III. Charles James Fox and the Whig Opposition in 1792

Abstract

If the year 1792 has come to be remembered for political crises which made it one of the turning-points in English history, it has been famous also for the auspiciousness of its commencement, the optimism and the promise that characterized its earliest months. In January and February Pitt repeatedly drew the attention of parliament to the increasing prosperity of the country and the flourishing state of the public revenue; and opposition did not pretend to deny this, but merely said that the prosperity ‘was no feather in the minister's cap’, since it was due to circumstances independent of government. Even that aggressive admirer of the French Revolution, Earl Stanhope, wrote to a Frenchman: ‘We are already free… and England is now the richest, the most prosperous and—climate apart—the happiest country in Europe.’ Even that determined reformer, the Rev. Christopher Wyvill, joined the crowd of witnesses to the country's good fortune, though he speculated that if a great European war should break out, ‘the English people would probably then renew, but in a louder tone’, the cry for parliamentary reform. Pitt attributed the prosperity to the rise of machinery, the credit facilities, the ‘exploring and enterprising spirit of our merchants’, and the mode in which money was continually being fed back into industry. He claimed that something was due, however, to the internal tranquillity of the nation and ‘the natural effects of a free but well regulated government’. The correspondence of the year 1792 often gives evidence of the sense of rising prosperity; and to this would be attributed on the one hand the general attachment to the constitution, and on the other hand the indifference of the nation to matters of foreign policy.