In his budget that spring Pitt had money to spare to revoke the ever more unpopular shop tax while reforming the taxation of tobacco to destroy yet another part of the smugglers’ trade. By the summer of 1789 his career and his popularity had reached their apogee. On 14 July he wrote to his mother from Downing Street confessing to a little gout but insisting that he was otherwise well, and hoping to visit her soon. The recess promised, he thought, ‘a good share of holidays’. Although events in France were ‘coming to actual extremes’, this made that country ‘an object of compassion, even to a rival’.40 Pitt could not foresee the volcanic consequences for himself and his world of what was happening even as he wrote. It was the very day that the sans culottes of Paris took the Bastille by storm.
14
Trials of Strength
‘Great Britain, is now incontestably in possession of the balance of Europe, for the first time perhaps since the days of K. Henry the 8th.’
ALLEYNS FITZHERBERT, BRITISH ENVOY TO THE HAGUE, 17901
‘I feel that we have nothing for it, but to go on with vigour and to hope for the best.’
WILLIAM PITT, MARCH 17912
PITT MAY HAVE CONSIDERED France in 1789 to be ‘an object of compassion’, but not so much as to agree actually to send compassionate assistance. Jacques Necker had come to power in France the previous year, as Director General of Finances and Minister of State, with the mission of rescuing his country and King Louis XVI. He had met Pitt on the famous trip to France six years before, and now, facing food riots after the failure of the 1788 harvest, he wrote to him to ask for emergency consignments of flour. On 3 July Pitt responded to the French Ambassador:
Mr. Pitt … has felt the strongest desire to be able to recommend sending the supply of flour desir’d by Monsr Necker and had hopes from the information at first given him … that it would be practicable … Mr. Pitt has now the mortification to find that, according to the accounts of the persons most conversant with the corn trade, the present supply in this country compar’d with the demand, and the precarious prospect of the harvest render it impossible to propose to Parliament to authorize any exportation.3
The British Corn Laws prohibited the export of wheat or flour when the price of wheat reached forty-four shillings a quarter,* and it was now a good deal higher. Reserves of flour, however, were relatively plentiful, and Pitt could have supplied the 20,000 sacks the French asked for if he had thought it politically essential and gained parliamentary approval. His refusal to do so was unfortunate in at least one sense: having insisted for years that it was possible for Britain and France to enjoy friendly relations, he would henceforth be regarded by the French as deeply unsympathetic. A genuine friend to France, he would now never be seen as one. He has sometimes been criticised for foiling to send crucial supplies which might have helped avert the Revolution,4 but it is probably a mistake to think that last-minute supplies from Britain could have tipped the balance in the days that followed, and his decision must be seen in the context of the domestic situation. The English harvest of 1788 had also been poor, and that of 1789 was looking little better due to the wet weather. Shortages of food could easily produce public disorder, as France had now discovered, and Pitt decided that caution was to be preferred to generosity.
Across the Channel in early July 1789, the circumstances required for a total breakdown of civil order now coincided – summer heat, food shortages, financial collapse and ministerial weakness. The significance of the events of 14 July, when the hated state prison, the Bastille, was stormed by the Paris crowds, was not immediately understood; in retrospect it was the day on which Louis XVI lost control of events. Soldiers joined the rioters, a revolutionary militia patrolled the streets, 32,000 muskets fell into their hands, and the King was forced to take back Necker as his Minister even though he had just dismissed him.
Although the flames of the Revolution burst forth that summer, the tinderbox of social and economic frustrations which fuelled it had been accumulating for decades. Britain had experienced its own convulsions in the civil wars of the seventeenth century, but had emerged from them with a general acceptance of a ‘balanced’ constitution. The settlement of 1688 implied a contract between monarchy and aristocracy, whose mutual dependence united them in defending each other, while the House of Commons provided for the interests of the wider nation to be forcefully, if patchily, represented. Governments might come and go, but the national consensus behind a constitutional monarchy and a powerful parliament endured.
Eighteenth-century France had made no such adjustment in preceding generations. The writ of absolutist monarchy still ran. From the advent of Louis XIV in the mid-seventeenth century, France had seemed to provide the very definition of royal power and ‘enlightened despotism’, represented in physical form by the unimaginable splendour of Versailles. France had been the superpower of western Europe, with a population four times that of England and a military capability no European power could ignore: Spanish, Austrian, Dutch and British Ministers could spend their lives responding to the initiatives and intrigues of the King of France and his powerful court. Yet as the eighteenth century wore on, this splendid edifice became rotten and hollow. The French nobility enjoyed no automatic role in the governing of the nation, no contract or understanding with the monarchy – nor was there any outlet through which an emerging middle class could wield even a modicum of influence. When the true crisis came, the French King would lack allies, and the frustrations accumulated over decades would be immense. The lack of provincial representation in the capital and the centralisation of the French state meant that events within Paris were decisive for the whole nation: convenient when the monarchy was strong, but catastrophic if it became weak. The result was that Louis XVI’s power was still absolute but it was brittle, and the state’s response to the crisis ‘oscillated between despotism and capitulation’.5 The culture of a strong state restrained by popular protest had already developed in France, and is arguably still recognisable in political events as recent as the 1990s, when strikes and demonstrations brought the abandonment of reforms favoured by a newly elected government.
In the 1780s the crisis came. France had been humiliated in the Seven Years’ War at the hands of Frederick the Great and the elder Pitt, and while technically victorious in the American War of Independence she had accumulated vast debts in the process, which now tipped the state into bankruptcy. In London, Pitt could raise taxes and design a Sinking Fund to address Britain’s indebtedness, but in France there was no equivalent leader to do so, and no Parliament able to sanction it on behalf of the people. In the meantime, the ‘diamond necklace affair’ of Marie Antoinette helped to ruin the image of the Royal Family,* and the privileged position of the unreformed Catholic Church was deeply resented. Such factors combined with the nature of a country whose philosophers were particularly attracted by the new age of reason and the appeal of science to make the coming Revolution far more intensely anti-monarchical and anti-clerical than anything experienced in Britain.
The French failure in the Dutch crisis of 1787 only made matters worse – Napoleon would later identify it as a key element in the onset of revolution. Now, as the harvest failed and bread became scarce, the French state was in retreat. The calling of an Assembly of Notables in 1787 had led to the summoning of the Estates-General in 1789, a body not called upon since 1614. There, in the Third Estate, a previously disenfranchised but ambitious middle class asserted its power, turning itself in the summer of 1789 into a National Assembly with the power to override all previous laws and conventions. The King and Queen were brought back from Versailles by hostile crowds and required to remain in the Tuileries. The French monarchy was on its knees.
In 1789, and for a good two years thereafter, most British politicians greeted the dramatic developments across the Channel with varying degrees of cheerfulness. ‘How much the greatest Event it is that ever happened in the World! & how much the best!’6 wrote Fox that July. Grenville noted that ‘
they will not for many years be in a situation to molest the invaluable peace which we now enjoy’.7 The British Ambassador in Paris, the Duke of Dorset, considered the Revolution ‘actually concluded’, although he had to return to Britain for good at the end of July after a letter he had written to the Comte d’Artois congratulating him on his escape was intercepted and read out in the National Assembly. French suspicion of Britain was further heightened, but in general the view from Westminster was that France was now out of action and might well develop a constitutional monarchy. With Parliament in recess, Pitt was able to avoid any statement on the matter until February 1790, when he gave this positive assessment:
The present convulsions of France, must, sooner or later, terminate in general harmony and regular order; and though the fortunate arrangements of such a situation might make her more formidable, it might also render her less obnoxious as a neighbour … Whenever the situation of France should become restored, it would prove freedom rightly understood; freedom resulting from good order and good government; and thus circumstanced France would stand forward as one of the most brilliant Powers in Europe; she would enjoy just that kind of liberty which I venerate.8
Only Burke railed against the Revolution, warning of its wider consequences: ‘Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is in my opinion safe.’9 At that stage he was a lone voice: it would be some time before the Revolution ran out of the control of its progenitors.
In its early stages, therefore, the French Revolution did not become an issue in British domestic politics. Instead, in the summer and autumn of 1789 Pitt was engaged in a further strengthening of his position in the Cabinet. Sydney had now spent five and a half years as the Secretary of State overseeing home and colonial matters. The prospect of legislation against the slave trade (the subject of the next chapter) was sufficiently unattractive to him to finally push him into leaving the government, a step which a grateful Pitt rewarded by advancing him in the peerage to the rank of Viscount. The opening gave Pitt his biggest opportunity to strengthen the Cabinet since its formation, and he now brought Grenville down from the Speaker’s Chair after only one session in it to take Sydney’s place.*
William Grenville was the third son of the former Prime Minister George Grenville, and was therefore Pitt’s cousin. His intelligence and reserve made him a typical scion of the Grenville family. In many ways he was similar to his cousin: born in the same year, he had excelled at Oxford in mathematics and classics, was elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-two and had a mind suited to administration and finance. Like Pitt, he had a rather forbidding bearing, but those who got to know him found him ‘uncommonly good-humoured’ and ‘easy in his manner’.10 He differed from Pitt in being financially as well as politically ambitious, and in sometimes displaying a rigid obstinacy. By comparison to his cousin he would in future years show more unyielding determination to advance certain liberal causes such as slave-trade abolition and Catholic relief, but also be more hardline and unforgiving in questions of peace or war. His promotion to Secretary of State in 1789 marked his advance into the front rank of British politicians. It also opened him up to ceaseless caricature: much fun was made of his unusually large head and posterior, and he would be depicted in a Gillray cartoon in 1795 holding his bottom towards a fire with the caption ‘A keen-sighted politician warming his imagination’.
Grenville had done his job seeing Pitt through a difficult period in the Commons during the Regency crisis; he in turn was replaced as Speaker by Henry Addington, another young MP and supporter of Pitt, and son of the Pitt family doctor. Twelve years later Pitt would nominate him as Prime Minister. At the same time William Eden was rewarded for his efforts on the French commercial treaty by being made a peer as Lord Auckland: Pitt was making clear that defecting members of the opposition could do very well in his employment. Later in the year, Pitt also needed a new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. His great friend the young Duke of Rutland had died in that post in 1787, and he had persuaded his cousin Temple (the one who had resigned from the government after three days in 1783), now advanced to the rank of Marquis of Buckingham, to take the post. The petulant Buckingham resigned through ill-health in 1789, and threatened further to resign the Lord Lieutenancy of his county if the King did not make him a duke. For all Pitt’s efforts, this proved impossible: George III would not create dukedoms outside his own family, and had in any case not forgotten Buckingham’s desertion of him six years before. The patient Pitt went to Stowe, Buckingham’s family seat, to smooth ruffled feathers, writing to his mother from Holwood on 21 November: ‘My excursions all proved extremely pleasant. The last has been to Stowe, where I went last Sunday, and found Lord Buckingham getting much better.’11 He now sent the young Earl of Westmorland to Ireland, launching him on a political career that would span almost four decades.
Despite the pleasant ‘excursions’, Pitt had continued to expand his workload. In addition to his command of the Treasury and leadership of the Commons, he had kept up the close supervision of foreign policy to which the Dutch crisis of 1787 had introduced him. As international events were no respecters of parliamentary sittings, the result was that he worked still harder when Parliament was sitting, and was still less able to leave London when it was not. He did not seem to mind this, except when it distressed his mother. Having twice planned a trip to the north of England and had to cancel it he ceased to think of it again. There is every sign that he enjoyed the need to work hard, the respect it brought from others, the despatches from overseas mingled with Treasury business, the complexity of events and the messengers and horses waiting outside in Downing Street to carry his next command.
In the summer and autumn of 1788 he had stayed on hand to manage the consequences of the crisis in the Baltic. After Catherine II of Russia and Joseph II of Austria had jointly made war on the Ottoman Empire, Gustavus III of Sweden had taken the opportunity to attack Russia in the north. The result was that the Russians crushed the Swedes while temporarily leaving the Austrians to be mauled by the Turks. With the Danes preparing to join the attack on desperate Sweden, Britain and Prussia threatened intervention to preserve Sweden as a viable power. This was an age of enterprising diplomacy: at a time of slow-moving communication Ambassadors sometimes had to take matters into their own hands, rarely more so than the British Ambassador in Copenhagen, Hugh Elliot, on this occasion. He went over to Sweden, found an exhausted Gustavus III preparing for the Danish attack, said to him, ‘Sire, give me your Crown; I will return it to you with added lustre,’ emboldened the Swedes and then returned to bully the Danes into an armistice. Throughout this he was backed by the idea floated in Berlin that a British fleet would support Prussian armed intervention, a threat never actually approved in London. Elliot’s behaviour obviously annoyed Pitt and Carmarthen, but it had the desired effect: the Danes refrained from war and the Swedes were saved from annihilation. Once again, the timely threat of British intervention, albeit unauthorised on this occasion, had brought success. The diplomatic isolation in which Pitt had come to power now seemed very distant.
In the autumn of 1789 the war in the East came closer to home. The demands made on his territories by Joseph II in pursuit of the war with Turkey created rebellions across his Empire, including in the Austrian Netherlands. As Austria threatened to send troops to enforce the imposition of imperial rule, Holland and Prussia proposed to recognise Belgian independence to break Austria’s involvement in the Low Countries. Prussia was in any case contemplating war against the Austrians while they were preoccupied with Turkey, and Pitt had found them increasingly troublesome and wayward allies. Belgic independence was not favoured in London, where Austrian influence over this buffer between Holland and France was regarded as preferable to French influence. Britain, unwanted as an ally by anyone a few years before, was now courted by Austria as well as by its established allies Holland and Prussia. While the Belgians were declaring a republic, British influence ensured that the Triple Alliance w
ould not intervene without Austrian consent. As it happened, the situation was saved by the sudden death in February 1790 of Joseph II, who was succeeded by his brother Leopold II. Leopold wanted peace on all fronts, and asked Britain to mediate.
These events illustrated to Pitt both the need and the opportunity for Britain to play a decisive role in European affairs. Even a war focused on the Baltic and Black Seas had soon touched Britain’s vital national interest in the Low Countries. With the Triple Alliance in place, France out of action for the moment, Austria friendly and smaller powers such as Sweden looking to Britain to defend their interests, Pitt was suddenly in a position to promote a general European settlement and bring peace to the Continent. It really did look as though Britain was, as Alleyne Fitzherbert, British Envoy to The Hague, put it, ‘incontestably in possession of the balance of Europe’. Pitt now promoted a solution that was typical of him: the man who had found an elegant answer to problems such as rising national debt and over-complex taxes could see the solution to the whole European crisis. He sought nothing less than a huge collective agreement on European peace on the basis of the pre-war frontiers – the status quo ante bellum. British mediation brought agreement between the Austrians and the Prussians at Reichenbach in July 1790 on exactly this basis. The Austrians ended their war with Turkey and promised to respect the constitutional rights of the Netherlands, under Austrian sovereignty. In return, the Triple Alliance would seek the end of the war between Russia and Turkey, and encourage Belgian respect for Austrian sovereignty. The agreement was also intended to give added security to Poland, always at risk from Prussia, Austria and Russia, and to guarantee peace in the Baltic. The last piece in the jigsaw would be the isolated Russians, who it was thought would be left with little option but to end the war.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 32
