Ministers were more despondent, but played for time by announcing that the war would go on, although offensive operations would no longer be conducted. The opposition, unprepared for the calamity, lacked the numbers to turn out the Ministers, but mobilised its supporters as quickly as it could. The administration beat off the initial opposition onslaught on 12 December by forty-one votes (220 to 179), but with increasing signs of divisions among Ministers about the future of the war.
Pitt was at the forefront of the efforts to expose ministerial disunity and uncertainty, and in these weeks proved himself a formidable parliamentary operator. He rose to speak on the second day of the session, and Wraxall described the scene:
In a speech of extraordinary energy (throughout the course of which he contrived with great ability to blend professions of devoted attachment to the person of the King with the severest accusation of his Ministers), he fully confirmed the high opinion of his judgement and parliamentary talents already entertained throughout the country … He concluded by calling on Ministers to state without circumlocution or deception what were their intentions as to the further prosecution of the American war, and to give some general idea of the manner in which it was henceforward to be pursued. A sort of pause took place when he resumed his seat, while the eyes of all present were directed towards the Treasury bench …7
With North and Germain declining to answer Pitt directly, Dundas took to his feet. He insisted that the war would not necessarily be continued, and implied disagreement in the Cabinet, all of which gave Pitt a great debating victory.
On 14 December Pitt was again on his feet denouncing the incapacity of Ministers when he spotted a three-way conversation taking place on the government benches between Lord George Germain, who remained what would now be called a hawk on continuing the war, Lord North, who had become decidedly dovish, and a third Minister, Welbore Ellis. Pitt paused in his speech and, drawing a parallel with the Greek characters of the Trojan War, said: ‘I shall wait till the unanimity is better settled, and until the sage Nestor of the Treasury Bench has brought to an agreement the Agamemnon and the Achilles of the American War.’ In the light of all we know about Pitt’s education, it may be no surprise that he could easily make a spontaneous classical allusion, but it came as an impressive revelation to the House of Commons. In Wraxall’s words once again, ‘its effect was electric, not only on the individuals to whom it was personally directed, but on the whole audience. The two Ministers and the Treasurer of the Navy in some confusion resumed their former attitudes. We cannot sufficiently appreciate or admire the perfect self-possession which, while addressing a crowded House of Commons, could dictate to a youth of little more than two-and-twenty so masterly an allusion. The conclusion of his speech breathed not a little of the spirit of his deceased father, while he seemed to launch the vengeance or the indignation of a suffering and exhausted nation on the heads of Ministers.’8
Pitt’s parliamentary reputation was now reaching the stratosphere. Horace Walpole wrote of the same speech: ‘Another remarkable day; the army was to be voted. William Pitt took to pieces Lord North’s pretended declarations and exposed them with the most amazing logical abilities, exceeding all the abilities he had already shown and making men doubt whether he would not prove superior even to Charles Fox.’9 Fox nonetheless remained a generous colleague on the opposition benches, referring to Pitt as his ‘Honourable Friend’ and saying, as the MP Sir Samuel Romilly recorded in his memoirs, ‘in an exaggerated strain of panegyric … he could no longer lament the loss of Lord Chatham, for he was again living in his son, with all his virtues and all his talents … He is likely soon to take precedence of all our orators.’10
By now North had come to the conclusion that peace must be made irrespective of the consequences, and Germain was increasingly isolated in the Cabinet. Even so, the view of the majority of Ministers was not put into effect because they were unwilling to impose their views on an intransigent King. Dundas pressed for the removal of Germain from the Cabinet, along with Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, in order to reunite the government and remove the opposition’s most attractive targets. As ever, North prevaricated. Eventually, when the House returned from its Christmas recess on 21 January 1782, his hand was forced by Dundas and the Paymaster General, Richard Rigby. They declared that they would not attend the House of Commons so long as Germain remained in office, a threat sufficiently potent, given the influence of Dundas over the Scottish seats, to bring down the government.11 By the end of January it was announced that Germain would be leaving the government and going to the Lords as Lord Sackville.
The departure of Germain was not accompanied by any change or clarification of policy, and the opposition, predictably, was now beginning to throw everything in its armoury at Sandwich. North had only staved off the collapse of his administration rather than rescued it. The government was tottering to its doom. The Commons was thronged with Members ready for the annual ‘call of the House’ and the opposition was fully mobilised. Most important of all, those independents and county Members who had supported North began to peel away. Pitt enjoyed himself to the full, speaking regularly against the government, performing the role for which he had been trained in the environment to which he was most suited. Yet even in the thick of these battles he took great care to mark himself out as a different type of politician, free of any base or corruptible motives, and always at a safe distance from the main party groupings.
While joining in the opposition onslaught on Lord Sandwich on 24 January, Pitt said, according to Pretyman, that he ‘supported the motion from motives of a public nature, and from those motives only. He was too young to be supposed capable of entertaining any personal enmity against the earl of Sandwich; and he trusted that when he should be less young it would appear that he had early determined, in the most solemn manner, never to suffer any private or personal consideration whatever to influence his public conduct at any one moment of his life.’12 Such a statement by a young Member, carrying as it does the implication of a long future career, would in today’s House of Commons be regarded as unbelievably pompous and pretentious. Coming as it did from Pitt, the son of Chatham and already one of the foremost debaters of the House, Members seem to have taken it in their stride. It marks a major difference in attitude between Pitt and his future rival Fox. Pitt’s statement of 24 January is something that Fox, who was often motivated by personal friendships above political consistency, is most unlikely ever to have said. While the two men applied themselves energetically to bringing the government to its knees in the early weeks of 1782, it would have been apparent to a shrewd observer that not only the style but also the content of their speeches was subtly different. Wraxall noted that ‘no man who attentively considered the different spirit which animated their speeches whenever the sovereign became indirectly the subject of their animadversion could fail to remark their widely dissimilar line of conduct’.13 Fox, who the previous year had privately described the King as a ‘blockhead’,14 ‘designated or characterised him [the King], in fact, as under the dominion of resentment, unfeeling, implacable, and only satiated by the continuance of war against his former subjects … more as a tyrant and an oppressor than as … the guardian of a limited constitution’.15 Pitt, by contrast, ‘repressed any intemperate expressions and personally spared the Sovereign. He separated the King from his weak or evil counsellors; admitted the purity of intention by which he was ever impelled; professed ardent attachment to the person as well as to the family of the reigning Monarch and declared that it would be best manifested by exposing the delusion that had been practised on him.’ In this respect, of course, it was Fox rather than Pitt who was unusual. For an opposition politician to burn his boats so completely with the monarch was clearly foolhardy, but Fox was given to impulses and had decided that in any case he would soon be able to force himself into office. Pitt, still at the start of his career, was playing a longer game, and the content of these speeches was the first sign that he was both more calculating and more consistently ambitious than his future rival. In addition, while Pitt had learnt from his father to be suspicious and wary of the King, he had also acquired at his father’s knee a healthy contempt for the great Whig magnates such as Rockingham, with whom Fox was in close alliance. While Pitt believed that the corrupting influence of