It may be that Pitt had not fully absorbed the possible consequences of Rockingham’s death on the day it happened. Perhaps more likely is that he was still rather in awe of Fox, and was keeping all his options open. Overnight reflection and the possibility of high office soon led him to be tempted. He wrote to his mother on 2 July: ‘With regard to myself, I believe the arrangement may be of a sort in which I may, and probably ought to take a part.’7 By 5 July he was writing: ‘Fox has chosen to resign, on no Ground that I can learn but Lord Shelburne being placed at the Treasury … My lot will be either at the Treasury as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or in the Home department as Secretary of State. The arrangement cannot be finally settled till tomorrow or next day; but every thing promises as well as possible in such circumstances. Mr. Townshend certainly makes part of this fresh arrangement, and probably in a more forward post, which is to me an infinite satisfaction.’8
This was a reference to Thomas Townshend, the only other Member of the House of Commons likely to occupy one of the top positions in the government. While the negotiations continued about who would occupy exactly which post, all attention remained on Fox, who now began to realise that he had gravely damaged his political career.
As a Secretary of State, Fox had felt seriously undermined by Shelburne, and had differed with him on a major aspect of policy. While he therefore had good grounds for resignation upon Shelburne becoming First Lord, these points were not widely appreciated even by other members of the government. Thus while Burke joined Fox in resigning, the senior members of the government saw no reason not to stay put in the Cabinet. The differences of opinion over the peace negotiations were not public knowledge, and for a politician openly to attack the backstairs influence of the King would have been going too far in the eighteenth century, at least until the great crisis which was still a year and a half away. The fact that Fox negotiated about the possibility of staying in the government for two or three days in the belief that Shelburne might accept his American policy (which he subsequently did) strengthened the perception that there was no good reason why he should not have carried on in the government. His uncle the Duke of Richmond remained in the Cabinet, saying he could ‘see no reason at present for suspecting that the Measures on which we came in will not be pursued, and under this persuasion I think it would be very wrong not to support this Ministry merely because Lord Shelburne is at the Treasury’.9
Seeing that he was losing the argument and was believed to have resigned out of personal animosity, Fox sought to explain himself in the Commons on 9 July, but probably made matters worse by the vituperative nature of his attack on Shelburne. He said of the new First Lord and his colleagues that ‘they would abandon fifty principles for the sake of power, and forget fifty promises when they were no longer requisite to their ends … and he expected to see that, in a very short time they would be joined by those men whom that House had precipitated from their seats’.10
The prediction he was making was that Shelburne would now form an alliance with Lord North. This was particularly unfortunate, since it was exactly what Fox himself would proceed to do the following year. Among those who took exception to the intemperate nature of Fox’s attacks on Shelburne was Pitt. Seated on the government front bench for the first time, although not yet officially in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pitt now had a stake in the success of Shelburne and the isolation of Fox. For all the ostensibly friendly relations between them over the previous years, he seems to have had no hesitation in adding to Fox’s wounds with a thrust of his own rapier:
The Right Honourable Secretary assures us, that it was with the sole view of preventing dissensions in the Cabinet he retired from office. I believe him, because he solemnly declares it; otherwise I should have attributed his resignation to a baulk in struggling for power. If, however, he so much disliked Lord Shelburne’s political principles or opinions, why did he ever consent to act with that nobleman as a colleague? And if he only suspected Lord Shelburne of feeling averse to the measures which he thought necessary to be adopted, it was his duty to have called a Cabinet Council, and there to have ascertained the fact before he took the hasty resolution of throwing up his employment.11
In vain did Fox protest that he had indeed called a meeting of the Cabinet to try to settle differences. The death of Rockingham and the evident anger of Fox at the elevation of Shelburne had obscured the original point of his resignation. By 10 July, as a new writ was moved for an election in Appleby to confirm Pitt’s position in the Commons as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the dust settled on a remarkable ten days in the politics of the eighteenth century. The events of early July 1782 amplified the appearance of Fox as a politician whose brilliance was flawed by rashness and personal enmity. The King could now say that his experience of Fox had ‘finally determined me never to employ him again’.12 The same events led to Pitt becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer and one of the most senior members of the British government at the age of twenty-three. Above all, the fact that Pitt had accepted office in the same circumstances as those in which Fox had rejected it would have lasting consequences for themselves and the country for the rest of their lives. The two most eloquent Members of the House of Commons had hitherto spoken from the same side of the House. Now they would never do so again.
Pitt’s re-election for Appleby was, of course, a formality. Given Lowther’s influence, he once again had no opponents. Not having to trouble himself with the election, and the House of Commons entering on its recess, he was able to contemplate his new situation with some leisure. The position of Chancellor of the Exchequer was a senior one in the government, but not as powerful as would normally be the case today. Its origins go back to the beginning of the twelfth century, when a chequered table was used for calculating expenditure and receipts. In the thirteenth century, the official responsible for making such calculations became known as the Chancellor of the Exchequer. By Pitt’s time, the Chancellor ranked second in the Treasury after the First Lord, an arrangement still nominally intact in the twenty-first century. Since the position of Prime Minister was far less well developed than today, however (and was not yet an official title), the First Lord was likely to concentrate much more heavily than now on Treasury business, and the Chancellor was not regarded as the Treasury’s departmental head.
Although he was in the Cabinet, Pitt had therefore not acquired extensive administrative power. He had ended up as Chancellor because at least three other people had turned it down in the game of Cabinet musical chairs between 1 and 10 July, and it was clear that the position he had been given had had to fit in with the demands of others. As Chancellor he would have a seat on the Treasury Board, with another seat given to his friend Edward Eliot, but Shelburne intended to be an activist First Lord with a firm grip on Treasury matters. Pitt’s role and power within the government would expand in due course, but only because he was indispensable to it in the House of Commons. Other than Townshend, nominally senior to him as a Secretary of State but a less effective speaker, General Conway and Dundas, who survived yet another change of government as Lord Advocate but remained outside the Cabinet, Pitt was the only spokesman in the House of Commons of a government which did not enjoy a majority. The other members of the Cabinet were all in the Lords: Shelburne himself as First Lord, Lord Grantham as a Secretary of State, Lord Thurlow yet again as Lord Chancellor, Lord Keppel as First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Camden as President of the Council, the Duke of Grafton as Lord Privy Seal and the Duke of Richmond as Master General of the Ordnance.
These grand figures of eighteenth-century politics – great landowners, political veterans or military experts – seemed happy to accept among their number in the Cabinet a young man who, for all his antecedents and abilities, was nevertheless a penniless twenty-three-year-old with no previous experience of office. More than two hundred years later, British Cabinets are no longer dominated by the aristocracy, but it would be impossible in practice for any twenty-three-year-old to achieve Cabinet rank, and would in any case be universally regarded as inappropriate. Sure enough, Pitt would receive some criticism on grounds of his youth, and a great deal more on becoming First Lord of the Treasury only eighteen months later. Yet at this point in history, for such a young person to enjoy such a high rank was regarded as unusual rather than ludicrous.
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