A Prime Minister of Great Britain needs to be an intellectual Proteus. Besides determining the lines of foreign and domestic policy, he must regulate the movements of a complex parliamentary machine, ever taking into account personal prejudices which not seldom baffle the most careful forecast. It is not surprising, therefore, to find statesmen at Westminster often slow and hesitating even when there is need of prompt decision. The onlooker may see only the public questions at issue. The man in the thick of the maze may all the time be holding the personal clue which alone can bring him to the open. How often has the fate of Europe turned on the foibles or favouritism of Queen Elizabeth, Louis XIV, Queen Anne, Charles XII, Catharine II. In the present age this factor counts for less than of yore. Hence it comes about that many modern critics assess the career of Pitt as if he were in the position of a Gladstone. In point of fact he was more under royal control than Walpole or Godolphin. He had to do with a Sovereign who in the last resort gave the law to his Ministers, and occasionally treated them like head clerks.

True, George III interfered with Pitt less than with his predecessors. That masterful will had been somewhat tamed during the “bondage” to the Coalition, and almost perforce accepted the guidance of his deliverer. The King even allowed Pitt to go his own way respecting Reform, Warren Hastings, and the Irish Commercial Treaty. Family scandals and family debts for a time overshadowed all other considerations, a fact which goes far to explain the bourgeois domesticity of his outlook on Dutch affairs. In these years, then, he acquiesced in the lead of the heaven-sent Minister who maintained the national credit and the national honour. But in the last resort George III not only reigned but governed. Thus, apart from the Eastern War, which we shall consider later, everything portended a time of calm in the year 1788, when suddenly the personal element obtruded itself. There fell upon the monarch a strange malady which threatened to bring confusion in place of order, and to enthrone a Prince who was the embodiment of faction and extravagance.

The career of the Prince of Wales illustrates the connection often subsisting between the extremes of virtue and vice. Not seldom the latter may be traced to the excess of the former in some primly uninteresting home; and certainly the Prince, who saw the light on 12th August 1762, might serve to point the moral against pedantic anxiety on the part of the unco’ guid. His upbringing by the strictest of fathers in the most methodized of households early helped to call out and strengthen the tendencies to opposition which seemed ingrained in the heirs-apparent of that stubborn stock. In the dull life at Kew or Windsor, bristling with rules and rebukes, may we not see the working in miniature of those untoward influences—fussy control and austere domination—which wearied out the patience of Ministers and the loyalty of colonists?

Moreover this royal precisian was not blessed with a gracious consort. Queen Charlotte’s youthful experiences at the ducal Court of Mecklenburg predisposed her to strict control and unsparing parsimony. Many were the jests as to her stamping with her signet the butter left over at meals. It was even affirmed that apple charlottes owed their name to her custom of using up the spare crusts of every day. These slanders (for the latter story fails before the touchstone of the term Charlotte Russe) owed their popularity largely to her ugliness. One of her well-wishers, Colonel Disbrowe, once expressed to Croker the hope that the bloom of her ugliness was going off.608 This sin revealed a multitude of others; and it is fairly certain that Queen Charlotte has been hardly judged. Some there were who accused her of callousness towards the King during his insanity; and the charge seems in part proven for the year 1804.609 Others, again, charged her with unmotherly treatment of the Prince of Wales. Who can suffice for these things? Aristophanes coined a happy phrase to denote lovers of the trivial in politics. He calls them “buzzers-in-corners.” Those who essay to write the life of a great statesman must avoid those nooks.

One thing is certain. The Prince of Wales grew to dislike both his father and mother. His temperament was far gayer and more romantic than theirs. Some imaginative persons have ventured to assert that a more generous and sympathetic training would have moulded him to a fine type of manhood. Undoubtedly his education was of the narrow kind which had stunted the nature of George III; and when the King, with ingrained obstinacy, continued to keep the trammels on the high-spirited youth of eighteen, he burst them asunder. At that age the Prince had his first amour (was it his first?), namely, with the actress, “Perdita” Robinson.610 The gilded youth of London, long weary of the primness of Windsor, cheered him on to further excesses, and Carlton House set the tone of the age. In vain did the King seek to regain the confidence and affection of his son.611 His efforts were repulsed; and the debasing influence of Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, inured the Prince to every kind of debauchery.

As if this were not enough, the heir to the throne made a bosom friend of the man whom his father most detested, Charles James Fox. Through that charming libertine the Prince became an habitué of the Whig Club, Brooks’s;612 and, as we have seen, he helped to defeat the King’s eager electioneering in the great fight of 1784 at Westminster. Thenceforth the feud between father and son was bitter and persistent. The Prince had all his father’s wilfulness, and far more than his stock of selfishness. So far as is known, he showed no sign of repentance, but argued himself into the belief that the King had always hated him from his seventh year onward.613 There is nothing that corroborates this petulant assertion. The King had been a kind and even doting father, his chief fault being that of guiding too long and too closely this wayward nature.

By the summer of 1783 the quarrel had waxed warm on the subject of the immorality and extravagance of the Prince. At that time the Coalition Ministry startled the King by proposing to grant the sum of £100,000 a year to the Prince of Wales, exclusive of the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, which amounted to about £13,000 a year.614 The King, having formerly received far less than that amount, considered it exorbitant. As we saw in Chapter VI, the Ministry would probably have fallen had not the Prince required his favourite to waive the proposal. Parliament then voted £30,000 to pay his debts, £30,000 to start his new establishment (Carlton House) and £50,000 a year out of the Civil List.

By the autumn of the next year the Prince defiantly proposed to travel abroad in order to ease his finances by evading his creditors. This the King forbade, and requested him to send in a detailed list of his expenses and debts. The result was a statement clear enough in most items, but leaving a sum of £25,000 unaccounted for. The King required an explanation of this, which the Prince as firmly refused to give, though he assured Sir James Harris it was a debt of honour. As the King refused to pass this sum, the whole matter dragged on, until in April 1785 the debts reached the total of £160,000. To escape the discomforts of his position, the Prince proposed to his friend, Harris, who was then in London, a term of residence at The Hague. The true reason for this proposal lies in the fact that the Prince had for some time been desperately in love with a fair young widow, Mrs. Fitzherbert, who was a Roman Catholic. In vain had he wounded himself as a sign of his undying passion for her: in vain had four of his friends sought to inveigle her into a mock marriage. In order to escape his importunities she had fled to the Continent; and the King refused him permission to pursue her.

Here, in truth, was the crux of the relations between father and son. King George saw no hope for the youth but in marriage with a Protestant princess. Prince George as firmly declared that he would not marry “some German frow,” and racked his brains with designs to secure the Roman Catholic of his choice. Mrs. Fitzherbert’s religion, her position as a commoner, and the anomaly of a morganatic marriage in these islands, rendered any connection with her odious in the eyes of the King. Besides, the Royal Marriage Act of 1772 forbade the marriage of any prince or princess of the blood under the age of twenty-six without the consent of the King. On all sides, then, the King had the Prince in his toils.

The Prince, realizing this fact, seems to have behaved as recklessly as possible in the hope of compelling the King to allow him to live abroad and marry Mrs. Fitzherbert. Such at least is the most charitable explanation of his early prodigalities. The debts, surely, were a means of forcing the hand of his father. But George was not to be gulled in this way. He, too, held firmly to his views, and the result was a hopeless deadlock. Pitt and Carmarthen sought to end it in May 1785. They threw out hints to Harris that the income of the Prince might be increased by Parliament if he would become reconciled to the King, cease to be a party man, and set about the discharge of his debts. Accordingly Harris waited on the Prince at Carlton House on 23rd May 1785, and suggested that on these conditions the Ministry would double his income, provided also that he set apart £50,000 a year for the discharge of his debts. To this the Prince demurred, on the ground that he could not desert Fox, and that the King’s unfatherly hatred would be an obstacle to any such proposal. In support of the latter statement he requested Harris to read the King’s letters to him, which were couched in severe terms, reprobating his extravagance and dissipation.

We cannot censure this severity. The gluttonous orgies of Carlton House were a public scandal, especially in hard times, when Parliament withheld the money necessary for the protection of Portsmouth and Plymouth. Both as a patriot and a father, George was justified in condemning his son’s conduct; and it is clear that the hatred of the Prince for his father led him to put the worst possible construction on the advice from Windsor. At the close of his interview with Harris he declared vehemently that he never would marry, and that he had settled with his brother Frederick, Duke of York, for the Crown to devolve on his heirs.615

As illustrating the relations of father and son, I may quote an unpublished letter from Hugh Elliot to Pitt, dated Brighthelmstone, 17th October 1785, and endorsed by Pitt—“Shewn to the King.”616 In it Elliot states that he went to Brighton merely for bathing, but was soon honoured by the Prince’s company and confidence. He had combated several of his prejudices, and this had not offended him; but the Prince asked him to discuss matters with the King’s Ministers, who would then report to the King. He then adds:

Elliot adds that the Prince would travel only with Colonels Lee and Slaughter and himself, if the King and Pitt approved of his going with him. The Prince hoped to economize and so win back the good opinion of the King and country. He (Elliot) would rejoice if he could further this course.

The desire of the Prince for foreign travel ended with the return of Mrs. Fitzherbert from her secret tour. The Prince’s pursuit of her now became more eager than ever, and he succeeded in inspiring her with feelings of love. Consequently, on 15th December 1785, he secretly married her, having four days previously assured his bosom friend, Fox, that there was no “ground for these reports which of late have been so malevolently circulated.” It is now proved beyond possibility of doubt that the marriage was legal (except in the political sense above noticed), and that the Prince did his wife grievous wrong in persistently denying the fact.617 She, with all the proofs in her possession, refrained from compromising him, and therefore had to endure endless slights. Many persons had the good sense to place her dignified silence far above his unblushing denials, and Society was rent in twain by the great question—“Was he married or not?” In view of these facts, is it desirable to present a full-length portrait of His Royal Highness? The wonder is that even in his Perdita days his name could ever be compared with the tenderest and most faithful of Shakespeare’s lovers, Prince Florizel. That he allowed himself to be painted in that guise argues singular assurance. Was not Cloten more nearly his prototype?

It would be interesting to know whether the King and Queen were aware of the secret marriage. The Queen in a private interview pressed him to tell the truth; but he probably equivocated. Their action bespeaks perplexity. In private they treated Mrs. Fitzherbert kindly, but never received her at Court.618 That Pitt was not ill-informed on the subject appears from the following hitherto unpublished letter from his brother, the Earl of Chatham. It is undated, but probably belongs to the month of December 1785:

Clearly the Earl of Chatham came very near the truth. Sir Carnaby Haggerston knew the secret, and chose to reveal a good deal of it. Mr. Errington was the bride’s uncle, and gave her away at the secret ceremony at her house in Park Lane on 15th December.620 The Duchess of Devonshire early recognized Mrs. Fitzherbert, and frequently entertained her along with the Prince.

The liaison with Mrs. Fitzherbert (for it was ostensibly nothing more) of course did not lessen expenses at Carlton House. The Prince insisted on her moving to a larger residence and entertaining on a lavish scale. As for Carlton House, it “exhibited a perpetual scene of excess, unrestrained by any wise superintendence.”621 It was therefore natural that the Prince’s friends should ply Parliament with requests for larger funds in the spring of 1786. The matter came up, not inappropriately, during debates on the deficiency in the Civil List. That most brilliant of wits and most genial of boon companions, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, had now espoused the Prince’s cause. With his customary charm he dragged in the subject of the monetary woes of his patron, pointing out that the dignity of the Crown demanded an ampler provision and the payment of the existing debts. Pitt replied that this matter was not before the House, and added that, as he had received no instructions on the subject, he would not be so presumptuous as to offer any private opinion on it.

Undeterred by this freezing rebuke to Sheridan, Fox on the next day raised the same question, maintaining that it was a national advantage for the Heir-Apparent to be able to live not merely in ease but in splendour. This patriotic appeal fell on deaf ears. The country gentlemen who on the score of expense had lately decided to leave Portsmouth and Plymouth open to attack, were not likely to vote away on the orgies of Carlton House an extra sum of £50,000 a year, which in fourteen years would have made the two great dockyard towns impregnable. Fox wisely refrained from pressing his demand, and vouchsafed no explanation as to how the nation would benefit from the encouragement of extravagance in Pall Mall.622 Clearly the Prince’s friends were in a hopeless minority. Accordingly he began more stoutly than ever to deny his marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert; but in such a case character counts for more than oaths and asseverations.

So the miserable affair dragged on. The King refused every request for help for the Prince, doubtless in the hope that debt would compel him to give up his mistress. The debts therefore grew apace, until in the summer of 1786 Carlton House was in danger of being seized by the brokers. It is clear that Pitt sided with the King. George III frequently commended him for his wise advice; but unfortunately nearly all the letters from Pitt to his sovereign, especially on this topic, long ago disappeared from the Library at Windsor, a highly suspicious circumstance. We know, however, that, as early as March and April 1785, the King approved the messages drawn up by Pitt from the Sovereign to the Prince. In general they seem to have been drafted by the Minister; and the following draft, in Pitt’s writing, but dated by the King and with one slight correction, remains as proof that Pitt was the mouthpiece for the royal rebukes. It is endorsed “Draft of Letter from the King to the Prince of Wales”:

That the details of the expenditure at Carlton House were laid before Pitt is clear from the evidence contained in the Pitt Papers. The packet entitled “Prince of Wales’s Debts,” affords piquant reading. For, be it remembered, at the very time when Pitt was straining every nerve to lessen the National Debt, to rebuild the navy, and to enable England to look her enemies once more in the face, the Prince was squandering money on rare wines, on gilding, ormolu, and on jewellery for Mrs. Fitzherbert, £54,000 being considered a “not unreasonable bill” by her latest biographer.626 An official estimate fixes the total expenditure of the Prince for the years 1784–86 at £369,977 (or at the rate of £123,000 a year) and yet there were “arrears not yet to hand.” Parliament had voted £30,000 for the furnishing of Carlton House; but in 1787 the Prince consulted the welfare of the nation by accepting an estimate of £49,700 for extensions and decorations; and late in 1789 he sought still further to strengthen the monarchy by spending £110,500 on further splendours. They included “a new throne and State bed, furniture trimmed with rich gold lace, also new decorations in the Great Hall, a Chinese Drawing-Room, etc.” The Pitt Papers contain no reference to the sums spent on the Pavilion at Brighton in the years 1785, 1786; but, even in its pre-oriental form, it afforded singular proof of the desire of the Prince for quiet and economy at that watering-place.

Much has been made of the retrenchments of July 1786, when the works on Carlton House were suspended, and the half of that palatial residence was closed. Whatever were the motives that prompted that new development, it soon ceased, as the foregoing figures have shown. The Prince’s necessities being as great as ever, he found means to bring his case before Parliament in the debates of 20th, 24th, and 27th April 1787. Thereupon Pitt clearly hinted that the inquiry, if made at all, must be made thoroughly, and that he would in that case be most reluctantly driven “to the disclosure of circumstances which he should otherwise think it his duty to conceal.” The House quivered with excitement at the untactful utterance—one of Pitt’s few mistakes in Parliament. Sheridan, with his usual skill and daring, took up the challenge and virtually defied Pitt to do his worst. Pitt thereupon declared that he referred solely to pecuniary matters.

Everyone, however, knew that the Fitzherbert question was really at stake; and the general dislike to any discussion, even on the debts, was voiced by the heavy Devonshire squire, who was to find immortality in the “Rolliad.” Rolle asserted on 27th April that any such debate would affect the constitution both in Church and State. Undaunted by Sheridan’s salvos of wit, he stuck to his guns, with the result that on the 30th Fox fired off a seemingly crushing discharge. As Sheridan had declared that the Prince in no wise shrank from the fullest inquiry, the Whig chieftain now solemnly assured the House that the reported marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert was a low and malicious calumny. When the tenacious Devonian plied him with the final inquiry whether he spoke from direct authority, Fox replied with the utmost emphasis that he did.

We now know that Fox had been cruelly deceived by the Prince. But in that age the assertion of Fox was considered as almost final, save by those who marked the lofty scorn poured by Mrs. Fitzherbert on her unwitting traducer. In Parliament the victory lay with the Prince; but even there Rolle firmly refused to comply with Sheridan’s challenging request and declare himself satisfied. To the outside world it was clear that either the heir to the throne or Fox had lied.

The letters of George III to Pitt in May 1787 and Pitt’s suggestions for a settlement of the dispute, show that the perturbed monarch placed absolute confidence in his Minister. Very noteworthy is the King’s assertion that there could be no reconciliation until his son consented to marry and to retrench his expenditure. His letter of 20th May 1787 to Pitt further proves that the proposal to add £10,000 to the Prince’s income emanated from Pitt, and was acquiesced in somewhat reluctantly by the King.627

This expedient brought about a partial reconciliation between father and son. On the strong recommendation of Pitt, Parliament allowed the extra £10,000 a year, besides granting £20,000 on behalf of the new works at Carlton House, and paying £161,000 towards the extinction of the Prince’s debts, on his express assurance that he would not exceed his income in the future. The vote was unanimous. Thereupon the King waived the question of the Prince’s marriage; so at least we may infer from the fact that they had a long interview on 25th May 1787 at the Queen’s House (Buckingham House), at the close of which the Prince proceeded to greet his mother and sisters. The parents had few happier days than that; and their joy was crowned a little later by the return of Frederick, Duke of York, after a long residence in Germany. Fanny Burney describes the radiant gladness of the King and Queen as they paced along the terrace at Windsor with their soldier son; and the inhabitants of the royal city crowded to witness the pleasing scene. It speaks well for the Prince of Wales, that he posted off from Brighton on the news of his brother’s home-coming, in order to double the pleasure of his parents. For a time, too, the Prince thought more kindly of Pitt; so we may infer from the statement of St. Leger to the Marquis of Buckingham that his feelings towards him had altered since the negotiation on the subject of his debts.628 But these sentiments of gratitude soon vanished along with the virtuous and economical mood of which they were the outcome. Those who break their word naturally hate the man to whom they had pledged it.

In the winter of 1787–8 the two Princes again abandoned themselves to drinking and gambling. The dead set made against Pitt over the Warren Hastings trial and Indian affairs so far weakened his position that the Princes counted on his fall and hoped for the advent to power of the Fox-Sheridan clique. Certain it is that they drank and played very deep. General Grant, writing to Cornwallis, 6th April 1788, says:

At this new club, called the Dover House or Welzie’s club, the Prince often won or lost £2,000 or £3,000 at a sitting. In other ways Frederick sought to better his brother’s example, so that his company was thought mauvais ton by young nobles.631

Compared with these buffooneries, political opposition was a small matter. But the King deeply resented the nagging tactics of his son at any time of crisis. Such a time came in March 1788, when a sharp dispute arose between Pitt and the East India Company. It originated in the Dutch troubles of the previous summer. The prospect of war with France was so acute that the India Board sent out four regiments in order to strengthen the British garrisons in India. At the time the Directors of the Company fully approved of this step; but when the war-cloud blew over, they objected to pay the bill. Pitt insisted that the India Act of 1784 made them liable for the transport of troops when the Board judged it necessary; and in February 1788 he brought in a Declaratory Bill to that effect.

At once the Company flung to the winds all sense of gratitude to its saviour, and made use of the men who four years previously had sought its destruction. Fox and Erskine figured as its champions, and the Prince of Wales primed the latter well with brandy before he went in to attack Pitt. The result was a lamentable display of Billingsgate, of which Pitt took no notice, and the Ministry triumphed by 242 against 118 (3rd March).

But the clamour raised against the measure had more effect two nights later, when Fox dared Pitt to try the case in a court of law. Instead of replying, Pitt feebly remarked that he desired to postpone his answer to a later stage of the debates. This amazing torpor was ascribed to a temporary indisposition; but only the few were aware that the Prime Minister had drunk deeply the previous night at the Marquis of Buckingham’s house in Pall Mall in the company of Dundas and the Duchess of Gordon—that spirited lady whose charms are immortalized in the song, “Jenny o’ Menteith.”632 Wit and joviality were now replaced by a heaviness that boded ill for the Ministry, whose majority sank to fifty-seven. Two days later, however, Pitt pulled himself and his party together, accepted certain amendments relating to patronage, but crushed his opponents on the main issue. To the annoyance of the Prince of Wales and Fox, the Government emerged triumphant from what had seemed to be certain disaster. Wraxall never wrote a truer word than when he ascribed Pitt’s final triumph to his character. Even in his temporary retreat he had commanded respect, so that Burke, who hurried up exultingly from the Warren Hastings trial, was fain to say that the Prime Minister scattered his ashes with dignity and wore his sackcloth like a robe of purple.

The prestige of the Ministry shone once more with full radiance on the Budget night (5th May 1788). Pitt pointed out that the past year had been a time of exceptional strain. The Dutch crisis and the imminence of war with France had entailed preparations which cost nearly £1,200,000. The relief of the Prince of Wales absorbed in all £181,000. The sum of £7,000,000 had been expended in the last four years on improvements in the naval service. He had raised no loan and imposed no new taxes. Nevertheless, the sum of £2,500,000 had been written off from the National Debt, and even so, there was a slight surplus of £17,000. The condition of the finances of France supplied the Minister with a telling contrast. It was well known that, despite many retrenchments, the deficit amounted to £2,300,000. In these financial statements we may discern the cause of the French Revolution and of the orderly development of England.

In vain did Fox and Sheridan seek to dissipate the hopes aroused by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. So experienced a financier as Pulteney justified his statement, and the country at large felt assured of the advent of a time of abounding prosperity. As for France, the inability of her statesmen, even of Necker, to avert the crisis caused by reckless borrowing and stupid taxation, seemed to be the best possible guarantee for peace. Pitt’s concern at the re-appointment of Necker in August 1788 appears in a letter to Grenville in which he describes it as almost the worst event that could happen—a curious remark which shows how closely he connected the power of a State with its financial prosperity.633 Thus the year 1788 wore on, with deepening gloom for France, and with every appearance of calm and happiness for the Island Power, until a mysterious malady struck down the King and involved everything in confusion.