The Once and Future King. F. H. Buckley
was faulted for conceding overgenerous terms to the Americans in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, his ministry was replaced in April of that year by an improbable Fox-North coalition. Lord North had been George III’s principal supporter in Parliament; Charles James Fox was the principal opponent of the King’s power. This seemed a union of both ends against the middle, but now North recognized that he had had quite enough of overbearing monarchs, and told Fox that “the King ought to be treated with every sort of respect and attention, but the appearance of power is all that a king of this country can have.”22 The much-abused North had come around to Fox’s constitutional theories of a purely ceremonial royal power.
George III detested Fox, whom he blamed for corrupting his son, the Prince of Wales, and sought out anyone who might keep Fox from office. A son of the Earl of Chatham (Pitt the Elder), the 23-year-old William Pitt, was the chancellor of the exchequer, and the King asked him to form a government. The time was not right, and Pitt refused, as did his uncle, Thomas. Get me “Mr. Thomas Pitt or Mr. Thomas Anybody,” cried the desperate King.23 He once again considered abdication, but at last concluded that it was easier to swallow Fox as secretary of state than the dissolute Prince of Wales as his successor.
One of the new government’s first acts was a motion to create a government-appointed board to oversee the oppressive East India Company, then ruled by the first governor general of Bengal, Warren Hastings. While this passed the House of Commons by a large majority, there were those who thought a board appointed by the wildly profligate Fox might not be a great improvement over Hastings. Fox possessed what Irish MP Henry Grattan called a “negligent grandeur,”24 an ability to inspire the deepest affection of his followers, while giving the impression he longed to be at the gaming table. He was without guile and artifice. The historian Edward Gibbon thought that “perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity or falsehood.”25 Nonetheless, few people were less suited to administer the fabulously wealthy East India Company than Fox, of whom Horace Walpole left a memorable picture:
As soon as he rose, which was very late, [Fox] had a levée of his followers, and of the members of the Gaming Club, at Brooks’, all his disciples. His bristly black person, and shagged breast quite open, and rarely purified by any ablutions, was wrapped in a foul linen nightgown, and his bushy hair disheveled. 26
His friend Sir Brooke Boothby said that Fox loved three things: women, gambling, and politics,27 and it seemed in that order. He had gambled away his father’s inheritance, and in an age of rakes and spendthrifts, set the tone for a high society of men of pleasure.
For the King, Fox and the India bill were targets too tempting to resist. George first persuaded Pitt to serve as prime minister were the government to fall. The King then contrived to kill the India bill, and thus defeat the Fox-North ministry. He gave Pitt’s cousin, Lord Temple, a letter to circulate to his fellow peers in the House of Lords, in which the King called the India bill unconstitutional and subversive of the rights of the Crown, and said he would consider all who voted for it as his enemies.28 The bill was accordingly defeated in the House of Lords on the evening of December 18, 1783, and George III immediately required Fox and North to deliver up the Seal of State, without even deigning to meet them. “I choose this method,” he wrote North, “as Audiences on such occasions must be unpleasant.”29
The next morning, December 19, a delighted George III invited Pitt to kiss hands and become prime minister. Pitt accepted, and that morning faced the most hostile of Parliaments. When his appointment was announced to the House of Commons, the members of the Fox-North coalition burst into laughter at the idea of a 24-year-old prime minister. They called Pitt’s new government the mince-pie administration, so certain were they that it could not last beyond Christmas. Behind the laughter was anger that the Fox-North government had fallen through an extraordinary assertion of royal power, with a new government, installed solely through the King’s influence, that thumbed its nose at the House of Commons.
What followed was gridlock. The House of Commons immediately defeated the government in two votes, with majorities of 39 and 54 against. Pitt had the support of the King and the House of Lords, but had few allies in the House of Commons, and no bills could be passed. The King offered to dissolve Parliament and hold a new election, which might have given Pitt more support in the House of Commons, but Pitt refused to go to the people until he had a chance to stare down Fox and North. On January 13, 1784, after a debate that lasted until seven in the morning, the House of Commons resolved by a vote of 296 to 54 that the King’s efforts to defeat the Fox-North government had been unconstitutional. There followed a series of nonconfidence motions, but with the King’s encouragement, the preternaturally calm and self-assured Pitt hung on. If not made to be loved, noted his fellow MP Nathaniel Wraxall, he had a remarkable ability to guide and command.
In his manners, Pitt, if not repulsive, was cold, stiff and without Suavity or Amenity. He seemed never to invite Approach or to encourage Acquaintance . . . Smiles were not natural to him, even when seated on the Treasury Bench . . . From the Instant that Pitt entered the Door-way of the House of Commons, he advanced up the Floor with a quick and firm step, his Head erect and thrown back, looking neither to the right nor to the left, nor favoring with a Nod or a Glance any of the Individuals seated on either side. 30
Faced with Pitt’s unblinking gaze, Fox’s majority continually shrank. Nor was Pitt unwilling to influence MPs with the tools now at his command. The floodgates of patronage were opened, and the Pittites suddenly found themselves endowed with titles and royal pensions. They sensed the country behind them, ready for a fresh start after the disastrous American war conducted by Lord North, Fox’s ally. On March 8, 1784, Pitt lost a vote in the House by only one vote. Fox had staked all on ultimate victory, but victory had eluded him; and now, finally, Pitt called for an election. The polls remained open for forty days, during which drink and cash, promises and threats were liberally applied to sway the voters. In Westminster the lovely Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was said to have kissed voters who pledged to vote for her lover, Fox.31 He won his seat, but Pitt won the House, with the largest majority any government had received in that century. With an eye to the Protestant martyrology, the government’s supporters went down to defeat as “Fox’s Martyrs.”
What Fox had sought was a revolution in constitutional governance, in which all power would devolve on Parliament and with the prime minister assuming the role of executive. “Had not a majority of the House of Commons almost from time immemorial governed this country?” he asked.32 But that was not the constitution of George III and William Pitt. What Fox wanted was Roger Sherman’s constitution, in which the legislature was supreme. By contrast, the Pittite constitution featured a form of the separation of powers that James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris would urge upon Americans. Pitt and the King had the better understanding of the British constitution, but Fox had a more accurate sense of the direction of constitutional reform. In one of the ironies of history, however, the Framers proposed a constitution that came to resemble the Pittite constitution more than that of the forward-looking Fox.
Americans regarded the political turmoil with great interest. Some ministers were better disposed toward Americans than others, and it mattered who would negotiate the peace treaty between America and Britain, and carry out its terms. No one was more sympathetic to the Americans than Fox, who wore their blue-and-buff uniform to Parliament to show his support for their Revolution. Gouverneur Morris was especially interested in English politics. His stepbrother had fought for the British, and had become a member of the House of Commons. At the Philadelphia Convention, Morris recognized how the prime minister had nearly assumed the executive power in Britain. “If [Fox] had carried his India bill, which he was very near doing, he would have [been] made the Minister, the King in form almost as well as in substance.”33
In time prime ministers became the ruler that Morris had foreseen, but this was far in the future. For the fifty-year period between the fall of Lord North and the British Reform Act of 1832, the Pittite constitution represented an intermediate stage, in which the prime minister had more power than he did in the early part of George III’s reign, but less still than a modern prime minister. The King would give full support to Pitt as an administrator,