The memories of the old empire had not entirely faded; Britain held on to Quebec and to Canada. It also established New South Wales as colony and prison compound. But the Pacific and Indian oceans were to become the bearers of merchants with commodities to buy and to sell. In the process the nature of empire changed. The first empire had been essentially an English enterprise with the reminders of the old home in names such as New York and New England. The second empire was truly British in scope with areas such as Bengal, and eventually the whole of the Indian subcontinent, patrolled by native troops strengthened by Scots, Irish and Welsh regulars.
It was in many respects a ramshackle empire, made up of separate constitutions and agreements. One territory was supervised by informal pacts, while another might be guarded by troops or circumscribed by treaties. Different types of colony had different types of constitution. Indian provinces were situated beside the older trading posts. There was really no guiding plan or intention in the acquisition of a second empire. There may have been some general feeling that English authority was ‘good’ for the native peoples, but there was also a great deal of hypocrisy and greed in the arrangements. This was not intended to be a political invasion but a mercantile policy in which British governors would work with the local elites to preserve good administration and flourishing trade.
This sounded to many like the old empire in all but name. The pursuit of trade in India, for example, led ineluctably to a policy of conquest and dominion by the East India Company. Trade could not be separated from power. And power fed upon itself. Ceylon was therefore annexed to protect the trade routes to India. By 1816 Britain possessed forty-three colonies, compared to twenty-six in 1792; the territories comprised 2 million square miles and contained some 25 million people, the majority of them non-white and non-Christian. This was a unique phenomenon that the ministers in London found it hard to grasp or to control. How could the power implicit in empire be reconciled with traditional British liberties? They approached the problem with extreme caution and an innate conservatism.
As early as 1782, when peace negotiations were being pursued between England and America, the king informed the Commons that ‘the regulation of a vast territory in Asia opens a large field for your wisdom, prudence and foresight’. Asia was in fact the major problem for the administration at Westminster. Since wisdom and prudence were too feeble a match for cupidity and cunning, there seemed to be no way to supervise or to control the workings of the East India Company.
Its administrators had grown too rich and too powerful. They needed to preserve their trade by imposing political stability upon the territories with which they negotiated; they required alliances with local princes or rulers, and they needed to master the complex procedures of both Koran and Hindu law; they needed an army, preferably of friendly natives. The government in Westminster was uneasy at this abrogation of its powers, and distressed by the news of exploitation and even of violence that reached it.
The ministers were no doubt also eager to get their hands on the surplus revenues that the company was accruing from its flourishing trade. The ‘nabobs’, the Englishmen who returned rich from Indian service, were treated with considerable disquiet; the combination of ‘new money’ with greed and exploitation was not considered suitable. They had become so familiar, and so despised, that Samuel Foote’s The Nabob (1772) became a great success at the Haymarket Theatre. ‘With the wealth of the East,’ one character laments, ‘we have, too, imported the worst of its vices. What a horrid crew!’ The nabob has ‘grown great from robbing the heathens’. This was also the perceived problem of the East India Company itself.
With his usual mixture of self-assurance and optimism Charles James Fox believed that he could resolve the problems of India. He proposed that the existing Court of Directors that administered the company should be replaced by seven commissioners. It soon became clear that the chosen commissioners were all supporters of the administration, and of Fox in particular; it was widely believed that Fox wished to transfer the patronage and wealth of the East India Company into his own political service. A cartoon was published at the end of 1783 showing him, wearing a turban and riding an elephant, trampling upon India House and its directors with the caption ‘Carlo Khan’s Triumphal Entry into Leadenhall Street’.
It was a moment of peril for Fox, who could be accused of purloining the king’s bounty, and his opponents were ready to fall upon him. The supporters of Fox and North were able to press the measure through the Commons but, at this juncture, on 11 December, the king let it be known through an intermediary ‘that whoever voted for the India Bill were not only not his friends, but he should consider them as his enemies’. It seems more than likely that William Pitt had a certain responsibility for this intervention since, if the bill fell, it effectively signalled the demise of the coalition. And so it proved. As the debate moved on, Thomas Orde, a Tory member, reported that Fox’s ‘countenance, gesture and expression were in the highest degree ludicrous from the extremity of dejection and rage, going off with an exclamation of despair’. As soon as the Lords objected to Fox’s measure, and voted it down on 17 December, the king asked for the resignation of his two principal ministers. They were gone by the next day. Pitt came forward almost at once. He was still only twenty-four.
The shambles of the coalition, the effrontery of Fox’s proposal to appoint the commissioners, the growing unpopularity of the government, gave Pitt his opportunity to strike where he had not struck before. He gambled that he could survive a combined opposition just long enough to be ready to go to the country. Fox, on the contrary, believed that ‘we shall destroy them almost as soon as they are formed’. It was nicknamed ‘the mince-pie administration’ fit only to last for the festive season. A verse was circulated:
A sight to make surrounding nations stare;
A kingdom trusted to a school-boy’s care.
Parliament reassembled on 12 January 1784, and Pitt would remain in office for the next eighteen years.
From the beginning he was cool, precise and determined; his aims and methods were clear, his calculations cogent and his command of the Commons exemplary. He had from the beginning the support and loyalty of the king, who opened for him the gates of patronage; some of his supporters were immediately made peers. But he was not above the convenient lie. When Fox charged that his India bill had been rejected by the Lords as a result of ‘secret influence’, Pitt replied that ‘he knew of no secret influence, and his own integrity would be his guardian against that danger’. It would not be the last time that he invoked his ‘integrity’.
He chose to be the only member of his cabinet in the Commons, and soon demonstrated his mastery of that assembly; he believed that innate loyalty to the king, his own new powers of patronage, and his steadiness in the face of fire, would allow him to survive until the next election. Slowly he whittled down the number of his opponents while keeping a grave and composed face.
His principal purposes, apart from the obvious necessity of staying in power, were to reform the national finances and to extend national commerce. These were the two props for safety and peace. In matters of money he was a master, and knew that the first priority must be to pay off or pay down the national debt incurred after years of warfare. It was also vital, as far as he was concerned, to cut expenditure by a process of careful and lengthy clearance of superfluous offices and sinecures. Of what, then, might Fox and his Whig colleagues complain? They had in any case given every sign that they would be profligate with the nation’s revenues. Pitt’s oratory was precise, cogent and irrefutable. As one of his opponents, Dr Parr, put it, ‘the dog talks grammar’; or, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, Pitt manifested ‘a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words’.
The long-anticipated elections took place in the spring of 1784, with a campaign that lasted for five weeks; it soon became clear that the advantage lay with Pitt and the king over Fox and his adherents. ‘We are cut up root and branch,’ o
ne MP, William Eden, confessed, ‘the country is utterly mad for prerogative.’ It was not a battle between Crown and parliament; it was a struggle for or against a parliament sanctioned by the throne. Pitt had on his side the landowners and the manufacturers, the merchants and the clergy. All wanted efficiency, security and, if possible, honesty in the administration. More than a hundred Whig members lost their seats; they became known as ‘Fox’s martyrs’ after Foxe’s Book of Martyrs published 200 years before. Pitt regained office as first minister, more powerful than any of his predecessors. Thomas Paine wrote, at a later date, that ‘Mr Pitt had merited nothing, but he promised much.’
He was not given to visionary plans or solutions; he did not press too far into matters of principle and was loath to question the status quo. He dealt principally with practical, administrative and factual details. It was hard to know whether he was a Whig or a Tory, but the distinction made very little difference. He had been brought up as a Whig but the party he commanded was now essentially Tory in nature. In any case, he was not a ‘party man’. He relished his independence, and confided in very few of his colleagues. On the question of India, he was pragmatic. He set up a Board of Control, composed of six members of the privy council, to oversee the affairs of the East India Company; the new governor general of India, the Earl Cornwallis, was sent out two years later. The idea of imperial trusteeship was in the air. Pitt’s proposals did not differ markedly from those of Fox, but they were regarded as more honest and more open than any projected cabal of Fox’s friends.
In matters of finance Pitt was in his element. His private secretary, the Reverend George Pretyman, gave a sermon before the House of Commons in St Margaret’s, Westminster, where he expatiated on the perils of the national debt and the critical state of the country ‘especially with regard to its revenue’. So the raising of taxes became a national endeavour. Pitt did not invent the window tax, but he made sure that it yielded much greater sums. He taxed horses and carriages; he taxed bricks, hats and perfumes; he increased the cost of postage and the taxes on newspapers; he invented probate and legacy duties. What could be squeezed was hard pressed. For the national debt itself, Pitt had a novel solution; the cutting of expenditure, together with the raising of taxes and customs duties, had led to a surplus in the public funds. Instead of spending that surplus, Pitt decreed that it would become part of a sinking fund to pay off the national debt. The fund could not be used for any other purpose.
For these measures Pitt relied upon tranquillity at home and abroad. He could not afford war, and wished to avoid public protest. He had decided upon a new tax on the cotton industry but a procession of 2,000 marched through Manchester with banners proclaiming ‘Let commerce flourish for ever!’, ‘Freedom restored’, ‘May Industry never be cramped’. To all these sentiments, Pitt was in fact thoroughly sympathetic and after much agitation and parliamentary protest, he gave way. From the mid-1780s there was indeed a recovery in the building trade and elsewhere, and consequently something of a ‘boom’.
Defeats in parliament did not seem to injure him in the least. He had in a sense already risen above party. In matters of Europe he was also a conciliator and negotiator by nature. It was said that he had no interest in, or knowledge of, foreign affairs, but his study in Downing Street was decorated with four sets of maps and his library was stocked with gazetteers and atlases.
He did believe in pursuing diplomacy through commerce, however, and in the autumn of 1786 he concluded a trade treaty with France that allowed the products of both countries to pass with the minimum of interference. Given the scale of English manufacture, the balance of trade would be inevitably favourable to Britain. Over the next few years Pitt also attempted to devise trade treaties with seven other countries. As the Public Advertiser put it, ‘it is no less than a general arrangement of the commerce of the greatest commercial power that ever existed with all the great commercial powers of the world’. As with many grand schemes, however, it came to nothing.
The problems of empire were never far removed and the trial of Warren Hastings, formerly governor general of Bengal, illustrated the deep uncertainty and confusion which still surrounded Britain’s imperial status. Fox had already stated in the Commons that India should be governed ‘by those principles of equity and humanity implanted in our hearts’. If this was the dream of empire, the reality was sometimes very different.
On his return to Britain, having spent most of his life in India, Hastings was charged by Edmund Burke and others with high crimes and misdemeanours: he was accused of accepting, and giving, bribes; he was accused of selling the aid of his troops to a local despot; he was accused of extortion against the begums of Oudh and the nabob of Benares who had been forced to flee his territory. The names were not familiar to the English, and suggested an alien sub-continent of which they understood very little, but all of Hastings’s supposed crimes could be seen to represent the East India Company itself.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a politician as well as a playwright close to Burke, rose in the Commons in February 1787, to appeal to his colleagues ‘to wipe off the disgrace affixed to the British name in India, and to rescue the national character from lasting infamy’. Many were not happy with the country’s imperial role, especially when it was no longer seen as guardian of a white Protestant empire. The accusations could also be used to diminish the standing of George III and Pitt who might be accused of seeking to use the company’s revenue for themselves. Sheridan spoke for five and a half hours and, at the conclusion of his speech, he was greeted by a ‘universal shout’ of approbation.
The impeachment of Hastings had become inevitable and, for a few months, it afforded the spectacle of an empire questioning, and deciding upon, its destiny. Everybody flocked to Westminster Hall for the proceedings which began on 13 February 1788. No one could then have guessed that the process would last for a further seven years. It became the sensation of the season, with the leading orators of the day – Sheridan, Burke, Fox – launching tirades against an old man in a blue French coat. Macaulay wrote that ‘the grey old walls were hung with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or gratified the emulation of an orator.’ The queen and the court were there; the leaders of fashion and art were there; the ambassadors were there; ‘society’, in all its manifestations, was there. A ticket might be sold for 50 guineas.
The speeches of denunciation would have given credit to the Haymarket or Covent Garden. Burke opened the proceedings with a speech that lasted four days; in the excitement he created, several ladies fainted in the galleries. Sheridan went one further; at the end of his final speech he fell, fainting, into the arms of Edmund Burke. The noted actress, Sarah Siddons, fainted simultaneously. It was a festival of fainting. Gibbon visited Sheridan on the following day. ‘I called this morning, he is perfectly well. A good actor!’ Burke himself seems to have fainted five times in the course of his orations. ‘Your lordships will spare my weakness,’ he said, ‘I have not spared myself . . . I cannot command strength to proceed further at present.’ It was all very stirring, but nothing came of it in the end.
Hastings was after seven years acquitted on all counts, but national attention had already turned elsewhere. The impeachment can best be construed as a momentary spasm of conscience in a country still ambiguous over its imperial role. It would take the greater self-belief of a later generation to quell all doubt.
Another source of doubt and disquiet, in the face of empire, was the continuing survival and prosperity of the slave trade. Not many people cared about it. It was believed that if the English gave up the selling or bartering of slaves, then the French would take over. The country needed the gold, the elephants’ tusks and the slaves. The merchants of London, Bristol and Liverpool sent out gaily coloured clothes, hats, rum, powder and flint. In return they were given men, women and children often taken in tribal wars. By 1750 the numbers of slaves had reached over 270,000 per decade. By 1793 Liverpo
ol handled three-sevenths of the slave trade of all Europe. Who would willingly let them go? From their slave labour in the West Indies came tobacco, cotton and sugar. They were vital tributes to the great god of commerce that ruled the nation.
Yet a small band of persistent opponents of slavery was active in its efforts and, during the course of the reign of George III, several petitions had been presented to parliament on the total abolition of the trade or on the more humane treatment of slaves in the West Indies. William Wilberforce, one of the founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, stated to the Commons that no more than half of the transported slaves lived to see their destination; some plunged into the sea and were said to hold out their arms in joy for the brief sensation of liberty before they sank beneath the waves.
Conversations and committees ensued but nothing was achieved until 21 May 1788, when Sir William Dolben proposed a bill to monitor the transportation of the captives who were forced to endure irons, putrid fever and scant space to move or breathe. It was the first measure against slavery to be tabled at Westminster and the ensuing legislation – one slave to be carried for each ton of the ship’s burthen – was passed by a considerable majority in both houses. The victory pleased the supporters of the bill, and in particular William Wilberforce. Pitt made brave speeches against the trade, admitting that ‘the perversion of British commerce carried misery instead of happiness to one whole quarter of the globe’, but was cautious with legislative action. As first minister he relied upon the immense popularity of a national cause before he committed himself to it. This was not the case for slavery. Its abolition was not given legislative force for another forty-five years. The slaves were part of the engine of trade.
Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4 Page 29
