On 18 December Pitt and Temple had audiences with the King. Pitt indicated his readiness to take office at the head of a new government, and at midnight that night Portland, Fox and North were meeting together when messengers arrived from the King asking them to surrender their seals of office. ‘I choose this method,’ the King wrote to North, ‘as Audiences on such occasions must be unpleasant.’19 On Friday, 19 December 1783 a packed House of Commons watched as Pitt’s friend Pepper Arden rose and moved a new writ for an election in the Borough of Appleby: ‘In the room of the Rt Hon William Pitt, who, since his election, has accepted the office of First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer.’* The massed ranks of the supporters of the Fox – North coalition, now gathering on the opposition benches, burst into laughter. For one thing, they were laughing at Arden’s high-pitched voice, and for another at the appointment of a twenty-four-year-old to be the First Minister of the Kingdom. More ominously, they were laughing with confidence. As Fox put it: ‘We are so strong … I think we shall destroy them almost as soon as they are formed.’ Pitt would become Prime Minister with a large majority of the House of Commons determined to force his immediate removal.
Why did Pitt decide to take office in December 1783, having refused to do so earlier in the year? He had previously ruled it out on the grounds that he could not be sure of a majority in the House of Commons, and that was as true now as it had been before. What had changed?
There were two major differences between this situation and his previous opportunities to lead a government. The first was that the likely balance of power between Pitt as Prime Minister on the one hand and George III on the other had changed. Had Pitt taken office in March 1783, he would have done so at the whim of the King, and to a large extent as a creature of the King’s making. Having made him, the King could have unmade him, by trying to dictate policy, control appointments, or at some stage dismissing him and turning back to Lord North, or even Shelburne, or some other figure who could cobble together an administration. The circumstances of December 1783 were quite different. The King had declared political war on a majority of the House of Commons and on almost all its senior figures, including the entire parties of Charles James Fox and Lord North. The abuse of royal power he had perpetrated was now under ferocious attack in that assembly. In this situation, it was not merely desirable to George III that Pitt should lead the government; it was indispensable to him. He literally could not do without the one man who could take on all comers in the House of Commons and at the very least hold his own. And such was the enmity now created between the King and the new opposition that he would not be able to let them back into office for a very long time, thus securing Pitt’s position for the future, if only he could get through the first few months. Pitt knew all this, and he also knew that if he could succeed in outwitting the hostile majority in the Commons and somehow entrench himself in office, his achievement would have been so great that his political following would be strong and his authority hard to challenge.
It was because of these realities that Pitt was able to take office on his own terms in a manner he could not have insisted upon earlier that year. He had made clear in the summer that he would only serve as First Lord of the Treasury if he could pursue his cherished goal of parliamentary reform, a project to which George III was unremittingly hostile. Now indeed he took office with the apparent understanding that although he could not expect the King and other diehard traditionalists such as Thurlow actually to support parliamentary reform, they would not actively prevent him from bringing it forward. Hence Pitt could take charge in Downing Street knowing that he had a large measure of freedom of action, and that the King’s need to keep him in office would allow him to maintain that freedom.
The second major difference between March and December 1783 was that matters had truly come to a head. Pitt’s attack on the India Bill as ‘the exercise of tyranny’ had been wild exaggeration, but there is no doubt that the successful passage of the Bill would have helped to cement the Fox – North coalition into power, and brought a great deal of valuable patronage under their control. If the government was not thrown out now, it might be much harder to do so later. A ready pretext might not easily recur, and the combination of powerful conspirators who brought about the coup in the House of Lords that December might have disintegrated if it was not put to use. Since Pitt was only twenty-four it would be an exaggeration to say that this was ‘now or never’, but he must have recognised that it might be ‘now or not for a very long time’. The stakes were high enough for the risk to be worth taking.
And risk it was. Given the constitutional precedents and conventions prevailing at the time, no substantive defence of the King’s action was possible. From 1688 onwards it had been understood that the King would operate only through his Ministers, who could then be held accountable in Parliament and who needed a majority in the House of Commons to support them. Now the King had acted through other politicians in order to depose his Ministers, and had proceeded to appoint a new government to which a majority of the House of Commons was clearly opposed. It is no wonder that Fox and the Whigs railed against this outrage: not only had they been deprived of office, but the constitutional settlement they had been brought up to believe was sacrosanct had been comprehensively violated. Wraxall admitted that the King’s action ‘appears at first sight subversive of every principle of political freedom’, but went on to make the one real defence, albeit in exaggerated language, of what the King had done: ‘We must, however, candidly allow that he was not bound to observe any measures of scrupulous delicacy with men who had entered his Cabinet by violence, who held him in bondage, and who meditated to render that bondage perpetual.’20 In other words, the constitution was breaking down, and the Ministers were themselves violating it by proposing greatly to extend their own power, an action against which the King had to defend himself.
It would turn out that a great majority of opinion in the country would agree with this latter defence of the King, and would give strong support to his actions and his new Prime Minister, notwithstanding the fact that he had broken all the rules. George III would join a long line of political rulers, which now stretches from Julius Caesar to Charles de Gaulle, in succeeding in taking unconstitutional action because he enjoyed great popular support for it. But this was far from apparent to the King’s friends as Pitt’s appointment was announced on 19 December, and the opposition benches rocked with laughter. Those who contemplated joining Pitt in office had to reckon with the likelihood that when the Commons met again in January it would vote them straight out of office with endless motions of no confidence and a refusal to authorise taxes. It would not take many weeks for a Commons majority to make the governing of the country impossible, which was the whole reason governments required a majority in the House of Commons in the first place. Worse still, the talk of ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’ raised the possibility of the impeachment of those who took office in these circumstances, and trials conducted by Parliament.
Veterans of politics blanched when faced with such prospects. It was the hope of many, evidently including Temple, that Pitt would ask the King to dissolve Parliament and call an immediate general election, in which all the advantages of incumbency and Treasury money would rest with Pitt and the King’s friends. Certainly this is what Fox and North expected him to do. He did not do so. There were several reasons for this. First, an eighteenth-century general election needed ‘preparation’, with careful arrangement of candidates and money. There had been no time to do this. Second, a Land Tax Bill had to be enacted by early January for the public finances to be secure. Third, the Parliament had four years yet to run, and early dissolutions were deeply unpopular with many independent and county Members who would face the huge expense of an early election. Pitt needed their support, and an election could have pushed them into hostility without depriving them of their seats. Fourth, a general election in the middle of a session, let alone in the middle of a Parliament, was without precedent since 1688 other than on the death of a monarch, and would