On 7th May 1783, the anniversary of his previous motion for parliamentary reform, Pitt repeated it. It was supported by one and opposed by the other of the two Secretaries of State, and was rejected by 293 to 149. A month later he introduced a Bill for the Reform of Abuses in the Public Offices. In his speech he produced the famous allegation that North in the last year of his ministry had been credited with the consumption of £ 1300 for stationery, of which £ 340 was for whipcord. The Bill passed languidly through the Commons, but was promptly strangled in the Lords, where the Ministry opposed it with vigour; a proceeding on which the country could not but comment.

In the recess Pitt went abroad for the only time in his life. He was accompanied by his brother-in-law, Eliot, and by Wilberforce. They first established themselves at Rheims, with the view of learning the language, residing for six weeks at the Archbishop's palace. Here Pitt was thrown into close companionship with the prelate's nephew, the young Abbe de Perigord. They were to meet again in 1792, when Talleyrand as a lay diplomatist was negotiating with Pitt as an autocratic prime minister.

Pitt, it is said, did not make much progress in French, though he proceeded to Paris, and thence to Versailles. The son of Chatham could not fail to make a stir in that volatile and curious court; it is even asserted that he narrowly escaped marriage with the daughter of Necker who was afterwards to talk down Europe and write Corinne.

The queen, indeed, is said to have considered the young lion awkward and dull, and so called forth the pun of Chastellux: "C'est egal: il ne s'en dpitera pas pour ca," but the politicians came round him "in shoals."

Two remarks of his during that visit have been preserved--one on the English, the other on the French constitution.

Of the first he said "The part of our constitution which will first perish is the prerogative of the king and the authority of the House of Peers."

Of the second be remarked to a Frenchman, "You have no political liberty, but as to civil liberty you have more of it than you suppose."

It was here, too, that be paid his famous tribute, not less generous than true, to Fox. Some one expressed surprise that a man of so little character should wield so great an influence. "The remark is just," replied Pitt, "but then you have not been under the wand of the magician."

He is said also to have astonished Franklin not merely by his talents, but by the antirepublican character of his sentiments. For the rest, he seems to have hunted and amused himself. He returned to England on the 24th of October (17 8 3). Parliament met on the 11th of November; on the 18th Fox asked for leave to introduce a Bill for the Better Government of India. That day, the Government had ceased to exist.

Better Government of India

Into the merits of the Bill it is not now necessary to enter. North, when he saw it, sagaciously described it as "a good receipt to knock up an administration"; in its scope and audacity it savoured even more of the elder than the younger Fox. The objections to its main provision, which handed over the government of India to irremovable commissioners named for four years, have been perhaps overstated. But it was clear that it furnished an admirable weapon against an unpopular Coalition which had resisted economical reform, demanded a great income for a debauched prince, and which now aimed at securing a monopoly of the vast patronage of India, patronage which, genially exercised by Dundas, was soon to secure Scotland for Pitt.

In the House of Commons the majority for the Bill was over 100; the loftiest eloquence of Burke was exerted in its favour; and Fox was, as ever, dauntless and crushing in debate. But outside Parliament the King schemed, and controversy raged.

There was a storm of caricatures. One of these, by Sayer, of Fox as an Oriental potentate entering Leadenhall Street on an elephant, Fox himself admitted had greatly damaged him. When the Bill arrived at the House of Lords, the undertakers were ready. The King had seen Temple, and empowered him to communicate to all whom it might concern his august disapprobation. The uneasy whisper circulated, and the joints of the lords became as water. The peers, who yearned for lieutenancies or regiments, for stars or strawberry leaves; the prelates, who sought a larger sphere of usefulness; the minions of the bedchamber and the janissaries of the closet; all, temporal or spiritual, whose convictions were unequal to their appetite, rallied to the royal nod.

Some great nobles, such as Gower and Bridgewater, the one old, the other indifferent to politics, roused themselves to violent exertion on the same side, keeping open tables, and holding hourly conclaves.

The result was overwhelming. The triumphant Coalition was paralysed by the rejection of their Bill. They rightly refused to resign, but the King could not sleep until he had resumed the seals. Late at night he sent for them. The messenger found North and Fox gaily seated at supper with their followers.

At first he was not believed. "The King would not dare do it," exclaimed Fox. But the under Secretary charged with the message soon convinced them of its authenticity, and the seals were delivered with a light heart.

In such dramatic fashion, and the springtime of its youth, fell that famous government, unhonoured and unwept. "England," once said Mr. Disraeli, "does not love coalitions." She certainly did not love this one.

On this occasion there was neither hesitation nor delay; the moment had come, and the man. Within twelve hours of the King's receiving the seals, Pitt had accepted the First Lordship of the Treasury and the Chancellorship of the Exchequer. That afternoon his writ was moved amid universal derision. And so commenced a supreme and unbroken Ministry of seventeen years.

Those who laughed were hardly blamable, for the difficulties were tremendous. Temple, who acted as Secretary of State, resigned in three days, having demanded apparently too considerable a reward for his services. To the young Minister, his first cousin, this was a cruel blow; but Pitt never faltered, though it gave him a sleepless night; while Temple retired in sullen magnificence to Stowe. On the other hand, the Opposition, already in high and hysterical spirits, were proportionately elated. "This boyish prank," writes Elliot, a shrewd and able Whig, " is already over."

Probably "they (the embryo Government) mean to gain a few days' time, and to wear some sort of countenance in order to make a capitulation, if it can be obtained.

"They have lost all character," continues the supporter of the Coalition, "and are considered as a set of children playing at ministers, and must be sent back to school; and in a few days all will have, returned to its usual course."

Pitt's friends seem largely to have shared the views of his enemies. Camden, the devoted friend of Chatham, and Grafton, whom Chatham had made Prime Minister, both refused office. For Secretaries of State he had to fall back on Tommy Townshend, now chiefly remembered by Goldsmith's famous line, who had become Lord Sydney; and the young Marquis of Carmarthen, who was upright and well intentioned, but vain and inadequate.

He secured, indeed, the scowling hypocrisy of Thurlow and the naval fame of Howe; but the one was insidious and the other dumb. It is always difficult to understand the principles on which the Cabinets of the eighteenth century were formed. Pitt's was a procession of ornamental phantoms. He, himself was the only Cabinet minister in the House of Commons. Dundas, lately Lord Advocate and now Treasurer of the Navy, who was to be his right-hand man from the beginning to the end of this administration, was outside the Cabinet. Of the Cabinet ministers, five occupied in solemn silence the front bench of the House of Lords; while Thurlow on the wool-sack, though he often spoke, as often as not did so in opposition to the Government. Never was there in appearance, to use Charles Townshend's graphic phrase, such a "lutestring administration."

There was one remarkable omission; nothing was offered to Shelburne. At first sight this can only seem attributable to gross imbecility or to flagrant ingratitude. That Pitt, who was gasping in a famine of capacity, should pass by the ablest statesman available, savours of insanity.

That he should deliberately and without any political difference ignore the Minister who had a few months before given him the lead of the House of Commons, on whom at the moment of resignation he had passed significant eulogy and who had been his father's closest adherent in public life, seems so incredibly ungracious as to leave a stain on Pitt's memory. But his action was deliberate: it had been determined months before.

Shelburne

To clear Pitt, one must understand Shelburne. And in any case it is not amiss to pause a moment by the complex character of the politician who introduced Pitt to official life; whose fate it has been to be utilised as a political stageproperty by a brilliant novelist, who was also a prime minister; and who is variously represented as a popular statesman crushed in the contest with a Venetian constitution, or a sinister schemer of unusual guile. But he was neither a Canning nor a Dodington, though bis career presents strange complications.

The problem may be briefly stated thus. How is it that a noble of high lineage and fortune, of great talents, and of an intelligence superior to his talents, who was a distinguished soldier before he was twenty four; who was a Cabinet Minister at twenty-five, and a Secretary of State at twenty-nine, when Secretaries of State often represented a greater power than the Minister nominally first; who was Prime Minister at forty-five; and who, to pass beyond dignities, was far beyond his age in enlightenment; a Free Trader, the friend of men like Franklin and Bentham and Morellet, the leader of men like Dunning and Barre; who, if not the friend, had at least the courage to be the admirer, of the successful rebel Washington, with whom he had to sign peace; how was it that this man, so rarely gifted and with opportunities so splendid, should only have touched power to see it vanish for ever from his grasp, and to spend the remainder of his life under universal detestation and distrust?

These phrases are unhappily not too strong. It is not too much to say that, during the last decade of the eighteenth century, the greatest reproach that could be directed against a statesman, short of calling him a Jacobin, was to insinuate a connection with Berkeley Square, where Shelburne had completed the palace which Bute had been forced to forsake.

The key to the enigma seems to lie in the bitter description which he penned of Chatham in his cynical but priceless fragment of autobiography; when he contemptuously dismisses the popular conception of his leader, and pronounces him to be a mere actor, incapable of friendship, anything but disinterested, studied and artificial in all that he wrote or said or did. This was what the man who had gloried in being Chatham's right-hand man, wrote of Chatham when Chatham was dust and his lieutenant forgotten.

Elaborate and picturesque as it is, it discloses the fury of a disappointed man wreaked on the cause to which he attributes his failure. It is the sneer of a worshipper burning the idol which he thinks has betrayed him, and attempting to warm himself at the fire. He had ruined his life by a great mistake; he had misread his lesson and misunderstood his master; but the fault, as is usual, seemed to the pupil not to be with himself, but with his teacher.

After a cool survey of Bute and Holland, and the politicians of that ilk, he had decided that Chatham was the grand type, and only discovered too late that it was also an impossible one. He could readily see that he must be satisfied with less eloquence and a paler fire; but what seemed within his reach was the patriotic spirit, the attempt to be above and aloof from party, the combination by which the popular prophet cringed before the King; easy to emulate were the mysterious retirement and the haughty demeanour; easiest of all, the pompous fawning style which befogged and bewildered Chatham's contemporaries.

All this Shelburne compassed, but what he never understood, until it was too late, was that these were not Chatham's aids but Chatham's drawbacks. There was something in the man, who almost discovered popular feeling in England, which was akin to inspiration; at any rate there was the occasional flash lighting up all his nature -- the low and the dark as well as the brilliant and the sublime, the purlieus as well as the majesty of the structure -- which dazzled the beholder into seeing nothing but a great splendour.

Chatham had and sought no friends. The only shadow of such a relation that he knew was in his wife's amiable family. Shelburne was, like Camden and Grafton, merely the superior disciple, and he was slow in discovering the difficulty of treading in the teacher's steps. In the meantime, having earlier in life gravely compromised his reputation for sincerity in a transaction which the popular and plausible Holland loudly stigmatised as a fraud, he further confirmed the general opinion of his subtlety by his imitation of his master in a sort of stilted finesse. He himself indefinitely strengthened this impression by his constant professions of guileless simplicity, and of a candour so effusive as to compel him to live in retirement for fear of self- betrayal.

Lampoons and caricatures are unanimous on this point. The testimony of his friends is only different in degree. Bentham extols his heart at the expense of his understanding, and charitably attributes the ambiguity of his patron to confusion of mind. But he admits a "wildness about him," and that he "conceived groundless suspicions about nothing at all."

Further, Bentham declares that Shelburne" had a sort of systematic plan of gaining people." The third Lord Holland, who avows his partiality, gives much the same opinion. Rose, who was naturally and officially a judge of character, speaks of his discomfort in acting with Shelburne, who was sometimes passionate or unreasonable, occasionally betraying suspicions of others entirely groundless, and at other times offensively flattering.

"I have frequently been puzzled to decide which part of his conduct was least to be tolerated." Perhaps an even more curious confirmation is afforded by Rayneval, who visited England as an envoy during the peace negotiations. "Lord Shelburne," he writes, "is not ignorant of the suspicions which have been, and probably still are, entertained in France as to his straightforwardness, and he feels them the more in proportion as he believes that he has not deserved them. I venture to be of the same opinion, and if I say so, it is because I consider my personal acquaintance and conversations with Lord Shelburne have placed me in a position to know him perfectly," and so forth.

This was in the middle of September 1782, and in December he writes, "You will perhaps ask me how it is possible to reconcile the character I gave you of Lord Shelburne with his conduct relative to the equivalent for Gibraltar," and then he explains. There lies the whole matter -- Shelburne's good faith was always exemplary, but always in need of explanation.

Some people seem to think that a reputation worse than his deserts unfairly encumbered his career. But, had his name been as untainted as Bayard's, his style both in writing and speaking would have accounted for the most inveterate distrust. The English love a statesman whom they understand, or at least think that they understand. But who could understand Shelburne? Whether from confusion of head or duplicity of heart his utterances were the very seed of suspicion. The famous lines in the Rolliad are merely the versification of a speech he actually delivered.

A noble Duke affirms I like his plan,
I never did, my Lords, I never can :
Shame on the slanderous breath which dares instill
That I who now condemn advised the ill.
Plain words thank Heaven are always understood,
I could approve I said -- but not I would,
Anxious to make the noble duke content,
My view was just to seem to give consent
While all the world might see
that nothing less was meant.

In 1792 the King asked his advice, and Shelburne gave it in a memorandum which may be commended to any student of the man. It is a mere labyrinth of stilted ambiguities. Take again his speech on the Irish Union, from which both parties to that controversy to this day extract the strongest opinions in support of their respective views.

Even his personal appearance, his sleek countenance and beady eye, imply the idea which is conveyed to the ordinary Briton by the word Jesuitical: and the caricatures of the time represent the outer wall of Lansdowne House as a mere rampart to screen his plots.

The pity of it is that his son, with much the same abilities, but richer by the warning, and aiming lower, achieved the position within the father's reach so exactly as to offer a reproachful contrast -. the splendid noble, the patron of arts and letters, playing with rare dignity a public part, from duty rather than inclination; sought, not seeking; a strength, instead of a weakness, to his associates; a pillar, not a quicksand.

Not in My Cabinet

It was because Pitt had so truly measured Shelburne's character that he preferred any risk and any reproach to including his late chief in his Cabinet. He thus earned Shelburne's undying enmity; but that, as things stood, was rather an advantage than otherwise.

The composition of the Government was, however, the least of Pitt's embarrassments. The majority against him in the House of Commons was not less than forty or fifty, containing, with the exception of Pitt himself and Dundas, every debater of eminence; while he had, before the meeting of Parliament to prepare and to obtain the approval of the East India Company to a scheme which should take the place of Burke's. The Coalition ministers were only dismissed on the 18th of December 1783; but, when the House of Commons met on the 12th of January, 1784 all this had been done.

The narrative of the next three months is stirring to read, but would require too much detail for our limits. Never was excitement so high; never were debates of more sustained and fiery eloquence. But these are like the wars of Marlborough and Turenne,splendid achievements, which light up the epoch, without exercising a permanent influence on the world; to us at any rate the sheet-lightning of history.

On the day of the meeting of Parliament, Pitt was defeated in two pitched divisions, the majorities against him being 39 and 54. His government seemed still-born. His colleagues were dismayed. The King came up from Windsor to support him. But in truth he needed no support. He had inherited from his father that confidence which made Chatham once say, "I am sure that I can save this country, and that nobody else can;" which made himself say later, "I place much dependence on my new colleagues; I place still more dependence on myself."

He had refused, in spite of the King's insistence, to dissolve; for he felt that the country required time, and that at the first blush it could hardly be expected to support so raw a Government. But he was daily preparing for the inevitable dispersal of a House of Commons sworn to hostility.

To gratify the independent members, he dallied with some idle negotiations for the conciliation of the Portland Whigs. He was able to show that the House of Lords was with him by a division in his favour of 100 to 53. He displayed the confidence of the King, who had refused to grant any honours at the instance of the Coalition, by the creation of several peerages.

The city of London, then the stronghold of Liberalism, vindicated him from the suspicion of being a mere tool of the Court by giving him its freedom. The East India Company spared no exertion. They established a Committee of Vigilance that sate permanently in Leadenhall Street. To every borough in the country they sent a copy of Fox's bill with this message, "Our property and charter are invaded, look to your own."

Ambushed

Two accidental circumstances also occurred to Pitt's advantage. On his return from his city triumph, he was waylaid and nearly murdered by an ambuscade of blackguards opposite Brooks's club. So low had Fox fallen as to be accused of instigating this outrage -- an imputation which no one otherwise would have credited a moment, but against which he thought it worth while to frame an indecorous alibi. This occurrence would, perhaps unreasonably, serve to attract the sympathy of Englishmen to the mob's victim, but another secured it.

The Clerkship of the Pells, a sinecure office worth not less than £ 3000 a year, fell vacant on the very day that Parliament met. It was universally expected that Pitt would take it as of right, and so acquire an independence, which would enable him to devote his life to politics, without care for the morrow. He had not £ 300 a year; his position was to the last degree precarious. If now defeated, it was clear that he would meet with no mercy, and that the King and the country would fall bound into the hands of the Coalition, who might almost achieve a permanent oligarchy to his permanent exclusion.

Pitt disappointed his friends and amazed his enemies. He gave the place to Barre, making it a condition that Barre should resign the pension received from Rockingham. To a nation inured to jobs this came as a revelation. They were familiar with great orators, and they had seen most of them provided at one time or another with sinecures and pensions. But here was a youth of equal ability to whom it did not seem to occur to place his own fortunes in competition with the commonwealth -- to whom money that could benefit the State was abhorrent. Even Thurlow could not refrain from a growl of admiration.

Above and beyond all was the fact that Pitt, young, unaided, and alone, held his own with the great leaders allied aginst him. Exposed to the heaviest artillery that wit and fury and eloquence could bring to bear, he was never swayed or silenced. In face of so resolute a resistance, the assailants began to melt away. Their divisions, though they always showed a superiority to the Government, betrayed notable diminution; and, large or small, seemed to produce no more effect on the administration than if they were the votes of a college debating society.

Worse than all, they had an uneasy consciousness, ripening daily into certainty, that the country was not with them. Addresses were pouring in, to applaud the conduct of the Kin- in dismissing the Coalition. Fox, moreover, found that his party would not join him in stopping the supplies. His one resource was a short Mutiny Bill, which would prevent sudden or premature dissolution. The current Bill would expire on the 25th of March. Ministers were in a state of perplexity and alarm.

Burgos, then Under Secretary of State, who was, however, too vain a man to be a perfectly trustworthy authority, relates that they were relieved by a simple expedient. It was found that more than once the Mutiny Bill had been introduced into the House of Lords, and coming thence had passed without question in the House of Commons. Such a solution would not be possible now, but it was adequate then.

Pitt enclosed the paper of precedents in a note to Fox, asking what course he intended to take. His answer is not known, though sufficiently indicated by the result. When the Committee on the Mutiny Bill was moved, only two members showed themselves in opposition.

This was on the 9th of March. On the 25th of March Parliament was dissolved, the announcement being retarded by the unexplained theft of the Great Seal. When the elections were over, the party of Fox, it was found, had shared the fate of the host of Sennacherib. The number of Fox's martyrs -- of Fox's followers who had earned that nickname by losing their seats -- was 160. He himself had to await, in the constituency of Orkney, the result of a scrutiny at Westminster, for which be had been chosen.

Conway and Lord John Cavendish, two Whig princes, succumbed. Coke, the Lord of Norfolk, shrank before the storm. The unknown and plebeian Wilberforce triumphed over the Whig aristocracy of Yorkshire. Pitt himself forsook the inglorious security of Appleby, and stood in the van of the battle as candidate for the University of Cam bridge, which had before rejected him. He ousted the two Coalition members, and secured the seat for life.

He won all along the line, but watched the last and longest contest with undisguised anxiety. Fox was carrying on one of those interminable combats which gave a singular celebrity to the constituency of Westminster. The poll was open for forty days. No effort was spared. Promises and menaces and drink and cash were all lavishly given; the proudest ladies stopped into the purlieus of the ancient city to secure highly flavoured votes; the Heir to the Throne himself took an animated part.

In this respect the contest was unequal. On the side of Fox's opponent Lady Salisbury took the field, but her haughty canvass was easily routed by the energy, spirit, and grace of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. At last, the first ministerial candidate headed the poll; but Fox easily distanced the second.

It was his only solace. On the other hand, he was excluded from office, with the exception of a few dying months, for life; more bitter still, he had to witness the complete triumph of the youth whom he could hardly yet consider a rival. Pitt, with the entire confidence of the King and the Legislature, was entrusted with a power such as no minister had ever wielded since the Revolution. And he was not yet twenty-five.

It is well here for a moment to pause and, with an undazzled eye, take stock of this splendid occasion. To idle observers it may appear that Pitt occupied his place by mere prerogative, aided by popular aversion to the Coalition. This is only a fraction of the truth. Fox, who had lately been the idol of the people, would have been supported by the constituencies against the prerogative, never popular, and against the King who had not then attained popularity, had the case been so simple; for they would have forgotten the Coalition in resentment against the arbitrary authority of the monarch. But, as it was, the unpopularity of the King was obliterated for ever by the odium of the Coalition. Nor was North personally an object of aversion. After his resignation, he made a tour in the country, during which he received ovations at once unexpected and unusual.

The truth lies much deeper. The King and Pitt were supported on the tidal wave of one of those great convulsions of feeling, which in Great Britain relieve and express pent-up national sentiment, and which in other nations produce revolutions.

"The Public," says a shrewd contemporary observer, "and the Public only, enabled Pitt to defeat the powerful phalanx drawn up against him."

The country was sick of the "old lot" -- the politicians who had fought and embraced and intrigued and jobbed among themselves, with the result of landing Great Britain in an abyss of disaster and discomfiture, such as she had never known since the Dutch ships sailed up the Medway. For eight years there had been war against scattered plantations of our own race, war ending in complete discomfiture; to which had been superadded the perhaps more poignant humiliation of being compelled to yield, not merely to the colonists, but to the French. And as, when the Dutch were insulting and threatening the metropolis, the memories of men recurred to the supremacy of Cromwell but a few years before, so now there was an additional sting to those still alive who remembered the glories of Chatham.

Since then, at an expenditure of a hundred and forty millions, through eight agonising years, Englishmen had seen their armies in a constant condition of capitulation or defeat. They had hired Germans by the thousand to shoot down American Englishmen in vain. They had employed Red Indians to tomahawk their brethren without effect.

John Paul Jones

Paul Jones had harried the coasts of Scotland, and people long remembered how the pious folk of Kirkcaldy had watched and prayed while his ships hove to within a mile of their shore. That night, by an interposition which the least devout hailed as a direct result of intercession, a gale arose and drove the flotilla away; but far in the Firth of Forth the traveller can still perceive, almost lost in a gaunt pier of the great bridge, the little simple fortification, which was erected against the audacious privateer.

They had seen the fleet of England retiring before the squadrons of France and Spain, and yielding to them the dominion of the British Channel. Even the splendour of Rodney could not atone for this; while his instant supersession increased their distrust of the Government. They had seen their ambassadors suing for assistance at European courts in terms almost abject, and repulsed in terms of candid contempt. It was universally admitted that Great Britain had sunk to be a second, if not a third, rate Power. And if they were thus considered abroad, what was there to console our forefathers at home? They had beheld their capital half burned to the ground by mobs, which the Ministry seemed as unable to control as the people of New England. They had seen Government, in the sheer shame of impotence, obliged to cede to Ireland whatever of independence the Dublin Parliament demanded, from the impossibility of sending a regiment to defend the island. What might have been an act of grace, was only another abasement. There was not a drop wanting to their cup of bitterness. Was it for this they had spent their treasure and their armies? There was something rotten in the State, and the rottenness seemed to begin in their politicians.

The English mind moves slowly, but with exceeding sureness, and it had reached this point at the election of 1784. The people had looked for a cause of these manifold effects, and had found it in their rulers. Any doubts they may have entertained would have been dispelled by the speeches of Burke on economical, and of Pitt on parliamentary, reform.

At the beginning of the reign they had fancied that the Scots were at the root of the evil. But, though Bute had long passed away from the political scene, matters had grown worse. And now they found it authoritatively declared how deep the gangrene of jobbery had eaten into the House of Commons; how one member received a large income as turnspit to the King; and how eight were purchased and nominated by an Indian prince. Taxes might grow, and armies might disappear, and the gazettes might reek of disgrace: still, war loans and war contracts swelled the spawn of corruption: still, successive ministers and their friends filled their bottomless pockets, and found a solid setoff to national dishonour in the pickings of national profusion.

Under North, political degradation seemed to have reached its climax. There had been hope, indeed, of Fox, who had denounced North in terms of masculine and indignant invective. But now he too had embraced North; the accuser had sat down with the accused, and both were involved without nice discrimination in the common system of turpitude. As to the Whig figure-heads, they were possibly honest but certainly wooden.

In their despair, men looked round for a saviour of society, who should cast the money-changers out of the temple of Government, and restore to Britain, not her former glory indeed, but a decent and honourable existence. At this moment, there appeared before them a young university student; rich with lofty eloquence and heir to an immortal name; untainted in character, spotless in life; who showed the very first day that he met Parliament as Minister a supreme disdain for the material prizes of political life. The auspices under which he obtained power were not indeed popular, but less odious than the combination he succeeded.

To a jaded and humiliated generation the son of Chatham came as a new hope and a possible revelation. Here was one who would not be easily corrupted; nay, one who might stem the tide flowing so fast against us at home and abroad. In a few months, the older Pitt had raised England from the ground and placed her at the head of Europe. Might not something be hoped of his son?

The change was thus not merely an epoch in the life of Pitt, but in English politics. It was hailed by the nation as a new departure. Nor did the situation lack the irony inseparable from great events; for there were piquant elements of miscalculation and anomaly. The anomaly lay with Pitt, the miscalculation with the King. Pitt, who had entered Parliament as a foe to prerogative and the friend of reform, was to become Prime Minister by a violent exercise of the one, and to lose sight for ever, with a faint exception, of the other.

On the other hand, the risk run by the King had been immense: and it is only fair to say he had made proof of rare and signal courage. For he had played on the throw all that to him made a throne worth having. The general election of May, indeed, condoned his absolute action of December. But, had it fallen differently, he must have become as much the prisoner of party as Louis XVI. on his return from Varennes.

And yet, while he stood to lose so much, his winnings, as he computed them, were small. He had reckoned on finding a minister who would execute his wishes, and be the pliant agent of a powerful monarch. But there is little doubt that in ridding himself of the tyranny of the Whigs, with the assistance of Pitt, he only exchanged one bondage for another. He had worked to procure for Pitt the majority which was henceforth to make Pitt independent of himself.

There is evidence to show that from the first be dreaded, and in the end disliked, his too powerful minister. In their correspondence we find none of the fondness with which George III. addressed Addington or Eldon. The King's tone is rather that of a man in embarrassed circumstances, corresponding with the family solicitor. He was sensible that Pitt had him in his power, and that, should Pitt desert him, he must fall bound into the hands of Fox. Later on, he was suspected of meditating a possible resource in Grenville. But we doubt his seriously contemplating an emancipation from Pitt so long as Pitt, and indeed so long as Fox, should last.

For the peculiarity of the position was that, apart from his own great qualities, the strength of Pitt lay in the aversion of both King and people for Fox. Just as in the opinion of the shrewd Auckland the opposition of Fox had kept North in office, so now it largely helped to sustain Pitt. Incapacity could not long have reposed on mistrust; but so able and honest a Minister was served to the end of his life by the generous extravagances of Fox and the undying memory of the Coalition.

Chapter IV: First Years of Administration