THE ORDEAL OF LORD NORTH
Lord North was the prime minister of England from 1770 to 1782, with a period of continued leadership unmatched by all save two prime ministers since then. There was a reason for this. He was an amiable and effective leader who disarmed his opponents with his wit and good humor. No man was less given to enmity, or better able to bury a quarrel with a jest. Years later he told an old antagonist that, notwithstanding their differences in Parliament, “there are not two men in the kingdom who would now be more happy to see each other.” Both were blind at the time, and led about by attendants.7
If we remember North today, however, it is as the blunderer who lost America during the Revolution. “Lord Chatham, the king of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble Lord has lost,” thundered Whig statesman Fox. “He has lost a whole continent.”8 That was a judgment North sought desperately to avoid; he knew early on that the Revolution was not going Britain’s way, and frequently asked George III to let him resign. In 1779 he described his agony to the King:
I have been miserable for ten years in obedience to Your Majesty’s commands . . . I must look upon it as a degree of guilt to continue in office, while the Publick suffers.” 9
The King refused North’s pleas and North remained in office, faithful to the constitutional principle that a King was entitled to choose his ministers. The seals of office may have been in North’s hands, but it was the King who supervised the conduct of the war, and North reported to him as an employee to his superior. However, North’s government could not carry on unless it enjoyed the support of Parliament, and this grew thin as the war continued. Fox argued that there were now two parties in the country, “His Majesty’s ministers, supported by the influence of the crown, against all Britain.”10
No one desired victory over the colonists more than the King, but after the 1777 British defeat in the Battles of Saratoga, it had become clear that the war would be a protracted and costly affair. The government was forced to increase taxation to meet the expenses of the campaign, and the House was bombarded with petitions to cut government spending. More than eight thousand freeholders in Yorkshire signed a petition demanding government reform, annual elections for Parliament, and an increase in the number of parliamentary county seats. Matters came to a head in 1780, when John Dunning’s motion that “the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished” was carried by 233 votes to 215.11
Thereafter the North ministry stumbled on, with the news from America becoming progressively worse. Word of Lord Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in October 1781 came to Lord North on November 25. “Oh God,” he repeated aloud, “it is all over!”12 He realized that he must make peace or his government would fall, but George III disagreed. On November 28 he wrote North, “I have no doubt when Men are a little recovered of the shock felt by the bad news . . . that they will then find the necessity of carrying on the war, though the mode of it may require alterations.”13 This meant keeping North in office, as the Whig leader, Lord Rockingham, had refused to serve as prime minister unless the King agreed to American independence, and to the dismissal of his current ministers.
North’s government struggled on for the next few months, temporizing about its plans and losing supporters. On February 22, 1782, a motion to end the American war was defeated by a single vote.14 A month later, on March 17, a motion of nonconfidence in the government was defeated by only nine votes. Everyone knew that North’s opponents were days away from defeating the government. Yet still the King resisted turning over power to the Rockingham Whigs, implying that he would abdicate before doing so. “I am resolved not to throw myself into the hands of Opposition at all events,” he told North, “and shall certainly, if things go as they seem to lead, know what my conscience as well as my honour dictates as the only way left to me.”15 The idea of a “Loyal Opposition,” of a party loyal to the King but opposed to the government, would be a nineteenth-century innovation. With George III as the de facto head of government, opposition to the government was opposition to the King.
The next day North finally persuaded the King to let him resign. At 4:30 on the afternoon of March 18, a packed House of Commons met to debate the fate of the government. As the session opened, the Earl of Surrey rose to move nonconfidence in the North ministry; at the same moment, North stood up to announce his resignation. “Each noble lord seemed determined not to give way to the other,” wrote the reporter. “This created a great deal of confusion, one side of the house crying out loudly for earl Surrey to speak first; the other side as loudly calling out lord North.”16 At last North was heard to say that he wished only to save Surrey from making a wholly unnecessary motion. Surrey had wanted to dismiss the ministry—but the ministry was no more.
Fox tried to pursue the matter, to establish the principle that a government might fall through a motion of nonconfidence. However, North conceded the point, and in a gracious and emotional speech thanked the House for its many years of support. He moved for an adjournment, to which the House consented, and walked out, much relieved that his ordeal was over. It was snowing, and the other members stood at the door waiting for their carriages. North had known that, with his resignation, it would be a short session, and unlike his enemies had his carriage at the ready. He saw a few friends gathered at the exit and said, “Come home and dine, and have the credit of having dined with a fallen minister on the day of his dismissal.” With them he stepped aboard his carriage; and to his opponents, huddled in the snow and awaiting their own carriages, he bowed and said, “Good night, gentlemen, you see what it is to be in [on] the secret!”17
Lord North had not lost a motion of nonconfidence, but he had lost the support of the House, and his government would certainly have fallen had he not resigned. This was the first example of a change of ministry as the immediate result of a vote in the House of Commons. It was also the first recognition of the vital principle of collective responsibility, in which all members of the inner cabinet would fall with the prime minister. “In the disasters of the American revolution,” concluded constitutional historian Sir David Keir, “the eighteenth-century constitution sustained its death-blow.”18
WILLIAM PITT’S CONSTITUTION
Constitutional changes in Britain are incremental, for the most part. While most historians believe, with John Dunning, that the influence of the Crown had increased on the accession of George III, a school of historians led by Sir Lewis Namier argued that the King had not departed from the generally accepted constitutional principles of the reigns of the first two Georges.19 North’s fall was not the first time that a government had left office because it had lost the support of the House of Commons; in 1741 a motion of nonconfidence had been made against the government of Sir Robert Walpole, in the form of an address to the King to remove Walpole. Walpole declared this to be “one of the greatest encroachments that was ever made upon the prerogative of the Crown,” and the motion was defeated by a large majority.20 However, in the general election that followed, many of Walpole’s supporters were defeated and he voluntarily resigned his office.
Even after North’s fall in 1782, George III continued to take an active part in British election campaigns and in the choice of who was to lead his government. The King was the “font of honour,” and could award peerages and knighthoods to his supporters. He also controlled the Civil List, a fund of moneys he could spend freely to secure the loyalty of the “King’s Friends” in Parliament.21
In succeeding North, Lord Rockingham had imposed his own policies and ministers upon a resentful King. When Rockingham died in July 1782, the King happily chose