At 9.30 that morning Pitt wrote to his mother, evidently wishing she was there to assist him.
My Dear Mother,
I wished more than I can express to see you yesterday. I will, if possible, find a moment today to tell you the state of things and learn your opinion. In the meantime the substance is, that our friends, almost universally, are eager for our going on, only without Lord Shelburne, and are sanguine in the expectation of success – Lord Shelburne himself most warmly so. The King, when I went in yesterday, pressed me in the strongest manner to take Lord Shelburne’s place, and insisted on my not declining it till I had taken time to consider. You see the importance of the decision I must speedily make. I feel all the difficulties of the undertaking and am by no means in love with the object. On the other hand, I think myself bound not to desert a system in which I am engaged, if probable means can be shown of carrying it on with credit. On this general state of it I should wish anxiously to know what is the inclination of your mind. I must endeavour to estimate more particularly the probable issue by talking with those who know most of the opinions of men in detail. The great article to decide by seems that of numbers.
Your ever dutiful and affectionate W Pitt
The secret did not last long, and by the evening of the twenty-fifth rumours of Pitt accepting office were sweeping Westminster. For two more days he weighed the matter, perhaps waiting for parliamentary support to be manifested once the news was well known. In the absence of that ‘he seemed averse, thinking he will not be supported in the House of Commons’.6 By the evening of the twenty-sixth, Pitt was telling the King that only the ‘moral certainty’ of a majority in the Commons would satisfy him that he could become First Lord. Dundas made a last effort to persuade him, assuring him that Lord North could be persuaded to desist from active opposition, thus tipping the balance. He believed Pitt was now persuaded. But just as the entreaties of the unfortunate Dundas had inadvertently helped push North into his pact with Fox, so his pleading with Pitt helped to highlight the crux of the decision, with the opposite effect to that intended. On the afternoon of Thursday, 27 February Pitt wrote to Dundas that what he had told him that morning ‘seemed to remove all doubt of my finding a majority in Parliament, and on the first view of it, joined to my sincere desire not to decline the call of my friends, removed at the same time my objections to accepting the Treasury’. But he said he had now reconsidered matters and his final decision was ‘directly contrary’, for this reason: ‘I see that the main and almost only ground of reliance would be this, that Lord North and his friends would not continue in a combination to oppose … Such a reliance is too precarious to act on. But above all, in point of honour to my own feelings, I cannot form an administration trusting to the hope that it will be supported, or even will not be opposed, by Lord North, whatever the influence may be that determines his conduct.’ For all Pitt’s earlier insistence that personal factors would never sway him, at no time could he bring himself to make any concession to cooperation with Lord North. This, he said, had ‘unalterably determined’ him to decline the King’s invitation. ‘I have to beg’, he finished by writing to a distraught Dundas, ‘a thousand pardons for being the occasion of your having so much trouble in vain.’7
In Dundas, Pitt had acquired a valuable ally who would stand by him for the rest of his life, but his decision that afternoon left his new lieutenant exasperated and demoralised, all the more so because he was assembling a dinner for leading peers and MPs that night for ‘hailing the new Minister’.8 Dundas told his brother, ‘How it will all end, God only knows. I don’t think I shall give myself any more trouble in the matter.’9 While Dundas explained the adverse turn of events to his disappointed dinner guests, Pitt proceeded to a long and difficult audience with the King. George III must have remembered the truculent refusal of Chatham to accept office on many occasions as he came up against the trenchant refusal of another Pitt. ‘Nothing’, the King wrote to Shelburne, ‘could get him to depart from the ground he took, that nothing less than a moral certainty of a majority in the House of Commons could make him undertake the task; for that it would be dishonourable not to succeed, if attempted.’10
For the third time in twelve months Westminster was enveloped by complete confusion as to who would next form the government of the country. When the Commons reassembled to hear details of the new government, they found no such government was in the making, although Pitt was still in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He would devote himself in the coming days to presenting and arguing for a Bill to provide for freer trade with America, leaving the King to renew his struggle to find a government that he thought he could live with. George sent first for Lord Gower, who could not muster enough support in the House of Commons, and then for Lord North, in an attempt to divide him from Fox. North refused the Treasury for himself, said he could support Pitt from the sidelines (the very thing Pitt would not rely on), and otherwise favoured his coalition with Fox. A struggle now commenced between George III and Fox which both saw, correctly, as being of major constitutional importance. The King decided he could only have North back in office with Fox alongside him if they would agree to serve under an independent figure, ‘a peer not connected with any of the strong parties that distract this kingdom’.11 This would greatly reduce the power of the Fox—North coalition, and would preserve the King’s prerogative of nominating his own First Minister. Fox, by contrast, wished to impose the Duke of Portland as First Lord of the Treasury, just as he had tried to do the previous July. This would put effective power into Fox’s own hands, and demonstrate that the ultimate decision on the composition and leadership of the government lay in the House of Commons. In the political parlance of the day, this was ‘storming the closet’.*
Given that North could not or would not serve without Fox, and that between them they commanded majority support in the Commons, there now arose a serious constitutional crisis. The wishes of the King and the opinions of a firm majority in Parliament were in direct conflict. For the King this was a far graver situation than the governmental crises of the previous year. When giving office to Rockingham, he had managed to sow division in the government at the outset and to maintain a loyal faction within it. This time he was presented with a previously agreed coalition which insisted on having its way and would not so easily be fooled again.
As the month of March wore on the King thrashed about for a way to avoid the inevitable, and the country had no effective government. Gower now bizarrely suggested turning to Thomas Pitt, Pitt’s cousin and veteran Member for Old Sarum, to form an administration. The King was prepared to try even this, asking for ‘Mr. Thomas Pitt or Mr. Thomas anybody’.12 Disappointingly for the embattled monarch, yet another Pitt showed sound self-knowledge, pronouncing himself ‘totaly [sic] unequal to public business, but most certainly unequal to a task like this’. Instead he recommended allowing the coalition to take office but withholding all royal favours from it, and warned the King that things were now getting dangerous, that this could be the most important decision of his reign, and that ‘every symptom of a distempered state seemed to prognosticate the danger of some convulsions if the temper of the times was not managed with prudence’.13
The King was not yet ready for prudence. He again talked of abdicating, and once more turned to Lord Gower to form a government, a project which, as before, turned out to be hopeless. By 12 March George was in his last ditch, sending for North and agreeing that Portland could be First Lord of the Treasury, and then trying to play the two of them off against each other while being as uncooperative as possible. The next ten days were taken up with highly complex negotiations, during which the King exasperated Portland by refusing to discuss the provisional appointment of Ministers until he could see the whole list, and the Fox and North parties fell out with each other over who was to have which jobs.
Even greater confusion would now commence. On 20 March Portland informed the King that the coalition could not after all agree on the composition of a government, largely because of the King’s insistence on trying to insert Lords Stormont and Thurlow into the Cabinet. Facing disaster, the Fox—North parties decided