When the House of Commons met again on 8 April 1782, the leading figures sat on the side opposite that to which they had grown accustomed for many years. In the eighteenth century this meant not only a change of position but a change of costume – since Ministers wore court dress – and Wraxall speaks of astonishment at them ‘emerging from their obscure lodgings, or coming down from Brooks’s … now ornamented with the appendages of full dress, or returning from Court decorated with swords, lace, and hair powder … some degree of ridicule attached to this sudden metamorphosis, which afforded subject for conversation, no less than food for mirth’.
Pitt would now sit on the government, rather than the opposition, side of the House, but he was not included among the Ministers who took their place on the front bench in court dress. In early March he had made in the Commons what seemed to many a rash and presumptuous declaration: ‘For myself, I could not expect to form part of a new administration; but were my doing so more within my reach, I feel myself bound to declare that I never would accept a subordinate situation.’24 At the age of twenty-two he was declaring, in other words, that he would serve as a senior Minister in the Cabinet or not serve in a new government at all. Many commentators found this too much to take, even from the son of Chatham who had become an accomplished debater. Horace Walpole described it as ‘so arrogant a declaration from a boy who had gained no experience from, nor ever enjoyed even the lowest post in any office, and who for half a dozen orations, extraordinary indeed, but no evidence of capacity for business, presumed himself fit for command, proved that he was a boy, and a very ambitious and a very vain one. The moment he sat down he was aware of his folly, and said he could bite his tongue out for what he had uttered.’25
It has indeed been claimed that as soon as Pitt made this statement he thought he had gone too far, and consulted Admiral Keppel, who was sitting near him, for advice about making a clarification. On the other hand, it would have been wholly uncharacteristic of him to make a major statement of his own ambitions without thinking about it carefully in advance, and we have the assurance of Pretyman that he had decided to make this statement some days before. We cannot know for sure who was right, or whether Pitt was responding to rumours or negotiations and trying to elevate himself in the pecking order of a new administration. We can judge, however, that his statement is wholly consistent with his view of himself and his approach to politics. He already had immense confidence in his own abilities, but even more important he was determined to succeed on the basis of those abilities and not through attachment to a large party or a more senior political figure. He could only preserve the independence and incorruptibility for which he wished to be known by either being in an office so senior that he had freedom of action, or being out of office where he could say what he wished. Office in a more junior position would have turned him into the sort of politician he did not want to be, dependent on the patronage of others and having to accept a party line which he would have no role in determining. It seems likely, therefore, that his statement of March 1782, however grating on many of his listeners, was absolutely deliberate. Certainly his resolve in sticking to it was to be put to an immediate test. Shelburne put to Rockingham the case for giving Pitt a senior position, but it does not seem to have been high among his priorities, and he had already secured a disproportionate share of other positions. Instead, Pitt was offered the Vice-Treasurership of Ireland, outside the Cabinet but the position his father had first held in government, and one which carried a very generous salary of £5,000 a year, probably nine or ten times his income at the time. He refused it. When the elder Pitt had accepted this office he was frustrated from more than a decade in opposition; the younger Pitt was prepared to wait.
Pitt was not a Minister in the new government, but he now had the opportunity to pursue an objective dear to the hearts of many who had opposed the former government: parliamentary reform. The movement of population over the centuries meant that by the late eighteenth century some large towns had no representation in Parliament of their own, while other places with almost no people at all were represented by two Members. The war in America had provided fertile ground for the belief that reform was essential to the good governing of the country, since it was assumed that MPs in closer touch with a wider range of people would have been less inclined to tolerate its continuation. Associations were formed around the country to campaign for the redistribution of parliamentary representation, and variously calling for the abolition of the most rotten boroughs, an increase in the number of county Members, and triennial rather than septennial Parliaments. The most prominent of these were the Westminster Association, with which Fox had associated himself as he adopted a more populist position on these issues in 1780; the Kent Association, of which Pitt’s brother-in-law Lord Mahon was a leading light; and the Yorkshire Association, led by the Reverend Christopher Wyvill of Constable Burton in North Yorkshire. Wyvill and his Yorkshire colleagues were to prove formidable campaigners, all the more so since they resisted more radical demands such as a wide extension of the franchise, were prepared to compromise on the issue of shorter Parliaments, and included the solid body of the country gentry of one of the major county seats of the land. Pitt’s many attempts to introduce parliamentary reform from 1782 onwards were heavily influenced by Wyvill, although nominally he was more closely attached to the Kent Association, to whose committee he had been elected in October 1780.
With the formation of a government more friendly to reform, the Duke of Richmond, now a member of the Cabinet as Master General of the Ordnance, hosted a meeting of the leading reformers in late April to consider how to seek parliamentary approval for reform as rapidly as possible. It was decided that Pitt had the necessary ability and respect in the Commons to lead the case for reform. He gave notice in the House that on Tuesday, 7 May he would ‘move for a Select Committee to take into consideration the present state of the representation of the Commons of England’.26
It was necessary caution on behalf of Pitt and the reformers to call for a Select Committee inquiry rather than to present a specific programme of reform. For all the fact that the new administration was sympathetic to the idea in principle, it would still be a tall order to get Members of Parliament to vote for changes which would do many of them out of their seats, and even Ministers themselves were divided. With the exception of Fox, the prime interest of the Rockingham Whigs had always been in economical reform, with the objective of diminishing the influence of the Crown at the expense of the Whig aristocracy, not in parliamentary reform, which had the objective of providing a fairer basis for the system of power which the aristocracy operated. Rockingham himself was not an enthusiast, and Burke was frankly opposed, although Fox appears to have persuaded him to absent himself on the occasion of Pitt’s speech.
The House was crowded on 7 May, not so much with Members as with a huge crowd attempting to enter the Public Gallery, which had to be locked after an hour. Pitt set out the case for reform in a speech lasting an hour and a half. First, he praised the new government: ‘the ministers had declared their virtuous resolution of supporting the king’s government by means more honourable, as well as more permanent, than corruption; and the nation had confidence in the declarations of men who had so invariably proved themselves the friends of freedom, and the animated supporters of an equal and fair system of representation’.27 He went on to lament what had happened to the British constitution:
That beautiful frame of government, which had made us the envy and admiration of mankind, in which the people were entitled to hold so distinguished a share, was so far dwindled and departed from its original purity, as that the representatives ceased, in a great degree, to be connected with the people. It was the essence of the constitution, that the people had a share in the government by the means of representation; and its excellence and permanency was calculated to consist in this representation, having been designed to be equal, easy, practicable, and complete. When it ceased to be so; when the representative ceased to have connection with the constituent, and was either dependent on the crown or the aristocracy, there was a defect in the frame of representation, and it was not innovation, but recovery of constitution, to repair it.28
This was very much the spirit in which Pitt, Wyvill and the moderate reformers campaigned. They were not seeking a radical change to bring in a wider