Crown of England if proper measures were not taken. upon it. He would not continue without having the direction."* Pitt accepted from the King a pension of £3000 a year for three lives, and the title Baroness of Chatham was conferred upon his wife. For a time this acceptance by a poor man of a moderate income from the nation which he had served so ably dimmed the lustre of his popularity. It was industriously rumoured that the patriot Minister had been bought, and that having accepted the bounty of the sovereign he would no longer act as the disinterested servant of the people. Pitt replied to his traducers by a dignified letter, addressed to the Town Clerk of · London. "Most gracious 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." The words of Edmund Burke dispose of the question: "With regard to the pension and title, it is a shame that any defence should be necessary." It is really a testimony to the loftiness of the public conception of Pitt's character that, in an age when pensions were so freely given, this pension should have excited any remark. The glorious administration of one man was ended. From despondency, Great Britain had been raised to the position of first nation in the world; from a condition of lethargy and confusion her army and navy had been urged to victory after victory in *British Museum Add. MSS. 32929, f. 18. three continents and on every ocean. The American Empire which had been restricted to the Atlantic seaboard now stretched to the Ohio and controlled the St. Lawrence. To the north and to the west the pioneers of the British race were to receive, as an inheritance, a vast empire bounded by the Arctic Sea and the Pacific Ocean. In India a few scattered factories had been made into an empire and both in Bengal and the Carnatic the foundations of supreme dominion had been surely laid. Above all, Great Britain had asserted more absolutely and more universally than in any previous era that command of the sea which has been at all times the means at once of her safety and of her imperial expansion. There had been admirals as valiant as Hawke or Boscawen, but never before a statesman who had perceived, as Pitt perceived, that the naval force of Great Britain could be used to isolate and conquer the arms of her European enemies in every part of the globe. The navy of France was crippled and her colonies reduced, and when Pitt learned that Spain had joined France he saw that there were fresh worlds to conquer, and that the empire which Columbus had founded would offer rich spoils to the countrymen of Raleigh and Drake. CHAPTER V. THE PEACE OF PARIS, AND THE STAMP ACT. 1761-1765. ITT'S conduct after his resignation, said Burke, set the seal upon his fame. PITT The greatest anxiety was felt by the Ministers as to the effect of his actions in the House, but when the House met Pitt "spoke moderately and not much of his own situation. Not a word offensive to any Minister slipped from him; on the contrary, he spoke with the greatest respect of those who differed from him in Council. In short, he blamed nobody but those who were for ending the continent part of the war, concerning whom he spoke with contempt."* Bute's first aim was to withdraw from the German war, and George Grenville favoured this view, though he dared not openly advocate withdrawal. He hinted that our success was not owing to the German war, but that, said Pitt, was "only saying we have conquered in the wrong way." "If you withdraw your troops all France will illuminate; if feeble or narrow-minded measures take hold of our councils * Add. MSS. 32931, f. 19. Barrington to Newcastle, Nov. 13, 1761. we are undone, and I will endeavour to break the Before Bute could com- heart of him who is so."* plete his plan for abandoning question had become acute. from America had arrived the Court of Madrid assumed a more haughty attitude, and declined to answer the English inquiries as to the terms of its treaty with France. On the last day of 1761 war was declared. The note delivered to Lord Egremont, by the Spanish ambassador, has been described as his Catholic Majesty's declaration of war against William Pitt; the Count de Fuentes was ordered to declare to the British King, to the English nation, and to the whole universe, "that the horrors into which the Spanish and English nations are going to plunge themselves, must be attributed only to the pride, and to the immeasurable ambition of him who has held the reins of Government, and who appears still to hold them, although by another hand. . . . The Spanish King's dignity required him to manifest his just resentment of the little management, or, to speak more properly, of the insulting manner with which all the affairs of Spain have been treated during Mr. Pitt's administration, who, finding himself convinced of the justice which supported the King in his pretensions, his ordinary and last answer was, that he would not relax in anything till the Tower of London was taken, sword in hand." Pitt had returned the answer quoted to only one of the Spanish demands, the claim to partake in the * Add. MSS. 32932, f. 74. West to Newcastle, Dec. 9, 1761. Newfoundland fisheries. He referred in Parliament to "the notion that he had courted a war with Spain," and asserted that he had offered great sacrifices in order to secure Spanish friendship (an allusion to the offer of Gibraltar) and had shown patience and longsuffering. When the declaration of war was announced, which so singularly justified Pitt's prescience, he made a speech very creditable to his fame. "The moment is come when every man ought to show himself for the whole. I do, said he, cruelly as I have And the whole ! been treated in pamphlets and libels. Be one people! 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 For what we are. Forget everything but the public! the public I forget both my wrongs and my infirmities." * "With all his faults," said Newcastle, "we shall want Mr. Pitt if such a complicated, such an extensive war is to be carried on. I know nobody who can plan, or push the execution of any plan agreed upon, in the manner Mr. Pitt did.” ↑ The campaign which followed was brilliantly successful. Pitt himself had planned the conquests in the West Indies. In February, Martinique was conquered, with the Caribbean islands; in August the Havannah fell, the key to Spanish power in Cuba; *Walpole's George III. ed. by E. F. Barker (1894), i., 105. "The single eloquence of Mr. Pitt can, like an annihilated star, I tell you it has conquered shine many months after it has set. Martinique." Horace Walpole to Montagu. |