Titans

Fox vs. Pitt

Dick Leonard, Mark Garnett

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786725776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Charles James Fox and William Pitt the Younger were the two political giants of their day - the greatest of orators, and the fiercest of rivals. But did the two men have anything in common? Each was a younger son of distinguished fathers, who themselves had been bitter rivals for power a generation earlier, and each came to prominence at a very young age. Temperamentally, however, they could hardly have been more different. Fox was genial, tolerant, gregarious, self-indulgent, rash, a reckless gambler and a drinking companion of the Prince of Wales (later the Prince Regent and George IV) whereas Pitt was cautious, self-controlled (though also a heavy drinker), calculating, ruthless and misanthropic. Their fates were heavily influenced by their respective relationships with George III, who formed an insensate hostility to Fox, using unconstitutional means to exclude him from power, while favouring Pitt, whom he appointed as Prime Minister at the age of 24, and maintained in office for 17 years (plus a further two years in his second administration). The result was that Fox enjoyed only three very short periods as Foreign Minister, and was effectively Leader of the Opposition for a record 23 years. But he did achieve a late triumph when, following the death of Pitt, he became the dominant member of the `Government of All the Talents' and lived long enough to be able to introduce the bill which abolished the slave trade. Featuring a wide cast of characters, this book sheds new light on the political landscape of Georgian England and two of the leading political players of the age.

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The Parliamentary Cockpit

The best-known and longest-running rivalry in British political history was undoubtedly that between William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, which dominated British politics for several decades in the nineteenth century.1 But running it a close second was that between Charles James Fox and William Pitt the Younger, some eighty to a hundred years earlier. If you take into account the earlier feud between their respective fathers, Henry Fox (Lord Holland) and the elder Pitt (Earl Chatham), of which this was to some extent effectively a continuation, this went on far longer and arguably had an even greater influence on British politics. Much more so than between Gladstone and Disraeli, it was entirely a parliamentary contest, and the cockpit in which they fought was the House of Commons. In this pre-railway age it was not practical to criss-cross the country holding rallies and mass meetings to put political arguments directly to citizens; in fact, Charles James Fox was reported to have spoken to his first ever public meeting on 27 January 1780, 12 years after his first election to Parliament.2

What sort of body was the House of Commons in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, and who were its members? The answers to these questions are contained in Lewis Namier’s groundbreaking book, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, first published in 1929 but still a key text for all students of eighteenth-century politics. Namier described an assembly whose formal structure had scarcely changed since the reign of Henry VI in the mid-fifteenth century, despite the political upheavals of the seventeenth century and the arrival of the Hanoverian dynasty in 1714. Formally, the powers of the Commons were no greater than those of the House of Lords, although since the days of Charles I the informal balance had undoubtedly shifted in favour of the ‘Lower Chamber’.

In 1760, when George III mounted the throne, the House of Commons had 558 members, representing 314 constituencies. Of these MPs, 489 represented English constituencies, 34 Welsh constituencies and 45 Scottish. All but a handful of the English constituencies returned two members, those in Wales and Scotland only one. The two universities of Oxford and Cambridge each had two members, elected by their graduates whether or not they were resident in those two cities.

The basis of membership had not changed from that of the very first Parliaments summoned by Simon de Montfort in 1264–5, which were attended by knights (originally four) to represent each of the counties and two burgesses chosen from the boroughs. There were relatively few of these at the time, but each succeeding monarch granted borough status to more and more towns until the total number was nearly 200 by the time of Henry VI’s reign, when the representation was frozen. During the next 300 years the distribution of the population radically changed, with many once flourishing boroughs declining sharply – particularly in sea ports and in the county of Cornwall – while major new cities such as Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield had no separate representation. Despite being restricted to two representatives, all of the counties had significant numbers of voters, ranging from 800 in Rutland to 20,000 in Yorkshire. This was because the property qualification for voters was relatively wide in the counties, being allotted to ‘forty-shilling freeholders’, that is, owners of freehold properties with an annual rental value of £2. That was a considerable sum in 1430, when Parliament set the limit, but over 300 years of inflation it meant that many more people were now qualified to vote. This was not the case in borough constituencies, where the rules were set according to monarchical whim and local custom. According to Namier,

broadly speaking they can be divided into five types. There were boroughs: (1) with what practically amounted to universal [male] franchise; (2) where the franchise was in those paying scot and lot [local taxes]; (3) where the vote was in the freemen; (4) where the franchise was limited to the corporation; (5) where the franchise was attached to certain houses or plots of ground called burgages.3

In the eighteenth century there were only about a dozen borough constituencies in category 1 and around 40 in category 2, where the franchise was quite wide. Only three borough constituencies, however, boasted more than 3,000 voters – Westminster (12,000), London (7,000) and Bristol (5,000). The vast majority of constituencies in the other three categories had fewer than 1,000 electors, and a large number less than 100. The most extreme examples were Gatton, with two voters, and Old Sarum, once represented by Pitt the Elder, which had an electorate of seven even though its last inhabitants seem to have left in the fifteenth century.4 Both of these constituencies returned two MPs, the same number as Yorkshire, which had 20,000 qualified voters!

It was among these constituencies with a minuscule electorate that ‘rotten’ and ‘pocket’ boroughs were found. The former were those whose electorate had fallen so far that the bribing of only a few citizens was sufficient to win a place in Parliament. The latter were those where a single person, probably a local landowner, was able to determine who would be elected by various forms of persuasion. In 1793, no fewer than 308 out of 513 English constituencies fell into one or other of these categories, according to the reformist Society of the Friends of the People.5 The figures for other elections in the mid-to-late eighteenth century are unlikely to be very different. Half or more of the ‘proprietors’ of these seats were members of the House of Lords, who typically nominated their sons or other relatives as candidates. Others quite blatantly put their seats up for sale; the going price for being elected for a single term was around £3,000 in 1780. Many of these MPs never set foot in their constituencies, including Pitt the Younger, who ‘represented’ Appleby between 1781 and 1784. Often the proprietors insisted that their nominees steered clear of their constituents, as they did not wish ‘their’ MPs to build up personal loyalties. Some proprietors controlled (or ‘influenced’) the representation of multiple seats. A legendary example was the Duke of Newcastle (1693–1768), who at the peak of his influence nominated no fewer than 14 MPs. Another famous ‘boroughmonger’, who controlled almost as many seats in the north of England (including Appleby), was James Lowther (1757–1844), whose reward for making some of his seats available to the government was the earldom of Lonsdale. Edward Eliot (1727–1804), who acquired a barony by the same means, controlled six seats in Cornwall, including Liskeard, which the historian Edward Gibbon represented for just one term in the 1780s. Gibbon made little mark as an MP, but was remembered for a single bon mot in which he asked, ‘What has a fat man in common with a Cornish borough?’, answering, ‘He never sees his own member.’6

About thirty seats were controlled by the government, being described either as Treasury or Admiralty boroughs. MPs elected for rotten or pocket boroughs were often seen as lacking in legitimacy, and as the more ambitious of them became better known they sought, not always successfully, to transfer to a more open and thus more ‘respectable’ constituency. Thus Pitt the Younger switched to represent the University of Cambridge, Charles Fox to Westminster, and Edmund Burke from the pocket borough of Wendover to Bristol.

In the opening chapter of his book Namier offered a variety of reasons to explain why rich men sought a seat in the House of Commons despite their numerous distractions. Of the four motives advanced by Namier, the first two were the most common. Number one was the enormous social cachet attached to being a Member of Parliament – the next best thing to having a peerage in the eyes of the country gentry, and often the first step to acquiring one. Second was the hope of material gain – the prospect of being offered a pension or a well-paid sinecure for oneself, or for relatives, friends or constituents, as a reward for consistently supporting the government in parliamentary votes. Third was the hope of building a ministerial career. Lagging behind in last place was a burning desire to promote a moral cause, or to improve the efficiency of government procedures. Although this would be condemned by twenty-first-century standards, it was not considered to be inherently corrupt at the time. MPs received no salaries, and those who enjoyed independent means would have been affronted by the suggestion that they should be recompensed for their service; but it was widely accepted that less affluent MPs should be the recipients of ‘perks’ of various kinds. Only those who too blatantly gave or received monetary bribes were disapproved of, and the same was true of the individuals who were chosen to serve as government ministers. Thus the Grenville family, which accumulated an excessive number of sinecures, was widely seen as avaricious, as was Henry Fox, who acquired a very large fortune from the eight years he spent in office as Paymaster General.

It was Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister, who devised the system of using secret service funds to ensure that the government was never defeated in a parliamentary vote, but the system was perfected by the Duke of Newcastle (Thomas Pelham-Holles), who was prime minister for nearly eight years and a senior Cabinet minister for more than forty. He kept a scrupulous account of how much was expended and to whom, which he submitted to the King every month. In a lengthy appendix to his book, Namier published a complete list of secret service disbursements from March 1754 to May 1762. Typical examples are the payments made during the month of May 1759:7

The monarch at the time was George II, and his grandson and successor, George III, expressed strong disgust at the system in accordance with his stated desire to be a virtuous ruler. However, when he succeeded to the throne George had no compunction in employing the same methods. The payments were made mostly to MPs or to the ‘proprietors’ of pocket boroughs, and were mostly intended to meet their election expenses. This was one reason why no government ever lost a general election during the whole of the eighteenth century. Governments fell not because of electoral defeat but because they had lost the confidence of the monarch.

The great majority of MPs were, at least nominally, members of two political parties. These were the Whigs and the Tories, reflecting a division which dated from the previous century, in the reign of Charles II, and the attempt to exclude the King’s younger brother, the Catholic James, Duke of York, from the succession. The opposition to James was led by the first Earl of Shaftesbury, whose Exclusion Bill failed to carry in 1680. His supporters were christened ‘Whigs’ by their opponents, after the Whiggamores, Scottish Presbyterian rebels who had opposed Charles I in 1648. The Whigs themselves happily accepted this appellation, claiming that Whig was an acronym for We Hope in God. They, in turn, branded their opponents as Tories, an Irish word meaning highwaymen or outlaws. It was largely the Whigs who presided over the replacement in 1688 of James II by his elder daughter, Mary II, and son-in-law, William III, though the Tory Earl of Danby also played a si...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Authors’ Note
• The Grenville and Pitt Families
• The Fox and Lennox Families
• The House of Hanover
• 1 • The Parliamentary Cockpit
• 2 • Fathers and Sons
• 3 • Charles James Fox: Early Life, 1749–
• 4 • The Early Career of Pitt the Younger: A Chip off the Old Block?
• 5 • The Third Man: A Stubborn and Determined Monarch
• 6 • From Tory to Whig
• 7 • Peace with America: The Rockingham and Shelburne Governments
• 8 • The Fox–North Coalition and the King’s ‘Coup d’État’
• 9 • The ‘Mince-Pie’ Government
• 10 • The Young Reformer
• 11 • The Regency Crisis
• 12 • The French Revolution and Foreign Relations
• 13 • The Younger Pitt as War Leader
• 14 • Union and Resignation
• 15 • The Addington Interlude
• 16 • Return and Death
• 17 • Fox’s ‘Last Hurrah’ … and Final Disappointment
• 18 • The Long Aftermath
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Appendix I • Extract from Pitt’s speech against the formation of the Fox–North coalition, 21 February
• Appendix II • Speech of Charles James Fox on 10 June
• Image Section