This was no innocent proposal. So extensive were the riches to be acquired in India that the power of the seven Commissioners to make key appointments within the East India Company would make them very powerful men. Furthermore, their appointment for fixed terms by parliamentary vote meant that the Fox-North majority would be able to determine all seven Commissioners to begin with, that they could not be immediately dismissed by a new administration, and that the King was shut out of a vital area of patronage and influence. Such would be the patronage accruing to the Fox-North coalition once they carried the Bill that it would materially consolidate their hold on power at Westminster. Well-intentioned as it may also have been, the East India Bill was therefore a direct challenge to the opposition and to George III to do their worst.
Fox intended to rush the Bill through within weeks as Pitt sought frantically to bring MPs to Westminster and denounced it as ‘one of the most boldest, most unprecedented, most desperate and alarming attempts at the exercise of tyranny that ever disgraced the annals of this or any other country’.52 Wilberforce was there to help his friend. In a debate on 20 November he spoke ‘with humour and ability’ and said that ‘If the present Bill passed we might see the government of Great Britain set up in India, instead of that of India in Great Britain.’53 That Wilberforce was speaking at Pitt’s behest rather than in any way representing the wider views of the independent MPs became clear when Fox carried the Bill through the Commons with three-figure majorities and, in early December, proudly carried it to the House of Lords for approval.
It was a gamble too far. Earl Temple warned the King that the Bill was ‘a plan to take more than half the royal power, and by that means to disable His Majesty for the rest of the reign’.54 After quietly consulting Pitt through an intermediary, George III took the unprecedented step of secretly asking members of the House of Lords to vote against the Bill, and then dismissed the Fox-North coalition from office on the grounds that their measure had been defeated in Parliament. On 19 December 1783, George III appointed Pitt as Prime Minister, even though Fox and North clearly continued to command majority support in the House of Commons. Few events in the entire history of the British constitution have roused such intense passions as this brutal exercise of royal power. To supporters of the King, he had been justified in ridding himself of ministers ‘who held him in bondage, and who meditated to render that bondage perpetual’.55 But to opponents, the dismissal by the King of a government with a clear majority in the House of Commons, and the handing out of royal instructions to members of the House of Lords on how to vote, were utterly unconstitutional and a total violation of the constitutional settlement of 1688. As an enraged Charles James Fox put it to the House of Commons, it was an issue which would decide ‘whether we are henceforward free men or slaves; whether this House is the palladium of liberty or the engine of despotism’.56 Pitt, at twenty-four by far the youngest Prime Minister in British history, would take office in the most difficult conceivable circumstances, on the back of a constitutional manoeuvre which was dubious at best and with a majority of MPs determined to remove him.
Seasoned observers believed Pitt to have little chance of surviving in office. Wilberforce himself recorded one of the most famous descriptions of the fledgling government in his diary on 22 December as Earl Temple, one of the few senior politicians prepared to join Pitt in the cabinet, resigned after only three days in office:
22nd. Lord Temple Resigned. No dissolution. Drove about for Pitt. Sat at home. Then Goostrees. ‘So your friend Mr Pitt means to come in,’ said Mrs Crewe;* ‘Well, he may do what he likes during the holidays, but it will only be a mince-pie administration depend on it.’57
The mince-pie administration, it was believed, would not last far into January 1784, but Pitt spent the period forming his government and winning over some MPs as best he could. Wilberforce was present throughout many key decisions – ‘23rd. Morning Pitt’s … Pitt nobly firm. Evening Pitt’s. Cabinet formed.’58 Pitt managed to bring in the relatively undistinguished Lord Sydney as Home Secretary and Earl Carmarthen as Foreign Secretary, but it was scornfully noted in many quarters that the only distinguishing feature of his government was their collective capacity for drink. For junior ministerial positions Pitt was able to look to some of his friends and personal allies, but at no stage does he appear to have contemplated asking Wilberforce, perhaps his closest friend and companion, to join the ranks of the ministers. Wilberforce could have been forgiven for having been puzzled by this. Leaving Downing Street on the evening of 23 December he said to Tom Steele, another MP and close friend of Pitt, ‘Pitt must take care whom he makes Secretary of the Treasury,’ only to receive the reply, ‘Mind what you say, for I am Secretary of the Treasury.’59 There is no record of Pitt offering office to Wilberforce and him refusing it. The subject seems simply not to have come up, either then or on any subsequent occasion.
Why would Pitt not offer a position to a friend he particularly trusted and liked, and who had already proved his parliamentary ability? Wilberforce was still only a junior MP, but so were several of the new ministers, including the Prime Minister himself. He needed more experience in debate, but so did many others, including Steele. He was popular, and could have held some sway over the Independent MPs whose votes would be desperately needed in the weeks ahead. The answer may be that Wilberforce was determined, even at this stage, to retain his nominal independence and to resist taking on a ministerial office which would have put an end to his travels to his beloved Lake District and elsewhere. He may even have made this clear to Pitt during their many long evenings at Wimbledon or in France, without making any record of it. Perhaps more likely, Pitt knew Wilberforce well enough, or thought he did, not to offer him a position which required skills of management and administration. His friends clearly thought of him as often being disorganised or late, not much of a recommendation in the days when ministers did most of their own work, with very few officials to assist them. And could a man who wrote to Henry Bankes earlier that year to say that his eyes had been so weak that he had been unable to write a letter for two or three weeks, carry out any function which involved the reading and writing of scores of letters each day? It would not have been difficult for Pitt to come to the conclusion that Wilberforce, however valuable as a personal friend and political ally, was neither physically nor temperamentally suited to ministerial office. If he had thought otherwise, Wilberforce’s life could well have run a very different course.
The passionate Commons debates of January to March 1784, as Fox inflicted one defeat after another on the infant administration while Pitt stoically refused to resign, were exhausting to many of the participants. Wilberforce was continually active on Pitt’s behalf, keeping in touch with the Independents, who at one stage made a serious move to bring about a grand coalition as a mediated solution to the constitutional impasse, voting regularly in the Commons and giving Pitt moral support. On the night of 28 February he called at White’s to see Pitt after he had been rescued from a violent affray in St James’s Street, and stayed up as so often until three in the morning. Two days later he spoke in the debate which became the climactic confrontation of the crisis, asserting that the conduct of Pitt