The one exception to this disorderly appearance might have been the Treasury bench, the front bench on the Speaker’s right. For here sat the Members of His Majesty’s Government in court dress, symbolising their proximity to the King and their employment in his service. Pitt took his seat somewhere on the back benches opposite them, sitting naturally enough with the opponents of a government his father had denounced. Most of those seated around him would call themselves Whigs, but Pitt recognised that the party labels of the early eighteenth century now had little meaning. ‘I do not wish’, he had written two years earlier, ‘to call myself any Thing but an Independent Whig which in words is hardly a distinction, as every one alike pretends to it.’4
The success of the Whigs in the early eighteenth century had itself contributed to the term losing much of its meaning. The Jacobite cause was dead, and Tories who had the ability or the desire to seek office had called themselves Whigs, much as a Republican in the post-Civil War southern United States would need to call himself a Democrat. George III had said to Pitt’s father in 1765: ‘You can name no Whig familys that shall not have my Countenance; but where Torys come to me on Whig principles let us take them.’5 Domestic political divisions had further broken down with the disappearance of the most burning political issue of the mid-eighteenth century, the entanglement of British affairs with those of Hanover. Unlike his grandfather, George III was an utterly English King, who was much less preoccupied with his ancestral country, and only occasionally did he let it complicate his politics.
Most of the MPs had not in any case entered politics in order to pursue a political agenda, quite apart from the fact that it was still frowned upon to come into Parliament or even government with a preconceived notion of what should be done. As Sir Lewis Namier put it in his comprehensive study of eighteenth-century politicians The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III: ‘Men went there [the House of Commons] “to make a figure”, and no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others may eat it … The seat in the House was not their ultimate goal but a means to ulterior aims.’6
Soame Jenyns, the author and Cambridgeshire MP, writing in 1784, said: ‘Men … get into Parliament, in pursuit of power, honours, and preferments, and till they obtain them, determine to obstruct all business, and distress government. But happily for their Country, they are no sooner gratified, than they are equally zealous to promote the one, and support the other.’7 Apart from the few such as Pitt who really did go into Parliament in order to be politicians, Namier identified the following as making up the majority of MPs: the ‘inevitable Parliament men’ who were part of the completely political families such as the Townshends, Cornwallises and Cavendishes; the ‘country gentlemen’ who sought primacy in their own county; the ‘social climbers’ who sought peerages; the ‘placemen and purveyors of favours’ who sought commissionerships and various offices and sinecures; those seeking ‘professional advancement’ in the army, the navy, the Civil Service or the law; the ‘merchants and bankers’ who sought government contracts and arranged public loans, particularly in wartime; and occasionally a small number seeking immunity from prosecution or arrest.
We should not be surprised that this was the nature of Parliament in an age when there were no salaries or pensions for MPs, and little concept of meritocratic preferment in the services of the state. The network of patronage which spread out from the Crown and the Ministers on the Treasury bench extended far into positions in every county, regiment and even church. Indeed, the bishops and peers in the House of Lords were generally even more craven than MPs in their susceptibility to such ‘influence’, since they often hoped for a more lucrative diocese or a step up in the ranks of the peerage.
Any eighteenth-century government could therefore usually rely on a large majority in the House of Lords. The combination of large-scale patronage and a general predisposition among the ‘country gentlemen’ that the King should be able to get his way, provided he did not directly assault the role and power of the aristocracy, meant that governments usually held the upper hand in the Commons as well. At any one time, about a quarter of the Commons might hold some government office, sinecure or pension. More than a third would regard themselves as entirely independent of any factional party, although some would certainly be open to ‘influence’ at its most persuasive. On top of that, there would be about twenty MPs whose seats had been directly purchased for them by the Treasury. These various groups tended to coalesce around the leading members of one of the factions chosen by the King to head his ministry. And so it was that Pitt would have looked across the Chamber at the ‘King’s friends’ and the ‘country gentlemen’ massed behind the complacent-looking figure of Lord North, First Lord of the Treasury for more than a decade.*
Lord North is generally remembered in British history without much respect or affection. Overweight and perhaps overpromoted, he is thought of as an uninspiring figure who carelessly lost the American colonies. He did indeed lack the administrative drive required from the centre of government at a time of war, but he was nevertheless an astute politician and a formidable parliamentarian. Despite his corpulence and tendency to doze off in debates, he could still command the House of Commons by means of powerful speeches and a noted sense of humour. During one long speech by George Grenville which reviewed the history of government revenues, North went into a sound sleep, having asked his neighbour to wake him when the speaker reached modern times. When he duly received a nudge, he listened for a moment and then exclaimed, ‘Zounds! You have waked me a hundred years too soon.’8
North is often thought of as a ‘Tory Prime Minister’, but he himself would have rejected both labels. True, there were Tories among the ‘country gentlemen’ who backed him, but these were the remnants of a now meaningless term. As for ‘Prime Minister’, he had explicitly denied being such a thing, lest he be held even more accountable for the failings of the government of which he was undoubtedly the senior member. Desperate to give up office for at least the last two years, but bound to the King by a mixture of duty and gratitude (George III had paid off his debts of £18,000), he had soldiered on with a war he no longer believed in. Despite experiencing some kind of nervous breakdown, he had maintained his outward good humour and amiability: ‘Constant threats of impeachment, fierce attacks upon himself and all his connexions, mingled execration of his measures and scorn of his capacity, bitter hatred of his person … seemed to have no effect on his habitually placid deportment, nor to consume his endless patience.’9
Lord North governed with the support of a small band of his own followers, along with the factions commanded by Lord Sandwich and Lord Gower, as well as the ever-helpful friends of the King. Alongside him on the front bench in the Commons Pitt would have seen Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for the Colonies, who had borne the brunt of directing the war and was even now hoping that the thrust into the southern colonies by Lord Cornwallis and his troops would finally defeat George Washington. Elsewhere on the Treasury bench would be Henry Dundas, the Lord Advocate for Scotland, who had begun developing an iron grip on the forty-five Scottish seats and was now a leading spokesman of the government in the Commons, albeit one who doubted that the government’s remaining life would be very long. Altogether, North could rely on around eighty MPs from his own and allied factions along with 140 ‘King’s friends’, so he needed the support of about fifty of the more than two hundred independents in order to win a majority in a full House.10