In the preceding days two of the most dedicated enemies in eighteenth-century politics had buried their differences and come together. Fox had actually opened contact with North the previous July, only days after denouncing Shelburne on the grounds that he might do the same. On 14 February North and Fox had met, agreeing to differ on parliamentary reform, with Fox promising to make no further attacks on the influence of the Crown. It seems that he was prepared to pay any price in order to ditch Shelburne and defeat the machinations of the King. If necessary he would denounce the results of the peace negotiations, on which he had himself been working the previous year with no prospect of achieving a better result.
The Ministers had realised in early February that their situation was desperate. Pitt had persuaded Shelburne to let him approach Fox with a view to bringing him back within the government. On 11 February he had called on Fox at his house off St James’s Street. Fox asked whether Shelburne would remain First Lord of the Treasury. Pitt said he would. Fox said that ‘It was impossible for him to belong to any administration of which lord Shelburne was the head.’ Pitt responded that ‘if that was his determination, it would be useless for him to enter into any farther discussion’, as ‘he did not come to betray lord Shelburne’, and left.28 Pretyman observed: ‘This was, I believe, the last time Mr. Pitt was in a private room with Mr. Fox; and from this period may be dated that political hostility, which continued through the remainder of their lives.’29
The only hope now of saving the government was the recruitment of Lord North. But Pitt ‘inflexibly refused’ to sit in the Cabinet with the man who ‘had precipitated Great Britain into disgrace as well as debt’.30 In desperation Dundas approached North anyway at least for support, implying that North might be subject to impeachment if he did not support the government on the peace treaty. Dundas told North’s friend William Adam, ‘If Lord Shelburne resigns, Fox and Pitt may yet come together and dissolve Parliament, and there will be an end of Lord North. I see no means of preventing this but Lord North’s support of the Address.’31 This threat may have finally pushed North into doing the exact opposite, teaming up with Fox in order to get back into power. Whatever the underlying motives. Fox and North now joined forces. With the Lords approving the peace proposals by the alarmingly narrow majority of seventy-two to fifty-nine, North and Fox joined to savage them in the Commons. Fox attacked ‘the sacrifice of our chief possessions in America, Asia and Africa’, saying, ‘If ever the situation of a country required a coalition of parties … it is that of the present.’32 In response to incredulous attacks on his ‘unnatural junction’ with Lord North, he said, ‘It is neither wise nor noble to keep up animosities forever … My friendships are perpetual, my enmities are not so.’33
Pitt had to reply to the debate. It was four o’clock in the morning, and he was tired. In one of his less effective speeches he argued that ‘the clamours excited against the peace were loud in proportion to their injustice; and it was generally the case, that where men complained without cause, they complained without temper’.34 He attacked the ‘unnatural alliance’ of Fox and North, saying it was ‘undoubtedly to be reckoned among the wonders of the age’,35 but made a mistake by also attacking Sheridan, telling him to reserve his talents for the stage. Sheridan rose immediately afterwards to say that ‘If ever I again engage in the composition he alludes to, I may be tempted … to attempt an improvement on one of Ben Jonson’s best characters, the character of the Angry Boy in the Alchymist.’36
Wounded by this devastating retort, Pitt and his colleagues were in any case on the way to defeat. The Commons divided 224 to 208 against them. Pitt wrote from Downing Street to his mother at a quarter to seven in the morning: ‘You are, I hope, enough used to such things in the political world as changes, not to be much surprised at the result of our business at the House of Commons … The two standards of Lord North and Fox produced 224 against us, 208 for us. This I think decisive … we should at least leave the field with honour. I am just going to bed, and I am perfectly well in spite of fatigue.’
The government had received a mortal blow, and before Shelburne could attempt any recovery Fox and North prepared the coup de grâce, tabling a fresh motion for 21 February saying that the concessions to Britain’s enemies were ‘greater than they were entitled to’. This second debate covered much the same ground as the first, but after his lacklustre speech on the Monday, Pitt turned up on the Friday to give a two-and-three-quarter-hour speech that ranks as one of the finest he ever delivered. This was in spite of being taken ill, and ‘actually holding Solomon’s porch door [the door between the Chamber of the Commons and the Members’ Lobby] open with one hand, while vomiting during Fox’s speech to whom he was to reply’.37* Knowing that the government was doomed and his own reputation rather dimmed from his previous performance, he gathered himself up to denounce the Fox – North coalition and to set out his own attitude to politics and office. After a long justification of the peace proposals he defended Shelburne, saying the debate originated ‘rather in an inclination to force the Earl of Shelburne from the treasury, than in any real conviction that ministers deserve censure for the concessions they have made’.38 He tore into Lord North: ‘Whatever appears dishonourable or inadequate in the peace … is strictly chargeable to the noble lord in the blue ribbon [North], whose profusion of the public’s money, whose notorious temerity and obstinacy in prosecuting the war which originated in his pernicious and oppressive policy, and whose utter incapacity to fill the station he occupied, rendered peace of any description indispensable to the preservation of the state.’39
Pitt raged against the Fox – North alliance: ‘It is the Earl of Shelburne alone whom the movers of this question are desired to wound. This is the object which had raised this storm of faction; this is the aim of the unnatural coalition to which I have alluded. If, however, the baneful alliance is not already formed, if this ill-omened marriage is not already solemnised, I know a just and lawful impediment, and, in the name of the public safety, I here forbid the banns!’
With an eye on the future, Pitt set out his own approach to office, saying that if the government was voted out he would
confidently repair, as to an adequate asylum from all the clamour which interested faction can raise. I was not very eager to come in, and shall have no great reluctance to go out, whenever the public are disposed to dismiss me from their service. It has been the great object of my short official existence to do the duties of my station with all the ability and address in my power, and with a fidelity and honour which should bear me up, and give me confidence, under every possible contingency or disappointment … High situation, and great influence, are desirable objects to most men, and objects which I am not ashamed to pursue, which I am even solicitous to possess, whenever they can be acquired with honour, and retained with dignity. On these respectable conditions, I am not less ambitious to be great and powerful than it is natural for a young man, with such brilliant examples before him [his father], to be. But even these objects I am not beneath relinquishing, the moment my duty to my country, my character, and my friends, renders such a sacrifice indispensable. Then I hope to retire, not disappointed, but triumphant; triumphant in the conviction that my talents, humble as they are, have been earnestly, zealously, and strenuously employed …40
When in opposition in the future, he said, he would behave entirely differently from the opposition of that day: ‘I will not mimic the parade of the honourable gentleman [Fox] in avowing an indiscriminate opposition to whoever may be appointed to succeed. I will march out with no warlike, no hostile, no menacing protestations; but hoping the new administration will have no other object in view than the real and substantial welfare of the community at large.’41 And calling on the memory of his father, he said: ‘My earliest impressions were in favour of the noblest and most disinterested modes of serving the public: these impressions are still dear, and will, I hope, remain for ever dear to my heart: I will cherish them as a legacy infinitely more valuable than the greatest inheritance.’42
Wraxall commented: ‘those who heard Mr. Pitt address the House … cannot easily forget the impression made upon his audience by a speech that might be said to unite all the powers of argument, eloquence, and impassioned declamation’. The speech