Britain’s other age of instability

As Britain is about to have its seventh prime minister in ten years, it is wise to remember that such turbulence is not unique or unprecedented in British political history. The 18th century, despite its reputation for the rise of stability, was at times even shakier than the present.

When George III ascended the throne in 1760, the Duke of Newcastle served as the First Lord of the Treasury. When the king appointed Lord North to the position in 1770, he became the young king’s seventh prime minister in a decade. Besides Newcastle, North had been preceded by the Duke of Grafton, William Pitt the Elder, the Marquess of Rockingham, George Grenville and the Earl of Bute.

Though Lord North managed to achieve longevity with his 12 years in office, the fall of North’s government in March 1782 ushered in an astonishingly turbulent period, when Britain had five prime ministers in less than two years. What caused such instability during the first decades of George III’s reign? War and imperial crises contributed greatly, but the instability had its roots in George III’s political vision, though it would eventually lay the foundation for a new political landscape.

The king had one major goal when ascending the throne: to break the Whig oligarchy’s grip on power. Convinced that his predecessors had been captured by the Whig aristocrats and used as their puppets, George III wanted to appoint ministers based on their loyalty to king and country without paying attention to party support as a source of parliamentary strength. But as partisanship had become a crucial feature of politics, and as the Whig magnates became experienced managers of elections and parliament, this turned out to be easier said than done.

Though George III initially kept Newcastle’s Whig ministry in place, he ended the proscription of the Tory party, which had been tainted by its reputation for Jacobitism. The Tories were not only fewer in number than the Whigs, but also rudderless and ill-disciplined, having become accustomed to their position as backbenchers since the Hanoverian Succession in 1714.

Roger Newdigate, MP for the High Tory seat of Oxford University for 30 years from 1751, reflected on the Tory suspicion of power after George III’s accession: ‘I believe it best not to lose the country gentleman in the courtier.’ Refusing to join any ambitious faction, Newdigate held that ‘men proscribed and abused for 50 years together [should] be presented with fools caps if they make ladders for tyrant Whigs to mount by’.

In 1762, George III appointed his former tutor and chief adviser the Earl of Bute as First Lord of the Treasury. But Bute was a court creature with no parliamentary standing, and as he was despised by the political class he did not last long. The king finally found a trusted premier in Lord North, who, though faced with the unique challenge of the American war, managed to give the government a semblance of stability, as he was an effective speaker and parliamentary operator, able to appeal to the independent backbenchers and conciliate different interests.

Taking a pragmatic rather than a partisan approach to politics, North became known for his competence, though he sometimes appeared to lack determination. As the American campaign floundered, North often wanted to resign, but the king refused to let him.

North was helped by the fact that the parliamentary opposition was split between two Whig factions: the larger led by the Marquess of Rockingham, and the smaller, but in some ways more conspicuous, led by William Pitt the Elder (now the Earl of Chatham), the hero of the Seven Years’ War (1756-63). It was the mission of the philosopher-cum-parliamentarian (and Rockinghamite) Edmund Burke to give the Whig opposition a coherent political programme, but division made it ineffective.

Britain’s defeat to America at Yorktown in 1781 meant that North’s parliamentary support vanished, impelling the king to reluctantly call for Rockingham to form a government, in coalition with the Chathamite Earl of Shelburne. But when Rockingham died four months into his premiership, in July 1782, several of his followers, such as Burke and Charles James Fox, resigned from the government because of their suspicion of Shelburne, the king’s first choice as Rockingham’s successor.

The Shelburne ministry shaped the postwar settlement with America, recognising the independence of the United States. Shelburne has a reputation as an enlightened statesman who favoured free trade and maintained friendships with Adam Smith and other political economists and men of letters. But the Shelburne ministry’s tenure was rocky, owing to the fact that its parliamentary base was unreliable. Shelburne was brought down in less than one year by an unholy alliance between North and Fox, which made Rockingham’s heir, the Duke of Portland, party leader and the new head of the government.

The king’s hatred of the Whig aristocracy remained. After Fox’s bill to reform the East India Company passed in the House of Commons, George III declared that every member of the House of Lords who voted in favour would be his enemy. The bill thus failed and the king dismissed the Fox-North Coalition, appointing William Pitt the Younger as the new leader of the government in December 1783.

Pitt’s ascent to power unexpectedly resulted in a return to political stability. Pitt was only 24 years old and had only served as an MP for three years when he took the helm. He was to serve as prime minister for most of the remainder of his relatively short life: from 1783 to 1801, and again between 1804 and his death in 1806.

Pitt and George III formed an unlikely partnership. The king had boycotted the funeral of Pitt’s father, and, as a result, ‘[Chatham’s] son entered public life with a healthy suspicion of the King – a suspicion which he was never to lose’, according to his eminent biographer, John Ehrman.

As prime minister, the Younger Pitt was determined to implement one of the king’s longstanding aversions: reform of Britain’s irregular system of parliamentary representation, with its notorious rotten boroughs. When Pitt failed as a parliamentary reformer on his third attempt in 1785, he quickly changed tactics, and instead became a successful fiscal and administrative reformer, improving tax collection and cutting waste.

As a patriotic war leader against the French Revolutionary regime in the 1790s, Pitt found a new purpose. He rose above faction and invited prominent members of the Whig opposition to government in 1794. The Younger Pitt was one of the great orators and House of Commons men of the 18th century. And he proved to be both adaptive and competent as prime minister. The Pittite system created a new governing coalition that would rule Britain until the next wave of domestic crises in the 1820s, caused by Lord Liverpool’s death and growing calls for religious and political reform.

Michael Oakeshott once said that Pitt had been born old. This is slightly unfair, because Pitt was one of the most prominent advocates of parliamentary reform in his youth, as we have seen. But he quickly learned that politics is the art of the possible. When he realised that he could not convince either Parliament or the population at large that parliamentary reform should be a priority, he gracefully moved on.

Pitt was also a man of principle. When unable to persuade the king that the union with Ireland had to be accompanied by Catholic Emancipation, he resigned from office in 1801 (only to be reappointed three years later).

The German sociologist Max Weber argued in his canonical essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’ that a successful politician needs to combine and balance the ethic of conviction with the ethic of responsibility. Pitt’s successful combining and balancing of these two different ethics made him the consummate political animal; for him, politics was a calling as well as a skill. This also makes him the appropriate role model for any future prime minister of the United Kingdom.