*It is possible that this incident occurred on the Monday, in which case it would help to explain Pitt’s inferior speech on that occasion.
*Townshend earlier toyed with the title of Lord Sydenham, and his decision not to adopt that name was to be of lasting importance to the people of Australia, since a few years later Sydney was to be named after him.
‘I am clear Mr. Pitt means to play false.’
KING GEORGE III, MARCH 1783
‘I had thought, from the first formation of the coalition, that Mr. Pitt was extinguished nearly for life as a politician, and wished to see him at the Bar again, under a conviction that his transcendent abilities would soon raise him to great eminence in his profession.’
GEORGE ROSE, SECRETARY TO THE TREASURY, IN 1783
THE DEFEAT OF SHELBURNE, and the happy translation of Townshend to the Upper House as Lord Sydney, meant that there was only one person left who could both hold his own in Parliament and did not belong to the Fox—North alliance. Twenty-three he might be, but after his speech on that Friday night, 21 February 1783, his reputation for ability and integrity stood high. It did not take long for those who had burnt their boats with Fox and North to alight on Pitt as the only available life-raft. Shelburne raised the idea on the Sunday, and on the Monday morning, 24 February, Dundas wrote to Shelburne:
My Dear Lord,
I cannot refrain from troubling your Lordship with a few lines upon a subject of the most serious importance; and the particular ground of my addressing you arises from the words which dropped from you yesterday morning relative to Mr. Pitt. I did not pay much attention to them when you uttered them, but I have revolved them seriously and candidly in the course of the day yesterday, and I completely satisfied my own mind that, young as he is, the appointment of him to the Government of the country is the only step that can be taken in the present moment attended with the most distant chance of rearing up the Government of this country … He is perfectly new ground, against whom no opposition can arise except what may be expected from the desperation of that lately allied faction, which I am satisfied will likewise gradually decline till at last it will consist only of that insolent aristocratical band who assume to themselves the prerogative of appointing the rulers of the kingdom. I repeat it again that I am certain the experiment will succeed if His Majesty will try it.1
From Pitt’s first arrival in Parliament Henry Dundas had admired his abilities. In declaring himself an enthusiast for Pitt to lead the government, Dundas was opening a quarter of a century of close friendship and steadfast allegiance. Forty-one years old, Dundas had been trained to drink and to argue at the Scottish Bar. Many of Westminster’s aristocrats would have found him coarse or dogmatic, but he always showed courage, a readiness for rough debate, fierce loyalty, and a gift for building a political machine based on patronage and rewards. His objective was the exercise of power rather than to take the leading role for himself. It would turn out that he and Pitt could find in each other precisely the qualities each of them needed in their ally: Pitt could supply oratory, intellect and integrity, while Dundas could bring cunning, solid votes and the arts of the political fixer.
The leading members of the defeated government looked around at each other and came to the same conclusion as Dundas. The only chance of frustrating the opposition was to present as head of the government someone relatively new, completely untainted, and possessed of an ability to win over the House of Commons. Extraordinary though it might be on grounds of age, they could muster no alternative. Both Shelburne and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Thurlow, concurred with the advice of Dundas and put it to the King. George III, who had determined with regard to Fox that he ‘would never employ him again’, was ready for anything provided it meant that Fox would not be returning to power. On the afternoon of Monday, 24 February 1783 William Pitt was summoned to the King and, three months before his twenty-fourth birthday, became by far the youngest person before or since to be invited to accept the office of First Lord of the Treasury and, in effect, Prime Minister.
The temptation must have been great. He was young, but he had known no other life, and had prepared from infancy to lead the political life of the nation. Even if he tried and failed, he would have held the highest office in the land, acquired its status, and could for the rest of his life be an alternative to whoever held it. As Horace Walpole put it: ‘The offer was no doubt dazzling, and so far worth accepting, as to obtain the chariot for a day, was glorious at his age, and to one so ambitious. It was placing him at the head of a party, – a rank which he must always preserve, in or out of place.’2
Pitt also knew that the government had been defeated by only seventeen votes three nights before, and that opposition MPs had been fired up with the objective of removing Lord Shelburne rather than himself. He was no doubt still savouring the adrenalin of his triumphant speech of defiance. All the indications are that his first thought was that he could do it.
At 6.30 p.m. George III wrote to Thurlow that he had made the offer to Pitt, who had ‘received it with a spirit and inclination that makes me think he will not decline though he has very properly desired time to weigh so momentous a step’.3 The King was optimistic that he would be rescued from disaster; Pitt had clearly given him cause to think that was likely. But tempted though he was, Pitt was not dazzled. Several times he had seen his father reject the invitation of the King to lead a government, and once he had watched him accept it and then regret it. It appears that over the following hours he weighed the options coolly. On the one hand, his Sovereign and ministerial colleagues wished him to accept the challenge. Many Members of Parliament concurred, despairing of the whole previous generation of political leaders – ‘Of all the public characters of this devoted country (Mr. Pitt alone excepted) there is not a man who has, or who deserves, the nation’s confidence,’ wrote Sir Samuel Romilly the following month.4 The object on offer was also unmistakably his principal ambition. Yet on the other hand, he had watched the King forsake his father, and owed him little; and many of the colleagues urging him on were entering the evening of their political careers, while his was at its dawn. It would do nothing for his future to please his fellow Ministers but look ridiculous by being First Lord of the Treasury for a week. In the uneasy constitutional balance of the eighteenth century, the King could nominate whom he wished to lead a government, but the House of Commons could reject his choice.
Pitt’s decision therefore came down to a matter of arithmetic, meticulously analysed and coldly assessed. Long into the night he sat with Dundas, going down the list of Members of Parliament and assessing their attitudes. It is not known how much port might have assisted the initial calculations, but it seems they were not wholly unfavourable. The following morning Dundas wrote to his brother in Edinburgh, telling him of the secret while urging him to keep it:
I was with him [Pitt] all last night, and Mr. Rigby and I have been with him all this morning, going through the state