‘A sum almost as great as the national debt’

The fact that the House of Commons launched a catch-up enterprise in the interval 1797-99 marked the last act of this long-running tragedy featur­ing Pitt the Younger’s career.

The price for Pitt’s unwillingness to guide the House of Commons towards best procedural practices became apparent after his death in office (23 January 1806). Lord Henry Petty (Member for Cambridge University and Chancellor of the Exchequer) informed the House (21 May 1806) that ‘an aggregate sum of no less than 455 millions sterling [was] still unac­counted for, within the last 20 years, a sum almost as great as the whole national debt’.⁴⁹ Then, as now, a half-billion pounds sterling is quite a lot of money to lose sight of. It would be 50 years after Pitt’s death before the House of Commons would concentrate its attention on financial manage­ment through new procedures.

The preceding serves as preliminary to the discussion framed by these questions. Was employment of skills learned in the 1770s mandatory in the 1780s? Had the real world changed sufficiently so that the skill acquisition path - in the 1780s - obliged members to expand skills previously acquired building canals, for example? Wasn’t there a point at which the House of

Commons might simply let the winds of chance shape its fulfilment of the national agenda? One would suppose that there had to be some interval in which backbenchers could let the leaders do all or most of the heavy lifting, given that leaders served as legislator-administrators.

In 1786 and 1787, Pitt’s attention turned to the establishment of the Sink­ing Fund and Consolidated Funds.

The procedural framework governing financial business at Westminster was decidedly thin. The Standing Orders of the House of Commons, for example, barely touched on the chamber’s annual budget deliberations. Commons’ Standing Order declared 29 March 1707 set forth what could have been the cornerstone:

That this House will not proceed upon any Petition, Motion, or Bill, for granting any Money, or for releasing or compounding any Sum of Money owing to the Crown, but in a Committee of the whole House.⁵¹

The next most recent Standing Order on financial business was declared on 25 March 1715.⁵² As noted above, declaration of the required procedures would not take place until the middle of the nineteenth century. Nor were practices in place to guide the House towards a rational approach to doing the public’s financial business. Paul Einzig has noted that ‘under the Hanove­rian Kings no Public Accounts Committees were appointed until 1780’.⁵³ One might point to a single session of the House of Commons in which best practices might be said to prevail. I follow the 1790/91 session of Parliament and that session’s Bill of Supply through its various stages. Initial debate on the floor (serving as a screening device) was followed by proceedings taken by the committee of the whole House. The member serving as the chair of that committee reported its progress or conclusions to the House at the recommencement of formal proceedings.

The sequence of proceedings in 1790-91 was marked off in three seg­ments, as the Bill of Supply in that session moved through the House of Commons. Commons’ behaviour effectively stitched together action taken by the assembly and two different committees. This framework made sense of the permission granted to members to speak more than once on a given

‘The average price of peace and war’ 111 question in committee of the whole House proceedings and, likewise, in the select committee ‘where every Member may speak as often as he pleases’.⁵⁴ On the other hand, members were limited to one opportunity to speak on any given question when formal procedure governed debate in the cham­ber.⁵⁵ It was not always an easy task for the Speaker to get politicians to stop talking. ‘Notwithstanding all the care possible, it will happen that, under pretence “of informing the House of a fact,” or “of explaining” where he has been misunderstood’, John Hatsell lamented, ‘a Member will break this order, and speak twice’.⁵⁶ I underscore that the practices in formal proceed­ings did not permit two members to square off against each other, leaving their colleagues to play the role of audience to their joint forensic display.

The House of Commons obtained financial data from the government after the Seventeenth Parliament opened (25 November 1790) to enable drafting and debate on the Bill of Supply. (I will turn to an important quali­fication shortly.) Commons approved the motion for the grant of supply to the government on 3 and 4 December 1790.⁵⁷ Between 4 December 1790 and 10 May 1791, members debated the details of the government’s funding requests - via the informal procedures governing its proceedings as a Com­mittee of the whole House - on 54 occasions. On 8 April 1791 the House appointed members to the Committee on Public Income and Expenditure.⁵⁸ This Committee completed its report on 10 May 1791; the financial details were spread over 67 pages of the Journal.⁵⁹ On 18 May 1791, the House took up this report, giving its formal approval on 19 May.⁶⁰