Pitt now had a political following as well as a circle of friends. Dundas had become a permanent lieutenant, and the Marquis of Carmarthen wrote that ‘I am proud to own my conduct should be regulated by yours.’ Thomas Pitt observed of the King that ‘it was to him alone that we must look up … when the moment should be ripe for it’.50 Pitt’s chosen style of opposition was judicious, displaying ‘neither an illiberal, a vindictive, nor an undistinguishing resistance to Ministerial measures’.51 Riding to and fro from Wimbledon, he was regularly on his feet in the Commons. In April he exchanged sharp words with Ministers over the disadvantageous terms on which they had raised a loan – the Ministers argued that Pitt’s delay in leaving office had left them in a difficult situation. Later in the session he brought forward the Bills on which he had worked as Chancellor, principally directed at removing waste from government departments. One of these was defeated in the Commons, and the other in the Lords. Pitt was not impressed by successors who did not have the political will or the concern for public money to carry his measures through.
It was once again to parliamentary reform that he directed his greatest efforts in the spring of 1783, and on which he suffered his most severe disappointment. On 7 May, the anniversary of his narrowly defeated motion to set up a Select Committee on parliamentary reform, he brought to the Commons a more specific plan to prevent bribery at elections, to disenfranchise boroughs guilty of corruption, and to add a hundred new Members for London and the counties. He had agreed with Wyvill a moderate approach to reform, rejecting in his speech any idea of universal suffrage and stressing that he only wished to correct ‘a deviation from the principles of that happy constitution under which the people of England had so long flourished’. He had real hopes for success, and the added bonus of advancing a course on which Fox and North were clearly divided. But Wyvill had hoped that Pitt would be proposing reform as a senior Minister; now this was not to be, and powerful forces were stacked against them. MPs turned out to be more hostile to a specific plan of reform than they were reassured by it; public apathy seemed more apparent than enthusiasm as the petitions and addresses failed to flow in the numbers needed; and while Fox gave nominal support to Pitt’s motion, North opposed it in a brilliant speech which maximised the vote against it. The vote went 293 to 149 against reform. Pitt wrote to his mother: ‘My defeat was much more complete than I expected.’
Fox had been civil to Pitt in the early weeks of the new government, no doubt with a possible view to recruiting him to it and disabling the opposition. There can be little doubt, however, that as Pitt watched Fox participate in a government which failed to argue for parliamentary reform, failed to deliver further economical reform, and failed to improve upon the peace terms which it had formerly denounced, he felt his breach with Fox was complete. And very soon the King would again put temptation in his way.
On 12 August 1783 George, Prince of Wales would come of age, requiring the creation of his own establishment and household. The attempt to settle his financial affairs would come within an ace of destroying the Fox – North administration within three months of it taking office. True to Hanoverian tradition, the Prince of Wales was developing a personality the precise opposite of that of his father, the King. In his late teens he had become a notorious philanderer, beginning at the age of sixteen by seducing one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour and going on to have a string of mistresses, at least two of whom he passed on to Charles James Fox. At Brooks’s Club and elsewhere he socialised with the very politicians whom his father detested. As the King put it: ‘The Prince of Wales on the smallest reflection must feel that I have little reason to approve of any part of his conduct for the last three years; his neglect of every religious duty is notorious; his want of common civility to the Queen and me, not less so; besides his total disobedience of every injunction.’52
Fox succeeded in persuading the other Ministers that his friend the Prince should be granted an income of £100,000 per annum, a proposition the Duke of Portland then had to put to the King, along with the information that the Prince had already run up debts of £29,000. George III responded: ‘It is impossible for me to find words expressive enough of my utter indignation and astonishment at the letter I have just received from the Duke of Portland.’ Continuing the explosions for several days, the King proposed £50,000 per annum instead. The government was paralysed, and when the Commons assembled to hear Fox make a statement on the matter he was not able to say anything at all. Not knowing what to do, Portland was surprised to find a little later, on 18 June, that the King had apparently mellowed in his attitude, and the Prince was induced to accept a compromise: £50,000 a year and the paying off of debts of £60,000, along with a dutiful exchange of letters between father and son.
The King had not actually mellowed; he had merely calculated the political odds. In the interim he had consulted Temple, telling him that he had ‘decided to resist this attempt [the £100,000 proposal], and to push the consequences to their full extent, and to try the spirit of the Parliament and of the people upon it’;53 but Temple advised him that it would be difficult to form a new administration if Ministers were dismissed on such a pretext. The King decided to bide his time but to take further soundings, possibly in order to be readier for the next such occasion. Thurlow was sent to sound out Pitt on the strength of his commitment to parliamentary reform, which the King opposed, and his readiness to make a bid for power with the support of the Crown. Pitt responded that he would take office, but on his own terms, as he made clear to Temple: ‘I stated in general that if the King’s feelings did not point strongly to a change, it was not what we sought. But that if they did, and we could form a permanent system, consistent with our principles, and on public ground, we should not decline it. I reminded him how much I was personally pledged to Parliamentary reform on the principles I had publicly explained, which I should support on every seasonable occasion.’54
Pitt was not ready to abandon the ideals of independence and integrity on which he had set his heart. He did want office, but knew he did not need to trade his opinions in order to get it, also telling Temple, ‘I think … what has passed will not tend to delay our having the offer whenever things are ripe for it.’55
Since it was now July, and Parliament was rising for the summer, there was no prospect of matters ‘ripening’ in the next few months. On 22 July Pitt wrote to his mother from his brother’s house in Savile Street: ‘I resume at last my pen, tho’ with no other Reason than ought to have made me do so every day for this month past. I can indeed hardly make out how that period has slid away, in which I have done little else but ride backwards and forwards between Wimbledon and London, and meditate plans for the summer, till I find the summer half over before I have begun to put any in execution.’56 In early August he was writing from newly fashionable Brighthelmstone, to which he had gone to take ‘some dips’. ‘By all I learnt before I left London, I now think things may possibly go thro’ the rest of the summer as they are, tho’ much longer there is every reason to believe, they will not.’57 In early September he was in Dorset at the house of Henry Bankes, meeting up with Eliot and Wilberforce. The short-sighted Wilberforce was teased for nearly shooting Pitt while aiming at some partridges, but we do not know how close he came to disabling the next Prime Minister.
Wilberforce, Eliot and Pitt had decided to visit France for the early autumn. Before doing so Pitt attended the King’s levée at St James’s. Ever in close touch with Temple, Pitt reported to him: ‘I am still inclined to believe … that the King does not like to hazard dismissing the present Ministry till he has found some ostensible ground of complaint, or till he sees the disposition of Parliament next Session … I am just returned from St. James’s … The King was gracious as usual, and he inquired as to the time of my stay [in France] in a manner which I rather thought significant.’58
Pitt thus departed for France knowing that he might once again be called upon to form a government at any time when he got back. Proximity to political power, however, did anything but bring efficiency to his travelling arrangements. When the three friends met at Sittingbourne ready to cross the Channel they found that each had expected the