1794 opened with a dramatic multiplication of the threats which Pitt had to face: the military situation was more daunting, the unity of the anti-French coalition was faltering, the possibility of an invasion of the British Isles growing, the appearance of domestic rebellion mushrooming, and the carefully calibrated budgetary plans of previous years were broken beyond repair. Such a situation was no longer a mere interruption of routine, but required an entirely new level of effort and concentration. To a mind which was apt to concentrate on one subject at a time it would mean strain, and to a man who felt he must control the whole of the essential business of government it would mean a workload of crushing weight.
Pitt’s declaration that a government based on terror would be overthrown was the centrepiece of his speech at the opening of Parliament on 21 January 1794. It is perhaps revealing that his confidence in victory was predicated on the internal collapse of the enemy rather than the military success of the allies. His new emphasis on the criminal nature of the French regime not only enabled him to avoid the hazarding of military predictions, but helped to unite what was becoming a domestic coalition under his leadership. Fox that day had moved an amendment to the King’s Speech calling for ‘peace with France … without any reference to the nature or form of the government that might exist in that country’.4 The continued opposition of Fox to the ‘madness’ of the war, which he claimed had been started ‘by artifice’5 and ought to result in French success as ‘the least Evil of any that can happen’,6 was finally driving the conservative Whigs into Pitt’s long-since opened arms. Fox’s amendment mustered only fifty-nine votes in the Commons, after Portland the previous night had chaired a meeting at Burlington House which had decided to give ‘a full, firm, unequivocal support, both of the war and of its conductors’.7 A formal coalition, involving the political realignment Pitt had sought for three years, would have to await the end of the parliamentary session, when ministerial responsibilities could more readily be changed, but from now on such a coalition was highly likely. The formal break-up of the Whigs who had followed Rockingham and Fox had begun.
Pitt thus enjoyed a supremacy in British politics which the eighteenth century had never before witnessed. The opposition in the Commons was reduced to a rump, and many of those would later cease to attend on a regular basis, while in the Lords it was literally down to a handful. In the years after 1784 Pitt had struggled with an unreliable parliamentary majority, but the affairs of the nation nevertheless prospered. The years after 1794 brought the reverse: his majority on almost every question was stable and massive, while the state of the nation moved from difficult to dire.
The army was being hugely expanded, although it remained very small on its own compared to that of France. The 1794 Estimates provided for 175,000 regular troops, 34,000 German mercenaries and nearly 100,000 militia and Fencibles (essentially mounted militia). Such expansion, combined with the full mobilisation of a navy with well over a hundred ships of the line, blew Pitt’s previous budgetary projections to pieces. His new budget required the raising of an £11 million loan along with additional taxes on items such as rum, spirits, bricks, tiles and plate glass.
But the central question was not so much how the forces were to be paid for, as how they should be employed. An expedition had sailed for the West Indies the previous November, and by May had taken possession of the French colonies of Martinique, St Lucia and Guadeloupe in addition to Tobago, captured the previous year. In the Mediterranean Hood’s fleet was overseeing a British attack on Corsica, where despite the rivalry between the army and the navy, May saw a major victory with the fall of Bastia. In addition, much time was spent by the Cabinet in February and March considering home defence, as a response to many rumours of an imminent French invasion. Troops and militia in the south-east of England were reinforced, and gunboats and floating batteries positioned along the coast. Other troops were held ready for renewed attempts to link up with royalist rebels in north-west France, and many others were being trained and equipped.
In the light of so many far-flung deployments, the British contribution to the war on the Continent in 1794 could be substantial but by no means immense. Forty thousand troops, many of them Germans in British pay, were envisaged for an allied army of over 300,000 which would provide the main thrust through Flanders into the heart of France. This time a huge knockout blow was envisaged, without the permanent siege warfare of 1793. The Austrian Emperor, Francis II, would himself arrive at the front in April and be on hand to mastermind this climax to the war. Coordinating conferences were held between British and Austrian Generals, with the preference of the latter for continuing to deal with the Duke of York persuading Pitt and Dundas to leave him in charge of the British forces for another campaign, rather against their better judgement.
Apart from questions of leadership, the planned campaign suffered from two disadvantages. The first was that the allies were heavily outnumbered by the French, whose forces on all fronts were possibly double those committed by the allies that year. The second was that once again soldiers who existed on paper took time to appear in human form. The British contingent would not reach full strength until the summer, by which time the decisive battles had been fought. More seriously, the Prussians had become distinctly half-hearted about the whole exercise. The Earl of Malmesbury (formerly James Harris, who had so distinguished himself in Holland in 1787) had been sent as a special envoy to Berlin at the end of 1793, and found the Prussians mainly concerned with Poland and desperately short of money. A long history of British finance keeping reluctant allies in play was about to commence. The Prussians initially sought £2 million for their expected contribution of 100,000 troops, a request that put the British government ‘under great difficulties from the enormity of the sum in question’.8 Protracted negotiations produced a compromise finally signed in April: 62,400 troops in return for £50,000 a month and £400,000 of ‘preparation money’. The Dutch would provide some of the money and the British most of it, and these two countries were to control the fate of any territory gained as a result. Such heavy payments led to an opposition attack in Parliament, but the government was happy that a great allied force could now thrust into France.
It would soon be disappointed. Superior French numbers and generalship halted the allied advance in early May after some initial successes. At the Battle of Turcoing on 18 May the French regained the initiative, with the British and Austrians retreating in some disorder. The effect of this not necessarily disastrous reverse was magnified by events in Poland, where the great Polish patriot Thaddeus Kosciuszko was leading the uprising which regained control first of Warsaw and then of most of what was left of Polish territory. Frederick William II of Prussia left Berlin for the East, and soon Francis II of Austria departed the French campaign. The truth was that the allies lacked the will, the focus and the manpower to overcome the armies of the Revolution.
In the same depressing month Malmesbury was recalled to London to discuss how to make best use of the subsidised Prussian forces. He found that Pitt and the other senior Ministers actually had their minds on domestic matters: ‘so fully employed in their discoveries and examinations of seditious and treasonable practices, that I had very short and very few conversations with them’.9 Pitt had refrained from any general clampdown on radical opinion in the course of 1793, which on the whole had been a period of domestic tranquillity. His most recent speeches against parliamentary reform had been aimed at driving a wedge between moderate reformers and radical agitators, and he would certainly have hoped that a policy of restraint might avert the danger of domestic discontent becoming united with radical causes.
By late 1793, however, trouble was brewing. The combination of the spread of revolutionary ideas, the recent creation of urban populations, and opposition to the war, all perhaps exacerbated by the short-lived economic downturn of 1792–93, did produce an apparent threat of serious unrest. As ever, Scotland gave particular cause for concern. There the senior judge, the
Lord Justice Clerk, Robert McQueen of Braxfield, presided in the courts. His maxim was ‘Let them bring me prisoners and I will find them law.’ He had already become notorious for imposing disproportionate penalties – up to fourteen years’ transportation to Australia – on two men convicted of seditious activities under the new restrictions imposed in 1792. The end of the year saw a ‘British Convention’ held in Edinburgh, which ominously modelled its proceedings on those used in Paris, and provoked the authorities into a number of further arrests.
The government knew by January 1794 that the radical Societies, the LCS and SCI, were making plans for a ‘General Convention of the People’ later that year. Spies reported a sharp increase in radical activity, reporting that ‘violence will be used very soon’.10 There were many rumours of caches of pikes and spears. Sheffield magistrates talked of ‘a most horrid conspiracy against State and Church under the pretence of Reform’,11 and many thousands of people attended a meeting at Chalk Farm, just north of London, to demand an end to threats to liberty such as the Scottish trials.
Since rumours of French invasion plans were rife at the same time, it is not surprising that the government was concerned. It is no doubt true, as most historians have concluded, that many of the reports of spies and magistrates were embellished for effect, but it must nevertheless have felt to Ministers like a perilous moment. There were no opinion polls to guide them on where public sentiment might be heading, and no comprehensive intelligence or instant transmission of it to give them early warning of a serious revolt. They all lived with the memory of the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the more recent disturbances in Birmingham, when many days of havoc had erupted with very little warning. Now, however much matters might be exaggerated, a plan hatched by sympathisers with the French Revolution to call a National Convention of radical activists indisputably existed. Pitt decided that tolerance had been stretched beyond the limit.
The authorities struck on 12 May, beginning with the arrest in the early hours of the Piccadilly shoemaker Thomas Hardy, Secretary of the LCS. Further arrests and the seizure of the books and papers of the radical Societies followed. These documents were brought to the House of Commons, where Pitt moved for a Select Committee to examine them. They reported on the sixteenth, whereupon Pitt proposed the suspension of Habeas Corpus, in effect the introduction of imprisonment without trial. He moved for leave ‘to bring in a bill to empower his Majesty to secure and detain all such persons as should be suspected of conspiring against his person and government’.12 He told the House of clear evidence that the Societies had been in correspondence with the Jacobins in France, and less convincing evidence ‘that arms had been actually procured and distributed by these societies’.13 While he did not believe that an uprising would be successful, he argued it was right ‘to prevent, by timely interference, the small misery which a short struggle might necessarily produce’.14
For Fox, these measures were evidence of a royal plot and tantamount to the destruction of liberty. He and his diminished band caused the Commons to divide fourteen times over the legislation, but he could muster only twenty-eight votes. As far as Parliament was concerned, Pitt now had a free hand. On the same day, four more leading activists were arrested, including the noted radical Horne Tooke, who had been imprisoned in 1778 for his attempts to raise funds for the Americans when they were at war with Britain. Others hid or escaped the country, while a small cache of arms was discovered in Edinburgh. Some of those arrested were questioned by members of the Privy Council, including Pitt. One of them, John Thelwall, wrote an account of his questioning which portrays Pitt as irritable and strained:
Pitt. What does he say? (Darting round, very fiercely, from the other side of the room, and seating himself by the side of the Chancellor.)
Lord Chancellor (with silver softness, almost melting to a whisper). He does not mean to answer any questions.
Pitt. What is it? – What is it? – What? (fiercely) …15
The arrests and accompanying legislation of May 1794 marked a major change in the way Pitt was viewed by contemporaries and has been regarded by historians. The champion of enlightened reform had now become the chief agent of repression. Some of the trials for high treason which followed later in the year would prove embarrassing to the government, in some cases because of the draconian nature of the penalties imposed, but mostly because convictions were not secured. Macaulay summed up the critical verdict of historians:
Men of cultivated minds and polished manners were, for offences which at Westminster would have been treated as mere misdemeanours, sent to herd with felons at Botany Bay. Some reformers, whose opinions were extravagant, and whose language was intemperate, but who had never dreamed of subverting the government by physical force, were indicted for high treason, and were saved from the gallows only by the righteous verdicts of juries.16
Yet at a time when the terror in France was reaching its height and the military situation was grave, it is not surprising that Ministers felt they had to respond to actual plans for domestic disturbance with a heavy hand. Whatever the embarrassments they were later to suffer, there is no doubt that they achieved their prime objective: the General Convention of the People never took place, and the radical Societies were deterred from becoming too headstrong. Deterrence, not punishment, seems to have been Pitt’s goal at this and later stages of popular discontent: if so, he must be judged largely successful.
The Ministry now needed some good news, and mercifully there was some to hand. From the beginning of May Admiral Howe had been at sea with the Channel Fleet searching for a huge grain convoy sailing from America to France. For nine anxious days from 19 May it was also known that a French fleet had put to sea from Brest although its whereabouts were undetected. Howe found it well out in the Atlantic on the twenty-eighth, was hampered by fog, but on the day known ever after as ‘the Glorious First of June’ inflicted what was seen in Britain as a major defeat on the French navy. The French had to run for harbour while Howe triumphantly towed six captured ships of the line into Portsmouth. Britain exploded with rejoicing, some of it carefully orchestrated – the King, Queen, Pitt, Dundas and Chatham all joined in the tumultuous welcome at Portsmouth – and some of it spontaneous – London was again ablaze with light and the audience at the opera broke into ‘Rule Britannia’ and the National Anthem.
The victory reduced the fears of invasion and increased the hopes of victory. But the disturbing truth was that the French had achieved their main object of bringing the grain convoy safely home, albeit at a heavy price for their navy. On the main front they were still advancing against the Duke of York and the Austrians, and once again had the conquest of Belgium in their sights. Pitt could stamp out rebellion in Britain and bask in the prowess of the navy, but France was no nearer to being beaten.
Pitt had now been trying for three years to bring leading Whigs into his ministry, but had so far only succeeded with Lord Loughborough in January 1793. The events of early 1794, during which the Portland Whigs had given robust support to the government while the Foxite Whigs had maintained an implacable opposition, presented the best opportunity yet. After the suspension of Habeas Corpus, Pitt asked Portland to come to see him to discuss ‘the probability of our forming a ministerial arrangement’.17 They met on 23 May. The negotiations took place over several weeks, during which the news rolled in from the battlefronts: first the elation of the Glorious First of June, but then mounting concern for Belgium after the decisive French victory at Fleurus on 26 June separated the allied armies and sent York retreating northwards. Late June saw Pitt desperately sending reinforcements to Ostend, but it was to no avail. By the end of July Belgium would be back in French hands, and Holland directly threatened once again.
The mounting problems at home and on the Continent brought only one benefit: they encouraged Portland and his colleagues to join Pitt in a united government. Indeed, it is likely that only a crisis of these dimensions enabled Pitt to overcome the deep enmity and mistrust felt fo
r him by his former opponents. They had never forgiven him for his behaviour in 1784. As Lord John Cavendish put it: ‘With the temper & disposition of Pitt & the Systems & Schemes of the K[ing] & his friends, it is not possible for any man who has the feelings of a Gentleman to continue for any time to act with them.’18 But by now the Portland Whigs had been emphatically at odds with Fox for nearly two years, and their hostility to Pitt was at last outweighed by the threats posed by domestic disorder and external revolution to the aristocratic order in which they believed. Pitt’s comments to Pretyman in 1793 suggest he had got the measure of them: ‘They see that their titles & possessions are in danger, & they think their best chance for preserving them is by supporting Government & joining me.’19 By early July Pitt and Portland had agreed on a new Cabinet – or thought they had.
Pitt was prepared to pay a high price to achieve the objective he had held so long in view. In a Cabinet enlarged from ten to thirteen members, he was prepared to give no fewer than five places to his former opponents, in addition to the one already given to Loughborough. A startled Addington suggested to Pitt that he might now be outvoted in his own Cabinet, but he replied happily that he was ‘under no anxiety on that account, since he placed much dependence on his new colleagues, and still more on himself’.20 Many of his own supporters thought far too much was being conceded: Canning said they ‘either grumble pretty audibly at the distribution of so great a part of the powers among new comers, or at best, shake their head’,21 and Rose complained that this was not so much the recruiting of some men of talents ‘but a junction of parties on a footing of mutual interest’. He thought Pitt’s long-standing followers would resent the titles and positions they had hoped to obtain going to their old opponents instead: ‘Numbers of Mr. Pitt’s friends, who would have liked marks of favour or of honour, remained perfectly contented and satisfied without them, aware of the difficulties in the way of their obtaining them; almost every one of whom will feel mortification and grow uneasy when they see the Duke of Portland’s adherents carrying their point.’22
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 41
