THE LIFE OF 
 LORD CHflTHflM
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 \
 
 DA 
 
 WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM. From the 
 
 Portrait by Hoare in the National Portrait 
 
 Gallery ....... Frontispiece 
 
 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE. After the Portrait by 
 
 Kneller ...... Facing page j 
 
 FREDERICK THE GREAT. After the Portrait by 
 
 George Van der Myn .....,, 24 
 THE DUKE or NEWCASTLE. After the Portrait 
 
 by Hoare . . . . . . . ,,40 
 
 SIR EDWARD HAWKE. After the Portrait by 
 
 G. Knapton. . . . . . . ,, 50 
 
 WOLFE. From the Portrait by Schaak in the 
 
 National Portrait Gallery . . . . ,,66 
 THE DEATH OF GENERAL WOLFE. After the 
 
 Painting by B. West ,,72 
 
 GEORGE in. After the Portrait by Ramsay . ,, 82 
 LORD HOLLAND. . . . . . . ,, 101 
 
 THE MARQUIS OF ROCKINGHAM . . . . ,,132 
 
 CHARLES TOWNSHEND. After the Portrait by 
 
 Reynolds ,, 148 
 
 STATUE OF LORD MANSFIELD IN WESTMINSTER 
 
 ABBEY . . . . . . . . ,, i6z 
 
 JOHN WILKES. From the Portrait by E. Pine 
 
 in the Guildhall ,, 168 
 
 EDMUND BURKE. After the Portrait by Reynolds 
 
 in the National Portrait Gallery . . . ,,191 
 THE LAST SCENE IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS. After 
 
 the Painting by Copley in the National 
 
 Gallery ,, 201 
 
 LORD CHATHAM. Wax Effigy in Westminster 
 
 Abbey ........,, 214
 
 ERRATUM. 
 
 Page 109, line 22, for "of heresy 
 read "for heresy."
 
 CHATHAM 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 EARLY LIFE 
 
 Pitt's birth and parentage At Eton and Oxford Holds a 
 commission in the Blues Enters Parliament The 
 position of parties Pitt joins the Opposition Whigs 
 His early speeches Deprived of his commission by 
 Walpole Pitt's intimacy with the Prince of Wales. 
 
 " 1\ /T R< 
 IV JL 
 
 Autobiography, " was a younger brother 
 of no great family, as I believe the founder of 
 it was Governor Pitt, his grandfather, commonly 
 known by the name of Diamond Pitt, on account 
 of a vast large diamond which he obtained I know 
 not how in the East Indies." l The quotation is 
 in the characteristic manner of the very human 
 document from which it is taken, but justice to 
 our subject demands its amplification here. It 
 
 1 Fitzmaurlce's Shelburne, i. 71. 
 I
 
 2 CHATHAM 
 
 was Governor Pitt, indeed, who conferred wealth, 
 and' .with it a pleasure >of celebrity, upon the 
 family. Bui they traced their origin farther 
 b/ick intc- jthe 'f>aE. The first authentic date for 
 the foundation of their fortunes seems to be in 
 the reign of Elizabeth, when a certain John Pitt, 
 their progenitor, was Clerk of the Exchequer. 
 His son settled at Blandford in 1662, and his 
 grandson was rector of Blandford. The rector's 
 son Thomas was the " Diamond " Pitt above 
 referred to, who brought the family into promi- 
 nence and gave them influence and means. His 
 virile and masterful personality found scope in a 
 varied career of commerce and administration in 
 the Indies. Beginning as an "interloping" mer- 
 chant, he became finally Governor of Madras ; and 
 in India he purchased the famous Pitt diamond, 
 which he sold to the Regent Orleans in 1717, 
 making probably over l 00,000 by the transaction. 
 At home he utilised his accumulated riches 
 according to the spirit of the times. He bought 
 among other property the borough of Old Sarum, 
 and himself sat in Parliament as its representative. 
 Robert, his eldest son, married Harriet, sister of 
 the Irish Earl of Grandison, and their second son 
 was William Pitt, the future Lord Chatham. 
 
 Pitt was born on November 15, 1708, in the 
 parish of St. James's, Westminster. Little is 
 known of his parents, and singularly few details
 
 EARLY LIFE 3 
 
 survive of his own boyhood and youth. Like 
 Walpole before him and Charles James Fox after 
 him, he went to Eton. George Lyttelton, with 
 whom he formed a close friendship, Henry Fox, 
 his political rival during the greater part of his 
 career, and Fielding were among his schoolfellows. 
 In after-years Pitt confided to Shelburne a re- 
 trospective view of Eton, which the latter em- 
 bodied in one of those mordant sentences that 
 make his portrait of Pitt, however palpably dis- 
 torted, the most readable of all the engrossing 
 passages in his fragment of autobiography. 
 " Mr. William Pitt," Shelburne said, "was by all 
 accounts a very singular character from the time 
 he went to Eton, where he was distinguished, 
 and must have had a very early turn of observa- 
 tion, by his telling me, that his reason for pre- 
 ferring private to publick education was, that he 
 scarce observed a boy who was not cowed for 
 life at Eton ; that a publick school might suit a 
 boy of a turbulent disposition, but would not do 
 where there was any gentleness." l Whatever 
 may have been the effect of eighteenth-century 
 Eton upon others, it can scarcely be said to have 
 cowed Pitt. But we may question whether his 
 early training exercised much formative influence 
 on a character that was soon strongly marked 
 and exceptional. It may possibly have ac- 
 
 1 Fitzmaurice's Shelburne, 1. jz.
 
 4 CHATHAM 
 
 centuated, by repulsion rather than attraction, 
 certain traits which were always noticeable in 
 Pitt, but which in normal cases a public school 
 education is supposed to modify or eradicate. 
 An intense self -consciousness, a lofty and 
 exasperating reserve, and an elaboration of 
 manner unusual even in the eighteenth century, 
 were characteristics that accompanied him 
 throughout his life. 
 
 From Eton Pitt went in 1727 to Trinity 
 College, Oxford, where by a curious irony of 
 circumstance Lord North, who was to be the 
 chief agent in carrying out that coercive 
 American policy which Pitt spent his last years 
 in denouncing, followed him some twenty years 
 later. About Pitt's life at college the records 
 are unfortunately silent ; and for the Oxford 
 period, as for that spent at Eton, we can in the 
 main only fall back upon conjecture. The chief 
 surviving trace of his industry is the Latin poem 
 which he wrote in his second year on the occasion 
 of the death of George the First. Lord Macaulay 
 makes merry over it in the first of his two 
 celebrated essays on Chatham ; but, though 
 conceived according to the spirit of the age in 
 strains of extravagant eulogy, and containing 
 one false quantity, which we may hope, with 
 Macaulay, was the error of his printer or 
 biographer rather than of himself, it is on the
 
 EARLY LIFE 5 
 
 whole not perhaps quite so worthless as the 
 great historian would have us believe. But Pitt 
 never attained to a true appreciation of the 
 beauty of classical poetry. When he discusses 
 matters of scholarship and taste he is invariably 
 pedantic ; and though his letters to his nephew, 
 Lord Camelford, contain repeated exhortations to 
 study Homer and Virgil, he fixes his attention 
 almost exclusively upon their moral aspect, 
 regarding them as essentially teachers of virtue. 
 History, ethics, and politics were subjects more 
 really congenial to him. When he was himself 
 arranging for the education of his son William, 
 he expressed a special desire that Thucydides 
 should be the first Greek book read by the latter 
 on going up to Cambridge. And long after his 
 own studies were finished, in the late evening of 
 his life, his thoughts went back at a great crisis 
 to the Athenian who has been finely called " the 
 historian of our common humanity, the teacher 
 of abstract political wisdom," and in one of his 
 American speeches he paid the first Congress at 
 Philadelphia the splendid compliment of setting 
 it side by side with the statesmen of antiquity 
 whom Thucydides imperishably depicts. 1 At 
 Oxford Pitt also imbibed the philosophy of 
 Locke, and with it the principles of Whiggism. 
 But his university career was never carried to 
 
 1 Fide p. 1 88.
 
 6 CHATHAM 
 
 completion. Gout, which had already made 
 itself felt at Eton, again attacked him, and he 
 left Oxford, without taking a degree, to make a 
 tour for his health in France and Italy. 
 
 He was, it must be remembered, a younger 
 son, and when he returned from the Continent 
 his father was dead and his own means were but 
 scanty. He decided to enter the army, and 
 secured a cornet's commission in the Blues. It 
 is not easy to conceive of Pitt as a soldier, but 
 during his brief career of arms he took pains 
 with his profession as he did with everything. 
 He afterwards told Shelburne that while he was 
 a cornet of horse there was no military book 
 which he did not read through. The real path 
 of his ambition was now, however, opening before 
 him. His elder brother, who had inherited 
 wealth and much Parliamentary interest, was 
 elected simultaneously for Okehampton and 
 Old Sarum. He took his seat for the former 
 borough, and got Pitt returned as junior 
 member for Old Sarum in 1735. Pitt's colleague 
 in its representation was Robert Needham, who 
 had married his sister Catherine. 
 
 When Pitt entered Parliament, Walpole was 
 drawing towards the close of his long period of 
 supremacy. Few epochs in English history are 
 superficially less attractive than the Walpolean 
 era. Looking back upon it, our eyes are fixed
 
 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE 
 After the portrait by Kneller
 
 EARLY LIFE 7 
 
 mainly on Parliament, where we see a vista of 
 government by corruption. Though Walpole 
 did not originate Parliamentary corruption, he 
 systematised it ; and to his unconcealed disbelief 
 in principle, and his avowed preference for retain- 
 ing power by bribery and patronage rather than 
 by the concentration of all available administra- 
 tive ability in the service of the Crown, the low 
 political tone of his time was largely due. Its 
 traces were seen in the want of public spirit 
 which was so apparent throughout the country 
 during the Forty-five. It was reflected in a 
 latitudinarian and lethargic Church, and in a 
 literature which, though polished, lacked inspira- 
 tion. Yet, in spite of Walpole's obvious short- 
 comings, few who watch the course of English 
 history during the period that succeeded his fall 
 can feel much doubt as to the supreme usefulness 
 of his career. He restored the financial equili- 
 brium of England, and with light taxation and 
 sound credit commerce and industries steadily 
 grew. Above all, his maintenance of the 
 Hanoverian dynasty saved the country from the 
 turmoil attendant on a disputed succession, and 
 ensured the tranquil development of the Parlia- 
 mentary system. Pitt's era of conquest represents 
 a reaction from the pacific policy of Walpole, but 
 it may be said with justice that it would scarcely 
 have been possible if Pitt had not been able to
 
 8 CHATHAM 
 
 build on the foundations which the great peace 
 Minister had laid. 
 
 But Pitt, when he came into the House of 
 Commons a young man of twenty-seven, could 
 hardly be expected to appraise Walpole's ad- 
 ministration with the judicial equability which 
 is now possible for us after a lapse of nearly two 
 centuries since the time in question. If he was 
 full of ambition, he was inspired also by lofty 
 principles uncommon in his age. Neither his 
 ambition nor his principles were of the kind 
 which Walpole was accustomed to conciliate. 
 Nor was Pitt likely to make advances. The 
 immense material progress of England under 
 Walpole would have been obscured in his eyes 
 by the aspect of Parliament immediately before 
 him. He found a Ministry intrenched in borough 
 influence and Crown patronage, and an Opposition 
 which comprised a much greater abundance of 
 talent than was to be found in the Government, 
 and was made up of men who, amid wide differ- 
 ences of political conviction, were united in one 
 common feeling of resentment at their exclusion 
 from the activities and the fruits of office. Its 
 most formidable group consisted of the dis- 
 contented Whigs. They were led in the House 
 of Commons by Pulteney, a man of property, a 
 brilliant and attractive speaker, and a great 
 master of debate. Few politicians of the
 
 EARLY LIFE 9 
 
 eighteenth century showed more early promise 
 than he, and few had a career which was so 
 lamentably ineffective. Faults of temper he 
 certainly had, and he lacked the judgment 
 and balance essential to a statesman ; but, like 
 many of his fellows, he suffered from the fact 
 that his lot was cast in the time of Wai pole, 
 whose neglect drove him into opposition, where 
 his policy henceforward was guided by little 
 more than pique. In the Lords the leader of the 
 Whig Opposition was Carteret, "a fine person of 
 commanding beauty," said his critical son-in-law, 
 "the best Greek scholar of his age, overflowing 
 with wit, not so much a diseur de bans mots, like 
 Lord Chesterfield, as a man of true, comprehensive, 
 ready wit, which at once saw to the bottom, and 
 whose imagination never failed him, and was 
 joined to great natural elegance." l His close 
 acquaintance with foreign politics, above all his 
 knowledge of Germany and the German language, 
 gave him a unique place among his contem- 
 poraries and an immense influence with the King. 
 Another prominent figure among the Opposition 
 Whigs was Chesterfield, remembered now chiefly 
 for his letters and his traditional position at the 
 head of ton ; a courtier rather than a statesman, 
 though as a diplomatist abroad and an adminis- 
 trator in Ireland he showed conspicuous ability. 
 
 1 Fitzmaurice's Shelburne, i. 38.
 
 io CHATHAM 
 
 The other great section of the Opposition was 
 made up of the Tories, "rows of ponderous fox- 
 hunters, fat with Staffordshire or Devonshire ale." 
 But two of them at least rose above mediocrity 
 Shippen, the able and incorruptible Jacobite 
 leader, and Sir William Wyndham, titular head 
 of the Tories for many years, whose eloquence 
 and personal charm won for him a considerable 
 position. How far the Tories were leavened 
 with Jacobitism it is difficult to say. Shippen's 
 group was confessedly Jacobite ; but most of the 
 remainder accepted the dynasty while they pro- 
 tested against its policy. The Ministry en- 
 deavoured to stultify them by proclaiming them 
 all Jacobites without discrimination. But their 
 most serious disability was, that long exclusion 
 from office had robbed them of administrative 
 experience and capacity ; and though in integrity 
 they compared favourably at this time with the 
 Whigs, it might be said without unfairness that 
 they were scarcely exposed to temptation, for 
 there seemed but little prospect of either a Tory 
 or a Coalition Ministry. 
 
 Pitt's place in this miscellaneous host was 
 settled for him by his strong Whig proclivities, 
 his antipathy to Walpole, and his intimacy with 
 one of those small groups of politicians united by 
 ties of friendship, family, or interest, which, under 
 the name of" connections," were unspeakably dear
 
 EARLY LIFE n 
 
 to the heart of the eighteenth century. The 
 " Cobham cousinhood," or " Cobham's cubs " as 
 they were irreverently called, included besides 
 Lord Cobham, who had been deprived of his 
 regiment by Walpole, Sir George Lyttelton, 
 Richard Grenville, and, soon afterwards, George 
 Grenville. Lyttelton owed his return for Oke- 
 hampton to the Pitt interest, and was in early 
 life Pitt's most intimate associate. His was a 
 moderating influence upon his greater but im- 
 petuous friend an influence contrasting strongly 
 with that exercised by the factious and overbear- 
 ing spirit of Richard Grenville. But the latter, 
 who is known to history by his later title of Earl 
 Temple, played a more considerable part than 
 Lyttelton in the politics of his time, and, becoming 
 afterwards Pitt's brother-in-law, took Lyttelton's 
 place in his counsels, with results that were more 
 than once attended with disaster. As of him, so 
 of George Grenville, much more will be heard in 
 the course of this short history. Of George 
 Grenville it is sufficient now to say that, despite 
 his probity, his great business powers, and the 
 orthodoxy of his Whiggism, there never was, and 
 never could have been, any real union between 
 him and Pitt. Grenville was a precisian ; and the 
 rigidity of his point of view, always that of a Parlia- 
 mentarian and a lawyer, made him an impossible 
 colleague for a man who, like Pitt, was at once
 
 12 CHATHAM 
 
 intensely proud, elastic in his sympathies, and ever 
 ready to sacrifice the letter to the spirit of the law. 
 
 Pitt made his first speech in support of an 
 address to the Crown, moved by Pulteney, on the 
 marriage of the Prince of Wales to the Princess 
 of Saxe-Gotha. It was "as empty and wordy," 
 says Macaulay, "as a maiden speech on such an 
 occasion might be expected to be." l Certainly 
 there is nothing in the report of it which has come 
 down to us that could excite enthusiasm. How- 
 ever, it received high contemporary praise, and 
 the impression which Pitt made was deepened 
 by his subsequent performances. He had not 
 yet attained, by any means, the maturity of elo- 
 quence which astonishes us in his later speeches. 
 But his personal attractions were great, and 
 instantly drew the attention of Parliament upon 
 him. His graceful and commanding figure and 
 his piercing eye, together with that strange 
 fascination of gesture and delivery in which no 
 English orator seems ever to have approached 
 him, can never have been seen to more advantage 
 than in these early years of opposition. Above all, 
 he possessed as yet unimpaired a voice of wonder- 
 ful melody and resonance, which in his later life, 
 when the substance of what he said showed far 
 more real beauty and power, sank too often 
 through exhaustion into an inaudible whisper. 
 
 1 Macaulay's Essays : " William Pitt, Earl of Chatham."
 
 EARLY LIFE 13 
 
 He soon attracted the notice of Walpole, who 
 lost no time in manifesting his disapproval. It 
 was time to "muzzle this terrible cornet," and 
 Pitt was accordingly dismissed from the army. 
 The only result was that he plunged with fresh 
 hostility into the fiercest of opposition, the chief 
 rallying point for which was now furnished by 
 the Prince of Wales. Prince Frederick had 
 quarrelled with the King because he had not 
 been allowed to wed a Prussian princess, and 
 after his marriage with the Princess of Saxe- 
 Gotha he cherished a still more bitter grievance 
 on account of the inadequacy and insecurity of 
 the allowance which he received from his father. 
 He was himself a man of straw, but under the 
 able tuition of Bolingbroke, who, though excluded 
 from Parliament, inspired the Opposition as a 
 plotter and a pamphleteer, he made himself its 
 instrument, and his personal feud against the 
 King and Queen lent its attack upon the Govern- 
 ment a peculiarly factious tone. The Cobham 
 party gathered round him, and Pitt duly supported 
 Pulteney's motion for an address praying the 
 King to settle 100,000 a year on the Prince 
 of Wales. Then, when in the summer of 1737 
 the rupture within the Royal Family was com- 
 plete, and the Prince, driven from Court, set 
 up a separate establishment at Norfolk House, 
 Pitt obtained compensation for his dismissal by
 
 14 CHATHAM 
 
 Walpole in a post in Frederick's household. The 
 Prince selected the little Cobham group as the 
 special object of his favours, and Pitt was ap- 
 pointed his Groom of the Bedchamber, Lyttelton 
 his private secretary. In this rival Court circle 
 Pitt lived on terms of great intimacy. Charles 
 Butler tells how the Prince and Pitt were walking 
 one day in Lord Cobham's gardens at Stowe, apart 
 from the other guests and deep in conversation. 
 Cobham thought that Pitt was trying to lead the 
 Prince into some incautious project, and he said 
 as much to one of the company. The latter 
 observed that at all events their tete-a-tete could 
 not last long. " Sir," said Lord Cobham eagerly, 
 "you don't know Mr. Pitt's talent of insinuation ; 
 in a very short quarter of an hour he can persuade 
 any man of anything." Pitt at this time was 
 constantly to be found at Stowe ; and the poet 
 Thomson, when he wrote of its "fair majestic 
 paradise," left a pleasant reminiscence of him in 
 the very characteristic lines 
 
 " And there, O Pitt, thy country's early boast, 
 There let me sit beneath the sheltered slopes ; 
 Or in that temple, where in future times, 
 Thou well shalt merit a distinguished name, 
 And with thy converse blest, catch the last smile 
 Of Autumn beaming o'er the yellow woods." 1 
 
 1 Thomson's " Autumn."
 
 EARLY LIFE 15 
 
 A still surer testimony to his increasing importance 
 was that the organs of the Government began to 
 assail him. " A young man of my acquaintance," 
 said the Gazetteer in the quaint language of the 
 time, "though an overbearing disposition and 
 a weak judgment, assuming the character of a 
 great man, which he is no way able to support, 
 is become the object of ridicule, instead of praise. 
 My young man has the vanity to put himself in 
 the place of Tully. But let him consider that 
 everyone who has the same natural imperfections 
 with Tully, has not therefore the same natural 
 perfections ; though his neck should be as long, 
 his body as slender, yet his voice may not be as 
 sonorous, his action may not be as just." 1 
 
 1 Almon's Anecdotes of Chatham, \. 33.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 RISE IN PARLIAMENT 
 
 Jenkins's Ear and the Spanish War War of the Austrian 
 Succession Fall of Walpole Ascendency of Carteret 
 Pitt's vehement attacks on him Carteret resigns 
 Pitt supports the Pelhams His change of policy 
 discussed Pitt and Carteret contrasted Carteret's 
 momentary return to power Pitt given office by the 
 Pelhams His attitude as Paymaster of the Forces. 
 
 IN the present chapter it is proposed to trace 
 the outline of Pitt's political career up to 
 the moment when, in 1746, he first attained 
 office. Both in the history of Europe and in his 
 own this was a period of transition. In British 
 annals it was ushered in by the " colony quarrel " 
 of the Spanish War, which merged itself eventu- 
 ally in the Continental War of Succession, and 
 led directly up to the beginning of the world- 
 wide struggle between England and France for 
 colonial supremacy over which Pitt presided. In 
 the sphere of Continental politics it witnessed 
 the rise of Prussia to the rank of a first-class 
 
 16
 
 RISE IN PARLIAMENT 17 
 
 power, and the commencement of the long 
 Austro-Prussian rivalry within Germany which, 
 though desperately fought out again in the 
 Seven Years' War, can only be said to have 
 closed in the nineteenth century on the field of 
 Koniggratz. And, finally, in the life of Pitt it 
 covered alike his growing prominence as a leader 
 of Opposition and his undisguised change of front 
 upon adhesion to the Government. 
 
 The Spanish War was in the nature of things 
 inevitable, but it was an accident, and almost, 
 it may be said, a phrase, which set it aflame. 
 When Captain Jenkins, in a sentence too 
 epigrammatic to have been original, declared at 
 the bar of the House of Commons that he had 
 commended his soul to God and his cause to 
 his country on being taken and tortured by 
 a Spanish guarda-costa, an electric thrill of 
 sympathy and indignation ran through the 
 country, which made it certain that Walpole 
 would not be able to resist the call for war. 
 Whatever may have been the merits of the case 
 of Jenkins, his story represented not unfaithfully 
 the precarious state of things in the New World. 
 Spain still claimed a monopoly of trade with South 
 America, and England in theory still recognised 
 the claim. By the Treaty of Utrecht British 
 rights were limited to the concession then 
 granted by Spain, of trading with a single vessel
 
 i8 CHATHAM 
 
 and trafficking in negroes; but in practice 
 England carried on a vast illicit trade which had 
 long outrun these dimensions. Spain retaliated 
 by stringently exercising the right of search on 
 the high seas ; and the Spanish officials, who 
 seized British ships and maltreated British 
 sailors, undoubtedly behaved with cruelty and 
 insolence in their repression of encroachments 
 on a monopoly which was really indefensible. 
 Beneath the question of treaty stipulations lay 
 other problems of incalculable importance, to 
 which Carlyle has given trenchant expression in 
 his Frederick the Great. " Shall there be a 
 Yankee nation, shall there not be ; shall the New 
 World be of Spanish type, shall it be of English ? 
 Issues which we may call immense. Among the 
 then extant sons of Adam, where was he who 
 could in the faintest degree surmise what issues 
 lay hidden in the Jenkins Ear Question ? " l 
 
 A further significance was given to the struggle 
 by the existence of the Family Compact between 
 the Crowns of France and Spain. This had been 
 signed in 1733, and it linked the two Bourbon 
 Powers together in a league to check England's 
 commercial development. Viewed in the light 
 of this menacing alliance, the Spanish War is 
 seen to be only an initial stage in the fight for 
 the expansion of England's colonial empire, 
 
 1 Frederick the Great, bk. xii. ch. 12 ; 3.
 
 RISE IN PARLIAMENT 19 
 
 which rapidly resolved itself into a duel with 
 France lasting for the rest of the century. So 
 regarded, it seems almost superfluous to debate 
 its morality. England's legal title was un- 
 questionably faulty, but she had the weight of 
 facts and the insistent pressure of destiny upon 
 her side. The enterprise on which she embarked 
 was characteristic of the time which Sir John 
 Seeley has well described as the iron age of 
 international relations. Material motives inspired 
 it. But it was not undertaken at the bidding 
 of a diplomatist or a dynastic combination : a 
 genuine national impulse prompted the first of 
 those struggles in which England seemed to 
 herself to be fighting not less truly for existence 
 than for expansion. 
 
 Walpole withstood the people's desire for war 
 as long as he dared, and at one time it seemed 
 possible that he might patch up the dispute by a 
 convention. But the gathering clamour in the 
 country and the increased hostility of the attitude 
 of France and Spain soon made further resistance 
 on his part impossible, and he declared war in 
 November 1739- On the details of the sadly 
 mismanaged campaign which followed there is 
 not space to dwell here. It began auspiciously 
 with Admiral Vernon's capture of Portobello. 
 But the great expedition against Carthagena 
 proved utterly disastrous ; and the only incidents
 
 20 CHATHAM 
 
 of the war on which it is possible to look back 
 with satisfaction are the exploits of Anson, whose 
 long adventurous voyage, ending with the cap- 
 ture of the Acapulco galleon, forms one of the 
 bright pages of British seamanship. 
 
 Pitt was one of the most active of the war 
 party in the House of Commons. Such reports 
 as we possess, however, of his attacks upon the 
 Government have not much authentic value. To 
 this period belongs that most celebrated repartee, 
 which was put into his mouth by the greatest 
 man who ever figured as a Parliamentary reporter. 
 Dr. Johnson was now writing accounts of the 
 debates for the Gentleman's Magazine from meagre 
 notes, and his own sense of the fitness of things 
 and his determination "that the Whig dogs 
 should not have the best of it " decided the 
 results. Horace Walpole the elder had taxed 
 Pitt in debate with the temerity of youth. To 
 this Johnson made Pitt reply in the well-known 
 words : " The atrocious crime of being a young 
 man, which the honourable gentleman has with 
 such spirit and decency charged upon me, I shall 
 neither attempt to palliate nor deny, but con- 
 tent myself with wishing that I may be one of 
 those whose follies cease with their youth, and 
 not of that number who are ignorant in spite of 
 experience." 
 
 The last fierce struggle within Parliament was
 
 RISE IN PARLIAMENT 21 
 
 now approaching which ended in the fall of 
 Walpole, and is so vividly pictured in his son's 
 letters to Sir Horace Mann. The failure of the 
 operations on the Spanish Main had by themselves 
 gone far to undo the Minister. But what made 
 his overthrow more certain was that he was 
 involved in a European war as well. 
 
 Dark clouds were gathering over the Continent, 
 and with the death of the Emperor Charles vi. 
 in October 1740 came the bursting of the storm. 
 Charles had for twenty years devoted himself 
 to securing his daughter's peaceable succession 
 to his dominions, and had secured from the 
 Great Powers a recognition of the Pragmatic 
 Sanction, which guaranteed it. But when he 
 died, leaving Maria Theresa apparently defence- 
 less, the opportunity for territorial peculation 
 was too tempting to be lost. 
 
 Frederick n. poured a Prussian army into 
 Silesia, and overwhelmed the Austrians under 
 Neipperg at Mollwitz. France threw herself 
 into the attack, hoping to secure the Austrian 
 Netherlands as her prize. The Italian duchies 
 of Maria Theresa attracted Spain. Finally, the 
 Elector of Bavaria appeared as a rival candidate 
 for the Austrian dominions and the Imperial 
 Crown; and before the end of 1741 Silesia was 
 firmly held by Prussia, Bohemia was in the 
 possession of the French and Bavarians, and the
 
 22 CHATHAM 
 
 Elector had been crowned its king. The obvious 
 and indeed the only ally to whom the Queen of 
 Hungary could look was England, and both 
 George and the country were eager for war. 
 Parliament voted a subsidy to Maria Theresa, and 
 George n. went over to the Continent to raise 
 an army in her defence. But, alarmed by the 
 advance of the French on Hanover, he made a 
 treaty holding it neutral for a year, to the great 
 disgust of the English people, who saw them- 
 selves deprived of the aid of George's principality, 
 by his anxious fears, on one of the few occasions 
 when it was worth having. The disgust recoiled 
 upon Walpole, who as a peace Minister was 
 wholly out of place in this complicated war. In 
 the general election of 1741 his majority dwindled 
 away, and, after subsisting precariously into the 
 next year, the Ministry resigned at the beginning 
 of February. 
 
 There was a fierce outburst of popular resent- 
 ment against Walpole, which took shape as a 
 demand for his impeachment. No one pursued 
 him with more pertinacity than Pitt. Such 
 violence appears to us extraordinary ; but it must 
 be remembered that Pitt was only obeying that 
 tradition of vindictiveness against fallen Ministers 
 which still lingered in English politics, that he 
 fully believed Walpole to have been guilty of grave 
 shortcomings of conduct and high policy, and that
 
 RISE IN PARLIAMENT 23 
 
 he faithfully reflected the temper of the people. 
 For this we may tax him with want of modera- 
 tion, but we can hardly tax him with insincerity. 1 
 Though foremost among the antagonists of Wai- 
 pole, Pitt did not obtain office in the new Ministry, 
 being personally unacceptable to the King. 
 That Ministry was indeed far from constituting a 
 complete triumph for the Opposition. Pulteney 
 
 1 The charge, however, to which Macaulay gives promi- 
 nence in his Essays would, if established, convict him of 
 being insincere. It is alleged that Pitt and Lyttelton, with 
 the concurrence of the Prince of Wales, offered to screen 
 Walpole from prosecution if he would use his influence with 
 the King in their favour. But as Mr. Walford Green, who 
 examines the story at length in his valuable and interesting 
 Life of William Pitt, has shown, there are weighty reasons 
 for regarding its authenticity as more than doubtful. 
 Macaulay calls it "a story which is supported by strong 
 testimony, and which may be found in so common a book as 
 Coxe's Life of Walpole." It does not appear at all in the 
 first edition of Coxe, and it rests on the biassed testimony 
 of Glover. Further, it was recounted to Glover by the 
 Prince of Wales in 1747, when the latter was full of hos- 
 tility towards Pitt. Horace Walpole knew nothing of it. 
 It represents Sir Robert as rejecting the offer "with the 
 utmost contempt " ; yet as a matter of fact he made over- 
 tures to the Prince before his fall. Finally, it represents 
 the Prince as making overtures to Walpole when his true 
 interest was undoubtedly to wait for advances from the 
 Court. On the whole, it must be said that both the character 
 and the credentials of the story are far from convincing. 
 Vide Green's William Pitt (1901), pp. 19-23.
 
 24 CHATHAM 
 
 had virtually effaced himself. At a moment when 
 there was an almost universal call for him to lead, 
 he remembered an old incautious pledge that he 
 would never take office ; and, with incredible 
 want of discretion, while refusing a department 
 he accepted a seat in the Cabinet and a peerage. 
 He never again recovered the confidence of the 
 people or obtained a commanding influence in 
 politics. The Ministry, as actually formed under 
 the nominal leadership of Lord Wilmington, was 
 really a coalition between the followers of Walpole 
 and the Opposition Whigs. Of the latter the 
 chief representative was Carteret ; of the former, 
 the Duke of Newcastle, Henry Pelham his 
 brother, and Lord Chancellor Hardwicke re- 
 mained in office. There was thus, from the first, 
 a division in the camp. Though Walpole had 
 fallen, he still enjoyed power vicariously through 
 the predominance of his nominees ; and, while 
 ostensibly outside politics, his influence always 
 made itself felt, and was finally strong enough to 
 turn the scale in favour of the Pelhams and 
 against Carteret. 
 
 For the moment, however, Carteret was in the 
 ascendant. His ambition and abounding energy 
 found full scope in conducting the European 
 War. To Maria Theresa he rendered inestimable 
 service. Seeing that Prussia held the key to 
 the situation, he induced the Queen to sign the
 
 FREDERICK THE GREAT 
 After the portrait by George I'ander Myn
 
 RISE IN PARLIAMENT 25 
 
 Peace of Breslau, by which, at the price of ac- 
 quiescence in the loss of Silesia, she detached 
 Frederick from France. He made ceaseless 
 efforts to galvanise the Dutch into activity, and 
 formed the composite army of aggression in 
 Flanders, which fought at Dettingen. By the 
 Treaty of Worms he pledged England anew 
 to the continuance of the war. Yet, in spite 
 of his undoubted ability as a War Minister, he 
 steadily lost ground at home. To some extent 
 this was due to intrigues within the Ministry, but 
 much more was it the result of the vehemence 
 with which Pitt and Chesterfield gave expression 
 to a popular cry. Carteret was charged with 
 sacrificing everything to Hanoverian interests. 
 The question of Hanover had always been one on 
 which George n. and his people parted company, 
 and Carteret was now involved in the un- 
 popularity of the King. The agitation reached 
 its height when, to prevent the reduction of the 
 Hanoverian army to its peace footing, Carteret 
 took 16,000 Hanoverians into British pay. Pitt 
 poured invective upon the Minister. It was but 
 too apparent, he said, that "this great, this 
 powerful, this formidable kingdom is considered 
 only as a province to a despicable electorate." 
 The troops of Hanover had "marched to the 
 place most distant from the enemy, least in 
 danger of an attack," and their only claim for
 
 26 CHATHAM 
 
 payment was that they had left their own country 
 for a place of greater security. We were " hiring 
 Hanoverians to eat and sleep." 1 While the 
 clamour still lasted Lord Wilmington died in 
 July 1743, and a trial of strength followed 
 between the two sections of the Ministry. 
 Pulteney, now Lord Bath, appeared as Carteret's 
 candidate for the leadership ; on the other side 
 Henry Pelham was supported by the secret but 
 still potent influence of Walpole. The contest 
 ended in a victory for Pelham, and Carteret's 
 extinction became only a question of time. Pitt 
 redoubled his attacks on him. Carteret was " an 
 execrable, a sole Minister, who seems to have 
 drunk of the potion which poets have described 
 as causing men to forget their country." 2 Speak- 
 ing again at the beginning of 1744 on the motion 
 for a grant to maintain Hanoverians in British 
 pay during the year, Pitt stigmatised him afresh 
 as " a Hanover troop Minister," and in the heat of 
 debate he went so far as to assert that the public 
 welfare demanded the separation of Hanover 
 from England. 3 At last Carteret made overtures 
 to the Opposition, but the Pelhams had been 
 before him, and were willing to take their chief 
 opponents into the Ministry in order to get rid 
 of their Foreign Minister. Left now in complete 
 
 1 Thackeray's Life of Chatham, \. 90. 
 
 2 Coxe's Pelham, i. 117. * Ibid. i. 129.
 
 RISE IN PARLIAMENT 27 
 
 isolation, Carteret gave up the struggle and 
 resigned office in November 1744. 
 
 In the reconstituted administration the Bedford 
 connection, the Cobham connection, and even 
 a few Tories, were represented ; and Henry Pelham 
 found himself practically a Premier without oppo- 
 sition. But Pitt was still excluded from office. 
 He had been promised the Secretaryship at War 
 by the Pelhams ; the Royal disfavour, however, 
 again proved too strong. Yet, though he did not 
 obtain office, the reconstruction of the Pelham 
 Ministry marks an important epoch in his career. 
 For now he relinquishes opposition, and appears 
 for the first time as a supporter of the Govern- 
 ment. The Pelhams pledged themselves to 
 induce the King to admit him ultimately to 
 office, and in return he gave them undeviating 
 assistance. 
 
 It is this change of front which forms one of 
 the chief of the many charges of inconsistency 
 that have been brought against him. It is urged 
 that, after carrying his denunciations of the 
 Hanoverian policy of Carteret to lengths hardly 
 compatible with loyalty to the Crown, he gave 
 his firm support to a Ministry which simply 
 continued that policy ; and that, though he had 
 inveighed without measure against all Carteret's 
 principles, they were in many respects identical 
 with his own, and were actually put into practice
 
 28 CHATHAM 
 
 by him later during his great War ] Ministry. 
 Undoubtedly, there were strong points of similarity 
 between Carteret and Pitt. Details of policy 
 apart, they had in their tastes and character much 
 in common. Both regarded with the indifference 
 of disdain those details of patronage and Par- 
 liamentary intrigue which filled so considerable 
 a place in the politics of the time. Both were 
 penetrated with a sense of the greatness of Eng- 
 land, and occupied themselves by choice with large 
 schemes designed to give effect to it. The mind 
 of Carteret, like that of Pitt, dwelt habitually 
 and by choice in the regions of high policy. His 
 well-known dictum " What is it to me who is a 
 judge or who is a bishop ? It is my business to 
 make kings and emperors, and to maintain the 
 balance of Europe " was one which Pitt might 
 have echoed. And no one who reads the moving 
 story in which Robert Wood relates how, when 
 Under-Secretary of State in 1762, he carried to 
 Carteret, then Lord President and lying upon his 
 deathbed, the preliminary articles of the Treaty 
 of Paris, and found him at first too languid to 
 attend to them ; how Carteret then roused him- 
 self, and repeated the lines from the Iliad in 
 which Sarpedon urges upon Glaucus that, since 
 even in peace men cannot live for ever, and death 
 hovers over them in countless shapes, they should 
 go forward into the battle ; and how he listened
 
 RISE IN PARLIAMENT 29 
 
 to the reading of the treaty, and recovered 
 strength to pronounce a benediction "on the 
 most glorious war, and the most honourable peace, 
 this nation ever saw," no one who reads this 
 story can fail to be reminded of the aspiring 
 genius of Pitt, and the manner in which he loved 
 to speak of "great subjects, great empires, great 
 characters, effulgent ideas, and classical illustra- 
 tions." Besides these resemblances in taste and 
 temper, the fundamental principle of the policy 
 of Carteret was one in which Pitt also believed. 
 Carteret's designs were inspired by antagonism to 
 France, and, like Pitt in the Seven Years' War, 
 he could not rest till he had brought her to her 
 knees. Nor can it be denied that, after Carteret's 
 fall, Pitt as a supporter of the Ministry acquiesced 
 in and defended the same schemes for the employ- 
 ment of Hanoverian troops which, when Carteret 
 proposed them, he had violently attacked. 
 
 Pitt certainly performed a remarkable volte face 
 when he linked his fortunes with the Govern- 
 ment. Was it due solely to his desire for office ? 
 In justice to him it must be remembered that the 
 Pelhams, in continuing Carteret's policy, con- 
 tinued it with a difference. Carteret's supremacy 
 involved a real menace to England, which was no 
 longer felt on his disappearance. His position 
 had been a peculiar one, based on his ascendency 
 over George n. and intimately bound up with the
 
 30 CHATHAM 
 
 Hanoverian connection. He ignored the national 
 will. His absorbed interest in Continental poli- 
 tics, and the undoubted partiality for Hanover 
 of his confidant the King, excited in England a 
 not unnatural distrust. Carteret took no pains to 
 make himself intelligible to the people, and in 
 consequence he never kindled their enthusiasm. 
 When Pitt became Minister he infused a measure 
 of his own energy and efficiency into every 
 department of government, and, himself re- 
 presenting most truly the ardent impulse of the 
 nation, he made England organic in a sense in 
 which she could hardly be said to have been so 
 since the great epoch of Elizabeth. But Carteret, 
 with all his great knowledge and ability, left 
 no mark on the public service, and preferred 
 diplomatic triumphs in Germany to a genuinely 
 British policy. His glance never swept the wide 
 horizon of England's colonial development ; and 
 while Pitt saw that the European struggle formed 
 merely a subsidiary part of the great duel with 
 France, to Carteret it was, we may say, not a 
 means but an end. 
 
 These considerations may help to explain Pitt's 
 change of attitude when Carteret was removed 
 from the scene. At the same time an attempt to 
 rationalise his conduct completely would be un- 
 true to history. He had undoubtedly a keen 
 desire for office a desire not unparalleled in the
 
 RISE IN PARLIAMENT 31 
 
 early careers of other British statesmen who have 
 afterwards been accorded the fullest confidence 
 of the nation, and not unjustifiable when we 
 consider the use he made of power when he 
 attained it. And no statesman ever cared less 
 about perfect political consistency. He seems 
 even to have taken a pride in his changes for their 
 own sake, as though conscious of an intellectual 
 strength and dominating force of character which 
 would command acquiescence in his most surpris- 
 ing conversions. Mr. Lecky, in the great history 
 to which all who attempt to tell any part of the 
 story over again owe so large a debt, well observes 
 that it is an extraordinary proof, not only of his 
 capacity, but of the impression of sincerity which 
 he left upon his contemporaries, that in the face 
 of his fluctuations he should still have preserved 
 his moral ascendency. What competent observers 
 thought of him at this period may be gathered 
 from a letter written in 1742 by James Oswald, 
 in which he is compared with the great lawyer 
 and orator Murray, the future Lord Mansfield. 
 Murray, said Oswald, spoke like a pleader, while 
 Pitt spoke like a gentleman and a statesman. 
 " Murray gains your attention by the perspicacity 
 of his arguments and the elegance of his diction, 
 Pitt commands your attention and respect by the 
 nobleness, the greatness of his sentiments, the 
 strength and energy of his expressions, and the
 
 32 CHATHAM 
 
 certainty you are in of his always rising to a 
 greater elevation both of thought and style. For 
 this talent he possesses beyond any speaker I ever 
 heard, of never falling from the beginning to the 
 end of his speech, either in thought or expression. 
 And as in this session he has begun to speak like 
 a man of business as well as an orator, he will in 
 all probability be, or rather at present is, allowed 
 to make as great an appearance as ever man did 
 in that House I think him sincerely the most 
 finished character I ever knew." l 
 
 Outside the field of politics he had attracted 
 the attention of a remarkable personage, who 
 testified her approval of his attacks on Carteret 
 in the most practical fashion. In October 1744 
 Sarah Duchess of Marlborough passed away, 
 bequeathing Pitt a legacy of 10,000 "upon 
 account of his merit in the noble defence he has 
 made for the support of the laws of England, and 
 to prevent the ruin of his country." This was the 
 first of the benefactions which Pitt received from 
 admirers of his politics, and it cannot have been 
 the least welcome. At once profuse and poor, 
 he was on the threshold of an official career in 
 which, by his own deliberate choice, he debarred 
 himself from the customary methods of Ministerial 
 plunder. 
 
 Pitt signalised his adhesion to the Pelhams by 
 
 1 Thackeray's Life of Chatham, i. 96.
 
 RISE IN PARLIAMENT 33 
 
 one of those elaborately theatrical appearances 
 in which he indulged so often in later life 
 and from the first delighted. Taking his seat 
 in the House "with the apparatus and mien of 
 an invalid," he announced that he perceived 
 a dawn of salvation to the country breaking 
 forth, and that he would follow it as far as it 
 would lead him. In point of fact the war went 
 on with very indifferent results. In 1745 the 
 British forces were defeated by Marshal Saxe 
 at Fontenoy, and two months later followed 
 Charles Edward's landing at Moidart, and the 
 Jacobite rebellion. Throughout the anxious 
 days of the Forty-five, when incompetence in 
 high places and public apathy conspired nearly 
 to wreck the dynasty, Pitt gave firm support to 
 the Government. The Pelhams had continued 
 to urge his claims to office upon the King. At 
 last, through a false move on the part of George 
 ii., came his opportunity. Ever since the dis- 
 missal of Carteret, the King had chafed at his 
 impotence in the hands of uncongenial Ministers ; 
 he had been compelled to admit Chesterfield, and 
 could only just contrive to exclude Pitt. By 
 February 1746 his powers of endurance were 
 exhausted, and he appealed to Pulteney and 
 Carteret, now Lords Bath and Granville respect- 
 ively, to rid him of the Pelhams. As a pretext 
 against this intrigue the Ministers resigned office 
 3
 
 34 CHATHAM 
 
 in a body. Granville with jovial optimism 
 stepped into their places, and spent forty-eight 
 hours in endeavouring to form a rival adminis- 
 tration. "It was a good idea of somebody/' 
 wrote Horace Walpole, "when no man would 
 accept a place under the new system, that 
 Granville and Bath were met going about the 
 streets calling Odd man ! as the hackney chairmen 
 do when they want a partner ! ! " 
 
 The scheme, which Granville himself owned 
 was mad, failed completely, and the Pelhams 
 returned to office, this time bringing Pitt with 
 them as a matter of course. On February 22 
 he was appointed Joint Vice - Treasurer of 
 Ireland, and soon after was transferred to the 
 more important post of Paymaster of the Forces. 
 To previous holders of the office the Paymastership 
 had brought enrichment in abundant measure. 
 It was the recognised official practice to invest 
 the large sum of public money handed to them 
 for payment of the troops, and appropriate the 
 interest, and also to retain a commission of per 
 cent, on all subsidies granted by Parliament to 
 foreign Powers. Both emoluments were illegal, 
 but for long no question had been raised against 
 their enjoyment, and in time of war, of course, 
 they were eminently profitable. Pitt refused to 
 touch either of these sources of income, and con- 
 tented himself with his regular official salary.
 
 RISE IN PARLIAMENT 35 
 
 Further, when the King of Sardinia offered him 
 a free gift equivalent to the commission which 
 he might have levied on his subsidy, he declined 
 it without hesitation. This probity has been 
 called ostentatious, and so in a sense it was. But 
 its very ostentation was salutary, for a less con- 
 spicuous act of self-denial would hardly have 
 impressed the country. It gave at least a 
 momentary shock to the corrupt politicians of 
 the time, and it raised hopes among the people 
 of a higher standard of Ministerial purity hopes 
 which no statesmen did more than Pitt and his 
 great son to fulfil. It carried to them the con- 
 viction that Pitt stood on a plane above his 
 fellows, and from thenceforward they yielded 
 him an ungrudging confidence, which, though 
 recalled for a moment in 1761, was never finally 
 withdrawn. 
 
 On his colleagues in office he made a most 
 favourable impression, and was pronounced to 
 have the dignity of Sir William Wyndham, the 
 wit of Pulteney, and the knowledge and judgment 
 of Walpole. He was staunch in their support, 
 and helped to defend the Treaty of Aix-la- 
 Chapelle, which in 1748 put an end to the 
 European War. The debate on the peace 
 furnishes an interesting example of the scant 
 attention which Pitt paid to charges of incon- 
 sistency. On this occasion Lord Egmont
 
 36 CHATHAM 
 
 ventured to observe that the claim against Spain's 
 right of search was not so much as mentioned in 
 the treaty. Pitt summarily dismissed the ac- 
 cusation. " He had once been an advocate for 
 that claim ; it was when he was a young man ; 
 but he was now ten years older, had considered 
 public affairs more coolly, and was convinced 
 that the claim of no search respecting British 
 vessels near the coast of Spanish America could 
 never be obtained unless Spain was so reduced as 
 to consent to any terms her conquerors might 
 think proper to impose." x On the other hand, 
 he refused to be a party to any weakening of 
 the national forces. He spoke strongly in favour 
 of increasing the naval establishment, and " called 
 the fleet our standing army ; the army a little 
 spirited body, so improved by discipline that that 
 discipline alone was worth five thousand men." 
 
 1 Thackeray's Life of Chatham, i. 175.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE HOUR OF CRISIS 
 
 Death of Henry Pelham Newcastle, Prime Minister The 
 leadership of the Commons Pitt passed over His 
 marriage with Lady Hester Grenville Pitt and Fox 
 mutiny against Newcastle Fox admitted to the 
 Cabinet Position of Pitt The situation in India and 
 America Diplomatic activity in Europe Beginning 
 of the Seven Years' War Minorca and the Black Hole 
 Newcastle resigns Pitt takes office with the Duke 
 of Devonshire. 
 
 r I S HE period 1748-1754 was a tranquil breath- 
 JL ing space between the war that had ended 
 and the greater war that was to follow. It was 
 during these years, the last of his life, that Henry 
 Pelham left most mark on English legislation. 
 Though in no sense a remarkable man, he had 
 industry and good business qualities, and con- 
 tinued not unworthily the fiscal policy of Wai pole. 
 His financial measures for reducing the interest 
 and consolidating the branches of the National 
 Debt were successful, and he had ample leisure 
 
 428780
 
 38 CHATHAM 
 
 to carry out his reforms. Parliamentary opposition 
 was for the time being practically dead, and the 
 interest of members centred in the prosaic dis- 
 cussion of commercial questions. Politics sank 
 back into Walpolean placidity. The only 
 vitalising influence in the country was the great 
 movement of Methodism. It was some ten years 
 since Whitefield had taken the momentous step of 
 preaching to the colliers of Kingswood, and, when 
 once the Wesleys had followed his example and 
 the institution of lay preaching had been 
 sanctioned, their work spread far and wide 
 through England. By 1749 it had even gained 
 a footing in fashionable London, and Horace 
 Walpole wrote to Mann : " If you ever think of 
 returning to England, as I hope it will be long 
 first, you must prepare yourself with Methodism. 
 I really believe that by that time it will be 
 necessary this sect increases as fast as almost 
 ever any religious nonsense did." Wide as the 
 gulf may seem between the work of the Method- 
 ists and the career of Pitt, and fully as Pitt shared 
 the prejudice of the eighteenth-century intellect 
 against " enthusiasm," yet Methodism, and the 
 Evangelical revival within the Church of England 
 to which it gave rise, co-operated most effectively 
 with his inspiring patriotism and the sense of 
 national greatness awakened by his administration 
 to arouse and dematerialise the nation.
 
 THE HOUR OF CRISIS 39 
 
 In March 1754 Henry Pelham died. The 
 Duke of Newcastle succeeded his bi'other as 
 Prime Minister, but the leadership of the House 
 of Commons was vacant. There were three men 
 to any of whom it might reasonably be offered : 
 Murray, Henry Fox, and Pitt. Murray enjoyed 
 as great prestige and power in the House as any 
 lawyer has possessed before or after him ; but 
 his real ambition was not Parliamentary but legal, 
 and he shrank from the turbulent life of a leader 
 in the House of Commons. Fox might be 
 regarded as the most natural heir of Pelham, for, 
 like Pelham, he had been trained in Walpole's 
 school. He had not passed through it unscathed. 
 Walpole's influence had left him, despite his good 
 heart and good sense, a political mercenary. But 
 it had not impaired his social attractiveness, his 
 courage, his readiness, and his consummate skill 
 in debate ; nor had he yet too palpably exposed 
 his conviction that all the objects of statesmanship 
 counted for little beside the chance which it 
 afforded of making money. 
 
 In genius Pitt was undoubtedly first of the 
 three men, but his very eminence made him an 
 object of suspicion to Newcastle, and he had not 
 yet overcome the dislike of the King. On the 
 whole his chances were probably the smallest, 
 and at the critical moment he was laid up with 
 gout at Bath. After balancing the aims and
 
 40 CHATHAM 
 
 abilities of the rivals, Newcastle decided to appeal 
 to Fox. In the negotiations which followed, the 
 Duke's foibles were conspicuously shown. He 
 was a timid, anxious busybody, industrious and 
 not without domestic virtues, but filled with a 
 consuming passion for the mean and multifarious 
 details of bribery and patronage, which were 
 regarded as essential to the working of the 
 Parliamentary machine. Fox had agreed to take 
 the Secretaryship of State on the understanding 
 that it carried with it the management of the 
 House of Commons and the control of the secret 
 service money, or, to put it more plainly, the 
 distribution of bribes. But this was the one 
 department of government with which Newcastle 
 was resolved not to part ; and when the point was 
 made clear to Fox, he refused to take office under 
 such restrictions. Newcastle's obvious course was 
 to turn to Pitt, who would have parted as readily 
 with the administration of patronage in 1754 as 
 he did in 1757. Instead of this, the Duke gave 
 the leadership to a nonentity from the diplomatic 
 service Sir Thomas Robinson. It was an act full 
 of audacity, for by it he deliberately discarded 
 the great men of the House of Commons, but it 
 was also characteristically short-sighted. The 
 selection of Robinson was really a manifesto to 
 the effect that the positions of the two Houses of 
 Parliament were to be reversed, and the tradition
 
 THE DUKE OF NEWCASTLE 
 After the portrait by Hoare
 
 THE HOUR OF CRISIS 41 
 
 of the supremacy of the Commons, which Walpole 
 had established, ignored by carrying on the real 
 government of the country in the Lords. It was 
 clear that common-sense as well as ambition 
 would unite Pitt and Fox in resistance to this 
 attempt to put back the clock, and that they 
 would sink their differences in order to make it 
 impossible. 
 
 Pitt, although he did not aspire to the first 
 place, undoubtedly took the total passing over of 
 his claims to heart. From Bath he had written 
 to Lyttelton and the Grenvilles on Pelham's 
 death : 
 
 " My dearest friends, 
 
 " The shock of Mr. Pelham's death has affected 
 me so powerfully as not to leave me in a proper 
 condition to write. I am sensibly touched with 
 his loss, as of a man, upon the whole, of a most 
 amiable composition ; his loss as a Minister is 
 utterly irreparable in such circumstances as 
 constitute the present dangerous conjuncture for 
 this country, both at home and abroad. . . . My 
 own object for the public is to support the King 
 in quiet as long as he may have to live ; and to 
 strengthen the hands of the Princess of Wales, as 
 much as may be, in order to maintain her power 
 in the Government, in case of the misfortune of 
 the King's demise. The means, as I said, suggest 
 themselves a union of all those in action who
 
 42 CHATHAM 
 
 are really united in their wishes as to the object ; 
 this might easily be effected, but it is my opinion 
 it will certainly not be done." l 
 
 On the whole, he thought Fox stood " first of 
 any " for the Chancellorship of the Exchequer ; 
 but it is interesting to observe that Murray 
 occurred to him as a possible alternative. " I call 
 this an idea only ; but I think it not visionary, 
 were it accompanied by proper temperaments." 
 In a letter which he wrote to Richard Grenville, 2 
 now Lord Temple, he described Fox's position as 
 more precarious : " Fox," he says, " is odious, and 
 will have difficulty to stand in a future time." 
 Other passages in these letters make it clear that 
 he expected the claims of his little party of the 
 Grenvilles to be substantially recognised, and he 
 gave shrewd advice as to how they might be 
 furthered. " Give me leave," he wrote to Temple, 
 " to recommend to your lordship a little gather- 
 ing of friends about you at dinners, without 
 ostentation ... a dinner to the Yorkes 3 very 
 seasonable." 
 
 Eventually George Grenville obtained the 
 Treasurership of the Navy, Lyttelton the Cofferer- 
 ship of the Household; and Legge, another friend of 
 Pitt's, the Chancellorship of the Exchequer. Pitt 
 himself was ignored. Newcastle and Hardwicke, 
 
 1 Gren-uille Papers, i. 106. 2 Ibid. i. 112. 
 
 3 i.e. Lord Hardwicke and his relatives.
 
 THE HOUR OF CRISIS 43 
 
 the Lord Chancellor, both seemed to realise that 
 this required explanation, and each despatched a 
 long apology to Pitt, the burden of which was 
 that they had done all they could to break down 
 the King's aversion, that an impression had been 
 made, and that Pitt should not give up hope for 
 the future. But this only threw him into deeper 
 dejection, and he replied to Hardwicke with one 
 of those laments about the Royal disfavour which 
 show him at his weakest and his worst : 
 
 " All ardour for public business is really extin- 
 guished in my mind, and I am totally deprived of 
 all consideration by which alone I could have 
 been of any use. The weight of immovable 
 Royal displeasure is a load too great to move 
 under ; it must crush any man ; it has sunk and 
 broke me. I succumb, and wish for nothing but 
 a decent and innocent retreat, wherein I may no 
 longer, by continuing in the public stream of pro- 
 motion, for ever stick fast aground, and afford 
 to the world the ridiculous spectacle of being 
 passed by every boat that navigates the same 
 river." * 
 
 Brighter events, however, before long chased 
 away his melancholy. He remained in the 
 country, recovering health, and seeking consola- 
 tion for the disappointment of his ambition among 
 " verdant hills and sequestered valleys." In his 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, i. 105.
 
 44 CHATHAM 
 
 private life this was a most eventful summer, for 
 in it he became engaged to Hester Grenville, 
 the sister of George Grenville and Earl Temple. 
 They were married in November, a week before 
 Parliament met. 
 
 Their surviving correspondence amply disproves 
 Shelburne's assertion that there was no sentiment 
 in the marriage. For twenty-three years Pitt and 
 his wife lived together in the most unbroken 
 intimacy of affection. Henry Fox, the model 
 husband, in this respect and in his courage alone 
 resembling Pitt, did not write more ardently and 
 unremittingly to his Lady Caroline than did Pitt 
 to Lady Hester. Alike amid the splendid triumphs 
 of his administration, and the anxieties of the great 
 political campaign for the Americans in his last 
 years, Pitt always turned for full enjoyment and 
 for consolation to the little circle at Hayes or 
 Burton Pynsent, and during the dark hour of his 
 eclipse Lady Hester tended him with unrelaxing 
 care. 
 
 On the meeting of Parliament it was seen that 
 Pitt and Fox were prepared, temporarily at least, 
 to act in common and indulge their resentment. 
 Pitt, who it must be remembered still held office 
 under Newcastle, gave the first sign of rebellion 
 in a debate on the Berwick election petition very 
 early in the session. The scene was characteristic, 
 and illustrates Pitt's extraordinary command of
 
 THE HOUR OF CRISIS 45 
 
 the House of Commons. Disputed elections were 
 then, according to invariable custom, decided by 
 a party vote of the whole House, and on this par- 
 ticular occasion honourable members were listen- 
 ing with evident sympathy and enjoyment to 
 stories of bribery whose truth to nature their 
 own experience could attest. Pitt, who had been 
 listening in the gallery, suddenly descended to 
 the floor of the House, and in a few minutes con- 
 verted his hearers from jocularity to awe by a 
 solemn protest against such trifling, and then 
 startled them into amazed excitement by asking if 
 they were going to sit simply in order to "register 
 the arbitrary edicts of one too powerful a subject." l 
 The too powerful subject was, of course, Newcastle, 
 whose unhappy lieutenant, Sir Thomas Robinson, 
 was now placed in the most ridiculous position. 
 Pitt and Fox united to make his life intolerable, 
 and seldom can there have been a more powerful 
 oratorical combination. Pitt annihilated him with 
 lofty rebuke ; Fox, under cover of mock loyalty, 
 delivered ironical attacks. Still Newcastle did 
 not venture to dismiss Pitt. But at last, fearing 
 that the assault was being pressed too nearly 
 home, he approached Fox with the offer of a 
 Cabinet post at the beginning of 1755. 
 
 The negotiations which ensued carried Fox 
 
 1 Fox to Hartington, November *6, 1754 ; Waldegravc 
 Memoirs, Appendix.
 
 46 CHATHAM 
 
 into the Government and away from Pitt, and thus 
 dissolved their short-lived alliance. It had 
 never been quite whole-hearted. Pitt's own 
 retrospect of it may be found in the diary of 
 Dodington, to whom later in the year he confided 
 a view of Fox's conduct which shows distinct 
 traces of mortification. " He (Pitt) was ready in 
 the last session to proceed to any lengths against 
 the Duke of Newcastle ; but, when it came to the 
 pinch, Mr. Fox acknowledged that he could not, 
 and went on, through the whole session, com- 
 promising everything when it began to pinch 
 the Reading election ; the linen affair ; and, when 
 Ireland began to be a thorn, Mr. Fox's great 
 friend, Lord Hartington, was to take it out ; that 
 by these means Mr. Fox had taken the smooth 
 part and had left him to be fallen upon ; Fox had 
 risen upon his shoulders, but he did not blame 
 him ; and he only showed me how impossible it 
 was for two to act together who did not stand 
 upon the same ground." In truth, the union of 
 Fox and Pitt, though more defensible than that 
 famous coalition some thirty years afterwards 
 between Lord North and Fox's son, was one 
 which in the nature of things could not per- 
 manently endure. 
 
 Yet Pitt must not now be regarded as standing 
 quite alone. He had behind him the whole 
 influence of Leicester House, with which con-
 
 THE HOUR OF CRISIS 47 
 
 nection he had once more entered into relations. 
 Its presiding genius was now the Princess Dowager. 
 For some time after the death of her husband, 
 Frederick Prince of Wales, she had practically 
 ceased to mix in politics ; but now the King's 
 design to marry her son to a princess of Brunswick 
 had fired all her maternal jealousy and driven her 
 into undisguised opposition. She turned all the 
 more readily to Pitt as an ally because he had 
 just broken with Fox, who was closely connected 
 with her sworn foe the Duke of Cumberland. 
 
 Such was Pitt's position at a moment of 
 immense importance in history. It may be said 
 without exaggeration that the destiny of half 
 the globe was at stake. Every question which 
 had been left open at the Peace of Aix-la- 
 Chapelle, or had arisen since, was now ready to 
 be determined. In the East had just been seen 
 the astonishing career of Dupleix. That great 
 Frenchman had made it clear that there was no 
 limit to the domination which a European Power 
 might exercise in India. The English had 
 borrowed his weapons, and, aided by the extra- 
 ordinary abundance of talent among their young 
 officers in India, above all by the daring genius 
 of Clive, they had defeated him and become 
 supreme in the Carnatic themselves. But the 
 contest was as yet by no means over, and behind 
 the fate of the Carnatic lay the fate of all India,
 
 48 CHATHAM 
 
 for it was impossible that the Europeans in the 
 peninsula should stand still. 
 
 In the other hemisphere the future of North 
 America awaited decision. Was the civilising 
 power of that great continent to be France or 
 England? The early history of their efforts in 
 America had been a rivalry between the genius 
 for settlement and the genius for exploration and 
 military enterprise. England possessed a group 
 of states stretching along the seaboard, which, 
 amid marked differences of individuality, showed 
 in their prosperous industry and the bracing 
 atmosphere of their social and political life all 
 the promise and vitality to be expected from the 
 colonising instincts of the race. France com- 
 bined paradoxically vast and vague possibilities 
 with a narrow and almost feudal regime. Her 
 intrepid explorers and devoted missionaries had, 
 in their passage through the wilderness and along 
 the great rivers, conceived large dreams of empire. 
 They saw in imagination the English colonists 
 confined to the strip of coast between the 
 Alleghanies and the sea, while the French, con- 
 trolling the chief arteries of the continent, the 
 Ohio and the Mississippi, expanded freely from 
 the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, 
 and exploited the heart of the continent and the 
 unknown Far West. The actual basis of the 
 French was Canada, a faithful reproduction of
 
 THE HOUR OF CRISIS 49 
 
 Old France, centralised, military, and rigidly 
 Catholic. The autocratic power wielded over 
 the whole dominion by great governors like 
 Frontenac, and the warlike spirit of their realm, 
 made it a formidable foe to the English colonies, 
 the very intensity of whose local patriotism 
 dissuaded them from general combination for 
 defence. Yet it was the English who were the 
 people of the future, and were to take and 
 transform into reality the ideas which French 
 genius had originated but was by the medieval 
 forms of French government forbidden to fulfil. 
 
 The pursuit of their transcontinental schemes 
 by the French took practical shape in the project 
 of connecting Canada with the far distant outpost 
 of New Orleans in the south by a chain of forts 
 along the Ohio and the Mississippi. This 
 brought them into collision with the English 
 settlers. The successive French garrisons were 
 Ticonderoga, at the southern end of Lake 
 Champlain ; Fort Niagara, between Lake Ontario 
 and Lake Erie ; and Fort Duquesne, at the head 
 of the Ohio. George Washington with a little 
 force from Virginia had marched on the latter in 
 1754, but had been surrounded and forced to 
 capitulate. Next year General Braddock was 
 despatched against it with a force that included 
 two regiments of British regulars. Braddock, a 
 martinet trained in the school of the Low 
 4
 
 50 CHATHAM 
 
 Countries, was helpless before the strange 
 phenomenon of bush - fighting, and when am- 
 bushed by a force of French and Indians his 
 troops were disastrously swept away. 
 
 This encounter alone would have brought 
 about a European rupture between France and 
 England, but in the meantime there had been 
 further hostilities as well. Boscawen with a 
 British fleet had started in pursuit of a great 
 French squadron that was sailing for Quebec, 
 and had intercepted and captured two of its 
 vessels. As soon as the news of this was brought 
 to Europe the French Ambassador was recalled 
 from London. Yet there was no declaration of 
 war. The French Government was waiting to 
 put England still further in the wrong ; the 
 English Government was in a state of complete 
 paralysis. The King was in Hanover, and 
 Newcastle was weeping and waving his hands at 
 home. His indecision and incompetence reached 
 a climax when the question arose as to what 
 instructions should be given to Hawke, who was 
 about to sail with a new fleet. Finally, an 
 extraordinary decision was arrived at by which 
 it was agreed that war was not to be declared, 
 but that Hawke should be instructed to seize all 
 French vessels. 
 
 The conflict was now so far seen to be 
 inevitable that England began to look about her
 
 SIR EDWARD HAWKE 
 After the portrait by G. Knapton
 
 THE HOUR OF CRISIS 51 
 
 for allies. She first asked Austria to join her in 
 the defence of the Low Countries and Hanover. 
 Austria, dissatisfied with the assistance given by 
 England in the last war, declined. Then the 
 British Government turned to Russia, and in 
 September 1755 Hanbury Williams concluded 
 a treaty at St. Petersburg, in which England 
 agreed to take into her pay 55,000 Russian 
 troops posted on the Livonian border. The 
 treaty itself was destined to vanish into air, but 
 indirectly it procured England the most efficient 
 ally in Europe. For Frederick of Prussia, 
 hearing of its consummation, and well aware 
 besides of the sleepless hostility of Maria Theresa 
 and the intrigues of Saxony, saw that only 
 prompt action could prevent his being crushed 
 by an irresistible European combination. Dis- 
 trust of France, and dread of Austria and Russia, 
 decided him. He made overtures to England, 
 and on January 16, 1756, was signed the Treaty 
 of Westminster, guaranteeing the neutrality 
 of Germany, and binding England and Prussia, 
 in the compact phrase of Carlyle, "to attack 
 jointly any and every armed non-German set- 
 ting foot on German soil." This action on 
 the part of Frederick produced yet another 
 change in the relations of the Powers, and that 
 one of the most startling in the history of the 
 eighteenth century, for it transformed the whole
 
 52 CHATHAM 
 
 fabric of Continental diplomacy. France, 
 abandoning all the traditions of her foreign 
 policy, became by the Treaty of Versailles 
 Austria's ally. Seven years before, Kaunitz, 
 Maria Theresa's Foreign Minister, had pointed out 
 that only by means of a French alliance could 
 Austria recover her lost territory and humble 
 Prussia, and his Sovereign had grasped eagerly 
 at the idea. What once would have seemed im- 
 possible had been accomplished by the untiring 
 efforts of the great Austrian diplomatist, by 
 the conviction of France, brought home to her 
 through the last war, that contests with Austria 
 were costly and indecisive, and above all by 
 Frederick's last move. The first Treaty of 
 Versailles between the two countries was indeed 
 merely defensive, binding Austria to remain 
 neutral in the Franco-English War, and binding 
 France to leave the Austrian Netherlands intact. 
 But it was in itself a diplomatic revolution, and 
 it formed the prelude to the second Treaty of 
 Versailles, concluded the following year, by 
 which France definitely committed herself to the 
 Austro- Russian schemes for the partition of 
 Prussia. 
 
 Thus the Continental Powers slowly sorted 
 themselves in view of war. In England, too, the 
 lines of division were being drawn more clearly. 
 The paramount need of the hour was a Cabinet
 
 THE HOUR OF CRISIS 53 
 
 that could be trusted to carry on the war with 
 intelligence and vigour. It was quite evident 
 that this was too much to expect from Newcastle. 
 Accordingly, on the one side stood a discredited 
 Ministry ; on the other an exasperated people, 
 and the apostle of efficiency, Pitt. Pitt was still 
 Paymaster, but he remained in the attitude of 
 opposition which he had taken up during his 
 short alliance with Fox. Newcastle endeavoured 
 to purchase his support, or even his silence, with 
 offers of further promotion, but without avail. 
 " Pitt," says Lord Waldegrave, " was very 
 explicit, and fairly let them know that he 
 expected to be Secretary of State, and would 
 not content himself with any meaner employ- 
 ment." x 
 
 On November 13, 1755, at the reassembling 
 of Parliament, Pitt had denounced the union 
 of Newcastle and Fox in a famous and still 
 unforgotten parallel. They were the Rhone and 
 Saone of politics ; " the one a gentle, feeble, 
 languid stream, and, though languid, of no depth ; 
 the other a boisterous and impetuous torrent ; 
 but different as they are they meet at last." 
 Five days later he was dismissed, together with 
 Legge, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and 
 George Grenville. This placed him in financial 
 straits, but his brother-in-law Lord Temple, who, 
 
 1 Waldegrave Memoirs, pp. 44-45.
 
 54 CHATHAM 
 
 with all his faults, never lacked generosity, came 
 to the rescue. The day after Pitt's dismissal he 
 wrote to Lady Hester : " I must entreat you to 
 make use of all your interest with Mr. Pitt to 
 give his brother Temple leave to become his 
 debtor for a thousand pounds a year till better 
 times ; Mr. Pitt will never have it in his power 
 to confer so great an obligation upon, dear Lady 
 Hester, your most truly affectionate brother, 
 Temple." l 
 
 Pitt's hands were now free, and he was 
 resolved to make the most of his position. The 
 menace of French invasion brooded over the 
 country, and the only expedient of defence that 
 the Cabinet could think of was the importation 
 of Hessian and Hanoverian defenders, to the 
 shame and disgust of the English people. Pitt 
 spoke as a statesman and a patriot when he 
 declared for a national militia in preference to 
 foreign mercenaries. He appeared in a new 
 light in Parliament by introducing a lucid and 
 comprehensive scheme for reviving that body, 
 and, though his Bill was rejected at the beginning 
 of 1756, it formed the substance of the Militia 
 Act of 1757. 
 
 Then the cloud that had been gathering on the 
 northern coast of France, and seemed about to 
 burst over England, disappeared again, and it was 
 
 1 Grenville Papers, \. 149.
 
 THE HOUR OF CRISIS 55 
 
 seen that the French preparations here were only 
 an elaborate feint to disguise a descent upon the 
 true objective, Minorca. On April 10, 1756, a 
 naval squadron under La Galissoniere, with trans- 
 ports carrying an army of 16,000 men under the 
 Due de Richelieu, weighed anchor from Toulon. 
 Newcastle and his colleagues had information of 
 these movements three months before, but they 
 were incredulous and criminally apathetic. Byng, 
 with a wholly inadequate fleet, was not despatched 
 to relieve Minorca till April 7. On May 20 he 
 encountered La Galissoniere off Port Mahon, 
 and after a doubtful engagement fell back again 
 on Gibraltar. Blakeney, a veteran of eighty, 
 held out dauntlessly in Fort St. Philip, but after 
 Byng's withdrawal its capture became only a 
 question of time. On June 28 the British were 
 obliged to capitulate, and Minorca fell into the 
 hands of France. 
 
 All the pent-up fury of the English people 
 broke out when the calamity was known. There 
 was a general cry for a victim, and Newcastle 
 was in terror, as well he might be. Minorca was 
 not the only catastrophe of this unhappy year. 
 More disasters were falling upon the country : in 
 June, the seizure of Calcutta by Suraj-ud-Dowlah, 
 and the atrocity of the Black Hole ; in August, 
 the loss of Oswego. 
 
 Pitt at this crisis described Newcastle with
 
 56 CHATHAM 
 
 great vividness and humour as a child driving a 
 go-cart close to the edge of a precipice. He was, 
 he said, bound to take the reins out of his hands. 
 It seemed at last likely that he would, for in the 
 autumn of 1756 Newcastle was deprived of his 
 two ablest subordinates. Fox, too astute to stay 
 in a falling Government, deserted him in October, 
 and Murray abandoned the House of Commons 
 for the vacant Chief Justiceship of the King's 
 Bench. Newcastle, after appealing fruitlessly to 
 Pitt, to Grenville, and to Egmont, resigned in 
 November and brought his Ministry to an end not 
 a moment too soon. The King then commissioned 
 Fox to form a Ministry with Pitt, but the latter 
 refused to act with his rival. Next the Duke of 
 Devonshire was appealed to, and after much 
 negotiation decided definitely for Pitt and not 
 for Fox. Pitt, therefore, now for the first time 
 attained high office as Secretary of State. Devon- 
 shire was First Lord of the Treasury and titular 
 leader ; Temple took the Admiralty, and George 
 Grenville the Treasurership of the Navy. Legge 
 became Chancellor of the Exchequer.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 
 
 The Devonshire-Pitt Ministry Cumberland contrives its 
 fall Administrative anarchy Coalition of Pitt and 
 Newcastle Fortunes of the war Campaigns of 1758 
 Brilliant successes of 1759 Continued victories in 1760 
 Pitt as a War Minister Accession of George m His 
 political partisanship Opening of peace negotiations 
 Pitt and Choiseul Intrusion of Spain Pitt's "Advice 
 to the King " The Cabinet refuses to follow him, and 
 he resigns. 
 
 IT was now to be seen whether Pitt was a man 
 of action or a mere declaimer. In this first 
 short Ministry of four months he had not time to 
 do more than lay foundations, but what he did 
 was enough to show that a new spirit had been 
 infused into the Government. The army estab- 
 lishment was largely augmented, and, instead 
 of the single battalion which Newcastle proposed 
 to despatch to America, Pitt sent eight. Most 
 remarkable of his measures was that authorising 
 the raising of two Highland regiments (Eraser's 
 
 67
 
 58 CHATHAM 
 
 and Montgomery's). They were not the first, 
 for the Black Watch was already in existence 
 and had been conspicuous at Fontenoy ; but no 
 new regiments had been raised since the Forty- 
 five. By thus boldly ignoring Jacobitism, Pitt 
 did more than any man to extinguish it as a 
 hostile force. He drew unhesitatingly on the 
 magnificent fighting material of Scotland, and 
 diverted the clan spirit into the service of the 
 country. Though these particular corps, which 
 had been suggested to him as specially fitted for 
 the American campaign, were afterwards dis- 
 banded, a precedent was set by their formation ; 
 and they were the lineal forerunners of the 
 splendid regiments which are still with us and 
 have given so freely of Scottish lives and Scottish 
 valour under the British flag. Pitt was un- 
 feignedly proud of them, and in one of his 
 American speeches nine years later he said it 
 was his boast to have looked for merit among the 
 mountains of the north, to have called it out, and 
 to have drawn into the service of the Crown a 
 hardy and intrepid race. 
 
 By another measure a militia was substituted 
 for the intruding Hessians and Hanoverians. 
 Though its numbers were cut down by the House 
 of Lords to 32,000 half its proposed strength 
 it rid the country of an incubus and set free the 
 regulars for their proper function of a foreign
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 59 
 
 service army. Finally Pitt, whom nearer know- 
 ledge was fast converting to a belief in Frederick 
 and in the possibilities of conquering America in 
 Germany, carried the subsidies for Prussia and 
 Hanover, dismissing all charges of inconsistency 
 with his accustomed nonchalance. 
 
 In spite of these practical proofs of its energy, 
 the position of the Ministry was extremely un- 
 stable. On one point Pitt, and Temple with him, 
 stood in complete opposition to the cry of the 
 people. This was on the question of the fate of 
 Byng. The finding of the court-martial upon 
 him was that he had not done his utmost to 
 relieve Minorca or destroy the French squadron, 
 and the Twelfth Article of War provided no 
 alternative in such a case to the penalty of death. 
 The Court, however, added to the sentence a 
 striking recommendation to mercy, setting forth 
 " the distresses of their minds " at the sentence 
 which the undue severity of the Article obliged 
 them to impose. The King, the late Ministers, 
 and the people were bent on disregarding this 
 plea and victimising the admiral. Pitt threw 
 himself into the breach, and with unfaltering 
 though unavailing courage did his utmost to 
 shield Byng from the storm of vengeance that 
 should by rights have fallen on the head of the 
 Ministry which sent him out. 
 
 Yet it was no popular dissatisfaction that now
 
 60 CHATHAM 
 
 threw out Pitt, but a Court intrigue. The King 
 complained that Pitt was prolix in his interviews, 
 and Temple pertly familiar, and he was quite 
 prepared to listen to the Duke of Cumberland 
 when the latter objected to taking up the 
 command in Hanover while Pitt held office at 
 home. Accordingly, on April 5, 1757, Temple 
 was dismissed, and Pitt and Legge, who refused 
 to resign, were driven out directly afterwards. 
 The Devonshire - Pitt Ministry was no more. 
 Brief as had been its tenure of power, it showed 
 more promise of vigorous administration than 
 England had known for years. It also centred 
 the hopes of the country on Pitt as the statesman 
 of the future. Now the rain of gold boxes, which 
 Horace Walpole's phrase has made historic, de- 
 scended on him. All the great towns offered 
 him their freedom, and the people, long so torpid 
 and lethargic, awoke in this common outburst of 
 sympathy to a new sense of national life. 
 
 For eleven weeks, in the presence of a great 
 war, there was complete political chaos. Then 
 at the end of June Pitt returned to power. He 
 could not be kept out of office, but the problem was 
 how to keep him in. Chesterfield's mediation 
 succeeded in effecting an alliance between him 
 and his old leader Newcastle, the master of 
 Parliamentary votes. Thus was formed the great 
 administration to which Pitt contributed his
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 61 
 
 genius, and Newcastle his indispensable majority. 
 Such a coalition was the only means of governing 
 the country at the moment, and it was amply 
 justified by results. It enabled Pitt, feeling that 
 the ground was firm under him, to devote himself 
 exclusively to the conduct of the war. Thus 
 fortified, he entered with supreme confidence on 
 his work. He had told the Duke of Devonshire 
 that he could save the country and that no one 
 else could. This was not the intoxication of 
 vanity. More fully than any of his rivals he 
 realised the greatness of the task before him, 
 but he felt himself not unequal to it. 
 
 Temple, Legge, and Anson, all found places in 
 the Ministry. So, most singularly, did Fox. He 
 took the Paymastership, frankly accepting it as 
 a sinecure, a short cut to wealth. It was probably 
 the most ignoble decision of his life ; for by it 
 he deliberately effaced himself and sat down in 
 silence as a subordinate of his great antagonist 
 in order to make money. Such an action would 
 have been venial in the case of most of his fellow- 
 politicians ; but Fox is too great a man to be 
 easily forgiven. 
 
 When Pitt came back to office the war was 
 everywhere in full blast. Frederick had taken 
 the offensive in 1756, overrunning Saxony, captur- 
 ing the Saxon army, and defeating the Austrians 
 at Lobositz. In 1 757 armies from every quarter of
 
 62 CHATHAM 
 
 Europe French, Austrian, and Russian threat- 
 ened him. He committed to Cumberland, who 
 came over in the spring, the problem of watching 
 the French in Germany, while he himself turned 
 suddenly on Bohemia. On May 6 he attacked 
 the Austrians on the plateau east of Prague, de- 
 feated them after a fiercely contested struggle, 
 and beleaguered the city. 
 
 The siege continued till the middle of June, 
 when Frederick encountered a second Austrian 
 army under Daun advancing tardily to the relief 
 of Prague. Daun stood on the defensive, strongly 
 posted ; but he owed his victory over Frederick 
 on this occasion mainly to the stubbornness of a 
 Saxon colonel, who at the critical moment dis- 
 obeyed his order to retire. The battle of Kolin, 
 however won, was decisive. It compelled 
 Frederick to raise the siege of Prague, and 
 robbed him of all the fruits of his earlier 
 victory. In July disaster overtook Cumberland. 
 He was defeated by the French at Hastenbeck, 
 and on September 8 signed the Convention of 
 Klosterseven, by which the allied army evacuated 
 Hanover. 
 
 If the outlook on the Continent was dark, the 
 news from America was no less mortifying. Lord 
 Loudoun's expedition against Louisburg was never 
 seriously pressed, and Montcalm, following up his 
 success in the previous year at Oswego, captured
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 63 
 
 Fort William Henry in August 1757. It was 
 little wonder that for a moment Pitt's mind 
 sank into despondency. " The day is come/' he 
 wrote to the British Ambassador at Madrid, 
 "when the very inadequate benefits of the 
 Treaty of Utrecht, the indelible reproach of the 
 last generation, are become the necessary but 
 almost unattainable wish of the present." l He 
 even resorted to offering Gibraltar to Spain if she 
 would assist in the recovery of Minorca. 
 
 Nor could the nation as yet take much comfort 
 from his own accession to power, for the first 
 enterprise planned by him proved an almost 
 unrelieved failure. On September 8 a force of 
 ten battalions under Sir John Mordaunt, who had 
 Conway, Cornwallis, and Wolfe as his subordinates, 
 started for Rochefort under the escort of Sir 
 Edward Hawke with sixteen sail of the line, 
 three frigates, five sloops, "bomb ketches, fire 
 ships, and busses." Thanks mainly to the 
 gallantry of Richard Howe, who commanded the 
 Magnanime, the fortifications of the He d' Aix were 
 destroyed and the small island itself taken ; but 
 the main object of the expedition, the attack on 
 Rochefort, was abandoned in view of the French 
 preparations for its defence. Amid general 
 disgust and much recrimination Pitt's armada 
 came home. His only overt commentary on its 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, i. 251.
 
 64 CHATHAM 
 
 proceedings was to promote Wolfe, who " on the 
 day after we had taken the island of Aix publicly 
 offered to do the business with five hundred 
 men and three ships only." 
 
 In spite of these discouragements Pitt decided 
 to go forward and not back. Cumberland had 
 now returned in disgrace from the Continent. 
 Pitt endeavoured with much generosity to shield 
 his old enemy from the anger of the King, reply- 
 ing, when his Majesty asserted that he had given 
 the Duke no authorisation to sign a treaty, " But 
 full powers, Sir, very full powers." But though 
 he was prepared to do his best for Cumberland 
 he had no intention of ratifying his policy, which 
 Prussia was already stigmatising loudly as a 
 desertion. On his recommendation, England 
 repudiated the convention and took the Hano- 
 verian army into her pay. If its leadership had 
 been entrusted again to Cumberland, or a com- 
 mander of his school, history might have repeated 
 itself; but Pitt discovered in Prince Ferdinand 
 of Brunswick, who was now put at its head, a 
 great general and an efficient ally. 
 
 As if to justify Pitt's onward policy, news of 
 successes began now, at the end of 1757, at last 
 to come in. Before Parliament reassembled on 
 December 1 it was known in England that 
 Frederick had scattered to the winds the great 
 composite army of Soubise and Prince Hildburg-
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 65 
 
 hausen at Rossbach, thereby ridding Prussia of 
 the menace of a French invasion from the west. 
 Still more momentous, though as yet its full 
 significance could only have been dimly gauged, 
 was the tidings of dive's victory of Plassey, which 
 had been won in June. 
 
 The estimates for 1758, which were now sub- 
 mitted to Parliament, showed that Pitt was 
 determined to prosecute the war with all possible 
 vigour. The British army was raised to a total 
 strength of practically 100,000 men, 30,000 being 
 allotted to service in the colonies and Gibraltar. 
 The personnel of the navy was also increased. 
 Frederick was voted an annual subsidy of 
 670,000, a sum most admirably invested. On 
 these foundations a comprehensive campaign * 
 in America was planned for the next year. 
 General Abercrombie was substituted for Lord 
 Loudoun in the chief command. Three junior 
 officers of marked ability Amherst, Lord Howe, 
 and Wolfe occupied conspicuous posts. A 
 triple attack was to be delivered against Canada. 
 In the north, Amherst, with Wolfe as one of his 
 brigadiers, was to descend on Cape Breton Island 
 and capture Louisburg ; in the centre, Aber- 
 
 1 An admirably lucid account of this, as of the other 
 British operations in the Seven Years' War, is given by Mr. 
 Fortescue in his History of the British Army, to which I am 
 much indebted in this chapter. 
 
 5
 
 66 CHATHAM 
 
 crombie, with Howe under him, was to advance 
 upon Ticonderoga, along the most direct line 
 to Montreal and Quebec ; and in the south, 
 Brigadier Forbes was to march against Fort 
 Duquesne. Boscawen convoyed the troops with 
 a great fleet to America, while Hawke with one 
 squadron watched the French Atlantic ports, 
 and Admiral Osborne with another blockaded the 
 exit from Toulon. 
 
 On June 8, 1758, Wolfe forced a landing on 
 the rock-bound coast of Louisburg, and on July 
 27 the fortress, after an incessant cannonade 
 from Amherst's batteries, surrendered. "The 
 Dunkirk of America," the great naval base of 
 France in the western seas, had passed for ever 
 from her hands. It was here and now that Wolfe 
 uttered his famous prophecy about North America : 
 "This will some time hence be a vast empire, 
 the seat of power and learning. Nature has 
 refused it nothing, and there will grow a people 
 out of our little spot, England, that will fill this 
 vast space and divide this portion of the globe 
 with the Spaniards, who are possessed of the 
 other half." 
 
 Meanwhile Abercrombie had moved upon 
 Ticonderoga. On July 5 his imposing force, 1 6,000 
 strong, rowed up Lake George, and next day 
 his army landed on the west shore of the chan- 
 nel uniting Lake George with Lake Champlain,
 
 WOLFE 
 From the portrait by Scliaak in the National Portrait Gallery
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 67 
 
 and the leading column encountered the French 
 in the forest. Here an unfortunate calamity 
 overtook the expedition. In the skirmish Howe 
 fell, and his loss was irreparable. He was the 
 soul of the enterprise, and more fully than any 
 other British officer he had imbibed the principles 
 of colonial warfare, which he learnt from the great 
 American ranger Rogers. Not only in America 
 but in Europe he was the British army's pride. 
 Pitt wrote on hearing of his death : " The loss 
 of Lord Howe afflicts me with more than a 
 public sorrow. He was, by the universal voice 
 of army and people, a character of ancient times ; 
 a complete model of military virtue in all its 
 branches." l Worse still was to follow. On July 8 
 Abercrombie, himself lingering at a distance from 
 the field, delivered a disastrous frontal attack 
 upon the breastworks and almost impenetrable 
 abattis of Ticonderoga. The British loss was 
 terrific; the Black Watch alone left nearly five 
 hundred on the field. Montcalm with a little force 
 of not 4000 men had rolled away Abercrombie's 
 army in disastrous confusion. One gleam of 
 success, however, lit up these central operations 
 before they closed. In August, Bradstreet, a New 
 Englander, took a flying column from the main 
 army and captured Fort Frontenac on Lake 
 Ontario. This cut the French line of communica- 
 
 1 Pitt to Grenville, Grenville Papers, i. z6z.
 
 68 CHATHAM 
 
 tion, and made possible the success of the third 
 line of attack that upon Fort Duquesne. 
 
 For this, Brigadier Forbes had Montgomery's 
 Highlanders and a motley host of provincials, far 
 inferior in quality to those with Abercrombie. 
 Forbes was himself a Scot, trained first in the 
 school of Continental and then of colonial war ; 
 full of expedients and of enterprise, as his prefer- 
 ence of the short untrodden route by Pennsylvania 
 to the longer but familiar road to Fort Duquesne 
 showed. On this expedition he displayed 
 wonderful tenacity. Racked by an internal 
 disease so painful that he had to be carried on a 
 litter, he pushed on through rain and snow across 
 the mountains until in the late autumn he reached 
 his goal. Bradstreet's capture of Fort Frontenac 
 had delivered Fort Duquesne into his hands, for 
 the French commander, finding his supplies cut 
 off", was obliged to evacuate it. On November 25 
 Forbes took possession of the abandoned post, 
 rechristening it Pittsburg. 
 
 Meanwhile in Europe Prince Ferdinand, who 
 had taken over the allied army towards the end 
 of 1757, steadily drove back the French, and on 
 June 23, 1758, completely defeated them at 
 Crefeldt. This opportune confirmation of Pitt's 
 policy determined him to engage still more 
 vigorously in the German War. " We are send- 
 ing," he wrote to Grenville directly after it,
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 69 
 
 "twelve squadrons of English cavalry to this 
 glorious school of war." l A few days later it 
 was decided to send infantry as well, and the 
 total number of reinforcements was more than 
 tripled. 
 
 Frederick in this year encountered the Russians 
 for the first time. The victory of Leuthen over 
 the Austrians (December 5, 1757) had given 
 Silesia into his hands ; and he now turned on the 
 great Russian army, which had been slowly 
 advancing westwards through Prussia, and in a 
 three days' battle at the end of August defeated 
 it after much carnage at Zorndorf. Though 
 during his absence the Austrians again assailed 
 Silesia and Saxony, and though he was severely 
 checked by Daun at Hochkirchen in October, he 
 succeeded with consummate adroitness in clearing 
 both countries before the end of the year. 
 
 Pitt's attention was by no means exclusively 
 absorbed by the Canadian and the German Wars. 
 In the course of 1758 he sent out two expeditions 
 to the Guinea coast, and captured the French 
 West African settlements of Goree and Senegal. 
 With less success he resumed nearer home his 
 raids on the French coast. Two elaborate attacks 
 were designed one upon St. Malo and one on 
 Cherbourg. The first was quite abortive, and, 
 though the second succeeded in destroying the 
 
 1 Grenville Papers, i. 244.
 
 70 CHATHAM 
 
 docks and shipping of Cherbourg, it was marred 
 by a costly reverse to the British infantry by 
 land. 
 
 These descents on France were by far the 
 least successful part of Pitt's policy, and whatever 
 moral effect they may have produced on the 
 French was probably more than counterbalanced 
 by the loss in time, life, and money which they 
 occasioned to the British army. Yet the record 
 of 1758 was on the whole a shining testimony to 
 Pitt. A great step forward had been taken in 
 America ; in Germany a general had been dis- 
 covered for the allies in Prince Ferdinand, and 
 Frederick, our ally, was contending indomitably 
 against vast odds ; while the successes in West 
 Africa foreshadowed still further colonial ac- 
 quisitions. 
 
 If 1758 had been successful, 1759 was glorious. 
 English history hardly records a more memorable 
 year. For America Pitt had again devised a 
 great scheme of operations. Amherst, who had 
 been appointed to the chief command in place of 
 Abercrombie, was to advance, as the latter had 
 tried to do, northwards by Ticonderoga and 
 Crown Point. Wolfe was to move directly on 
 Quebec, and it was intended that Amherst, when 
 his own work was done, should join his sub- 
 ordinate there or divert French attention by an 
 attack on Montreal. Amherst's march proved
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 71 
 
 quite successful as far as it went, but it was too 
 slow. The French fell back before him, abandon- 
 ing Ticonderoga and Crown Point, and both these 
 coveted posts passed into his hands. Another 
 British column captured Fort Niagara, thus finally 
 severing Canada from the French outposts in the 
 west. But it was now August, and, by the time 
 Amherst was ready to move forward again from 
 Crown Point, the campaigning season was almost 
 over. The diversion could not be executed, and 
 the northern army was left to fight its battles by 
 itself. 
 
 There is not space here, nor perhaps is there 
 need, to narrate once more the heroic and familiar 
 tale of Wolfe. The skilful navigation of the St. 
 Lawrence, followed by the long and apparently 
 hopeless leaguer of Quebec ; the bombardment of 
 the city ; the daring passage of the fleet into the 
 upper channel of the river ; Wolfe's abortive 
 attack, wrecked by the impetuosity of his 
 grenadiers, upon the French lines at Beauport ; 
 his illness and recovery ; the landing by night at 
 the Anse du Foulon, and the appearance of 
 British troops on the tableland in the dim light 
 of dawn ; the infatuated decision of the French to 
 give battle ; the triumph of discipline by which 
 the British reserved their fire and then delivered 
 a volley, the blasting effect of which has hardly a 
 parallel in war; Wolfe's fall in the moment of
 
 72 CHATHAM 
 
 victory, all this is one of the best-known passages 
 in the military annals of our race. Indescribable 
 elation was felt in England at the news of the 
 battle of Quebec, mixed with mourning for the 
 loss of Wolfe. This was but the bare tribute due 
 to an achievement which determined the history 
 of a continent and produced results the full and 
 final operation of which we can hardly even yet 
 foresee. 
 
 Wolfe had owed not a little of his success to 
 the admirable co - operation of the navy, and 
 everywhere in this year the supremacy of British 
 sea-power became apparent. France, ignoring 
 that supremacy, had conceived the design of 
 invading England and Scotland a design of 
 which Thurot's momentary seizure of Carrick- 
 fergus in 1760 proved the only outcome. The 
 main scheme depended on the junction of the 
 Toulon squadron with that of Brest. This was 
 prevented by Boscawen, who gave chase to the 
 French Mediterranean fleet when it slipped out 
 in August, and crushed it on the Portuguese 
 coast at Lagos. The crowning blow was delivered 
 by Hawke in November. Gales had driven him 
 into Torbay for shelter, and allowed Conflans 
 with the Brest squadron to escape. Returning, 
 he followed the French fleet with superb coolness 
 into the reefs and shoals of Quiberon, and there, 
 in a raging storm and formidable sea, ground the
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 73 
 
 enemy to pieces on a lee shore. Few naval 
 victories have been more marvellously snatched 
 from forbidding circumstances. 
 
 In the Eastera seas also the influence of the 
 British navy was decisive. This was the last 
 phase of the struggle for the dominance of India, 
 in which both the French power and the Dutch 
 were to fall ; but England's success would have 
 been impossible but for her mastery of the sea. 
 It was this that enabled her to throw reinforce- 
 ments into India at the hour of need, and the 
 unflagging persistence of Pococke, who com- 
 manded the British fleet on the Coromandel 
 coast, drove the French squadron under d'Ache 
 from Indian waters, and thus sealed the fate of 
 Lally's efforts by land. In the military operations 
 of 1759 in India the British name that stands out 
 most prominently is that of Colonel Forde. At 
 the beginning of the year he was campaigning 
 in the Northern Sirkars. Capturing Masulipatam 
 and its French garrison in the face of tremendous 
 odds, he destroyed by his victory French influence 
 at the court of Haidarabad. In the autumn he 
 went back to Bengal, and there, at Chander- 
 nagore and Badara, he twice defeated the Dutch, 
 and shattered for ever the hopes which they 
 had cherished of rebuilding their ascendency. 
 
 In the long tale of Imperial and maritime 
 achievements the first great success in the West
 
 74 CHATHAM 
 
 Indies must not be forgotten. Its record is one 
 of the romances of the war. Forbes's expedition 
 to Fort Duquesne, Wolfe's triumph at Quebec, 
 Forde's storming of Masulipatam, were not 
 carried out in the teeth of more deterring 
 obstacles than the conquest of Guadaloupe by 
 Barrington and his indefatigable subordinates. 
 After three months of unflagging effort the 
 island was subjugated at the beginning of May. 
 
 In Europe the year was made illustrious by 
 Prince Ferdinand's victory of Minden. It was 
 marred by Sackville's disgraceful inertia, " when 
 the moment came, and the man was not there, 
 except in that foggy, flabby, and for ever ruinous 
 condition." l But not even Sackville's short- 
 comings could dim the glory won by the British 
 infantry in their advance almost as astonishing 
 to onlookers as the Light Brigade's charge at 
 Balaclava which pulverised the seventy-three 
 squadrons of French cavalry massed in the centre 
 of the hostile line. Ferdinand's success was in- 
 valuable to Frederick, who was now struggling 
 desperately against the Russians, and in the same 
 August suffered the fearful defeat of Kunersdorf. 
 
 Frederick's straits and Wolfe's death were the 
 only misfortunes which chequered this extra- 
 ordinary year. Canada had been practically 
 gained, British supremacy in India was assured, 
 
 1 Carlyle, Frederick the Great, bk. xix. ch. 3.
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 75 
 
 and the conquest of the West Indies was begun ; 
 while in Europe both on land and sea, at Minden 
 and at Quiberon, England had won glorious 
 laurels. She stood indisputably first among the 
 Powers ; never before had she been so great. It 
 was no inappropriate coincidence that still fur- 
 ther ennobled 1759, already so illustrious, by the 
 names of the great men who were born in it 
 the younger Pitt, the poet Burns, and Wilberforce 
 the Parliamentarian and philanthropist. 
 
 In 1760 the tide of success seemed only to 
 rise higher. Pitt's estimates for the year had 
 provided for a fresh augmentation of the army, 
 and men and money were unsparingly voted. In 
 Canada he meant to reap the fruits of the 
 victories of the previous year and destroy the 
 last strongholds of French power. With this 
 object he planned a concentric attack upon 
 Montreal. The whole movement was excellently 
 organised by Amherst. At the beginning of 
 September three British forces his own, which 
 had descended the St. Lawrence from the west ; 
 Murray's, which had come up the river from 
 Quebec ; and Haviland's, which had advanced by 
 Lake Champlain from the south united before 
 Montreal ; and before this massed army of 1 7,000 
 men the French garrison, hardly more than 2000 
 strong, was helpless. On September 8 the city 
 surrendered, and Canada was won.
 
 76 CHATHAM 
 
 In the East Eyre Coote fought on January 
 22 the decisive battle of Wandewash, which 
 robbed France of Madras. At the beginning of 
 the next year followed the fall of Pondicherry, 
 closing Lally's tempestuous Indian career, and 
 annihilating the last vestige of French power in 
 the peninsula. In Europe Prince Ferdinand 
 obtained two brilliant successes at Emsdorf and 
 Warburg, the British cavalry on both occasions 
 behaving with great dash and gallantry. 
 
 We have been chronicling the mere outlines 
 of an era of unexampled triumphs. The bare 
 facts are sufficient to force on the mind some 
 conception of Pitt's abilities as an organiser of 
 victory ; but it will not be out of place here to 
 dwell somewhat more fully on what is generally 
 agreed to be one of his chief titles to enduring 
 fame. The genius of a great War Minister may 
 be primarily political or primarily military. He 
 may conceive a large national policy involving an 
 appeal to arms, and preside over its execution ; 
 or he may be a master of the technique of 
 military detail, a great departmental chief, and 
 an expert in the art of war. Bismarck may be 
 taken, broadly speaking, as an historic example 
 of the first class, Louvois of the second. Pitt 
 cannot strictly be compared to either, for in 
 many respects he played the part of both. 
 Bismarck could trust implicitly to Roon and
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 77 
 
 Moltke to forge and use his instrument of war ; 
 Pitt had, if not to create, at least to resuscitate 
 an army, and then to supervise its operations. 
 Pitt, again, was the supreme director of British 
 policy during his administration, whereas Louvois 
 was but the agent of Louis xiv. 
 
 Pitt's revival of the British army first claims 
 attention. When he came into office he found 
 depleted garrisons and a dispirited service. 
 With each year of his administration he effected 
 a progressive increase in the numbers of the 
 army ; and even more valuable than the aug- 
 mentation itself was the character of the steps 
 which he took in order to attain it. Mention 
 has been already made of his two most con- 
 spicuous steps in this direction. By utilising 
 the militia for home defence he strengthened 
 automatically the striking power of the regular 
 army abroad. By the enlistment of Highlanders 
 he permanently widened the area of recruiting. 
 But all such measures might have proved 
 ineffective if Pitt had failed to find leaders for 
 his big battalions, and it is a true instinct which 
 has fastened on his selection of officers as a 
 matter of the first importance. Wolfe is of course 
 the classic instance ; but most of the other pro- 
 minent commanders in Canada Amherst, Howe, 
 Murray, and Monckton were also Pitt's men. 
 He may be said to have set a new standard for
 
 78 CHATHAM 
 
 the British officer, the only standard which can 
 ever be of service to an army like our own. The 
 ideal of enterprise and resource and adaptability 
 to the immense variety of physical conditions 
 that presents itself to an army, which, like our 
 own, has to campaign in every quarter of the 
 globe, was for the first time comprehensively 
 outlined in the days of Pitt. 
 
 The narrative of operations will have made it 
 clear that Pitt, though essentially a statesman, 
 had yet to perform some of the chief func- 
 tions which we usually associate with a modern 
 General Staff. He had indeed his expert advisers, 
 Ligonier and Anson, but his was the directing 
 brain. The intrusion of a civilian, even of a 
 civilian of genius, into the sphere of war could 
 hardly be hoped to escape altogether without 
 disaster. And, as we have seen, Pitt was oc- 
 casionally at fault. His series of raids on the 
 French coast was a costly mistake. His Canadian 
 schemes for 1758 and 1759, involving the most 
 punctual and accurate co - operation of all 
 concerned, made little or no allowance for the 
 inevitable obstacles interposed by climate, and 
 the difficulties of transport in the vast wilder- 
 ness which formed the scene of war. Nor does 
 it appear that he was sufficiently careful to 
 economise life, and so lessen the drain caused by 
 a struggle of unprecedented dimensions.
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 79 
 
 But though these were errors of significance, 
 they were still errors of detail. Such mistakes 
 are the inevitable penalty that has to be paid for 
 entrusting the control of an imperfectly organised 
 system to civilian hands. They weigh as little 
 by the side of Pitt's work in that higher region 
 where statesmanship and strategy merge in one 
 another. Here he was unsurpassed. To his firm 
 grasp of the two cardinal factors in the situation 
 modern England owes her empire. He saw that 
 the contest with France was one for world-wide 
 ascendency, and that its true arena lay in the 
 colonies and on the sea. At the same time he 
 soon discerned the possibility of conquering 
 America in Germany, to use his own immortal 
 epigram. He played skilfully and successfully 
 on the besetting French passion for Continental 
 war. France allowed herself to be dragged at 
 Austria's chariot-wheels ; she squandered her re- 
 sources on campaigns that did not concern her, and 
 starved her garrisons over sea. Pitt, when he saw 
 that Frederick and Ferdinand were to be trusted, 
 sent men and money in an ever-increasing ratio 
 to the Continent. But he never lost sight of the 
 fact that the German War was only valuable to 
 England as a diversion, and that her real prize 
 was to be the maritime empire which was falling 
 from the hands of France. 
 
 It is a matter of tradition that to secure
 
 8o CHATHAM 
 
 efficiency of administration he ruled all the 
 public departments with coercive sway. He 
 threatened their chiefs with impeachment if they 
 should be found wanting, and he had no scruples 
 about making the Board of Admiralty sign 
 despatches the contents of which they were not 
 allowed to see. In the hands of anyone else such 
 methods must have led to instant and irretrievable 
 calamity ; but Pitt was no ordinary man. He 
 knew what he was about when he said that he 
 could save the nation, and never has it moved 
 more rapidly to greatness than when impelled by 
 the driving power of his dictatorial will. Yet it 
 would be wholly misleading to suppose that mere 
 force was the foundation of his ascendency. He 
 was brought into office by an irresistible wave of 
 popular enthusiasm, and he retained office because 
 the people continued to believe in him. He 
 drew his strength from moral causes. His ardent 
 patriotism awakened all the sleeping energies of 
 the nation, and called into existence a depth of 
 feeling and fortitude unsuspected in that leisured 
 age. Under his guidance his fellow-countrymen 
 rose above themselves, and they never forgot the 
 source from which their inspiration came. 
 
 So long as Pitt remained Minister the people 
 would follow him. But his position was now 
 shaken by changes in another quarter. On 
 October 25, 1760, George n. died, and the
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 81 
 
 accession of his grandson marks a dividing-line in 
 English history. Brought up in almost entire 
 seclusion by the Princess Dowager his mother, 
 and her counsellor Lord Bute, the character of 
 George in. showed traits that were strangely 
 compounded. Unlike his predecessors, he was a 
 pattern of the domestic virtues, and had a real 
 sense of religion. But his mother's admonition, 
 " George, be a king ! " had, to the misfortune of 
 his country, indelibly imprinted itself upon his 
 mind. He was educated to believe that a con- 
 stitutional monarch was a monarch in fetters, and 
 the rapidity with which, from the hour of his 
 accession, he adopted the opposite policy of 
 personal rule showed that the Princess's teaching 
 had fallen on responsive ground. George in. did 
 not shrink from immoral means to carry out an 
 unconstitutional end. Armed with the whole 
 influence of Crown patronage, he descended, like 
 Walpole and Newcastle, into the arena of 
 Parliamentary corruption, and plunged with 
 evident enjoyment into the business of sordid 
 electioneering. At the same time he traded un- 
 blushingly on the natural sentiments of loyalty 
 and attachment to the throne. It was this poli- 
 tical partisanship, coupled with certain very real 
 failings his uncandid and ungenerous temper, 
 his invincible obstinacy, and his extraordinary 
 propensity for seeing only the wrong side of a 
 6
 
 82 CHATHAM 
 
 case that produced most of the many calamities 
 of his long and chequered reign. His immediate 
 object at present was to build up a Court party. 
 Such a party was, however, an exotic which 
 required careful nursing ; and it was clear that it 
 would never mature in the bracing atmosphere of 
 public spirit and patriotic feeling diffused by Pitt. 
 The King accordingly resolved to cut down the 
 Minister, whatever the results might be to the 
 nation. 
 
 He gave speedy signs of his intention. Bute 
 was made a Privy Councillor before the end of 
 October, and the draft of the King's speech, which 
 he composed in concert with George in., referred 
 to the great contest that was still raging as " a 
 bloody and expensive war." Only upon making 
 strong representations could Pitt succeed in 
 getting the obnoxious epithets altered to "just 
 and necessary." Early in 1761 Legge was dis- 
 missed from the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, 
 and his place was taken by Lord Harrington, an 
 undisguised " King's Friend," as members of the 
 new Court party came by a lamentable abuse of 
 language to be called. Finally Holderness, Pitt's 
 fellow Secretary of State, was induced, at the 
 price of a pension and the reversion of a sinecure, 
 to yield his place to Bute. 
 
 The King's designs were furthered by a distinct 
 cleavage in the Cabinet on the question of the
 
 GEOHGE III 
 After the portrait by Ramsay
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 83 
 
 continuance of the war. Partly from sheer pique 
 at Pitt's monopoly of power, partly from a genuine 
 desire for peace, the great Whigs took up an 
 attitude of almost open hostility towards him. 
 "The treatment that the greatest and most 
 respectable persons meet with," Newcastle wrote 
 this summer to Hardwicke in a letter full of 
 unconscious humour, "if they presume to differ 
 with anything that has been done or shall be 
 proposed, and the making personal points of what 
 ought to be free, cool, and deliberate debate and 
 consideration amongst those whom his Majesty 
 has appointed for that purpose, this conduct has, 
 and will drive every person from the Council who 
 is at liberty to go. The Duke of Bedford has 
 already taken the resolution to come no more. 
 The Duke of Devonshire the same." l Pitt's 
 view was that we still stood to gain much. He 
 had despatched an expedition to Belleisle, he 
 contemplated further conquests in the French 
 West Indies, and he did not mean to abandon 
 Frederick. On the other side it was urged that 
 the war had now become almost wholly Con- 
 tinental, and that England's burden of debt was 
 already vast. 
 
 The foreign Powers were so far conscious of 
 exhaustion that negotiations for peace were begun 
 in the spring of 1761. There was a congress at 
 
 1 Rockingham Memoirs, i. 30, 31.
 
 84 CHATHAM 
 
 Augsburg, to which England sent plenipoten- 
 tiaries, on the subject of the European War; 
 and a separate negotiation between France and 
 England, to carry on which Hans Stanley, 
 grandson of the celebrated Sir Hans Sloane, 
 was sent to Paris, while M de Bussy came to 
 London. 
 
 France proposed that she herself and England 
 should retain their respective conquests, and 
 named certain dates after which any fresh con- 
 quests that were made should be null and void. 
 Pitt at first, while agreeing to the broad principle 
 suggested, considered that the day of signing the 
 treaty should be the only limit to determining 
 the validity of future acquisitions. On June 17, 
 however, he accepted the French dates for fixing 
 the uti possidetis, on condition that the peace 
 should be made obligatory irrespective of the 
 negotiations at Augsburg, and that its prelimi- 
 naries should be ratified by August 1. By the 
 time he despatched this memorial Belleisle had 
 been taken, and he declared his intention " to 
 enter into compensation for that important con- 
 quest." Choiseul, the French Foreign Minister, 
 then handed to Stanley a document called the 
 " little leaf," which was, said Stanley, "in shape 
 and size more like a billet-doux to a lady than the 
 memorial for a peace between two great nations." 1 
 1 Thackeray's Life of Chatham, ii. Appendix V.
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 85 
 
 This contained Choiseul's own ideas on the 
 subject of compensations. It included among 
 other stipulations proposals about the frontiers of 
 Canada, which Pitt called " captious and insidious 
 ... in the view to establish what must not be ad- 
 mitted, namely, that all which is not Canada is 
 Louisiana." l Pitt replied with far more sweeping 
 claims : the cession, without new limits, of all 
 Canada and its dependencies, Cape Breton, and 
 the right of fishery ; the cession of Senegal and 
 Goree ; the reduction of Dunkirk ; the equitable 
 partition of the neutral islands ; the restoration 
 of Minorca and destruction of the French settle- 
 ment in Sumatra ; and the restitution of all 
 conquests in Hanover, Hesse, and Westphalia. 
 The points to which Choiseul demurred in these 
 proposals were the yielding of the right of fishery, 
 the cession of Goree, and the dismantling of 
 Dunkirk ; he also showed signs of recalcitrance 
 with regard to the German conquests and the 
 compensation for giving up Minorca. 
 
 An agreement would probably have been 
 arrived at but for the sudden intrusion of Spain 
 into the negotiations. On July 15 Choiseul 
 presented a memorial in which he urged certain 
 Spanish claims with regard to the Newfoundland 
 fishery, the British settlements in the Bay of 
 Honduras, and the restitution of prizes taken 
 
 1 Thackeray's Life of Chatham, i. 544.
 
 86 CHATHAM 
 
 under the Spanish flag. Pitt received it with 
 indignation, and haughtily refused to allow the 
 disputes with Spain " to be blended in any 
 manner whatever in the negotiation of peace 
 between the two Crowns." He did not, however, 
 close the negotiations without making one more 
 offer to Choiseul. This contained substantial 
 concessions with regard to the fisheries in the 
 Gulf of St. Lawrence and off the Newfoundland 
 coast in return for the reduction of Dunkirk. 
 On the question of the German conquests and 
 the right to support Continental allies he re- 
 mained firm. No agreement could be arrived 
 at on these last points, and in September the 
 negotiations dropped. 
 
 Undoubtedly " the truly British spirit " which 
 Stanley described as reigning throughout Pitt's 
 State papers militated against the success of his 
 diplomacy. It annoyed Choiseul and mortally 
 offended Spain. Still his last proposals were 
 liberal, and Choiseul's reply approximated to 
 them very closely. A settlement might have 
 been effected but for France's entanglement with 
 Spain, which Pitt was amply justified in resenting. 
 How far he had information of the Family 
 Compact between the two Crowns signed in 
 August of this year is still disputed. In any 
 case, he judged the situation with great boldness 
 and decision. He knew enough to convince
 
 CHATHAM AS WAR MINISTER 87 
 
 him that the two Bourbon kingdoms were linked 
 in some menacing combination, and that Spain 
 was pushing on naval preparations which in spite 
 of her disavowals could only be meant for war. 
 Choiseul himself had told Stanley that if peace 
 were not made France would have new allies. 
 In these circumstances Pitt considered that the 
 right course was to strike first and to strike 
 quickly. On September 18, in conjunction with 
 Temple, who was now practically his one adher- 
 ent in the Cabinet, he submitted the celebrated 
 "Advice to the King," urging the immediate 
 recall of the British Ambassador from Madrid 
 and the declaration of war against Spain. Neither 
 George in. nor the Ministry would follow him. 
 On October 2 there was a final Cabinet 
 meeting, at which Pitt's policy was rejected. 
 Pitt thereupon proudly declared to his colleagues 
 that he had been called to the Ministry by the 
 voice of the people, to whom he considered 
 himself accountable, and that he would no longer 
 remain in a situation which made him responsible 
 for measures he was not allowed to guide. Three 
 days later he and Temple laid their resignation 
 before the King, and the most brilliant adminis- 
 tration of English history was ended.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PEACE OF PARIS 
 
 Honours pressed upon Pitt His appearance at the Guild- 
 hall Crowning victories of the war Attitude of the 
 Ministry The Peace of Paris Methods employed to 
 carry it Pitt on the Peace George Grenville becomes 
 Premier Wilkes and the North Briton Differences 
 between the King and Grenville Negotiations with 
 Pitt The Bedfords join Grenville Persecution of 
 Wilkes Pitt and the Wilkes question. 
 
 ~T~) EWARDS and honours were immediately 
 _1_V pressed upon Pitt. So unprecedented 
 an administration could scarcely have been 
 passed over without notice, and doubtless the 
 King felt for him a measure of unaffected gratitude. 
 But there was also a sinister design to undo him 
 as a popular favourite by making him the recipient 
 of Royal favours, and for a moment it seemed 
 likely to succeed. Pitt, after refusing the governor- 
 ship of Canada with 5000 a year and without 
 the obligation of residence, and the chancellor- 
 ship of the Duchy of Lancaster with the same 
 salary, accepted a peerage for his wife and a
 
 THE PEACE OF PARIS 89 
 
 pension of .3000 a year, for three lives, for 
 himself. As soon as these rewards, which were 
 published in the same Gazette that announced 
 Pitt's resignation, were made known, there 
 was a bitter popular outcry. Perfectly natural 
 and intelligible as was his acceptance of them, 
 and positively meagre as they were when com- 
 pared with his services Lord Holderness had 
 just received a larger sum as the price of his 
 resignation Pitt's independence had been so 
 remarkable that he was judged by a standard of 
 his own. The people left him as though dis- 
 illusioned. Horace Walpole complained to 
 Conway that he had been " the dupe of his 
 disinterestedness." Two months later Fox was 
 still rubbing his hands over what he thought the 
 discomfiture of his rival, and wrote down an in- 
 cautious sentence which has survived to show the 
 futility of political prophecies dictated by mal- 
 evolence. "It is already growing no paradox," he 
 says in the valuable memoir which, together with 
 the letters of that most fascinating of eighteenth- 
 century personages, Lady Sarah Lennox, has been 
 lately given to the public, ' ' it will perhaps by 
 the time these papers shall be read be an allowed 
 truth, that Mr. Pitt, who has made so great a 
 figure these four years, was what Lord Winchelsea 
 four years ago said he was, a very silly fellow." l 
 
 1 Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox, i. 57.
 
 QO CHATHAM 
 
 In point of fact, Pitt's unpopularity lasted not 
 much more than a week. On October 15 he 
 wrote a little manifesto to the Town Clerk of 
 London, which speedily set him right with the 
 people. "I resigned the seals on Monday, the 
 5th of this month/' he said in the course of it, 
 "in order not to remain responsible for measures 
 which I was no longer allowed to guide. Most 
 gracious public marks of his Majesty's approbation 
 of my services followed my resignation. They are 
 unmerited and unsolicited ; and I shall ever be 
 proud to have received them from the best of 
 sovereigns." l As Burke said, it was a shame that 
 any defence should have been necessary. There 
 was an immediate reaction in his favour. The 
 Common Council passed a vote of thanks to him, 
 and York, Exeter, Chester, Stirling, and other 
 towns followed their example. Finally, there was 
 a great demonstration of confidence on Lord 
 Mayor's day. Pitt was pressed to join the Royal 
 procession to the Guildhall, and his appearance 
 produced an extraordinary scene, of which 
 Nuthall, Pitt's solicitor and intimate friend, has 
 left us an amusing record. 2 The young King 
 and Queen were hardly noticed. Bute's carriage 
 was at first supposed to be Pitt's, but as soon as 
 the mistake was discovered the people made their 
 feelings clear by cries of " No Bute ! " " No New- 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, ii. 158, 159. a Ibid. ii. 166-168.
 
 THE PEACE OF PARIS 91 
 
 castle salmon ! " Pitt himself passed through 
 the crowded streets amid storms of cheering, 
 and at the Guildhall he was not less enthusi- 
 astically received. Bute had taken the precaution 
 to surround himself with "a party of bruisers, 
 with George Stephenson, the one-eyed fighting 
 coachman, at their head ; " but before they 
 reached their destination Stephenson " had been 
 obliged to retire under the chariot, and with great 
 difficulty got into Guildhall Coffee-house, in great 
 disgrace and trampled under foot." Pitt's action 
 on this occasion has been censured as unbecoming, 
 and, as he must more or less have foreseen what 
 the result of his appearance would be, he can 
 hardly be acquitted of having shown disrespect 
 to the King. That he realised this afterwards 
 is clear from the endorsement, in Lady Chatham's 
 hand, on the note from Beckford urging him to go : 
 "Mr. Beckford, 1761 ; to press my lord to appear 
 with Lord Temple ; to which he yielded for his 
 friend's sake ; but, as he always declared, both then 
 and afterwards, against his better judgment." 1 
 
 When Parliament met, Pitt spoke with 
 moderation of his late colleagues, only laying 
 stress on the paramount necessity of continuing 
 the war in Germany. In a very few weeks the 
 policy for which he had fought his final battle in 
 the Cabinet received a triumphant justification. 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, ii. 165.
 
 92 CHATHAM 
 
 Spain, having got her silver-ships from America 
 safely home, made no secret of her warlike 
 preparations and her alliance with France. The 
 Spanish diplomatists assumed a tone which they 
 would never have dared to use to Pitt. At 
 length, on December 10, the English Ambas- 
 sador was withdrawn from Madrid, and on the 
 last day of the year war was declared. 
 
 Pitt might have been excused if he had 
 improved the opportunity thus offered him 
 against the Ministers who, after declaiming 
 against war with Spain, were obliged to have re- 
 course to it as soon as they had driven him from 
 office. Instead, he made the kindling appeal to 
 patriotism, which is one of his best remembered 
 utterances. " Be one people ! " he said in the 
 House of Commons. " This war, though it has 
 cut deep into our pecuniary, has augmented our 
 military faculties. Set that against the debt, that 
 spirit which has made us what we are. Forget 
 everything but the public ! For the public I 
 forget both my wrongs and my infirmities." 
 
 Then followed a series of brilliant victories. 
 The ardour and efficiency which Pitt had inspired 
 in the public services still produced great results 
 in spite of his removal. Martinique was con- 
 quered in February 1762, and, one after another, 
 all the French West Indies fell into our hands. 
 Then fell Havannah, the richest city of the
 
 THE PEACE OF PARIS 93 
 
 Spanish Main ; and in October came a crowning 
 success in the Far East, Sir W. Draper capturing 
 Manilla and the Philippines. These triumphs 
 were held to redound not to the credit of the 
 Ministry but to that of Pitt ; for all knew that 
 he had urged on the Spanish War, that he was 
 responsible for the Martinique expedition, and 
 that he had planned the attack upon Havannah. 
 His single eloquence, said Horace Walpole, could, 
 like an annihilated star, shine many months 
 after it had set. "I shall burn all my Greek 
 and Latin books they are histories of little 
 people. The Romans never conquered the world 
 till they had conquered three parts of it, and 
 were three hundred years about it. We subdue 
 the globe in three campaigns ; and a globe, let 
 me tell you, as big again as it was in their 
 days." 
 
 Within the Ministry there was disunion. 
 Newcastle had exulted over Pitt's departure, but 
 before long he regretted that he had exchanged 
 Pitt's hauteur for the deliberate insolence of 
 Bute. Ever since Pitt's resignation he had been 
 carefully kept in ignorance of all that was in 
 progress, and did not know even of the decision 
 to declare war on Spain until the day before the 
 step was taken. He wrote to Hardwicke on 
 December 30, 1761, that he had received that 
 morning an "extraordinary uninforming note
 
 94 CHATHAM 
 
 from my Lord Egmont," and also "from my 
 porter, a summons for a council, I think this day, 
 upon what I know not." x By the end of May 
 1762 he could bear it no longer, and, having 
 learned that Bute intended to withdraw Eng- 
 land from the German War and not to renew 
 Frederick's subsidy, he resigned office. Pitt 
 contended to the last for the policy of continu- 
 ing the war not only in Germany but in the 
 Peninsula, where a fresh area of conflict had been 
 opened by Spain's shameless invasion of Portugal. 
 He did not mean, he said, that we should bear 
 Portugal on our shoulders, but only set him on 
 his legs and put a sword in his hand. France, 
 he affirmed, was almost a ruined nation. But, 
 while the tide of victory was rising higher, the 
 Cabinet thought only of making peace at any 
 price. The Duke of Bedford spoke of England's 
 conquests in accents of positive alarm, and it was 
 made abundantly clear to the hostile Powers 
 that if they asked for peace the English Ministers 
 would be only too ready to give it them. Bute 
 was carrying on secret negotiations through 
 Count de Viri, the Sardinian Ambassador in 
 England. Dark charges of want of faith were 
 also brought against him. He treated with 
 Maria Theresa without Frederick's knowledge, 
 and was said to have pressed Russia to adhere to 
 
 1 Rockingham Memoirs, i. 102, 103.
 
 THE PEACE OF PARIS 95 
 
 her alliance with Austria in order to bring the 
 King of Prussia to his knees. After much 
 private diplomacy he put the settlement of the 
 peace into the hands of Bedford, and the 
 preliminaries were soon decided upon. 
 
 In North America France ceded to England 
 the whole province of Canada, together with Nova 
 Scotia and Cape Breton ; but she retained her 
 fishing rights on the Newfoundland coast, and 
 within the Gulf of St. Lawrence at three leagues' 
 distance from the shore, and she acquired two 
 little islands, St. Pierre and Miquelon, as a 
 shelter for her fishermen. In the West Indies 
 England kept Grenada and the Grenadines, St. 
 Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago, but she restored 
 Guadaloupe, Martinique, St. Lucia, Marie Galante, 
 and Desirade to France. In Africa she kept 
 Senegal and ceded Goree. In India all conquests 
 made since 1749 were mutually restored ; France 
 undertook, however, not to garrison or fortify her 
 Bengalese factories, and she acknowledged the 
 English candidates in the Carnatic and the 
 Deccan. In Europe she surrendered Minorca, 
 evacuated her German conquests, and demolished 
 the walls of Dunkirk. 
 
 Spain gave up Florida, which completed the 
 line of the English colonies in America to the 
 south, renounced her claim to fish off Newfound- 
 land, acknowledged the English right to cut
 
 96 CHATHAM 
 
 logwood in the bay of Honduras, on the 
 demolition of the English fortifications there, 
 and agreed to British adjudication on prizes 
 captured under the Spanish flag. But she took 
 back Havannah as compensation, and recovered 
 Manilla and the Philippines, tidings of whose 
 conquest did not come until the preliminaries 
 were already signed, without even paying the 
 ransom for the private property of Manilla to 
 which she was pledged. The bare outlines of 
 the Peace show that it was made on conditions 
 no more favourable than could have been ob- 
 tained by Pitt a year before, since when France 
 had suffered a monotony of defeat. And when, 
 on closer investigation, we see the spirit in which 
 the English Ministers made terms, and examine 
 the value of the mutual restitutions, there is still 
 greater reason for dissatisfaction. Bute appears 
 to have been anxious only to dispose of everything 
 with as much speed as possible. Frederick he 
 abandoned so perfunctorily that nothing but the 
 prompt action of the King enabled him to secure 
 the German territory, as to which Bute had 
 simply stipulated that France was to cede it, 
 without saying whether to enemies or allies. 
 Alone in the Cabinet George Grenville made a 
 stand for the national honour. He protested 
 strongly against the surrender of Guadaloupe 
 and St. Lucia ; but while he was ill in bed Bute
 
 THE PEACE OF PARIS 97 
 
 took advantage of his absence to call a council 
 and get rid of the former island, the value of 
 which had considerably increased during the 
 few years it had been a British possession. 
 Similarly, Bute made no scruples about giving up 
 the great prize of Havannah, and would actually 
 have surrendered it without compensation if 
 Grenville had not insisted on the acquisition of 
 Florida, which was a very meagre exchange. 
 We yielded Martinique, the fruit of a costly 
 expedition, and St. Lucia, which Rodney de- 
 scribed as second only to Martinique in stra- 
 tegic importance. But, of all the shortcomings 
 of the Peace, the most characteristic was the 
 total loss of Manilla, which passed from us 
 uncompensated because no stipulation of any 
 kind had been made with regard to it in the 
 preliminaries, which were signed before the news 
 of its capture arrived. France, on the other 
 hand, though in yielding her conquest of Minorca 
 she ceded us a prize, could not have retaken by 
 arms the West Indian islands which we restored 
 to her ; and still less could Spain have recovered, 
 otherwise than by negotiation, Havannah and 
 Manilla. 
 
 None the less, and now, at any rate, when the 
 
 dust of the political struggles that hung round 
 
 the Peace of Paris has long been laid for ever, we 
 
 can hardly deplore a treaty which gave England 
 
 7
 
 9 8 CHATHAM 
 
 gains so solid and unprecedented, and set the 
 stamp on her dominion of the sea. It was other- 
 wise in November 1762, when the preliminaries 
 were signed. To the unpopularity which Bute 
 derived from his position as a Royal favourite and 
 his Scotch nationality was now added a disgust at 
 the Peace, and a general belief that he had been 
 bribed to make it. But by fair means or foul he 
 had to get the consent of Parliament to what he 
 had done, and he turned to look for a colleague 
 unscrupulous enough to corrupt the House of 
 Commons and strong enough to face Pitt. Fox, 
 who still wanted a peerage and might fairly be 
 called upon to earn it, was clearly the man. 
 George Grenville, who had neither the audacity 
 nor the stamina to carry a peace of which he 
 disapproved, made way for him in the leadership 
 and became instead First Lord of the Admiralty. 
 Fox immediately opened a characteristic campaign. 
 At the Pay Office members of Parliament dis- 
 posed of their support for the best bargains they 
 could make, 200 for a vote on the treaty being 
 the very lowest sum taken. Twenty-five thousand 
 pounds of public money were thus squandered in 
 one morning, and in a fortnight Fox had made 
 certain of a substantial majority. At the same 
 time victory was made doubly sure by a vast 
 proscription. The great Whigs were smitten 
 down without respect of persons. With his own
 
 THE PEACE OF PARIS 99 
 
 hand the King dashed the Duke of Devonshire's 
 name off the list of the Privy Council. The Duke 
 of Newcastle, the Duke of Grafton, and Lord 
 Rockingham were dismissed from their lord- 
 lieutenancies, and Fox was not content with con- 
 spicuous victims. Everyone who was found to owe 
 the smallest salary in the public service or on the 
 list of public benefaction to a Whig patron was de- 
 prived of it, and neither age nor sex was spared. 
 
 Even with their bought majority the Ministers 
 looked forward apprehensively to the meeting of 
 Parliament. Popular clamour rose daily higher, 
 and they had still to reckon with the eloquence 
 of Pitt. Parliament met at the end of November, 
 and on December 9 the preliminaries of the 
 Peace were discussed in both Houses. In the 
 Lords, despite the opposition of the Whig dukes, 
 they were approved without a division. Pitt, 
 who was suffering painfully from gout, was not 
 present at the opening of the debate in the 
 Commons, and there was much speculation as to 
 whether he would appear at all. At length 
 cheering in the Lobby was heard, the doors opened, 
 and Pitt, "at the head of a large acclaiming 
 concourse," was borne in by his servants and set 
 down inside the bar. There he crawled to his 
 seat on his crutch, and with the aid of his friends, 
 " not without the sneers of some of Fox's party." 
 He was dressed in black velvet, "buskins of
 
 ioo CHATHAM 
 
 black cloth " covered his feet, flannel swathed 
 his thighs, and there were thick gloves upon his 
 hands. 1 It was one of those dramatic exhibitions 
 which led his critics to call him a mountebank, 
 and which nothing but his astonishing personal 
 magnetism saved from absurdity. Suffering as he 
 was from sickness and exhaustion, he spoke with 
 indomitable pertinacity for over three hours, but 
 much of his oration had to be delivered sitting ; 
 and on a day when, as Horace Walpole observed, 
 thunder was wanted to blast the treaty, Pitt's 
 voice flagged through weakness and robbed his 
 words of their full beauty and power. 
 
 But he made clear his entire disapprobation 
 of the Peace. He condemned unsparingly the 
 fishery concessions to France, the exchange of 
 Havannah for Florida, and the surrender of all 
 our most valuable gains in the West Indies. It 
 is characteristic of him and of his time that the 
 ground of his condemnation was that we had 
 failed to establish a commercial monopoly for 
 England and to extinguish the trade of France. 
 Great and generous as was his devotion to the 
 empire, he yet believed fully in the ancient 
 fallacy of the mercantile system, which held that 
 only one of the two parties to a commercial 
 exchange could be the gainer by it. Still his 
 speech was full of statesmanlike insight. He 
 
 1 Walpole's Memoirs of George the Third (ist ed.), i. ZZ3, ^^^.
 
 LORD HOLLAND
 
 THE PEACE OF PARIS 101 
 
 discerned unerringly the new forces that were at 
 work in Europe. Russia and Russian policy he 
 described compactly ; a? moving "In its own orbit 
 extrinsically of ell other systems, but gravitating 
 to each according*, to. the mass of -attracting 
 interest it contains." And he foretold the course 
 of German consolidation when, in expatiating on 
 the baseness of Bute's desertion of Frederick, he 
 referred to the King of Prussia as "born to be 
 the natural asserter of Germanic liberties against 
 the House of Austria." l 
 
 Despite Pitt's efforts, the House approved the 
 Peace by the substantial majority of 254. But 
 the Ministry found that public opinion was far 
 from ratifying this verdict ; and the Cider Tax, 
 which, according to tradition, was imposed by 
 the incompetent Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
 Sir Francis Dashwood, because it was the only 
 one which he could understand, set even the Tory 
 counties of the west aflame. At the height of 
 the storm, Bute, whose unpopularity was seriously 
 menacing the stability of the King's new party, 
 resigned. With him Dashwood retired, in April 
 1763 ; and Fox, now become Lord Holland, 
 departed from active politics with his peerage, 
 and with as much pecuniary emolument as, after 
 acrimonious haggling with his colleagues, he could 
 manage to retain. 
 
 1 Almon's Anecdotes of Chatham, i. 412, 413.
 
 102 CHATHAM 
 
 George Grenville then resumed the leadership 
 of the House of Commons from which Fox had 
 displaced him, "and toecjijj&ie -First Lord of the 
 Treasury His osfe. at- -the -Admiralty was taken 
 by Lord Sandwich," :t oiioe-thfe ablest and most 
 profligate figure in the great political connection 
 of the Duke of Bedford. Bedford himself, who 
 had held opposite views to Grenville on the 
 subject of the Peace, did not join the Ministry. 
 The two Secretaries of State were Lord Egremont, 
 son of the Tory leader Sir William Wyndham, and 
 inheriting from him much Tory influence, and 
 Lord Halifax, who was to be chiefly conspicuous 
 as the adversary of Wilkes. 
 
 Grenville had only been at the head of affairs 
 for a fortnight when an event occurred which, 
 ludicrously small in origin, grew through the 
 obstinate stupidity of the King and his Ministers 
 to the dimensions of a grave constitutional 
 question. In 1762 had been founded the North 
 Briton, "a, most virulent weekly paper," which 
 assailed Bute and the King's party with much 
 dexterity and directness, and specially devoted 
 itself to fanning the violent prejudice against the 
 Scotch. It was produced by John Wilkes, at 
 this time member for Aylesbury. Wilkes was 
 the son of wealthy middle-class parents, and when 
 quite a young man had contracted a marriage, 
 which he himself called "a sacrifice to Plutus,
 
 THE PEACE OF PARIS 103 
 
 not to Venus/' with a Methodist heiress. Her 
 life was soon made so intolerable by the dissolute 
 men of fashion whom Wilkes brought to dinner, 
 that she left first his table and then his house ; 
 but Wilkes, having spent his own money and 
 most of hers on the purchase of a seat in Par- 
 liament, still pursued her with attempts to get 
 possession of her small remaining annuity, until 
 the Courts warned him to desist. Then, when he 
 had offered himself impartially for the posts of 
 Governor of Canada and Ambassador at Con- 
 stantinople, and failed to obtain either, he betook 
 himself to the publication of the North Briton. 
 Forty-four numbers had appeared before Bute 
 resigned, and at the beginning of April, when his 
 impending retirement became known, Wilkes for 
 a time ceased publishing. But the King's speech 
 proroguing Parliament on April 19 made it clear 
 that the policy of the new Ministry was to be the 
 same as that of the old ; and on April 23 Wilkes 
 issued the now historic " No. 45." In it he took 
 his stand boldly on the received doctrine that 
 the King's speech was really the speech of the 
 Ministers. From this point of view he attacked 
 them with great vigour and effect. He called the 
 speech " the most abandoned instance of official 
 effrontery ever attempted to be imposed on man- 
 kind," and inveighed against its attempt to gloss 
 over the desertion of the King of Prussia.
 
 104 CHATHAM 
 
 With no suspicion of the long - continued 
 struggle to which they were committing them- 
 selves, George in. and his Ministers resolved to 
 crush Wilkes. They issued a general warrant, 
 signed by the Secretary of State, commanding the 
 arrest of " the authors, printers, and publishers " 
 of the paper, but specifying no names. Under 
 this, Wilkes and forty-eight other persons were 
 brought before Lord Halifax. Acting with great 
 coolness and spirit, Wilkes pleaded his privilege 
 as a member of Parliament against arrest, and 
 protested against a warrant containing no names 
 as illegal. The Secretaries of State rejoined by 
 committing him a close prisoner to the Tower. 
 Far from quailing under this extraordinary treat- 
 ment, he wrote a letter to his daughter, who was 
 then at school in France, congratulating her qn 
 living in a free country, and sent 'it open to Lord 
 Halifax. A writ of Habeas Corpus'was obtained 
 for him by his friends, and he was brought before 
 Chief. Justice Pratt in the Court of Common 
 
 I 
 
 Pleas. Here he was victorious at all points. Ttye 
 Chief Justice ordered his release on the ground 
 that the privilege of Parliament shielded membSrfc 
 from arrest in all cases except treason^ felony 
 and breach: of the peace ; and, in the actions that 
 were brought by the arrested persons against 
 those who had executed the warrant, he decided 
 
 V 
 
 that warrants to search for and seize papers on a
 
 THE PEACE OF PARIS 105 
 
 charge of libel were illegal, and expressed the same 
 opinion as to general warrants. A Guildhall jury 
 awarded Wilkes 1000 damages against Wood, the 
 Under-Secretary of State; and Halifax, against 
 whom also Wilkes brought an action for illegal 
 arrest, only escaped an adverse decision by employ- 
 ing legal technicalities to delay the proceedings. 
 The King now descended on Wilkes and removed 
 him from the colonelcy of the Buckinghamshire 
 militia. Lord Temple, wjho had warmly supported 
 Wilkes from the first, was obliged, as Lord- 
 Lieutenant of the county, to inform him of the 
 fact. "He did so in a very complimentary letter, 
 and was at once removed from his Lieutenancy 
 and from the Privy Council. 
 
 Before, the end of. this toirbulent summer "the 
 King had grown weary of his new Prime 
 Minister. It was not that they disagreed abqut 
 the Wilkes question ; on the' contrary, in this, as 
 in all the other arbitrary proceedings of the Gren- 
 ville administration, the King and his Ministers^ 
 were in full accord. But George in. had already 
 discovered that Grenville was possessed of a dic- 
 tatorial obstinacy closely resembling his own, and 
 that if he wanted, as he always did want, to govern 
 in person, he must look for some more respectful 
 agent. There is not a little irony in the fact that, 
 on Bute's advice, he now decided to appeal to Pitt. 
 
 rPitt had, since his resignation in 1761, been
 
 io6 CHATHAM 
 
 numbered with the Opposition, and had taken, 
 as we have seen, as prominent a part as his 
 ill-health would allow in denouncing the Peace 
 of Paris. At the same time, though overtures 
 had been made to him by Newcastle and the 
 Duke of Cumberland for co-operation in a con- 
 certed plan of action, he had refused to commit 
 himself to a definitive union with the great 
 Whigs. It is probable that he was still somewhat 
 dazzled with the magnificence of his own achieve- 
 ments as a War Minister, and was not attracted by 
 the aspect which domestic politics were begin- 
 ning to wear. It is certain that his cleavage 
 with the main Whig connection at the close of 
 his Ministry had left a deep impression on his 
 mind, and intensified that distrust of party which, 
 as will be more fully seen later, always impelled 
 him to stand alone. At the same time he 
 counted himself a Whig, he was far from ignoring 
 the fact that the Whig families were still in- 
 dispensable to the nation, and when Bute and 
 the King approached him on this occasion he 
 gave a convincing proof of his loyalty to Whig 
 beliefs. On Friday, August 26, 1763, he 
 received a message from the King requiring his 
 attendance at noon next day at "the Queen's 
 palace in the Park." Accordingly, on Saturday 
 he "went at noonday through the Mall in his 
 gouty chair, the boot of which (as he said
 
 THE PEACE OF PARIS 107 
 
 himself) makes it as much known as if his name 
 was writ upon it." The King received him 
 graciously, and they talked for three hours. Pitt 
 laid stress on "the infirmities of the Peace" and 
 the necessity of calling in the great Whig families. 
 He was told to come again on Monday. On 
 Sunday, " fully persuaded from the King's manner 
 and behaviour that the thing would do," he 
 visited Newcastle at Claremont and wrote to the 
 other Whig leaders. 1 But on the same day Bute 
 had met, at Kew, Elliot and Jenkinson, two 
 typical hirelings of the Court party, and they 
 terrified him so much with a lurid picture of the 
 results that would ensue if the King called in 
 Pitt, that Bute went back to his master and 
 advised him to revert to Grenville. 2 Accordingly, 
 on Sunday evening the King put himself once 
 more in Grenville's hands, and assured him that 
 he need not be afraid of any more machinations 
 on the part of Bute. There still remained Pitt's 
 interview of Monday. The King allowed this to 
 be protracted to the length of two hours, and 
 then, after Pitt had again pointed out that he 
 could not take office without " the great families 
 who have supported the Revolution government, 
 and other great persons of whose abilities and 
 integrity the public have had experience," he 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, ii. 236-238. 
 3 Grenville Papers, ii. 197.
 
 io8 CHATHAM 
 
 ended the conversation by the remark, "Well, 
 Mr. Pitt, I see this won't do. My honour is 
 concerned, and I must support it." * Before the 
 end of the day further offers were made by Bute 
 to Pitt, but these were refused. The conclusion 
 of the whole matter was that, as the result of 
 another characteristic piece of obliquity on the 
 part of the King, the Bedfords were taken into 
 the Ministry. Bedford, who knew nothing of 
 the previous overtures to Pitt, had advised the 
 King to send for the latter ; but the King was 
 careful in return to inform him that Pitt, who, 
 for his part, knew nothing of Bedford's recom- 
 mendation either, had animadverted strongly 
 upon him and the other negotiators of the Peace. 
 Filled with resentment against Pitt, Bedford 
 brought his powerful faction to the support of 
 Grenville, himself becoming President of the 
 Council, and Sandwich Secretary of State. 
 
 The Ministry was no less resolved on the 
 annihilation of Wilkes because of its reconstruc- 
 tion. When Parliament met again on November 
 15, the Government majority in the House of 
 Commons condemned the offending number of 
 the North Briton as a ' ( false, scandalous, and 
 seditious libel," while in the House of Lords 
 Sandwich, himself a fellow-reveller of Wilkes in 
 the notorious brotherhood of Medmenham, pro- 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, ii. 240, 241.
 
 THE PEACE OF PARIS 109 
 
 duced an indecent but unpublished parody of 
 Pope which Wilkes had composed, entitled the 
 Essay on Woman. The Peers without loss of 
 time voted it blasphemous, and also a breach of 
 privilege against Warburton, the latitudinarian 
 Bishop of Gloucester, who, having found that 
 some burlesque notes appended to the poem 
 had been maliciously attributed to his name 
 by Wilkes, "foamed with the violence of a St. 
 Dominic " in the debate, and said that the 
 blackest fiends in hell would not keep company 
 with his traducer. 1 Nor was this all. The 
 next day, Martin, an ex-Secretary of the Treasury, 
 who had been practising with the pistol all the 
 summer, revived an old insult which he had 
 received from Wilkes, challenged him to a duel 
 in the Park, and left him a few hours later 
 dangerously wounded on the field. 
 
 Pitt keenly resented the extravagant illegali- 
 ties in the proceedings against Wilkes. "Why 
 do not they search the Bishop of Gloucester's 
 study of heresy?" he exclaimed indignantly 
 when he heard of the debate in the Lords on 
 the Essay on Woman. When the question of 
 Wilkes' Parliamentary privilege was raised on 
 November 23, obviously with a retrospective 
 and vindictive purpose, he spoke strongly against 
 its surrender. " No man could condemn the 
 
 1 Walpole's Memoin of George the Third, i. 312.
 
 no CHATHAM 
 
 North Briton more than he did ; but he would 
 come at the author fairly, not by an open breach 
 of the Constitution and. a contempt of all re- 
 straint." Pitt had no sympathy with the mob- 
 worship which Wilkes was beginning to receive, 
 and detested both his character and his virulent 
 journalism. At the same time he firmly main- 
 tained the question of constitutional principle. 
 The House of Commons, he said, had no business 
 to vote away the inherent rights of future 
 members ; and in the debates on the legality of 
 general warrants which followed he spoke his 
 mind still more freely, protesting against the 
 sacrifice by Parliament of its own privileges and 
 its abandonment of the liberty of the subject. 
 These declarations foreshadowed his greater 
 deliverances on the subject in 1770. For a time 
 the case of Wilkes disappears from the scene. 
 Important as were the questions which it had 
 raised, they were small in comparison with the 
 transcendent issues involved in the proposal to 
 tax America, which was now by the unwisdom of 
 George Grenville brought within the sphere of 
 practical politics.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE TAXATION OF AMERICA 
 
 England's colonial policy Its effect upon America Gren- 
 ville's attitude The Stamp Act Pitt in retirement 
 Sir W. Pynsent's legacy Pitt at Burton Pynsent 
 Again approached to form a Cabinet Pitt and Temple 
 The Rockingham Ministry America's reception of 
 the Stamp Act Pitt and the Rockinghams His views 
 on party First speeches on America Repeal of the 
 Stamp Act. 
 
 THE British conquest of Canada had brought 
 about a change in the relations between the 
 American colonies and the mother country which 
 was vast, even if its full significance was not yet 
 realised. It had removed the incubus of French 
 aggression, and opened to the colonists the pos- 
 sibility of unchecked expansion from sea to sea. 
 In so doing it had removed also their chief need 
 of British succour, and henceforward, whatever 
 tie of political union still remained, they were 
 no longer dependent on England for actual ex- 
 istence. Separation thus became feasible, but, 
 111
 
 ii2 CHATHAM 
 
 though foreign observers confidently predicted it, 
 it was as yet only a dream, and in no sense repre- 
 sented the desires of the American people. 
 
 The true cause of the final rupture lay in the 
 old colonial system, which looked upon the 
 colonies as simply so many tributary estates. 
 British policy had been ever since the Navigation 
 Act of 1660, as Burke said, purely commercial, 
 and to be commercial it had, according to the 
 spirit of the age, been restrictive. Like all other 
 European countries in the eighteenth century, 
 England was a monopolist in the matter of colonial 
 trade. Thus in the case of America the develop- 
 ment of all industries which could compete with 
 English manufactures from iron and steel pro- 
 ducts to woollen goods and hats was barred by 
 legal enactment. The exchange of American 
 timber for the sugar and molasses of the French 
 West Indies was prohibited in order to preserve 
 the sugar monopoly of the English West Indies, 
 which themselves could only afford a very in- 
 adequate market for the Americans. Very many 
 American articles might only be exported to 
 the home market in England, and no Conti- 
 nental articles might be imported by the colonists 
 unless they had first been landed and paid duty 
 in England. Such was the spirit of British 
 monopoly, but America was not without her 
 consolations. She had bounties on the importa-
 
 THE TAXATION OF AMERICA 113 
 
 tion into England of her ship-timber, her pitch 
 and tar ; by exemption from duties on certain 
 articles she herself monopolised the British 
 market in respect of these ; the grievance with 
 regard to Continental goods was alleviated by 
 means of drawbacks ; and in practice the restraint 
 on her commerce with the French West Indies 
 was virtually evaded. 
 
 This was America's commercial lot ; she bore 
 it because she had known no other, and because 
 it was in accordance with the universal custom 
 of the time. It had not prevented her from 
 attaining prosperity ; but all practicable mitiga- 
 tion, and all possible indifference on the part of 
 British statesmen to her contraband trade, were 
 needed to make it tolerable. Such indifference 
 English Ministers had characteristically seldom 
 failed to show. But, clearly, the greater America 
 grew the more unbearable would commercial 
 restriction become, and a conflict was inevitable 
 if fresh irritating impositions should be super- 
 added to those already existing. For this there 
 had now arrived both the hour and the man. 
 England had emerged from the Seven Years' War 
 an empire, but an empire burdened with a great 
 debt ; and she had before her the difficult task, 
 not only of organising efficient Imperial defence 
 but of economising its expenses. The Minister 
 in control of her affairs at this supremely import- 
 8
 
 U4 CHATHAM 
 
 ant moment was George Grenville. Of all men 
 he was the least likely to make graceful conces- 
 sions, the most resolute to stand on the strict 
 letter of the law. On the present occasion his 
 very merits contained elements of danger ; but 
 for his strong sense of duty and his legal abilities, 
 his want of political prescience would have been 
 less fatal. Having found that the customs reve- 
 nue actually derived from America was costing 
 four times its own value in collection, and that the 
 commercial regulations were freely infringed by 
 the colonists, he revived the strict enforcement 
 of the trade laws, and made it part of the duty of 
 all naval officers stationed off the American coasts 
 to act as revenue officials and repress smuggling. 
 At the same time he determined to maintain a per- 
 manent army in America, and by Parliamentary 
 taxation to make the colonies contribute towards 
 its maintenance. This was the origin of the ill- 
 omened Stamp Act. In March 1764 Grenville 
 introduced and carried a motion to the effect that 
 " for further defraying the expense of protecting 
 the colonies it may be proper to charge certain 
 stamp duties in the said colonies." Then for a 
 year the matter was suspended, so that the 
 colonists might have time to consider it and 
 suggest any other method of raising the money 
 which seemed preferable to them. The tradi- 
 tional mode of contribution was by separate grants
 
 THE TAXATION OF AMERICA 115 
 
 on the part of the colonial assemblies in response 
 to a requisition from the Crown, and Benjamin 
 Franklin urged Grenville to resort to it again. 
 Franklin had, however, to admit, when pressed by 
 the Minister, that the colonies would never agree 
 on the proportionate sum which each should raise. 
 
 This was the last diplomatic effort on the part 
 of the colonial agents in England ; the colonial 
 assemblies in America were wholly recalcitrant. 
 In February 1765 Grenville brought in the Bill, 
 which was received in a scanty House with very 
 languid interest, and passed almost without 
 opposition. It provided that all business agree- 
 ments, legal documents, and newspapers should 
 be issued upon stamped paper only, which was to 
 be sold by public distributors at fixed rates. The 
 revenue resulting was to be paid into the Treasury 
 and applied solely to the maintenance of colonial 
 defence. The Admiralty Courts were to ad- 
 judicate on offenders under the Act, which was 
 to come into operation on November 1. 
 
 While Parliament was unconsciously voting 
 away its colonies, and the colonies themselves 
 were fermenting with alarm, Pitt was buried in 
 seclusion. For long he was laid up with gout at 
 Hayes. The contrast between his present deep 
 retirement and his recent splendid Ministiy struck 
 the imagination ; the people waited for his return 
 to office in order to yield him a ready allegiance,
 
 ii6 CHATHAM 
 
 and some admirers, following the example of the 
 old Duchess of Marlborough twenty years before, 
 gave substantial form to their esteem. Mr. Allen 
 of Prior Park, near Bath, left him a legacy of 
 1000 in 1764, and in 1765 he received a strange 
 and unexpected bequest on the death of an aged 
 Somersetshire baronet. Sir William Pynsent had 
 abandoned politics and the town when the Tory 
 party rose to power in the last years of Queen Anne, 
 and in the Treaty of Paris he now seemed to see a 
 peace not less ignominious than that of Utrecht, 
 and a second Marlborough in its victim, Pitt. 
 To Pitt accordingly he left his estate of Burton 
 Pynsent, which was worth some 3000 a year. 
 
 Round Burton Pynsent centred henceforward 
 much of Pitt's private life. He was never so 
 happy as when in country scenes, and certainly 
 never so well as when he spent his days scouring 
 the hills with his children, following them, " longo 
 sed proximus intervallo, after a hare," or led on by 
 "the all-exploring eye of taste," and coming 
 home in the evening to supper with, as he said, a 
 farmer's appetite. He shared the fashionable 
 passion for landscape-gardening, in which Bishop 
 Warburton pronounced his taste inimitable, and 
 at Burton Pynsent he could indulge it to the full. 
 Here too he gathered memorials of the kind he 
 loved to treasure. He hung the ballroom of 
 Burton Pynsent with full-length portraits of the
 
 THE TAXATION OF AMERICA 117 
 
 Marquis of Granby, Admiral Boscawen, and 
 Admiral Saunders, to recall the service they had 
 rendered in the hour of England's glory and his 
 own, when, in Cowper's words 
 
 " .... It was praise and boast enough 
 In every clime, and travel where we might, 
 That we were born her children ; praise enough 
 To fill the ambition of a private man, 
 That Chatham's language was his mother tongue, 
 And Wolfe's great name compatriot with his own." 1 
 
 In the spring of 1765 Pitt was again ap- 
 proached to form a Ministry. The cause was not 
 the administrative errors of the Government, but 
 the King's impatience under the ever-tightening 
 hand of Grenville. The insult inflicted by the 
 Ministers on his mother, the Princess Dowager, 
 whose name they excluded from the list of 
 possible Regents in the Bill which was brought 
 forward after his first illness, goaded him to 
 distraction. He turned to the uncle whom he 
 had before treated so badly, the Duke of Cumber- 
 land, and empowered him to negotiate with Pitt. 
 Both Lord Albemarle and the Duke were sent to 
 see him. To them Pitt unfolded his policy, 
 which embraced a counter-alliance against the 
 Bourbons abroad and the reversal of unconstitu- 
 tional measures at home. He does not seem to 
 
 1 For Chatham at Burton Pynsent cf. Chatham Correspondence, 
 iii. 469, 470; iv. 183-185, 231, 232, 267-269.
 
 n8 CHATHAM 
 
 have been at all reluctant to take office. But 
 the situation was greatly complicated by the fact 
 that Lord Temple had just effected a reconcili- 
 ation with his brother George Grenville, and 
 aspired to form a Ministry based on the family 
 triumvirate of himself, Grenville, and their 
 brother-in-law Pitt. If Temple had stood alone 
 these designs would not have mattered, but his 
 close union with Pitt gave them grave importance. 
 Behind Pitt the baleful star of Temple is 
 generally visible, and never did it exercise a more 
 fatal attraction than in the spring and summer 
 of 1765. Through Temple's influence Pitt now 
 declined to move. George in. had once more to 
 submit to Grenville and Bedford, and King and 
 Ministers treated each other with relentless 
 rudeness. So intolerable was the position that 
 the King a second time appealed to Pitt. Once 
 more Temple refused to take office with him. 
 "This declaration of Lord Temple's," wrote the 
 Duke of Cumberland to Albemarle on June 26, 
 " prevents Pitt from taking a share, which indeed 
 most thoroughly and most heartily he had 
 done. . . . By what I can pick up, Pitt is com- 
 pletely mortified, and I am heartily sorry for it, as 
 he had entered more sincerely and cordially into 
 the King's service, nay, and went further almost 
 than the King's views." l 
 
 1 Roclingham Memoirs, \. 213, 114.
 
 THE TAXATION OF AMERICA 119 
 
 Nevertheless, it was the Whigs, though the 
 Whigs without Pitt and Temple, who eventually 
 set the King free from Grenville. Their main 
 connection took office under the Marquis of 
 Rockingham, who had Conway and the Duke of 
 Grafton as his Secretaries of State, while the old 
 Duke of Newcastle was included in the Ministry 
 as Privy Seal. As an administration it was far 
 from strong, though the lustrous eloquence of 
 Burke, whom it brought into politics, has cast 
 a halo round its mediocrity. Rockingham was a 
 timid and embarrassed speaker ; Conway, who 
 led the House of Commons, was a gallant soldier 
 but no statesman ; Grafton, though a man of 
 promise, cared more for sport than politics, and 
 was really a follower not of Rockingham but of 
 Pitt. Further, the Ministry contained an alien 
 element in the young and brilliant Charles 
 Townshend, who, though Paymaster, spoke of the 
 Cabinet with disdain ; and in Lord Chancellor 
 Northington and Lord Barrington, Secretary for 
 War, who were both sworn followers of the King. 
 Yet, morally, the Rockingham Whigs them- 
 selves stood head and shoulders above preceding 
 Ministries. They not only professed but practised 
 political integrity, and, short as was their tenure 
 of office, and stubbornly as they were thwarted by 
 the King, they succeeded in carrying most sorely 
 needed measures.
 
 120 CHATHAM 
 
 The great problem before the new Ministers, un- 
 conscious of it as, when they took office, they seem 
 to have been, was the American question. The 
 tidings of the passing of the Stamp Act set the 
 colonies ablaze, and that union which Indian war 
 and French menaces had been unable to inspire 
 was automatically produced by the imminence 
 of this common danger. Nine States sent repre- 
 sentatives to a congress at New York in October 
 1 765, and in petitions to the King and Parliament 
 and a Declaration of Right they set forth the case 
 for America. It was, they held, "inseparably 
 essential to the freedom of a people, and the un- 
 doubted right of Englishmen, that no taxes be 
 imposed on them but with their own consent, 
 given personally or by their representatives." 
 They themselves, however, were not, and by the 
 nature of circumstances never could be, repre- 
 sented in the House of Commons, and it followed, 
 therefore, that the British Parliament could not 
 tax them. Besides these calm constitutional 
 protests there were violent disturbances, which 
 forced the hand of the moderate party. There 
 was rioting at Boston and much burning of 
 effigies, and, more seriously, the burning of Chief 
 Justice Hutchinson's house. Stamp distributors 
 were terrorised out of their posts, and the stamps 
 themselves were not allowed to circulate. To 
 put an end to the entire block in public business
 
 THE TAXATION OF AMERICA 121 
 
 which resulted, the Governors were obliged to 
 authorise non-compliance with the Act. The 
 American merchants also took retaliatory steps 
 which touched England more nearly. They 
 boycotted British goods and repudiated their 
 debts to British merchants while the obnoxious 
 Act remained in force. This course of action had 
 the effect of converting the whole trading com- 
 munity of Great Britain to a belief in the necessity 
 for its repeal. 
 
 The effectiveness of the Ministry in dealing 
 with the American question mainly depended on 
 Pitt's attitude towards them. Without him any 
 fabric of reform that they might raise would be 
 built upon the sand. If he joined them he 
 would bring with him the enthusiastic support 
 of the people, and, led by his genius and backed 
 by a united public opinion, they might hold down 
 the forces of coercion and prerogative. In the 
 light that we now possess of the policy of George 
 the Third it is impossible to resist Burke's con- 
 clusion that the supreme need of the time was a 
 stable and cohesive party. Nothing else could 
 combat successfully the systematic corruption 
 practised by the Court, or put an end to the 
 aimless disunion and selfish apathy among the 
 chief political groups which made that corruption 
 possible. Pitt was offered a unique chance of 
 consolidating such a party. It was unique,
 
 122 CHATHAM 
 
 because the body of statesmen which now invited 
 him to join them was the only one which could 
 point to a record of untarnished honour. But he 
 gave no sign, and deliberately drew back from 
 the opportunity. The new Ministers consulted 
 him repeatedly and conciliated him by distinguish- 
 ing his friends. It was again and again made 
 clear to him that if he was willing to lead he 
 had only to place himself at their head. His 
 only response was to write letter after letter to 
 his friends during the last half of 1765 expressing 
 a rooted distrust of Newcastle, and at most to 
 send to Grafton " the best wishes of a Somerset- 
 shire bystander." l 
 
 Mere physical causes had no doubt something 
 to do with this strange reluctance. Incessant 
 fits of gout, operating on a highly strung and 
 excitable temperament, had produced the be- 
 ginning of that extreme nervous tension which in 
 1767 developed into complete prostration. His 
 naturally indocile temper became almost im- 
 practicable. Illness had impaired his grasp of 
 realities, for the image of the pervading influence 
 of Newcastle which he conjured up was the 
 phantom of a distorted brain. At the same time 
 we cannot say with any certainty that if his 
 brain had been unclouded he would have acted 
 differently. For his attitude was quite consistent 
 
 1 Anson's Grafton, p. 59.
 
 THE TAXATION OF AMERICA 123 
 
 with his peculiar views on party. It is abundantly 
 clear from his correspondence, that, so far from 
 desiring to act always in concert with any 
 particular set of politicians, he preferred to stand 
 alone, or, at most, to draw support from all 
 quarters without much regard for the homo- 
 geiieousness of his following. For party, as such, 
 he never professed to care. There was thus a 
 strong superficial resemblance between his own 
 methods and those of George the Third, but Pitt's 
 ideal was very different to the King's. He 
 desired a union of ability in the service of the 
 country, without respect of persons. It is an 
 ideal with which nowadays we can ourselves 
 sympathise, for, though Ministries of all the 
 talents have not been among the most successful 
 in history, it takes a hearty conservatism to admit 
 that the party system represents the final and 
 completed effort of political development. More 
 than one cause had probably contributed so to 
 shape Pitt's views. In his War Ministry he had 
 united several varieties and shades of opinion in 
 the support of his policy, and he himself ac- 
 knowledged the loyal help which the Tories had 
 given him. For the great family connections, 
 which, though supposed to form the nucleus of 
 the Whigs, were generally oscillating to and fro 
 in pursuit of patronage and public money, he felt 
 a growing disdain. It may be urged that the
 
 124 CHATHAM 
 
 Whigs proper were at this time reduced to the 
 blameless circle of the Rockinghams, and that 
 the party which Pitt was asked to reconstruct 
 was thus free from the features of Whiggism 
 which he most disliked. That even under these 
 circumstances he forbore to join it, shows that 
 his distaste for party was all-embracing. 
 
 But, though he. stood thus persistently alone, 
 his utterances on the Peace of Paris had not been 
 more eagerly awaited than was his first pronounce- 
 ment upon America. He was at the parting of 
 the ways. No definite decision had been taken ; 
 Rockingham, with Grafton and Con way, preferred 
 the repeal of the Stamp Act, but the King, the 
 Court party, and its adherents within the 
 Rockingham Cabinet, threw their weight on the 
 other side. George Grenville was committed to 
 the enforcement of his own Act, and of course 
 denounced repeal. The debates of December 
 1765 had done little to clear up matters. 
 
 When Parliament met after the Christmas 
 recess on January 14, 1766, Pitt was in his 
 place. There followed one of the historic debates 
 of the House of Commons, and one for which 
 America was listening not less anxiously than 
 England. Pitt delivered two great speeches in 
 the course of it, and they show his mastery of 
 lucid argument, and still more the height of 
 inspiration to which he was capable of rising in
 
 THE TAXATION OF AMERICA 125 
 
 reply. He began his first speech by emphasising 
 the fact that he stood there " single and uncon- 
 nected." He denounced the late Ministry, saying 
 that every capital measure they had taken was 
 wrong. He discomfited the Rockinghams with a 
 characteristic expression of want of confidence, 
 which was all the more embarrassing because 
 it was couched in strains of eulogy. Their 
 characters were fair, he said, and he was always 
 glad when men of fair character engaged in the 
 King's service. "They will do me the justice 
 to own I advised them to engage ; but, notwith- 
 standing I love to be explicit I cannot give 
 them my confidence: pardon me, gentlemen, 
 confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged 
 bosom ; youth is the season of credulity." 
 
 Then, discarding personalities, he plunged into 
 the heart of the American question : 
 
 "When the resolution was taken in the House 
 to tax America, I was ill in bed. If I could have 
 endured to have been carried in my bed, so great 
 was the agitation of my mind for the conse- 
 quences, I would have solicited some kind hand 
 to have laid me down on this floor, to have 
 borne my testimony against it. It is now an Act 
 that has passed. I would speak with decency of 
 every Act of this House, but I must beg the 
 indulgence of the House to speak of it with 
 freedom. I hope a day may soon be appointed
 
 126 CHATHAM 
 
 to consider the state of the nation with respect 
 to America. I hope gentlemen will come to this 
 debate with all the temper and impartiality 
 that his Majesty recommends and the import- 
 ance of the subject requires a subject of greater 
 importance than ever engaged the attention 
 of the House, that subject only excepted when 
 nearly a century ago it was a question whether 
 you yourselves were to be bond or free. . . . 
 I will only speak to one point a point which 
 seems not to have been generally understood ; 
 I mean, to the right. . . . It is my opinion that this 
 kingdom has no right to lay a tax upon the colonies. 
 At the same time I assert the authority of this 
 kingdom over the colonies to be sovereign and 
 supreme in eveiy circumstance of government and 
 legislation whatever. Taxation is no part of the 
 governing or legislative power. The taxes are 
 a voluntary gift and grant of the Commons 
 alone. . . . The idea of a virtual representation of 
 America in this House is the most contemptible 
 that ever entered into the head of a man. It 
 does not deserve a serious refutation. The 
 Commons of America, represented in their several 
 assemblies, have ever been in possession of the 
 exercise of this their constitutional right, of 
 giving and granting their own money. They 
 would have been slaves if they had not enjoyed 
 it. ... I never shall own the justice of taxing
 
 THE TAXATION OF AMERICA 127 
 
 America internally until she enjoys the right of 
 representation. In every other point of legisla- 
 tion the authority of Parliament is like the north 
 star, fixed for the reciprocal benefit of the parent 
 country and her colonies." 
 
 Pitt thus took his stand firmly on the in- 
 dissoluble connection between taxation and re- 
 presentation. Grenville in his reply asserted 
 that the right of taxation was included in the 
 sovereign Power, and that Parliament, as 
 sovereign, could therefore tax the colonies. 
 Legally his position was irrefragable, and doubt- 
 less Pitt was unwise in attempting to rest his 
 case so much as he did upon considerations of 
 constitutional law, though in his justification it 
 must be remembered that the chief judicial 
 authority on his side, Lord Camden, indulged in 
 even more unrestrained language against the 
 validity of Grenville's view. But there was a 
 broad ground of policy in Pitt's utterances 
 which Grenville never seriously touched. Gren- 
 ville moved in a world of formulas and abstrac- 
 tions, and, having discovered that it was not 
 absolutely unconstitutional to tax the colonies, 
 resolved to enforce his decision at all costs. Pitt 
 looked at the concrete case. He discerned that 
 the spirit which animated American resistance 
 was one with the principle which throughout 
 English history had prompted the most famous
 
 j 2 8 CHATHAM 
 
 vindications of popular right against prerogative, 
 and he saw that coercion would be disastrous and 
 impossible, and that nothing less than the unity 
 of the empire was at stake. This is brought out 
 more fully in his reply. Rising a second time, 
 with characteristic disregard of Parliamentary 
 conventions, to answer Grenville, he poured forth 
 a torrent of eloquence which decided the 
 immediate question of repeal and left an in- 
 effaceable impression on America. 
 
 "The gentleman tells us America is obstinate, 
 America is almost in open rebellion. I rejoice 
 that America has resisted. Three millions of 
 people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as 
 voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have 
 been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest. 
 I come not here armed at all points with law cases 
 and Acts of Parliament ; with the Statute Book 
 doubled down in dogs' ears, to defend the cause of 
 liberty. ... If the gentleman does not understand 
 the difference between internal and external 
 taxes, I cannot help it. But there is a plain 
 distinction between taxes levied for the purpose 
 of raising a revenue, and duties imposed for the 
 regulation of trade for the accommodation of the 
 subject ; although in the consequences some 
 revenue might accidentally arise from the latter. 
 The gentleman asks, When were the colonies 
 emancipated ? I desire to know when they were
 
 THE TAXATION OF AMERICA 129 
 
 made slaves. But I dwell not upon words. 
 When I had the honour of serving his Majesty, 
 I availed myself of the means of information 
 which I derived from my office; I speak, there- 
 fore, from knowledge. My materials were good ; 
 I was at pains to collect, to digest, to consider 
 them ; and I will be bold to affirm that the profit 
 to Great Britain from the trade of the colonies 
 is two millions a year. This is the fund that 
 carried you triumphantly through the last war. 
 And shall a miserable financier come with a 
 boast that he can bring a peppercorn into the 
 exchequer, to the loss of millions to the nation ? 
 I dare not say how much higher these profits 
 may be augmented. Omitting the immense 
 increase of people by natural population in the 
 northern colonies and the migration from every 
 part of Europe, I am convinced the whole com- 
 mercial system may be altered to advantage. A 
 great deal has been said, without doors, of the 
 strength of America. It is a topic that ought to 
 be cautiously meddled with. In a good cause, 
 on a sound bottom, the force of this country can 
 crush America to atoms. But on this ground, on 
 the Stamp Act, when so many here will think it 
 a crying injustice, I am one who will lift up my 
 hands against it. In such a cause your success 
 would be hazardous. America, if she fell, would 
 fall like the strong man. She would embrace 
 9
 
 130 CHATHAM 
 
 the pillars of the State, and pull down the Con- 
 stitution along with her. Is this your boasted 
 peace ? Not to sheathe the sword in its 
 scabbard, but to sheathe it in the bowels of your 
 countrymen ? The Americans have not acted in 
 all things with prudence and temper. They have 
 been driven to madness by injustice. Will you 
 punish them for the madness you have occasioned ? 
 Rather let prudence and temper come first from 
 this side. I will undertake for America that she 
 will follow the example. 
 
 ' Be to her faults a little blind, 
 Be to her virtues very kind.' 
 
 Upon the whole, I will beg leave to tell the 
 House what is really my opinion. It is that 
 the Stamp Act be repealed absolutely, totally, and 
 immediately ; that the reason for the repeal be 
 assigned, because it was founded on an erroneous 
 principle. At the same time let the sovereign 
 authority of this country over the colonies be 
 asserted in as strong terms as can be devised, and 
 be made to extend to every point of legislation 
 whatever ; that we may bind their trade, confine 
 their manufactures, and exercise every power 
 whatsoever, except that of taking their money 
 out of their pockets without their own consent." 1 
 Repeal was henceforth assured, but it was not 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, ii. 363-372.
 
 THE TAXATION OF AMERICA 131 
 
 carried without long and embittered debates, in 
 which the influence of the Court was turned 
 unsparingly against the Ministers. The King's 
 Friends openly opposed it, and the King himself 
 ignored Rockingham's remonstrances against their 
 conduct. At last Lord Strange circulated a 
 rumour that repeal was contrary to his Majesty's 
 wishes, whereupon Rockingham went straight to 
 George the Third, and elicited from him a denial. 
 Curious memorials of this survived in the shape of 
 three disavowals in the King's handwriting, in 
 the last of which, a mere scrap of paper, and 
 seemingly part of the cover of a letter, he declares 
 that, though he would have preferred modification, 
 he was for repeal as against coercion. It was 
 impossible for the Ministers, in view of their own 
 weakness and the contemptuous disregard which 
 had been shown by the Americans for the late 
 Acts, to carry repeal without the addition of a 
 qualifying measure. Accordingly, it was accom- 
 panied by a Declaratory Act affirming the right 
 of Parliament to make laws binding on the 
 colonies in all cases, without exception. But 
 across the sea this implied menace was held as 
 nothing beside the immediate boon of repeal, 
 which for a time most truly pacified the people of 
 America.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 PEERAGE, MINISTRY, AND RETIREMENT 
 
 Fall of the Rockinghams Pitt induced to take office 
 Composition of his Ministry He becomes Earl of 
 Chatham His foreign policy His Indian policy His 
 tactical errors as a party leader The visit to Bath and 
 return Townshend's insubordination Mental eclipse 
 of Chatham His mysterious malady Grafton visits 
 him at Hampstead Chatham sinks back into seclusion. 
 
 FIT'S American speeches had once more 
 _L shown how indispensable was his adhesion 
 to the Rockingham Ministiy if that Ministry was 
 to stand. They had shown, as the Prime 
 Minister said in a letter which he wrote to the 
 King the day after the great debate, " the 
 amazing powers and influence " of Pitt whenever 
 he chose to intervene. 1 Overtures to him were 
 again made, but again ended in failure, as they 
 were bound to end ; for the two principal parties 
 were at cross purposes, Rockingham wishing 
 to remain titular leader, or at most to divide 
 supremacy with Pitt, and Pitt pronouncing for 
 
 1 Rockingham Memoirs, i. 270. 
 132
 
 THE MARQUIS OF ROCKINGHAM
 
 PEERAGE, MINISTRY, RETIREMENT 133 
 
 " a transposition of offices " to the detriment 
 of Rockingham. 1 In February, however, Rocking- 
 ham was prepared to place himself in Pitt's 
 hands. But Pitt, who was chagrined by the 
 failure of the earlier negotiations, declared himself 
 obdurate to all but the express command of the 
 King ; and two months later Rockingham himself 
 became more sanguine as to the maintenance of 
 his Ministry, and again moved away from Pitt. 
 Yet in fact he was on the brink of his fall. In 
 May, Grafton resigned, carrying himself over 
 avowedly to the camp of Pitt, where in spirit he 
 had always been. In July the Chancellor, Lord 
 Northington, who as a King's Friend had been a 
 focus of disaffection within the Cabinet, finally 
 broke away, and, this done, George the Third 
 promptly dismissed his Ministers. 
 
 He then turned to Pitt, very much as he had 
 done in 1763. But he was now far more insidious 
 and more dangerous. In 1763 he had not 
 matured his policy, and sought mainly an escape 
 from Grenville ; now he had set his system in 
 full and successful operation, and in Pitt he 
 discerned an unconscious instrument. Skilfully 
 and fatally did he work on the apparent coinci- 
 dence between Pitt's maxim of "measures, not 
 men," and his own design of " routing out the 
 present system of parties banding together." 
 1 Anson's Grafton, p. 67.
 
 134 CHATHAM 
 
 Pitt's course of action at this juncture does more 
 credit to his heart than to his head. It is 
 astonishing that he should have allowed his 
 regard for the King to blind him to the inherent 
 and disastrous flaws of the administration he 
 was called upon to form. But it was one of his 
 weaknesses to be dazzled by the attributes of 
 Royalty. How deep wasTiis dejection under the 
 "irremovable Royal displeasure" of George the 
 Second in 1754 we have already seen. Whig as 
 he was, no believer in the divine right of kings 
 in Stuart days venerated more devoutly than 
 he " the deputy elected by the Lord." While 
 his language to his colleagues was pronounced 
 by Conway to be of an autocratic kind seldom 
 heard west of Constantinople, he approached 
 his sovereign in a spirit of abasement that was 
 similarly Oriental. It was part of the florid and 
 fantastic element in his character, akin to the 
 pomp and circumstance and mystery with which 
 he surrounded himself in his journey through the 
 world. 
 
 The miscellaneous nature of his new Cabinet 
 can only be appreciated by examining its 
 component parts in detail. It contained a solid 
 substratum of King's Friends. Northington 
 became Lord President. Barrington remained 
 Secretary for War. Lord North, now coming 
 forward into ill-starred prominence, was Joint
 
 PEERAGE, MINISTRY, RETIREMENT 135 
 
 Paymaster of the Forces. Charles Townshend, 
 whose American policy was diametrically opposed 
 to Pitt's, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
 At the same time Pitt took from the Rockingham 
 party Conway, who resumed his former office of 
 Secretary of State, and Grafton, who became 
 First Lord of the Treasury. For his Chancellor 
 he had Lord Camden, who, as Chief Justice Pratt, 
 had decided in the Wilkes case in favour of 
 popular right, and was one of the chief advocates 
 of a liberal policy towards America. He attracted 
 also the clever but inscrutable Shelburne, and his 
 follower Barre, who, after signalising his entry 
 into public life by stormy declamations against 
 Pitt, had found salvation when the clamour over 
 Wilkes arose. Only one figure was lacking which 
 could possibly have made the Ministry more 
 dissonant, and that was Temple. His self- 
 importance now received a chastisement that was 
 only unfortunate because it came so late. Pitt 
 offered him the Treasury, but Temple would be 
 content with nothing less than an absolute 
 equality with Pitt in allotting the various posts in 
 the Cabinet. This, Pitt had the firmness to 
 decline, whereupon Temple's injured vanity ex- 
 ploded in inspired pamphlets and sarcastic private 
 letters that commented indignantly on "the 
 proposition of being stuck into a Ministry as a 
 great cipher at the head of the Treasury, sur-
 
 136 CHATHAM 
 
 rounded by other ciphers, all named by Mr. Pitt, 
 of different complexion with me." l 
 
 So diverse was the composition of the Ministry, 
 which Burke has described in a famous passage 
 as "such a tesselated pavement without cement 
 here a bit of black stone and there a bit of 
 white ; patriots and courtiers, King's Friends 
 and republicans, Whigs and Tories, treacherous 
 friends and open enemies that it was indeed a 
 very curious show ; but utterly unsafe to touch, 
 and unsure to stand on." 2 Pitt in his prime 
 might possibly have managed to hold it together 
 through his ascendency in the House of Commons. 
 But its last chance of cohesion vanished when, at 
 the very outset, he took the momentous decision 
 to withdraw to the House of Lords with the 
 Earldom of Chatham and the post of Privy Seal. 
 The reasons for this step were obvious and simple. 
 With health grievously impaired and nerves so 
 shattered that the strain of business became to 
 him daily more intolerable, he could neither have 
 led the Commons nor taken over the charge of a 
 laborious department. But to his whole Cabinet, 
 from Northington to Camden, the tidings came 
 as a startling shock. They realised more fully 
 than he himself did how far his position in the 
 country depended upon his remaining the Great 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, ii. 4^8, 4^9' 
 
 * Speech on American Taxation, April 19, 1774.
 
 PEERAGE, MINISTRY, RETIREMENT 137 
 
 Commoner, unique and impeccable, the chosen 
 representative of the people. Horace Walpole 
 had predicted truly that the circumstances both 
 of the time and of the Ministry would be against 
 Pitt ; that he wanted the thorough bass of drums 
 and trumpets, and was not made for peace. 
 These disadvantages were crowned by his accept- 
 ance of a peerage. The people fell away from 
 him. The countermanding by the City of London 
 of the illuminations which had been prepared to 
 celebrate his return to office was an infallible, if 
 somewhat ludicrous, sign of the revocation of 
 popular favour. His enemies compared him to 
 Pulteney, and his best friends felt that, however 
 unfair the parallel, there was an ominous similarity 
 in the attitude of the public on the two occasions. 
 
 Thus in July 1766 stood Chatham, to give him 
 the title by which he must henceforth be called, 
 and by which he has been generally known in 
 history, in distinction from his statesman son. 
 Under such circumstances, with fear and fainting 
 of hearts inside the Cabinet and the withdrawal 
 of popular support outside, with his own vigour 
 failing and the cloud darkening over his brain, he 
 could at most only adumbrate a policy. What 
 little he could do he did, and it is interesting to 
 trace his activity, brief as it was, in various fields 
 of statesmanship. 
 
 First he turned to his old and chosen sphere of
 
 138 CHATHAM 
 
 foreign affairs. He had been watching with 
 attention apd alarm the busy diplomacy of 
 Choiseul, and he now projected a "northern 
 system" to counterbalance the Family Compact. 
 It was to be a triple alliance of England, Prussia, 
 and Russia, with provisions for taking in the 
 smaller Powers of north Europe if they were 
 willing to join. Chatham was always fascinated 
 by schemes of this kind, partly from his natural 
 taste and ability for planning great measures of 
 high policy, partly because he had ever vividly 
 present before his eyes the menace of Bourbon 
 aggression. To this menace he conceived a 
 northern alliance 'to be the natural counterpoise ; 
 it was, as we have seen, one of the chief items in 
 the programme which he put forward when 
 approached by Cumberland in the Cabinet crisis 
 of 1765. The astute diplomatist Hans Stanley, 
 who had been Chatham's emissary to Paris in 
 1761, was selected to negotiate at St. Petersburg 
 and to sound Frederick upon his way. In a 
 letter which he wrote to Chatham in August 
 Stanley surveyed the chances of his mission. 
 Russia, he thought, felt secure and independent 
 owing to her distance from the southern Powers, 
 and there were no indications that she particularly 
 wanted to bind herself to England. Prussia 
 desired a dual and exclusive alliance with Russia. 
 The sole hope of success lay in the possibility of
 
 PEERAGE, MINISTRY, RETIREMENT 139 
 
 persuading Frederick that it would be to his 
 interest to admit England to the compact. 
 Frederick, however, when he was approached, 
 proved recalcitrant. He spoke in general terms 
 to Mitchell, the British Ambassador at Berlin, of 
 his distaste for complicated unions in time of 
 peace. "When the storm seems to be rising, 
 and clouds begin to appear, then, and not till 
 then, is the time of uniting together and of 
 concerting measures to ward off the impending 
 danger." Probably the chief reason for his 
 refusal was that he had neither forgotten nor 
 forgiven England's treatment of him at the 
 Peace of Paris. For Chatham he expressed, now 
 as always, great admiration and regard ; but his 
 confidence in the continuity of British policy had 
 been shaken by the short-lived and oscillating 
 Ministries that had succeeded each other since 
 George in. came to the throne. He did not 
 believe in the durability of Chatham's influence. 
 When Mitchell reminded him that his great ally 
 was again in power and would so continue, 
 Frederick replied, "That does not agree with 
 my accounts from England." l Prussia thus 
 proved impracticable, and Russia was not less 
 perverse. As Stanley had predicted, and 
 Chatham himself had foreseen when he said in 
 his speech on the Peace that Russia's true 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, ill, 140.
 
 140 CHATHAM 
 
 interests led her to move " extrinsically of other 
 systems," she would only consent to an alliance on 
 terms entangling to the Western Power. She 
 declared that the treaty must embrace the 
 eventuality of a Turkish war, and, as this was 
 not a matter in which England could feel any 
 interest, the negotiations dropped altogether. 
 
 Another great question, closely touching those 
 Imperial interests which Chatham held so dear, 
 was now crying for settlement. Since the 
 victories of Clive, Bengal had been devastated 
 by scandalous misgovernment. The English 
 power was supreme and undisputed, though 
 nominally native rulers still held sway. The 
 officials of the Company utilised this power to 
 establish trade monopolies and levy blackmail ; 
 and while they amassed huge fortunes native 
 industry succumbed. Sometimes the people of 
 Bengal, in Macaulay's words, " submitted in 
 patient misery. Sometimes they fled from the 
 white man, as their fathers had been used to 
 fly from the Mahratta ; and the palanquin of 
 the English traveller was often carried through 
 silent villages and towns, which the report of his 
 approach had made desolate." l The results were 
 seen in England in the return of the " nabobs," 
 who had begun, as Chatham said in 1770, to 
 buy themselves into Parliament with such a 
 1 Essay on Clive.
 
 PEERAGE, MINISTRY, RETIREMENT 141 
 
 torrent of corruption as no private hereditary 
 fortune could resist. In 1765 Clive went back 
 to India invested with great powers in response 
 to a universal call. Confronted by the bitterest 
 opposition from his subordinates, he organised 
 and carried through with wonderful firmness 
 far-reaching measures of reform ; but when his 
 short administration of eighteen months was 
 ended the Company failed to maintain his policy, 
 and the fundamental question of the relative 
 right of the Crown and the Company to the 
 sovereignty of the Indian territories came forward 
 in substantial shape. 
 
 " I need not tell you," wrote Chatham to 
 Townshend in January 1767, "how entirely this 
 transcendent object, India, possesses my heai*t 
 and fixes my thoughts." l The fullest statement 
 of his views on Indian policy is to be found in 
 letters which he wrote to Shelburne, who himself 
 shared his opinions, when the question of India 
 was revived in Parliament in 1773. "I always 
 conceived/' he said then, " that there is in 
 substantial justice a mixed right to the territorial 
 revenues between the State and the Company, as 
 joint captors ; the State equitably entitled to the 
 larger share, as largest contributor in the acquisi- 
 tion by fleets and men, etc. Nor can the Com- 
 pany's share, when ascertained, be considered 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, iii. 153-
 
 142 CHATHAM 
 
 as private property, but in trust for the public 
 purposes of defence of India and the extension of 
 trade, never in any case to be portioned out in 
 dividends to the extinction of the spirit of 
 trade." l His conviction that the ultimate right 
 to, and responsibility for, the Indian territories 
 lay with the Crown, and that the Company 
 must be regarded as essentially a trustee, was 
 characteristic of a statesman who always empha- 
 sised the moral obligations of Government. He 
 asserted it just as emphatically in 1766-1767 as 
 in 1773. In November 1766 he secured the 
 appointment of a Parliamentary Committee of 
 Inquiry into the affairs of the Company. But 
 illness prostrated him before he could develop 
 the lines of his policy, and he was not destined 
 himself to inaugurate Indian reform. For his 
 attitude towards the schemes eventually adopted 
 we must have recourse to another of the letters 
 written to Shelburne in the summer of 1773, in 
 which his statesmanlike ideas found large and 
 liberal expression. " India," he wrote, " teems 
 with iniquities so rank as to smell to earth and 
 heaven. The reformation of them, if pursued in 
 a pure spirit of justice, might exalt the nation, 
 and endear the English name throughout the 
 world. . . . The putting under circumscription and 
 control the high and dangerous prerogative of 
 
 * Chatham Correspondence, iv. z6^..
 
 PEERAGE, MINISTRY, RETIREMENT 143 
 
 war and alliances, so abused in India, I cannot 
 but approve. . . . The abolition of inland trade on 
 private account is highly laudable, as far as that 
 provision goes ; but I would assuredly carry the 
 prohibition further, and open again to the natives 
 and other Eastern merchants the inland trade 
 of Bengal, and abolish all monopolies on the 
 Company's account, which now operate to the 
 unjust exclusion of an oppressed people, and to 
 the impoverishing and alienating of those exten- 
 sive and populous provinces. The hearts and 
 good affections of Bengal are of more worth than 
 all the profits of ruinous and odious monopolies." x 
 A suggestion of Chatham's preoccupation with 
 India at the opening of his Ministry is given in 
 an amusing letter written by Wedderburn the 
 lawyer to George Grenville in September 1766. 
 Wedderburn pictures Chatham as surveying the 
 kingdoms of the earth from " the pinnacle of 
 Hampstead Hill," himself invisible ; though how 
 he intends to dispose of them passes conjecture. 
 " Fame says, indeed, that he has begun at one 
 extremity of the world, and that 
 
 ' Hydaspes, Indus, and the Ganges, 
 Dread from his arm impending changes.'" 2 
 
 To Hampstead Chatham had fled when he was 
 forming his Ministry in the hot days of July, and 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, IV. 276, 277. 
 
 2 Grenville Papers, iii. 320.
 
 144 CHATHAM 
 
 it is closely, if inauspiciously, connected with this 
 epoch in his life. 
 
 From India, however, his attention was speedily 
 distracted by less important but more irritating 
 and immediate concerns. A bad harvest had 
 been followed by extreme scarcity, by rioting and 
 great distress ; and to secure the food supply, and 
 prevent a further rise in prices, the Ministry by 
 an Order in Council laid an embargo on the 
 export of corn. Having exceeded the letter of 
 the law, they had to apply to Parliament for 
 indemnification. In the debates which followed, 
 Camden, in the House of Lords, let fall the 
 unlucky observation that the measure was at 
 worst only a forty days' tyranny, while in the 
 House of Commons Chatham's henchman 
 Beckford, "the wild alderman " as Temple called 
 him, made a mysterious and extraordinarily 
 injudicious allusion to the dispensing power. 
 These indiscretions furnished a telling oppor- 
 tunity of which Mansfield and Grenville made 
 full use in reply, and thus the Government was 
 handicapped from the start. 
 
 Still more vexatious to Chatham was the 
 miscarriage of his party diplomacy. In the early 
 autumn of 1766 negotiations were opened with 
 the Bedford interest in the view of strengthening 
 the Ministry. Chatham, true to his cherished 
 principle, seems to have thought it both advisable
 
 PEERAGE, MINISTRY, RETIREMENT 145 
 
 and possible to detach a single member from that 
 well - disciplined connection, and he contented 
 himself with offering a post to Lord Gower. 
 This was not enough for the Bedfords, and it was 
 declined. In October, however, Chatham met 
 the Duke at Bath, and they had frequent con- 
 ferences together. This made an impression on 
 the political world, but neither now nor later, 
 when Chatham returned to town, did it issue in 
 an alliance. The final result was indeed just the 
 opposite, as Bedford's failure to obtain what he 
 wanted parted him decisively from Chatham, and 
 linked him closely with the other groups in 
 opposition. These circumstances made it abso- 
 lutely imperative that the Ministry should be itself 
 at one and able to show an undivided front to 
 its foes. 
 
 But at this critical time it was rent asunder by 
 a piece of discourtesy on the part of Chatham 3 for 
 which he paid most dearly. Wishing to dispose 
 of the Treasurership of the Household in another 
 quarter, he brusquely invited Lord Edgcumbe, 
 who held it, to exchange it for a Lordship of 
 the Bedchamber. Edgcumbe was unwilling ; but 
 the Earl of Bessborough, who was at the Post 
 Office, to arrange the difficulty offered to take 
 the Lordship of the Bedchamber, and to surrender 
 his own post to Edgcumbe. Chatham, however, 
 trampled mercilessly on the feelings of these 
 10
 
 146 CHATHAM 
 
 illustrious Whigs. He dismissed Edgcumbe and 
 summarily vetoed Bessborough's proposal. With 
 Edgcumbe departed the patronage of four 
 boroughs, but there was also a more serious 
 defection. The most eminent and unimpeach- 
 ably Whig section of the Ministry the Duke of 
 Portland, Lord Bessborough, Lord Scarborough, 
 Lord Monson, Sir Charles Saunders, Sir W. 
 Meredith, and Admiral Keppel resigned in a 
 body. Conway, who was hardly to be persuaded 
 not to resign himself, wrote to Chatham that he 
 was "much distressed and hurt" by what had 
 taken place. 1 
 
 The only distinguished name among the 
 substitutes whom Chatham found to fill these 
 gaps was that of Sir Edward Hawke, who took 
 the Admiralty. The outlook of the Ministiy 
 had never been more dark. Chatham himself 
 had already given signs of growing fallibility of 
 judgment, not only in the case of Edgcumbe, but 
 in tactics more purely political, as when, for 
 example, he entrusted the motion for an Indian 
 inquiry to the windy Beckford. Further, his 
 ardent eloquence was chilled in the uncongenial 
 atmosphere of the House of Lords, where the 
 Duke of Richmond, confronting the great states- 
 man with a boldness that had only been paralleled 
 in the House of Commons by Barre's celebrated 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, ill. iz8.
 
 PEERAGE, MINISTRY, RETIREMENT 147 
 
 attack, said he hoped the nobility would not be 
 browbeaten by an insolent Minister. But in the 
 Cabinet Chatham seems, as long as he was able to 
 be present at its deliberations, to have preserved 
 intact his remarkable ascendency. The most 
 brilliant and most wayward of his colleagues was 
 Townshend ; yet Townshend confessed to Grafton, 
 as they drove home together after a Cabinet 
 Council over which Chatham had presided, " that 
 the Earl had just shown them what inferior 
 animals they were." l 
 
 The master hand was now to be withdrawn. 
 On the rising of Parliament in December, 
 Chatham had set forth on that memorable visit 
 to Bath from which dates his disastrous eclipse. 
 In January 1767 he started to return to London. 
 Gout drove him back, and he did not leave 
 Bath again till the middle of February, when 
 he got as far on his homeward journey as the 
 Castle Inn at Marlborough. There, in the ram- 
 bling red - brick mansion which has now been 
 turned to such different uses, but was then chief 
 among posting-houses on the great Bath road, he 
 remained, invisible and unapproachable, till the 
 end of the month. Astonished passers-by found 
 inn and town alike thronged with servants in his 
 livery ; for, as Gilly Williams observed to Selwyn, 
 he carried with him more equipage, household, 
 
 1 Anson's Grafton, p. 105.
 
 148 CHATHAM 
 
 and retinue than most of the old patriarchs 
 used to travel with in ancient days. At last on 
 March 2 he arrived in London, "full of gout, 
 and not able to stir hand or foot." 
 
 He found the Ministry in a state of demorali- 
 sation which the despondent letters of his 
 colleagues had not exaggerated. When his face 
 was hid for a moment, Burke said finely, his whole 
 system was on a wide sea, without chart or 
 compass. The Ministers fell an easy prey to the 
 most virile and aspiring personality among them, 
 Charles Townshend, who was now fairly embarked 
 upon that course of champagne speeches which 
 has won him his ill-starred renown. Townshend 
 had already given signs of a spirit of rebellion 
 which no one but Chatham in person could 
 repress. On the Indian question he accepted 
 the principle that the Company had a right to 
 territorial revenue, in frank contradiction of the 
 views of Chatham. His carelessness had largely 
 contributed to bring about the grave defeat on 
 the land-tax which the Government had just 
 suffered in the House of Commons. Most serious 
 of all, he had in the army debate of January 26 
 let fall the light-hearted but fateful declaration 
 that he would find a revenue in America nearly, 
 if not quite, sufficient to make her support 
 an establishment of her own. Chatham, was 
 well aware of his insubordination. In December
 
 CHARLES TOWNSHEND 
 After the portrait by Reynolds
 
 PEERAGE, MINISTRY, RETIREMENT 149 
 
 1766 he had written to Grafton that Townshend's 
 fluctuations and incurable weaknesses could not 
 " comport with his remaining in that critical 
 office." l As soon as he returned to London he 
 offered Townshend's post, with the King's leave, 
 to Lord North, who would not accept it. This 
 refusal would doubtless not have altered his 
 decision to dismiss Townshend ; but fate forbade 
 him to achieve his purpose. Before the end of 
 the first week in March he became incapable of 
 all mental effort ; his long melancholy illness 
 had begun. 
 
 From this time until July 1769 he remained 
 buried in seclusion. The precise character of his 
 strange malady has given rise to abundant 
 conjectures. Of his contemporaries some pro- 
 nounced him completely mad, while others were 
 of the opinion that it was only a consummate 
 piece of acting designed to relieve him of re- 
 sponsibility for the failure of his administration. 
 The second hypothesis is wholly inconsistent 
 with the character of Chatham, who vould never 
 have stooped to such a subterfuge ; nor does it 
 agree with the bulk of the evidence which we 
 possess. The first hypothesis, thus absolutely 
 stated, is at least misleading. It would probably 
 be untrue to say though this is a point which 
 physicians and not laymen must finally decide 
 
 1 Anson's Grafton, p. no.
 
 150 CHATHAM 
 
 that Chatham ever became actually insane, but 
 at the same time it must be admitted that his 
 behaviour at this time bore many traces of an 
 unhinged mind, and that, whether or not his 
 reason positively left him, it was no doubt most 
 seriously shaken. His extravagances were never 
 more conspicuous than during the period of his 
 life which preceded this collapse, and the record 
 of them reads like a chapter in the life of some 
 barbaric potentate. 
 
 When he settled at North End in Hampstead, 
 upon taking office, he began rapidly buying up 
 all the houses round his own, " to ward off the 
 noises of neighbourhood." He had done the 
 same thing at Hayes, where he also spent great 
 sums in hurrying on the planting of his grounds 
 at night by the light of torches. At Burton 
 Pynsent he had cedars and cypresses brought 
 down from London to cover a bleak hill which 
 bounded his view. In his kitchens might be 
 seen chickens boiling or roasting without inter- 
 mission through the day ; so uncertain was his 
 appetite, so imperative his whim to gratify it 
 instantaneously when he felt disposed. Now he 
 was filled with an agitated desire for Hayes, 
 which he had sold in 1766 to Thomas Walpole. 
 Walpole offered it to him for a month or for the 
 whole summer ; " he would immediately remove 
 his family, who were there, and Lord Chatham
 
 PEERAGE, MINISTRY, RETIREMENT 151 
 
 would find it well aired." But Chatham would 
 be content with nothing less than its repossession. 
 Under the combined pressure of Lady Chatham 
 and Lord Camden, Walpole was persuaded to 
 yield it in the course of the autumn with a good 
 grace. The repurchase had been a delicate 
 matter. " If this sacrifice," wrote Camden, 
 " shall prove instrumental to the recovery of Lord 
 Chatham's health, Mr. Walpole will be well paid ; 
 and I am afraid that nothing short of that will 
 make him completely happy. It is impossible to 
 describe as it deserved the pangs he felt at part- 
 ing with this favourite place." l 
 
 Facts like these show into what strange 
 latitudes Chatham's mind had wandered. A life 
 of illness had told fatally upon his system and 
 intensified his eccentricities. Now, when he 
 stood most in need of a reserve of strength, his 
 constitution failed him. Probably the peculiar 
 temperament which never allowed him to unbend, 
 helped to bring about this result. He had always 
 lived at full pressure, and sustained himself, not 
 without much self-consciousness and ostentation, 
 at a high level of thought and action. The 
 extreme tension thus produced now accentuated 
 his morbid depression, and allowed the gout to 
 settle like a pall over his disordered nerves instead 
 of relieving him by a sharp attack of physical pain. 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, Hi. 290.
 
 152 CHATHAM 
 
 There is no sadder or more impressive testimony 
 to his greatness than the series of imploring notes 
 which, while he lay prostrate at Hampstead 
 through the months of 1767, poured in on him 
 from George the Third, from Grafton, and from 
 Shelburne, begging him to speak but a word, to 
 grant but a momentaiy interview, in order to put 
 an end to that distemper in the political world 
 which was as calamitous as his own. On May 
 30, when dwindling majorities in the House of 
 Lords seemed to foreshadow immediate disaster, 
 the King made an insistent appeal to him to see 
 Grafton. " Your duty and affection for my 
 person," he wrote, "your own honour, call on 
 you to make an effort ; five minutes' conversation 
 with you would raise his spirits, for his heart is 
 good." Chatham obeyed, and Grafton went next 
 day to Hampstead. His account of the inter- 
 view gives a moving description of Chatham's 
 state, of " the sight of his great mind bowed down, 
 and thus weakened by disorder." The whole 
 appalling catalogue of Ministerial woes was un- 
 folded by Grafton. In reply Chatham could only 
 beg him to stay in office himself, and to believe in 
 Shelburne, whom he profoundly distrusted. 1 
 
 This momentaiy glimpse was all that was seen 
 of Chatham in politics for two years. His prostra- 
 tion grew more and more complete ; at the bare 
 
 1 Anson's Grafton, pp. 136-138.
 
 PEERAGE, MINISTRY, RETIREMENT 153 
 
 mention of a word of business he would tremble 
 and burst into tears. From time to time he 
 entreated to be allowed to resign a Premiership 
 that had long been merely titular. But it was 
 not till October 1768 that he ceased to be the 
 official head of an administration which had 
 travelled far from every conviction which he 
 cherished, and farthest of all in the matter of 
 America. Within the limits of a short life of 
 Chatham it would be impossible and undesirable 
 to recount in detail the disastrous things which 
 were done in his name, " how Townshend, usurp- 
 ing command of the Government, madly reopened 
 the fatal issue by the imposition of a number of 
 import duties ; how Parliament gave a careless 
 assent to Townshend's proposal; how colonial 
 resistance was renewed." l For, keenly as 
 Chatham strove afterwards to avert the con- 
 sequences of these errors, at the time they were 
 committed he was politically dead, plunged in an 
 isolation too deep to be penetrated even by the 
 highest public calls or claims. 
 
 1 Goldwin Smith, United States, p. 68.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 
 
 Reappearance of Chatham His altered policy Return of 
 Wilkes The Middlesex election- Chatham on the 
 Constitutional question The Ministry dissolves 
 Widespread agitation for reform Lord North Parlia- 
 ment and the Press Effect of the struggle upon 
 Chatham His declarations on Parliamentary reform 
 Chatham in the House of Lords. 
 
 ON July 7, 1769, London was startled by 
 the news that Chatham had been seen at 
 the King's levee that morning. Violent fits of 
 gout had at last dispelled his brooding malady, 
 and he was indeed returning to a world that 
 stood sorely in need of him. But he was return- 
 ing to it an altered man. The gulf that separates 
 the Chatham of 1769 from the Chatham of 1767 
 is not merely the gulf of two obliterated years. 
 A change had passed over his character, the 
 traces of which are from this time clearly visible. 
 Since his great War Ministry his life had been 
 broken and unhappy. This period had been 
 
 154
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 155 
 
 marked by one great outpouring of his genius, 
 when he came forward to oppose the taxation of 
 the colonies ; but circumstances and his own 
 caprice had turned the whole current of affairs 
 awry. If Chatham had not played for his own 
 hand in the sense in which most politicians of his 
 age did so, he cannot be acquitted of having 
 alienated the men who would naturally have 
 followed him, by his dictatorial pose and his 
 repellent and exasperating reserve. At length he 
 had returned to power, only to succumb to a 
 disabling illness ; but before it crushed him he 
 was allowed for a moment to see the consequences 
 to which his impolicy was leading. Now, when 
 his brain was cleared and he was able to survey 
 things round him as they really were, he saw 
 that nothing but the most single-hearted and 
 unflagging service could arrest the misgovernment 
 of his country. His patriotism, which had never 
 really faltered, burned out the unworthier ele- 
 ments of his character like a consuming fire, and 
 he came back to politics prepared to sacrifice 
 his dearest prejudices to the furtherance of the 
 common cause. 
 
 He discarded his old doctrine about the futility 
 of party. It was this that had prevented him 
 from coalescing with the Rockinghams and had 
 placed him at the mercy of the King. He now 
 made it plain that, if the Rockinghams would
 
 156 CHATHAM 
 
 forgive and forget, he would yield them ungrudg- 
 ing confidence and be proud to fight under their 
 banner. " This I am resolved upon," he said, 
 " that I will not even sit at council but to meet 
 the friends of Lord Rockingham. Whatever 
 differences may have been between us, they 
 must be forgotten; the state of the nation is 
 such that all private animosities must subside. 
 He, and he alone, has a knot of spotless friends 
 such as ought to govern this kingdom." In 
 another conversation which was reported to 
 Rockingham by the Duke of Portland, Chatham 
 said that he united body and soul with Lord 
 Rockingham and Sir George Savile in their 
 measures, and that he would go hand in hand 
 with Lord Rockingham and his friends, who 
 were, and had proved themselves to be, the only 
 true Whigs in the country. " Former little 
 differences must be forgotten when the contest 
 is pro arts et focis." l It is true that they were 
 never quite forgotten. The Rockingham party 
 was intellectually inspired by Burke, who never 
 trusted Chatham, and pointed the sense of 
 difference between them in his great pamphlet 
 on the Present Discontents. Chatham, on the 
 other hand, found it almost insuperably difficult 
 to keep time with the slow and sedate pace 
 at which the Rockinghams moved along the 
 
 1 Rockingham Memoirs, ii. 142, 143.
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 157 
 
 path of reform. Now and then his fiery 
 impatience would flare out, as when, in the 
 following year, he complained that "moderation, 
 moderation, was the burden of their song," and 
 that he would have to be <e a scarecrow of violence 
 to the gentle warblers of the grove the moderate 
 Whigs and temperate statesmen." The best 
 intentions could not efface this cleavage of 
 temperament ; but Chatham's generous sense of 
 duty enabled him, in spite of it, to keep the 
 alliance unbroken for the rest of his life. 
 
 He never did things by halves, and on the 
 present occasion he did not stop at a rapprochement 
 with the Rockinghams. He reconciled himself 
 also with Temple, and with his other distinguished 
 brother-in-law George Grenville, who was now 
 on the point of atoning for a misdirected career 
 by his great speech against the expulsion of 
 Wilkes and by his invaluable Election Act. 
 What was, in the light of his old obsequiousness, 
 more remarkable still, he came to the conclusion 
 that the best loyalty was to speak the unflatter- 
 ing truth to the King, and in his audience of 
 July he made plain his disagreement with certain 
 measures of his Majesty's Ministers, and expressed 
 the hope that, if he was found opposing their 
 policy in Parliament, his conduct might not be 
 put down to pique or ambition, for office of any 
 kind had ceased to be desirable to him.
 
 158 CHATHAM 
 
 But George the Third had not enough belief 
 in other people's disinterestedness to see that 
 Chatham was in earnest, or enough humour to 
 realise the ridiculous unwisdom of the renewed 
 campaign against Wilkes on which he had just 
 launched his Government. That persecuted man 
 of the people, whose previous fortunes have been 
 recounted in an earlier chapter, had gone to 
 Paris as soon as he became convalescent after his 
 duel with Martin. There he learned that he had 
 been found guilty in the Court of King's Bench 
 of publishing the Essay on Woman and republish- 
 ing the North Briton ; and that, on his failure to 
 come up for sentence, he had been declared an 
 outlaw. For four years he remained abroad, 
 making a leisurely tour through Italy, but 
 spending most of his time in Paris, where he 
 was immensely popular. But even the society 
 of "the gay, the polite Athenians," as he called 
 them, could not compensate him for his exclu- 
 sion from England, and, after a furtive visit 
 thither in 1766 and an unsuccessful appeal to 
 Grafton for a pardon, he returned without any 
 pretence of concealment, just before the General 
 Election of 1 768, and stood for the City of London. 
 He was late in the field and was defeated ; 
 but, undismayed, he immediately proceeded to 
 offer himself as' a candidate for Middlesex. The 
 rector of Brentford, where the polling for the
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 159 
 
 county took place, was Home, earliest and most 
 passionate of Wilkites, and so ably did he 
 engineer his idol's electoral campaign that 
 Wilkes was returned with ease at the head of 
 the poll. 
 
 The long sequel to the Middlesex election 
 then began. At the beginning of June 1768 the 
 outlawry of Wilkes was reversed by Mansfield on 
 a technical point of law ; but the other verdicts 
 against him still hung over his head, and ten 
 days later he appeared again in court and was 
 sentenced upon these to pay a fine of 1000 and 
 to be imprisoned for twenty-two calendar months. 
 He was fast becoming the object of that 
 rapturous popular devotion which led Franklin 
 to say that if George the Third had had a bad 
 private character, and Wilkes a good one, the 
 latter might have turned his sovereign out of the 
 kingdom. After the Middlesex election "45" 
 was chalked on every house in London, the 
 whole city was illuminated, and the streets were 
 paraded by a mob. When Parliament met in 
 May, crowds shouting " Wilkes and Liberty ! " 
 surrounded the House, and in St. George's 
 Fields there was a riot, in the course of which 
 the troops fired and five or six lives were lost. 
 Lord Weymouth, the Secretary of State, had 
 written a letter to the magistrates before the 
 disturbance, in which he urged them not to
 
 ibo CHATHAM 
 
 shrink from employing the military. Wilkes 
 obtained a copy and sent it to the St. James's 
 Chronicle, where it was published in full, with a 
 few violent words of preface by Wilkes himself. 
 The King and his Ministers, who, in spite of the 
 rising tide of public feeling, were resolved upon 
 the expulsion of Wilkes from the House of 
 Commons, determined to make this a casus belli, 
 and on February 3, 1 769, at the motion of Lord 
 Barrington, Wilkes was expelled for his accu- 
 mulated transgressions of the North Briton, the 
 Essay on Woman, and the preface to Lord 
 Weymouth's letter. Middlesex promptly re- 
 elected him. The House retaliated by voting 
 him incapable of sitting in the existing Parlia- 
 ment. He was again unanimously re-elected, 
 and again disqualified. Then the Government 
 unearthed a sufficiently intrepid rival candidate 
 in Colonel Luttrell, and put him up for the seat. 
 The result was that at this, the fourth Middlesex 
 election, Wilkes obtained 1143 votes and 
 Luttrell 296. Nothing daunted, the House 
 reversed the verdict of the constituency and 
 declared Luttrell duly elected as its member. 
 
 This unblushing violation of electoral rights 
 raised a storm of indignation throughout England. 
 The era of great public meetings began, and 
 protests and petitions flowed in from every part 
 of the country. In the midst of this ferment
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 161 
 
 Chatham emerged from his seclusion. Seldom, 
 if ever, has there been a political reappearance 
 more unlocked for and more stirring. Everyone 
 who had served under him, as Sir George 
 Trevelyan aptly says, was as restless as an 
 Austerlitz veteran who had just heard of the 
 landing from Elba. 1 For in the Ministry, 
 leavened though it now was with the Bedfords, 
 and led in the House of Commons by Lord North, 
 there were still remaining some of Chatham's 
 old adherents. There was the Prime Minister, 
 Grafton, whose ductility, however, Chatham 
 could not bring himself to forgive. There was 
 Granby, the Commander-in-Chief, and Camden, 
 the Lord Chancellor. They waited eagerly for 
 him to show his hand, and he did not keep them 
 long in suspense. When Parliament met for 
 the Session of 1770 on January 9, Chatham, 
 rising immediately after the seconder of the 
 address in the House of Lords had sat down, 
 moved an amendment inviting the Peers to 
 consider the causes of the prevailing discontent, 
 and " particularly the late proceedings of the 
 House of Commons touching the incapacity of 
 John Wilkes, Esqre., expelled by that House, 
 to be elected as a member to serve in this 
 present Parliament." 2 
 
 1 Early History of Charles James Fox, p. 209. 
 
 2 Chatham Correspondence, ill. 369, et icy. 
 II
 
 i62 CHATHAM 
 
 When he had finished, Camden rose to follow 
 him. For some time, the Chancellor said, he 
 had beheld with silent indignation the arbitrary 
 measures of the Ministry. He had often 
 drooped and hung down his head in Council, and 
 disapproved by his looks those steps which he 
 knew his avowed opposition could not prevent. 
 However, he would do so no longer, but openly 
 and boldly speak his mind. As to the incapaci- 
 tating vote, he was of the same opinion as 
 Lord Chatham. He considered it as a direct 
 attack upon the first principles of the Constitu- 
 tion ; and if, in giving his decision as a judge, 
 he was to pay any regard to that vote, or to 
 any other vote of the House of Commons in 
 opposition to the known and established laws 
 of the land, he should look upon himself as a 
 traitor to his trust. Never did the magnetism 
 of Chatham receive a more striking tribute than 
 this speech of Camden's, and never was Mansfield, 
 his great rival in the Lords, placed in a more 
 embarrassing situation. The latter, whether from 
 sheer consternation at his position, or from that 
 natural leaning towards subtlety of thought and 
 statement which led Chatham to describe him 
 as the genius of penetration, began his speech 
 by saying that his personal views as to the 
 legality of the steps taken by the House of 
 Commons were locked up in his own breast and
 
 STATUE OF LORD MANSFIELD IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 163 
 
 should die with him. Then he went on to argue 
 that, though the House of Commons could not 
 declare general principles of law, it could, as a 
 judicial body, decide special cases concerning its 
 own composition. From such a decision there 
 was no appeal, and there could be no remedy 
 but by a fresh Act of Parliament. 
 
 This contention called up Chatham once more, 
 and he delivered a reply which ranks among his 
 very greatest speeches. Mansfield had practically 
 attributed to the House of Commons an extra- 
 legal power which would enable them to defy 
 the wishes of the people whom they represented. 
 To this Chatham retorted 
 
 "The Constitution of this country has been 
 openly invaded in fact ; and I have heard, with 
 horror and astonishment, that very invasion 
 defended on principle. What is this mysterious 
 power, undefined by law, unknown to the 
 subject, which we must not approach without 
 awe, nor speak of without reverence, which no 
 man may question, and to which all men must 
 submit ? My lords, I thought the slavish 
 doctrine of passive obedience had long since 
 been exploded ; and when our kings were 
 obliged to confess that their title to the Crown, 
 and the rule of their government, had no other 
 foundation than the known laws of the land, I 
 never expected to hear a divine right or a divine
 
 164 CHATHAM 
 
 infallibility attributed to any other branch of the 
 Legislature." 
 
 If, said Chatham, Mansfield's doctrine were 
 admitted, we had only exchanged the arbitrary 
 power of a king for the arbitrary power of the 
 House of Commons. " But, my lords, this is not 
 the fact, this is not the Constitution ; we have a 
 law of Parliament, we have a Code in which every 
 honest man may find it. We have a Magna 
 Charta, we have the Statute Book, and the Bill 
 of Rights." It was the duty of the House of 
 Lords to redress the balance of the constitutional 
 machine in view of this usurpation on the part 
 of the House of Commons, and Chatham con- 
 cluded with a splendid strain of rhetoric in which 
 he appealed to his fellow-Peers : 
 
 " My lords, I have better hopes of the 
 Constitution, and a firmer confidence in the 
 wisdom and constitutional authority of this 
 House. It is your ancestors, my lords it is to 
 the English barons that we are indebted for the 
 laws and Constitution we possess. Their virtues 
 were rude and uncultivated, but they were great 
 and sincere. Their understandings were as 
 little polished as their manners, but they had 
 hearts to distinguish truth from falsehood ; they 
 understood the rights of humanity, and they had 
 spirit to maintain them. . . . Let us not, then, 
 degenerate from the glorious example of our
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 165 
 
 ancestors. Those iron barons (for so I may call 
 them when compared with the silken barons of 
 modern days) were the guardians of the people ; 
 yet their virtues, my lords, were never engaged 
 in a question of such importance as the present. 
 A breach has been made in the Constitution, 
 the battlements are dismantled, the citadel is 
 open to the first invader, the walls totter, the 
 Constitution is not tenable. What remains, then, 
 but for us to stand foremost in the breach, to 
 repair it or perish in it ? " 
 
 The immediate result of Chatham's speech 
 was the dismissal of Camden and the resignation 
 of Granby, who, after declaring in the House of 
 Commons that he would always lament his vote 
 for the incapacitation of Wilkes as the greatest 
 misfortune of his life, gave up the command of 
 the army and the Mastership of the Ordnance, 
 making, as Chatham said, " the name of Granby 
 as revered by the friends of the Constitution as 
 it is honoured and feared by the nation's enemies 
 in the field." l Before the end of January a still 
 greater sensation was caused by the retirement of 
 Grafton. Chatham's return had not awakened 
 in him the feelings of penitence which it stirred 
 in Camden and Granby, for from his old leader 
 he had now parted for ever ; but he was bitterly 
 dissatisfied with a Premiership which had made 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, iii. 392.
 
 166 CHATHAM 
 
 him irretrievably unpopular, and clouded almost 
 at its dawn the promise of his early day. 
 
 It says much for the perseverance of George 
 the Third, and more for his extraordinary success 
 in corrupting the House of Commons, that, with 
 all the integrity and most of the ability in the 
 country against him, and in the face of an 
 exasperated people, he still contrived that his 
 party should hold the field. As the year 1770 
 went on, the task of maintaining his regime might 
 well have seemed hopeless to a weaker man. 
 The spirit of reform was astir, and that in un- 
 expected quarters. In February Grenville intro- 
 duced the Bill which at last put an end to the 
 crying scandal of deciding disputed elections by 
 a party vote of the House of Commons. A 
 motion to inquire into the expenditure of the 
 Civil List followed, and, though it failed, the 
 indignation that lay behind it was not stifled. 
 The Livery of London, headed by Beckford, 
 presented to the King a remonstrance of 
 astonishing outspokenness, in which they told 
 their sovereign to his face that Parliament was 
 corruptly subservient to his Majesty's Ministers, 
 and that those Ministers and their majority 
 between them had engaged in more ruinous 
 proceedings than those in which Charles the 
 First or James the Second ever indulged. In 
 the House of Lords Chatham thundered con-
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 167 
 
 tinually on the subject of the Middlesex elec- 
 tion, frankly declaring it to be the alarm bell 
 to liberty, which he meant to ring incessantly in 
 the ear of the kingdom. Junius, who was now 
 at the height of his power and popularity, had, 
 a few months before, discarding dukes and 
 Ministers, indited his famous letter to the King. 
 
 That the general upheaval, which seemed so 
 imminent, after all did not come, was due very 
 largely to the two following circumstances. In the 
 first place, George the Third secured a successor to 
 Grafton in the Premiership who proved himself a 
 perfectly invaluable servant for the purpose which 
 his Majesty required. Lord North looked, to use 
 the irresistibly comic phrase of Horace Walpole, 
 like a blind trumpeter. But his passivity of con- 
 science, his unruffled temper, his unfailing tact, 
 and his debating skill, qualified him only too 
 successfully to be the effective mouthpiece of a 
 bad cause and a misguided King. 
 
 The second circumstance which prevented a 
 convulsion was, that Wilkes, with an admirable 
 persistence, prompted equally by his strong 
 common-sense and his equally strong desire for his 
 personal comfort, steadily declined to play the 
 part of a republican hero. His subsequent career 
 must be very briefly told. It is enough to say 
 that his only ambitions were the acknowledg- 
 ment of his violated Parliamentary rights, and as
 
 168 CHATHAM 
 
 much luxurious leisure as he could obtain in 
 compensation for his past vexations. 1 He satisfied 
 the first substantially in 1774, when Luttrell retired 
 and he himself returned to Parliament, and in all 
 due form in 1782, when the record of all the 
 arbitrary proceedings against him was expunged 
 from the journals of the House. He enjoyed a 
 monopoly of popular admiration almost more com- 
 plete than even Chatham had ever possessed, and 
 after serving as Lord Mayor he at length secured 
 the congenial place of Chamberlain of London. 
 
 Wilkism had not subsided, before a second 
 struggle between Parliament and the people 
 began. This centred round the question of 
 Parliamentary reporting. In March 1771, at the 
 instigation of Colonel Onslow, who had been 
 unceremoniously handled in the papers, the House 
 of Commons began an incautious campaign against 
 the Press, which' ended in flagrant illegality. In 
 the course of it a messenger of the House of 
 Commons attempted to take one of the incrimin- 
 ated printers, named Miller, into custody. Miller 
 at once summoned a constable and gave the 
 messenger himself in charge. Miller and the 
 messenger were then both brought up at the 
 Mansion House before Lord Mayor Crosby, Alder- 
 man Wilkes, and Alderman Oliver. Thither came 
 also , the deputy Serjeant -at -Arms from West- 
 1 Trevelyan's Early History of Fox, p. 254.
 
 JOHN WILKES 
 From the portrait by E. Pine in the Guildhall
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 169 
 
 minster to claim his missing victim. The Lord 
 Mayor asked the messenger whether his warrant 
 for arresting Miller was backed by a city magis- 
 trate, and on receiving a denial committed him 
 for trial. War was thus declared between the 
 privilege of Parliament and the charters of the 
 City. The House of Commons summoned Crosby 
 and Oliver, who were both members, to attend 
 in their places, and Wilkes to present himself at 
 the bar. Wilkes, whose tactical skill may be 
 traced as inspiring the defence of the City 
 throughout the whole proceeding, refused to 
 appear anywhere but in his place as member for 
 Middlesex ; and Parliament shrank from a second 
 conflict with the redoubted Alderman. Crosby 
 and Oliver, however, came, and were committed 
 to the Tower ; and, not content with this, the 
 House took the extraordinary step of forcing the 
 Lord Mayor's Clerk to attend and to strike out 
 from his books the recognisance binding their 
 messenger to come up for trial. But the final 
 result was a victory all along the line for the 
 freedom of the Press and of Parliamentary 
 reporting, as the printers were left at liberty, 
 and Wilkes was unmolested, while Crosby and 
 Oliver, both during their short confinement and 
 on their release at the prorogation, were the 
 objects of enthusiastic demonstrations of popular 
 sympathy.
 
 170 CHATHAM 
 
 Chatham was quite prepared to admit with 
 regard to this matter that the Lord Mayor laid 
 himself open to censure by contravening the 
 established jurisdiction of the House of Commons 
 in his commitment of the messenger ; but he 
 also saw plainly the unwisdom of the course of 
 action which was taken by Parliament. In a 
 letter to Barre on March 21 he wrote : " These 
 wretches called Ministers will be sick enough of 
 their folly (not forgetting iniquity) before the 
 whole business is over. If I mistake not, it will 
 prove very pregnant, and one distress generate 
 another ; for they have brought themselves and 
 their master where ordinary inability never arrives, 
 and nothing but first-rate genius in incapacity can 
 reach ; I mean, a situation wherein there is noth- 
 ing they can do which is not a fault. They have 
 wantonly called up a conflict of high and sacred 
 jurisdiction ; neither can relinquish their right ; 
 one may err (and I continue to be clear that Lord 
 Mayor errs), but his error, taking it to be sincere 
 and conscientious, cannot be criminal or punish- 
 able." i 
 
 The contest with the printers seems finally to 
 have convinced Chatham of the hopeless character 
 of the existing Parliament and the necessity for 
 drastic and immediate action. On May 1 he 
 brought forward in the House of Lords a motion 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, iv. 119.
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 171 
 
 for a dissolution, and in a few telling sentences 
 surveyed the struggle which had just been raging. 
 The Commons, he said, not satisfied with shutting 
 their doors, would overturn the liberty of the 
 Press. The printers had spirit, and resisted. The 
 magistrates of London undertook their defence, 
 but the Commons proceeded with outrageous 
 violence. "These men, who had allowed the 
 prostituted electors of Shoreham counsel to defend 
 a bargain to sell their borough by auction, would 
 not grant the same indulgence to the Lord Mayor 
 of London, pleading for the laws of England and 
 the conscientious discharge of his duty." And the 
 expunging of the messenger's recognisance was, 
 he said, " the act of a mob, and not of a Parlia- 
 ment." 
 
 At the same time he made a most important 
 declaration on the subject of Parliamentary 
 reform. Calling for a dissolution in the closing 
 passages of his speech, he wound up as 
 follows : " Not that I imagine this act alone 
 sufficient. . . . The influence of the Crown is 
 become so enormous that some stronger bulwark 
 must be erected for the defence of the Constitu- 
 tion. The Act for constituting septennial Parlia- 
 ments must be repealed. Formerly the incon- 
 venience attending short Parliaments had great 
 weight with me ; but now we are not debating upon 
 a question of convenience ; our all is at stake ; our
 
 172 CHATHAM 
 
 whole Constitution is giving way ; and, therefore, 
 with the most deliberate and solemn conviction, 
 I declare myself a convert to triennial Parlia- 
 ments." l 
 
 This deliverance shows how the impression 
 made upon Chatham by the lawless proceedings 
 of the House of Commons majority, acting under 
 the direction of the King, had gradually deepened. 
 But its full significance can only be measured by 
 setting it side by side with his previous pronounce- 
 ments on the question. In June 1770, when a 
 deputation from the City of London waited on 
 him with a resolution of the Common Council 
 thanking him for his efforts in furtherance of 
 Parliamentary reform, he said : " With all my 
 deference to the sentiments of the City, I am 
 bound to declare that I cannot recommend 
 triennial Parliaments as a remedy against that 
 canker in the Constitution, venality in elections ; 
 ready to submit my opinion to better judgment, 
 if the wish for that measure shall become pre- 
 valent in the kingdom." 2 And even in April 
 1771 he had written to Shelburne : "As to 
 shortening the duration of Parliaments, I find a 
 real dislike to the measure, in minds very sound 
 about other public matters. The dread of the 
 more frequent returns of corruption, together 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, iv. lyz, 173. 
 
 2 Ibid. Hi. 464, 465.
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 173 
 
 with every dissoluteness which elections spread 
 through the country, strongly indisposes families 
 of all descriptions to such an alteration." l 
 
 His palinode was made under pressure of 
 necessity, but there is not the smallest reason to 
 doubt that it was sincere. He approached the 
 subject with an open mind ; and if reflection led 
 him in the direction of democracy, he would not 
 draw back. It was by his conversion to triennial 
 Parliaments that he drew nearest to nascent 
 Radicalism and recoiled farthest from Burke and 
 the Whigs. 
 
 But this particular remedy did not exhaust 
 Chatham's ideas about reform. Shortly after his 
 return to politics, on January 22, 1770, he had 
 traversed the whole question in a memorable 
 speech in the House of Lords. Corruption had 
 been increased tenfold by the appearance of the 
 Indian nabobs on the scene, and Chatham took 
 their electioneering excesses as the text for his 
 remarks. " The riches of Asia," he said, " have 
 been poured in upon us, and have brought with 
 them not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic 
 principles of government. Without connections, 
 without any natural interest in the soil, the 
 importers of foreign gold have forced their way 
 into Parliament by such a torrent of private 
 corruption as no private hereditary fortune could 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, iv. 157.
 
 174 CHATHAM 
 
 resist. For this great evil some immediate 
 remedy must be provided." Chatham recognised 
 the iniquity of the small pocket boroughs, which 
 he called the rotten parts of the Constitution, but 
 he did not consider their extinction a practicable 
 measure of reform. "The limb/' he said, "is 
 mortified, but the amputation might be death." 
 He looked to the cities and counties for salvation, 
 and he proposed to counteract existing evils by 
 giving an additional member to each county. 
 The ruling idea of the Constitution, according to 
 Chatham, was that there should be " a permanent 
 relation between the constituent and representa- 
 tive body of the people." An increase of county 
 members, as representing the soil, would, he con- 
 sidered, best meet the need for more public spirit 
 in the House of Commons. 1 As he himself said 
 later in the year : " Purity of Parliament is the 
 cornerstone in the Commonwealth, and, as one 
 obvious means towards this necessary end is to 
 strengthen and extend the natural relation be- 
 tween the constituents and the elected, I have, 
 in this view, publicly expressed my earnest wishes 
 for a more full and equal representation, by the 
 addition of one knight of the shire in a county, 
 as a farther balance to the mercenary boroughs." - 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence , iii. 406, 47- 
 
 2 To the City of London Deputation, Chatham Corrc- 
 spondtnct, iii. 465.
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 175 
 
 It is easy to point out the inadequacies in this 
 scheme, the most obvious of them being that it 
 made no provision for the representation of those 
 cities which were the growing centres of industry 
 and intelligence. But it was at all events a con- 
 tribution. Courageously taking up the question in 
 the face of difficulties which made success well- 
 nigh impossible, he laid it seriously before Parlia- 
 ment, and lent the weight of his great name to a 
 cause which was founded in justice and destined 
 to eventual triumph, immature as in his day it 
 was. 
 
 Since the renewal of Chatham's activity our 
 eyes have been fixed on domestic affairs. The 
 course of British colonial policy will be considered 
 in the following chapter ; British foreign policy 
 was practically in abeyance. In 1770 Spain made 
 a descent upon the Falkland Islands, which had 
 been in British occupation for four years, and 
 captured and evicted the little garrison. The 
 possibility of hostilities with his ancient enemy 
 aroused the keenest interest in Chatham, who did 
 his best to stimulate the Government to energetic 
 measures. Its inertia in the sphere of foreign 
 politics was almost as depressing to him as its 
 crusade on behalf of privilege and prerogative 
 at home. "England at this day," he wrote, "is 
 no more like to old England, or England forty 
 years ago, than the monsignori of modern Rome
 
 176 CHATHAM 
 
 are like to the Decii, the Gracchi, or the Catos." l 
 Further, his activities had to be confined to a 
 peculiarly lethargic House of Lords, in which the 
 labours of opposition, he complained, were like 
 the labours of Hercules. "We are reduced to 
 a very snug party of unhearing and unfeeling 
 lords, and the tapestry hangings, 2 which last, 
 mute as Ministers, still tell us more than all the 
 Cabinet on the subject of Spain, and the manner 
 of treating with an insidious and haughty Power." 
 In spite of these disadvantages, he delivered 
 on November 22, 1770, a forcible and note- 
 worthy speech on the question at issue. 3 Its tone 
 was incisive, and even bellicose ; but Chatham 
 was well advised in thinking that no language 
 could be too strong if it only brought home to 
 Ministers the paramount necessity of vigilance 
 and preparation in face of the sleepless activity 
 of France and Spain. He laid down with great 
 lucidity, and with an authority to which no other 
 English statesman could lay claim, the primal 
 requirements of our naval policy. The lapse of 
 a hundred and thirty years since he spoke has 
 profoundly modified the situation, but there is a 
 familiar echo in the observation that England 
 must maintain such a sufficient naval force that 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, iv. 83. 
 
 2 The tapestry depicting the defeat of the Armada. 
 
 3 Chatham Correspondence, iv. 4, et seq.
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 177 
 
 even the combined fleets of her two most likely foes 
 might never be masters of the Channel. Probably, 
 however, the passages of the speech which are 
 read with most interest to-day are those in which, 
 with impressive iteration, Chatham turned to praise 
 famous men. There is the curious and remark- 
 able eulogy of Cromwell, who "did not derive 
 his intelligence from spies in the Cabinet of every 
 prince in Europe ; he drew it from the cabinet 
 of his own sagacious mind. He observed facts, 
 and traced them forward to their consequences. 
 From what was, he concluded what must be, 
 and he never was deceived." There is the en- 
 dorsement, memorable as coming from the lips 
 of his antagonist, of the statesmanship of Carteret, 
 whose abilities "did honour to this House and 
 to this nation; in the upper departments of 
 government he had not his equal." And there 
 is the generous tribute to Anson, to whose 
 "wisdom, experience, and care (and I speak it 
 with pleasure), the nation owes the glorious naval 
 successes of the last war." 
 
 12
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 
 
 American policy under Townshend and North The tea 
 duty Benjamin Franklin The Boston Tea-party 
 Coercion of Boston America rallies to her side The 
 Philadelphia Congress Chatham's approbation of the 
 Congress He speaks against coercion Introduces a 
 Bill to solve the problem Succumbs to illness The 
 policy of France Chatham returns to politics Speech 
 on the employment of Indians France joins America 
 Critical position of England The King refuses to 
 summon Chatham Chatham's last speech in the House 
 of Lords His death Burial in Westminster Abbey. 
 
 THE closing scene of Chatham's life has 
 imprinted itself deeply on the national 
 imagination. While the early part of his political 
 career is forgotten, and many of its middle and 
 later phases very dimly remembered, his cham- 
 pionship of the cause of America is hardly less 
 familiar than the most brilliant passages of his 
 War Ministry. It is still possible to maintain, 
 and to maintain with reason, that if, even at the 
 eleventh hour, he could have returned to office 
 
 178
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 179 
 
 with a free hand, separation might have been 
 averted, or at least long postponed. But that is 
 one of the unvouchsafed opportunities of history. 
 The task actually set him was Sisyphean ; for, 
 with the burden of age and infirmity upon him, 
 he had to contend against the ignorance of the 
 British governing class, a venal Parliament, and 
 the blind rancour of the King. 
 
 The extraordinary pettiness of British colonial 
 policy during this critical epoch almost passes 
 comprehension. Fever had smitten down Charles 
 Townshend before the year in which he carried 
 his Budget had run out, but his American policy 
 remained behind him in the shape of the im- 
 portation duties which he had imposed. Would 
 Parliament have the sagacity or the moral courage 
 to repeal them? In March 1770 Lord North 
 introduced a measure in the House of Commons 
 repealing all the duties except that upon tea 
 a duty, be it observed, which brought scarcely 
 300 into the Treasury. Grafton had, to his 
 honour, striven for unqualified repeal ; but the 
 King, and the Bedfords, who were strongly anti- 
 American, won the day, and the tea duty was 
 retained. Its retention was meant to keep alive 
 the principle of the Declaratory Act, and it was 
 so far successful in its object that the Americans 
 saw in it the menace of other measures of the 
 kind and the fruitful parent of discord, and it
 
 i8o CHATHAM 
 
 did eventually prove the efficient cause of war. 
 Yet, half-hearted as was the nature of the con- 
 cessions thus made, the attitude of the colonists 
 immediately changed for the better. Though 
 tea was still boycotted, the non-importation 
 agreements in the case of other articles were 
 dropped, and the reviving effect upon British 
 commerce was felt at once. In spite of the 
 perennial irritation caused in America by the 
 presence of British troops at Boston, in spite of 
 ebullitions of the smuggling spirit like the 
 burning of the ship Gaspee in 1772, in spite of 
 the significant formation of committees of 
 grievances, colonial turbulence was stilled from 
 this time to 1773. 
 
 In that year events began once more to move 
 fast towards their fatal conclusion. Benjamin 
 Franklin had been for long colonial agent and 
 virtually ambassador in England, the chosen 
 representative of the colonies abroad, the father 
 of American letters and of science. He now 
 committed that fatal error of making public the 
 Hutchinson letters which has been well described 
 as his social catastrophe. The brutal and blasting 
 invective of Wedderburn, delivered before thirty- 
 five amused and applauding Privy Councillors 
 and in the presence of Franklin himself, set an 
 indelible seal on the transaction, deeply wounded 
 Franklin, and exasperated the Americans, who
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 181 
 
 felt themselves stricken in the public insult 
 offered to their great fellow-countryman. 
 
 More momentous still and more irretrievable 
 were the outburst of violence at Boston and 
 the coercive measures which it provoked. This 
 would never have occurred but for the existence 
 of the tea duty ; its occasion was as follows : 
 Lying in the warehouses of the East India 
 Company was an immense quantity of tea, for 
 which, if only the Government could be persuaded 
 to repeal the duty, America formed an obvious 
 and extensive market. No course more politic 
 or more lucrative to all parties concerned than 
 the repeal of the tea duty could have been 
 adopted at this moment. But with blind per- 
 sistence the Government retained the import 
 duty payable in America, while remitting to the 
 Company the duty on exportation previously 
 paid in England. As the exportation duty was 
 a shilling on the pound, while the import duty 
 was only threepence, the result of the step 
 was to make tea exceptionally cheap for the 
 Americans. But there was a principle at stake. 
 As Burke said, with admirable conciseness, in his 
 speech on American Taxation : " No man ever 
 doubted that the commodity of tea could bear 
 an imposition of threepence. But no commodity 
 will bear threepence, or will bear a penny, when 
 the general feelings of men are irritated, and
 
 182 CHATHAM 
 
 two millions of people are resolved not to pay. The 
 feelings of the colonies were formerly the feelings of 
 Great Britain. Theirs were formerly the feelings 
 of Mr. Hampden when called upon for the payment 
 of twenty shillings. Would twenty shillings have 
 ruined Mr. Hampden's fortune ? No ! but the pay- 
 ment of half twenty shillings, on the principle it 
 was demanded, would have made him a slave." 
 
 At the end of 1773 the fleet of tea-ships ap- 
 peared upon the American coast, where it was 
 awaited as if it had been a second Armada. The 
 cargoes for New York and Philadelphia were never 
 landed. The cargo for Charleston was stored up 
 in cellars, where it rotted away. The Boston 
 cargo was flung [into the sea by a body of 
 colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians, who had 
 boarded the ships in which it lay. 
 
 England had been congratulating herself on 
 her moderation in repealing all the obnoxious 
 duties but one, and the news of the outrage at 
 Boston came to her with a startling shock. The 
 British people did not stop to consider minutely 
 the course of provocation which had led up to it, 
 and they gave their moral support to the policy 
 of the King and his Ministers. That policy was 
 one of undisguised coercion, and it was directed 
 entirely upon the head of Massachusetts, the 
 other American communities implicated in re- 
 sistance to the duty being deliberately ignored.
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 183 
 
 One measure closed the port of Boston, and 
 transferred its Custom House to Salem. Another 
 provided that the Council of Massachusetts should 
 be nominated by the Crown, restricted the right 
 of public meeting, and placed the appointment 
 and tenure of all judges and magistrates in the 
 hands of the Governor. A third empowered the 
 Governor to send any person in Massachusetts 
 charged with a capital offence, to be tried in 
 another colony or in Great Britain. This mass 
 of punitive legislation was virtually a declaration 
 of war, and such the colonists felt it to be. The 
 first measure, they said, took away the property 
 of unoffending thousands for the act of a few 
 individuals, the second annihilated their chartered 
 liberties, and the third made their lives liable to 
 be destroyed with impunity. 
 
 Chatham was not well enough to speak in the 
 earlier debates of this time. But his thoughts on 
 the coercive policy of 1774 may be effectually 
 gathered from a letter which he wrote to 
 Shelburne in March. In this he said that the 
 violence committed upon the tea cargo was 
 certainly criminal, and Boston owed reparation 
 to the East India Company for the destruction of 
 its property. " But," he went on, " the methods 
 proposed by way of coercion appear to me too 
 severe, as well as highly exceptionable in order of 
 time, for reparation ought first to be demanded
 
 1 84 CHATHAM 
 
 in a solemn manner, and refused by the town and 
 magistracy of Boston, before such a Bill of pains 
 and penalties can be called just. Perhaps a fatal 
 desire to take advantage of this guilty tumult of 
 the Bostonians in order to crush the spirit of 
 liberty among the Americans in general, has 
 taken possession of the heart of Government. If 
 that mad and cruel measure should be pushed, 
 one needs not to be a prophet to say England has 
 seen her best days." l Five months later he 
 sounded the same despondent note : " I fear the 
 bond of union between us and America will be 
 cut off for ever. Devoted England will then 
 have seen her best days, which nothing can 
 restore again ! " 2 
 
 He reappeared in the House of Lords in the 
 course of the year, and, in a speech upon the Bill 
 for quartering soldiers on the Americans, uttered 
 a solemn and impressive plea for conciliation. 
 And if England could have realised in its full 
 extent the magnitude of the task before her, she 
 might even now have again retraced her steps. 
 For America had rallied instantly to the side 
 of Boston. From Salem and Marblehead, the 
 two neighbouring communities which had been 
 selected to ruin her, to the distant colonies of the 
 Carolinas, came not only sympathy but substantial 
 aid. And a more speaking sign of the times than 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, iv. 336, 337. 2 Ibid. iv. 361.
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 185 
 
 even the succour of Boston was furnished by the 
 great Congress at Philadelphia, in which the 
 representatives of twelve colonies met. Before 
 the end of October it had drawn up that series 
 of resolutions and addresses the determined lines 
 of which made clear that, if the idea of inde- 
 pendence was still scouted by the vast majority of 
 the American people, coercion was none the less 
 impossible. 
 
 Chatham's attitude towards the Congress de- 
 serves more than a passing thought, as it lay at 
 the foundation of his later American policy. He 
 realised its supreme importance as representing 
 the collective opinion of America, and he dis- 
 cerned the great part which it might play alike 
 in negotiation and in any scheme of reconstruction 
 that should be mooted. For the spirit in which 
 it went to work he had nothing but the heartiest 
 approval. " I have not words to express my 
 satisfaction," he wrote on Christmas Eve, "that 
 the Congress has conducted this most arduous 
 and delicate business with such manly wisdom 
 and calm resolution as do the highest honour to 
 their deliberations. Very few are the things 
 contained in their resolves that I could wish 
 had been otherwise. Upon the whole, I think it 
 must be evident to every unprejudiced man in 
 England who feels for the rights of mankind, that 
 America, under all her oppressions and provoca-
 
 186 CHATHAM 
 
 tions, holds forth to us the most fair and just 
 opening for restoring harmony and affectionate 
 intercourse as heretofore." l 
 
 But Chatham did not confine his views at this 
 crisis to his private correspondence. He meant 
 to make them heard in Parliament, and in 
 January 1775 he did so. His enemies would 
 have been only too glad if he had kept silence. 
 Infinite pains were being taken, as we learn from 
 a note written by Lady Chatham to her husband 
 two days before the debate, to create an impres- 
 sion that he was determined not to trouble 
 himself about American affairs, and that he did 
 not intend to come to town. " For God's sake, 
 sweet life," he wrote in answer, " don't disquiet 
 yourself about the impudent and ridiculous lie of 
 the hour. It is only a pitiful device of fear ; 
 Court fear and faction fear. If gout does not put 
 in a veto, which I trust in Heaven it will not, I 
 will be in the House of Lords on Friday, then 
 and there to make a motion relative to America." 
 He meant, as he said grimly next day, to knock 
 at the Minister's door to wake him. 2 
 
 The debate took place on January 20, when 
 he moved for an address to the King to with- 
 draw the troops from Boston. His speech was 
 memorable, as were also some of the circumstances 
 of its delivery. For among Chatham's audience 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, iv. 368. 2 Ibid. iv. 370, 371.
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 187 
 
 was William Pitt, then a Cambridge undergradu- 
 ate of fifteen, but destined within nine years to 
 be Prime Minister of England ; and his enthusi- 
 astic appreciation of his father's oratory is attested 
 by the charming note he wrote to his mother on 
 the morning after the debate. There too, by 
 Chatham's special desire, was Franklin. Supremely 
 indifferent whether or not the great American 
 had been ostracised by official England, Chatham 
 himself led him into the House of Lords and, as 
 he handed him over to the charge of the door- 
 keeper, said, " This is Dr. Franklin, whom I would 
 have admitted into the House," in tones loud 
 enough for the surrounding throng of Peers and 
 friends of Peers to hear. 
 
 Chatham was the leader of a forlorn hope, but 
 his assault was boldly and unflinchingly delivered. 
 Gage's army in Boston, he said, was an army of 
 impotence and irritation ; he urged Parliament to 
 adopt the conciliatory measure of withdrawing it. 
 " If illegal violences have been, as it is said, 
 committed in America, prepare the way, open 
 the door of possibility, for acknowledgment and 
 satisfaction ; but proceed not to such coercion, 
 such proscription ; cease your indiscriminate in- 
 flictions ; amerce not thirty thousand, oppress not 
 three millions, for the fault of forty or fifty 
 individuals. Such severity of justice must for 
 ever render incurable the wounds you have
 
 i88 CHATHAM 
 
 already given your colonies ; you irritate them to 
 unappeasable rancour. What though you march 
 from town to town, and from province to province ; 
 though you should be able to enforce a temporary 
 and local submission, which I only suppose, not 
 admit, how shall you be able to secure the 
 obedience of the country you leave behind you in 
 your progress, to grasp the dominion of eighteen 
 hundred miles of continent, populous in numbers, 
 possessing valour, liberty, and resistance ? . . . 
 As an American, I would recognise to England 
 her supreme right of regulating commerce and 
 navigation ; as an Englishman in birth and 
 principles, I recognise to the Americans their 
 supreme inalienable right in their property a 
 right which they are justified in the defence of to 
 the last extremity. To maintain this principle is 
 the common cause of the Whigs on the other side 
 of the Atlantic, and on this. <'Tis liberty to 
 liberty engaged,' that they will defend themselves, 
 their families, and their country. In this great 
 cause they are immovably allied ; it is the alliance 
 of God and nature immutable, eternal fixed as 
 the firmament of heaven. For myself, I must 
 declare and avow that in all my reading and 
 observation and it has been my favourite study ; 
 I have read Thucydides, and have studied and 
 admired the master-states of the world that for 
 solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 189 
 
 of conclusion, no nation or body of men can 
 stand in preference to the general Congress at 
 Philadelphia." 
 
 If the Ministers persevered in misadvising and 
 misleading the King, Chatham concluded, " I will 
 not say that they can alienate the affections of 
 his subjects from his Crown ; but I will affirm 
 that they will make the Crown not worth his 
 wearing. I will not say that the King is 
 betrayed ; but I will pronounce that the kingdom 
 is undone." l Not content with a single great 
 oration, he rose in the course of the debate to 
 make another shorter speech. It was one of his 
 energetic days. On the next morning William 
 Pitt wrote to Lady Chatham : " My father has 
 slept well, without any burning in the feet or 
 restlessness. He has had no pain, but is lame in 
 one ankle near the instep, from standing so long. 
 No wonder he is lame, his first speech lasted 
 above an hour, and the second half an hour 
 surely the two finest speeches that ever were 
 made before, unless by himself! He will be 
 with you to dinner by four o'clock." 2 
 
 While few, if any, English statesmen have 
 exercised a greater influence by sheer unaided 
 eloquence than Chatham, none have realised 
 more fully than he the necessity of translating 
 eloquence into action. It is characteristic of him, 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, iv. 377-384. 2 Ibid. iv. 377.
 
 igo CHATHAM 
 
 that, ten days after the delivery of this speech, he 
 came forward with a Bill for settling the troubles 
 in America. This was his most detailed con- 
 tribution towards the solution of the American 
 question. Whatever the futility of such a pro- 
 posal at a time when not the wisdom of Solomon 
 could have turned Parliament from the course 
 upon which it was obstinately bent, it remains a 
 monument of Chatham's ideas of constructive 
 statesmanship. He fully countenanced Imperial 
 supremacy on the one hand, and colonial self- 
 government on the other; the problem was to 
 make the two principles compatible. His Bill 
 gave to the colonies the sole right of self-taxation, 
 made their charters inviolable, and reformed the 
 tenure of their judges and the jurisdiction of the 
 Admiralty Courts. At the same time it decisively 
 affirmed the supreme authority of Parliament in 
 all matters that could properly be called Imperial, 
 particularly commerce and navigation ; and it 
 asserted the right to despatch armies to any 
 colony without the assent of the colonial 
 assemblies. 
 
 These may be called the indispensable con- 
 ditions of any scheme of settlement, but by 
 themselves they were not enough. There was 
 need of some mediating body to adjust the 
 burden of colonial contribution, to represent 
 adequately American opinion, and to maintain
 
 EDMUND BURKE 
 After the portrait by Reynolds in the National Portrait Gallery
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 191 
 
 diplomatic relations with the British Parliament. 
 Such a body Chatham sought and found in the 
 Philadelphia Congress. It was to be legalised 
 and made permanent ; it was to be asked to make 
 a free grant to the Imperial revenue, and to fix 
 the proportion to be paid by each province ; and 
 it was to avow the ultimate supremacy of Parlia- 
 ment, as a preliminary to the exercise of the right 
 of self-taxation and the repeal of the coercive 
 Acts. 
 
 This recognition of the Congress is'what mainly 
 differentiates Chatham's Bill from the scheme 
 outlined by Burke in the great speech on Con- 
 ciliation with America which he delivered on 
 March 22, 1775. Of Burke's proposals it may 
 be said that they would have restored the status 
 quo, but there was no guarantee that they would 
 preserve it. Chatham was probably right in 
 thinking that the best security for the colonies 
 against Parliamentary encroachment was that 
 their strength and unity should be made so 
 patent that the bare idea of coercion must be 
 dismissed from the British mind. In objection to 
 his scheme it may of course be said that, as soon 
 as the Congress made America articulate and 
 conscious of her strength, she was bound to break 
 away. But on Chatham's side must be remem- 
 bered the moderate attitude which the Congress 
 in point of fact took up, and the united testimony
 
 i 9 2 CHATHAM 
 
 of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and John 
 Adams, 1 that what the mass of colonists desired 
 was not separation but redress. Chatham's Bill, 
 in any case, deserves most careful consideration 
 from all who would appreciate his policy as an 
 organiser of empire. Characteristic of it was his 
 willingness to transform the de facto Government 
 of Congress, the "rebel assembly," into a de jure 
 Government as an official body, and his unwavering 
 belief in the political genius of the American 
 people ; characteristic above all was his dream 
 of a federation under the British flag. That 
 dream may have been too far advanced for his 
 age, but we who see a Dominion of Canada and 
 an Australian Commonwealth can scarcely call it 
 visionaiy. 
 
 Parliament, however, treated the Bill much more 
 summarily, and refused to admit it to a second 
 reading. Burke's resolutions met the same fate. 
 Then another catastrophe overtook the Opposition. 
 Chatham collapsed again, and without him it was 
 maimed. For two years he was withdrawn from 
 politics the two years which saw the first blood 
 shed at Lexington, and the opening indecisive 
 period of the war. During 1776 we catch 
 occasional glimpses of his attitude towards the 
 struggle. He treated it as a civil war, "the 
 unhappy war with our fellow-subjects of America." 
 
 1 Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, iv. 185.
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 193 
 
 Consistently with this view, he refused to allow 
 his eldest son, who had been in Canada under 
 Carleton, to serve against the colonists. To Dr. 
 Addington, his physician, he made a formal 
 declaration that his feelings with regard to 
 America were unchanged, and identical with those 
 set forth by him in the Bill which he had offered 
 to the House of Lords. " Confiding in the 
 friendship of Dr. Addington, he requested of him 
 to preserve this in memory ; that in case he 
 should not recover from the long illness under 
 which he laboured, the doctor might be enabled 
 to do him justice by bearing testimony that he 
 persevered unshaken in the same opinions." 
 Chatham added that he was fully persuaded that 
 in a very few years France would set her foot on 
 English ground. Her policy for the present 
 would probably be to wait while England plunged 
 herself still more inextricably in the ruinous 
 American War. During this time she would abet 
 America indirectly, but she would in the end take 
 the open course of declaring war upon England. 1 
 
 This declaration was made by Chatham in July 
 1 776, and it is an extraordinarily true picture of 
 the course which France had in fact just decided 
 to take. Vergennes, her Foreign Minister, had 
 at the beginning of the year drawn up the 
 celebrated memorial in which he laid down what 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence , iv. 424, 425.
 
 194 CHATHAM 
 
 should be the true course of French policy in 
 view of the American War. If the military and 
 financial means of the two Bourbon kings had 
 been in a state of development proportionate to 
 their substantial power, he said, "it would, no 
 doubt, be necessary to say to them that Providence 
 had marked out this moment for the humiliation 
 of England." But though a unique opportunity 
 was offered by the conflict to reduce England to 
 the status of a secondary power, and France and 
 Spain should not shrink ultimately from open war, 
 for the present their policy must be confined to 
 giving secret assistance to the Americans. In 
 exact accordance with the prediction of Chatham, 
 Vergennes declared : " The continuance of the 
 war for at least one year is desirable to the two 
 Crowns. To that end the British Ministry must 
 be maintained in the persuasion that France and 
 Spain are pacific, so that it may not fear to 
 embark in an active and costly campaign ; while, 
 on the other hand, the courage of the Americans 
 should be kept up by secret favours and vague 
 hopes which will prevent accommodation." 
 
 There is much in the situation in France at this 
 moment upon which it is tempting to linger the 
 differing policies of Vergennes and Turgot, the 
 zenith of Franklin's curious ascendency in Paris, 
 the idealisation of the American rebellion by 
 sympathetic French thought, and the Nemesis
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 195 
 
 by which the consequences of France's inter- 
 vention recoiled upon her own head in the shape 
 of the French Revolution ; but we must content 
 ourselves with noting the broad facts of the 
 position. Obedient to Vergennes, the Govern- 
 ment adopted unhesitatingly the policy of revenge. 
 In the course of 1776 France furnished America 
 with a substantial loan, and a continued stream of 
 munitions of war. The note of alarm which 
 Chatham sounded with regard to French aggres- 
 sion was thus amply justified. It is probable that 
 the information with which he was supplied 
 was much more complete than that which was 
 at the disposal of the British Government, but 
 nothing can excuse the lethargy of that Govern- 
 ment in the face of a patent and stupendous 
 danger. 
 
 In the spring of 1777 Chatham was well enough 
 to reappear in Parliament, and on May 30 he 
 brought forward a motion for the cessation of 
 hostilities. Weak as he still was, we have 
 William Pitt's assurance that his speech was full 
 of his usual force and vivacity. He dwelt on the 
 menacing attitude of France, whose pretensions, 
 he said, were increasing daily, while she still 
 deferred as long as possible the actual signing of 
 a treaty with America. Our chances of dis- 
 persing the American forces were remote. " I 
 might as well talk of driving them before me
 
 196 CHATHAM 
 
 with this crutch." l In the debate on the 
 address on November 20 he was again in his 
 place, and moved an amendment that the King 
 should be pleased to cause the most speedy and 
 effectual measures to be taken for restoring peace 
 in America. He declared persistently that its 
 conquest was an impossibility. He urged that it 
 was not even yet too late to appeal to " the sound 
 parts of America," by which he meant the middle 
 and southern colonies. In almost humorous 
 tones of national pride he expressed his disbelief 
 that the colonists, the sons of England, could 
 combine seriously with her ancestral foes. 
 " America and France cannot be congenial ; there 
 is something decisive and confirmed in the honest 
 American that will not assimilate to the futility 
 and levity of Frenchmen." 
 
 Then, in a passage which is among the best 
 remembered fragments of his oratory, he de- 
 nounced the policy which had not shrunk from 
 employing against the colonists the terrors of 
 Indian war. "But, my lords, who is the man 
 that, in addition to these disgraces and mischiefs 
 of an army, has dared to authorise and associate 
 to our arms the tomahawk and scalping knife of 
 the savage? To call into civilised alliance the 
 wild and inhuman savage of the woods ; to 
 delegate to the merciless Indian the defence of 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence i iv. 433.
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 197 
 
 disputed rights, and to wage the horrors of his 
 barbarous war against our brethren ? " Lord 
 Suffolk was incautious enough to say in reply that 
 "it was perfectly justifiable to use all the means 
 that God and nature put into our hands." This 
 roused Chatham once more. With a rhetoric 
 grandiose and elaborate indeed, but none the less 
 the spontaneous expression of his imaginative 
 mind, he reprobated " principles equally abhorrent 
 to religion and humanity." " I call upon the 
 bishops to interpose the unsullied sanctity of their 
 lawn, upon the learned judges to interpose the 
 purity of their ermine, to save us from this 
 pollution ; I call upon the honour of your 
 lordships to reverence the dignity of your 
 ancestors, and to maintain your own ; I call upon 
 the spirit and humanity of my country to vindicate 
 the national character; I invoke the genius of 
 the Constitution." l 
 
 And now it seemed as if the star of England 
 was at last about to set. On October 17, 1777, 
 Burgoyne had surrendered at Saratoga. At the 
 beginning of December the news was brought to 
 Paris, and France immediately entered into formal 
 alliance with America. In March 1778 the 
 French ambassador in London made known the 
 treaty, diplomatic relations were broken off, and 
 war with France began. England stood absolutely 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, iv. 450-459.
 
 198 CHATHAM 
 
 alone, with a discredited Ministry, an inadequate 
 navy, and an army locked up in the New World. 
 Saratoga had so far impressed the King that, 
 before the Franco-American alliance was made 
 public, he had allowed the Ministry to enter 
 upon a policy of conciliation, to give up all the 
 points in dispute, and to despatch peace com- 
 missioners to America. But any boon which was 
 offered to the colonists by the hands of North was 
 fated to rejection, and rejection was doubly cer- 
 tain when France stood forth as America's ally. 
 
 At this supreme and culminating moment all 
 eyes in England turned to Chatham. His genius 
 alone was equally potent for conquest and concilia- 
 tion. No other name was so loved in America, 
 none was so terrible to France. Even now, with 
 an invincible optimism, he still refused to believe 
 that the breach with the colonies was final. He 
 only clung to them with a more passionate 
 assurance when France prepared to enter upon 
 "the dismemberment of this ancient and most 
 noble monarchy." While the Rockingham Whigs 
 were prepared, in order to halve the danger, to 
 let the colonies go, Chatham's view was that no 
 foreign intervention should be allowed to shatter 
 the essential unity of the English-speaking race. 
 His policy was therefore to concentrate all 
 military effort upon the defeat of France, and to 
 retain the colonies, even though they struggled
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 199 
 
 to depart, until by his own persuasive counsels, 
 and his overthrow of their ally, he led them back to 
 that allegiance which he hoped and believed they 
 were still ready to embrace once more. It may 
 safely be said that no one but Chatham could have 
 carried out such a policy, and that even in his 
 hands it would have presented almost insuperable 
 difficulties. But it was the one absolutely honour- 
 able and statesmanlike course, and Chatham was 
 so unquestionably the first of living politicians 
 that it was a national duty to commit the country 
 to his guidance. 
 
 Everything pointed one way, and even Bute 
 and Mansfield gave expression to the desire of 
 the people. North himself entreated the King 
 to send for Chatham. But George the Third 
 remained obdurate and unmoved. He knew that 
 Chatham's advent would mean the reversal of his 
 own personal regime, and the overthrow of the 
 Court party and the Crown influence which he 
 had made it the object of his reign to establish. 
 He refused to put Chatham in power ; he refused 
 to make any sort of concession to him except 
 the preposterous offer of a subordinate place to 
 North. He thus deliberately closed the door by 
 which alone it seemed possible that succour and 
 success might come. His conduct in so doing 
 has been pronounced by Mr. Lecky to be as 
 criminal as any of those acts which led Charles
 
 200 CHATHAM 
 
 the First to the scaffold. 1 It has been dimmed 
 in the popular recollection, because the death of 
 Chatham followed it so quickly as to produce the 
 impression that, whatever line of action the King 
 had taken, the consequences must have been the 
 same. But George the Third is not to be so 
 lightly acquitted at the bar of history. Even a 
 month of Chatham's leadership might have done 
 much; and, in any case, our after-knowledge of 
 the event cannot extenuate in the least degree 
 the culpability of the King's action. 
 
 On April 7 Chatham spoke for the last time 
 in the House of Lords. The Duke of Richmond 
 was to move that the British forces should be 
 withdrawn from America, thus tacitly conceding 
 independence. Though almost prostrate with 
 illness, Chatham came down to oppose the motion. 
 In a black suit and swathed with flannel he 
 entered the House, leaning upon crutches, and 
 supported on either side by his son William and 
 his son-in-law Lord Mahon. After Richmond had 
 spoken he rose with difficulty. His voice was 
 low, and at times his memory lapsed, but the 
 House of Commons which he used to sway never 
 listened to him with more awestruck attention 
 than did the House of Lords on this supreme 
 occasion. His pale and sunken face and glittering 
 eye warned his audience only too surely that they 
 
 1 History of England in the Eighteenth Century, iv. 458.
 
 THE BREACH WITH AMERICA 201 
 
 were witnessing the closing scene of an historic 
 life. A thrill must have passed through them 
 like that which pierced the heart of Wordsworth 
 when, on a stormy evening at Grasmere, he 
 heard of the expected end of Charles James 
 Fox 
 
 "A Power is passing from the earth 
 To breathless nature's dark abyss." 
 
 No other speech of Chatham's breathes a more' 
 indomitable patriotism than the last words which 
 he spoke with the hand of death upon him. 
 While English history is read and English oratory 
 remembered, it will not be forgotten how he 
 rejoiced that he was still alive to lift up his voice 
 " against the dismemberment of this ancient and 
 most noble monarchy " ; how he asked whether 
 the great kingdom that had survived whole and 
 entire all shocks from the Danish depredations 
 to the Armada, was now to fall prostrate before 
 the House of Bourbon, whether it was to stoop so 
 low as to say to its ancient inveterate enemy, 
 " Take all we have, only give us peace ! " and 
 how, finally, he urged his fellow-countrymen to 
 make at least one effort, and, if they were to fall, 
 to fall like men. 1 
 
 Richmond replied, and then Chatham tried to 
 rise again, but, pressing his hand to his heart, he 
 
 1 Chatham Correspondence, iv. 5 '9-
 
 202 CHATHAM 
 
 sank down speechless and unconscious./ He was 
 carried to Downing Street, and thence to Hayes. 
 There for more than four weeks he lingered, 
 tended by his wife and children. We know that, 
 while he thus lay dying, he had read to him 
 Homer's narrative of the burial of Hector and the 
 lamentation of Troy. 
 
 On May 11 he passed away. A public 
 funeral had been voted, and he was laid in 
 Westminster Abbey. Macaulay's sonorous prose 
 has once for all described the scene. "The 
 banner of the lordship of Chatham was borne by 
 Colonel Barre, attended by the Duke of Richmond 
 and Lord Rockingham. Burke, SaVile, and 
 Dunning upheld the pall. Lord Camden was 
 conspicuous in the procession. The chief mourner 
 was young William Pitt. After the lapse of more 
 than twenty-seven years, in a season as dark and 
 perilous, his own shattered frame and broken 
 heart were laid, with the same pomp, in the same 
 consecrated mould." l 
 
 1 The Earl of Chatham (Second Essay).
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 Burke upon Chatham Later views Chatham as a young 
 politician His lack of Parliamentary influence as then 
 understood His integrity Inconsistencies produced 
 by his ambition The mimetic element in his character 
 His oratory Essentially a man of action Signifi- 
 cance of his career in Imperial and domestic politics 
 His patriotism and love of liberty. 
 
 TWELVE years afterwards, Burke, while look- 
 ing through Lord Rockingham's papers, 
 came upon a letter written to his old leader by 
 Chatham in 1770, and on the back of it made the 
 following note : "July 13, 1792. Looking over 
 poor Lord Rockingham's papers, I find this letter 
 from a man wholly unlike him. It concerns my 
 pamphlet ("The Cause of the Discontents"). I 
 remember to have seen this knavish letter at the 
 time. The pamphlet is itself, by anticipation, an 
 answer to that grand artificer of fraud. He would 
 not like it. It is pleasant to hear him talk of the 
 great extensive public, who never conversed but 
 
 203
 
 204 CHATHAM 
 
 with a parcel of low toadeaters. Alas ! alas ! 
 how different the real from the ostensible public 
 man ! Must all this theatrical stuffing and raised 
 heels be necessary for the character of a great 
 man ? Edmund Burke." 
 
 Then, as if suddenly smitten with a pang of 
 remorse, he adds the qualification : " Oh, but 
 this does not derogate from his great, splendid 
 side. God forbid." l 
 
 Posterity has revised Burke's judgment, but 
 yet, alike in its scathing criticism and its outburst 
 of generous eulogy, it represents not unfairly the 
 perplexity and the fluctuations of opinion which 
 have been felt by all those who have tried to 
 estimate the career and character of Chatham. 
 That career abounded in dramatic contrasts, and 
 these have tended to seize upon the imagination, 
 to the exclusion of all other features in his life. 
 Historical writers, whether consciously or not, 
 have given strength to this tendency. The 
 stereotyped portrait of Chatham is probably 
 Macaulay's. Now, though Macaulay in his two 
 celebrated Essays yields far less than might have 
 been expected, in view of the nature of his 
 subject and his own passion for antithesis, to the 
 temptation of dwelling exclusively upon the 
 vicissitudes and incongruities in the life of 
 Chatham, he could not fail, and it was hardly to 
 
 1 Rockingham Memoirs, ii. 195
 
 CHARACTERISTICS 205 
 
 be wished that he should fail, to make the most 
 of his opportunity for presenting effectively the 
 contrasted lights and shades in one of the most 
 singular careers of modern English history. The 
 same result is apparent in the less dramatic but 
 much more luminous and suggestive survey of 
 Chatham's life by Mr. Lecky. " Of all very 
 great Englishmen," writes the latter, "he is 
 perhaps the one in whom there was the largest 
 admixture of the qualities of a charlatan." l 
 
 That in a sense such a delineation and such 
 strictures are just, no one will be disposed to deny. 
 The incongruities in Chatham's character are of 
 the first importance, and they are in themselves 
 so striking that the descriptive powers of an 
 historian are not in much danger of exaggerating 
 them. But, though in a presentment of the life 
 of Chatham they must always dominate the 
 picture, they cannot be rightly understood unless 
 full account is taken of the underlying causes 
 which made them what they were. We must 
 beware of regarding Chatham as a mere bundle of 
 contradictions. Whatever his qualities and de- 
 fects, the extraordinary position he achieved in 
 the course of his self-made career forbids us to 
 disbelieve in his tenacity of purpose ; and the 
 fact that he was a great rather than a small man 
 should only lead us to look, and to look rightly, 
 
 1 History of England in the Eighteenth Century, \\. 402.
 
 zo6 CHATHAM 
 
 for that unity of will and character which, while 
 traceable in the personality of all men, is only 
 manifest fully in the strong. 
 
 He entered on that political life in which all 
 his desires and hopes were centred, a young man 
 of boundless ambitions. He knew that he had 
 extraordinary powers, and that if he were given 
 a fair field nothing could prevent him from being 
 the first man in the country. But he laboured 
 under disabilities. He was a political adventurer 
 in the sense in which Canning and Disraeli, in 
 differing degrees, were accounted political ad- 
 venturers after him. By this it is not meant that 
 he was a low-principled opportunist, but merely 
 that he had not a stake in the country like most 
 of his contemporaries, and that he trusted to rise 
 by the unassisted force of his genius in an age 
 when the carriere ouverte aux talents was by no 
 means an established maxim of Parliamentary 
 life. 
 
 It is true that he was carried into Parliament 
 for Old Sarum, the classic example of rotten 
 boroughs for all time. But, though that is a 
 piquant circumstance in the life of our first great 
 democratic statesman, it is not of great importance 
 to an estimate of the position of Chatham. The 
 borough was a family possession, but the other 
 gifts which his family could make to him were 
 few. He was not enrolled on the list of any of
 
 CHARACTERISTICS 207 
 
 those bands of placemen which moved in solid 
 and ignoble phalanx in the train of the great 
 magnates of the time. He had been brought 
 into Parliament, but once there he was compelled 
 to make his own way. Certain political associa- 
 tions, indeed, he had : the connection of his 
 family with the Stanhopes, his alliance with the 
 Grenvilles under the banner of Lord Cobham, 
 his espousal of the Prince of Wales's cause and 
 enrolment in the Prince's household, all helped 
 him and rescued him from the obscurity of 
 isolation. But as elements of influence these fell 
 far short of the ideal of the ordinary eighteenth- 
 century politician. 
 
 In spite of the rich abundance of memoirs and 
 letters on which we can draw for a knowledge of 
 that age, we can only dimly picture to ourselves 
 a state of things in which men, not of genius, but 
 without any mental or moral qualifications what- 
 ever, saw in Parliament a perfect Eldorado and 
 a prospect of sinecures comparing favourably even 
 with "the fat slumbers of the Church." These 
 recompenses were not, indeed, for all ; though 
 there was, as Lord Melbourne once said of a still 
 
 prized distinction, " no d d nonsense of merit " 
 
 about them. They were the admitted perquisites 
 of the great families and certain widely ramifying 
 connections of political influence, and of the 
 swarm of hirelings and clever men of prostituted
 
 208 CHATHAM 
 
 talents whom these carried along with them upon 
 the golden tide of opportunity. Chatham stood 
 outside this circle, large as it was. Friends and 
 foes alike recognised that he drew his strength 
 from the popular support which his own ability 
 and eloquence gave him, and most of the great 
 Whigs regarded him with unconcealed suspicion 
 as an intruder. 
 
 It was not merely that he did not possess 
 political influence of the customary kind, but 
 that it and its objects had no attractions for him. 
 This was his second disability that he was 
 incorruptible. His refusal to pilfer public money 
 had, no doubt, as has been already acknowledged, 
 an element of ostentation in its publicity ; but 
 this ought not to disguise from us its importance. 
 It would seem nowadays such a very tepid form 
 of virtue merely to abstain from acquisitions like 
 those which Chatham refused on becoming Pay- 
 master of the Forces that there is some danger of 
 our failing to remember that it was not always 
 so. Chatham's integrity was not a mere appeal 
 to the gallery. It was the outward and visible 
 sign of that moral fire and warmth of soul within 
 him which made his advent to power so supremely 
 significant in English political history. Without 
 doubt, his whole being recoiled from the sordid 
 immorality, the torpor, the helplessness which 
 the Walpolean era, despite its solid benefits to
 
 CHARACTERISTICS 209 
 
 the nation, left behind it as its legacy to 
 Parliament. He brought an inspiration into 
 politics, and in the darkest days since we have 
 never wholly lost it. 
 
 However much Walpole might sneer and place- 
 men smile, it must have been evident to impartial 
 observers that it was this note of sincerity and 
 passion which gave Chatham's eloquence its 
 singular power, and that it was in virtue of this 
 quality that he would leave his mark on history. 
 We recognise it now; and indeed without this 
 key his career would remain wholly unexplainable. 
 But the critics of his early speeches had this 
 much of truth upon their side, that in Chatham's 
 first utterances ambition and moral indignation 
 were both struggling to find expression, and that 
 his desire to attain power was not less apparent 
 than his desire to oust from it incompetent and 
 apathetic politicians. He meant every word he 
 said, but he knew quite as well as his hearers 
 that the condition precedent to reform was that 
 he should himself attain a sufficiently powerful 
 position to be able to undertake it. In this 
 sense, then, ambition was in early years his 
 dominating motive. But so it has been with all 
 great men who have a task before them from 
 Caesar onwards. 
 
 The fact, however, that he was a young 
 politician with a career to make was not lost
 
 210 CHATHAM 
 
 upon his adversaries, and when he took office in 
 a Government dominated by the chosen heirs of 
 Walpole, and defended measures which when in 
 opposition he had attacked, they did not fail to 
 make use of their telling opportunity. Pitt's cool 
 defence of his changed attitude took their breath 
 away, and seems still to be a stumbling-block to 
 many. The truth is, probably, that he had 
 previously fixed his eyes entirely on the attain- 
 ment of office, and had not counted on the diffi- 
 culties of his position when he should actually 
 secure it. Having attained it, he found that 
 office and power are far from being synonymous, 
 that the failings of Government take on a more 
 explicable aspect when viewed from within, that 
 a period of political apprenticeship is necessary 
 before a man can command the confidence of 
 Parliament, with which, as a Minister, he has, 
 after all, to work, and that the whole con- 
 temporary regime is not to be changed in a day. 
 
 More perplexing to those who watched him 
 than either his integrity or his political incon- 
 sistencies was the artificiality and elaboration, 
 which seemed to be not simply an eccentricity of 
 manner, but to strike deep down to the very base 
 of his character. Did it actually do so, or was it 
 no more than a mask which the wearer could put 
 on or off at will ? In part this " theatrical stuffing 
 and raised heels," as Burke contemptuously called
 
 CHARACTERISTICS 211 
 
 it, was the natural product of the time. The 
 prevailing conception of the eighteenth century 
 as the period par excellence of formality and mode 
 is too widely attested to be seriously untrue. It 
 is possible that, in our retrospect of it, our 
 eyes have been fixed too exclusively on its 
 manners and its literature, and we have been in 
 danger of forgetting that it produced its comple- 
 ment, and more than its complement, of great 
 men of action, "masculine from head to heel." 
 But, after all, it is to the social and intellectual 
 habits of an age that one must look to appreciate 
 its ruling motives, and a judgment all but unani- 
 mous has pronounced the eighteenth - century 
 world, charming as it was, to have been an artificial 
 society. No man can free himself entirely from 
 the influences that environ him, and Chatham 
 was in many respects the child of his time. He 
 speaks with all the eighteenth - century horror 
 of "enthusiasm," as though unconscious of the 
 measure in which he himself really possessed it ; 
 and his intellectual equipment was that of his 
 age. And besides this he delighted in the 
 courtly formality of the life around him, himself 
 preserving, as we know from contemporary 
 witness, all the manners of the vieille cour. 
 
 But this was by no means all. Though he had 
 all the qualifications to shine in the formal world 
 of society about him, it was felt that he preferred
 
 212 CHATHAM 
 
 to dazzle and astonish it by carrying formality 
 almost to the length of a caricature. His elabora- 
 tion of manner, passing now into an almost 
 intolerable arrogance and hauteur, and now into 
 a hardly less terrifying self-abasement, surprised 
 everybody and sowed broadcast occasions of 
 offence. This curious pose was partly the result 
 of pride the pride of a great man among medi- 
 ocrities who did not understand him, and of a 
 political adventurer who in the teeth of great 
 obstacles had mounted to the highest place. 
 There is a vein in his character that reminds us 
 involuntarily of the sardonic genius of Swift ; he 
 felt something of the same contemptuous bitter- 
 ness for weakness, triviality, and error ; and among 
 the great Englishmen of the eighteenth century 
 Chatham and Swift are those who stood most 
 conspicuously alone. Very likely, also, he made 
 his mysterious aloofness into a system largely as a 
 measure of self-defence. Child of his age as he 
 was, he had cut himself off deliberately from some 
 of the most characteristic developments of the 
 society about him. He had none of the pleasant 
 vices which absorbed so much of its time and its 
 attention. In politics he took an unusual course, 
 which drew still more definitely the line of 
 demarcation separating him from his fellows. 
 As time went on, his position became still 
 more lonely. This deepened his reserve and
 
 CHARACTERISTICS 213 
 
 stiffened his manner into a kind of social coat of 
 mail. 
 
 But neither the influence of the age nor the 
 exigencies of his position are by themselves 
 sufficient to account for an attitude that was not 
 merely formal, but full of studied and dramatic 
 effect. The primal cause lay deeper in the 
 character of Chatham. He was a convinced 
 believer in outward as well as inward greatness. 
 He reproduces for us, with a strange verisimilitude 
 in some features, Aristotle's immortal portrait of 
 the man of lofty spirit. His view, whether he 
 formulated it to himself like a philosopher or 
 not, was that a great personality must have its 
 appropriate setting. Hence he lived habitually 
 in the grand manner. Though the age of Louis 
 xiv. and the eighteenth century furnish some 
 similar examples, there is none in which the 
 adoption of the grand manner as a rule of life 
 took quite the same shape as it did in the case of 
 Chatham. He carried it into every public and 
 private transaction in which he engaged, and, 
 uniquely impressive as it often was, there were 
 other occasions on which the combination of 
 popular statesmanship with studied pomp pro- 
 duced results so incongruous that nothing but 
 his unequalled histrionic faculty and knowledge 
 of effect saved them from absurdity. We have 
 heard already of his immense retinue and his
 
 214 CHATHAM 
 
 theatrical appearances in Parliament. In the 
 private business of politics it was the same. " 1 
 never found him," said Shelburne, " when I have 
 gone to him, which was always by appointment, 
 with so much as a book before him, but always 
 sitting alone in a drawing-room waiting the hour 
 of appointment, and in the country with his hat 
 and stick in his hand." The admission which 
 he made to the same statesman in one of his 
 illuminating asides, that independently of his 
 health and circumstances he should, for reasons of 
 policy, always have lived as he did, a few miles 
 out of town, shows plainly that he deliberately 
 counted upon producing an impression by sur- 
 rounding himself with an atmosphere of mystery. 
 He was, Shelburne said, " constantly upon the 
 watch, and never unbent." l These last words, 
 corroborated by everything we know of Chatham, 
 are extremely significant. They explain not only 
 the artificial exterior which was, in truth, a 
 second nature to him, but much of the unac- 
 commodating arrogance with which he treated his 
 political colleagues. His natural imperiousness 
 was accentuated by the continually high tension 
 at which he lived. Self-centred, he wandered in 
 a world of his own imagination, and did not 
 trouble to gauge the characters of his fellow- 
 statesmen, whom he too often regarded as mere 
 1 Fitzmaurice's Shelburne, \. 77, 78.
 
 LORD CHATHAM 
 Wax liffigy t Westminster Abbey
 
 CHARACTERISTICS 215 
 
 lumber on the political stage. We see the results 
 in his refusal to act with the Roekinghams, in the 
 formation of his Ministry of 1766, and in his 
 blindly impolitic conduct towards the Whigs 
 within it. 
 
 In some such sense as this it is true to say, as 
 has been said by Carlyle, that Chatham " lived 
 the strangest mimetic life all along." But this 
 mimetic element was the product of an intense 
 self-consciousness rather than of a shallow in- 
 sincerity. Chatham modelled his own life on the 
 lives of " Plutarch's men " ; and if this imitation, 
 translated into the modes of thought and action 
 of the eighteenth century, produced results that 
 were often extravagant and regrettable, it must 
 not be forgotten that it helped him to keep 
 steadily before himself a high and generous ideal, 
 and that England's debt to him for having done 
 this is great. For we cannot separate the several 
 parts of his temperament and say that without 
 such and such a characteristic he would have 
 effected more. A simpler and greater character 
 may easily be imagined, but it would not have 
 been Chatham. The spectacular point of view 
 from which he regarded all human conduct, his 
 own included, was an inseparable part of his 
 peculiar genius. We may wish that the latter 
 had taken another form, but we can hardly deny 
 that it is traceable throughout all his career,
 
 216 CHATHAM 
 
 inspiring both his great actions and those which 
 we regard as incongruous and misplaced. 
 
 His oratory confirms this impression. It passes, 
 just as his actions did, not infrequently into florid 
 and flamboyant expression, from which a purer 
 taste would have preserved him. In these cases 
 a superb gesture and delivery, pronounced com- 
 parable only to those of Garrick, enabled him to 
 take liberties which would have made other 
 orators seem absurd. " His tones," said Grattan, 
 " were remarkably pleasing ; I recollect his 
 pronouncing one word, ' effete,' in a soft charming 
 accent." But much the most remarkable charac- 
 teristic of his speaking was its union of dramatic 
 power with a striking moral ascendency ; and this 
 was the salient characteristic in his life as well as 
 in his oratory. Humour, close argument, and 
 elaborate statement were not points in which his 
 eloquence excelled. But in sheer enthralling 
 power it has probably never been surpassed by 
 any oratory in the language. "He lightened 
 upon his subject," said Grattan again, "and 
 reached the point by the flashings of his mind, 
 which were felt but could not be followed." 
 Charming all listeners by his brilliant conver- 
 sational ease in ordinary moments, he held them 
 spellbound when on a great occasion he rose to 
 the very summit of imaginative art. Though of 
 all eloquence his must lose most by being read
 
 CHARACTERISTICS 217 
 
 merely as the written word, and though what we 
 have left of it is only fragmentary, we can still 
 call up in some degree the effect produced by his 
 great surviving apostrophes. His appeal to the 
 House of Commons after the Peace of Paris to 
 forget everything for the public ; the speech on 
 the Constitution in the House of Lords, in which 
 he contrasted the silken barons of to-day with 
 the iron barons of old ; his great American 
 speeches in both Houses; and the gorgeous 
 rhetoric of his reply to Lord Suffolk when the 
 latter had defended the employment of Indians 
 in the war, must, when enhanced by the moral 
 weight and magical delivery of the speaker, have 
 been among the greatest moments of declamation 
 which Parliament has ever known. Effective 
 above all were the phrases and sentences of 
 inspired epigram, eminently modern in character, 
 in reading which it seems as though the spirit 
 of Gladstone had been breathed into the barbed 
 and polished periods of Disraeli. 
 
 There is, however, a certain air of unreality in 
 viewing Chatham's oratory from a purely literary 
 point of view. For he never used it except as an 
 instrument, and he was a man of action above all. 
 It was a supreme boon that gave him to England 
 at the most epoch-making moment in her history 
 as a great Power since the Elizabethan wars. The 
 history of Ministries records no change so sudden
 
 2i8 CHATHAM 
 
 and so startling as that produced by his accession 
 to leadership at the beginning of the Seven Years' 
 War. Centralising the administration in his own 
 hands, and working its almost disused machinery 
 with extraordinary vigour, drawing from his chief 
 naval and military subordinates a fuller measure 
 of devotion than has ever been yielded to any 
 other Minister, kindling to white heat the ardour 
 of every soldier and sailor in the services arid the 
 enthusiasm of the people, he produced results 
 which were felt all over the world and changed 
 the face of history. What the fate of the country 
 would have been if Chatham had not been there 
 to take the helm, one does not care to think. It 
 is true that, as his son said in the shortest and 
 greatest of his speeches, England is not to be 
 saved by any single man. Without him she 
 would have survived the struggle, but she might 
 have done no more than barely survive it. To 
 Chatham belongs of right the old Roman boast 
 that he carried forward the confines of the 
 Empire, and, in the light of the events which 
 followed the Seven Years' War, he appears hardly 
 less as one who strove to consolidate it than as its 
 extender. 
 
 He lived to see his work of Imperial consolida- 
 tion at least partially undone by one of the 
 greatest revolutions of all time. His last years 
 were spent in a splendid effort to avert the
 
 CHARACTERISTICS 219 
 
 dismemberment of the Empire, and the separation 
 of the two great English-speaking communities 
 of the globe. It was unavailing, but yet we 
 cannot say that Chatham's endeavours were 
 altogether thrown away. Without his American 
 speeches, we should have been deprived of some 
 pages of political wisdom to which it will never 
 be unprofitable to recur. If in his War Ministry 
 he showed the way to win an empire, in this 
 last oratorical campaign he showed how to keep 
 one that was won. The whole duty of Imperial 
 patriotism is set forth in these speeches, which, 
 with Burke's, are a kind of charter of the consti- 
 tutional rights and privileges of the members of 
 our colonial empire. 
 
 Chatham's influence on the internal develop- 
 ment of England, though less tangible, was none 
 the less real. Although he left no great measure 
 on the Statute Book, his career forms a landmark 
 in English political history. There had been 
 statesmen before him who maintained the privi- 
 leges of Parliament against the encroachment of 
 the Crown; it was Chatham's part to maintain 
 the constitutional rights of the people against an 
 autocratic Parliament. From the first he was the 
 chosen representative of the still scarcely articu- 
 late democracy. They made his rise to power 
 possible, and in return he never forgot the quarter 
 from which he drew his strength. His conscious-
 
 220 CHATHAM 
 
 ness that he had the people at his back no doubt 
 contributed something to the contemptuous dis- 
 dain with which he watched the movements of 
 the warring elements in Parliamentary life, and 
 may even explain to some extent his reluctance, 
 so disastrous in the history of the Rockingham 
 Ministry, to bind himself by any party tie. His 
 greatest period as a popular statesman was un- 
 questionably that when he threw off his long 
 illness in 1769 and returned to politics with a 
 clearer vision and a kindlier heart, prepared to 
 sacrifice at the eleventh hour his dearest beliefs 
 about the inefficacy of party if only by so doing 
 he could give effect to the nation's will. But, so 
 far as his relations with the mass of the people 
 were concerned, his career was a salutary one 
 throughout. They were far enough off to see 
 only his great qualities undimmed by their im- 
 perfections. Whether the endeavours of his last 
 years may be held to outweigh his political blind- 
 ness in 1765-66 is an open question. English- 
 men would gladly remodel the latter period, but 
 Chatham, with his imperfections and his strength, 
 his lack of self-knowledge and his magnetism of 
 the people, must be taken as a whole. 
 
 His hold upon the people was due to his 
 unfaltering patriotism and love of liberty. The 
 former was not that tepid emotion which often 
 masquerades under the name, but a passion which
 
 CHARACTERISTICS 221 
 
 filled his entire being. His imagination set no 
 bounds to the grandeur of England, and under 
 his guidance her capacities were drawn out to the 
 full. His love of liberty was the generous com- 
 plement of that lofty ambition, and enabled him 
 not only to do great things in his generation, but 
 to leave a permanently inspiring example. In 
 his enthusiastic devotion to the interests of the 
 Colonies and the whole Empire, and in his strenu- 
 ous championship of freedom and progress at 
 home, he anticipates the fundamental principles 
 which are the basis of the wider Britain of to-day.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abercrombie, General, 65-67. 
 Addington, Dr., 193. 
 Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of, 35, 
 Albemarle, Lord, 117, 118. 
 Amherst, General, 65, 70, 75. 
 Anson, Admiral Lord, 20, 61, 177. 
 
 Barre", Colonel, 135, 170, 202. 
 
 Beckford, Lord Mayor, 91, 144, 146, 166. 
 
 Bedford, Duke of, 94, 95, 102, 118, 145. 
 
 Black Hole of Calcutta, 55. 
 
 Bolingbroke, Lord, 13. 
 
 Boscawen, Admiral, 50, 66, 72, 117. 
 
 Boston Tea-party, the, 182. 
 
 Braddock, General, 49. 
 
 Breslau, Peace of, 25. 
 
 Burke, 90, 119, 121, 136, 148, 156, 181, 191, 192, 202-204. 
 
 Burton Pynsent, 44, 116, 117. 
 
 Bute, Lord, 81, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101, 105, 107-109. 
 
 Byng, Admiral, 55, 59. 
 
 Camden, Lord, 104, 127, 135, 151, 161, 162, 165, 202. 
 
 Carteret, afterwards Earl Granville, 9, 24-30, 33, 34, 177. 
 
 Charles vi., Emperor, 21. 
 
 Chatham, Lady, 44, 151, 186, 187, 189, 202. 
 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 9, 25, 33, 60. 
 
 Choiseul, 84, 85-87, 138. 
 
 dive, Lord, 47, 141. 
 
 Cobham, Lord, n, 14. 
 
 Conflans, 72. 
 
 Conway, 63, 119, 124, 134, 135, 146. 
 
 Coote, Sir Eyre, 76. 
 
 223
 
 224 INDEX 
 
 Cowper, quoted, 117. 
 Crosby, Lord Mayor, 168, 169. 
 Cumberland, Duke of, 60, 62, 64, 106, 117. 
 
 Dashwood, Sir Francis, 101. 
 Daun, 6z, 69. 
 
 Devonshire, Duke of, 56, 61, 99. 
 Dupleix, 47. 
 
 Edgcumbe, Lord, 145, 146. 
 Essay on Woman, 109, 158. 
 
 Family Compacts, the, 18, 86, 138. 
 
 Ferdinand, Prince, 64, 68, 74, 76, 79. 
 
 Forbes, Brigadier, 66, 68. 
 
 Forde, Colonel, 73, 74. 
 
 Fort Duquesne, 49, 68, 74. 
 
 Fort William Henry, 63. 
 
 Forty-five, the, 33. 
 
 Fox, Henry, Lord Holland, 3, 39-42, 44-46, 56, 61, 89, 98, 
 
 99, 101. 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 115, 159, 180, 187, 192, 194. 
 Frederick, Prince of Wales, 12-14, 23. 
 Frederick n., King of Prussia, 21, 25, 51, 59, 61, 62, 64, 69, 
 
 74. 79>9 6 > IOI > '39- 
 
 George n., 13, 22, 25, 29, 33, 39, 43, 50, 56, 59, 60, 80, 134. 
 George in., 81, 82, 88, 90, 91, 99, 102, 104-108, 117, 118, 
 
 121, 123, 124, 131, 133, 152, 157, 158, 166, 167, 179, 
 
 182, 199, 200. 
 Gower, Lord, 145. 
 Grafton, Duke of, 99, 119, 122, 124, 134, 135, 147, 152, 
 
 158, 161, 167, 179. 
 Granby, 117, 161, 165. 
 
 Grenville, Lady Hester. See Lady Chatham 
 Grenville, George, n, 42, 53, 56, 96, 98, 102, 105, 107, 
 
 no, 114, 115, 118, 124, 127, 128, 133, 143, 144, 157, 
 
 166. 
 Grenville, Richard. See Lord Temple. 
 
 Halifax, Lord, 102, 105. 
 
 Hampstead, 143, 150, 152. 
 
 Hardwicke, Lord Chancellor, 24, 42, 43, 93.
 
 INDEX 225 
 
 Havannah, 92, 97. 
 
 Hawke, Admiral Sir Edward, 50, 63, 66, 72, 146. 
 
 Hayes, 44, 115, 150, 151. 
 
 Holderness, Lord, 82, 89. 
 
 Howe, Lord, 65, 67. 
 
 Hutchinson, 120, 180. 
 
 i 
 
 Jenkins's Ear, 17. 
 Johnson, Dr., 20. 
 
 Kaunitz, 52. 
 
 Klosterseven, Convention of, 62. 
 
 Lall 7> 73. 7 6 - 
 
 Legge, Henry, 42, 53, 56, 60. 61, 82. 
 Lennox, Lady Sarah, 89. 
 Lexington, battle of, 192. 
 Louisburg, capture of, 66. 
 Luttrell, Colonel, 160, 168. 
 Lyttelton, Sir George, n, 14, 41, 42. 
 
 Manilla, 93, 96. 
 
 Mansfield, Lord (Murray), 31, 39, 56, 144, 159, 162, 163, 
 
 199. 
 
 Maria Theresa, 21, 24, 51. 
 Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess of, 32. 
 Martinique, 92, 97. 
 Masulipatam, storming of, 73, 74. 
 Middlesex Election, the, 158-160. 
 Minden, battle of, 74. 
 Minorca, 53, 59, 97. 
 Mitchell (Ambassador at Berlin), 139. 
 Montcalm, 62, 67. 
 Montreal, fall of, 75. 
 
 Newcastle, Duke of, 24, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 50, 53, 55-57, 
 
 60, 61, 81, 83, 93, 94, 99, 106, 107, 119, 122. 
 North, Lord, 4, 134, 149, 161, 167, 179, 198, 199. 
 North Briton, the, 102, 103, 108, 158. 
 Northington, Lord, 133-135. 
 
 Oswego, loss of, 55, 62. 
 15
 
 226 INDEX 
 
 Paris, Peace of, 95-101. 
 
 Pelham, Henry, 24, 26, 27, 29, 33, 34, 37-39, 41. 
 
 Pitt, Governor, i, 2. 
 
 Pitt, Robert, 2. 
 
 Pitt, William, Earl of Chatham, birth and parentage, 1-2 ; 
 at Eton, 3, 4; at Oxford, 4-6; in the army, 6; enters 
 House of Commons, 6 ; joins the Cobham party, 10, n ; 
 dismissed from the army, 13; in the Prince of Wales' 
 household, 13, 14; Pitt and the Spanish War, 20 ; Pitt 
 and Walpole, 22, 23 ; attacks Carteret, 25, 26 ; supports 
 the Pelhams, 27; Pitt and Carteret contrasted, 28-30; 
 legacy from the Duchess of Marlborough, 32 ; Paymaster 
 of the Forces, 34, 35 ; Pitt and the leadership of the 
 House of Commons, 39-41 ; marries Lady Hester 
 Grenville, 44 ; union with Fox, 44, 45 ; connection 
 with Leicester House, 46, 47 ; dismissed from office, 
 53; Secretary of State under the Duke of Devonshire, 
 56; Pitt and the army, 57, 58; dismissed from office, 
 60; the Newcastle - Pitt Ministry, 60, 61 ; Pitt's war 
 policy, 63-75 ; his qualities as War Minister discussed, 
 76-80 ; negotiations with Choiseul, 84-86 ; the " ad- 
 vice to the King," 87; resignation, 87; pension, and 
 peerage for his wife, 89 ; at the Guildhall, 90, 91 ; 
 speech on the Peace, 100, 101 ; overtures from the 
 King and Bute, 106-108 ; Pitt on the Wilkes case, 
 109, no; receives two legacies, 116; life at Burton 
 Pynsent, 116, 117; negotiations with Cumberland and 
 Albemarle, 117, 118; attitude towards the Rock- 
 inghams, 121-124; speeches on the Stamp Act, 125- 
 130; fresh negotiations with the Rockinghams, 132, 
 133 ; forms a Ministry, 134; created Earl of Chatham, 
 136; foreign policy, 137-140; Indian policy, 140-143; 
 weakened position of the Ministry, 144-147 ; visit to 
 Bath, 147; illness and seclusion, 149-153; return to 
 politics, 154; reconciliation with the Rockinghams, 
 156; with the Grenvilles, 157; audience of the King, 
 157; speech on the Constitutional question, 163-165; 
 speeches on Parliamentary reform, 170-175 ; on the 
 Falkland Islands dispute, 176 ; views on the American 
 policy of the Government, 183, 184; on the Philadel- 
 phia Congress, 185 ; moves for withdrawal of troops 
 from Boston, 186-189; proposals fora settlement, 190- 
 192 ; illness, 192; declaration to Dr. Addington, 193 ;
 
 INDEX 227 
 
 moves for cessation of hostilities, 195-197; denounces 
 employment of Indians, 196, 197; Chatham and the 
 King, 199, 200; last speech, zoo, 201; death, 202; 
 criticisms of Chatham, 203-205 ; his rise to power 
 discussed, 206-210 ; his character, 210-215 ; his oratory, 
 216, 217 ; importance as an Imperial statesman, 218, 
 219 ; as a domestic statesman, 219, 220. 
 
 Pitt, the younger, 5, 75, 187, 189, 195, 200, 202. 
 
 Plassey, battle of, 65. 
 
 Pondicherry, fall of, 76. 
 
 Pragmatic Sanction, the, 21. 
 
 Pulteney, afterwards Lord Bath, 8, 9, 12, 13, 23, 24, 26, 
 33-35- 
 
 Quebec, battle of, 71. 
 Quiberon, battle of, 72. 
 
 Richmond, Duke of, 146, 200-202. 
 Robinson, Sir Thomas, 40, 45. 
 Rochefort, expedition against, 63. 
 
 Rockingham, Lord, 99, 119, 124, 125, 131, 133, 156, 157, 
 202, 203. 
 
 Sandwich, Lord, 102, 108. 
 
 Saratoga, 197. 
 
 Savile, Sir George, 156, 202. 
 
 Senegal, capture of, 69. 
 
 Shelburne, Lord, i, 3, 9, 44, 135, 141, 142, 152, 172, 183, 
 
 214. 
 
 Shippen, 10. 
 
 Stamp Act, the, 115, 120, 121, 124-131. 
 Stanley, Hans, 84, 86, 87, 138, 139. 
 Suffolk, Lord, 197, 217. 
 
 Temple, Lord, n, 42, 53, 54, 56, 59, 61, 87, 91, 105, 118, 
 
 i3S '57- 
 
 Thomson, quoted, 14. 
 Ticonderoga, 66, 67, 71. 
 
 Townshend, Charles, 119, 135, 141, 147-149, 153, 179. 
 Turgot, 194. 
 
 Utrecht, Treaty of, 17, 63, 116.
 
 228 INDEX 
 
 Vergennes, 193-195. 
 Versailles, Treaty of, 52. 
 
 Walpole, Horace, the elder, 20. 
 
 Walpole, Horace, the younger, 34, 38, 60, 89, 93, 100, 137, 
 
 167. 
 Walpole, Sir Robert, 6-8, 13, 17, 19, 22, 24, 35, 81, 208- 
 
 209. 
 
 Walpole, Thomas, 150, 151. 
 Wandewash, battle of, 76. 
 Wedderburn, 143, 180. 
 Westminster, Treaty of, 51. 
 Weymouth, Lord, 159. 
 
 Wilkes, John, 102-105, 108, no, 158-161,167-169. 
 Williams, Hanbury, 51. 
 Wolfe, General, 63-66, 71, 72. 
 Worms, Treaty of, 25. 
 Wyndham, Sir William, 10, 35. 
 
 Printed by MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, Edinburgh
 
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