*This is the origin of the layout of the House of Commons to this day, although the current Chamber was built on a different location within the new Palace of Westminster after the fire of 1834, and rebuilt after being bombed in 1941.
*Lords could be Members of the House of Commons if they held Irish or Scottish peerages or a courtesy title. Lord North, for instance, was heir to the Earldom of Guilford, and went on to the House of Lords when he succeeded to this title in due course.
‘The enemy carried two advanced redoubts by storm … my situation now becomes very critical; we dare not show a gun to their old batteries, and I expect that their new ones will open tomorrow morning … the safety of the place is therefore so precarious that I cannot recommend that the fleet and army should run great risque in endeavouring to save us.’
LORD CORNWALLIS, 15 OCTOBER 1781
‘Those persons who have for some time conducted the public affairs are no longer His Majesty’s Ministers.’
LORD NORTH, 20 MARCH 1782
MUCH OF THE FIGHTING between British troops and American colonists had been concentrated in and around the northern American states, but at the end of 1779 the British Commander-in-Chief, Sir Henry Clinton, had embarked on a new strategy. By launching a sudden offensive in the Deep South, the British would take the Americans by surprise, encourage what was believed to be a large number of colonists in that area still loyal to the Crown, and do so before further French reinforcements could arrive in the course of 1780. Landing in the Carolinas with 7,600 men early in the new year, Clinton accomplished his initial objectives. With the capture of Charleston after a protracted siege in May, he dealt a heavy blow to the rebels. In the summer he returned to his principal base in New York, leaving four thousand British troops in the south under the command of Lord Cornwallis, a rival general with whom Clinton’s relations were severely strained.
For much of the next year, the American war seemed to have sunk into stalemate. Where fighting took place, the British were generally the technical victors, but this rarely improved their ability to hold on to territory, since lines of communication were so difficult; neither did it bring the war any nearer to a conclusion, as most of the population remained hostile. The operations conducted by Cornwallis in the south were a good example of this. A full year of manoeuvring and skirmishes culminated in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina in March 1781, where Cornwallis inflicted severe losses on the Americans but his own army was left too weak to follow up the advantage. The American General he defeated, Nathanael Greene, commented, ‘We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.’
Complacency and confusion brought the ruin of British strategy in the summer of 1781. Clinton was afraid that the Americans under George Washington and the French forces under Lafayette would combine against him in New York. As a result he was unwilling to send any reinforcements to Cornwallis, and sometimes asked for troops to be sent back. In addition, Clinton believed, on the basis of intelligence reports, that 1781 would be the last year in which France would make any serious effort to help the Americans, and that consequently there was a good deal to be said for simply sitting tight. The summer passed with confusing and bad-tempered messages being sent back and forth between Clinton and Cornwallis: the confusion was compounded not only by Clinton’s uncertain instructions to his subordinate, but also by his messages sometimes arriving in the wrong order.
Clinton’s caution was to lead to catastrophe. Washington and Lafayette were not combining against him in the north-east, but against Cornwallis as he marched north through Virginia, and their decision to do so would bring them final victory in the war. At the beginning of October 1781, as he fortified the town of Yorktown on Chesapeake Bay, Cornwallis had fewer than nine thousand troops to face at least 16,000 French and Americans. Within days his position was desperate, and on 15 October he wrote to Clinton: ‘the safety of the place is therefore so precarious that I cannot recommend that the fleet and army should run great risque in endeavouring to save us’.1 Clinton now realised the gravity of the position: ‘I see this in so serious a light that I dare not look at it’.
On 17 October Clinton belatedly set sail from New York with a fleet and a small army to relieve the siege of Yorktown. Five days later they arrived at the approaches to Chesapeake Bay, where they came across a small boat carrying three people who told them that the battle was already over. On the very day that the relieving force had left New York, Cornwallis had surrendered. The ships turned round and headed back to New York. The war was lost.2
Across the Atlantic, Members of Parliament had no inkling that the war was approaching its climax. After spending the summer on the Western Circuit Pitt passed some weeks with his mother at Burton Pynsent, where the visitors included Pretyman. A letter to his mother written from Dorset gives us some insight into his life at the time, and a reminder of his dislike of society parties:
Kingston Hall, Oct. 7, 1781.
My Dear Mother
I have delayed writing to you longer than I intended, which I hope is of little Consequence, as Harriot will have brought you all the News I could have sent – an account of that stupid Fête at Fonthill,* which, take it all together, was, I think, as ill imagined, and as indifferently conducted, as anything of the sort need be … By meeting Lord Shelburne and Lord Camden, We were pressed to make a second Visit to Bowood, which, from the addition of Colonel Barré and Mr. Dunning, was a very pleasant party. – Since that Time I have been waging war, with increasing success, on Pheasants and Partridges – I shall continue Hostilities, I believe, about a week longer, and then prepare for the opening of another sort of campaign in Westminster Hall. Parliament, I am very glad to hear, is not to meet till the 27th of Novr, which will allow me a good deal more leisure than I expected.3
Pitt’s reference to a ‘campaign’ in Westminster Hall meant that he was intending to do further legal work in the courts there that autumn. The visit to Bowood was for a meeting of the small Chathamite party, which continued to maintain a separate identity from the main opposition grouping of Rockingham and Fox, and was now planning for the session ahead. They were not exactly in high spirits about it, as Lord Camden’s letter of 8 November to Thomas Walpole shows: ‘You may be anxious to know whether I shall take any part in the House. I protest I do not know. Our opposition is scattered and runs wild in both houses under no leader. God knows how all this will end.’4 Although Cornwallis had surrendered three weeks earlier, news of this had not yet arrived in London. The government circulated its supporters with a routine request to attend the autumn session, and the opposition made little effort to mobilise its supporters, being unaware of any new opportunity.
It was on the morning of Sunday, 25 November 1781, only two days before the opening of Parliament, that the first news of the defeat at Yorktown arrived in London, by means of a messenger sent from Falmouth to Lord George Germain’s house in Pall Mall. Lord George got into a hackney coach, collected two other Ministers, and proceeded to take the news to Lord North at 10 Downing Street. North was said to have reacted ‘as he would have taken a ball in his breast … he opened his arms, exclaiming wildly, as he paced up and down the apartment during a few minutes, “O God! it is all over!” Words which he repeated many times under emotions of the deepest consternation and distress.’5
Sure enough, Yorktown would bring the fall of the North government, but it did not do so immediately. The King’s reaction to the news was characteristically unyielding: ‘I trust that neither Lord George Germain nor any