This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  And so from this came William Pitt the Younger. He was twenty-three. A year on and he would be Prime Minister. Of the rest, North hoped to return, but how could he? Few cared for Shelburne and Charles James Fox was volatile and a factionalist. Fox and Shelburne never got on. In fact, Fox detested Shelburne. Even when Rockingham was alive they would competed with each other for the right to hand out offices and general patronage. They disagreed over the way in which peace might be negotiated. Fox had long abandoned the illusion that the thirteen colonies were in fact colonies. He and Shelburne even had different envoys to the Paris talks. Animosities and schisms are the stuff of politics in any century. The ‘Long Century’ from the French Revolution to the outbreak of the First World War, as defined by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, was no different and indeed probably a sturdier than most examples of this truism.43 Britain was witnessing its own Age of Revolution from the loss of America to a period of industrial and technological innovation, when seemingly every conceivable task of labour was not necessarily eased but certainly revolutionized, that was to last a hundred years and more. Less easily sat the political changes within the islands and especially the shifting relationships between England and Ireland. The historical differences between the English and the Irish had not disappeared or become any less important simply because Britain had been at war across the Atlantic Ocean.

  For example, Lord Shelburne had criticized the North administration for its attitude to Ireland, especially for its restrictions on trade with the colonies during the war. To be fair, North had attempted to make concessions and it was English merchants who had opposed him (which explains something of the political realities of the day and particularly why it is wrong to think in simple terms of Whigs, Tories and the power of political majorities).

  The Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, Edmond Sexton Pery (1719–1806), reported in 1779 that the restrictions were ‘one general Cause of Distress in the economy and the people’. The laws, he believed, were cruel and short-sighted, and the interests of the English merchants repressive. He claimed history suggested that whatever the motives of the English, by which he particularly meant the Anglican Ascendancy,44 Ireland ‘must continue in a state of poverty, frequently of misery’. He continued:

  It seems to be equally obvious that it is not in the interest of Great Britain to keep her in that state, in the view of commerce only. Great Britain must be the loser by it. Little is to be got by trading with a poor country . . . At present the people of Ireland are taught by partial laws to consider themselves as separated from the inhabitants of Great Britain. Were that fatal obstacle removed, they would be united as much in affection, as they certainly are in interest; and it would not then be in the power of malice to disturb their harmony. But the seeds of discord are sown, and if suffered to take root, it is feared will soon overspread the land.

  By 1780 the suffering of Ireland and the Irish, particularly from the restrictions on trade, began to have some political effect, yet solutions were not really obvious. Two Bills went through the Westminster Parliament which allowed the Irish export of woollens and glass, and an expansion of trade with America, the West Indies and Africa. But not much actually changed. Industry did not attract investors. Both the hard cash necessary to build these industries and shipping were in short supply. And so, in spite of the joy with which the new legislation was greeted in Ireland, reality soon descended, and Edmond Pery’s hoped-for economic miracle and calming of animosities barely materialized.

  In Scotland in the eighteenth century, there was an unprecedentedly strong export trade, especially in sturdy clothing and iron tools and, thanks to the increasing demand for glass, high investment there meant bigger potential export markets, which in turn supported an expanding fleet. And Scottish entrepreneurs appear to have been more imaginative than those trading from or through Ireland.

  Yet even in Scotland the effects of the war were catastrophic. Just before the war, the Scottish Tobacco Lords, as they were known, were bringing in some forty-six million pounds of tobacco. More than 90 per cent of it was then re-exported, much of it to France. Halfway through the war, the Scottish import-export trade was down by 40 per cent, but the resilience of the Scottish traders meant they survived. In 1783 Glasgow set up a group to examine potential markets. It became the first Chamber of Commerce in Britain and it worked. Within seven years Scottish trade figures had recovered to their pre-war levels.

  But it was at the centre of British power where reform was most needed. Its symbol was the action of George III in asking Pitt the Younger, then twenty-four years old, to form an administration in December 1783. This was the fifth administration in under two years. At that time, ministers still owed their loyalty first and foremost to the monarch, not to their party. In fact, there probably wasn’t a Whig or a Tory party political position on many major matters at the time. There was a political instinct, yes, but not a manifesto in the way they exist today. And the Cabinet was not single-minded: it was a coalition. The King had the right, which he exercised, to appoint his ministers but George didn’t like political parties. To him a party meant a faction and therefore a danger. Sometimes that faction imposed its will: Rockingham’s administration did. So did the coalition of Fox and North. What about Pitt?

  In May 1782 he had spoken in the House on Parliamentary reform, although he didn’t outline the best way forward. However, he pointed out that there wasn’t a Member of Parliament who wouldn’t, as he put it, agree with him ‘that the representation, as it now stood, was incomplete’. (In fact, he was wrong on that. Many would disagree with him.) He concluded that there should be a committee to ‘enquire into the present state of the Representation of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament’. Pitt’s proposal was rejected, but only by twenty votes. The King was not sorry.

  George III had reigned for two decades and had been through, and often suffered from, almost every form of political intrigue. He had watched, fought and compromised at every opportunity to keep control of his administrations and, in some cases, to lead them. Furthermore, his reputation, once the immediate loss of the colonies was out of the way, was high enough for this Hanoverian to be called Good King George by his people. His reputation was helped by the low public esteem in which politicians were held, and by the antics of the Prince of Wales.

  In 1784, shortly after George III appointed Pitt, there was an election that produced a political confrontation between North and Fox on one side and the King and Pitt on the other. The result represented a show of support for George III’s decision to send North and Fox packing and to appoint Pitt as his Prime Minister. George was satisfied especially as Pitt never had more than fifty MPs supporting him and so was compelled to rely on the King and his supporters. One consequence of this was that most of the ministers owed more allegiance to the Crown than to the Prime Minister.

  But Pitt had advantages of his own. First, he was a Pitt and he carried the family name with ease. He was conscientious, honourable and, despite his age, he had already been Chancellor of the Exchequer and was formidably bright. Above all, he was not associated with the old group of politicians and so it followed that he had no close cronies. He also recognized that he had to accept political change, and even defeat, rather than risk causing more damage by open confrontation. He was a man who could take stock to analyse, after success, why he had been successful and, after failure, how to avoid repeating the experience. If there existed an advantage in defeat, or an unrecognized one in success, Pitt knew how to make that advantage work for him. One of his key advantages was his understanding with the King. They were never friends in the social sense but their relationship worked. Pitt needed the King and the King needed Pitt – particularly in matters of finance and economic reform. For example, the nearly seventy different forms of customs and excise duties were revised so that the bureaucracy no longer had the right to multiply the duty gathered by charging it in different forms – on the same import. The further revisions began to
be set out as household accounts. Pitt was producing for the first time what we now call the Budget. The King was, or should have been, pleased. But the King was not always in an understandable state to give good judgement on anything put before him.

  In the autumn of 1788, George III was showing visible signs of erratic behaviour that has unfairly been diagnosed as insanity. He suffered from porphyria, a lack of haemoglobin production. The symptoms were sometimes unbearable itching, skin pain and purple urine. His pain and increased pulse brought out exclamations, so easily dismissed as ramblings. Imagine how his suffering may have increased when he was bound, gagged and tied to furniture – a reminder that even the royal physicians had little medical learning. Certainly George III was not the first member of a British royal family to suffer from some form of porphyria. Mary Queen of Scots displayed some symptoms as did, in the twentieth century, the late Prince William of Gloucester.

  The medical condition of the King was of intense concern because of his political authority. The King’s followers needed his support especially against Fox and his friends who had taken up with the Prince of Wales, who would become George IV in 1820. The Prince, in 1788, was following the path of most Princes of Wales by setting up in opposition to the monarch. Fox in particular had nothing to lose in opposing George III. There was no chance, after the antagonisms of the Fox–North coalition, that George would ever admit Fox as his first minister; but the heir to the throne might. Fox was an opportunist and he was older than Pitt, so he felt his chances of becoming prime minister were fading. When there were rumours that the King might die, this was good news to Fox’s ears. The new King would get rid of Pitt and give his post to Fox. He could hardly have guessed that, ill or not, George III would outlive the lot of them. In fact, with Pitt the Younger as his Prime Minister, George III was about to witness a remarkable decade in England’s political and social history. The Norfolk pamphleteer, Tom Paine, was writing The Rights of Man, Edward Gibbon was finishing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the working environment was radically changing because industrial society was shifting (and not because there was deep anxiety about the ways and circumstances of people’s lives). Furthermore, here was a period that demonstrated that events elsewhere, and not at home, might excite the society in which radical thought germinates. For example, Tom Paine’s ideas about England were triggered by the American revolt and then the French Revolution.

  In the year following the King’s illness, the Revolution started in France, Fox once again misjudged the mood of the country. It is easy to see why. Pitt thought it best to have no great opinion on the Revolution other than to believe that the spirit of the French would not cross the Channel. Fox, on the other hand, heard the cry Liberty as a rally to break Pitt’s grip on power. It was not. Nevertheless, for three years, the Revolution in France could not be ignored by those who governed the British Isles. The British were no strangers to revolution, but what was happening to France, with the very real possibility of regicide, was no casual moment at a time when the British were feeling their own way towards reforming systems and even Catholic Emancipation, albeit on a limited scale. Americans had rebelled against being ruled and taxed by another nation; theirs was an anti-colonial rebellion. The English Revolution of 1688 had not been against monarchy and nobility, but against a particular monarch, James II, and Roman Catholicism. And no one tried to return to the Cromwellian model, to a republic. But in France, almost without warning to those preoccupied with their political, commercial and colonial ambitions, that was what was happening.

  In eighteenth-century France the King governed from Versailles, surrounded by his courtiers. However, the courtiers, the French nobility, had been stripped of power. They were landlords who simply took revenues from their distant estates and as a class, or, more accurately, as a caste, did nothing to help govern the country. They certainly weren’t as powerful as the Church, nor were they as powerful as the peasants. The French peasantry was a European phenomenon: peasantry with power. They were depressed by high rates of taxation but they also owned half the land in France and their lot was getting better. They were potentially dangerous.

  There was also in France an influential group of extraordinary people not to be under-rated. They carried no guns, received no patronage and had no crude plans for the downfall of the monarch. Nevertheless, their names have survived longer than many of the revolutionaries themselves. They were the philosophers: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.

  On 14 July 1789 the royal prison in Paris, the Bastille, fell. It held only a handful of prisoners, one of them mad, but it represented the absolute rule of the French monarch. The revolution was well under way. At the start, Britain appears to have assumed that the outcome would be an English-style Constitutional monarchy. Pitt quietly welcomed this idea: he believed a reformed French throne would be less of a military threat.

  Fox and the so-called Whig opposition were excited by the prospect of change. But there was no fear that the revolutionary ideas would spread to Britain. Perhaps this short-sightedness had a lot to do with the fact that few people anywhere in Europe, perhaps even in France, understood the implications of what had been started. In Britain in particular, judging the French Revolution’s effects was probably influenced by the satisfactory outcome of the nation’s own revolution, the centenary of which was being celebrated. It was 100 years since the English Bill of Rights was published. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 could have been mistakenly assumed similar to what was going on in France.

  Fox got up in Parliament and sang French praises. Edmund Burke, however, was pessimistic. He supported the idea of change, but he thought that what was actually happening was potentially dangerous.

  Furthermore, Burke, a devout Christian, believed the outcome would be, at least, civil war on a scale more ferocious than the old wars of religion. The consequences of 14 July for many of the Non-conformists in the British Isles were imagined to be far more exciting than the content demeanour of the Anglicans. For example, in Ireland, Irish Catholics greeted the news of the opening of the Bastille as a huge act of change. As for Burke, he could not accept that the French were merely shuffling their society. Burke saw the Revolution as a prelude to something quite frightening: a creeping threat to the institutions of Christian Europe. For that reason, Burke wanted Pitt to make troops ready for war against the French. But it’s doubtful if he expected Pitt to do as he advised. He thought the Prime Minister was a man of no imagination and little vision.

  Pitt did nothing. Burke wanted intervention, and a few Whigs, if not exactly in agreement, took serious note of what Burke was saying; and Fox (even though he understood the instinctive British mistrust of the French) supported the Revolution. But the differences between Fox and Burke were so great that the two men quarrelled in public (in the House of Commons, ironically during the Canada Debate), and Burke broke from the party.

  And, by the late summer of 1792, the French Revolution had spread beyond the French borders. The French monarchy was no more. News of mass murders of the aristocracy crossed the Channel. What had been seen as constitutional reform was turning into bloody dictatorship. And dictatorship was turning into war.

  British radicals, poets, writers and, in some cases, the constituents of the new working men’s clubs were all in touch with the French extremists, the Jacobins (the Jacobin Club existed between 1790 and 1794 and was a club for those with radical ideas). The Jacobins shouldn’t be confused with the Jacobites, the old supporters of a Stuart pretender to the English throne. Jacobinism in Britain was strong enough for the French to believe they had support for the export of the Revolution. They turned out to be wrong, but at the end of January 1793, the French announced the annexation of the Austrian Netherlands. The next day, 1 February, they declared war on Holland and on Britain. And so now, with the declaration of war, Pitt, with his do-nothing policy shredded, expressed his misery to the Commons.

  The contempt which the French have shown for neutra
lity on our part most strictly observed; the violations of their solemn and plighted faith; their presumptuous attempts to interfere in the government of this country and to arm our subjects [a comment that could have been read in almost any of the previous four centuries], to vilify a monarch, the object of our gratitude, reverence and affection, and to separate the Court from the people; does not this become, on our part, a war of honour, a war necessary to assert the spirit of the nation and the dignity of the British name? We are at war with those who would destroy the whole fabric of our Constitution. In such a cause as that in which we are now engaged, I trust our exertions will only terminate with our lives

  So Britain was once more at war with France and would continue to be for more than two decades.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  1793–1800