The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (61 page)

However, Fox’s whole radical style of politics–such as stirring up the London mob to intimidate the House of Commons, which was one of his set pieces–was going out of fashion. Ever since the summer of 1780, when the Gordon Riots against a new relief act for Roman Catholics had ruined half of London in three days of uncontrollable violence, out-of-doors agitation had been deeply discredited. The petitioning of Parliament by the half-mad Protestant fanatic Lord George Gordon, with ‘No Popery’ as its slogan, had made the streets literally run with blood. Catholic chapels were burned, prisons were opened and many killed. Ministers seemed paralysed, and it was George III who saved the day by ordering troops to fire on the rioters. These events had frightened off the middle classes, who preferred to remain unenfranchised–in the event, until 1832–than be associated with mob disorder.

On the unexpected death of Rockingam in July 1782, the intellectually gifted but unpopular Lord Shelburne became prime minister, only for Fox, who had been fighting with Shelburne, to destroy the ministry by resigning (though he was Foreign Secretary) taking the 160 Rockinghamite or ‘old corps’ Whigs with him. Shelburne, left high and dry, was forced to govern with the King’s Friends and his little group of Chathamite Whigs–among whom remained the twenty-three-year-old Pitt, who became chancellor of the Exchequer. Though he had spent the previous twelve years tormenting Prime Minister North over the prosecution of the American War, Fox’s only route to power again was to join forces with the Tories. Together he and North would have enough MPs to form a government. By April 1783, in a cynical power-play that scandalized the electorate, the Fox–North axis forced Shelburne out before he had seen through the treaty to end the war. Under a nominal prime minister, the Duke of Portland, Fox’s and North’s coalition government took office. North, following an apparently amazing conversion, announced that ‘The appearance of power is all that a king in this country can have.’

But, just as before, George III was not to be underestimated. He now loathed the treacherous North only slightly less than Fox, who he believed with considerable justification was leading his son the Prince of Wales into bad ways. One observer watching the burly Fox swagger across the floor at Buckingham House to kiss George’s hand as a sign of taking office, remarked that the king looked like a furious horse who ‘turned back his ears and eyes’ as if he was about to throw the new minister. George not only defeated Fox’s attempt to increase the prince’s allowance but managed to get the whole administration ejected over Fox’s India Bill. This proposed that, instead of a governor-general, India should be ruled by seven commissioners appointed directly by Parliament.

Fox’s reputation for untrustworthiness and his large majority in the House of Commons led to the general assumption that his aim was to secure Indian patronage for himself and his friends. This was greatly resented on the ground that it infringed the East India Company’s chartered rights, while the King’s Friends considered it an attack on the royal prerogative. The king was heard to mutter that if the India Bill passed he would take the crown off his head and put it on Mr Fox’s untidy black locks, while the cartoonists contented themselves with drawings of Carlo (Charles) Khan riding into London on an elephant and taking all before him. The hitherto impassioned belief that the crown’s influence should be limited had passed its high-water mark. What was far more pressing was that Fox and his followers should be restrained.

While the affable, black-browed Fox relaxed after effortlessly piloting the bill through the Commons, George III put his own sly plan of attack into action. He instructed a young peer named Lord Thurlow to take a visiting card to all the members of the House of Lords dining before the vote, on which he had menacingly inscribed in his own handwriting the words: ‘Whoever votes for the India Bill is not only not the King’s friend, but would be considered by the King his enemy.’ The Lords’ role in the eighteenth century was as the king’s advisers and, because George III had been lavish with his creations, they were mainly supporters of his, if not actually King’s Friends. The king’s enmity was something no eighteenth-century peer desired. They defeated the bill.

That same night, 18 December, the king sent for Fox to demand the seals of office. He had a new candidate ready for supreme responsibility, the twenty-four-year-old William Pitt, the youngest prime minister in history. Twice previously the king had secretly approached the virtuous and hardworking Pitt, for all his youth, to see if he would take office at a time when Shelburne could not control the House of Commons and opposition to the American Peace Treaty was threatening its progress. On both occasions Pitt had declined, feeling that he would not himself be able to control the House. The determined king did not give up easily. He kept coming back to Pitt, and eventually by taking soundings persuaded him he should have a go at being prime minister and see whether office did not eventually bring MPs over to him.

To jeers of derision, and the taunt ‘A kingdom entrusted to a schoolboy’s care’, the tall slender young man took over the government. He refused to call an election, relying for his power entirely on the support of the king, and slowly the Tories in the House of Commons began to abandon North for him, not least because he was unsullied by compromise. Pitt was a very different man from Lord Chatham, cool where his father was passionate, happy to be a member of a team where Chatham had to dominate, simple where his father had preferred the grand style. And he was a consummate party politician, where his father had been a statesman and virtuoso war-leader. But it was no longer possible to talk with the same certainty of Whigs and Tories. Many of the old Whig aristocratic families had cut their connection with the party, which was itself continuing to decline in popularity. In the first election Pitt dared call, in March 1784, as many as 160 of Fox’s Whigs lost their seats–Fox’s Martyrs as they were humorously known. The Pitt government, which Fox had contemptuously termed a ‘mince-pie administration’ because he did not believe it could outlast the Christmas season in which it began, endured for seventeen years.

After the election Pitt was in a uniquely powerful position: he had not only the country behind him, but the two Houses of Parliament and, most crucially, the king. He was powerful as no one had been since the days of Walpole. An eminently sensible and worldly man who believed that those with wealth should be involved in politics and have a proper stake in the country, Pitt filled the House of Lords with a new Tory aristocracy which became as powerful as the old Whig revolutionary families. But though he was now at the head of the Tories, he did not forget his liberal origins as a reforming Whig, and put an end once and for all to the dubious methods by which government had been carried out for almost a century, by reforming the audit of public accounts. Like his father, Pitt refused to take the additional income from obscure sinecures, ‘perks’, which so many other politicians in office lived off.

Despite British mastery of the seas, it was rumoured that in peacetime things had got pretty slack with the navy, that there was not a single ship which could set sail and not need to call in for repairs. The dockyards were said to be slow and incompetent at their work. The sensible Admiral Howe, a reformer after Pitt’s own heart, was made first lord of the Admiralty. In five years the fleet was up to speed again, with ninety ships of the line ready to sail to whatever ocean required their presence.

Though Pitt was now head of the Tory party, he continued to be a disciple of the radical economist Adam Smith, who had formed part of Shelburne’s team of advisers. Smith, whom Pitt would continue to consult, had written a seminal work,
The Wealth of Nations
(1776), that turned on its head the mercantile protectionist orthodoxy to which all European colonial powers of the time subscribed. His argument was that low duties and freer trade between nations would dramatically increase their wealth. Pitt’s attempts to free Irish trade from the restrictions imposed on her by English manufacturers met with shortsighted obstructions thanks to the clout of Lancashire businessmen, but his imaginative treaty with France created the lowest possible duties between the two countries. He hoped trade would encourage peace between the ancient enemies. As a painstaking financier who believed in fiscal probity, Pitt also established a sinking fund to pay off the National Debt, which after two world wars had reached £250 million, and reduced the duty on a large number of items such as tobacco, spirits and tea. It was the resulting cheapness of tea that encouraged the British to become a nation of tea drinkers, and to favour ‘the cups that cheer but not inebriate’, as one of the period’s most characteristic poets, the Evangelical William Cowper, would write.

To some extent Pitt’s zeal was shackled by his dependence on the support of the king and the King’s Friends. He was a consummately practical politician who more than most believed that politics was the art of the possible. Although, true to his origins, he introduced a Reform Bill on coming to power, his motion to purchase some corrupt boroughs and redistribute their seats failed. When he saw how unpopular this measure was in the House of Commons, he simply abandoned it. Likewise, despite his belief in religious toleration, he would not lend his official backing to a series of attempts to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts between 1788 and 1791. The importance of the sugar industry to the economy and the lobbying of the powerful West Indian interests also stalled the abolition of the slave trade, but at least progress to that end was being made.

Pitt was fortunate that the beginning of his premiership coincided with that astonishing moment in the industrial revolution when James Watt’s perfected steam engine allowed mass machine production of textiles and iron and steel. Although Britain had developed manufacturing processes throughout the century in tools, textiles and pottery the introduction of Watt’s steam engine in the early 1780s changed the speed of production exponentially. In the space of a few years Britain could produce all kinds of goods from cotton sheets to machine tools ten times more quickly and ten times more cheaply than any other country in the world. For all Pitt’s reforms, without the wealth created by the industrial revolution the country would have been bankrupted by war and by the ten-year boycott by America of English goods.

In only one area did Pitt win less than golden opinions from contemporaries and that was the trial of the former governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, which arose out of Pitt’s 1784 act to regulate Indian affairs. Pitt’s reforms, while not going so far as Fox’s, gave the East India Company a government-run Board of Control, a new department of state. Its president was to be a member of the British Cabinet whose role was to supervise any political decisions of the company with regard to the Indian territories. The British government would also have a veto over the company’s choice of governor-general, though the company’s commercial policy was to remain unrestricted.

In the course of investigating the East India Company’s affairs, poisonous reports from his rivals prompted questions over Hastings’s conduct. Hastings was an extraordinarily able and constructive administrator, but his rooting out of corruption within the East India Company itself had aroused hostility, while his high-handed ways of doing business made him a great many enemies. Eventually he was impeached for extorting money, for corruption and for the murder of a witness against him. Most of the charges turned out to be untrue, and after what was then the longest trial in history, lasting for over seven years, he was acquitted–though he had been utterly ruined in the process. His friends blamed Pitt for not preventing the impeachment, but Pitt felt that the British government could not be seen to condone Hastings’s actions or stand behind a man against whom there were so many adverse rumours. As a result of the trial a much higher code of conduct was demanded of the British Indian civil servant as a caste.

Thanks to Pitt’s ceaseless work, England looked as if she faced the last decade of the century in tolerably good and modern shape in both her internal structures and her external relations. She had also added a new colony to her empire. The continent of Australia was founded in 1788 as a penal colony when the English government established a convict settlement to make up for the loss of America as a home for prisoners whose sentences had been commuted to transportation. The explorer Captain James Cook, who had discovered New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia on his voyages in the 1770s, had reported that Botany Bay would make a favourable place for a settlement. In January 1788, when the settlement of Sydney (named after the then home secretary) was founded, convicts were taken from their temporary prison hulks on the Thames to start a new life a world away. By 1830, over 50,000 convicts had arrived. Soon afterwards the state governments ended the practice, and Australia in the 1850s was instead flooded with gold prospectors and sheep farmers attracted by the wide open spaces. Australia’s neighbour New Zealand was to remain unsettled by the English until 1839, when Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s New Zealand Company began colonization.

In foreign relations, as with everything else, Pitt was careful and sensible. He retrieved the alliance with Prussia as well as the age-old one with Holland lost during the American War of Independence. He was the first European statesman to recognize the potential danger the formerly sleeping giant Russia posed, now that she was becoming more involved in European affairs. The sturdy network of alliances ended England’s dangerous isolation which had been hers for far too long after the American War. Those foreign friends would be much needed in the turbulent years to come, as the hidden pressures boiling away under France’s glittering surface were soon to break out like a volcano, showering destruction far beyond its own circumference.

But in 1788, as a portent that trouble could erupt out of nowhere, George III suddenly lost his wits and became a violent maniac. He got out of his carriage while driving at Windsor, approached a tree, gripped its lower branches as if shaking it by the hand, and carried on a long conversation with it in the belief that it was the King of Prussia. His agitated wife Queen Charlotte eventually managed to lure him back into the carriage. But the king was so ill and strange on the night of 6 November that the two eldest princes, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, together with his doctors and his equerries, had to spend the night in the room next to his bedroom for fear of what he would do next. All night long he ran up and down the draughty corridors of Windsor Castle, gibbering, unreachable, a hopeless lunatic. The queen was too frightened of him to share a room with him any longer, and the king’s footmen were so exhausted by his behaviour, because he needed so little sleep, that one named Fortnum had to leave for the sake of his health. He started a food emporium in Piccadilly.