Abstract
Pitt came to office in December 1783 as the choice of King George III, but he always maintained his sense of himself as an independent leader basing his support on Parliamentary and public approval of his policies. Pitt did not rise to power as the leader of a political party. He had few intimate friends, inspiring respect rather than personal loyalty. An important element in Pitt’s political image was his carefully cultivated reputation for probity, competence, and disinterestedness. When accused of using ‘unconstitutional influence’ to obtain office, he stated that ‘the integrity of my own heart, and the probity of all my public, as well as my private principles, shall always be my sources of action.’1 His competence in government and moderation in reform convinced a broad public that he deserved their confidence.
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Notes
James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1993), 33–5.
Philip Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford, 1996), 45–55.
Whig Organization in the General Election of 1790, ed. Donald E. Ginter (Berkeley, CA, 1967), xx–xxxvii, 24.
Mitchell, Charles James Fox and John W. Derry, Politics in the Age of Fox, Pitt, and Liverpool (New York, 2001).
Paul Kelly, ‘British Parliamentary Politics, 1784–1786,’ Historical Journal (1974), 27:733–53. Kelly argues that the politics of Pitt’s first decade do not exhibit an identifiable two-party alignment.
Diary and Correspondence of James Harris, First Earl of Malmesbury, ed. Third Earl of Malmesbury (4 vols. 1844, repr. 1972), 2:157.
William Morgan, A Review of Dr. Price’s Writings on the Subject of the 4 Finances of this Kingdom: To which are added the Three Plans Communicated by him to Mr. Pitt in the Year 1786 (1792). Morgan was Price’s nephew. See Considerations on the Annual Million Bill, and on the Real and Imaginary Properties of a Sinking Fund (1787), republished in A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on the National Debt and the Sinking Fund, ed. John R. McCulloch (1857).
William J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 1640–1845 (Oxford, 2003), 9, 176–83.
W. A. Cole, ‘Trends in Eighteenth-Century Smuggling,’ Economic History Review, 2nd ser. X (1958), 395–409.
Correspondence Between the Right Honble. William Pitt and Charles [Manners] Duke of Rutland, [ed. Earl Stanhope] (1890), 142.
PH 26:115–25 and PH 28:747–54. On excise jurisdiction, see Edward Hughes, Studies in Administration and Finance, 1558–1825 (Manchester, 1934), 328–35.
Pitt also began negotiations for trade treaties with Portugal, Spain, and Russia, but nothing came of them. John Ehrman, The British Government and Commercial Negotiations with Europe, 1783–1793 (Cambridge, 1963).
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© 2007 Earl A. Reitan
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Reitan, E.A. (2007). William Pitt and Fiscal Stability, 1783–92. In: Politics, Finance, and the People. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230211032_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230211032_9
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