THE AGE OF CHATHAM, 1742-1775 The 33 years that followed Walpole's fall are dominated by the genius and the defects of William Pitt the elder, first earl of Chatham. They commence with the struggle of "the great Com moner" to secure office and power against the established Whig families, the sunshine and splendour of the great ministry of Pitt from 1757-61, the accession of a young king, George III., who with the new Tory Party first divided the Whigs and then de stroyed the Whig supremacy, and they concluded with the civil war in the British Commonwealth, commonly called the "War of American Independence" against which Chatham led the opposi tion, and which ended with the disruption of the British empire. In these 3o years the elder Pitt proved himself to be head and shoulders above all his contemporaries, yet the most intractable of colleagues and in all the arts of party organization, essential for parliamentary government, defiantly ignorant, and, for his own leadership, tragically deficient.
The ministry of Henry Pelham, 1743-54, maintained Whig solidarity and a coalition of Whig forces for 11 years, but its conduct of the British share in the War of the Austrian Succes sion, brought it no credit either on land or on sea. Great Britain won Cape Breton in 1744 and lost Madras, and was defeated at Fontenoy (1744) and Raucoux (1746) . The Treaty of Aix-la Chapelle of 1748 was, in reality, a truce which settled neither the British claims on Spain which had caused the war in 1739, nor the issues raised between Prussia and the House of Austria. The war and the peace only made clear that the alliance with France had passed into open antagonism in every quarter of the globe. In 1745 had occurred the dramatic episode of the second Jacobite rebellion under the leadership of Prince Charles Edward, "the young Pretender." Victorious at Prestonpans, he marched to Derby, retreated, and won a second victory at Falkirk. At Cul loden (April 16, 1746), Jacobitism was finally extinguished by the duke of Cumberland. The Hanoverian monarchy was never again in Great Britain seriously challenged. Highland Scotland was remodelled by a series of administrative measures and the union with England entered on a new and happier chapter for both countries.
Henry Pelham's death
broke up the Whig coalition which the duke of Newcastle failed to re-solder. While Great Britain drifted into war with France (1756) for which she was quite unprepared, the politicians wrangled, combined and recom bined. Finally William Pitt, who had first obtained office under Henry Pelham "borrowed Newcastle's majority" in the House of Commons and formed a coalition (1757) with Newcastle and Fox, in which Pitt was the supreme figure with the confidence of the nation. The next four years justified Pitt's belief in his own powers, and the trust that his countrymen placed in him.
The Seven Years' War was a combination of two separate and deeply founded rivalries—a maritime and colonial struggle on the seas, in North America and the Indian peninsula between Great Britain and France, and a purely continental struggle between the House of Austria and Prussia under Frederick the Great. It was prefaced by "The Dip lomatic Revolution," more accurately described as a reversal of the diplomatic system on which the policy of the European States had hitherto been based. In order to crush Prussia the House of Austria abandoned the alliance with Great Britain and obtained an alliance with France, combined with an alliance with Russia. Prus sia, isolated, found an alliance with an isolated Great Britain. When the war broke out Great Britain and Prussia were confronted with a coalition of France, Russia, the House of Austria and the Germanic States that supported the Habsburg empire. The fate of Prussia was thus linked up with the fate of the British empire. The war, as so often, opened disastrously for Great Britain. The British had lost Ft. Duquesne (1754), and Brad dock's expedition to recover it (1755) ended in the annihilation of the troops; operations against Ft. William Henry and Louis burg, and against Rochefort were failures, and Minorca, for fail ing to relieve which Admiral Byng was court-martialled and shot, was lost (1757). Pitt had, however, now established his suprem acy in the Government and rapidly showed his genius for conduct ing a war. Confidence, competence and victory dispelled disil lusionment, incompetence and defeat. Pitt grasped and enforced two principles—the power vested in the command of the sea, and the value of focussing a superiority of force on a strategic centre instead of dissipating it on varied and unconnected efforts. Ft. Duquesne was recovered and Louisburg recaptured; the British fleet blockaded the French coast. "The year of victory"
followed. Guadeloupe and Ft. Niagara were captured ; Quebec fell after Wolfe's victory on the Heights of Abraham; British troops materially aided in the decisive defeat of the French at Minden; and the French fleet was crushed in Lagos bay and off Quiberon. In India Clive had avenged the outrage of "The Black Hole of Calcutta" by the victory of Plassey (1757) which made the East India Company master of the three rich provinces of Bengal, Orissa and Behar. Pitt was determined to fight the war to a decisive finish. In 176o the conquest of Canada was completed by the capture of Montreal; in India a victory at Wandewash led up to the capture of Pondicherry; Dominica in the West Indies was taken, and Belle Isle, commanding the French coast, stormed and captured. France, to avert defeat, had but one card left to play—to bring in Spain (as agreed by the Third Family Compact of the Bourbon dynasties in Paris, Madrid and Naples). Pitt's ultimatum to Spain, to anticipate the blow, was rejected by the cabinet and he resigned (Oct. 5, 1761). Three months later Spain declared war ; Great Britain had lost three months, her invaluable war minister, and the alliance with Frederick the Great, alienated by the withdrawal of his subsidy. Lord Bute who had replaced Pitt and Newcastle carried on Pitt's war measures. Martinique, Granada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Havana (in Cuba) and Manila in the Philippines were captured by the expeditions that Pitt had planned. Bute, however, meant to have peace at any price, with or without Britain's allies. The Peace of Paris (Feb. 1o, 1763) brought to Great Britain, Canada, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, a group of West India islands and an assured position in India; but Bute's clumsy and reckless diplomacy threw away without com pensation many valuable acquisitions, and if the independence of Prussia was maintained, Frederick owed it, as he claimed, not to his "treacherous" ally, but to his own genius and the luck that in the supreme crisis, changed Russia from a foe to a friend. The terms of the treaty, denounced by Pitt's unanswerable criticism, were only forced through parliament by the remorseless corrup tion of Henry Fox. The victorious end of the war and the parlia mentary rout of the Whig coalition were precisely the prelude to his reign desired by the young king, George III., who in 176o, had succeeded his grandfather on the throne.
It was the fate of this young prince to rule nominally for 6o (actually for 5o) of the most momentous years in British history, 32 of which were absorbed in war (apart from wars in the over-seas dependencies of Great Britain)—a period which saw the Industrial Revolution subverting the history and settled order of social life begun and consummated, the civil war and disruption of the empire in North America, the Pacific brought into the orbit of European policy by the explorations of Capt. Cook, the French Revolution, and the titanic struggle with Napoleonic France, the grant of Irish auton omy (1782) followed by revolution and civil war in Ireland, the destruction of the Whig system and the reconstruction of parlia mentary government. The reign closed in 182o with the prelude to what, but for the Reform act of 1832, would have been civil war and revolution in Great Britain. That the monarchy not only survived, but was a force through these momentous 6o years, was a tribute, not to the intellectual gifts or political insight of the king (for these were mediocre and surprisingly limited in range and vision) but to solid qualities of character. The first two Georges were German princes reigning in a British kingdom which they neither understood nor assimilated. George III. was, by training and temperament, English, and he exhibited both in youth, middle and old age, the virtues and defects of middle-class English insularity. The only logic which influenced him was the logic of fact; and it was the fact, not the logic, that compelled a reluctant acquiescence in conclusions though not in a new point of view. The ambitions of the new and young king inaugurated "a new monarchy." He was determined to make the Crown, not merely as an institution but as a person, the decisive power in policy and government. This involved the destruction of the Whigs and the Whig system. But even had George III. been simply a replica of George II., a remodelling of the system and a re-grouping of the parties and social forces in Great Britain would have followed the Peace of Paris in 1763.
The two great strongholds of Toryism—the country clergy and the country squire, the manor and the parish church, on which English life from the Reformation to the French Revolution was solidly built—had shed their Jacobitism and their political theory of a king ruling divino iure, and were ready to assert their right against a handful of territorial magnates (with the Nonconform ists and commercial middle class) to make the policy and conduct the government of their country. Pitt's career and achievements had been a corrosive and dissolvent acid of Whiggism. A Whig of the Whigs in the fundamentals of his creed he had forced the Whig magnates to accept his leadership, while he had voiced the patriotism and aspirations of the manor and the rectory. The Whigs had ceased to be a party led by able statesmen; they had degenerated into a group of clans ranged round a dozen chieftains as quarrelsome, vindictive and jealous in their rivalries as Camp bells, Frasers, Macleods or Macdonalds in the heyday of High land Scotland. That parliament in 1763 did not represent the constituencies and that the constituencies did not represent the nation is the one sovereign and tragic fact in British history be tween I 76o and 1792 ; and this fact wrecked alike the Whigs, the later career of Pitt the elder, and the system of George III. which crashed in 1783.
The dreary kaleidoscope of ministries —Bute, Grenville, Bedford, Rockingham, Pitt, who became earl of Chatham, and finally North (which lasted during 177o-82) was due to the refusal of the king to work with the successive groups and the refusal of the groups to work with the king. The king's determination to make parliament a submissive organ of the royal will was responsible, f or the gross mismanagement of the struggles which converted in the person of John Wilkes (q.v.) a libertine demagogue into the triumphant champion of constitu tional law and liberty. Parliamentary privilege, the law of libel, general warrants, the rights of the electors in the county of Mid dlesex and the publication of debates provided material for per manent and beneficial definition. Burke's Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (177o), re-stating the principles of cabinet and party government, with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) redeem the period by their foundation of a phi losophy of national policy on the transient issues of an empty day. The acid test of statesmanship came from the American colonies and the action of the home government.
The 13 colonies on the eastern coast of North America had, down to the accession of George III., been governed on an imperial system which allowed them a large measure of internal autonomy, but subjected them to a code of mercantile economics, defined in the Navigation Acts and other statutes of the imperial legislature at Westminster, which implied that the colonies were an integral part of an un divided British empire to be governed as a whole alike for de fence, commerce and foreign relations. Grenville's Stamp Act (1 7 65) imposing internal taxation by an imperial statute illus trated this system, because it required a colonial contribution to imperial defence from which the colonies directly benefited. The colonial opposition to this and subsequent measures of legislation and coercion, culminating in the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) challenged the whole system. Three cardinal re sults since 166o had really destroyed its basis. As the Wealth of Nations proved, the economic mercantilism of "the old colo nial system" was obsolete in its principles and no longer true to the facts either of colonial or British trade. Thirteen weak and strug gling "plantations" had become, unconsciously, a nation of three millions of prosperous English-speaking men and women with an inherited right to self-government in a vast country 3,00o miles from Westminster, ignorant of their needs and their capacity. The conquest of Canada and the removal of the French danger pared the need of imperial protection to a minimum. In the light of present knowledge two conclusions on the embittered con troversy between 1763 and 1776 are certain. The policy of the home government, ignorant, prejudiced and blind to the facts, precipitated a crisis in 1775. But that crisis would have arisen even if there had been no George III. or Lord North, unless Great Britain had been prepared to anticipate the challenge by a dras tic reconstruction of her whole system of economic policy and of imperial administration and defence. The American War of In dependence which developed from the Penal Acts of 1773 into the first bloodshed at Lexington (April) and Bunker's Hill (June
7 5) was a civil war of two radically different societies in America and Great Britain, speaking the same language, sprung from the same racial stocks and with a common heritage of law, institutions and religion. Chatham was the one statesman who could have resolved the deadlock; but Chatham's criticism of the king's policy made him a "trumpet of sedition"; he had de stroyed the party without which he could not make or maintain a ministry and by 1775 he was a physical and mental wreck. His death in 1778 ended an epoch.
