districts, except among the sturdy yeomen of the Eastern Counties, where the spirit that fought at Naseby had so far survived as to render snail-throwing a pastime of doubtful expediency. The same remark applies to London, where the tactics of the city fathers had signally failed to suppress Dissent. Very many churchmen were ashamed of these petty attempts at persecution, and the progress of the Evangelical revival aroused a feeling of uneasiness at seeing the most sacred rite of the Church degraded into a political shibboleth. Comprehension within the bosom of Mother Church was highly desirable; but clearly it might be too dearly purchased by Erastian laws which enabled a lax Nonconformist to buy his way into the Customs or Excise by presenting himself at the altar of the nearest church along with convinced communicants.
Accordingly Nonconformists had a strong body of opinion on their side in the session of 1787, when they asked for the repeal of those exclusive statutes. A staunch churchman, Mr. Beaufoy, championed their cause in a very powerful and eloquent speech, which won the admiration of Wraxall.[288] Beaufoy dwelt on the anomaly of retaining this old-world exclusiveness, which would expose to the penalties of the law the illustrious John Howard, if ever he returned to this country. He showed that no danger need be apprehended for the Established Church, especially as the Act of Supremacy would continue to exclude from office all Roman Catholics, as well as Quakers. Further, the loyalty of the Protestant Dissenters had been sufficiently shown in the election of 1784, when they voted with Pitt on behalf of the prerogatives of the Crown. He then inveighed against the continuance of enactments which “degraded the altar into a qualification-desk for tax-gatherers and public extortioners.” Fox followed with a strong plea for religious toleration, quoting Locke and other writers who denounced the imposition of religious tests in political matters. The Church of England, said the Whig leader, was disgraced by the present state of things; and, seeing that it represented the majority of the English people, it could not be endangered by the proposed change.
On the other hand North, now quite blind, came into the House leaning on his son, Colonel North, in order to oppose the motion. Speaking with much earnestness, he declared that the Test and Corporation Acts were the bulwarks of our Constitution. Pitt must have felt some surprise at speaking on the same side as North; but he now asserted that those Acts did not impose any stigma or penalty on Nonconformists, for whom, indeed, he had a great respect. There must be a Church Establishment, and it of necessity implied some restrictions on those outside its pale. The constitution of Society involved limitations of individual rights; and he averred that the laws in question were justified by that consideration. Further, there were no means whereby moderate Dissenters could be admitted to these privileges while the more violent were excluded. If all were admitted, they might overthrow the outworks of the Establishment. These arguments carried the day by one hundred and seventy-six votes to ninety-eight (28th March 1787).[289]
Bishop Watson, of Llandaff, in his “Reminiscences,” explains Pitt’s conduct on this occasion. He declares that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had no strong feelings of his own on the subject, and had therefore referred the matter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Primate had assembled his colleagues at Lambeth, and by ten votes to two they had decided to uphold the Caroline enactments. If this be correct, Pitt’s action was weak. Certainly his speech was half-hearted, and utterly different in tone from his orations on Reform, the Regency, Slavery, and other topics which moved him deeply. Moreover, the referring a matter of this kind to the bench of bishops was about as reasonable as taking the opinion of country squires on a proposed mitigation of the Game Laws, or of college dons on a reform of their university. A Prime Minister abdicates his functions when he defers to the opinions of a class respecting a proposal which will trench on its prerogatives.
X. INDIA
“We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territory by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects.”--(Proclamation of Queen Victoria, 1st November 1858.)
Montaigne once uttered a protest against those historians who “chew the mouthfuls for us,” and spoil all in the process. He coupled with it, however, another vice which is really far more serious, namely, their habit of laying down rules for judging, and “for bending history to their fancy.” As for the presenting history in mouthfuls, it is probably the only way of making it digestible except for those mighty intellects which seize facts and figures with avidity, and assimilate them as if by magic.
Further, the modern historian may urge in defence of the topical method that it is the only practicable way of dealing with the infinity of topics of the last two centuries, ranging over parliamentary debates and wars, finance and social gossip, mean intrigues and philanthropic movements, industrial changes and empire-building, the efforts of great men and the impersonal forces that mould and move great nations, together with the denuding agencies that weather away the old surface and the resistless powers that thrust up a new world. How shall a finite intellect grasp at once all the moving details of this varied life? The mind craves to consider at any one time only one part of the majestic procession, just as it demands that the facts of Nature shall be grasped under different sciences. Human life is one as Nature is one; but the division in each case is necessitated by the increasing width of man’s outlook. All that is essential in the sorting-out process is that it shall honestly set forth all the important facts, and here and there open out vistas revealing the connection with other fields of human activity. In short, history can no longer be a detailed panorama of life, but it can and ought to be a series of companion pictures, informed by the personality of the artist and devoid of conscious prejudice.
Among the diverse subjects which confront us in the many-sided career of Pitt, none stands more apart than that of his relations to India. Of his Herculean labours we may, perhaps, term this one the cleansing of the Augean stables. The corruption that clung about the Indian Government, the baffling remoteness of its duties, the singular relations of the East India Company to the Crown, and of its own officials to it, above all, the storms of passion which had been aroused by the masterful dealings of Warren Hastings and the furious invectives of Burke, presented a problem which could not be solved save by the exercise of insight, patience, and wise forcefulness. It would greatly overburden this narrative to recount the signal services, albeit marred by deeds of severity and injustice, whereby Hastings grappled with the Mahratta War and the incursion of Hyder Ali into the Carnatic. All that need be remembered here is that Parliament had censured some of his actions and demanded his recall, that the Court of Directors of the Company had endorsed that demand, but that the Court of Proprietors had annulled it. Hastings therefore remained at his post, mainly, it would appear, from a conviction that he alone could safeguard British supremacy.
Accordingly, on this all-important question there was division in the executive powers at Calcutta, and in the East India Company itself; while the insubordination of very many of the Company’s servants in India further revealed the insufficiency of Lord North’s Regulating Act of 1773. Fortunately, however, the finances of the Company were in such disorder as to make it amenable to pressure from Westminster. It owed a very large sum to the Home Government for duties on its imports into Great Britain; and Parliament was thus the better able to assert the supremacy of the nation.
It was high time to make good this claim. The India Bills of Fox and of Pitt had been thrown out; and thus, despite an infinity of talk, the whole situation remained unchanged, except that nearly every one now agreed that it must be changed. On questions of detail opinions differed widely. Some of the proprietors and Directors of the Company protested against any interference whatsoever with chartered rights which they were perfectly able to uphold and vindicate. The opposite extreme was touched by Fox during a preliminary debate on the affairs of the Company, when he declared that body to be a sink of corruption and iniquity, a mere conduit for bringing home the wealth acquired by its servants in India. If, said he, the patronage of the India service must be vested either in the Directors or in the Crown, let the Crown take that influence from hands which had so shamefully abused it.
Pitt’s position, it soon appeared, was intermediate between these extremes. Four days later, on 6th July 1784, he introduced his second India Bill in a speech marked by great circumspection. He started from the same principles which had fashioned the outlines of his former measure (see chapter vii), that, though a charter ought not to override the needs of the State, yet nothing but absolute necessity could justify its abrogation. The affairs of the Company, he claimed, did not warrant so extreme a measure. His aim would be, not to abolish, but improve on, the existing plan of government for India. There were two essentials to be aimed at, namely, a due share of activity and resourcefulness in the Indian Government and obedience to the measures dictated by Parliament. The former of these requisites could be attained only by according to the Indian Government a certain degree of power, and from the latter it resulted that that power must be subject to the control of a regulating Board at home.
Pitt therefore recurred to his former plan. He left to the Governments of the Presidencies, above all, to the Governor-General, enough authority to enable them to cope with emergencies; but he also proposed to subject them to a Board consisting of members chosen by the Crown from the Privy Council. To this special committee of the Privy Council would be entrusted the power of devising legislation for India, of controlling Indian policy, and of recalling any of the Company’s officials. It was not, however, to have a voice in those questions of patronage which might deflect it from the path of duty and impartiality. The proceedings of the Board might be open to perusal by the Directors of the Company; but its behests would be final. In case of flagrant disobedience, or of other grave offences, the officials and servants of the Company were to be tried by a Commission consisting of members of the two Houses of Parliament chosen by ballot shortly before the trial.
Such were the chief proposals. As for the spirit which informed the measures, it may be divined from that part of the speech in which the Prime Minister set forth the fundamental principles of our Indian policy. They were in brief these, the avoidance of war and of alliances that might lead to war, and the use of such conciliatory methods as would further the aim which we had chiefly in view--pacific commerce.[290]
Neither the spirit of enlightened patriotism, which pervaded the speech, nor the practical nature of the proposals screened the measure from fierce opposition. That acrid opponent of Warren Hastings, Mr. Francis, taunted Pitt with leaving to the Directors of the Company the mere shadow of authority, but he prophesied that the large powers vested in the Governor-General and in the Governments of the Presidencies would be abused as flagrantly as ever they had been in the past. Fox expanded these objections with his usual force, asserting that far too large powers were given to the Crown, and that the proposed Board would be quite as partisan a body as the Commissioners to whom he in his India Bill had entrusted the regulating power. He further insisted that to leave appointments to the Company, while depriving it of authority, was a miserably weak expedient which must sap the base of government. On their side, the Directors of the Company complained that the present Bill at several points trenched on their trading rights, which they had always expressly reserved to themselves; and they urged that they must retain in their own hands the right of recalling their own servants. As for the proposed tribunal for the trial of disobedient officials, it seemed to them an unsatisfactory experiment, seeing that both trial by jury and impeachment were ill adapted to the complex questions of Indian administration.[291]
Nevertheless, the Company had to give way at nearly all points. The powers of the Court of Proprietors almost entirely lapsed (to the satisfaction of all but themselves); and a clause was passed, compelling the Company’s officials to state on oath the amount of their fortunes at the end of their service, Pitt himself suggesting that private gains up to £2,000 a year after the first five years of service should not be deemed culpable. Though the Bill prohibited the receiving of “presents” from natives, it was clear that officials would use other equally objectionable means in order to arrive at that unobjectionable sum.
On the whole, however, the principle of controlling Indian affairs from Westminster, which Lord North had rather haltingly asserted eleven years earlier, now became the dominant fact of the situation. This will be clear if we review the constitution and powers of the new Board of Control. It was to consist of six members of the Privy Council chosen by the King; the Chancellor of the Exchequer and one of the Secretaries of State being always included. In the absence of these two, the senior member of the remaining four was to preside; and finally the conduct of the Board’s affairs came to rest virtually with him, so that he became, in all but name, Secretary of State for India. For the present, however, as appears from a letter of Dundas to Cornwallis of 29th July 1787, Pitt attended the Board regularly and thoroughly mastered its business.
To this Board were submitted all letters and despatches between the Company and its officials in India, except those which referred solely to trade. Every proceeding and resolution of the Court of Directors must come to it; and from it there issued orders which the Directors were bound to enforce. Further, at the second reading Pitt amended his Bill so as to allow the Board in urgent cases to frame and transmit their commands to India without communicating them to the Directors. Finally, if the Company appealed against the Board’s decisions, the ultimate judgement lay with the King in Council, that is, with a body largely the same as that from which it appealed.[292] While, therefore, Pitt instituted what was called a system of dual control, that control, save in the lower sphere of commerce, was really exercised by the Home Government. In the long series of changes which transformed the venture of a company of London merchants into an Empire administered by the British people, no step is more important than that taken by him in this, his first great constructive effort.
But this was not all. Various circumstances in the next eighteen months showed the need of still further strengthening the Indian executive. Certain ominous moves of the French caused anxiety. In the spring of 1785 their East India Company was revived on an imposing scale; and the close relations subsisting between France and the Dutch Republic augured ill for the British dominions in the Orient. Everything, therefore, tended to emphasize the need of strong Government at Calcutta; and the attention directed to Indian affairs, consequent on the charges brought against Warren Hastings early in the year 1786, further convinced many competent judges of the need of strengthening the Indian executive. These considerations furnish the reasons which led Pitt to bring in an Amending Act.
If we may judge from Pitt’s speeches of 17th and 22nd March of that year, he had been much impressed by the sagacity of the Governor-General in seeking to frame an alliance with the Great Mogul for the purpose of counterbalancing the offensive league of Tippoo Sahib with the French. The action of Hastings’ Council in frustrating this statesmanlike plan, because it contravened the instructions of the Company, showed the unwisdom of doubly tying the hands of a competent governor, first by instructions drawn up in Leadenhall Street, and secondly by a Council in which pedantry or personal spite could paralyze great enterprises. Obviously what was required was to choose the right man as Governor-General, then to grant him powers large enough to meet serious crises, and to place him in such a relation to the Home Government that those powers would not be abused. None of these conditions could be satisfied so long as the Company appointed the supreme officials and prescribed their functions.
But Pitt’s Bill of 1784 had changed all this. As we have seen, the British Government was now the driving force of the Indian machinery, the Company acting merely as an intermediate wheel. The responsibility of the Governor-General to the new India Board and to Parliament having been decisively asserted, his powers could now safely be increased.
This formed the raison d’être of Pitt’s Amending Act of March 1786. Though introduced by Dundas--a graceful compliment to his exertions in Indian matters in time past--it emanated from the Prime Minister. It applied the principles of the India Bill of 1784 to the servants of the Company in Great Britain. But, what was far more important, it enabled the Governor-General to override the opinions of his Council at Calcutta, the members thenceforth merely recording in writing their protests or the grounds of their opposition. The like powers were also conferred on the Governors of Madras and Bombay. Finally, the Governor-General was empowered to fill up any vacancy in the Council occasioned by death, and was also to act as Commander-in-Chief.
These far-reaching proposals caused Burke’s spleen to overflow. He burst forth into a violent diatribe against this “raw-head and bloody bones Bill.” Pitt’s first India Bill, he declared, was an abortion of tyranny, an imperfect foetus in a bottle, to be handed about as a show, but hypocrisy had nursed it till now the full-grown monster was before them.
And at his heels, Leash’d in like hounds, shall famine, sword, and fire Crouch for employment.
It was absurd, he said, to expect energy and despatch from a despotism like that about to be set up in India. Democracy owed most of its triumphs to the openness and strength of its operations. The joint experience of many must prevail over the fallible judgements even of the best mind on earth. After this outburst, which Burke must have regretfully recalled when he undertook his crusade against French democracy, Fox emptied the vials of his wrath on the measure, especially taunting Pitt with robbing the Council at Calcutta of all administrative functions. This was not surprising, he said, as the Minister so obviously preferred speech to action. His speeches were splendid, his actions presented a long record of failure. “Let others act, the honourable gentleman desired only to argue.” Pitt wisely declined to notice heated personalities, and limited his speech to the task of proving that the Bill cured several of the weaknesses of the Indian Government, and met the needs of the situation. This reply, quiet, dignified, and practical, carried the House with him by a majority of eighty-nine. The Bill passed the third reading without a division on 27th March. Such was Pitt’s retort to the windy declamation of his opponents.
Thus was completed the fabric begun two years before. Thenceforth the Governor-General wielded a concentrated power such as India had not known since the decline of the Moguls. No longer could he be thwarted by the members of his own Council as Warren Hastings had often been by the intrigues of Monson and Francis. In truth the Viceroyalty was now an autocracy such as orientals could understand and respect. But this autocracy was, after all, local and conditional--a fact which Burke overlooked or ignored. While wielding despotic authority in India, the new Viceroy was but an adjunct of the British constitutional machine. It is perhaps the highest of Pitt’s achievements that he saw how to combine two ideals of Government, the oriental and the occidental, in a way that conduced to vigour of action in Bengal, and did not impair popular progress at home. While investing the real ruler of India with powers far greater than those wielded by Warren Hastings, he subordinated them to the will of King and Parliament.
It has been asserted that Pitt was weak as a legislator.[293] It will be well to notice this charge at the close of these volumes. But surely, when judged by all conceivable standards, his India Bills must take rank amongst the greatest of legislative achievements. For by those measures, Pitt subordinated the most powerful of all Companies to the British Parliament. By it, as we have seen, he harmonized the claims of a viceregal autocracy in the Orient with those of popular government at home; and he thereby saved the British Empire from the fate which befell that of Rome. Historians of the Roman Republic agree that the favourites of the Senate of the type of Verres who were let loose on the provinces beyond the sea, not only proved the most frightful scourge to the subject peoples, but also undermined popular liberty at home by the unscrupulous use of their plundered hoards. The same system palsied the limbs of that Empire and drugged its brain. Whether the “nabobs” who rolled off from India and settled down in England would finally have exerted this doubly baleful influence, it is futile to inquire; but, had they gorged and bribed for several generations, the results must have been serious among a people that look on politics from a very practical standpoint.
On the other hand, to have run amok at that class, like Burke, might have yielded them the ultimate victory. Pitt observed the golden mean. For the present, the Company hailed him as its champion. But, while saving it from the Quixotic crusader, he bound it and its servants by strong ties, which it was found easy to tighten at every renewal of the Charter. Above all he strengthened the hands of the Viceroy even while binding him more closely to the Home Government. Has any other statesman succeeded in the task of linking an oriental autocracy with the ancient parliamentary system of a Teutonic race?
The first of the parliamentary Governors-General was the man whom Pitt early in 1784 designed for the equally difficult post of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In the summer of that year, as also early in 1785, he urged Earl Cornwallis to combine the functions of Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief of India; but the earl at that time declined, partly because the powers of the Commander-in-Chief were unduly restricted.[294] The high hopes which Dundas had long entertained of the abilities of Cornwallis, shown by his desire to offer to him the Viceroyalty in 1782, now led the Ministry to meet his objections by introducing the Amending Act for extending the powers of the Governor-General in cases of emergency.[295] Cornwallis accordingly accepted office; and in the seven years of his Viceroyalty (1786–1793) British rule was so far strengthened as to withstand the attacks of the Mahrattas and the far-reaching combinations of Bonaparte.
* * * * *
The same year which saw the dawn of a new era for India, witnessed also the impeachment of Warren Hastings. We are not concerned here with the series of events which provided material for that longest and most famous of our State trials. What does concern us is the behaviour of Pitt in what was perhaps the most complex problem confronted in his early manhood. Seeing that he was chiefly responsible for the vote in the House of Commons which made impeachment inevitable, this part of the question cannot be passed by. Difficult though it is to separate one of the charges brought by Burke and Fox against Hastings from the others, yet limits of space compel us to restrict our survey to that one which induced Pitt to vote for the impeachment. It related to Hastings’ treatment of Cheyt Singh, the Zamindar (not quite correctly termed the Rajah) of Benares.
The reader is doubtless aware that Hastings’ tenure of the Governorship of Bengal in and after the year 1772 coincided with a period of exceptional difficulty, which was enhanced by the acrid and often underhand opposition of Francis, Clavering, and Monson in the Governing Council at Calcutta. Further, the East India Company was often on the verge of bankruptcy. Undoubtedly the perpetual want of money led Hastings to the most questionable of his enterprises, the letting out of the Company’s troops to the Rajah of Oude for the purpose of driving out or subjecting the Rohillas, a race of freebooters on his north-western borders. But difficulties thickened with the outbreak of the war with the Mahrattas and the French. The climax came in 1780 when Hyder Ali, the usurper of Mysore, let loose his hordes upon the Carnatic, and threatened to sweep the British into the sea. Then it was that the genius of Hastings awoke to full strength. He strained every nerve to send from the Hooghly a large force of troops to the relief of the despairing settlement at Madras; and, money being an essential, he cast about for all means of finding it without wholly depleting the exchequer of the embarrassed Company. Among other devices he pressed one of his feudatories, Cheyt Singh, Zamindar of Benares, for a sum of £50,000 in addition to the annual tribute. Seeing that the British held the paramountcy in India, and therefore enjoyed the right of calling on the vassal princes for help in time of emergency, the claim was reasonable, especially as Cheyt Singh’s father owed his position to the East India Company. After giving extra assistance in each of the years 1778–80, Cheyt Singh began to grow restive in 1780 when the demand was renewed, and showed signs of disloyalty. Hastings thereupon imposed a fine of £500,000. More than this, he went to Benares in person, hoping to browbeat the Zamindar; but, his following being scanty, the troops of the latter rose against him, and cooped him up in his residence. With the splendid coolness which never deserted him, he manfully faced the danger. Secretly he sent warning to some of the Company’s forces not far distant, and British valour rescued him from his desperate plight. An Englishman in resolution, Hastings was an oriental in his methods of punishment and revenge. Forthwith he deposed Cheyt Singh, and set in his place another Zamindar with a much enhanced tribute (September 1781).
The same plea of overmastering necessity impelled him to interfere in the affairs of Oude, an episode which, when tricked out in the gorgeous rhetoric of Burke and Sheridan, shocked the conscience of the British people. Sheridan’s oration on “The Spoliation of the Begums of Oude” is perhaps the most thrilling Philippic of the modern world; but its force is sensibly lessened when we know that Burke derived his version of facts from a poisoned source. Francis, the bitter enemy of Warren Hastings, had been worsted by that master-mind in the Council-chamber at Calcutta; and, on challenging him to a duel, had been wounded in fair fight. It was this man, beaten twice over, who in 1781 returned to England to brood over means of revenge, and found them incarnate in Burke.
The genius which enabled that great Irishman to pour out serene and soul-satisfying judgements on the affairs of nations was allied with a more than feminine sensitiveness that often left him at the mercy of first impressions and Quixotic impulses. On all points of honour, whether personal or national, his chivalrous nature carried him to extremes bordering on the fantastic. The two incidents recounted above kindled in him a passion of indignation, which cooled but slowly, even when hatred of the French Revolution obsessed him. All attempts to ascribe Burke’s crusade against Hastings to partisanship or personal spite have egregiously failed. As Macaulay has shown in his brilliant but untrustworthy essay on Warren Hastings, Burke’s opposition to Hastings began in 1781, survived the kaleidoscopic changes of the next decade, and lived on into the new world of the Revolutionary Era. Clearly it resulted from a profound difference of view on Indian affairs. Even to-day, when the justificatory facts of Hastings’ career are well known, his actions are wholly condemned by men of a similar bent of mind. On the other hand his policy appears statesmanlike to those who look first at the wealth of benefits conferred on India by the British Raj and pay little heed to miscarriages of justice which they regard as incidental to an alien administration. The Hastings episode will ever range in hostile groups men of strongly marked dispositions; while the judicial minority will feel themselves drawn perplexingly first to the sentimental side and then to the practical side as new facts and considerations emerge from the welter of evidence.
From midsummer 1785, when Hastings landed at Plymouth and repaired to the Court at Windsor, England was rent asunder by these prepossessions. The King, as might be expected, received him with marked favour; but it caused some surprise that Queen Charlotte, who was propriety personified, should affably receive his wife, the divorcée of a complaisant Baron Imhoff. For a time it seemed that Hastings could afford to scorn the efforts of his opponents. Burke had given notice of a hostile motion in the House of Commons; but, in the then discredited state of the Opposition, it was unlikely to pass. Ministers for the most part approved the conduct of Hastings. Pitt also is said to have been favourably impressed by an interview which they had towards the end of June. Unfortunately no account survives of what must have been a memorable meeting. Hastings was then fifty-two years of age, exactly double the span of life passed by the Prime Minister. But the young statesman had by instinct the same faculty of controlling his feelings under a calm exterior which the Governor-General had perfected during years of vindictive opposition at Calcutta. The countenance of each was thin and worn by the workings of a too active brain, reminding the beholder of the noble lines of Milton:
Deep on his front engraven Deliberation sat and public care; And princely counsel in his face yet shone Majestic.
Undoubtedly they were then the ablest men of action of our race; and, despite envious surmises to the contrary, we may be sure that Pitt looked with admiration on the placid intellectual features of the man whose gigantic toil had saved British India. Both of them had the power of throwing off the cares of state and of indulging in playful intercourse with friends;[296] and charm of manner and conversation must have enlivened the interview.
Yet each was closely on his guard. The opposition of Dundas to Hastings (for he it was who moved the vote of censure on him in May 1782) must have coloured Pitt’s feelings; and Hastings, as we know, believed that the India Bill of 1784 was a veiled attack upon himself. The interview certainly did not reassure him; for he thenceforth informed his friends that he could not depend on the support of Pitt.[297] The doubts were strengthened by the omission of the honours that so distinguished a man might have expected; but this fact was attributable to the motion of censure of which Burke had given notice in the House.
Thus Pitt maintained a cautious reserve. To say that he was waiting to see which way the wind would blow is manifestly unjust. He was awaiting further information in what was a most complicated case. We know that he sent to Hastings for an explanation of the terms of a zamindar’s tenure of office, evidently in order to clear up some of the questions respecting the Zamindar of Benares.[298] Thus, while Lansdowne, Mansfield, and Thurlow loudly proclaimed their confidence in Hastings; while the King continued to converse with him most affably at the levées, and Queen Charlotte accepted a splendid ivory bedstead presented by his wife, Pitt remained guardedly neutral.
Many members of the Opposition wished to let the motion of censure drop, and urged this at a private meeting held at the Duke of Portland’s residence shortly before the meeting of Parliament in January 1786. But the zeal of Burke and Fox had not cooled with time. Further, on the first day of the session they were pointedly challenged by Major Scott, the accredited agent of Hastings in the House. At best Scott was a poor champion. Verbose, tedious, and ever harping on the same theme, he wearied the House with the wrongs of Hastings before they came officially before it; and on the first day of the great trial Fanny Burney remarked: “What a pity that Mr. Hastings should have trusted his cause to so frivolous an agent! I believe--and indeed it is the general belief, both of friends and foes--that to his officious and injudicious zeal the present prosecution is wholly owing.”[299]
Yet Scott would scarcely have flung down the gauntlet without the knowledge and consent of his patron. Indeed on all grounds it is probable that Hastings, with his customary daring, preferred that the question should come to the clear light of a trial rather than swell with the accretions of gossip and dark innuendoes.[300] We must also remember that until the vote of censure of 28th May 1782 was removed from the journals of the House his name was under a cloud; and now that the accusations of Burke and Francis hurtled more thickly through the air, the whole matter was bound to come to the arbitrament of the law or of pistols.
On Hastings and Scott, then, rests the responsibility for renewing the strife. While they thus rashly opened the game, Burke replied on 17th February 1786 by a move of unusual skill. He requested that the Clerk of the House should read Dundas’s resolutions of censure of May 1782, and then ironically suggested that that gentleman, formerly the president of the special committee of the House, was the man who now ought to take action against the ex-Viceroy. He himself was but a humble member of that committee, and he now looked, but in vain, to those in power to give effect to the earlier resolutions. “But I perceive,” he said, with his eyes on Pitt, “that any operations by which the three per cents may be raised in value affect Ministers more deeply than the violated rights of millions of the human race.”[301] Dundas, never an effective speaker, failed to wriggle away from the charge of inconsistency thus pointedly driven home. The attitude of Pitt was calm and dignified. In the course of the adjourned debate he professed his neutrality on the question. While commending Burke for the moderation with which he then urged his demands, he admitted that the charges brought against Hastings ought to be investigated and his guilt or innocence proved by incontestable evidence. “I am,” he said, “neither a determined friend nor foe of Mr. Hastings, but I will support the principles of justice and equity. I recommend a calm dispassionate investigation, leaving every man to follow the impulse of his own mind.”[302]
This declaration of neutrality, the import of which will appear in the sequel, did not imply that there was to be no investigation. The challenge having been thrown down, the tournament was bound to proceed. Thenceforth Pitt confined himself to the functions of arbiter. Burke now enlarged his motion so as to include all the official correspondence respecting Oude, whereupon the Minister urged him always to state his reasons for the production of documents, and not to expect those which revealed any secret policy. Burke said he was ready to specify his charges, and he did so. He further said that he was in possession of abundant evidence to make good those charges. On his applying for certain confidential papers, Pitt opposed the motion; but he agreed to sixteen other motions for papers. In face of these facts, how can the panegyrists of Warren Hastings claim that Pitt objected to Burke’s procedure and carried a motion against it?[303] Burke’s motions were agreed to without a division, the Prime Minister having merely given an obviously necessary veto in the case of confidential documents.
In view of the charges of gross inconsistency that have been brought against Pitt on the Hastings trial, it will be well to look into details somewhat closely. On 3rd March 1786 Burke returned to the charge by pressing for the communication of papers respecting the recent peace with the Mahrattas and cognate subjects. At once Dundas and Pitt objected, on the ground that very many of those documents were of the most confidential character, revealing, as they did, the secret means whereby the Mahratta confederacy was dissolved. In the course of his speech Pitt declared that Hastings had made that peace “with an address and ingenuity that did him immortal honour.” But he added that other charges against him might be substantiated. In vain did Fox and Burke protest against the withholding of documents bearing on the present topic. The sense of the House was against them. Wilberforce applauded the caution of Ministers, as did eighty-seven members against forty-four on a division. A similar motion by the accusers for the production of papers relative to Delhi met with the same fate three days later.
On Fox renewing his demand for the Delhi papers (17th March), Pitt took occasion to state his views clearly. If State papers were called for in order to set on foot a criminal prosecution, he required the mover to “show a probable ground of guilt,” and secondly, that the papers were necessary to substantiate that guilt; the third condition was that the public service would not suffer by publication.[304] He then proceeded to prove that the action of Hastings in seeking to form an alliance with the Great Mogul (despite the orders of the Company) was timely and statesmanlike, as it promised to thwart the alluring offers of Tippoo Sahib and the French to that potentate. Finally he asserted that, if he could reveal the Delhi correspondence to the House, all members would see how improper its publication would be. For his own ease and for the reputation of Hastings, which would be enhanced by such a step, he could wish to give it to the world, especially as all the documents hitherto granted were hostile to the ex-Viceroy; but in the interests of the country he must oppose the demand of the prosecutors for the Delhi papers. In spite of the slap-dash assertions of Sheridan that the contents of those papers were perfectly well known, the House upheld Pitt’s decision by 140 votes to 73.[305]
The next move of the prosecutors was to demand the presence of certain witnesses at the bar of the House. The Master of the Rolls objected on points of form, and also protested against the appearance of pamphlets hostile to Hastings which had been industriously circulated among the members of both Houses. Burke then admitted that most of the State Papers asked for had been granted, though some had been denied, but acridly complained that Ministers were now trying to quash the prosecution. Pitt did not speak.[306] On 26th April Burke brought forward two more charges, whereupon Pitt remarked that they contained much criminal matter, but he had formed no opinion as to their correctness; he hoped that it would appear otherwise, but the House must examine them with the utmost impartiality. Fox having taunted him with pretending to see no guilt where he saw too much, Pitt deprecated such outbursts. Later in the debate he demurred to the examination of witnesses called by the prosecutors before Hastings himself had been heard at the bar. Justice, he said, demanded that the accused should have a hearing before the accusers substantiated their case. He also declared that he would not consent to the examination of witnesses, still less to vote the impeachment of Hastings, on the vague and indefinite charges as yet before the House. Wilberforce expressed the hope that the Minister would persevere in the steady path he had pursued and would not be driven from it by the intemperate attacks of opponents. Burke inveighed against Pitt’s decision; but the latter carried the day by 139 votes to 80.
It was therefore by Pitt’s action that Hastings procured a hearing in the House--an opportunity which, if tactfully used, might have disconcerted his accusers. But the opportunity was lost. Instead of making a telling speech, Hastings proceeded to read a long and laboured reply, which occupied all the sittings of 1st and 2nd May, and emptied the House. Members accustomed to the faultless oratory of Pitt and the debating vigour of Fox, yawned at the dreary recital of remote events of which they knew little and cared less. Accordingly, it was with enhanced hope of success that Burke, after a month of careful preparation, brought forward his charges respecting the Rohilla War. On 13th June he introduced them. On the former of them Grenville defended the conduct of Hastings on the ground that the Rohillas had by their raids provoked the war, and that it was well to remove them. Dundas censured the Rohilla War, but maintained that, while the Governor-General should have been recalled for it twelve years ago, there was no ground for impeaching him for it now, especially as in the interval Parliament had three times named him Governor-General. Wilberforce, whose opinion weighed much with Pitt, took the same view. The most significant speech of the defence was that of Wilbraham who, on behalf of Hastings’ honour, urged the House to refer the charges to the House of Lords, where alone a full acquittal could be pronounced.[307] Pitt spoke only on a small technical point, but voted with Grenville and Dundas. Despite a long and powerful speech by Fox, the House sided with what seemed to be the ministerial view, and at half-past seven in the morning of 3rd June rejected Burke’s motion by 119 votes to 67.
Undaunted by this further rebuff, Fox, on 13th June, very ably brought up the charge relating to the treatment of Cheyt Singh, Zamindar of Benares.[308] He allowed that the continuance of Hastings in power twelve years after the Rohilla War seemed to imply that Parliament had condoned that offence; but this plea could not be urged respecting the Benares affair of 1781. He showed that the Company had agreed to respect the independence of the Zamindar of Benares, and that Hastings had pressed on him remorselessly for aids in money and cavalry, and had finally mulcted the exhausted prince of half a million sterling. The fate of Bengal, he claimed, depended on their condemnation of so tyrannical a proceeding.
All eyes were turned on Pitt as he rose to state his views on this question; and Wraxall avers that never did the range of his faculties appear greater, his marshalling of facts more lucid, or his elocution more easy and graceful. This is the more remarkable as the young Minister avowed his desire on personal grounds to absent himself from the discussion of so complex and remote a problem. We also know from his letter of 10th June to Eden, that he had “hardly hours enough to read all the papers on that voluminous article” (the Benares charge).[309] It is therefore clear that he formed his judgement within a very short time of his speech. In this, however, he soon showed that he had probed the intricacies of the question. Setting forth in detail the terms of a zamindar’s tenure, he disproved Fox’s contention that the Company had no right to exact an “aid” from an “independent rajah.” He demurred to the epithet “independent,” at least as regarded the supreme power in India. The suzerain power has as good a right in time of crisis to exact “aids” from its feudatories as any Suzerain in Europe from his feudal dependents. Next he crushed Francis by citing his own written opinion that extraordinary demands might be exacted from such feudatories. Having set forth the question in its true light, and exposed the inconsistency and malice of Francis, he approached the crux of the whole problem, whether the fine ultimately exacted from Cheyt Singh was not excessive. Here he objected to the drawing of precedents solely from the days of the Indian Emperors. It was the duty of every British administrator to behave according to the rules of justice and liberty; and, said he, “On this ground I feel it impossible to acquit Mr. Hastings of the whole of the charge brought against him; for I feel in my conscience that he has pushed the exercise of that arbitrary discretion which, from the nature of the Eastern Government, was intrusted to him to a greater length than he was warranted to do by the necessity of the service.” While justified in imposing a penalty, he continued, Hastings had not proportioned the punishment to the guilt. In fining Cheyt Singh £500,000 for a mere delay to pay £50,000 (which £50,000 in the last instance was actually paid) Hastings had “proceeded in an arbitrary tyrannical manner.” As to the restoration of Cheyt Singh to his possessions, it was beset by certain difficulties, and he preferred for the present to withhold his opinion.
That speech led to the impeachment of Warren Hastings; for though Grenville, Lord Mulgrave, and the Attorney-General (Pepper Arden) spoke against the Prime Minister, the judgement of the last named prevailed; the House endorsed it by 119 votes to 79, or about the same numbers as had rejected the previous charge. The conduct of Pitt on this occasion has been vehemently assailed. Wraxall, writing many years later, maintained that it was a sudden and unaccountable change of front; and he further suggested that the jealousy which was said to be felt by Dundas for the superior abilities of Hastings might have influenced Pitt’s action.
As the insinuation has been endlessly repeated, I may be pardoned for dwelling on it somewhat fully. The story has been tricked out with a wealth of details. It is asserted that Pitt issued a Treasury circular calling for the attendance of his supporters on the 13th of June, as if it were for the defence of Hastings. No proof of this statement has ever been given; and there are good grounds for disbelieving it. In the first place it should be remembered that attendance at the House had been greatly thinned by the Whitsuntide holidays. The vacation was just over; and, as everyone acquainted with Parliament ought to know, a full House was hardly to be expected at the first sitting afterwards. Pitt’s letter of 10th June to Eden contains the following sentence. After stating that there had recently been a short and languid debate, and a division of seventy-one to thirty-three, he continues: “We shall probably have some attendance next Tuesday when Mr. Fox moves the charge respecting Benares; and after that our chief difficulty will be to get a House for the next fortnight. In the meantime I have hardly hours enough to read all the papers necessary on that voluminous article.”[310]
These are not the words of a man who is about to perform an act of treachery. It is clear that Pitt found great difficulty in getting through the evidence on that charge before the debate came on; and further, that he was doing his duty as leader of the House in trying to assure as good an attendance as the holiday season permitted on a charge of this importance. Wraxall, who here opposed Pitt, makes no mention of any ministerial “whip” in favour of Hastings, as he would certainly have done if he could thereby have strengthened his case against him. The fact that neither he nor Tomline refers to the calumny proves the lateness of its origin. Further, if a special “whip” had been sent out for the support of Hastings, would not some of the ex-Viceroy’s friends, especially Major Scott, have exposed the fraud? But no reference to it is to be found in the report of that debate. Are we also to suppose that the forty or fifty members who changed sides with Pitt, would have gone over to the accusers if he had been guilty of such duplicity? Finally, it is clear from the remarks of Grenville, Mulgrave, and Pepper Arden, that even the colleagues of Pitt felt perfectly free to vote as they chose. Mulgrave declared that the Prime Minister would not be fit to remain in office a single day if he expected his friends and associates to give up their opinions on this subject. Pitt, as we have seen, had at the outset called on members to exercise their impartiality; and he now assented to Mulgrave’s statement.[311] The story that Pitt sent round a “whip” for the support of Hastings, and then drove his followers like sheep into the opposite lobby, may therefore be dismissed as a malicious fiction, at variance with all the known facts of the case.
Then again it is stated by Lord Campbell in his sketch of the life of Lord Eldon,[312] that Pitt mysteriously abandoned Hastings, “and--contrary to the wish of Lord Thurlow who had a scheme for making Hastings a peer, perhaps a Minister--gave him up to impeachment.” The charge is made in a very loose way; but on it the detractors of Pitt have built a theory that Dundas and he feared the advent of Hastings to the India Board, or to the Ministry, or to the House of Lords. This story has been varied and amplified, so that in one version George III appears as desirous of forcing him into the Cabinet, or granting him a peerage on the sole recommendation of Thurlow. But the letter which the King wrote to Pitt on 14th June shows that, while regretting his action concerning Hastings, he respected his conscientiousness, and harboured no thought of breaking with him.[313] That Thurlow had boasted of his power to further the interests of Hastings is likely enough; but it is certain that the King never thought of thrusting the ex-Viceroy into the Cabinet, or the India Board of Control, or of raising him to the House of Lords without the approval of his Prime Minister. The King’s letters to Pitt[314] show that his chief desire then was to meet the large and growing expenses of his family; and Pitt’s economic policy made his continuance in power at that time especially desirable. Royal condescension towards Hastings set all tongues wagging; and they have wagged ever since on the malignant jealousy of Dundas, and the gross inconsistency of Pitt; but the proofs adduced are of the flimsiest character. Wraxall and Bland Burges, who later on jotted down their impressions of parliamentary life, asserted that Dundas had somehow become convinced that the King intended to eject him from the India Board of Control and put Hastings in his place. But neither of them gave any proof. Wraxall merely stated that “the public believed” that Dundas feared such a change.[315] Bland Burges averred that Dundas had “by some means” come to know the secret intention of the King, and therefore “sedulously fanned Mr. Pitt’s jealousy and uneasiness and so alarmed his mind that he hurried him on to a decision before he had time to satisfy himself as to its justice or expediency.”[316]
Equally unconvincing is the story, which Hastings himself told some thirty years later, that on the morning of 13th June Dundas called on Pitt, remained closeted with him for some hours, and convinced him that they must abandon the ex-Viceroy. The insinuation conveyed in this belated anecdote is that Pitt was then and there won over by Dundas, and owing to the mean motives mentioned above. The ingrained tendency of men to seek for petty personal pretexts rather than larger, more generous, and more obvious causes, seems to be the raison d’être of the story and of its perpetuation. There are also some natures so warped by partisanship that they naturally refer actions of political opponents to discreditable motives; and it is a sign of the bias which detracts from the value of Macaulay’s “Warren Hastings,” that he did not mention the late date at which the story was started, while he gives it as an historic fact that Pitt’s change of front was “the result of this conference.”
No statement of what went on at this alleged interview has ever been forthcoming; but, fortunately, on the all important question of motive, we have the clear testimony of one who knew Pitt most intimately, and whose political differences never distorted his imagination. Wilberforce, who had followed Pitt’s actions closely throughout the case, afterwards declared that justice had not been done to Pitt:--
People [he said] were asking what could make Pitt support him [Hastings] on this point and on that, as if he was acting from political motives; whereas he was always weighing in every particular whether Hastings had exceeded the discretionary power lodged in him. I well remember (I could swear to it now) Pitt listening most attentively to some facts which were coming out either in the first or second case. He beckoned me over, and went with me behind the chair, and said: “Does not this look very ill to you?” “Very bad indeed.” He then returned to his place and made his speech, giving up Hastings’ case. He paid as much impartial attention to it as if he were a juryman.[317]
Here we have evidence at first hand, though belonging to Wilberforce’s later years. Clearly it must refer to the events of 13th June; and it shows that if any one person was responsible for Pitt’s change of front that person was Wilberforce. Late in life the philanthropist declared that Pitt’s regard for truth was exceptionally keen, springing as it did “from a moral purity which appeared to be a part of his nature.” He also added that the want of simplicity and frankness sometimes observable in his answers really sprang from this scrupulous veracity.[318]
To quote the opinion of another experienced politician. William Pulteney wrote to Pitt the following hitherto unpublished letter:
LONDON, 15th June 1786.
I cannot abstain from congratulating you on the line you took on Tuesday. It will do you great credit everywhere, but, what you will always think of more importance, I am convinced it will have the most salutary effects in every part of this great Empire, and particularly in India. Such is the powerful influence of strict honour and justice in those who govern kingdoms that it pervades every mind and in a great degree regulates the conduct of individuals. On the other hand, the wilfully permitting persons in high and responsible situations to go unpunished and uncensured, when guilty of important offences, is sufficient to foster the bad and corrupt principles in all other minds and to lay a foundation for similar and greater offences. You have my hearty thanks, and I am sure will have the thanks of all who understand the importance of your conduct.
I am, etc. W. PULTENEY.[319]
Few persons did understand his conduct, and sensitive pride kept his lips sealed. Nevertheless to all unprejudiced minds his conduct needed no defence. On that higher plane where truth and justice are alone considered (for justice is applied truth), Pitt did not swerve from the principles which he at first laid down. From the beginning of the Hastings case he had sought to hold the balances even. He left it open to his colleagues to differ from him. He refused the publication of papers favourable to Hastings where they compromised the welfare of the State or the characters of our Indian feudatories. He insisted that the charges against Hastings should be clearly drawn up, and that he should be allowed to answer those charges in person. On the topic of the Rohilla War he did not speak, doubtless because his mind was not made up. The fact that Parliament had three times re-appointed Hastings after that very censurable event, did in a technical sense screen him from prosecution now. But on the Benares affair, no such plea could be urged. It was a question on which the present Parliament alone had to decide.
The enormous vogue enjoyed by Macaulay’s Essays compels me once more to notice his treatment of Pitt respecting the Benares charge. A man of philosophic temperament once expressed a wish that he was as sure about anything, as the great Whig historian was about everything. This assertiveness peeps through the veil of diffidence which Macaulay donned before delivering the verdict, that any man with a tenth part of Pitt’s abilities ought to have convicted Hastings on the Rohilla charge and acquitted him on the Benares charge.[320] In order to establish this assertion Macaulay passed by the technical plea above named, which must have weighed with Pitt, and then used his powers of special pleading to whittle down Pitt’s arguments on the Benares case, so that they seem to turn ultimately on the trumpery question whether the fine inflicted on the Zamindar was rather too large or not. But we may ask, firstly, was it a small affair to exact half a million sterling from a prince who during three years had been hard pressed, and as a matter of fact had paid up the arrears for which that fine was imposed? Did it concern the Zamindar alone? Did it not concern all the subjects from whom that half million must ultimately be wrung?
Not only did the conduct of Hastings far exceed the limits required by justice; it was also bound up with a question on which the stability of our Indian Empire has ever rested. So long as the feudatories of the British Raj feel confidence in his sense of justice, India is safe. Whenever they have cause to believe that injustice and oppression are the characteristics of his rule, the foundations of the Indian Empire are shaken to their base. Not without reason did Fox declare that the decision on the Benares affair was vital to the preservation of our ascendancy in Bengal. The statesmanlike eye of Pitt, we may be sure, discerned the same truth. Besides, there was an additional reason why he should now more than ever resolve to engrave the names of Justice and Mercy on the newly formed arch of the Indian Government. As has been shown, the recent India Bill placed greatly increased powers in the hands of the Governor-General. Burke and Fox had taunted Pitt with setting up a despotism from which endless suffering must flow. The charge was hollow; but, adorned as it was by splendid rhetoric, it created a deep impression. Was it not well, then, to show by a concrete example that any Viceroy who violated the principles of justice would meet with condign punishment at Westminster? A statesman has to consider, not merely the principles of justice, as applied to an individual; he must also think of the results of his actions on the millions whom they will affect; and we may reasonably infer that among the motives which led Pitt to break with many of his friends not the least was a heartfelt desire to safeguard the relations of the feudatories to the Suzerain Power, and to protect the myriads of Hindoos who had no protection save in the dimly known court of appeal at Westminster.
On the charge respecting the spoliation of the Begums of Oude, Pitt also cast his vote against Hastings; and again a majority followed him. It is questionable whether even the sensationally brilliant oration of Sheridan on this affecting topic moved the House so much as the silent but scornful disapproval expressed in Pitt’s vote.[321] The impeachment was thenceforth inevitable.
With the forensic pageant that ensued we are not here concerned. Thenceforth the case belonged strictly to the legal domain. Its duration throughout the years 1788–95 was certainly discreditable to British law. Hastings out of his never affluent fortunes spent some £71,000 in the vindication of his actions,[322] and at last secured an acquittal. But though men in Europe forgot the case amidst the potent distractions of the French Revolution, the effect of it was not lost upon the Orient. The comparative calm which settled benignly on India for twelve years may be attributed largely to a renewal of confidence in the sense of justice of our people. After the events of the year 1786 princes and peasants alike felt assured that the most transcendent services, if smirched with acts of injustice, would never screen a Viceroy from the censure of the British Parliament.
XI. THE IRISH PROBLEM
(1785)
We have the satisfaction of having proposed a system which will not be discredited even by its failure, and we must wait times and seasons for carrying it into effect.--PITT TO THE DUKE OF RUTLAND, 17th August 1785.
There is a story, uncertain as to date and origin, which picturesquely describes Pitt’s indebtedness to the author of “The Wealth of Nations.”[323] Adam Smith had been invited to meet the young Prime Minister at dinner; but some mischance delayed his arrival. Nevertheless, the guests patiently waited for him, and on his entrance Pitt exclaimed, “Nay, we will stand until you are seated; for we are all your scholars.” The compliment came with none the less graciousness because the father of Political Economy had in his work incautiously defined a statesman as “that insidious and crafty animal.” Pitt was now to give a new connotation to the word. Almost alone among the politicians of the eighteenth century, he had set himself to gain a store of knowledge which would enable him to cope with the increasingly complex problems of his craft; and thus, in an age when a university degree, the grand tour, and London club-life were held to be a sufficient preparation for a political career, he came forth like a Minerva fully armed at all points.
Among the practical questions to which the Scottish thinker turned the attention of his age, none was more important than those dealing with the relations between England and her American colonies, the desirability of an unfettered trade with France, and the need of a close union with Ireland. The first of these questions had been disposed of by war, and the second will engage our attention in a later chapter. On the Irish question Adam Smith strongly advocated union with Great Britain as conferring on the smaller island the boons which had breathed new life into Scotland, namely, freedom of trade and deliverance from an oppressive dominant caste.
These contentions must have secured the approval of Pitt; for the outlines of his policy both towards Ireland and France bear a striking resemblance to those sketched in “The Wealth of Nations,” with this important difference, that after the gain of independence by the Irish Legislature in 1782 the union of the two Parliaments was clearly impossible for the present. We therefore find Pitt turning his attention to the two topics which then chiefly agitated public opinion in Ireland, viz., the reform of Parliament and the fiscal relations to Great Britain. In order to understand Pitt’s handling of these problems it is necessary briefly to review the course of Anglo-Irish affairs.
The story of the dealings of England with the sister isle in the years 1688–1778 is one that it is painful to contemplate. The efforts to dragoon the Catholic Irish out of their creed, or to grind them into the lowest stratum of society, produced a race hatred of which we are still reaping the dire harvest. The Celt broods over the past; and his memory clings round the days when Papists were excluded from Parliament, from the possession of freehold estates, from the professions and from juries; when they might not act as guardians or possess a horse worth more than £5; and when their Protestant neighbours on tendering £5 could take any horse that pleased them. All this and far more may be read in the pages of Lecky. As for the ruffianly enactments of the Irish penal code, many of them were so monstrous as to bring their own cure. In the latter half of the eighteenth century even the arrogant Protestant squirearchy of Ireland found it impossible or undesirable to enforce them.
The growth of principles of toleration and enlightenment which marked the years 1760–80 had some effect even on the nominees of Protestant landlords and borough-mongers who formed the bulk of the Irish Parliament. It is a curious fact that even the narrowest and most bigoted of governing castes cannot wholly resist the tendencies of the times; and the Dublin Parliament, representing only a part even of the Protestant minority of Irishmen, was no more able to keep out new ideas than the members of the pocket boroughs of Britain could withstand the Reform movement of 1830–32. The infiltration of novel principles into the Irish Legislature was slower and more partial, inasmuch as that body misrepresented even more ludicrously the opinions of the mass of Irishmen.[324] It had long been swayed by a clique of politicians who were termed “Undertakers,” because they undertook its manipulation, ostensibly in the interests of the British Government, but really in their own. The traditions of the past and the determination of the members of the Protestant Established Church to keep the Government in their own hands, formed a massive barrier against change. Yet the dissolving touch of the Time-Spirit and the shocks of war were at work upon that barrier; and when the war with the American colonies and France strained the resources of Great Britain and Ireland past endurance, it showed signs of giving way on two questions, the one religious, the other fiscal. In the year 1778, Catholics who took the oath of allegiance were allowed to become in effect owners of land, that is, they might hold land on lease for 999 years. Further, the odious temptations formerly held out to sons of Catholics to abjure their creed were also abrogated. That year therefore seemed to be the beginning of an epoch of toleration, which it was the ardent desire of Pitt to crown with an act of justice too long delayed.
At present, however, we are concerned mainly with his attempt to reform the fiscal relations between the two islands. Until the year 1778 Irishmen were still in the state of economic vassalage to England which the Parliaments of William III had forcibly imposed. In some respects, especially in regard to the woollen industry, they were now worse off than in that time of humiliation. The enactment of 1699, which absolutely forbade the export of her woollen goods, hopelessly crippled an otherwise promising industry. Nor was this all. Her staple product, wool, might not be sent to foreign lands lest their manufacturers might benefit, and become rivals to ours. That fear was not wholly groundless in the case of France; for French weavers found that Irish wool supplied the qualities lacking in their own wool. The result was the rise of an extensive smuggling trade in that article from Ireland to France, which the Government utterly failed to stop.
The outbreak of war with the American colonies, as I have said, brought all these questions to an acute phase; and in 1776 the British Government so far relaxed the prohibitions on export as to allow Irish woollens to be exported for the clothing of the Irish troops serving away from their own country. At the same time Irish fishermen were admitted to a share in the Newfoundland and other fisheries from which they had been excluded.
Nothing, however, was done for the most important of Irish manufactures. The linen industry had not been severely hampered by the British Government. While prohibiting the export of fine linens, and of sail-cloth, in the supposed interests of British manufacturers, the British Government granted bounties on the coarse linens exported from Ireland; and up to the year 1771 that industry had greatly prospered. Thereafter it underwent a serious decline. So alarming was the shrinkage of trade and the rise of Ireland’s debt, that in 1778 Lord North’s Ministry was fain to propose the abolition of many of the fiscal disabilities which sapped her strength. She was to be allowed to send her products to the British colonies and to receive theirs directly in return; but, in order to allay the fears of British manufacturers, the old restrictions on the Irish woollen trade remained in force. Nothing, however, could allay those fears. At once loud complaints were raised from Aberdeen to Plymouth, so that North gave up nearly all his proposals; and Ireland gained little or nothing from his well meant efforts, except that ships built in Ireland thenceforth counted as British-built, and could receive bounties granted for the fisheries.[325]
Where reason and statesmanship had failed, force was to succeed. The utter inability of the British Government to defend Ireland against threatened French invasions furnished the pretext for the formation of powerful Volunteer corps, consisting solely of Protestants, and therefore especially strong in Ulster. The Presbyterians of that province, smarting under the civic disabilities imposed by the old Test Act, and under an equally archaic system of commerce, demanded redress of these grievances, in the latter of which the more lethargic Romanists gave them increasing support. Religious antipathies were forgotten in the face of Ireland’s urgent needs. The governing coterie at Dublin Castle failed either to check the movement or to revive the old schisms. It seemed that the intolerable burdens of the British fiscal system were about to mould the jarring elements of Irish society into the unity that marks a nation.
Though they failed to reach that far-off goal, they for the present won a noteworthy success. By combining to refrain from the purchase of British goods they dealt a severe blow at the system thrust upon them. Nor did they abstain from threats of force. The Volunteers paraded the streets of Dublin with cannon bearing the motto, “Free Trade--or this.” In face of an overwhelming opposition, the Lord-Lieutenant, the Earl of Carlisle, advised the British Government to give way; and at the close of the year 1779, and early in 1780, a series of enactments was passed at Westminster withdrawing the prohibitions on the export of woollen goods and glass from Ireland. Commerce with the British colonies was now also provisionally thrown open to Irish merchants, and they were admitted to a share in the Levant trade.
At the same time the cause of religious toleration gained an equally signal triumph. The strength of the Ulster Volunteers and the abatement of religious bigotry brought the Irish Parliament to pass a measure for relieving the Protestant Dissenters of that land from the sacramental test which had been looked on as one of the bulwarks of the Established Church; and in the spring of 1780 the British Parliament gave its grudging assent to that boon for Ireland which for nearly half a century longer it persisted in withholding from Nonconformists in England and Wales. As was stated in Chapter V of this work, the Irish Volunteers in the year 1782 gained another most important concession, namely, the recognition of the legislative independence of the Irish Parliament. Fortunately the British Government on this occasion acted with grace and dignity. The Rockingham Ministry advocated the change, which passed both Houses with but a single adverse vote, that of Lord Loughborough. The disagreeable fact, that this last boon, like the others, was extorted by force, was thus tactfully glozed over; and when the suspicions of the good faith of England aroused in Ireland by that restless demagogue, Flood, were laid to rest by the Renunciation Act of the year 1783, the relations of the two islands became almost cordial.
Causes of friction, however, remained. The royal veto might, and probably would, still tell against the Irish Legislature, even though the veto of the British Parliament and of the Privy Council had lapsed. The influence of the Lord Lieutenant and of his Chief Secretary on the Irish Ministers was also great; and his influence was distinctly British. Dublin Castle could also generally determine the votes of a majority in both Houses of Parliament. Further, it was quite possible that on commercial questions the Irish Parliament would differ sharply from that of Westminster. This seemed so in the early months of Pitt’s Ministry. The beginning of the year 1784 found Ireland depressed by a very inclement winter; and the cry was raised that her Parliament should “protect” her industries, especially that of wool, from English competition. The exertions of the new Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Rutland, aided perhaps by the reluctance of the more moderate members to enter on a commercial war with England, sufficed to defeat these proposals; but the Irish House of Commons, in May 1784, unanimously passed an address to the King, emphasizing the need of “a wise and well-digested plan for a liberal arrangement of a commercial intercourse between Great Britain and Ireland.” This was the friendly challenge which Pitt determined to take up. From the outset he made the Irish commercial question peculiarly his own. More than once in his correspondence with the Duke of Rutland he describes it as the nearest to his heart.[326]
No problem could have been more tangled. Ireland was still in a very restless state. Despite the warnings of that uncrowned King of Ireland, Grattan, the Volunteers began to enroll Catholics and to threaten the coercion of the Dublin Parliament. But, as the Duke of Rutland wrote to Pitt, Parliament “does not bear the smallest resemblance to representation”; and a petition from a great meeting held at Belfast in July 1784 declared that “the [Irish] House of Commons has degenerated into a fixed body so little connected with the people that it ceases to be a guardian of their property, and hath become the representative of an overbearing aristocracy.” The petitioners asserted that the delegates of the Volunteers were a representative body, and urged the King to dissolve the Irish House of Commons.[327] This demand was widely echoed. The Volunteers, having already through their delegates exerted on Parliament a pressure which was semi-national, refused either to let politics alone, or to disband. Ultimately their recklessness and the efforts of Grattan undermined their influence, and they gradually dwindled away; but, for the present, they seemed able to extort all their demands, prominent among which was that for the “protection” of Irish industries and products. In his first long communication to Pitt, the Duke of Rutland dwelt on the urgent need of investigating Irish claims, though he frankly declared that he could not understand the commercial question. Open-handed to ostentation, and devoted to the pleasures of the table, this affable young aristocrat occasionally showed signs of political foresight, as when he ventured to predict “that without an union Ireland will not be connected with Great Britain in twenty years longer.”[328]
Far abler and more painstaking was his chief secretary, Orde, on whom was to fall the burden of work connected with the proposed Reform. The letters which passed between him and Pitt in the summer of 1784 show the care taken by both of them to master the facts of the situation. Orde (the future Lord Bolton) warned Pitt that a resolute effort would soon be made to effect the entire separation of the two Kingdoms, and urged him to “act towards Ireland with the utmost liberality consistent with your own safety: it must in the long run be the wisest policy.” Above all he insisted, as the duke had also done, on the need of a firm decision, which even the malcontents must regard as final.[329]
Pitt on his side sought to procure the fullest information on all points. In regard to the Reform of the Irish Parliament he deprecated any extreme measure such as the admission of the Roman Catholics then appeared to be; but he advocated the extension of political rights to Protestant Dissenters; for, as he forcibly put it, “we may keep the Parliament, but lose the people.” As for the fiscal question he required first of all a satisfactory knowledge of the facts, so that some general principles of action could be agreed on; and he urged that the financial relations of the Kingdoms should be regulated according as the prosperity of Ireland increased with her enlarged commercial opportunities. Justice required that Ireland should then take her share of the imperial burdens, which at present rested almost entirely with Great Britain. Finally they must seek some means calculated to bestow on Ireland that permanent tranquillity which the late commercial concessions had failed to secure.[330]
In this letter, dated 19th September 1784, we see not only an outline of the scheme which took definite form in the Irish Propositions, or Resolutions, of the session of 1785, but also an instructive example of Pitt’s methods of procedure. He began by collecting all the ascertainable facts, including the causes of previous failures, and, by sifting these data, he sought to arrive at general principles which would illuminate the whole question. In a word, his method was inductive. It begun with facts and ended with principles. Unlike the French legislators of 1789–93, who first enunciated principles and then sought to square the facts of life to them, he started with a solid basis and reared on it a structure from whose summit the toiler might take a wide survey. The Revolutionists built symmetrically and grandly, but without foundations.
In order thoroughly to master details, Pitt summoned from Ireland not only Orde but also Foster, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Beresford, Chief Commissioner of the Revenue. Both were able and masterful men, the former the doughtiest opponent, the latter the staunchest champion, of Pitt’s Act of Union. Beresford did much to beautify Dublin, and his name lives on in Beresford Place. With these experienced officials Pitt had many conferences at Downing Street, or at the house on the north side of Putney Heath, which he rented for the latter part of 1784. They confirmed Orde’s advice as to the wisdom of granting to Ireland complete liberty and equality in matters of trade, but warned him as to the difficulty of drawing from Ireland any contribution to the imperial funds. Here it should be remembered that Ireland supported 15,000 regular troops, 3,000 of whom were at the disposal of the British Executive in Ireland, while the others could be moved from Ireland with the consent of her Parliament.
Converse with Foster must also have strengthened Pitt’s resolve to press on the Reform of the Irish Parliament; for he now warned the Duke of Rutland, who stoutly opposed Reform, not to confuse peaceable efforts in that direction with subversive or treasonable schemes; and in a notable phrase of his letter of 4th December, he declared that Parliamentary Reform must sooner or later be carried in both countries. As regards procedure, he thought it best to postpone a change in the Irish franchise until a similar measure came forward at Westminster; for this, if successful, would impart to the movement in Ireland an irresistible force. In the meantime it would be well to take up the commercial problem.
Pitt’s sanguine temperament here led him into a tactical mistake. The Irish Resolutions were destined to arouse in Great Britain a storm of opposition which swept away the hopes of the Reform Associations; and the collapse of their efforts told unfavourably on the Irish political movement. Probably also he erred in bringing forward his proposals first in Dublin--a matter on which Fox readily aroused resentment at Westminster. Yet, where the issues were so tangled, it is difficult to say whether success could have crowned Pitt’s efforts had they been put forth in a different order.[331] From his letter of 7th October 1784 to the Lord Lieutenant we see that he looked on the Reform of the Irish Parliament as simpler, but yet “perhaps more difficult and hazardous,” than the commercial questions then at stake.
Here again he calculated wrongly. Ireland’s demand for equality of trading advantages with Great Britain was certain to meet with vehement opposition from our manufacturers, as the events of the year 1778 convincingly showed. His mistake is the more remarkable as he proposed “to give Ireland an almost unlimited communication of commercial advantage, if we can receive in return some security that her strength and riches will be our benefit, and that she will contribute from time to time in their increasing proportions to the common exigencies of the Empire.”[332] How buoyant was Pitt’s nature to cherish the hope that British merchants would concede commercial equality to Ireland, or that the factions at Dublin would take up the burdens of Empire!
No letter of Pitt’s rings with more enthusiasm, though an undertone of anxiety can be detected, than the very long one of 6th-7th January 1785. Writing until far past midnight he explained to the Lord-Lieutenant in great detail the aim which he had in view, namely, the sweeping aside of all local prejudices, so that England and Ireland might become “one country in effect, though for local concerns under distinct Legislatures.” The pupil of Adam Smith had caught a clear glimpse of the truth that States which throw down their customs’ barriers become effectually parts of the same body. But he now saw that British manufacturers would probably resist so sweeping a change; and he pointed out to Rutland that the admission of Ireland to commercial equality, even in the case of the export trade from British Colonies, to which, he said, she had no claim of right, involved a solemn duty to respond to imperial duties. He then pointed out that Ireland would have more than mere equality; for Great Britain was burdened by taxes which were the outcome of those duties; and Irish shippers, with their lighter burdens, might find it possible to export the produce of those colonies to Great Britain to the detriment of British shippers. In many ways he sought to disprove the claims or excuses put forward by Irish patriots why they should receive much and give little in return. He showed the impossibility of conceding so much unless Ireland would irrevocably pledge herself to contribute, according to her ability, to the expenses of the Empire.[333]
The despatches sent by the Home Secretary, Lord Sydney, to the Lord Lieutenant, and the letters of Pitt to Orde, contained precise instructions on this last point. Pitt first desired that Ireland’s contribution should go towards the navy.[334] Then for a time he harboured the notion that it should go towards his proposed Sinking Fund, because that money would not pass beyond England, and would return in the form of a trade the balance of which was known to be in favour of Ireland.[335] But the Cabinet adopted the earlier proposal, with the proviso that the contribution towards the naval expenses of the Empire should be made in such a way as the Irish Parliament might direct. The letter of George III to Pitt, of 28th January 1785, shows that the King insisted on a contribution from Ireland as essential.
The ten Propositions, or Resolutions, embodying the aims of Pitt, were brought before the Irish Parliament on 7th February 1785. They embodied the information gleaned from Beresford, Foster, and Orde; and a report recently drawn up by a special committee of the British Privy Council also furnished useful information. Modified in some particulars, and, with the addition of a Proposition soon to be noticed, they passed the Dublin Parliament with little difficulty. In their modified form they may be summarized as follows. Foreign and colonial products were to pass between Great Britain and Ireland, in either direction, without any increase of duty. The goods and products of the sister islands were also to be imported either free or at identical rates; or again, where the duties were not equal, they were to be reduced to the lower of the two tariffs hitherto in operation. All prohibitions on inter-insular trade were to lapse without renewal, unless it should seem expedient in the case of corn, meal, malt, flour, and biscuits. The British Government required that, when the “hereditary revenue” exceeded a certain sum, Ireland should pay over the surplus as a contribution to the naval expenses of the Empire. As the “hereditary revenue” consisted mainly of custom and excise duties, its increase (which was generally steady) afforded the best index of the prosperity of Ireland. Moreover that branch of the revenue had hitherto been under the general direction of the Crown; and Pitt’s proposal to transfer its surplus to the control of the Irish Parliament was both statesmanlike and conciliatory.[336]
Nevertheless, the letters of the Duke of Rutland to Pitt revealed the conviction even of the best friends of Government that the Propositions would fail if they were coupled with any demand for a money payment. The time, said the Duke, was very critical. They were seeking to organize a legal militia force in place of the self-constituted Volunteers; Grattan and Daly had spoken splendidly for the change; but the demand for a subsidy would jeopardize everything, even the connection with Great Britain.[337] A secret report which he sent to Pitt showed that of the members of the large towns of Ireland, only Londonderry was well disposed to the Resolutions. In the case of Waterford (“well governed, under Lord Tyrone’s influence”) the freemen opposed them while the two members supported them. Belfast, a close borough, opposed them. In all, he reckoned forty-five members hostile, twelve friendly, and the others absent or not accounted for. A list followed of the “expectations” of members as regards judgeships, pensions and sinecures.[338]
As Rutland and Orde had foreseen, the assailants of the measure fastened on the question of the contribution. How could a country, whose annual expenditure at present exceeded income by £150,000, and whose absentee landlords drained her of a million a year, pay a large sum to the richer island? Did not Ireland contribute largely in men and money to the army? And was not a great part of her administration controlled by a Monarch and a Ministry in whose succession and appointment she had no voice? Such were the invectives of that most acrid and restless of demagogues, Flood. Far more statesmanlike was the conduct of Grattan. Equalling, nay excelling, Flood in his oratorical powers, he held them under the control of a masculine reason. As his energy and tact had gained for his land the boon of legislative independence, so now he sought to cement friendly relations with Great Britain, and therefore gave a general assent to the commercial proposals. The Irish Ministers also pointed out that Great Britain opened a far larger market than Ireland did; that the industries of the larger island, being handicapped by war taxes and high wages, could be exploited by Irishmen, whose national burdens were comparatively light, and that the colonial trade was now to be opened up in its entirety and for ever, not on terms that were revocable at the option of the British Government, as was the case in 1780.
All these arguments were of no avail to carry the proposal respecting Ireland’s contribution to the navy. Though Pitt had carefully framed it so that Ireland would pay nothing until she was in a prosperous state, he failed to meet the rooted objections of the Dublin Parliament to money going out of the country. Grattan focused the opposition by demanding that Ireland should pay nothing until her Government had put an end to the long series of deficits. In private conversations with him Orde failed to weaken this decision, in which nearly all Irishmen concurred. A Resolution to that effect was therefore added. It was further arranged that when the annual hereditary revenue, which then stood at £652,000, should exceed £656,000 in time of peace, the surplus should go towards the support of the imperial navy in such a way as the Irish Parliament should direct. Additional taxes were then voted which were estimated to yield £140,000 a year.
No beginning could have been less auspicious. The arrangement was far less satisfactory than the worst of the alternative plans to which Pitt expressed the hope that Orde would never resort. The contribution, on the present terms, could be evaded by any juggling Chancellor of the Exchequer who should contrive a series of small and profitable deficits. Consequently Orde, who came to London to persuade Pitt of the need of the change, found him inexorable. Pitt was resolved “not to proceed until the condition should be taken away from the last Resolution.”[339] This also appears in a part of his letter to the Marquis of Buckingham:
[Secret.]
Sunday, February 20, 1785.[340]
... I am able to tell you confidentially that we shall certainly suspend the final approbation of the commercial system, and declare the impossibility of completing it till more satisfaction and explicit provision is made in Ireland respecting the object of contribution.
Yours ever, W. PITT.
In opening his case at Westminster on 22nd February, Pitt had to contend with the discouragement caused by this rebuff, and with a fit of hoarseness, which he informed Grenville he had been trying to sleep off without much success. Nevertheless his speech was allowed to be a fine effort. He besought members fairly to consider his proposals, which aimed at settling the relations of the two islands on a liberal and permanent basis. Glancing scornfully at the tactics of the Opposition and the campaign of malice and misrepresentation started by the “Gazetteer” and taken up by various trading bodies, he claimed that there should be fair play, at least until he had stated his case fully. It was complex, and his proposals might need modification in details. The old system of cruel and abominable restraint imposed on Irish trade had vanished. They now had to complete a new system, and community of benefits was the only principle on which they could proceed. They proposed entirely and for ever to open to Ireland the trade of our colonies except that of India, which was a monopoly of the East India Company. There was no solid ground for the fear that so poor a country as Ireland would become the emporium of colonial goods, and would re-export them to our shores. Equally unlikely was the suggestion that Ireland would undersell us in manufactures; for British energy had secured for our goods a fairly large market in Ireland even against her import duties. He then referred guardedly to the subject of Ireland’s contribution to the imperial navy. Finally, while deprecating any immediate decision, he declared that what England lost by the bargain she would more than recoup from the growing friendliness and prosperity of the sister island. He therefore proposed a general motion for the permanent and irrevocable admission of Ireland to all the advantages of British commerce when she irrevocably pledged herself to pay a sum towards the defence of commerce.[341]
The Opposition, exasperated by Pitt’s ungenerous treatment of Fox concerning the Westminster election, at once opened a furious fire of criticisms. Fox, who held the old Whig views in favour of a “national commerce,” that is, protection, urged that Ireland would probably smuggle into Great Britain the produce of foreign colonies, and would become the “grand arbitress of all the commercial interests of the Empire.” The Resolutions ought, he claimed, first to have been moved at Westminster, in which he was probably right. If they were passed, he said, Great Britain would never have anything more to concede to Ireland. The Navigation Acts, the source of England’s prosperity, would be a dead letter. As for Ireland’s contribution to the navy, he would “trust everything to her generosity, but not much to her prudence.” Eden, formerly Irish Secretary, then dwelt on the danger of allowing a lightly taxed country to compete with a heavily burdened country. The debt of Great Britain was a hundredfold that of Ireland; and, while a Briton paid on an average fifty shillings a year in taxes, an Irishman paid only eight shillings. The plan now proposed would be a revolution in British trade. These words are remarkable in view of Eden’s desertion of North and his assistance to Pitt in carrying through a still greater “revolution,” the commercial treaty with France of 1786. The speeches of Fox and Eden did some good; their attack on Pitt’s measure convinced Irishmen that it must have many excellences. The Earl of Mornington (afterwards the Marquis Wellesley) declared that Ireland would warmly support Pitt. Beresford also stated that the Irish members now only wanted an excuse for siding with him; but England must beware of pressing Ireland too hard in this bargain. A rebuff would seriously jeopardize the cause of order.[342]
No sense of prudence or responsibility restrained the action of the British Opposition and their mercantile allies. A campaign had already begun. It bore signs of careful organization. The signal was given by the “Gazetteer” of 16th February, which pointed out that the Navigation Acts, the source of Britain’s prosperity, would be virtually annulled by Pitt’s proposals. On the next day it showed that Irish competition, based on low wages, must ruin our industries. On 18th February a meeting of silk manufacturers protested against the Resolutions. On the 24th the planters and merchants of the West Indies followed suit. On that day the “Gazetteer” stated that, if Pitt’s measure became law, the Exchange would be transferred from Cornhill to Cork; later on it declared that Arkwright and Dempster would set up their factories in Ireland. On 3rd March the “Morning Chronicle,” the organ of the middle classes, joined in the hue and cry, declaring that even as it was the balance of trade between Great Britain and Ireland was in favour of the latter, and that the larger island must be drained of money by the smaller if the old restrictions were not maintained.
Meetings of protest were now in full swing. Delegates of the West India merchants had an interview with Pitt and declared his answer to be unsatisfactory. The merchants themselves refused, by fifty-nine to forty, to petition against his proposals, but the minority published and circulated their opinions. The manufacturing towns, except those of the woollen districts, petitioned strongly against the Resolutions. Manchester, Lancaster, and Dudley each sent two petitions to that effect; while three apiece emanated from Glasgow, Paisley, and Bristol. So the game of misrepresentation went on. A petition from Lancashire contained 80,000 signatures; and a document purporting to come from 13,243 weavers of Glasgow and Rutherglen, shows that artisans were as much alarmed as the merchants. The weavers stated their conviction that if the Resolutions became law, they would be undersold by the Irish in the home market and reduced to beggary.[343] This solidarity of interest is noteworthy. In those days the “manufacturer” was actually, as well as in name, the weaver; and tens of thousands of households, where the hand-loom kept the wolf from the door through the winter, saw pale Ruin stalking behind the figure of thrifty, resourceful, energetic Paddy. The agitation therefore spread through all classes with a unanimity that would scarcely be possible now, when the term “manufacturer” has come to mean a capitalist who owns a factory where nothing is done by hand. Then the solidarity of interest between merchants and weavers was obvious. In imagination both classes saw their industries wafted by a cruel east wind to a land whose inhabitants they disliked and despised.
Some of the petitions were based on false information. That of the Glasgow cotton workers complained that the fourth Resolution, as it left the Irish Parliament, would place a heavy duty on British cottons.[344] But Pitt had throughout insisted that there must be an equalizing of duties on both sides of the Irish Sea, the lower level being always taken. In truth, all reasoning was in vain. The protectionist spirit was proof against all arguments. Thus, the committee of the merchants and manufacturers of Sheffield declared that their industry could not be carried on without grave injury if the present duty on bar iron imported into Great Britain, namely, 56 shillings per ton, were reduced to the level then obtaining in Ireland, that is, 10 shillings a ton.
Still keener was the opposition in Bristol. The protectionist feeling had lost none of the bitterness which mainly caused the unseating of Burke in the election of 1774. The sugar refiners of that town now declared that they had spent more than £150,000 in buildings and plant, all of which would go for naught, if the Irish Parliament, “under the privilege of importing raw and refined sugars through that country to this [should] lay a heavy duty on loaf and lump sugar and a small duty on bastard and ground sugars and molasses”; for the Irish merchants would then “effectually prevent our exporting the former to that kingdom and also to foreign markets, and enable them to send the latter into Great Britain at a less price than it can be manufactured here under the burthen of the high duties, the high price of labour, and heavy taxes, which would inevitably tend to the ruin of that valuable branch of trade in this kingdom.”[345] The Bristol sugar-refiners can scarcely have read Pitt’s proposals, which implied equal duties on all articles at British and Irish ports; and the Irish Parliament had agreed to this. The notion that Irish sugar-refiners, by complex duties of their own devising, would soon beat their British rivals out of foreign markets and ruin them in the home market, is a sign of the mad folly of the time. Against stupidity such as this even the gods fight in vain.
By no arguments could the hubbub be appeased. Pamphlets, especially one by Lord Sheffield, denounced the doom awaiting England should Pitt’s Resolutions pass. In a short time sixty-four petitions poured in against them;[346] and the manufacturers of Great Britain, under the chairmanship of Wedgwood, formed a “Great Chamber” in order to stave off the catastrophe. Yet Pitt’s energies and spirits seemed to rise with the rising opposition. In order to emphasize the importance of commerce, he had recently appointed a Committee of Council for Commerce, which promised to answer the purposes which that ornamental body, the Board of Trade (abolished in 1782), had signally failed to fulfil. The new Council was charged to examine manufacturers and others as to the relations of Anglo-Irish commerce and the probable effect of the Resolutions. Similar investigations were made at the bar of the House of Commons. Pitt cherished high hopes from these inquiries. “The more the subject is discussed,” he wrote to Orde on 4th April, “the more our cause will be benefited in the end.... I do not myself entertain a doubt of complete success.” To the Duke of Rutland he wrote on the 16th: “Though we may lose a little in popularity for the time, we shall ultimately gain--at least the country will, which is enough.”[347]
The report of the committee is very curious, as showing the difficulty of obtaining trustworthy statistics even on the weightiest topics. The Irish accounts showed a far larger export of goods to Great Britain than of imports from Great Britain; while, on the contrary, the British Custom House returns gave the balance of trade as largely against Ireland. The committee could discover no means of accounting for this extraordinary discrepancy.[348] Thus, while protectionists on both sides of the Irish Sea were croaking over the decline of their trade and the growth of that of their rival, the official returns showed that (as they would have phrased it) the balance of trade was so largely in their favour as to warrant the hope of the speedy exhaustion of that rival.
In matters which were within the ken of the financiers of that age, the report was reassuring. The woollen manufacturers of Norwich declared that, though the wages of Irish spinners were less by one-half than those of English spinners, Irish competition was not to be feared under the conditions now proposed. Everett, a London merchant, maintained that the British manufacturers, owing to their skill, taste, and ingenuity, would always have a superiority over those of Ireland, provided that British sheep and wool were not exported thither. Nine woollen manufacturers of Yorkshire were decidedly of this opinion. The chief clothier of Devizes expected harm from Irish competition only in the cheaper stuffs.[349] For the cotton industry the evidence was less encouraging, the witnesses from Manchester claiming that Irish thread could be spun 20 per cent. cheaper than British thread, and that an import duty of 10½ per cent. was needed to protect the home market.[350] Representative silk merchants of London and Scotland had little apprehension for the future, until the Irish workers developed skill and taste.[351] As for the iron trade, the evidence of eight iron-masters who were examined refuted the reasoning of the Sheffield petition. Provided that Ireland did not pay a smaller duty than Great Britain on imports of bar iron, they asserted that they could hold their own against her small and struggling iron industry.[352]
In face of the alarmist statements of Wedgwood in public, his evidence before the committee is of some interest. When asked whether he feared Irish competition in pottery if the duties in both kingdoms were equalized, he replied that “there might be danger of a competition in time, in their own and every foreign market.[353] I should think we were safer if earthenware was allowed to be imported free of all duties into both countries.” This was the man who headed the protectionist “Great Chamber of Manufacturers.” Wedgwood’s chief manager admitted that he had only the day before heard that any pottery at all was made in Ireland. Is it surprising that Pitt sharply criticized Wedgwood’s tactics?
Other strange features of this report are, first, that the outcry in England against any relaxation of duties was greatest in the case of the very articles, calicoes and sugar, in which the Irish Parliament had recently imposed higher duties; secondly, that whereas much of the evidence told in favour of inter-insular Free Trade, the committee decided in favour of a system of moderate duties to be agreed on by the two Governments.[354] Some such conclusion was perhaps inevitable in view of the popular clamour; but the committee made no suggestion how the two Parliaments, now drifting into fiscal hostility, were to come to terms.
If the evidence contained in the report had been duly weighed, the scare among British traders must have passed away; but official reports are of little avail to thwart the efforts of panic-mongers. In vain did George Rose, in an unsigned pamphlet, point the moral of the case, and appeal to the common sense of his countrymen.[355] The Opposition had the ear of the public, and the fate of the Resolutions in their present form was evidently sealed. Probably Pulteney was right in stating that the report came out too late to influence public opinion, and that Pitt had unaccountably underrated the force of the prejudices contending against him. Now, when the vote on the Westminster Scrutiny alarmed him, he became perhaps unduly cautious.[356] This may be the true explanation of his disposition to compromise. In his letter of 21st May, to the Duke of Rutland, he dwelt on the difficulties arising from the unscrupulous tactics of the enemy and the very marked independence of a large number of his supporters, so that “we are hardly sure from day to day what impression they may receive.”
This avowal is of some interest. It shows how critical was Pitt’s position in the spring of 1785. As has been seen in a former chapter, he had strained the allegiance of his motley following by taking up too many thorny questions at once. The composite elements--Foxite, Northite, and Chathamite--had not yet been fused into unity by the power of his genius and the threatening pressure of France. Only by the most careful leading could he keep his supporters together, and save the country from the turmoil which a Fox-North Ministry must have caused. There was the danger; and we may be sure that Pitt clung to office, not merely from love of power (though he did love power), but because, in the proud words of Chatham, he knew that he could guide his country aright, and that no one else could.
Viewing the question of the independence of members of Parliament in a more general way, we may hazard the conjecture that in the days of pocket boroughs and small electorates members probably acted more independently than in the present time, when their action is apt to be the resultant of two external forces, pressure from constituents and pressure from the party “whip.” However we may explain the fact, it is certain that Pitt, despite his huge majority, failed to carry three important proposals in 1785–6; and in the case of the Irish Propositions he hesitated and lost the day.
* * * * *
In the second week of May, 1785, the Prime Minister bent before the storm, and on the 12th presented his modified measure in the form of twenty Propositions. The chief changes were those tending to safeguard our West India planters and merchants against the secret importation of the products of the French or Spanish colonies into this country on Irish ships. He maintained the monopoly of the East India Company in all the seas and lands between the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellan, but allowed the Company’s ships to export goods from Ireland to the East Indies. Further, he proposed that the Navigation Laws, whether present or future, and the enactments respecting colonial commerce, should be equally binding on both kingdoms. Respecting the reduction of duties in either country, it was suggested that they should not fall below 10½ per cent.; also that no new duties should be imposed except such as would “balance duties on internal consumption.” He also added a Proposition concerning the copyright of books. Respecting Ireland’s contribution to the navy, Pitt annulled the Irish proposal asserting the prior need of balancing income and expenditure, and required that the proposed financial arrangement should be perpetual.
In his speeches of 12th May and succeeding days he showed that most of the petitions against his plan were founded on error, and he refuted the hackneyed assertion that, because Ireland was lightly taxed and wages were low, she would therefore undersell Britons in their own markets. Considering her extreme poverty, he said, her burdens were in effect as great as those of England; her backwardness in industry would long cripple her; moreover, for skilled labour she had to pay as dearly as British employers. He claimed that a liberal scheme of commercial union would benefit both islands, just as the Union with Scotland had immensely furthered the prosperity of Great Britain despite the prophecies of ruin with which it was at the time received.
His opponents now changed their tactics. Seeing that the Propositions had been altered largely in deference to their fears, they could scarcely meet them with a direct attack. They therefore sought to procure their rejection, if not at Westminster, then at Dublin. Congratulating themselves on having caused the abandonment of the first proposals, as fraught with ruin to Great Britain, they sought to set Ireland in a flame against the amended measure. It is true that Fox deprecated the concession of the proposed advantages to Ireland, on the ground that they would subject our workers to the caprices of the Dublin Parliament. But he reserved his denunciations for the proposals which treated Ireland as a subsidiary State, in the matter of the Navigation Acts. Above all, he declared, he would trust Ireland where the Prime Minister distrusted her, namely, in the contribution to the navy. Put that to her as a debt of honour, said he, and she would discharge it. Compel her, and she would either refuse from injured pride or concede it grudgingly, while perhaps equally withdrawing her support from the army. “I will not,” he exclaimed, “barter English commerce for Irish slavery: that is not the price I would pay, nor is this the thing I would purchase.” Finally he declared that the House could not understand these matters so well as the traders and workers of Great Britain, who had overwhelmingly declared against the measure. Fox did well to disclaim any positive opinions on these subjects; for he took no interest in them, and is known never to have read Adam Smith’s work, which he scoffed at as a collection of entertaining theories.[357] We can now understand his conduct in declaiming against the new safeguards for British industry, which he himself had demanded; and if we may judge from Wraxall, the most telling parts of his speech were the personal touches in which he reprobated Pitt’s lofty dictatorial manner, and his novel connection with the “King’s friend,” Jenkinson. Formerly War Secretary under Lord North,[358] he had recently been appointed by Pitt head of the new “Committee of Council for the Superintendence of Commerce.” Burke, who must have approved Pitt’s proposals (except the contribution from Ireland, against which he hotly inveighed), made capital out of the new “Coalition,” calling Jenkinson Pitt’s pedestal, and wittily declaring that he envied not the statue its pedestal or the pedestal its statue.[359] Other members, including Fox and Pitt, skilfully played with the simile, and thus beguiled the hours of these otherwise exhausting debates, which, we may note, caused Wilberforce to faint in the midst of his efforts to defend his chief.
The most brilliant, though not the least mischievous, speech of these debates was that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. It is needless to dilate on the Celtic charm and vivacity of this great littérateur. Descended from an old Irish family, which gave to Swift one of his dearest friends, and to Dublin one of its leading actors and authors, he was born in 1751, doomed to sparkle. Educated at Harrow, and called to the Bar, he soon attracted attention by his speeches and still more by his plays. His “Rivals” and “School for Scandal” attested the versatility of his wit and the cynical geniality of his nature. In 1780 he made what was perhaps the chief mistake of his life in entering Parliament as member for Stafford; for his character was too volatile his satire too caustic, to ensure success except as a frondeur. Friendship with Fox condemned him almost entirely to this rôle and exaggerated the recklessness of his utterances. He was the Charles O’Malley of politics. When, therefore, that engaging political satire, “The Rolliad,” appeared, in castigation of Rolle, the somewhat roisterous member for Devonshire, everyone attributed the poems to Sheridan; and his strenuous denial found little credence.[360]
One of the “Probationary Odes” amusingly hit off the alliance of Jenkinson with Pitt and the increase in the number of the Irish Propositions:
Lo! hand in hand advance th’ enamour’d pair This Chatham’s son and that the drudge of Bute. Proud of their mutual love Like Nisus and Euryalus they move To Glory’s steepest heights together tend, Each careless for himself, each anxious for his friend.
CHORUS
Hail! most prudent Politicians! Hail! correct Arithmeticians! Hail! vast exhaustless source of Irish Propositions!
Elsewhere in dolorous strains the Muse
Sees fair Ierne rise from England’s flame, And build on British ruin Irish fame.[361]
In these witticisms we have the high-water mark of the achievements of the Opposition. Sheridan inveighed against the exaction of a contribution from Ireland towards the navy, and the re-imposition of the Navigation Laws (certainly the weakest part of Pitt’s case) as implying a legislative inferiority from which she had escaped in 1782. He scoffed at the commercial boons as a mean and worthless bribe, and the whole scheme as “a fraud, cheat and robbery,” fatal to the confidence of the Irish in the good faith of Britain. The playwright further exclaimed that it would be a misfortune if the Irish Parliament dared to pass the Resolutions, and that, as it was not by Parliament that the independence of Ireland had been obtained, so it was not by Parliament that it should be given up. This was tantamount to an invitation to the Irish Volunteers to renew their coercion of the Dublin Parliament; and it was now clear that Fox and his friends, in despair of defeating the proposals at Westminster, were seeking to wreck them at Dublin, if need be, at the cost of civil broils.
In this they succeeded. By substantial majorities Ministers carried the Irish Propositions at the end of May; and the Lords passed them on 18th July. But long before this the storm-centre had moved across St. George’s Channel. Throughout the length and breadth of Ireland an outcry was raised against the state of ignominious dependence in which Ireland would be placed by the contribution now imposed on her for ever in return for greatly diminished advantages. Fox’s telling phrase about the bartering of Irish liberty against British commerce was on every lip. The results were at once obvious. Though Pitt, with his usually sanguine forecast, had expressed the belief that the Dublin Parliament would be more manageable than that of Westminster, it set at naught all the Viceregal blandishments. Some of its members even taunted Pitt with acting treacherously towards Ireland throughout. Grattan, while refraining from this taunt, opposed the new scheme, especially clause iv and the perpetual contribution, in a speech which the Lord Lieutenant described to Pitt as “seditious and inflammatory to a degree scarcely credible.” Flood excelled himself in recklessness; and in that body of usually subservient placemen, leave to bring in the Bill was granted only by a majority of nineteen (12th August).
* * * * *
In face of this storm-signal the Irish Government decided to furl their sails and come to anchor. The measure was deferred to another session; and of course was never heard of again. Considering the “very great clamour”[362] in the country, this was inevitable; and Dublin manifested its joy by a spontaneous and general illumination. Woodfall, an opponent of Pitt’s policy, admitted to Eden that neither the populace nor the members could explain the cause of their recent fury or their present joy.[363] The excitement soon abated; and it must be allowed that the popular party in Ireland did not adopt the hostile measures against British trade which might have been expected after the breakdown of these enlightened proposals. Lord Westmorland, during his viceroyalty five years later, admitted that complete harmony existed in the commercial relations of the two kingdoms.
This may have salved the wound which the events of 1785 dealt to Pitt. Up to the very end he had hoped for success in what had been the dearest object of his life. After hearing of the ominous vote of 12th August in Dublin, he wrote to the Marquis of Buckingham in the following manly terms:
Putney Heath, Aug. 17, 1785.[364]
MY DEAR LORD,
I have many thanks to return you for your letter. Grenville will probably send you the account we received to-day from Ireland, after a long period of suspense. The motion for bringing in a Bill has been carried only by 127 against 108; and such a victory undoubtedly partakes, for the present at least, of the nature of a defeat. A motion was announced for Monday last, declaratory against the 4th Resolution. The event of this motion seemed to be thought uncertain. The probable issue of all this seems to be that the settlement is put at some distance, but I still believe the principles of it too sound, not to find their way at last.
To the Duke of Rutland he also wrote in the same lofty spirit, using the words quoted at the head of this chapter, and adding that, when experience had brought more wisdom, “we shall see all our views realised in both countries and for the advantage of both.”
Faith and courage such as this are never lost upon colleagues and subordinates, especially when they can rely on loyal support from their chief. Both to the Duke and to Orde Pitt now tendered his thanks for their tact and resolution in face of overwhelming difficulties, and thus manifested that kindliness and magnanimity which wins heartfelt devotion. For, as usually happens after defeat, envious surmises were rife. Some spiteful influence (probably that of the Marquis of Buckingham),[365] had sought to poison Pitt’s mind against Orde as the chief cause of the failure in Dublin. As for Beresford, he believed that some of Pitt’s colleagues had turned traitors. Lesser men might pry into corners to find petty causes for that heart-breaking collapse; but no such suspicions mar the dignity of Pitt’s voluminous correspondence, a perusal of which enables the reader to understand why Orde once exclaimed: “I am so sensible of the manly and noble part which Mr. Pitt has acted, that I will die by inches in the cause of his support.”[366]
The real reason of failure, as Pitt clearly saw, was the determination of powerful factions in both kingdoms to wreck his proposals by representing each concession made to the sister-island as an injury or an insult, or both. At all times it is easier to fan to a flame the fears and jealousies of nations than to allay them; and in that age the susceptibilities both of Britons and Irishmen were highly inflammable. Twelve decades, marked by reforming efforts and closer intercourse, have softened the feelings then so easily aroused; and as we look back over efforts of conciliation, not yet crowned with complete success, we see no figure nobler and more pathetic than that of the statesman who struggled hard to bring together those hitherto alien peoples by the ties of interest and friendship; we see also few figures more sinister than those of his political opponents at Westminster who set themselves doggedly to the task of thwarting his efforts by means of slander and misrepresentation.
XII. PITT AND HIS FRIENDS
(1783–94)
Keep thy friend Under thy own life’s key.
SHAKESPEARE, All’s Well that Ends Well.
A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymball where there is no love.--BACON.
Some statesmen merit notice solely from the magnitude of their achievements; others attract attention by the charm of their personality. Pitt claims homage on both accounts. Accordingly I propose to devote this chapter to his private life and friendships during the early part of his career, beginning with the time when he laid down the Chancellorship of the Exchequer and fled to the house of his friend Wilberforce at Wimbledon. In the Diary of the latter we read this brief but suggestive entry: “April 3 [1783]. To Wimbledon, where Pitt, etc., dined and slept. Evening walk--to bed a little past two. April 4. Delicious day: lounged the morning at Wimbledon with friends: foining at night, and run about the garden for an hour or two.”
We can picture the scene. Lauriston House, Wilberforce’s abode on the south side of Wimbledon Common, is a spacious villa, comfortable in its eighteenth-century solidity, and scarcely changed since those days. One of the front bedrooms is known as “Mr. Pitt’s room.” There he would look forth on the Common, which had for him a peculiar charm. At the back, the south windows look upon an extensive lawn, bordered not too thickly by trees, under one of which, a maple, tradition says that he was wont to lounge away his Sunday mornings, to the distress of his host. At other times the garden was the scene of half riotous mirth. Pitt, Dudley Ryder, Pepper Arden, Tom Steele, and Wilberforce there broke loose from the restraints of Westminster, and indulged in foyning. That old-English word, denoting thrusting or fencing, conjures up visions of quips and pranks such as Horace loved. Would that Pitt had had more time for these wholesome follies!
Imagine these youths, with the freshness of Cambridge still upon them, cheating the hours with fun. Pitt, the stately, austere leader of the House of Commons, who, on entering its precincts, fixed his eyes straight on his seat, and tilted his nose loftily in air during his State progress thither, with not so much as a nod to his supporters[367]--yet here, on the lawn of Lauriston House, is all fun and laughter, sharpening his wit against the edge of Wilberforce’s fancy, answering jest with jest, quotation with quotation, in a fresh mingling of jollity and culture. As yet all is joyous in the lives of the friends. Wilberforce has inherited from an uncle an ample fortune along with Lauriston House, and adds rooms to it so as fitly to entertain the friends who always cluster about him. The woes of the slaves have not yet struck a chill to his life, and he lives amidst a buzz of friends and admirers. He reminds us of that character in Disraeli’s “Lothair,” who proved an irresistible magnet at every party--no one quite knew why; but every one sought to be next him. The magnetism of Wilberforce is easily intelligible; it lay in his lovable and gifted nature, which welled forth freely in genial anecdote, friendly parody, sparkling retort.
For Pitt, too, there were as yet no oppressive cares. True, at that time, there loomed before him the toilsome career of an impecunious barrister, but that did not daunt his serene and self-reliant nature. Doubtless the troubles of England moved him more, now that the prospect of peace with America and the half of Europe was overclouded by the triumph of Fox and North. But Pitt had that protective faculty, inherent in all great natures, of laying aside personal and even national cares in the company of his dearest friends, and it set him free for life-restoring mirth. Then, too, his nature, shy and stiff to mere acquaintances, blossomed forth radiantly to a chosen circle, such as he found at Wimbledon. Here, then, was seen the real man. Away went the mask of official reserve, which prudence compelled him to wear at Westminster as a defence against his seniors. Here, among youths and friends, his pranks were startling. One of them must be told in the words of Wilberforce: “We found one morning the fruits of Pitt’s earlier rising in the careful sowing of the garden beds with the fragments of a dress-hat in which Dudley Ryder had overnight come down from the opera.”
Would that we knew more of those bright days! For Pitt the man, not Pitt the statesman, is seen at Wimbledon. The pillar of State, columnar in its Doric austerity, becomes a lithe facile form, twined about with social graces, gay with the flowers of friendship. The hours of recreation, rather than those spent in the office, reveal the inner life. Alas! the self-revealing episodes in the life of Pitt are hidden from us. None of his friends was a Boswell. Wilberforce, who might have been the enlightener, was troubled by defective eyesight, which curtailed his correspondence; and his Diary is a series of tantalizing jottings, a veritable Barmecide feast. As for Pitt’s relatives, they never drew him out of himself. Lord Chatham, though a good talker in general company, seems to have exerted on his younger brother a slightly chilling influence; and their letters were fraternally business-like. We therefore search in vain for those lighter traits of character, those sparkles of wit, which enlivened the joyous years 1783–5. This side of Pitt’s character is little more known to us than are the hidden regions of the moon. We wish to know it all the more because it is not the frozen but the sunny side of his being.
Failing to catch more than one sportive echo of those glad times, the chronicler falls back on mere externals, such as Pitt’s occasional reluctance to attend the parish church at Wimbledon, or his fondness for fishing in Lord Spencer’s lake on the lower land east of the Common. Clearly the neighbourhood must have attracted him; for in August 1784 he leased the house next to Lord Ashburton’s, on the north side of Putney Heath, scarcely two miles distant from the abode of Wilberforce. He resided there up to the autumn of 1785, when the opportunity of buying the house at Holwood drew him to the scenes of his boyhood, near Hayes, in Kent. Nevertheless the Surrey Common was to win him back. For, during his last term of office, he purchased Bowling Green House, on the old Portsmouth road, near the middle of that beautiful space.
There it was that he fought his duel with Tierney on Whitsunday 1798. There, too, he breathed his last, on 23rd January 1806. In the dark days that followed on the news of Austerlitz, his thoughts turned with one final flicker of hope towards the news which he expected from his special envoy to Berlin, the Earl of Harrowby, formerly Dudley Ryder. The news proved to be heart-breaking. But fancy persists in wondering whether, perchance, during the time of waiting, the dauntless spirit did not for a brief space fling off the thraldom of the present and flit across the open to dwell with fond remembrance on that spring sowing of the flower-beds of his friend Wilberforce.[368]
* * * * *
After the severe disappointments of the session of 1785, the signs of friskiness vanish from the life of Pitt. Up to that time his hopefulness is of almost boyish intensity. Confidence in himself, and in the goodness of his cause, and determination to carry out a work of national revival, lead him to grapple with great enterprises in a way that astonishes friends and baffles opponents. The nation having given him a mandate in 1784, he hopes to solve the most urgent of existing problems. They are the restoration of public credit, the reduction of the National Debt, the reform of Parliament, the subordination of the East India Company to the control of Parliament, the opening up of freer trade not only with Ireland but also with France, and the preservation of peace, so that, as he phrased it--“Let peace continue for five years, and we shall again look any Power in Europe in the face.”[369]
Here was a programme which transcended anything previously seen. But to it were added the many unforeseen events and problems that provide a full stock in trade for an ordinary parliamentary leader. The Warren Hastings affair alone would have occupied a whole session under a quiescent Minister; and we may here note that Pitt’s conscientious treatment of it, as a matter on which Ministers and members must vote according to their convictions, tended to relax the bonds of party discipline to a dangerous extent.
Indeed, there is only one of his important actions during the first years of power that needs apology. This is the persistence with which he pressed against Fox the demand for a complete scrutiny of the Westminster election. Despite the fact that that wearisome and very expensive inquiry brought to light few bad votes, and did not exclude Fox from Parliament (for as we saw, he sat as Member for Orkney), the Prime Minister refused to put an end to “this cursed business,” as Pulteney termed it,[370] until his own supporters compelled him to desist. How are we to explain this conduct? It led to waste of time and temper in Parliament, besides annoying many of his friends, and straining to breaking-point the allegiance of his composite majority. There can be no doubt that he committed a blunder, and one which Englishmen detest; for his conduct seemed ungenerous to a beaten foe and a violation of the unwritten rules of fair-play.
Nevertheless, it is likely that he acted, not from rancour, not from a desire to ban his enemy, least of all under any dictation from Windsor (of this I have found no sign), but rather from the dictates of political morality. That there had been trumping up of false votes was notorious; for the votes polled exceeded the total number of voters; and Pitt, as the champion of purity at elections, may have deemed it his duty to probe the sore to the bottom. In these days an avowed champion of Reform would be praised for such conduct. In that age he was condemned; and it was certainly tactless to single out Fox from among the many candidates for whom corrupt practices had been used. Such an act appeared the outcome of personal pique, not of zeal for electoral purity. So at least men looked on it in the spring of 1785. Pulteney, Wraxall, and the ordinary ruck of members failed to see anything but personal motives in the whole affair.[371] Fox, who always gauged the temper of the House aright, carried it with him when he protested that he had little expected to find Pitt acting as the agent of the Crown in his persecution; that it was clearly the aim of the Ministry to ruin him, for he was a poor man. “Yet,” he added, “in such a cause I will lay down my last shilling. If ultimately I lose my election, it will be for want of money, not from want of a legal majority of votes, while Westminster will be deprived of its franchise because I am unable to prosecute a pecuniary contest with the Treasury.”
This is the most effective type of parliamentary speech. It avoided all reference to the abstract principles which were at stake, and it appealed with telling force to the sporting instincts of squires. Little wonder is it that Pitt’s followers went over to the side which seemed to stand for fair play to a poor man in his contest with a spiteful bureaucracy. A few days later Pitt could muster only a majority of nine (21st February 1785), and this clearly foreshadowed the end of the scrutiny, which came with a vote hostile to Ministers on 3rd March. On a subordinate motion, six days later, several malcontents returned to their allegiance, thus proving, in Wraxall’s words, that “they wished to control and restrain, but had no desire to overturn, the Administration.”[372]
This affair deserves mention here because it illustrates what was the chief weakness of Pitt. His secluded childhood, his education apart from other youths, even at Cambridge, his shyness in general company, and his decided preference for the society of a few friends, gave him very few opportunities for knowing ordinary men. He therefore was slow in understanding the temper of the House, and he never gained what we may call the Palmerston touch. Well would it have been for him if he had mixed more with men and shown towards members of the House the affability with which Fox and North charmed friends and foes alike. But, like Peel, Pitt had neither parliamentary graces nor small talk for the lobby. In truth he was too shy or too proud to unbend with ease. Or rather he did so only in a circle of friends or among his juniors. Then his sense of fun could go to surprising lengths, witness that historic romp when Lady Hester Stanhope, two of her younger brothers, and young William Napier (the future historian) managed to get him down and blacken his face. In the midst of their jubilant triumph there came a knock at the door. Two Ministers were announced as desirous of taking his commands on some question. For a few minutes State business stood still until the Prime Minister shook off his assailants and washed his face for the interview. Then the boys marvelled more at the change of manner than of colour. The Prime Minister threw up his chin, loftily inquired the cause of the visit, imparted his decision, stiffly dismissed the Ministers--and resumed the romp.[373] Clearly there were two Pitts.
His rather stilted manners at Westminster were doubtless a reflection--a lunar reflection--of the melodramatic splendours of his father. Never was a colleague or a subordinate introduced to Chatham’s presence until the effects of light were Rembrandtesque, and the telling phrase had been coined. But where the father triumphed by the force of his personality, the son only half succeeded. For he was more a Grenville than a Pitt, and he inherited from that family some of its congenital stiffness. Hence the efforts which the son put forth, as if with the aim of fulfilling the precept of St. Paul to Timothy--“Let no man despise thy youth”--were calculated, not to impress beholders, but rather to freeze them.
Far different was the easy good nature of Fox, which often salved the wounds inflicted in the course of debate. It is said that Lord North, after one of the debates on the American War, in which Fox had mercilessly belaboured one of the Ministers, good-humouredly remarked to the orator, “You were in fine feather to-night, Charles; I am glad that it was not my turn to be fallen upon.” Fox, we may add, reciprocated these sentiments. However he might threaten North with impeachment, he was ready in private to shake him by the hand; and shortly before the fall of that Minister he publicly asked his pardon for offending him by his tremendous indictment, adding that he meant it not. To us this sounds unreal. Either the indictment against the author of the nation’s ruin was not quite sincere, or the apology was hollow. Pitt, with his exceptionally high standard of truthfulness,[374] could not have tendered it. Fox did; and Wraxall praised his conduct, adding that Pitt was less placable, and was wanting in those frank, winning, open ways which made friends and retained them through adversity.[375]
This rather superficial verdict--for Wraxall knew Pitt only very slightly--summed up the views of the easy-going mass, which cares nothing for principles, little for measures, and very much for men, provided that they keep up the parliamentary game according to the old rules and in a sportsmanlike way. It must always be remembered that few members of Parliament took their duties seriously, and looked on the debates mainly as a change from the life of the other fashionable clubs. To such an assembly the political philosophy of Burke was foolishness, and the lofty principles of Pitt, mere Pharisaism. Its ideal would have been Esau, provided that he had held fast to the customs of primogeniture.
We have little or nothing that directly shows the impression produced on Pitt by his discovery of the shallowness and fickleness of his supporters. Perhaps it intensified his natural shyness and awkwardness of manner, which Wilberforce assures us were very great. Certainly he did not mix more with men. “Pitt does not make friends” is a significant entry in Wilberforce’s Diary for March 1785.[376] This inability to make a wide circle of friends was not incompatible with those rarer gifts which link a man closely to those with whom he had real kinship of spirit. If we may read Shakespeare’s thoughts into the well-known words of Polonius to Laertes, the poet supremely admired a man who inspired the few with ardent affection and held the many at arm’s length. In regard to character, then, we may honour Pitt for the very characteristic which to men like Wraxall seemed a blemish.
Nevertheless, it was a serious failing in a parliamentary tactician. Onlookers, who saw only the cold and reserved exterior, described Pitt as the embodiment of egotism and pride. His friends knew full well that he was the soul of kindness. Dundas and Wilberforce testify to his affable behaviour to subordinates, his fund of good temper, which was proof even against contradiction and the advent of bad news. Wilberforce mentions a case in point. Pitt had long been ruminating on some revenue proposal, and at length mentioned it to the Attorney-General, only to learn that there would be grave legal objections to the scheme; far from showing annoyance, he received the announcement “with the most unruffled good-humour,” and, giving up his plan, “pursued his other business as cheerfully and pleasantly as usual.”[377]
It is not thus that a proud and egotistical nature sees his castle vanish into air. Anecdotes such as this have been known only since the year 1897. Now we know the real Pitt; the men of these times saw only the professional mask; and therefore we find exclamations like that of Sir Gilbert Elliot who, after hearing the almost inspired speech of Pitt on the abolition of the slave-trade, remarked: “One felt almost to like the man”;[378] or again Lady Anne Hamilton in her “Memoirs of the Court of George III,” asserted that Pitt was always cold and carried his frostiness even into his carouses.
This certainly was the general belief. In one particular Pitt’s behaviour often gave colour to the charge of pride or egotism. His letters were as stiff as his parliamentary attitudes. Worst of all, he very often left letters unanswered; and this applied not merely to begging letters, against which silence is a Prime Minister’s panoply, but even to important matters of State. We find Eden, in the midst of the commercial negotiations with France, writing from Paris in despairing terms about the Prime Minister’s silence, and finally suggesting that all his letters of the last fortnight must have sunk in the Channel. Sir James Harris, too, when fighting an unequal battle against the French party in Holland, begged Pitt to send a few lines to encourage the hard pressed friends of England. For four months not a line came; and at last Harris begged Carmarthen to cajole a letter out of his chief: “Is it impossible to move him, who speaks so well, to write one poor line to these sound shillings and pence men?”[379] The excuse doubtless was, that Pitt was overworked in Parliament (as indeed he stated to Eden);[380] but, even with the then scanty facilities for dealing with a vast correspondence, he should certainly have handled it with more method and tact. Careless correspondents will readily conjecture how much a Prime Minister may harm his prospects by subjecting friends and foes alike to a peculiarly annoying slight.
Pitt, then, owed little or nothing to social graces; and Horace Walpole gave a very superficial judgement, when, in his companion sketches of Pitt and Fox, he stated that the former “cultivated friends to form a party.” On the contrary, he harmed his party by cooling his friends.
* * * * *
The men who most helped Pitt to keep in touch with his following were Dundas, Grenville, and Jenkinson. They did not, as Wraxall avers, hold the first place in his confidence. That was still held by Wilberforce; and to their friendship we may apply the apt remark of Montaigne, that the amity which possesses and sways the soul cannot be double. For political reasons Pitt after the year 1784 came into closer contact with his subalterns, among whom Dundas and Grenville claim notice.
Henry Dundas (1742–1811), a younger son of the Right Honourable Robert Dundas, Lord President of the Scottish Court of Session, and of Anne Gordon of Invergordon, was born at Edinburgh, where he was educated first at school, then in the University. The atmosphere in which he grew up was strictly legal; and his ancestry, no less than his upbringing, seemed to fit him for success at the Bar, at which he appeared in 1763. His rise was rapid, and in 1774 he entered Parliament as member for Midlothian. At Westminster he attached himself to North’s party and became known as a hard worker and hard hitter. United as these powers were with a manly presence, genial gifts, and the full fund of Scottish shrewdness, he acquired favour and became Lord Advocate. Grace and persuasiveness of speech he lacked; a harsh voice, a still harsher accent, and awkward gestures told against him; but above these defects he rose triumphant, thanks to indomitable courage, which enabled him unabashed to bear the heaviest blows of debate. Napoleon once expressed his admiration of Blücher, because, however badly he was beaten, “the old devil” came up again as though nothing had happened. So it was with Dundas in his many encounters with Fox. He might be repulsed but never routed. His features were bold and handsome, and, if they were “tinged with convivial purple,” that perhaps enhanced their charm. For the House loved a bon vivant, who entertained with lairdly lavishness and had good store, not only of wine, but of broad stories.
Wraxall, while admitting Dundas’s appearance to be “manly and advantageous,” avers that his conviviality was part of a deep-laid scheme for managing men and tightening his grip on the Administration; for “never did any man conceal deeper views of every kind under the appearance of careless inattention to self-interest.” The same insinuation is wittily conveyed by the authors of “The Rolliad” in a skit on the Cabinet Meetings which Dundas was supposed to hold in his villa. “March 9th, 1787. Got Thurlow to dine with us at Wimbledon--gave him my best Burgundy and blasphemy to put him into good humour. After a brace of bottles ventured to drop a hint of business. Thurlow cursed me, and asked Pitt for a sentiment. Pitt looked foolish, Grenville wise. Mulgrave stared. Sydney’s chin lengthened. Tried the effect of another bottle. Pitt began a long speech on the subject of our meeting. Sydney fell asleep by the fire”--and so on.
In one respect Dundas was the great political agent of the age. He managed Scotland, so thoroughly, indeed, that he has been termed “the foremost Scotsman of the eighteenth century.”[381] No civilian since the time of John Knox has ever controlled the energies of that people so thoroughly as Henry Dundas. What the great Reformer achieved by an appeal to their highest aspirations, the party manipulator achieved by an appeal to the purse. Since the collapse of the Stuart cause material interests had been paramount; and their deadening effect on national character appears in the political torpor which lay upon Scotland until the strident call of the French Revolution awakened her. The men north of the Tweed had even more reason than Englishmen to desire Parliamentary Reform; for, as will be seen in a later chapter, in all Scotland there were only 1303 electors; and these returned 45 members as against 44 who misrepresented Cornwall. But so long as the Scots slumbered, it mattered not whether they had 45 members or 4; for the return of 45, and their course of conduct at Westminster were alike prescribed by Dundas. The soporific fruit which drugged the Scottish people and kept their representatives close to his heel was “patronage.” Dundas it was who dispensed all important prizes both in Church and State. Valuable livings at home, lucrative posts in India or speedy advancement in the navy, these and many other rewards were in his hands. His influence at the Admiralty and at the India Board of Control was immense; he worked hard for his men; and it may be admitted that his choice of officials, especially for India, was often sound. Certain it is that he opened up golden avenues to hundreds of poor Scottish families, so that he was often hailed as the benefactor of his people.
In one respect Dundas conferred a substantial boon. He persuaded Pitt to extinguish the embers of hatred to the reigning dynasty which still smouldered in the Highlands, by restoring the estates that were confiscated after the “Forty-five.” By this act of clemency Pitt and Dundas linked their names to the work of reconciliation so tactfully begun by Chatham, and helped to foster the sentiment of British nationality, which bore a rich harvest on the fields of Salamanca and Waterloo. It is not surprising, then, that Dundas had the small governing clique in Scotland entirely at his beck and call. One of his forty-five henchmen at Westminster, Ferguson of Pitfour, frankly stated that he had never heard a speech which had influenced his vote, and that there was only one defect in Dundas’s leadership, namely, that he was not quite tall enough to enable his followers readily to see into which lobby he was going at division-time.[382]
Even so, the magnetic influence of Dundas upon the obedient Caledonian squad was a political asset of no small worth. Not seldom could the laird of Melville decide the fate of Cabinets by throwing his forty-five votes into this or that scale. He himself was fully aware of his importance; for in a letter which he wrote to Grenville early in 1789, he declined another official post because in his present position (or positions) he was “a cement of political strength to the present Administration,” the dissolution of which might be ruinous. The words are instinct, not only with the Scottish canniness, but with Scottish loyalty. In truth, the staunchness of Dundas’s friendship to Pitt suffices to refute those critics, both of his own and later times, who speak of him as of a political Vicar of Bray. In his early days his trimming propensities were often disagreeably prominent; and the speech in which he hailed the rising sun of Pitt, and slighted the waning orb of North, was quite characteristic of the earlier half of his career.[383] But, for him as for some others, the splendour of Pitt’s genius, and the glow of his pure patriotism, inaugurated a brighter future; and he might well say of his tergiversation at that time what Talleyrand said of his still more numerous changes of front: “I have never deserted a party before it deserted itself.” While recognizing in this new ally great powers of work, and still greater powers of “influence,” Pitt did not at once give him his whole confidence; and we shall probably not be far wrong in inferring that only after the disillusionment of the spring of 1785, did “Henry VIIIth of Scotland” become his counsellor on matters of the highest moment. Thenceforth his influence over Pitt steadily increased, while that of Wilberforce somewhat waned; and we find the latter declaring at a later time that Pitt’s connection with Dundas was his “great misfortune,” a remark which applied mainly to the slavery question.[384] It is, however, still more applicable to Dundas’s conduct of the war, when, as we shall see, his absorption in other work, and his utter inexperience of military affairs, should have made him backward in giving advice. Far from that, he was for some time the guiding spirit; and from his seat at the Home Office or the India Board, or from his suburban villa, he dashed off orders of momentous import, which were to gladden the heart of Carnot.
Such, then, was the man at whose house, on the west side of Wimbledon Common, Pitt was a frequent visitor. There the conviviality was unrestrained by those scruples which more and more prevailed at Wilberforce’s abode hard by; and after the latter gave up that villa, in the autumn of 1786, the associations of Pitt with Wimbledon are somewhat vinous. Both Pitt and Dundas were hard drinkers. The former frequently tossed off several tumblers of port wine before a great speech in the House of Commons; and it would seem, if rumour spoke truly, that at Dundas’s the potations were long and deep. It must not, however, be supposed that Pitt performed no serious work there. The long and important despatches which he wrote at Wimbledon show the contrary; and their contents prove them to have been written before the Bacchic pleasures, which men of that age deemed the appropriate close of a busy day. Only once did the pleasures of dessert at Dundas’s cause Pitt and his host to compromise themselves in public. But on one occasion they came to the House of Commons obviously the worse for liquor. The occasion was equally remarkable. It was on the acceptance of the French Declaration of War, in February 1793. Fox generously forebore from taking advantage of his rival’s incapacity,[385] but the situation was hit off in the following lines:
I cannot see the Speaker, Hal, can you? What! Cannot see the Speaker, I see two.
A man so frank and intriguing, so subtle and pugnacious as Dundas, is fair game for the satirist; and it is not surprising that the Whig rhymsters who compiled the “Rolliad” scourged the factotum of Caledonia:
Whose exalted soul No bonds of vulgar prejudice control. Of shame unconscious in his bold career He spurns that honour which the weak revere; For, true to public Virtue’s patriot plan, He loves the Minister and not the Man. Alike the advocate of North and Wit, The friend of Shelburne and the guide of Pitt, His ready tongue with sophistries at will Can say, unsay, and be consistent still.
This is, of course, the effusion of unscrupulous party hacks; but it shows the skill with which the enemies of Dundas seized on the weak points in his career. As a matter of fact, few men have worked harder than the future Viscount Melville, and on few men has fortune at the close pressed more unkindly.
* * * * *
William Wyndham Grenville (1759–1834) is a less interesting man than Dundas. First cousin to Pitt, and born in the same year, he seemed destined to advance hand in hand with him, just as his father had signally helped Chatham in certain parts of that meteoric career. Nature, however, had clearly designed the Grenvilles, both father and son, not to be comets, scarcely planets, but rather satellites. The traditional pride of the Grenvilles (in which Pitt was by no means lacking) appeared in William Grenville, blended with a freezing manner, the effect of which was enhanced by his heavy features and stiff carriage. To counterbalance these defects, he was dowered with an upright and virtuous disposition, great industry, a choice store of classical learning, good sense, though not illuminated by imagination, and oratorical gifts, which, if neither majestic nor pleasing, partook of his native solidity. As Paymaster of the Forces (conjointly with Lord Mulgrave) he did useful work, the higher branches of which involved questions of foreign policy.
Pitt’s appreciation of his sound sense appeared in his choice of Grenville for very delicate diplomatic missions to The Hague and Paris in the crisis of 1787. The evenness of his judgement and temper procured him the Speakership of the House of Commons in 1789, after the death of Cornwall. From this honourable post he was soon transferred to more congenial duties, as Secretary of State, and entered the Upper House as Lord Grenville. In 1791 he became Secretary for Foreign Affairs, his conduct of which will engage our attention later on. Here we may note that in all his undertakings he gained a reputation for soundness; and if the neutral tints of his character procured for him neither the enthusiastic love of friends nor the hatred of foes, he won the respect of all. The envious railers who penned the “Rolliad” could fasten on nothing worse than his solidity--
A youth who boasts no common share of head. What plenteous stores of knowledge may contain The spacious tenement of Grenville’s brain! Nature, in all her dispensations wise, Who formed his head-piece of so vast a size, Hath not, ’tis true, neglected to bestow Its due proportion to the part below.
Unfortunately, though Grenville could manage business, he could not manage men; and at this point he failed to make good a defect in the political panoply of Pitt. On neither of the cousins had nature bestowed the social tact which might have smoothed the rubs of diplomatic discussion, say, in those with the French envoy, Chauvelin, in 1792. That fervid royalist, Hyde de Neuville, complained bitterly of the freezing powers of Downing Street. The enthusiastic young Canning found it impossible to work with Grenville, who was also on strained terms with Dundas. The “inner Cabinet,” composed of Pitt, Grenville, Dundas, must have been the scene of many triangular duels; and it needed all the mental and moral superiority of Pitt (as to which every one bears witness) to preserve even the appearance of harmony between seconds who were alike opinionated, obstinate, and covetous of patronage.[386] On the whole, the personality of Grenville must rank among the dullest of that age. I have found no striking phrase which glitters amidst the leaden mass of his speeches and correspondence. His life has never been written. He would be a very conscientious zealot who would undertake it.
* * * * *
Turning to the central figure of the group, we have once more to mourn the lack of information about those smaller details which light up traits of character. Few of Pitt’s letters refer to his private affairs in the years 1784–86; and the knowledge which we have of them is largely inferential. Even the secondary sources fared badly; for it seems that Pitt’s housemaid made a holocaust of the many letters which Wilberforce wrote to him during his foreign tour in 1785.[387] In the Pitt Papers there is only one letter of Wilberforce of this period; and as it throws light on their friendship and the anxiety felt by Pitt’s friends at the time of the Irish Propositions, I print it here almost in extenso.[388]
Lausanne, 2nd Aug., 1785.
MY DEAR PITT,
... If I were to suffer myself to think on politics, I should be very unhappy at the accounts I hear from all quarters: nothing has come from any great authority; but all the reports, such as they are, are of one tendency. I repose myself with confidence on you, being sure that you have spirit enough not to be deterred by difficulties if you can carry your point thro’; and trusting that you will have that greater degree of spirit which is requisite to make a person give up at once when the bad consequences which would follow his going on are at a distance. Yet I cannot help being extremely anxious: your own character, as well as the welfare of the country are at stake; but we may congratulate ourselves that they are here inseparably connected. In the opinion of unprejudiced men I do not think you will suffer from adjourning the Irish propositions ad calendas Graecas, if the state of Ireland makes it dangerous to proceed and you can make it evident you had good reason to bring them on, which I think you can. At the worst, the consequences on this side are only that you suffer (the Country may suffer too, but I am taking for granted this is the lesser evil); but I tremble and look forward to what may happen if the Irish Parliament should pass the propositions, and the Irish nation refuse to accept them; nor would it be one struggle only; but as often as any Bill should come over from our House of Commons to be passed in theirs, which was obnoxious, there would be a fresh opportunity for reviving it, especially as you have an Opposition to deal with as unprincipled and mischievous as ever embroiled the affairs of any country. God bless you, my dear Pitt and carry you thro’ all your difficulties! You may reckon yourself most fortunate in that chearfulness of mind which enables you every now and then to throw off your load for a few hours and rest yourself. I fancy it must have been this which, when I am with you, prevents my considering you as an object of compassion, tho’ Prime Minister of England; for now, when I am at a distance, out of hearing of your foyning, and your (illegible) other proofs of a light heart, I cannot help representing you to myself as oppressed with cares and troubles, and what I feel for you is more, I believe, than even Pepper feels in the moments of his greatest anxiety; and what can I say more?...
Pepper Arden, to whom Wilberforce here refers, scarcely lived up to his name. His character and his countenance alike lacked distinction. The latter suffered from the want of a nose, or at least, of an effectively imposing feature. What must this have meant in a generation which remembered the effect produced by Chatham’s “terrifying beak,” and was dominated by the long and concave curve on which Pitt suspended the House of Commons! Further, Pepper lacked dignity. His manner was noisy and inelegant.[389] He pushed himself forward as a Cambridge friend of Pitt; and the House resented the painful efforts of this flippant young man to run in harness by the side of the genius. Members roared with laughter when Arden marched in, at Christmastide of 1783, to announce that Pitt, as Prime Minister of the Crown, would offer himself for re-election. The effrontery of the statement was heightened by the voice and bearing of the speaker. Nevertheless, Pitt, as we have seen, made him Attorney-General. No appointment called forth more criticism. He entered the peerage as Lord Alvanley.
It is the characteristic of genius to attract and inspire the young; and Pitt’s influence on them was second only to that of Chatham. As we shall see later on, Canning caught the first glow of political enthusiasm from the kindling gaze of the young Prime Minister. Patriotism so fervid, probity so spotless, eloquence so moving fired cooller natures than Canning’s; and among the most noteworthy of those who now came forward was Henry Addington. His father, Anthony Addington, had started life as a medical man in Reading, and afterwards in Bedford Row, London, where Henry was born in 1754. In days when that profession held a lower place than at present, this fact was to be thrown in the teeth of the son on becoming Prime Minister. Chatham, however, always treated his family physician (for such Addington became) with chivalrous courtesy. Largely by the care of the doctor William Pitt was coaxed into maturity after his “wan” youth.[390] It was natural, then, that the sons should become acquainted, especially as young Addington, after passing through Winchester School and Brasenose College, Oxford, entered at Lincoln’s Inn while Pitt was still keeping his terms there.
Considering the community of their studies and tastes, it is singular that few, if any, of their letters of this period survive. Such as have come down to us are the veriest scraps. Here, then, as elsewhere, some evil destiny (was it Bishop Tomline?) must have intervened to blot out the glimpses of the social side of the statesman’s life. It is clear, however, that Pitt must have begun to turn Addington’s thoughts away from Chancery Lane to Westminster; for the latter in 1783 writes eagerly against “the offensive Coalition of Fox and North.” At Christmas, when Pitt leaped to office as Prime Minister, he sought to bring Addington into the political arena, and held out the prospect of some subordinate post. Addington accordingly stood for Devizes, and was chosen by a unanimous vote at the hustings in April 1784. Nevertheless, his cool and circumspect nature rose slowly to the height of the situation at Westminster. Externals were all in his favour. His figure was tall and well proportioned; his features, faultlessly regular, were lit up by a benevolent smile; and his deferential manners gave token of success either as family physician or family attorney. In fine, a man who needed only the spur of ambition, or the stroke of calamity, to achieve a respectable success. It is said that Pitt early bade him fix his gaze on the Speaker’s chair, to which, in fact, he helped him in 1789, after Grenville’s retirement. But, for the present, nothing stirred Addington’s nature from its exasperating calm. As worldly inducements failed, Pitt finally made trial of poetry. During a ride together to Pitt’s seat at Holwood, the statesman sought in vain to appeal to his ambition; but Addington--five years his senior, be it remembered--pleaded the disqualifying effects of early habits and disposition. Thereupon Pitt burst out with the following passage from Waller’s poem on Henrietta Maria:
The lark that shuns on lofty boughs to build Her humble nest, lies silent in the field; But should the promise of a brighter day, Aurora smiling, bid her rise and play, Quickly she’ll show ’twas not for want of voice, Or power to climb, she made so low a choice; Singing she mounts; her airy notes are stretch’d Towards heaven, as if from heaven alone her notes she fetch’d.
Then the statesman set spurs to his horse and left Addington far behind.[391] It is curious that when Addington’s ambition was fully aroused, it proved to be an obstacle to Pitt and a danger to the country in the crisis of 1803–4.
Adverting now to certain details of Pitt’s private life, we notice that he varied the time of his first residence on Putney Heath (August 1784–November 1785) by several visits to Brighthelmstone, perhaps in order to shake off the fatigue and disappointment attendant on his Irish and Reform policy. At that seaside resort he spent some weeks in the early autumn of 1785, enjoying the society of his old Cambridge friends, “Bob” Smith (afterwards Lord Carrington), Pratt (afterwards Lord Camden), and Steele. We can imagine them riding along the quaint little front, or on the downs, their interchange of thought and sallies of wit probably helping in no small degree the invigorating influences of sea air and exercise. If we may trust the sprightly but spiteful lines in one of the “Political Eclogues,” it was at Brighton that Pitt at these times especially enjoyed the society of “Tom” Steele, whom he had made Secretary of the Treasury conjointly with George Rose. Unlike his colleague, whose visage always bore signs of the care and toil of his office, Steele was remarkable for the rotundity and joviality of his face and an inexhaustible fund of animal spirits.[392] Perhaps it was this which attracted Pitt to him in times of recreation. The lines above referred to occur in an effusion styled--“Rose, or the Complaint,”--where the hard working colleague is shown as bemoaning Pitt’s preference for Steele:
But vain his hope to shine in Billy’s eyes, Vain all his votes, his speeches, and his lies. Steele’s happier claims the boy’s regard engage, Alike their studies, nor unlike their age: With Steele, companion of his vacant hours, Oft would he seek Brighthelmstone’s sea-girt towers; For Steele relinquish Beauty’s trifling talk, With Steele each morning ride, each evening walk; Or in full tea-cups drowning cares of state On gentler topics urge the mock debate.
However much Pitt enjoyed Steele’s company on occasions like these, he did not allow his feelings to influence him when a question of promotion arose. Steele’s talents being only moderate, his rise was slow, but he finally became one of the Paymasters of the Forces. In that station his conduct was not wholly satisfactory; and Pitt’s friendship towards him cooled, though it was renewed not long before the Prime Minister’s death.
For George Rose, on the other hand, despite his lack of joviality, Pitt cherished an ever deepening regard proportioned to the thoroughness and tactfulness of his services at the Treasury. In view of the vast number of applications for places and pensions, of which, moreover, Burke’s Economy Bill had lessened the supply, the need of firm control at the Treasury is obvious; and Pitt and the country owed much to the man who for sixteen years held the purse-strings tight.[393] On his part Rose felt unwavering enthusiasm for his chief from the time of their first interview in Paris in 1783 until the dark days that followed Austerlitz. Only on two subjects did he refuse to follow Pitt, namely, on Parliamentary Reform, from which he augured “the most direful consequences,” and the Slavery Question. That he ventured twice to differ decidedly from Pitt (in spite of earnest private appeals) proves his independence of mind as well as the narrowness of his outlook. He even offered to resign his post at the Treasury owing to their difference on Reform, but Pitt negatived this proposal. We need not accept his complacent statement that Pitt later on came over decidedly to his opinion on that topic.[394]
The tastes of the two friends were very similar, especially in their love of the country; and it was in the same month (September 1785) that each bought a small estate. We find Pitt writing at that time to Wilberforce respecting his purchase of “Holwood Hill,” near Bromley, Kent, and stating that Rose had just bought an estate in the New Forest, which he vowed was “just breakfasting distance from town.” “We are all turning country gentlemen very fast,” added the statesman. A harassing session like that of 1785 is certain to set up a centrifugal tendency; and we may be sure that the nearness of Holwood to Hayes was a further attraction. Not that Pitt was as yet fond of agriculture. He had neither the time nor the money to spare for the high farming which was then yearly adding to the wealth of the nation. But he inherited Chatham’s love of arranging an estate, and he was now to find the delight of laying out grounds, planting trees and shrubs and watching their growth. Holwood had many charms--“a most beautiful spot, wanting nothing but a house fit to live in”--so he described it to Wilberforce.[395] He moved into his new abode on 5th November 1785, and during the rest of the vacation spent most of his time there, residing at Downing Street only on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Many affairs of State were decided at parties at Holwood, or, later on, at Dundas’s villa at Wimbledon.
Pitt admitted to Wilberforce that the purchase of Holwood was a piece of folly; and this was soon apparent to all Pitt’s friends who had old-fashioned notions of making both ends meet. That desirable result had rarely, if ever, been attained by the son of the magnificent Chatham. Sparing for the nation’s exchequer, Pitt was prodigal of his own. The aristocratic hauteur, of which all but his friends complained, led him to disregard the peccadilloes of servants and the overcharges of tradesmen. A bachelor Prime Minister, whose nose is high in air, is good sport for parasites; and even before the purchase of Holwood, Pitt was in difficulties. During one of the visits to Brighthelmstone, “Bob” Smith undertook to overhaul his affairs, and found old and forgotten bills amounting to £7,914. The discovery came as a shock; for Pitt, with his usual hopefulness, had told his Mentor that, as three-quarters of his official salary were due, he would have enough for his current liabilities. A further scrutiny showed that tradesmen, in default of any present return, took care to ensure an abundant harvest in the future. The butcher usually sent, or charged for, three or four hundredweight of meat on a Saturday, probably because Pitt was often away for the week-end. The meat bill for January 1785, when Pitt generally dined out, was £96, which, reckoning the price at sixpence a pound, implied a delivery of 34 hundredweight. Other bills for provisions (wrote Smith to Wilberforce) “exceed anything I could have imagined.” Apparently they rose in proportion to Pitt’s absence from home. His accounts were kept by a man named Wood, whose book-keeping seems to have been correct; but Smith begged Wilberforce to urge on Pitt the need of an immediate reform of his household affairs.[396] Whether it took place, we cannot tell; for this is one of the private subjects over which Bishop Tomline chose to draw the veil of propriety.
An economical householder would have found relief from the addition of £3,000 a year to his income. That was the net sum which accrued to him after August 1792, from the Lord Wardenship of the Cinque Ports.[397] That Pitt felt more easy in his mind is clear from his letter to Lady Chatham, dated Downing Street, 11th November 1793. She had been in temporary embarrassment. He therefore sent £300, and gently chid her for concealing her need so long. He continued as follows: “My accession of income has hitherto found so much employment in the discharge of former arrears as to leave no very large fund which I can with propriety dispose of. This, however, will mend every day, and at all events I trust you will never scruple to tell me when you have the slightest occasion for any aid that I can supply.”[398]
Unfortunately, Pitt soon fell into difficulties, and partly from his own generosity as Colonel of the Walmer Volunteers. As we shall also see, he gave £2,000 to the Patriotic Fund started in January 1798. But carelessness continued to be his chief curse. In truth his lordly nature and his early training in the household of Chatham unfitted him for the practice of that bourgeois virtue, frugality. That he sought to practise it for the Commonwealth is a signal proof of his patriotism. We shall see that his embarrassments probably hindered him from a marriage, which might have crowned with joy his somewhat solitary life.
In the career of Pitt we find few incidents of the lighter kind, which diversify the lives of most statesmen of that age. Two such, however, connect him with the jovial society of Dundas. It was their custom to outline over their cups the course of the forthcoming debates; and on one occasion, when a motion was to be brought forward by Mr. (afterwards Earl) Grey, Dundas amused the company by making a burlesque oration on the Whig side. Pitt was so charmed by the performance that he declared that Dundas must make the official reply. The joke sounded well over wine; but great was the Scotsman’s astonishment to find himself saddled with the task in the House. Members were equally taken aback; and the lobbies soon rustled with eager conjectures as to the reason why Pitt had surrendered his dearly cherished prerogative. It then transpired that the Prime Minister had acted partly on a whim, and partly on the conviction that a speaker who had so cleverly pleaded a case must be able to answer it with equal effect.[399]
The other incident is likewise Bacchic, and is also uncertain as to date. Pitt, Dundas, and Thurlow had been dining with Jenkinson at Croydon; and during their rollicking career back towards Wimbledon, they found a toll-bar gate between Streatham and Tooting carelessly left open. Wine, darkness, and the frolicsome spirit of youth prompted them to ride through and cheat the keeper. He ran out, called to them in vain, and, taking them for highwaymen, fired his blunderbuss at their retreating forms.[400] The discharge was of course as harmless as that of firearms usually was except at point-blank range; but the writers of the “Rolliad” got wind of the affair, and satirised Pitt’s lawlessness in the following lines:
Ah, think what danger on debauch attends! Let Pitt o’er wine preach temperance to his friends, How, as he wandered darkling o’er the plain, His reason drowned in Jenkinson’s champagne, A rustic’s hand, but righteous fate withstood, Had shed a premier’s for a robber’s blood.
Gaiety and grief often tread close on one another’s heels; and Pitt had his full share of the latter. The sudden death of his sister Harriet, on 25th September 1786, was a severe blow. She had married his Cambridge friend, Eliot, and expired shortly after childbirth. She was his favourite sister, having entered closely and fondly into his early life. He was prostrated with grief, and for some time could not attend even to the public business which was his second nature. Eliot, now destined to be more than ever a friend and brother, came to his house and for some time lived with him. It will be of interest to print here a new letter of George III to a Mr. Frazer who had informed him of the sad event.
WINDSOR, Sept. 25, 1786. 9.15 p.m.[401]
I am excessively hurt, as indeed all my family are, at the death of the amiable Lady Harriot Elliot (sic); but I do not the less approve Mr. Frazer’s attention in acquainting me of this very melancholy event. I owne I dread the effect it may have on Mr. Pitt’s health: I think it best not at this early period to trouble him with my very sincere condolence; but I know I can trust to the prudence of Mr. Frazer, and therefore desire he will take the most proper method of letting Mr. Pitt know what I feel for him, and that I think it kindest at present to be silent.
G. R.
The King further evinced his tactful sympathy by suggesting that Pitt should for a time visit his mother at Burton Pynsent. In other respects his private life was uneventfully happy. The conclusion of the commercial treaty with France, the buoyancy of the national revenue, and the satisfactory issue of the Dutch troubles must have eased his anxieties in the years 1786–87; and after the serious crisis last named, his position was truly enviable, until the acute situation arising from the mental malady of George III overclouded his prospects at the close of the year 1788.
Certainly Pitt was little troubled by his constituents. Almost the only proof of his parliamentary connection with the University of Cambridge (apart from warnings from friends at election times how so and so is to “be got at”) is in a letter which I have discovered in the Hardwicke Papers. It refers to a Cambridge Debt Bill about to be introduced by Charles Yorke in April 1787, to which the University had requested Pitt to move certain amendments in its interest. It will be seen that Pitt proposed to treat the request rather lightly:
DEAR YORKE,
I am rather inclined to wish the Cambridge [Debt] Bill should pass without any alteration, unless you think there are material reasons for it.--The impanelling the jury does not seem to be a point of much consequence, but seems most naturally to be the province of the mayor.--With regard to the appeal, I think we agreed to strike it out entirely.--As the Commission are a mixed body from the town, the county, and the University, there seems to be an impropriety in appealing either to the town sessions or the County Sessions, either of which may be considered as only one out of three parties interested. The decision of the Commission appears therefore the most satisfactory, and if I recollect right, it is final as the bill now stands.
Yours most sincerely, W. PITT.[402]
In the whole of Pitt’s correspondence I have found only one episode which lights up the recesses of his mind. As a rule, his letters are disappointingly business-like and formal. He wrote as a Prime Minister to supporters, rarely as a friend to a friend. And those who search the hundreds of packets of the Pitt Papers in order to find the real man will be tempted to liken him to that elusive creature which, when pursued, shoots away among the rocks under a protective cloud of ink. At one point, however, we catch a glimpse of his inmost beliefs. Wilberforce, having come under deep religious convictions in the autumn of 1785, resolved to retire for a time from all kinds of activity in order to take his bearings anew. Then he wrote to Pitt a full description of his changed views of life, stating also his conviction that he must give up some forms of work and amusement, and that he could never be so much of a party man as he had hitherto been. Pitt’s reply, of 2nd December 1785, has recently seen the light. After stating that any essential opposition between them would cause him grief but must leave his affection quite untouched, he continued as follows:
Forgive me if I cannot help expressing my fear that you are nevertheless deluding yourself into principles which have but too much tendency to counteract your own object and to render your virtues and your talents useless both to yourself and to mankind. I am not, however, without hopes that my anxiety paints this too strongly. For you confess that the character of religion is not a gloomy one, and that it is not that of an enthusiast. But why then this preparation of solitude, which can hardly avoid tincturing the mind either with melancholy or superstition? If a Christian may act in the several relations of life, must he seclude himself from them all to become so? Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action. I will not, however, enlarge upon these subjects now. What I ask of you, as a mark both of your friendship and of the candour which belongs to your mind, is to open yourself fully and without reserve to one, who, believe me, does not know how to separate his happiness from your own.[403]
On the morrow, a Saturday, he called on Wilberforce at Wimbledon, and the friends for two hours unburdened their hearts to one another. We know little of that moving converse. The two men had ideals so different that unison was out of the question. The statesman, so we learn, had never reflected much on religion, that is, in the keenly introspective sense in which Wilberforce now used the word. To Pitt, as to most Englishmen, religion meant the acceptance of certain doctrines laid down by the State Church, and we may describe it as largely political and conventional, buttressing the existing order, but by no means transforming life or character. One glance alone we gain into the sanctuary of his thoughts; he told Wilberforce that Bishop Butler’s “Analogy” raised in his mind more doubts than it answered--a proof (perhaps the only proof that survives) of his cherishing under that correct exterior a critical and questioning spirit.
To Wilberforce, thenceforth, all doubts were visitations of the devil. Indeed, the microscopic watch which he kept on his thoughts and moods seemed likely to stunt his activities. From this he was perhaps saved by his friendship with Pitt. True, they could no longer tread the same path. Pitt obeyed that call to action on behalf of his country which from his boyhood had deadened all other sounds. Wilberforce for a long time held aloof from politics as debateable ground beset with snares to the soul. And yet, though the two men diverged, the promptings of affection kept them ever within hail. No gulf ever opened out such as Coleridge finely pictured as yawning between two parted friends:
They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between.
Indeed, Wilberforce found with some surprise that on most questions they agreed as before[404]--a proof that there was no desertion of principle on Pitt’s part after the session of 1785. We may go further, and assert that in their changed relations the two friends exerted upon each other a mutually beneficent influence. The new convictions of Wilberforce tended to refine the activities of his friend; and Pitt’s practical good sense helped to launch the philanthropist on that career of usefulness in which he could both glorify God and uplift myriads of negroes.
A sharp difference of opinion respecting the war with France overclouded their lives in the year 1793. Wilberforce fully recognized the sincerity of the Cabinet’s efforts to avoid a rupture, and admitted that Ministers had not pursued a “war system.” But shortly before the outbreak of hostilities, when he was about to speak in favour of conciliation, Pitt took the strange step of sending Bankes to him, earnestly begging him not to speak, as it might do irreparable mischief, and promising him an opportunity for the statement of his views. That opportunity did not come; and Wilberforce evidently resented this attempt to make political capital out of their friendship.[405] The breach between them did not widen until late in the year 1794, when Wilberforce deemed it his duty to move an amendment in favour of peace. Bankes and Duncombe supported it; but it was easily defeated. In the following year the relations between Pitt and Wilberforce on this question became so strained as to cause both of them deep distress. Indeed Pitt, who generally enjoyed profound slumbers, for a time suffered from insomnia. The only other occasions when sleep fled from him were the sudden resignation of Earl Temple late in 1783, the mutiny at the Nore, and the arrival of the news of Trafalgar.
The old feelings began to reassert themselves, when Pitt spoke strongly in favour of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (26th February 1795); but the friends did not meet for nearly a month, and then with some little embarrassment on both sides. All shadows, however, vanished in a few months’ time, when Wilberforce came to see that his friend longed for peace so soon as it was compatible with security. Thereafter their old friendship revived, though tinged with the sadness attending disappointed hopes.
Pitt did not so readily forget the independence now and again displayed by Bankes, for instance, in opposing Parliamentary Reform, the Westminster Scrutiny, and the continuance of the war. Though they were friendly at Cambridge, and afterwards at Goostree’s Club and in the House, Pitt never warmed to Bankes, whose nature indeed was too precise, cold, and prudent ever to call forth affection. Respected by all for his sound but stolid speeches, he for forty years sat at Westminster as member for Corfe Castle. No one seems ever to have thought of making Bankes either a Minister or a peer. At a later time the circle of Pitt’s friends included Canning and Wellesley, who will receive notice in later chapters.
On the whole, Pitt seems to have been somewhat exacting in his friendships. One of his early comrades complained that all suggestions to the Prime Minister must, under pain of his resentment, go forth to the world as emanations of his wisdom. This is to sacrifice friendliness and candour to egotism and parliamentary punctilio. True, no statesman can afford to neglect prudential considerations; and we may freely grant that the cautious calculations of Pitt rarely obsessed his whole being, as that of Napoleon was dominated by his egotism. We do not find Pitt acting, still less speaking, in the sense which prompted the remark of Napoleon about an over scrupulous servant: “He is not devoted to me; he does not want to get on.”
It must be confessed that there is something wanting about Pitt. He lacked geniality and glow alike in his treatment of men, and in his attitude towards the aspirations of the age then dawning. Probably this defect sprang from a physical basis. It must be remembered that Chatham was nearly all his life a martyr to gout. He bequeathed this weakness to his second son, a fact which may account for the coldness of Pitt’s nature. Just as creatures with a torpid circulation love to bask in the sun, so his chilliness may have prompted the cravings for the Bacchic society of Dundas and Steele. In this respect he suffers by comparison with Fox, the full-blooded man, the impetuous foe, the open-handed, forgiving friend, whose character somewhat resembles that of Antony, deified by Cleopatra:
For his bounty, There was no winter in ’t; an autumn ’twas That grew the more by reaping; his delights Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above The element they lived in.[406]