‘One directing minister should plan the operations of government’

While American legislators were learning the basics of their craft, members of the House of Commons were displaying their expertise in support of the anti-war cause. On 29 occasions from 26 January 1775 through 10 Decem­ber 1777, Edmund Burke, Charles Fox and Col.

Following the King’s speech on 30 November 1774, members moved the obligatory Address of Thanks. This Address served as Commons’ insti­tutional response to the ministry’s articulation of the national agenda (5 December 1774).⁵¹ In the ensuing debate Henry Cavendish and Frederick Montagu proposed an additional two paragraphs of text. In the brief debate that followed, 12 members spoke. The division went against the Cavendish- Montagu amendment 73-264. Without a recorded vote the ‘Address was then agreed to’.⁵² Initially, Commons’ consideration of anti-war petitions went against Burke, Fox and Barre. This pattern continued through the first 12 votes. (The opposition won a minor vote on 15 February 1775.) The opposition’s fortunes were significantly repaired in the fall of 1776, winning nine of the last 17 votes.⁵³ The balloting began badly for the opposition; war opponents were swamped 839 against 2,236. As the tide turned opponents had more respectable outcomes to show for their efforts. When cumulated, these latter 17 votes show 1,925 members balloting with the opposition against 1,461 members supporting the government.⁵⁴

The government’s eroding support must be measured against this benchmark. A count of 190 to 250 placemen - King’s Friends - in the House revealed that North was treading water.

John Brooke’s History of the House of Commons concludes that party allegiance was ‘shaped by the great issues of the American war and reform... from 1775 to 1782’. Lord North ‘stood for the prosecution of the American war and was opposed to both economical and parliamentary reform’. He could count on supporters in numbers ‘between 150 and 200; it was at its highest in 1775 and 1776 when enthusiasm for the war was at its greatest, and began slowly to decrease from 1780 as it became clear that the aims for which the war had begun were not to be attained’.⁵⁶ I underline that Brooke marked 1780 as a watershed; this was a year in advance of the British capitulation at Yorktown.

The correspondence between George Hanover and his ministers docu­mented how far these developments had unravelled at the end of the 1770s. In 1778 North advised the King: ‘There are two points which Lord North has the honour of submitting to his Majesty’s consideration, which he con­ceives very important for the government of this country’.⁵⁷

That in critical times, it is necessary that there should be one directing Minister, who should plan the whole of the operations of government, control all the other departments of administration so far as to make them co-operate zealously actively with his designs even tho contrary to their own.⁵⁸

‘Orders indispensably necessary’ 25 North delineated his next point with an even sharper edge. ‘That the Pub­lic business can never go on as it ought, while the Principal most efficient offices are in the hands of persons who are either indifferent to, or actu­ally dislike their situation’.⁵⁹ North underscored that Commons could not accomplish its ‘Public business’ if the monarch tasked his ministers to advo­cate programs that inspired virulent hostility in Commons or that entailed a serious risk of being voted down.

North’s administration, in more ways than one, laid the foundations for the reforms that followed Yorktown. North's successor Shelburne availed himself of the opportunity to school George Hanover. Writing to William Petty, Lord Shelburne (serving as chief Treasury minister after North’s res­ignation, 20 March 1782), the King recognised that it was ‘quite new for business to be laid before the Cabinet and consequently advice offered by the ministers to the Crown unasked; the Minister of the Department used always to ask the permission of the King to lay such a point before the Cabinet’.⁶⁰

These developments explain the King’s rather shocked response to the lesson served up. Not only were patterns of official action changing, but the King was not the actor or body directing the forward progress. It was, as the King remarked, ‘quite new for business to be laid before the Cabinet and consequently advice offered by the ministers to the Crown unasked’. A sin­gle self-confident institution might assert itself as change-agent for other systems and structures.